Moira punts the pulverized part – a pressure helix, in point of fact – with a jackboot, sending the hunk of thermosteel skirring across the sand, splaying purple grains in every direction. After a hop, skip and a clatter, the helix connects with a protuberant sheet of teltriton and breaks upon impact into a spread of dislodged metal pieces. Unfortunately, Odisseus is nowhere in sight and therefore unable to appreciate Moira's little act of vengeance against the pressure helix and all its malfunctioning ilk.
The five of them meandered about through the wreckage like disinterested tourists forced to spend an afternoon paying their respects at an abandoned memorial crash site. They'd spread pretty liberally over the ruins, which were extraordinarily extensive, to the point where Moira'd not encountered another member of The Unconstant Lover's crew in the past thirty minutes of idle wanderings.
Frankly, she'd been enjoying the solitude afforded her immensely, only having to ignominiously gun down a single deranged Moshi vagrant who menaced her with a shorn shard of plexishield. For Talos, that was considered comparative peace-and-quiet.
Seven of the eight moons in orbit about mighty gas giant Talos each inhabited some distinct niche in the Bad Space life cycle, allowing visiting criminals to most conveniently cull their vices a la carte.
Porttown 5, for example, was committed to the fine art of dash racing, the entire community constructed around the twisting circuit that, once a galactic year, would play host to the exclusive Khali Rhon Classic. Porttown 8, meanwhile, was effectively one pervasive red-light district, so choked with brothels, bordellos and cathouses that one couldn't spend a credit anywhere on Talos VIII without the bill eventually coming to line the pocket of pimp, madame or prostitute. Porttown 6 consisted only of a junk heap and an auction block. Porttown 4 played host to a diverse menagerie of squabbling drug cartels. Porttown 7 placed high in the running for the galaxy's most despoiled urban ghetto and so on and so forth.
Talos II, then, was the marketable exception to this otherwise effective system, containing, as it did, no actual Porttown. Instead, all Talos II contained was a shipwreck.
The moon's one defining feature was the wreck – the enormous skeleton of some immeasurably huge, pre-Imperium capital ship that once made an explosive, nose-first landing on the moon's purple dunes decades earlier than even Abraham's memory reached. Scavenged, salvaged and scraped clean of all valuables uncounted years past, all that remained of the humongous hulk were its meatless bones, protruding from the surrounding sands for a mottibles-wide radius.
With a population in the double digits and an ecosystem meager enough to be counted with five fingers, only gorjo geckos, occasional half-crazed vagabonds and, currently, the crew of The Unconstant Lover had any conceivable interest in Talos II.
Benign breezes insinuate sand between the towering pieces of eroded hull. Sunset, refracted off the looming enormity of Talos Prime, spreads storybook shadows from the gnashed and gnarled wreckage.
Moira is a pedestrian, navigating an unfamiliar city at dusk. She ambles through spires formed by upended turbines. She patronizes art galleries that exhibit only ruined landscape paintings, seen through row upon row of smashed portholes. She gazes upward at colossal cathedrals, constructed only by scrap chance and buttressed by interlocking debris.
Currently, Moira didn't care what Nemo's machinational reasons for arranging the rendezvous with Greatgullet here were. She was suddenly prepared to forgive the twenty-six day, galaxy-spanning warp, in the light of these several free hours to explore the improvised museum to fractured flotsam and jagged jetsam.
While they'd both religiously refrained from commenting on Odisseus' new theories, neither Nemo nor Two-Bit bothered denying the well-accepted fact that the aforementioned meet-up with Greatgullet was what brought the Lover to Talos II. Upon touching down, they'd each been issued the same vague orders by their tight-lipped Captain – “scope the place out” but “don't get lost.”
The crew knew they were killing time until Greatgullet graced them with his bewhiskered presence. Moira chose to murder that time by strolling through the bygone crash site, her first act of honest-to-moons tourism in ever.
The Captain and his accomplice had been, following the most recent revelation on Mannimar, commendably more circumspect about any further details. They'd departed that night on a straight shot for Talos II and, seemingly, the resolution of all the mysteries. Both guilty parties kept largely to their own quarters, where they'd occasionally host covert conferences, doubtlessly to twist their oily mustaches and practice their villainous monologues.
