The fact that it played out on Sifer's screen, however, made the true events surrounding the unexpected cancellation of Quuilar Noxix Wants You Dead Or Alive take on a distressing significance.
Now the truth would come out. Now the unverified rumors would be verified. Now, with this seventy-second video beamed to every corner of the galaxy on a perpetually repeating loop, any chance they might had at shirking responsibility for Noxix's death was obliterated.
Here, made easily available to the eyes of Huong Xo, GalaxCom Interstellar Media, and every wanna-be badass with a camera and a speargun, was indelible proof of Nehel Morel's culpability to the murder of their employee, cash cow, and idol respectively.
“Oh, shit,” Odisseus blurts.
Chapter 9
Gertie Gundeck, as she was called these days, wasn't above a little spaceway robbery. Certainly this spaceway robbery was simply a means to an end; six pockets full of change and the contents of one cash register clearly weren't the real prize. The real prize was the GCF Dividend, a cushy cargo cruiser on the payroll of the Gitter Consortium she was carrying a considerable quantity of top-shelf Gittertea, the kind panty-waisted Anglian nobles take with their buttered scones and crumpets.
Before reaching Anglia, however, the Dividend had to pass through Yelfo Minor, an exhaustively dull system that would normally contain absolutely nothing of interest, today being the obvious exception. Today, Yelfo Minor contained three things of interest; namely Gertie Gundeck, a V&R IV1 Belladonna-Class Assault Sub-Frigate and her restless band of bloodthirsty boyfriends.
In the meantime, though, Gertie had seventeen hours to kill. She reckoned knocking over the Warp Gate Junction might be an amusing way to waste at least one of those hours.
“Darlin',” she reasons with the shopkeep, shoving the snub of her shotgun against his Diraaqi cheekbone, “is the cash in the drawer worth more to you than the brains in your head?”
The shopkeep is surprisingly salty for a backwater station agent. He shrugs defiance up at her. “The ten cred you'd find in there wouldn't pay for the canister.”
Gertie returns the shrug. “Fair enough.”
With one brutal chop, she clubs the clerk in the temple with the bloodstained butt of her weapon. Sheathing the shotgun, she bunches her skirt in both hands and prepares to scramble, ladylike, over the counter, when a squelching voice interrupts her from behind.
“Uh, Captain...?”
Gertie, frozen with skirt hoisted above her knees, turns laboriously back to face the speaker. “Yes, Evileye?”
The Laquian lackwit stands stammering for a moment, incessantly licking that damned ruin of an eye with the tip of his adhesive tongue. “I'm thinkin',” he manages, “you're gonna wanna watch this.”
Releasing her skirt to waft about her ankles, Gertie daintily dismounts the counter. She strides across the Junction, over the quivering forms of its prostate customers, between shoddy plastic displays of Happy Yum-Yum Bars and Carcinocrisps, all the while giving Evileye's namesake a run for its money.
Her current first mate, one of the last holdovers from her husband's original crew, was quickly dwindling through the final vestiges of his usefulness. Gertie inwardly wondered, watching him repeatedly tongue the blackened orb that was his right eyeball, how much longer she'd endure him. Sooner, rather than later, she'd be forced to jettison the loutish Laquian in favor of some even stupider, even more ambitious beau to serve as her newest right hand.
After all, aboard the Magnet, there was never any shortage of lusty deckhands willing to do nearly anything to gain the ever-dangled affection and much-sought favor of their lovely Captain.
“What'm I watchin'?” she questions innocently, glancing about at nothing but packaged junk food and bottles of engine coolant.
“That.”
Evileye's padded fingertip reveals a previously unnoticed holovision set, caged into the Junction's back wall as some manner of ill-conceived thief deterrent. Through the corrugated thermosteel bars that crosshatch the screen, Gertie watches the concluding seconds of some newsplash story that smash cuts, without warning, to some shakily-filmed eyewitness footage. She gathers voice for an objection when, paradoxically, she recognizes one of the figures on the screen.
