Galactic Menace

by Timothy J Meyer

  "Yeah, thanks, whee!" the prick belatedly adds before proceeding to wank off the clutchlever.

  The Unconstant Lover's abused boosters, Port and Starboard, both springboard into acceleration and the Refinery Complex immediately hazes away into blurry shapes beneath them. Moira, of course, is more concentrated by the suddenly presented promise of actually shooting down that accursed Arrowhead. Only moments previously, it was smugly sniping at their unshielded backsides from the relative safety of the inside of its own ray shields.

  Despite Jargon's hilarious ability to strike every empty patch of sky around her target, Moira must imagine there's not quite so terrifying a visual to an up-and-coming young bounty-privateer than what The Arrowhead's viewport treats them to currently.

  An enraged Unconstant Lover, with maniac at the helm and spewing green hatred from perhaps only one turret accurately, bears down on their position with every visible intention of ramming her torpedo launcher directly into their undercarriage.

  If a convoy escort was capable of pissing its pants and shuffling backward nervously, The Arrowhead would. She quickly converts as much power as she can to her driftjets and cranks into reverse spare seconds before The Unconstant Lover would've smashed both their bows to bits.

  In olden days, every member of the Lover's crew would've voiced some flaccid complaint or ignored jibe at this. Today, the crew is either too knowledgable of people's reactions to a charging Nemo or eager enough to annihilate the Arrowhead that they don't necessarily object to the closeness of this call.

  For her part, Moira pleases herself with the act of pummeling the privateer's ray shields into a pittance. Thanks to the Lover's skyrocketing route, she predictably loses her line of sight before she can cinch the deal.

  "Sods," Two-Bit manages to squeeze in edgewise.

  The vertically-pointed Lover clears the scrambling Arrowhead by a few ship lengths. Nemo adjusts her bearing to swing the freighter around for a second and hopefully final pass. Moira is cautiously optimistic toward her chances of actually shooting the peevish little privateer down. It's at approximately this moment when everyone aboard the Briza fails to notice that they've crossed back into the firing range of a certain swath of anti-aircraft turrets.

  Jargon's shocked screams are the first indication. They come heartbeats before the ray shields take their customary dip under the harsh reprimand of four individual turrets. Two-Bit yelps out a handful of percentages that're immediately made meaningless by the increasingly familiar sound of a certain recurring shipborne alarm.

  The bone-chilling sights of the ray shield promptly vanish and The Arrowhead swoops up from beneath.

  This time, it's The Arrowhead's who finds purchase on the Lover's naked hull. Only by bracing both boots against the nearby consoles can Moira prevent herself from being tossed down the topturret's ladder well and into the gundeck below. Three more terrible tremors seize the ship, each one accompanied by that same shearing sound and a storm of screaming and swearing over the comm.

  In a moment of desperate evasiveness, Nemo jackknifes both boosters at almost right angles, plummeting the previously ascending Lover's into a nosedive. Seconds following this, the contents of Moira's stomach debate the merits of a full evacuation.

  Clamoring klaxon and Ortoki curses blend together into strange music in Moira's earpiece. A rainbow myriad of poorly-aimed laserfire paints the air about them. The very concrete and unrelenting ground, dotted with smokestacks and covered snow, rushes forward to meet the Briza's dented bow. The nosedive lasts precisely one second long enough to convince Moira that all-important screw in Nemo's head finally came fatally loose.

  He inevitably pulls up, of course, with a sickening slap of inertia. Before her vertiginous mind can precisely sort out which direction's up and which direction's west, she realizes that the anti-aircraft turrets have ceased fire.

  The ray shields were demonstrably still offline, as evinced by Odisseus' grumbling and, most obviously, the lack of ray shields encircling the ship. Despite this, however, the turrets simply stare resentful daggers down at The Unconstant Lover as she skirts around the refinery's perimeter. Uncertain as to the why but more than willing to exploit their sudden ceasefire, Moira whirls the Antagonist fully around and, in so doing, first notices the line of blatantly labeled oil tanks that line the facility's perimeter to the Lover's immediate port.

