Galactic Menace

by Timothy J Meyer

  "Tell me then," blurts an also standing Greatgullet, though his restlessness seems to stem from a wholly different source. "Is there any fucking action either of you fuckers would give consent to?" He halts his pacing to immediately stab at Vobash with a greasy gray finger from across the table. "Don't fucking say Moqu. Don't you fucking give me Moqu again."

  "See, you've-torn-me," opines Captain Charybdis from the table's opposite end, her pair of inferior officers humming harmoniously under her every sung word. "A-minute-ago, I-too-would've-agreed-with-Vobash-but, to-hear-Nemo-tell-it, there-may-be-something-to-this-pattern-breaking-idea."

  "I have a solution," Two-Bit repeats for the umpteenth time.

  Sunrise siphons through the wreck's easternmost cracks and crevices, its rosy light rendered virtually invisible on the chamber's purple floor. After much heated debate about individual gundecks and galleys, the crash's cargo hold was nominated to serve as the primary meeting spot for the Council of Captains – another of Two-Bit's carefully crafted alterations he'd attempted to popularize. In an act of unprecedented charity, Greatgullet had donated the use of an enormous ale-stained mess table and accompanying suite of chairs, professedly from his "banquet hall," for the use of the Captains and their shadows, either three or thirteen apiece.

  While each of his contemporaries flooded every available seat with firearm-toting insurance, Nemo had, wisely or unwisely, elected only a pair of additional hangers-on beyond Two-Bit: Odisseus and Abraham, the former as an act of good faith towards his saltbrother, the latter as an act of good faith towards the other Captains. Pugnacious as they each might be, the mere presence of Abraham Bonaventure, stern grandfather of space piracy, was seemingly enough to stifle any roughhousing impulses that may arise.

  Abraham, meanwhile, need contribute practically nothing to the conversation for this effect to be present; in fact, he spends the majority of the time administering to his calabash pipe.

  Even minor logistical concerns were hotly contested. Which fences should the plunder pass through? How many of the Surimiah's newly-recruited convicts should each ship's boarding party would be bolstered with? The current issue of debate was especially destined to become an old saw: which of the nine remaining ports on the Valladian Shipping Line should they attack next?

  All five Captains, with Nemo the notable exception, were far more accustomed to passing out unquestioned orders than debating the merits of individual theories or tactics in a chaotic quorum of competing egos. One faction – Vobash and Aju Vog Xah Qaj – favored humble Moqu, unpretentious exporter of cagonut and considered by most to be the least wealthy of Valladia's ports. The other faction – Nemo and Greatgullet – favored Ohostoi, booming hub of the Outer Ring's carbon fuel industry and Kiesha Shipyards' next door neighbor on the Shipping Line. Well beyond the two-hour mark, the two competing factions were nowhere near any manner of accord.

  With breakfast passing and the previous night's supper a distant memory, Two-Bit Switch bemoans his unsatisfied stomach and awaits another momentary lull to propose his ignored solution.

  "Pattern-breaking could have its uses, mainly to help disarm somewhere especially thorny," Vobash admits, a rare concession. "I'm talking about Valladia Prime here. Trick is," he stipulates in the same breath, "surviving that long."

  "They're-ready-to-underestimate-you," Charybdis points out.

  Vobash's reminder is nothing if not gentle. "Us."

  "To-underestimate-us," Charybdis corrects with equal or greater gentleness, even replicating the musical cadence of the sentence that came before.

  Two-Bit considered himself reasonably cosmopolitan, mostly by virtue of his upbringing aboard the rampantly interspecial Takioro Defederate Station. The only Trijans he ever had cause to encounter, however, were all second or third generation expatriates. In every aspect beyond skin color, these were identical to any other member of the assimilated potpourri of humanoid subspecies.

  Socorro Charybdis and her three-ship flotilla of Radiant Armada rejects were the only first-generation exiles of the Supreme Sovereignty he was ever likely to encounter. Two-Bit became convinced, over their comparably short association, that, despite their virtually identical anatomies, he likely shared more cultural framework with the Ortok seated to his right than he did with any of these true Trijans.