Against a swirling white scrim of unending snow, Gertie recognizes the butch haircut and unfriendly face of Moira Quicksilver, second fastest draw in the Ring. She suffers a savage blow from the pleasure end of a wooden polearm of some kind and falls to the frost. Her attacker is a spear-wielding Yheum colossus who, despite being encased entirely in arctic survival gear, is identifiable only as the AWOL Quuilar Noxix by size and skill. He rears back to strike, the harpoon's barbed point aimed directly at the heart of proned Moira.
When, like cavalry over the proverbial hill, a lone streak of blazing blue introduces itself bloodily to the side of Noxix's unsuspecting head, Gertie discovers her mouth hanging open. When the shooter in question emerges from the blinding blizzard – firearm raised, spent ditrogen mingling with the whipping white flakes, expression of sheer untameable badassery on his face – and reveals himself to be Nehel Morel, Gertie Gundeck finds herself cursing.
“That son of a bitch,” she murmurs, watching, uncomprehendingly, as the footage re-loops to the beginning of the minute long clip. “That son of a bitch. I knew it.”
Moira successively sizes up both potential opponents with each slow step down the companionway stair. Both are Gungi'noojian, both are unarmed, both genders are indiscernible, both are standing stupidly on the opposite end of the entrance of the betweendecks corridor. They were startlingly identical, save for a single dissemblance each.
The goon on the right's underbite is a thicket of mismatched and intersecting fangs. The goon on the left's three nostrils weep copious amounts of green mucus, thick dollop by thick dollop, onto the besmirched hold floor.
Moira stops herself seven steps from the floor and glances down to her right. “Any preference?”
“I'm thinking left,” Odisseus mutters contemplatively. The hulking Ortok is still attired in Nemo's borrowed pullover. He reclines across five stairs, his elbows propped atop the eighth, his hind paws gripping the third, his thickset tail dangling between the fourth and fifth. His beady black eyes study the pair of silent intruders with all the selectivity of a deli counter customer. “Snot is less of a problem at paw-to-paw range.”
“See,” Moira reasons, squatting down to claim a seat beside him, “but actually look at those teeth.” She nudges her head towards the orthodontially nightmarish Gungi'nooj. “All crisscrossed like that, he couldn't possibly gain any purchase on a bite.” She clasps her mug in both hands. “He probably thinks he can, is convinced he can, and that's gonna be his first and last real mistake.”
“That one's a female,” Odisseus corrects.
Moira scowls. “Based on what?”
“My understanding is that the head-ridge is slightly higher on the female.” He shifts most of his weight to point a foreclaw. “See?” Returning to his fully reclined position, he adds, almost casually, “That and the boobs.”
Pursing her lips to banish columns of steam from the surface of her spacer's tea, Moira is, after long moments of examination, forced to concede. “Granted.”
Both Gungi'noojians, perfectly within earshot of the entire conversation, simply drag their knuckles, stare vacantly ahead and deign to comment.
Moira was forced to admit, only inwardly of course, that the Veraspo Belt wasn't actually the downright stupidest place to lay low. There were much worse places to seek shelter from the shitstorm the Quuilar Noxix footage, sure to shake Bad Space's outlaw populace overnight, was certain to unleash. At the best of times, the Belt was far from easily navigable. It was generally peopled by pirates too small-fry to even fantasize about tangling with the confirmed murderer of Quuilar Noxix. By and large, it was considered, by the majority of the Ring's rougher customers, to be vaguely “antwacky,” to use Two-Bit's terminology.
One could
certainly do much better than the crags and crooks of Veraspo for a temporary hideout, but one could also conceivably do much worse.
Days spent slinking between the shadows of asteroids also hadn't afforded them much opportunity to view the media's response to Nemo's tacit confession. Moira was anxious to return to space unclouded by spinning hunks of rock and beam in a halfway decent feed to check the story's scope, status and, most importantly, the current bounty postings of its chief characters.
She was made further anxious, a feeling only freshly brewed spacer's tea could abate, by the presence of strangers aboard the Lover. She was especially anxious about playing hostess without specific knowledge regarding the prices on their heads.
Nemo's contention, however, had been that, should there be one sentient breathing in this galaxy with less concern for the reward offered for their capture, it would be Greatgullet, remorseless captain of The Rule of Thumb.
