Chapter 16
Moira Quicksilver twirls the keyring obnoxiously close to the Captain's face. When she's particularly lucky, the gaudier pieces, that kitschy Takioro memorabilia in particular, will manage to clock him on the ear or the cheekbone. As hilarious as she finds this, Nemo's either too stupid or too stubborn to acknowledge her.
Reclining more completely in her chair, Moira brings her tankard, frothing to the brim with top-shelf Gitterswitch, to her lips and enjoys the spectacle of combat unfolding below her. For once, she's content; she'll continue sipping and spinning until either Nemo moves out of range or her wrist grows tired, whichever comes first.
A roar of raucous approval rumbles the ruined walls. Down below, Boogers finally stakes some solid footing and manages to heft his opponent over his head. His opponent, Teeth, is understandably displeased with this turn of events. She, however, continues her vain attempts to clamp her confusion of fangs around some exposed portion of her counterpart's hide, the very fate Moira'd once predicted would be her eventual downfall.
With Teeth gripped tightly in his claws, Boogers bellows a bellicose Gungi'noojian bellow and launches the hapless hulk against the pit's opposite wall, soliciting a sympathetic sound from the crowd. Slamming once into the teltriton and once again onto the sand hardly seems to phase the gigantic Gungi'noojian. She immediately springs back to her own clawed feet and starts to square off against her snotty doppelganger anew.
The audience hoots encouragements or insults, brandishes fists full of bunched currency and throngs about the jagged edges of the pit like carrion-eaters over a carcass. They're made all the more savage by their being, each one of them, murderous pirates.
Following their triumphant return from Valladia Prime with all the swag, loot and booty they could conceivably cram onto each prize ship captured, a massive celebratory debauch was promptly thrown. As the only location on Talos II spacious enough to accommodate such a guest list, the shipwreck's massive central chamber of course played host.
Pirates pack the palatial wreck. Nearly a thousand some individual heads are visible to Moira from her seat high atop the dais and each one is engaged in a dizzying array of vices across the armada of banquet tables. From her humble seat, Moira can spot Iniquity games, arm-wrestling, actual wrestling, marble matches, drinking contests and prostitution. In addition to the more prominent prizefighting drama on display within the pit, she's witnessed no less than nine separate murders tonight with her own two eyes.
There were, in fact, so many vices in such dense concentration that Moira shouldn't have been surprised that the ingenious minds of the Freebooter Fleet spontaneously conceived of a brand spanking new one. Though, Moira supposes, what she watched in the center ring was less an innovation and more a timeless classic all tarted up with a shiny new handle.
Pirateball, as it was colloquially referred to, involved no visible ball, nor any rules regarding the handling of any such ball. In fact, the “sport” was only tangentially related to the act piracy in that, thus far, its only players were all universally pirates. The legitimately ball-less rules of pirateball were deceptively simple; both contestants attempt to kill each other.
In short, it was pugilism, cheap and dirty, with all the sophistication or sportsmanship left at the door. An industrious team of wannabe fight promoters had troubled themselves to install a convenient arena – a gnashed and gnawed cylinder from one the crashed cruiser's former turbines – at the center of the council chamber. As a result, Moira Quicksilver has patronized the fledgling sport's first three inaugural matches, one contestant defeated by a garrote wire, one by bombard knuckles and one by flamethrower.
The fourth bout, a Boogers v. Teeth grudge match, was rapidly approaching a full ten minutes in length, with no end in sight, both participants only sporting superficial injures and the only bored head amongst the assembly Nemo's.
"Hey," he asides to Moira, almost receiving a mouthful of swung keys for his trouble. "Pop a shot down there, would you?"
Catching the keys with a clatter in her first, Moira screws up her expression. "You ever consider volunteering yourself for gladiatorial combat sometime?"
"Come on, now," carps Two-Bit, seated, unusually, to Moira's immediate right, "Don't dritch me on this. I've got three thou on what's his kisser, the one with the chompers."
"Teeth," Odisseus provides from his seat adjacent to Nemo.
"Sure," Two-Bit agrees uncertainly. "Him."
"Her."