  One missed shot from the perched turrets would almost certainly ignite the entire supply, destroying millions of credits worth of the refinery's finest in a single stroke. Moira opens her mouth to offer the Captain cursory congratulations on the passing cleverness of this scheme. The notion strikes her then that, should one ambitious turret gunner call his bluff, the unshielded Lover and all her hapless hands would also be obliterated in the ensuing blast.

  "Does anybody miss the ray shields?" poses Nemo wistfully. "I sure do."

  "Is there anything you miss more?" Odisseus is quick to return. "Engines, perhaps? Sensors?" He presses further. "Weapons is always an option."

  Flattening both triggers beneath her fingers, Moira and her fully functional Antagonist reduce the next turret into rubble. "Get bloomed, assfur."

  "Only way these shields'll be coming back online is if I swap power from some other system," Odisseus warns significantly. When no one volunteers their own system to be lobotomized for the sake of ship's power, the Ortok sighs heavily. "How's about the underturret? Would anyone besides Jargon object?" The radio is blissfully silent another second longer. "We have a winner."

  Undercut by a colorful new cornucopia of Iella invective, Two-Bit, in his capacity as co-pilot, cheerfully announces the return of the ray shields. "Underturret's zilched to 14%. Edgies're" he states, mere moments before the familiar sheen triumphantly returns to lacquer the length of the ship, "live at 74%!"

  A general uproar of good cheer ripples through the Lover's interior comm. Moira, in celebration, mercilessly destroys another of the defenseless gun emplacements that so plagued them minutes earlier. "Shields! Huzzah!" Nemo exclaims. "We can–"

  At this moment, the vannaphant in the room, a certain painfully persistent privateer and its uninspired name, drops seemingly out of nowhere to intercept the Lover's forward progress from the opposite corner of the refinery. A groan of collective displeasure chases away the sounds of fleeting relief that flooded the comm only moments before. The first order of business for The Unconstant Lover's freshly restored ray shields are to absorb the brunt of The Arrowhead's return fire.

  "I will personally pay topturret," Nemo proposes calmly, "one hundred of my own Commercial if she can blow that fucker up before I'd have to dodge it."

  Her skills challenged, Moira pivots bouncily in the bucket seat. She points her trifurcated Antagonist perfectly through the viewport and directly where her best guess supposed the brain, right lung and left lung of whatever unfortunate blowbag happens to be piloting The Arrowhead this morning would be. "Normally," she stipulates, "I'd ask to see the money first."

  Before he can counter, she's off, contributing her own bright green stream to the ditrogen exchange whipping between both stubborn spaceships. The beating the Lover's own shields endure at the hands of The Arrowhead's cannons is plenty punchy. The privateer's shields, crucially lacking all the regenerative wonders that Kiesha Laser Corp can bestow, bruise, buckle and are eventually banished.

  The Antagonist, as expected, performs flawlessly, whittling The Arrowhead's shields away to nothing. Without warning, Moira's ammunition window blinks warning red and her very last canister shorts out the last scrap of ray shield the foe can muster.

  "Of course," comments a frustrated Moira, fumbling with the release hatch for the crossed leather seat belts that meet over her sternum. Before she can stumble from her seat and insert a fresh chain of canisters, she catches sight of a faint green flashing, originating from The Unconstant Lover's underside.

  Moira watches, frozen with horror, as a string of enervated green bolts from Jargon's 14% Antagonis
t puncture the rack of stacked engines on The Arrowhead's port quarter. With a sudden suffusion of smoke, the craft careers unpredictably, tilting sideways on its axis and headbutting the cliffside.

  "Of fucking course," continues a griping Moira as the shockwave of the ensuing explosion, a bubble of soot, smoke and snow, practically starts another avalanche, its so forceful. Nemo cranks the deceleration with enough speed to avoid the cascade of shorn rock, tumbling boulder and the river of snow that deluges the southwestern corner of the refinery.

  "One hundred credits to underturret, then," Nemo awards with surprise, as he pumps the clutchlever and soars The Unconstant Lover away from the rockslide. The sound of the anti-aircraft cannons, firing with relief at the once-again airborne freighter, is nearly drowned out by the sound of the deranged Iella cackling from her seat of victory in the underturret.

  Third Interlude

  "Why Greatgullet and why him first?"