The counter-tactic, of course, was for the remaining three members of the crew to hold their own secret councils. These consisted primarily of evaluating what little evidence remained and complaining about the Captain's staunch refusal to cooperate.
When all spelled out, Odisseus' logic had overall been the most sound. The vast majority of his baseline assertions she and Abraham could easily agree to.
The plan appeared to be to pillage some Valladian port and potentially to throw in with Greatgullet. The pillage somehow involved an ill-conceived notion to utilize all twenty of Hook's bought airlocks and relied on Two-Bit to concept and chart the rockier areas of Nemo's supposedly genius ideas. This was all generally agreed upon and, with Moira and Abraham's help, they'd even managed to solder several of the outlying factors more firmly into place.
According to Abraham's testimony, Greatgullet and Velocity'd once engaged in a brief and bloody romance, when both were younger and rival buccaneers. It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility, then, that Nemo would have slid the Depot-Commissioner a healthy bribe to arrange the necessary introductions in Veraspo.
It had fallen to Moira to make the Trija connection. She quickly ascertained that those mysterious uniforms paid off on Xathik Major likely did not, as it happens, represent the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija at all. Rather, she surmised they represented a certain rogue element, a certain Captain Socorro Charybdis, Trijan privateer-turned-pirate-turned-privateer-again and currently number one on Valladia's mercenary payroll.
Thusly, it stood to reason that with approximately two million credits worth of bribes, all doubtlessly drawn from their hard-won currency, the Captain had cemented an allegiance with two of Bad Space's most puissant picaroons. One was purchased for her silence and mysterious elsewhereness come the day of the actual attack. The other, Moira theorized, was for the use of his prodigious number of cutlass-swinging boarders.
Questions remained unanswered, of course. The release of the Noxix footage would seem to socket neatly into the need to charm Greatgullet, celebrated bounty hunter hunter. That gain, however, was so minor compared to the widespread ramifications of so publicly claiming responsibility for the murder of Huong Xo's favorite lapdog. In even his most imprudent mood, Moira couldn't imagine Two-Bit endorsing such a drastic tactic.
The timing surrounding the suite of airlocks purchased from the Mannimar scrapyards and their contingent delivery was also majorly out of sync. According to the Ufaki's estimate, they wouldn't be due to arrive for some weeks, a date far too removed to necessitate any manner of sit-down with Greatgullet this early.
The main point of contention, however, what persistently stuck in the three's collective craw, was the niggling feeling that they were underestimating the overall scope of Nemo's ambition.
Certainly sacking a Valladian port, especially one along the Shipping Line, was no mean feat. It would require planning, significant capital and no small supply of muscle.
The investment of time, risk and money Nemo was cascading on what otherwise would be a month, perhaps two month, caper, at the most, however, was making the uninformed members of his crew more and more anxious.
The possibility of a more ambitious prize, Valladia Prime herself, perhaps, had been discussed, but it was Abraham who held firm in his original belief. To his thinking, the whole enterprise, from boosting banks on Gallow to scoping shipwrecks on Talos, would manifest as some
thing substantially more grandiose than any three of them could predict.
Moira's padding through the cobbled dwelling of some marooned desperado, his bones long dissolved into purple sand, when she first spies it. Whether her crewmates have already spotted the descending shape or whether she's the keen-eyed first, Moira's not sure. Simple fate grants her a makeshift window, little more than a point of total corrosion in the decay-colored wall, within which the spaceship is perfectly, almost idyllicly, framed.
Hustling out into the open better assesses the incoming craft as friend, foe or foreigner. Moira wastes several seconds halfheartedly wishing she'd somehow remembered to pocket a Spyglass as the ship gradually passes through the lower layers of the moon's atmosphere and materializes into full view.
Recognition dawns later still. At first, Moira's memory doesn't clock the pentahedral teltriton sledge of a spacecraft, both port and starboard bristling with what appear, from a ground-level vantage, to be steering vanes of some kind. A score of unexpected driftjets ignite, the ship's angle shifts considerably and the “steering vanes” are revealed to be the craft's most distinguishing feature. A full dozen circular hull plates are thrust far enough from the cruiser's main body to effectively shield the gun emplacements and airlocks beneath from return fire.