While they engaged in prescribed board-and-butcher piracy at occasional intervals, The Unconstant Lover and her crew were, in point of fact, really more freelance lawbreakers than workaday buccaneers, necessarily. They smuggle, they rob banks and they swindle, cheat or bushwhack by whatever means necessary.
The Rule of Thumb, however, represented the prime, even paragon, example of that other species of pirate. Their craft was a redoubtable weapons platform bristling with disabler cannons and airlocks. Their crew was a savage swarm of rapacious plunders and pillagers from half a hundred species. Their captain a sword-swinging ransacker of every brand of spacecraft imaginable, the Rule was known far and wide as the single specimen that expertly straddled the line between cunning criminal and unabashed barbarian.
While locating one particular ship amongst the jostling asteroids, merchant passerby and the preening court of beginner brigands was to be no mean feat, wrangling Greatgullet and his Thumbs for a sit-down would even more impressive. Once again, Moira'd been unpleasantly surprised at the relative ease with which Nemo and his new talking pet rat-canary Two-Bit arranged the entire affair with the ferocious freebooter. The Lover and the Rule were both magnetized to the same spinning space rock and conjoined at the airlock, while both Captains currently powwow in the former's mess.
Moira, of course, was denied attendance to the boy's secret circle jerk and could only speculate on the meeting's outcome. She, the eternal pessimist, speculated the worst.
For what it's worth, they were both, Moira and Odisseus, relegated to the same rank as Greatgullet's clueless entourage of Gungi'noojian muscle. There was nothing for the Lover's first mate and mechanic to do but talk shop and stare daggers at the competition.
“I'm left, you're right, then?” Odisseus clarifies with resignation.
Moira hoists her spacer's tea an inch higher in toast. “I'll drink to that.” After a scalding sip, she considers the Ortok again, under a new notion. “You sure you don't wanna go fetch your piece?”
“Eh,” he grunts disdainfully. “Not really my taste, quite frankly.” Clearly anticipating Moira's expression of mock outrage, he doesn't bother making eye contact to confirm this. “You'd be amazed how much your aim would suffer if you had my trigger finger,” he posits, wiggling the relative digit of his padded paw; fat, furry and far more cumbersome than her own adroit humanoid fingers.
“Can't argue with the safety presented by distance, though.”
“Shitty eyesight and superior sense of smell are crap at distance, though,” he counters.
“I don't spend all the time I spend on the bag,” she recalls, the soreness granted her muscles by three hours of Tebi-Gali rehearsal rising to her defense, “not to appreciate a little melee contact, don't get me wrong.” She make a cautious gesture towards the compliant pair of meathooks across the way with her still-brimming mug of tea. “But, going toe-to-toe with Gungi'noojians is asking for broken bones and not much else.”
“Somehow, I'll manage.”
“For instance,” Moira offers with an air of sham neighborliness, “I could, without much trouble, do you the kindness of plugging yours in the kneecap for you, when the time comes.” She holds the spacer's tea a breath's breadth from her mouth before adding, “Free of charge.”
“I don't need your charity,” Odisseus protests petulantly.
“You might against her,” Moira snarks into her mug.
He, in response, determines himself to have the last word. “Him.”
A silence three feet this side of chummy elapses between the four of them. As the humanoid and the Ortok ruminate their murderous designs against the two Gungi'noojians, Greatgullet's bodyguards return this voiced hatred with nothing but vapid stares and the occasional snot spatter. Moira, as predicted, burns her tongue.
It's Odisseus who breaks the silence. “Think he'll tell us this time?”
She indulges a knowing sigh. “You know, I wish I did.”
The betweendecks door clatters open without warning, causing everyone present to snap to attention. Who steps through the open portal, however, is neither of their employers but instead a tubby, shirtless Grimalti, whistling another tired sea shanty and stuffing tobacco into the chamber of his ostentatious calabash pipe.
Abraham first spies the Gungi'noojians and reacts bodily, opening his mouth to honk some protest or expectoration. He then catches sight of recumbent Odisseus and decumbent Moira atop their companionway roost. He thrusts the pipe's stem towards both of Greatgullet's reticent bodyguards and gives his fellow crewmen a confused expression.