  "Muscle, mostly. You sway somebody like that to your cause, a real skullcracker, it'll make the other psychopaths consider your offer twice. We went the extra mottible to win Greatgullet over but, to see how fast he signed on the dotted, eh, maybe we didn't have to."

  "The extra mottible meaning?"

  "The Noxix footage. Never seen somebody with more of an appetite for bounty hunters than this guy. You ever meet him? Wears a moons-damned necklace of their fucking licenses around his neck. You utter the words "county" or "punter" anywhere in his slimy earshot, you best be ready to run 'cause he'll go berserk at first whiff."

  "Must've been difficult to stage."

  "What must've been difficult to stage?"

  "The Noxix footage."

  "You think that footage was staged?"

  "I assumed so. I mean, I applaud you, the move's grade-a, publicity-wise, and the forgery's absolutely top notch. I'm sorry, though – you bury a canister in the cranium of Huong Xo's poster child, you brag about said murder to the entire galaxy and then Xo doesn't paint a target on your face so large that guns don't just naturally point towards you? I'm sensing now, from the gun in your hand, that perhaps the footage was not staged."

  "You like?"

  "It's a very fancy gun. Vintage. Will that very fancy, vintage gun be returning to its holster anytime soon? I'd really feel more comfortab–"

  "This's the gun responsible, believe it or not. This is the very gun that buried a canister in Quuilar's cranium. Allegedly."

  "Those allegations are not–"

  "Where did that impression come from? Tell me, what brainless sack of quorki-fucking shitgargler gave you the impression the footage was staged?"

  "You shoot me and there's no column. You shoot me and the galaxy thinks Ikoril was you and the Noxix footage was staged."

  "Tell me who else thinks that."

  "Logical people. People who understand politics and crime. You've gotta understand, if you actually did shoot Quuilar Noxix in the head, there're better and more reliable means to advance that information that leaking some shakily-shot footage. These days, faking holoreel is no insurmountable feat."

  "And what, bribing a journalist is supposed to be one?"

  "Bribing me is."

  "What're you implying?"

  "Remove the pistol from my temple. Allow me to write the column. Watch people's opinions change."

  "That quickly? We like ourselves, don't we?"

  "Listen, Noxix could've met with a thousand and some unlikely and ignominous ends. He's disappeared or dead two years and you think you're the only claimant? The best claimant? Sure. Not the only one, is my point. Footage, as I said, can be faked. You shoot me and there's no column."

  "I heard you."

  "Bears repeating, I think. There. See? Much appreciated."

  "That goes in."

  "That you pressed a gun to my temple? For your credibility's sake–”

  "That I shot Quuilar Noxix. That the footage wasn't staged."

  "Long as it's true."

  "Take a shovel, visit beatific Baz and find out.”

  "And the others? Who was next to fly the colors?"

  "Vobash. And my own sources tell me he was the most difficult get, more difficult even than Charybdis."

  "Those sources being Greatgullet?"

  "I was under the impression a journalist never reveals their sources."

  "You're not a journalist."

  "Thank fuck. No, I did not have the misfortune of conducting Vobash's interview personally. The whole fucking purpose of recruiting Greatgullet first was that the water he draws might drag the other big nuts with him. Vobash, I guess, being among them."

  "Can't say as I've heard much about him. That is, prior to the Freebooter Fleet."

  "Not many have. Weaselly motherfucker tries rather extremely hard to keep his profile low and his ship under the radar. You know the type, I'm assuming, very cautious, very uptight about professionalism and all that shit. Thing is, that's great, we're all impressed and stuff, but might as well be a blooming actuary, right, at that point? Way he plays, even I can't find mucha point in piracy. You want me to repeat that one, 'cause I can, if you wanna make special note. Way he plays–"

  "Pretty sure it got picked up. No worries."

  "Alright. Use that, though. That's good, 's ironic. Tell you the truth–"

  "I'd prefer that."

  "Could he hear me now, he'd be abso-fucking-lutely livid, the shitsnake. You hear that, galaxy? Ciff Vobash, captains a Hesko Planetary 7762 Destroyer Medium The Loose Cannon. Triomman, red coat, you believe this, keeps a live honest-to-moons brushvezzer up his sleeve to fucking confuse people or I don't know. I do know, for a fact, that he's personally responsible for that bit of skullduggery that saw Artelse's fourth moon pushed outta orbit some four years ago, much as he'd like to avoid that being widely known."