As the two Gungi'noojian gladiators lock horns for the umpteenth time, the occupants of the Captain's Table preside over the proceedings with a slurry of emotions, ranging from a Xendo implacability to an Obaxi exuberance. Nemo and his confederates are cast as the respected ringleaders. Charybdis's crew constitute bemused onlookers. Greatgullet's group holler and harrumph their support. The Xendo ambassador and its ilk offer token representation and little more
Vobash, as ever, is the most vocal detractor.
"Nemo!" The Triomman, leaning over the table, attempts conjure the Captain's notice by mere shouting, no mean feat amid all this ruckus and even more so against the depths of Nemo's obliviousness.
"Gull!" the Captain instead shouts across the tables, himself attempting to snag Greatgullet's attention via the methods of shouting louder, waving his arms and ignoring Vobash.
"Nemo!"
"Gull!"
"Huh?" grunts the Obax, peeling his pupilless eyes from the pushing-and-shoving of his matched pair of bodyguards. "Boss?" he barks towards the Captain.
"Nemo, we need–"
The line of communication thus established, Nemo screams his question with hands cupped around his mouth. "Who're you betting on, even?"
"Both," he returns with an innocent shrug. "Don't wanna hurt nobody's fucking feelings."
"Huh," Nemo grunts contemplatively. "Fair enough."
Vobash will not, it seems, be so easily denied. "We need to discuss–"
A thunderous crash, echoed by the clamoring protests of a hundred voices, grinds the merriment to an unexpected halt. Not gifted with the greatest possible vantage point towards the corner in question, Moira strains to see what, precisely, seems to have caused all the trouble. Something mighty enough, it appears, to screech the chamber's chaos to an anticipatory silence.
Accidentally or intentionally, a corner table, once host to a handful of Iniquity games, has been toppled at an ungainly angle. A mixed heap of cards, currency and weaponry stands accumulated at its base. A circumference of standing, accosted players transform their stares from accusatory daggers to greedy gaping at the jumbled up winnings at their feet.
The teeming audience is captivated by this, equal parts stalemate and showdown. Suddenly, in a mad scramble of appendages, all interested parties leap upon the unclaimed cash.
The first punch, from a tattooed Chook to a goggled humanoid, is only moments away. Among an assembly this drunken and querulous to begin with, the idea spreads like a plague. Before long, Moira's watching a small army implode; the thousand-man brawl that suddenly dwarfs Boogers and Teeth's meager melee is a foregone conclusion within thirty seconds.
As with this evening's previous spectacles of violence, reaction across the Captain's Table is mixed, ranging predictably from distaste to non-reaction to enthusiasm. Unsure precisely how to measure this turn of events, Moira is more enraptured by the alarming sight of a thousand flung fists, a thousand tossed tankards, a thousand crashing chairs.
"Could you–" Nemo asks of Odisseus, placidly passing the Ortok his beverage. Bemusedly, Odisseus accepts and, this achieved, the Captain rises from his chair, giving his trousers and duster a cursory brushing off.
Before Odisseus can voice the obvious "where do you think you're going" question, Nemo clears his throat once, gazes out across the festival of fisticuffs that stretches from wall to wall, utters "if you'll excuse me" and springs up onto the table.
"Would you," Odisseus snarls, spilling Nemo's stein in his attempt to swipe at the
scruff of his saltbrother's neck, "quit jumping on things!" The massive paw, of course, misses Nemo's collar by fortuitous inches. With a whoop of alleviated boredom that inspires both Trijan crewmen sitting directly in his flightpath to scatter aside, Nemo hurdles himself off the table, off the dais and into the fray.
Moira and Odisseus exchange bewildered and agog expressions. They hustle from their chairs, clamber across the Captain's Table, to more consternation from those seated across, and launch themselves into the fracas after their careless Captain.
His initial leap lands him unsteadily atop the nearest table within jumping distance, amid a circle of shocked and sprawled onlookers. His footing secure, Nemo instigates his own hostilities by kicking whichever of the table's idle flagons he spots towards whomever's in range, with hollow sounds and tumbling sprays of alcohol. Substantially more graceful than her Captain, Moira achieves the same table measly seconds before a vengeful, Gitter-drenched Zibbian wraps an angry tentacle around Nemo's ankle and yanks hard. Wrenched wickedly off the tabletop, Nemo forfeits the higher ground to spill onto the sandy floor.