Moira positively identifies The Rule of Thumb as soon as she's afforded a clear view of these shields. Each is reinforced by scads of bolted-on scrap and each is painted to appear as the snarling or sneering visage of a dozen different alien species. Captain Greatgullet's flagship is a formidable TFS Onslaught-Class Heavy Troop Transport, known galaxywide for plundering and puissance.
If only, Moira muses, the Imperium could see in whose diabolical hands the handiwork of their industrious shipwrights were landing.
She's shuffled several steps back, already mentally retracing her path through the refuse jungle to the most logical place to encounter another of her scattered crew. She stops when two more shapes, little more than airborne specks, also break the cloud cover and begin to descend, following in the Rule's wake.
Moira lingers long enough to at least attempt to identify either of the arriving spacecraft. The fading sunlight glints off the copperish hull and pumping pistons of the easternmost ship, revealing its Hesko manufacturer. The westernmost ship, however, is cut from a wholly different cloth. A spiny remix, Moira supposes, fashioned from disparate sections of half a dozen unlikely specimen. It's accompanied by a thin cloud of lumpy, irregular starfighters, like droning flies encircling a wallowing buhox.
Moira adjusts her hustle to a run. She sprays purple sand with each bootprint as she circumnavigates the junk labyrinth to locate Nemo or Odisseus or Abraham to deliver the news – Greatgullet has arrived and he brought friends.
Two-Bit considers Nemo's kind offer. “Think I'll stand, mate.”
At this, Nemo only shrugs, his attention focused on dragging an HV tray across the uneven floor to provide a relatively flat surface on which to place his cards. “First things first,” Nemo begins peremptorily, spreading out, as he speaks, the makings of a one-player Iniquity game. “Gimme your word you won't say squat to the others. I'm trusting you to go along with this, but if they catch wise, I'll have to endure every flavor of 'are you out of your mind' and 'what were you thinking' imaginable.” He raises both eyebrows as he makes his ultimatum. “Time being, lips sealed. Savvy?”
“Savvy,” Two-Bit agrees guardedly, excitement mounting despite himself.
“Second things second,” Nemo continues, “I'm bringing you in because, at this point, I need your help. I've gone as far ahead on this frankly mad venture as I can without the resources and contacts you provide. My telling you, then, has gotta go hand-in-hand with you agreeing to come aboard permanently.” Once again, he pauses in his dealing to fix Two-Bit with those steely gray eyes. “Once I tell you, you're in, better or worse. Savvy?”
Two-Bit nearly voices one of the hundred objections that well in this throat, but once again, burning curiosity, the potential doom of them all, overtakes him.
He consents with a grunting “Savvy.”
Nemo gives Two-Bit a smile, the sort of smile that harbingers further mischief to come; not only for themselves but, in this case, for the galaxy at large. “Excellent. Here's what I'm thinking.” The first card, the Three of Nooses, snaps daintily to the HV tray's surface. “You remember Qel Qatar?”
“The planet? Yes?”
“The last time we were there,” Nemo clarifies. “After Surimiah. After Gasbox.” He compliments his Three of Nooses with its partner, the Three of Truncheons. “Nanosecond Pizza? Remember?”
“Cap'n,” Two-Bit pleads with sudden exasperation, “me droidvox is comin' along, I'm facting. I don't hink–”
“The press conference,” Nemo reiterates. “Valladia.”
Two-Bit's jaw settles firm. “'Piracy is pointless'?”
The Valladian Shipping Line, ten lustrous ports from Kiesha to Kezz, ever tempted the more ambitious breed of Bad Space's buccaneers. Their increased presence in the media, thanks to the signing of the Imperium contract, doubtlessly only heightened the temptation and, ironically, made them that much more inaccessible. Two-Bit's summarily unsurprised to discover the Captain eyeing a target vastly outside the range of the Lover's capability.
“Got me thinking,” Nemo confesses, considering each card in his hand. “Why's nobody move against them? What makes them so invincible?” He plants a third entry, the Hooligan of Fisticuffs, onto the tray perfectly in sync with the planting of his second question.