  The choral conversation were hands-down their most bizarre trait. High Trijan, the language spoken on their isolated homeworld, communicated the vast majority of its subtext through intricate subtleties of pitch, rhythm and even vibrato in some cases. Low Trijan, what Charybdis and her cronies spoke, transliterates the actual words sung into understandable Commercial, while retaining the musical underpinning and imbedded significance of the original dialect.

  Not much of a linguist, Two-Bit was honestly more impressed with Charybdis' seemingly limitless ability to compose distinct ditties for every single thing she said, tuneless and unmelodious as they might be.

  "Given-certain-previous-statements-they've-made-regarding-'piracy'-and-'pointlessness', Valladia-will-be-eager-to-classify-the-authors-of-these-attacks-as-nothing-but-thoughtless-brigands," she chants smoothly before attaching a brief coda. "In-my-experience."

  "And Ohostoi's as undefended now as she's ever gonna blooming be, that gem," pipes up Greatgullet, his gills gasping with the force of his vitriol. "Imagine the coffers on that bitch," he croons. "Imagine the sheer coinage they've vaulted up in there."

  "I've a hard time," carps Vobash pointedly, "imagining anything but her turrets, I'm afraid."

  "I have a solution."

  "Afraid? You?" the Obax laughs, his voice replete with mock outrage. "That surprises nobody, eh, boss?" At that, Vobash is chucked companionably on the shoulder with enough force to make the vermin squeal and disappear up his master's sleeve.

  When Vobash refuses to be goaded, the displeasingly humane voice of Aju Vog Xah Qaj forces the proceedings forward. "This palaver wastes time. Our hunger grows."

  Nemo spreads both hands. "Are we merely down to votes, then?"

  Vobash sniffs again, re-adjusts his posture from the impact of Greatgullet's shoulder swat and clears his throat. "Moqu."

  "We vote Moqu," the ambassador concurs immediately, spewing out the word 'vote' as though somehow profane.

  "Sorry, kids," Nemo apologizes. "Gotta say Ohostoi."

  Greatgullet's vote comes as less of a shock to anyone present than do his opinions of Vobash's supposed cowardice. "Ohostoi."

  Ultimately, it's Captain Socorro Charybdis who becomes the focal point of every gaze in the room, drumming her dirt-deep fingernails against the hardwood of Greatgullet's table in the classic pose of indecision.

  The silence persists another three seconds before "I have a solution" makes another appearance.

  Bodies groan as they twist in wooden chairs. All assembled pay him with befuddled scowls. As though angelic illumination suddenly spotlighted him from above, Two-Bit Switch is finally the recipient of that hard-fought attention he'd been persistently, if not passionately, seeking these past two hours.

  "You have a solution, Two-Bit?" prompts Nemo danglingly.

  He shrugs. "Why not blag both?"

  Chapter 13

  vo Veaff obeys orders.

  She mows the final security officer to the blood-stained floor amid another angry salvo from her stalwart SV7 assault rifle. Thankfully, the Moqu Planetary Police Department entrusts the safety and security of their space station to no one but these flimsy credit-cops. Popping free her weapon's empty banana clip, vo Veaff stalks forward into the now-pacified airlock. Confirming their landing is secure, she gestures beckoningly over her shoulder.

  At her motion, a cadre of colorful creatures – a bruiser broader than a battlecruiser boasting a three-foot trunk, a skinny sapient that exudes slick spines with each exhale, an eyeless, hairless something that resembles only a sapient earthworm – spills forth from the Cannon's open airlock. They pass into the visitor's atrium and cluster all around their leader.
/>
  Only three years departed from Baz following the extermination of her kojaj, vo Veaff couldn't assert much specific knowledge about any of the Outer Ring's menagerie of monsters. Despite this, she remained somewhat less than impressed with the crack squad of madmen and murderers assigned to her boarding party.

  Her new koj, of course, issued orders to this effect and vo Veaff obeys orders.

  Sarge is thankfully not far out of arm's reach and, spotting her, an original Cannon amongst all these fresh recruits, vo Veaff issues her own string of orders. With an intricate argot of silent hand-signals and delicate finger-gestures, she commands the cutthroats to form up behind her, weapons ready, as they prepare to sweep through and commandeer the remainder of the station.

  As adept at interpreting the Baziron's secondary tongue as anyone aboard the Cannon, Sarge receives these instructions with a succinct and militaristic nod. The former commando proceeds to translate those orders into that detestable mouth-speech the majority of the galaxy, lacking throatsacs as they do, favored as a means of communication.