“Greatgullet,” Moira supplies.
Abraham's features only creases further. “Greatgullet? I thought he weren't expected 'till half past.”
Moira shrugs a shoulder and an eyebrow simultaneously. “He's early.”
“Wait,” Odisseus realizes. “Were you not just in there?”
“In where, precisely?”
“The mess.” Odisseus waves a paw fruitlessly, as though this would somehow explain the matter any faster. “Are they not meeting in the mess?” he presses Moira first and, moments later, the Gungi'noojians.
“Oh.” Abraham's answer contains a certain degree of bashfulness, a strange emotion to see displayed upon his lumpy Grimalti features. “Well, er, I were takin' a dump, so.”
There is no universal reaction to this revelation among the four members of Abraham's audience. The Gungi'noojians, as rote, make no indication of understanding. Odisseus nods grimly, as though now burdened with dreadful mental imagery. Similarly, Moira presses her forehead hard against the rim of her mug, as if the issuing steam might somehow permeate both her forehead and her skull and evaporate what her knee-jerk imagination had planted there. “My fucking brain,” she murmured into the ceramic.
With his trademark, cock-eyed glare of disdain paid to both Gungi'noojians, Abraham bustles his bulk towards the companionway and, leaning an elbow against the railing, joins the gossip circle. “Have we any new theories?”
“Too many,” Moira intones. Since departing Gallow, the crew had endeavored their best to divine some meaning, some obscure purpose, lying substrate and unseen beneath all Nemo's actions. Thus far, they'd collectively concluded on nothing.
It was Odisseus' contention that time spent imprisoned may have done some irreparable damage to the Captain's psyche, a stipulation supported by Abraham, who claimed firsthand experience with an incarcerated Nemo. She could hardly follow their argument, of course, between all the significant glances and the Ortok's unwillingness to divulge even the barest sliver of their shared personal history. His implication was that something, some flimsy barrier to moderation or hesitancy had, with the evident trauma of jail time, finally caved. Nemo was now, by Odisseus' reckoning, directly on the warpath of some imminently destructive and probably suicidal mission.
Vengeance upon the Endless Imperium, for the fall of the house of Ott and other, more ambiguous slights, had been an early favorite. Moira, for her own guarded, personal reasons, took exception with this theory.
In her own mind, Moira lent c
redence to a hunch that'd only materialized with the abrupt and unprecedented inclusion of Two-Bit Switch thirty days past. With that slippery sneak brought into the fold, the likelihood, in Moira's opinion, that this whole song-and-dance would be revealed as nothing more than a needlessly byzantine and hopelessly ambitious caper became a foregone conclusion. One does not commission the specific services of someone like Two-Bit Switch unless one has a very distinct goal, universally that of breaking into somewhere one doesn't belong and absconding with any valuables in sight.
Neither of her confederates concurred, of course, citing the lateness of Two-Bit's arrival as proof positive of something substantially more sinister. Whatever their individual opinions, however, the barefaced facts were indisputable.
Nemo was waist-deep in orchestrating something outlandish, something that included or incorporated a number of puzzling and contradictory factors. A multimillion credit bank heist on Gallow was involved. The blessing of an unknown Takioro benefactor was involved. The publication of the Quuilar Noxix footage was involved and, most recently, a parley with Captain Greatgullet, terror of decent society and aspirant pirate alike, was also somehow involved.
“I do agree Two-Bit's the key,” Odisseus half-concedes. “At least to some honest answers. You think,” he muses, lowering his pitch into the telltale conspiratorial range, “with a little pressure, he might–”
“Nemo's where the pressure belongs,” Moira redirects, swallowing a mouthful of her quickly cooling spacer's tea. “What baffles me is the reason behind all the secrecy. At this point,” she gestures openly across to the patient pair of dimwitted thuggery, “these motherbloomers are liable to know the whole score before we do, dependent on what that motherbloomer in there tells them.” Moira shrugs thickly. “What threat does our knowing pose?”
Galactic Menace Page 18