Galactic Menace

by Timothy J Meyer

  It fell upon Greatgullet and his personal platoon of marauders to perform the jborra's share of boarding duties across all three of Kiesha Shipyards' expansive orbital platforms. As populous as the Thumb's crew might be, it proved a task not easily undertaken by an army.

  As the pillaging wound down, all the four participating pirate ships indeed kissed airlocks and ventured aboard to lend a hand toward pacifying the station. By and large, though, it was Greatgullet's goons who absorbed the initial hostilities, with the highest casualty count and with the unenviable responsibility to secure gunbanks, airlocks and, most importantly, plunder. Meanwhile, the spaceships of their accomplices tangled with Kiesha's redoubtable defenses, with much less risk to their individual crews.

  For all the difficulty that confronted them, however, Greatgullet's vastly outnumbered thuggery provided quite visible results. Strongboxes, stamped with the corporate logo of Kiesha Laser Corp and overflowing with booty, are plentiful in the hands of the Rule's disorganized throng of crewmen. One by one, they're each deposited into the quickly-towering stack of similar strongboxes previously stacked by the Lover's crew.

  As he watches the chests accumulate, carried by colorful character after colorful character amongst Greatgullet's cast of cutthroats, it strikes Odisseus how atypical a pirate ship The Unconstant Lover truly is, with her crew so skeletal.

  The posse that accompanies Greatgullet and each adds another strongbox or two is easily thrice the size of the Lover's entire five-member crew and doubtlessly only makes up a single digit percentage of the Rule's full compliment. From an albino Aurik to a shaved Zourim, diverse the Thumbs might be but they shared one common denomination. Perhaps inherited from their festooned Captain, they shared a rather public penchant for tattoos, totems and ornaments.

  Among their celebrated ranks, Odisseus spies a shaggy Quarg brute sporting a scaldingly pink mohawk the length of her spine. Behind her comes a shirtless Corgassi enameled so thickly in tiny loops of piercings as to create improvised chainmail for his torso. Odisseus nearly snorts at the sight of the pheromone-exuding Ruuvian self-aware enough to tattoo an enormous biohazard warning onto his back.

  Compared to the charming self-mutilation of his crew, Captain Greatgullet, with his dangling baubles and clacking beads, appears almost underdressed.

  Even their ship, the commandeered and repurposed Terro Fleet Systems 773 Onslaught-Class Heavy Troop Transport, plays the intimidation game. The Rule of Thumb couldn't realistically hope to drop anchor in any respectable port without her cannons ablaze, the evidence of her lawlessness literally painted on both of her sides.

  Odisseus actually recognizes two of Greatgullet's irregulars from their portraits, painted onto the Rule's host of broadside shields. An ugly Umijo with a pair of golden replacement fangs and an obese Vyorn with the Rule's trademark Jolly Roger inked over her face have somehow both earned this dubious honor.

  What she sacrifices in subtlety, however, she more than buys back with pure pugnacity. More well-endowed with weapons than any of her contemporaries, The Rule of Thumb boasts broadside batteries, forward-facing cannons, rearward-facing torpedo launchers and practically enough gravitons and airlocks to yank Talos II clean free from its orbit. Her battlefield prowess need never be further questioned once she'd obliterated a third of Platform A's quadroturret defense system in a single sweep.

  The Rule's true talent, however, was her unprecedented ability to install a hundred murderous psychopaths onto a single target in under five minutes. As such, any attempt to deny Greatgullet's request for more boarders could prove thorny.

  “I agree,” Nemo immediately relents. “Trick is where from?”

  Greatgullet expertly combines a laugh and a scoff. “That ain't no trick. There's no shortage, you know, of muscle-for-hire in Bad Space. Trick is,” he confesses, with a slimy thumb over his shoulder, “where to keep 'em. Rule's ranks are thinned some, sure, after this last thing, but I fly her full fucking capacity most of the time.” Both thumbs are hooked thickly into his voluminous leather belt. “Life support on my boat couldn't hardly handle another beating heart.”

  Odisseus is already shaking his head before Nemo glances back for confirmation. “Lover won't support more than twenty. Absolute maximum.”

  “What we hank,” Two-Bit chimes in, a finger pointed directly at the disapproving Ortok, “is a steady pool of brunos.”