  Someone had invested a considerable amount of time and effort to convince the patrons of the Moqu Planetary Galleria that the visitor's atrium and perhaps the entire station were not, in fact, in space. Every corner is populated by a potted plant. All the walls are painted warm and welcoming colors. An overabundance of landscape paintings maintain a homely and domestic atmosphere for the disembarking.

  This hard-won atmosphere is undercut somewhat, vo Veaff appreciates, by not only the spread of slaughtered corpses but also the cowering citizenry, who clump behind interposing furniture and whisper tears or prayers. Her boarding party entertains itself by snarling or snapping their jaws comically at any civilians they encounter.

  This seems to produce only screaming children and subsequent irritation from vo Veaff.

  Days prior, when The Unconstant Lover returned to Talos with The Low-Hanging Fruit – a commandeered passenger cruiser crammed to the gills with escaped convicts turned volunteer vandals – in tow, the general consensus was overwhelmingly positive. Four hundred some extra bodies to absorb bolts and bash skulls would go an incredibly long way towards the raiding and ransacking of each of Valladia's nine remaining ports. Even koj Vobash agreed.

  Shortly after the goons were divvied up for the purposes of the sack of Moqu, The Loose Cannon's Baziron first mate received her first doubts about their crop of Fruits. This ragbag of random convicted criminals may not, she theorizes, contain the conviction and discipline necessary to cut it under her and ultimately koj Vobash's leadership.

  Despite how simple this particular sacking was shaping up to be, vo Veaff, a pessimist amongst a pessimistic people, wasn't holding out much hope for the swabbies.

  Her posse of neophyte pirates fall into sloppy rank behind her. vo Veaff marches through the lobby and its carnage, ignoring the shivering survivors and focusing her attention instead on reaching the agreed-upon rendezvous point at the station's heart.

  In truth little more than a glorified Warp Gate Junction, the Moqu Planetary Galleria is revealed to be a humble shopping center, cropped up around a cargo redistrib. Here can the provincial peoples of the planet below most effectively peddle their cagonut milk, their cagonut meat and their cagonut novelty shells to the mostly uncaring galaxy at large.

  The visitor's atrium shortly gives way to the main shopping center without. The corridor of glitzy outlet storefronts represents seemingly popular or important corporate galactic chains, with names like "Pickle Planet" or "Bubble" or "Nanosecond Pizza" emblazoned across their signage. These supposedly important names vo Veaff is, much like species of alien or models of spaceship, equally ignorant of.

  Holographic advertisements, mainly in the form of voluptuous humanoid females or fizzing cans of carbonated beverage, babble, chitter and entice at the passing pirates. Those customers too stupid, stubborn or unlucky to evacuate before the Cannon could seal airlocks with the station are duck behind racks of merchandise or begging for mercy from any marauder who happens to glance in their direction.

  Through the latticed glass viewport overhead, vo Veaff catches intermittent glimpses of the asymmetrical frame of a stray Xend starfighter whizzing past or a spray of familiar white disabler fire. After each such sight, a booming impact or blaring afterburner reverberates, with satisfying strength, through the station's metal framework.

  vo Veaff's daydream is rudely interrupted by the metallic hiss of an adjacent door opening. Two additional security officers – one a Gord, one a Jrosk, both plastolieum-armored mall cops come lately to a party bloodily concluded – bumble into view. With uncertainty and service revolvers, trained forward in trembling hands, they attempt to bar the pirates' further passage into the station.

  The shower of reprising ditrogen she expects to paint these hopeless heroes onto the vending machines is tardy in arriving. Her own slack-jawed swarm of gunslingers are too surprised to do anything but receive a canister through one of their moronic ribcages and vo Veaff surges into action.

  Her weapon too unwieldy at this close range, she strides a step forward to swing the SV7 upward, clubbing the offending Jrosk in the jawbone these outlanders are so proud of. He stumbles back, his mandible shattered, into a pyramidal display of something called “Radioactive Chew” and is lost amid an avalanche of tiny tins. vo Veaff, meanwhile, is immediately pivoting her weight and lunging at the backpedaling Gord. Before he's scrambled six feet back, the sharpened tip of the Baziron's blood-sucking proboscis dives into the arterial junction between head and neck. vo Veaff drinks deep of his tangy, terrified blood.