At precisely the same moment, the offending Zibbian is pummeled to the earth by the protective pounce of an oddly apologetic Odisseus. Now alone atop the table, Moira finds herself fleetingly fending off the unfriendly advances of a natty Nimglo with the hobnailed heel of her favorite baby-stomper.
When push came to shove, she's probably unwilling to actually murder any of the well-meaning brawlers that, ostensibly, were under her indirect employ. Moira, then, makes the executive decision to ground both Righty and Lefty to their holsters for the time being.
She dawdles her hands on both their handles before she extends this decree to her electrobatons. Dishing out anything but cuts, scrapes and bruises were, on a purely practical level, detrimental both to Moira's long-lasting health and her long-lasting wealth.
Moira Quicksilver, let it be known, is nothing if not purely practical.
Fortunately for Moira, of course, inimitable marksmanship and increasing skill with a pair of dual-wielded shock sticks weren't her only redeemable features.
Shifting her weight into a flawless Counterbalanced Gracko stance, Moira dispatches her Nimglo assailant with a complimentary pair of savage kicks to sternum and shoulder successively. Like the gracko of her stance's namesake, Moira hops lightly to the sand to discover only a huffing Odisseus, an unconscious Zibbian and a patch of purple sand where once Nemo lay.
"Where...?" a supremely confused Moira breathes.
A pointed claw from an equally frustrated Odisseus indicates, across an adjacent table, both their courageous Captain and the telltale trail of elbow and knee gouges he'd carved when he'd soldier-crawled beneath the table. Squirming fruitlessly in the general direction of his new earringed Tracath adversary, Nemo appears both hell-bent to escape from and oblivious to the civilizing influences of his first mate and saltbrother.
Career bounty hunter Moira Quicksilver, now forced to admit that her tracking skills are perhaps somewhat rusty, shares an eye-rolling moment with Odisseus. She drops into a second stance, that of the Poised Hukia, in preparation to save Nemo's undeserving asshole one more time.
Employing what running start the space allows, Moira skids beneath the intervening table, boots spraying up sand, and slide-tackles a Venewla threatening to cosh Nemo's cranium with an uplifted stool. Moira is more than happy to obligingly fill the Venewla's open mouth, screaming her lungs bloody, with swallowed sand. Rising, she punts the prone pirate unforgivingly in the pelvis.
With a sharp exhale, Moira's gratified to turn and find herself face-to-face with a profoundly annoyed Nemo. Beyond him, Odisseus mauls the Tracath and all her piercings as politely as possible, as though only intending to do harm to her body and not to her ego.
"What gives?" Nemo exclaims with painful exasperation.
"You what gives!" exclaims Moira with equal exasperation and significantly less sense. "We just, what're you, I mean," she concludes with a point to the grounded, groaning Venewla.
"You're gonna get killed," Odisseus, still manhandling his Tracath, has the presence of mind to interpret.
"I'm not gonna get killed," Nemo denies to both of his babysitters. "See?" He gestures at the pandemonium flipping tables and throwing punches in every direction. "It's a friendly dust-up. Nobody's gonna–"
A noise uniquely alien to Moira interrupts Nemo's argument as an oscillating frequently streams between the two of them. Nemo, turning to address Odisseus is precisely dumb and lucky enough to twist the bulk of his body away. A shimmering wave of displaced energy, haloed by heat and colored bright pink, streaks narrow inches past him.
His duster, flapping dramatically open with the vigor of his indignation, is not nearly as fortunate, however. With a sizzling sound, it receives the brunt of the attack.
Instinct tosses Righty and Lefty from their holsters into Moira's outstretched hands and she sweeps three-hundred and sixty degrees around. This buys a significant berth from the surrounding brawlers as she scans for any obvious signs of a triggerman or their most bizarre of weapons. To his credit, Odisseus has forgotten the Tracath, shoved Nemo securely onto the sand and stands, defiant and snarly as ever, over the prone form of his saltbrother in the same space of time that Moira spends locating the Captain's would-be-assassin.
All the bedlam and brouhaha of the previous second is promptly evaporated. Each participant is frozen mid-punch and gazes slack-jawed towards Moira, Odisseus and Nemo's revealed assailant.