  Greatgullet furrows his fishy brow. “How's that?”

  “This is gonna be a common crunch, isn't it?” Now given license to enter the conversation, Two-Bit slaps his manual happily onto the junk heap and saunters four steps forward. “Between the four gantines? Your scrubbers can only fangle so much, our scrubbers can only fangle so much.” He mimes an imaginary box with two vertical hands, as though presenting a perfect idealized gift wrap of their solution. “We hank a mondo pool of willing volunteers each gantine can draw from whenever they run scanty on bad motherbloomers.” A thought, a lightning bolt of inspiration, visibly strikes him. “And I hink I know where to bump that.”

  “Like your boy, boss,” Greatgullet comments, inflating Two-Bit's runaway ego all the more. “He's clever.”

  “Your new job, then,” Nemo assigns Two-Bit immediately with a pointed finger of his own. Seconds later, he swings that same finger around to spear Greatgullet. “Your new job–”

  “Captains,” greets a new voice.

  Before he can make a visual on the chamber's newest entrants, the Ortok's heightened sense of smell is suddenly overcome with an influx of new pheromones. The smell sympathetically instilled in him a wave of suspicion and fear. When his subpar eyesight does manage to grok the speaker and the cloud of figures moving behind him, Odisseus is unsurprised to discover Captain Vobash, his own bevy of bodyguards and, most saliently, his pet brushvezzer.

  “We've too many ships.”

  As speciest as this may sound, Odisseus quite frankly would never have imagined that Ciff Vobash, conniving captain of The Loose Cannon and the most successful pirate nobody's ever heard of, would've been a Triomman.

  On the whole, Triommans were a thuggish people from a crumbling planet with an exhaustively-earned galactic reputation for their willingness to be paid to punch people in the face and not ask an awful lot of questions about why. They were not necessarily known for their leadership, discretion or initiative.

  In his eight short years of tramping about Bad Space, Odisseus had made the acquaintance of an entire population's worth of Triommans. To this day, he'd never heard one string as many words as cleanly together as Vobash just had. As a culture, they were somewhat less keen on conversation and decidedly more keen on collateral damage.

  Vobash shares little in common with the rest of his race, however. For a Triomman, he's exceptionally thin, a weedy specimen from a brawny breed, with lanky legs and knobby elbows. He seemingly scorns the skullcaps also adorned by his species, preferring instead to display the stunted ridges sprouting from his head. Like Nemo, his most distinguishing feature is his crimson mountebank's coat, rivaling Nemo's own duster in length and trumping it in craftsmanship, stitched to perfection by a master tailor.

  For a Triomman, he's also exceptionally wily, should the allegations about him prove accurate. The Captain's main claim to fame, reputedly, was his utter lack of one. Few were well-connected enough to have even heard of Vobash, an accolade Two-Bit Switch could evidently claim.

  By his report, the Triomman took a strangely businesslike attitude towards brigandage. Among the preeners and poseurs of Bad Space, this was a bizarre affectation indeed. It was this, his mathematical, risk-minimizing mind, that was the biggest contributing factor to his overall wealth and what separated him most from his peers in piracy.

  For most, this was an industry dominated by presence, reputation and the perverse glory to be gained by stacking bounty postings to the ceiling. Vobash, though, was reputedly shrewd, cautious, circumspect and appreciated more than most the virtues of flying under the radar.

 
Odisseus was ten feet this side of respecting Vobash for this, were it not for that accursed little vermin. What truly stood the Ortok's fur erect about Vobash was the tamed brushvezzer that roamed free inside the territory of the Triomman's scarlet jacket.

  One subspecies among many of the mustelids native to the grasslands of Patessh, the striped brushvezzer juts its ferrety snout out from the shadow of Vobash's voluminous sleeve and tastes the air with a few sniffs. Like all the members of its species, it emits a constant stream of musky pheromones designed for communication with its brood and the discombobulation of its enemies. The Captain doubtlessly carried the creature for some cunning reason – to pacify and bewilder his fences and middlemen with chemical warfare, no doubt.

  Odisseus, meanwhile, is separated from the brushvezzer by fewer evolutionary steps than most. He struggles against the creature's broadcast hunger toward the gorjo gecko darting between the boots of Vobash's men as they tender their own strongboxes to the hoard.