“Backing's the short answer, these days. And Moira's gal, whasserkisser, Charybdis?” Two-Bit splays out an open hand from his back pocket. “I mean, finger any one of them ports and it's too tragged for anybody on the market to tackle right now. Moons, you'd spend more rhino on ditrogen than you'd jank back by tossin' the place. And that,” he further stipulates, “is assuming you don't bump this Charybdis herself and only one 'a her cronies.”
“Suppose–”
Two-Bit reads Nemo's withdrawn expression easier than his dismal hand of Iniquity. “Suppose you was jazzed in blagging one of these ports, learn Valladia a lesson 'bout jabbing things they shouldn't?”
Nemo smiles breezily. “For starters, sure.”
“Well, me instinct would be to jabb that it ain't possible but,” Two-Bit allows, “moons know, scrapping that Pylon weren't supposed to be possible neither, so.” He shifts his weight, as much as the rubbish accumulated around him will allow. “My ringer wouldn't be whether or not such a job's possible. Would be whether not such a job's any kinda earner.” He shrugs. “You fume all five mil into the caper, sure, it may become more possible, but who's to jabb you're feez to coop your investment back?”
“Indulge me,” Nemo requests beneficently, completing his current incident, A Poor Choice of Weapon, with a Pickpocket of Stilettos and subsequently wiping all four cards into the further corner of the HV tray. “You've got five million to spend. How'd Two-Bit Switch, criminal mastermind, pull it off?”
It requires all of Two-Bit's swindler skill to prevent the phrase “Two-Bit Switch, criminal mastermind” from curling his mouth into a smirk.
“Chief crunch is how many gantines you gotta caffle,” he advances, matter-of-factly. “You know? Most of the rhino don't come from the station, place like that – it comes from the traders, their goodies and their gantines.” He gestures beckoningly towards the Captain, determined to prove his villainous valor and earn the compliment he'd just been paid. “Which one you vizzing to blag?”
“Kiesha Shipyards, say,” Nemo answers, entirely too quickly.
“Sure, then, with them Shipyards, you've got all the station's normal defenses to hink about, their jocks, their wheels, their edgies, yeah, plus you've gotta specc some way to deer or deck all or most of the trader's gantines in statee to even turn an earnie and you've gotta do all this while fending off whatever privvy scum Valladia's scored for just such an occasion.” If Nemo's remotely d
aunted by all the adversities arrayed before him, his outward demeanor makes no indication. “Possibly Charybdis herself, depending on how hard your cheese is,” Two-Bit adds momentarily. “What you hank, mate, is more gantines.”
Nemo draws an additional three cards off the stack and mingles them in amongst his hand. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Two-Bit realizes, becoming more and more enamored of this idea. “You mate up with another buccaneer, suddenly there's another somebody to absorb half the hurt, deck half the gantines, pulp half the privvies.” His brow furrows as the thought expands. “You mate up with a wankload of other buccaneers and you could–”
Language falls behind Two-Bit's accelerating thought process. He stares, speechless a few moments, as ambitions and arguments inwardly clash. Nemo's patient, sliding the first card of a new incident, the Picaroon of Stilettos, onto the tray. “And you could?”
“And you could,” Two-Bit repeats numbly, until the objection strikes him in the face. “Nag, nag, nag, that ain't feez – the mathematicals don't work out. First rule of hiring more brunos, yeah, the more wanks, the smaller the takes're. With all the goodies split four, five, ten ways, individual earnie goes down and, with five mil investment up front, it ain't vizzing so tomato no more.”
Nemo scans the various options splayed before him. “Unless?”
“Unless,” Two-Bit dangles, fully expecting Nemo to supply the caveat and is duly surprised to discover himself arguing Nemo's own lunacy. “Unless you, what, pull more jobs? Plunder more ports?” Nemo smiles. “How many more ports?” Nemo's all smiles. “You're propoing,” Two-Bit apprehends slowly, savoring the sheer insanity of each word, “we assemble some manner of mad, what, armada of blooming pirates and lay blooming waste to all ten ports along the Valladian Shipping Line? From Kezz to Kiesha?”
Nemo's response is minimal. He plucks a second card from his hand, slides it onto the tray, the Picaroon of Nooses, to keep his original Picaroon company and curls his smile from breezy to bastardly.
Galactic Menace Page 21