With the smoking gun – a bizarre, brassy-looking rifle of fluting tubes and charge chambers – gripped in gloved mitts, the goggled humanoid, the recipient of the scuffle's first punch, is revealed to be the dastardly culprit. Apart from his targeting goggles, worn uselessly high across his brow, his attire suggests some manner of desert wayfarer. He sports a dusty burlap slicker, chest-crossing bandoliers of equally bizarre ammunition and precisely the style of cocksure swagger borne by no plebeian pirate, nor even ship's captain, but rather, by some haughty-ass amateur bounty hunter.
As a professional courtesy, from one angler to another, Moira shoots the gawky weapon from his hands hours before he can open his mouth to offer any manner of taunt, retort or curse. Overcome with generosity, Moira plants Righty's own bolt in the bounty hunter's bandoliered shoulder, inciting a freakish pink spark from the ammunition struck and toppling him onto the nearest table.
The corona of awestruck bystanders, drunk or punch-drunk enough to react audibly to the sight and sound of gunfire, continue to steer clear of Moira. She's amble room as she pads towards their downed assailant, both pistols pointed towards him. She pauses to consider his discarded weapon with a boot.
"He alright?" she questions, nodding towards the Captain.
"He's alright," repeats Nemo, climbing to his feet next to a paranoid Ortok, sniffing the crowd in every direction for any trace of further attackers.
Standing, however, gives Moira a glimpse of the extensive damage the Captain's beloved duster's sustained. Its lower third is jaggedly missing, as though the bounty hunter's inexplicable firearm had somehow taken a great cartoonish bite from it. “Oh, bloom me out!” bemoans Nemo, upon following Moira's eyes and noticing the damage for himself.
"I don't even know what to call this thing," Moira observes, nudging the castoff weapon beneath her boot.
"It's-a-disintegrator," sings Charybdis, accompanied by the vice captains in her squadron. All eyes return to the Captain's Table, where the Trijan's risen from her seat.
"That's a disintegrator?" Moira spits dismissively. "These're what the Imperium regulates halfway to Jotor?"
Like any sane person, Charybdis rounds the Captain's Table and descends the dais by the perfectly good staircase. The ex-privateer approaches, brandishing her own bizarre firearm, as dissimilar to the one at Moira's feet as it is from Righty or Lefty. "Not-of-Trijan-make, mind. Some-third-party-imitation, I'd-wager."
"Frankly," Moira confesses to the prone assassin,
"I'm underwhelmed."
"Look at my poor jacket!" Nemo wails, hefting the missing section of his tattered duster around as apparent evidence of the weapon's power.
Odisseus' voice is thick with suspicion. "Is no one curious who this motherbloomer is? Some hired gun of Valladia's?”
"Potentially," Moira acknowledges cooly, closing to inspection range with both pistols hovering comfortably at waist level. "He is a bounty hunter."
The very words, spoken in accusation against seemingly one of their own, provokes a schoolyard "ooo" of anticipation from the hordes of witnesses. There's a commotion from the Captain's Table and Greatgullet's on his feet. "He's a what?"
"You recognize him?" Odisseus growls.
"I recognize the type," she confirms, mounting a handy chair to reach the tabletop. From her towering position, she sheathes Righty, plants a jackboot on the bounty hunter's throat and performs a fast frisking of his writhing body.
"Do you have any idea how long I've fucking had this?" Nemo threatens, suddenly enraged, towards Moira's prisoner.
"You're-lucky-to-be-alive, is-what-you-are," Charybdis informs him, still harmonized by her distant choir. "A-Trijan-model, such-as-we-have-back-home, would've-spread-out, disintegrating-the-jacket-entirely, along-with-its-wearer."
"Thanks, Odi," singsongs Odisseus.
The contents of his trouser and jacket pockets – spare change, a crisp holodeck worthy of further inspection, some starship keys – don't draw Moira's interest nearly so much as the scuffed, ConFed-issued ident card she uncovers does.
"Dimick Decarios," she reads, nonplussed. "Not ringing anything. Age 37, homeworld Haess, first-tier bounty hunting status under the Ring ConFed," she grunts, a note of impression tinging her voice. "Explains the disintegrator, I suppose. Friends in high places, sounds like." She considers the quivering Dimick from the opposite side of her sidearm. "Well? Anything to say for yourself?"
Galactic Menace Page 33