  He surrounds himself with a slimmer sheet of security and hangers-on than Greatgullet does, this Ciff Vobash. The Triomman's retinue more resembles Nemo's own, with a mere five members. Four of the five are unremarkable, indistinct hoods from a sprinkling of various species, but it's Vobash's first mate, pinpointed as the only crewmember exempt from the manual labor, that catches Odisseus' immediate attention.

  She's, against all odds, a Baziron, a bloodsucking member of Baz's insular, indigenous population. Natively of some kojaj Odisseus wasn't familiar with, she's now costumed as an interstellar criminal, complete with ditrogen scar, nicotine halo and sidearms strapped to her vaguely viridian thigh. Pariahs, by all appearances, put more hands to The Loose Cannon's capstan than most.

  Odisseus had been bodily surprised to discover The Loose Cannon a Hesko Planetary vessel. These spacecraft were designed with an internal logic so bizarre that no non-Heskite engineer could ever hope to make sense of one. Even in this, though, there's an ulterior motive that directly benefits Vobash.

  So long as he continues to employ a team of Heskites to oversee maintenance aboard his vessel, the Cannon is never in danger of ship-jacking. Better still, it prevents the ever-present danger of a reverse boarding action, unless the reverse boarding party in question thought ahead to subcontract a Heskite of their own.

  Ultimately, the Cannon's crew size falls somewhere between the vast expanses of the Rule's teeming hundred and the Lover's meager five. Her modus operandi, however, couldn't be further from either school of thought, the former's philosophy of storm-and-boarding one's targets and the latter's tendency to select targets using eyes wildly disproportionate to one's stomach.

  Odisseus didn't require Two-Bit's testimony to realize that The Loose Cannon and her crew were utterly devoted to the very profitable ideal of commandeering a ship intact. Her twin DF498 ConcInd Cascade Heavy Rapidfire turrets, heavily modified to maximize disabler power and minimize permanent damage, told him that much.

  Frankly, though, the Ortok couldn't argue the logic. This way, any prize captured was that much easier sold, through whitewashed channels, to an upscale clientele for a practically sticker price. This virtue was lost to those with more interest in savage slaughter or personal plunder.

  For better or worse, Captain Vobash appears to be a pirate of a particularly different color than the vast majority of Bad Space's bandits, brigands and barbarians.

  “Too many ships?” Nemo expectorates. “In one ear,” he gestures from Greatgullet's mouth to his own ear, “I'm hearing we don't have enough boarders and, in the other–”

  “That I agree with also,” Vobash consents. “We have captured too many ships, I should say. How many ships did we each cart back here with us?”

  A somewhat embarrassed silence passes. With vivid memories of the two days of mayhem and madness following the sack of Kiesha Shipyards, each person present is saliently aware of the point Captain Vobash is driving home.

  “Only three for us,” Nemo confesses. Through the joint methods of dividing the crew in half and magnetically slaving two spaceships together, The Unconstant Lover had managed to truck a paltry three prize ships – two TFS barges and one V&B rigger – back from their explosive victory on Kiesha. In normative circumstances, three ships of this size and quality would be an enormous haul for any enterprising pirate but, given these unique circumstances, they constituted a tiny percentage of the ships captured.

  “Three?” Greatgullet snorts, somehow attempting to bolster his own claim. “We brought ten.”

  “I managed ten as well,” Vobash offers, whilst simultaneously relaying a gesture of nonjudgmentalism. “A similar number, I imagine, Her Majesty will report.” He pauses significantly. “How many ships did we leave on those platforms?”

  “Lots?” Nemo ventures hesitantly.

  Vobash savors every syllable. “Seventy-seven. You believe that?” The brushvezzer suddenly appears, coiling about its master's neck. Odisseus detects a suddenly territorial spike in pheromones as the Captain's voice raises slightly. “A hundred some fucking spacecraft, all disabled, all defenseless, all prime for the market, and we could only scrape back, what, a third of those? That's millions of credits we left sitting back there.” The last of his goons, a Qhem with a whirring bionic leg, plops the last of his strongboxes onto the stack. “There's gotta be some way to exploit that.”