  "I'm sure he'll be delighted to hear this."

  "No, I think he'll be really fucking pissed off."

  "Who's left? Charybdis? Ajuvog?"

  "Aju Vog Xah Qaj. Had I a credit for every time a Xend corrected me on that buhoxshit, I'd probably have like ten fucking credits."

  "How's working with the rogue queen?"

  "Weird, as you'd expect. She I didn't know. Practically nobody, among my crew or Greatgullet's knew her personally. Was Vobash, believe it or not, who made contact with her. Her work, obviously, we're all familiar with. What I hear, half the layout of the Crawk's Locker is the handiwork of her and that eyesore she slimes around inside. Tell you why I'm lucky, I've never met the monster face-to-face. You ever see a holo of what they look like, those Xendo queens? Moira pulled one up, in another attempt to gross me out and blech, blech, with a side order of blech."

  "Does that create tension, though? That you find the Xend gross?"

  "Tension? Nah. I mean, I don't trust the creepy fuckers near as far as I can throw one but, truth be told, there's tension everywhere, between everybody. Much as Gull and I're maybe boon companions, shit arises pretty regularly that we just don't fucking agree on. Vobash and Aju Vog Xah Qaj can typically be relied upon to agree on whatever, I suppose, but it's Charybdis none of us can predict."

  "She's becoming quite the cause celeb in her own right."

  "She's a fucking weirdo, yeah. That can't be argued. Assume for a minute she wasn't Trijan, you know what I'm saying, assume she didn't wear that spooky fucking naval uniform everywhere she moons-damned goes, and she'd still be weirder than smiles on Moira. You putta gun to my head, I couldn't tell you why she joined up. We're glad she did, obviously, but totally clueless as to why."

  "Bad blood with Valladia?"

  "You assume, sure, but, in all honesty, that's never the vibe I got offa her. All signs point to her just, I don't know, being a fucking lunatic. Gives me the creeps."

  "The creeps? You?"

  "Listen. You ain't met her. She's a privateer, right, and we're pirates. Dad's suddenly pinching cigarettes and spray-painting schoolbuses with his teenaged sons again, you understand me? Either she's a spy and a d
umb one, or she's a complete psychopath."

  "And psychopaths creep you out?"

  "Other ones do, yeah."

  Chapter 14

  Odisseus is thirsty from all this morning's manual labor. En route to the galley, he scowls at and waddles past a queer queue of unrecognizable strangers. Had Moira Quicksilver, standing sentry at the shaded foot of the boarding ramp, not given him expressed verbal warning, the Ortok might be inclined to righteous outrage at the purple Talosian sand this intrusion's freshly tracked all over the Lover's admittedly unclean deck plates.

  With full knowledge of their purpose aboard, Odisseus can only marvel and scoff.

  If the parched mechanic could've predicted one outcome from the repeated raidings of the Freebooter Fleet, it would have been progressively fewer pirates, not more.

  Three distinct cliques comprise the majority of the foot traffic paraded down the betweendecks corridor. All of these beings Odisseus must sidle, shoulder and snarl past in order to gain access to the galley.

  The first cluster, whom Odisseus neatly sidestepped, consisted primarily of Triommans, a half-dozen drooling males encircling with instinctual protectiveness an elderly female of the species. His patience waning, Odisseus then stomps through the second group, three Mungabs and a Vollocki, each broadcasting their colors on blue bandanas tied around scalps and biceps, each reacting with the same boyish standoffishness that's such an epidemic among petty hoods. With as fearsome a growl as the dehydrated Ortok can manage, Odisseus scatters those remaining, a flamboyant posse including a sashed Saurian, a pantalooned Prul and an epauletted Cyngok.

  The hurdles overcome, his sweaty, sweatered bulk arrives, after much effort, in the mess hall. "Holding court" was the term Moira had attributed to Nemo's activities in the hold. At the time, Odisseus had, evidently erroneously, assumed she was just being poetic. The scene that occupies the main well of The Unconstant Lover's mess hall is, he discovers, a decidedly medieval one.