  It's Sarge who flexes her lateral reasoning muscles to surmise that perhaps the drab, unmarked entrance the security officers ambushed them from could, in fact, provide the swiftest route to their destination.

  Before long, vo Veaff, Sarge and their train of trigger-sad thugs are padding through austere, industrial corridors that're so dissimilar from the brassy commercialism of the station's main thoroughfare they seemed almost like an apology or a retraction.

  A smattering of staff – mostly torch-wielding patrolmen with a life expectancy equal the time it takes to open a door and pull a trigger, plus one very courageous accountant – reveal themselves on the pirates' corkscrewing journey to the cargo hold. Most likely caused by the removal of the flashing lights to distract them, vo Veaff's boarding party feels no compunction towards cooperating this time around. A veritable flash flood of ditrogen gushes past her at each enemy as they appear.

  Once again, it's Sarge who uncovers the necessary door from among a host of more or less identical options. She guides vo Veaff and the rest of her raiders from the redistrib's restricted internal hallways and into the refreshingly expansive cargo bay.

  The cargo bay is a mammoth rectangle of negative space that dominates the center of the Moqu Planetary Galleria. Upon their entrance, it also appears to be predominantly devoid of hostiles. This seems greatly to disappoint vo Veaff's flock of freelance Fruit, now denied the chance to gleefully butcher more innocents in violation of their parole.

  Only one craft is present, dwarfed somewhat by the sheer volume of available space all around it. It's vo Veaff's amateur estimation that the vehicle might have been some manner of cargo vessel, but she can't confirm this for reasons other than simply her ignorance.

  Its hull literally crawls with Xend.

  The insectoid boarding party carpets the confused spacecraft as though they were magnetized to its hull. Watching them agog, their mass is so solid and singleminded that it hurts vo Veaff's brain less for her to consider the Xend one continuous creature rather than dozens of smaller creatures. Its segmented legs click and clatter against the teltriton, its sensitive antennae lick and scrape every square inch of the ship and its mandibles continually find purchase in viewports and exhaust vents.

  The pilot, understandably confused as to the recommended course of action should your craft become enveloped within a patina of living insectoids, uselessly pu
tters about the bay on the ship's bouncy driftjets.

  Surprisingly, this at turns horrifying, at turns comical spectacle is considerably overshadowed by the space opera unfolding through the shimmering purple of the cargo bay's embarkation shields. vo Veaff orders Sarge and the rest of her pirate platoon to fan out and poke through crates until they invariably each discover their own lifetime supply of cagonut. In the meantime, vo Veaff herself stalks forward, giving the Xend-decorated cargo ship a significant berth, to watch the ship-to-ship slaughter unfolding outside.

  She was born and raised in the deserts of southern Baz, with very little practical conception of galactic civilization beyond the goose-stepping jackboots of the Imperium invaders. As a newly-enrolled galactic citizen, vo Veaff never lost her wonderment at the sight, sound and indeed, very concept of spaceships. To see them jostling about for position like massive teltriton leviathans would always give her pause.

  Through oscillating waves of embarkation shield, this is what vo Veaff watches – the utter routing of Moqu's pitiable planetary defense forces.

  Outnumbered orbital squad cars, the only resistance this one-two space pirate punch still faces, are thronged by teams of Xendo divebombers. The Xendo colonyship, that eyesore, is the unmoving nexus of all this swarming chaos, as though simply providing an anchor for its legions of expendable minions to dock was enough justification to kick back and enjoy the fireworks.

  The entire airspace surrounding the station and Warp Gate is choked with powerless civilian craft. One hapless privateer, the one unlucky enough to be assigned Moqu duty this week, is visible among their ranks, its systems shocked into lifelessness by a certain pair of high-powered disabler cannons.

  Heralded by an unrelenting storm of that selfsame cannon fire, vo Veaff's very particular slodzen in this fight, The Loose Cannon, comes rocketing into view. She unloads the full brunt of optimized weaponry on that one pesky fruit freighter which somehow managed to evade pacification with all the rest. The freighter in question hiccups from the electrical impact, its engines sputter and, with a whimper rather than a bang, the Moqu Planetary Galleria is succinctly, and with minimum loss of life, sacked.