  Nemo immediately deflects the notion to Two-Bit. “Ideas?”

  A helpless shrug is his first reaction. “More pirates is me only flash off the bat but, again, the more wanks we hire, the more hatches that is to mess. Take goes down for all of us. Ends up no different.” This time, no inspired solution appears from thin air and Two-Bit is forced to simply massage his stubble in contemplation. “Hmm.”

  “You keep thinking, then, huh?” Nemo tasks. “Lemme know the–”

  Conversation ceases once again at the unannounced entrance of a fourth party. Upon seeing who's joined their merry gathering, the chamber's atmosphere becomes somewhat too eerie for any conversation to continue.

  A twenty-member parade of Xend – a churning river of clicking chitin, flexing mandibles and hunting legs – enters the chamber via another opening several yards to Moira's right. Once they've arrived, they spend a tense moment simply waving antennae about, seemingly to smell the room's chemical composition before progressing any further.

  When seemingly satisfied, they begin, along their snaky route, passing forward their own strongboxes, drone to drone, until they arrive at their mountainous destination.

  The unnerved silence that accompanies this act is broken only by the persistent skittering sound that seems to plague every movement of the Xend's carapace, multiplied twentyfold for each insectoid present. Odisseus can only imagine the disturbing cacophony of squeaking, chittering and clacking that must resound within the uneven walls of their ungainly eyesore of a colonyship.

  To an outside observer, these Xend would all appear to be identical. Largely, they are – very little physically distinguishes one drone from another. Odisseus can only manage to highlight some slight dimorphism, possibly between castes, as the unsettling assembly line continues their wordless work.

  Consigned the thankless duty of managing all the crates, the workers are relatively uniform with the galaxy's conception of what a Xend looks like. These are diminutive, six-legged and segmented insectoids with dull red carapaces and curious antennae, constantly waving about and brushing nearby objects.

  The soldiers, however, those standing guard on either side of their brethren's column, are substantially larger, almost of a height with a fully-straightened Odisseus. At a glance, these sport more powerful mandibles and more powerful legs. Rumor was, even their antennae –hypersensitive feelers comprised of many moving fronds – were more powerful than their worker cousins. This was widely corroborated, Odisseus supposes, by the fact that the soldiers lack eyes or eyesight or any kind.

  They all move with that unspoken coordination that spells a hive mind, something not
found among any of the galaxy's other major species of sentient insects, from the Kezzerak to the Mezzrians and even all the way out to the Spith. Traditionally clustered into colonies whose populations climb into the tens of thousands, the Xendo drones themselves could barely constitute intelligent life, each one an insignificant cell in the queen's single consciousness.

  It is the secretive Xendo queen who pulls the strings of each colony member, each of the Xend that march out into the center of the shipwreck and each of their hundreds of peers that lurk aboard their parked colonyship.

  This most unlikely ally came as a connection, unsurprisingly, to Vobash. Neither Nemo, Greatgullet nor even Two-Bit could vouch for the dependability or reputation of the rogue Xendo colony queen, with the unbecoming handle of Aju Vog Xah Qaj. From what pitifully little xenoentomology Odisseus could reasonably command or have explained to him, he understood that Xendo queens enforce their own morality slavishly, religiously, amongst their subjects. Luckily, for the most part, the Xend are a benevolent, if somewhat stern and autocratic, people.

  When a bad apple is hatched among the Xendo queens – an individual who may not subscribe to the codified ethical standards of her culture – she drags her entire colony, each falling into line with fanatical devotion, into her subversive philosophy along with her.

  Xendar's rulership does everything in their conceivable power to stomp out such a threat whenever one rears its ugly, chitinous head. The very occasional rogue queen will still, however, escape their nets from time to time.

  Such was the case with this Aju Vog Xah Qaj and, in the very particular case of Aju Vog Xah Qaj, that rogue queen chose to become a pirate captain.

  All her fervid followers still couldn't hope to rival the sheer numbers of the major hives. In total, they numbered a sum much closer to Greatgullet's own legions.

  Nevertheless, Aju Vog Xah Qaj posed such an alien threat to the chubby merchant ships and unsuspecting cargo haulers of Bad Space that any who survived her predations were less likely to compare her to a calculating criminal and more like a ravenous creature.