Galactic Menace

by Timothy J Meyer

  These concerns seemingly occur to neither Nemo nor Two-Bit, the former basking shamelessly in the attention and defacing any weapon presented before him, the latter facilitating these spontaneous bursts of PR far more than preventing them.

  Questions, in addition to pistols, are hurled with equal frequency and less discrimination towards the Galactic Menace. The majority of said hurled questions blend into a buzzing backdrop of noise Odisseus must needs, in order to make any sense of the swirling sounds, mentally drown out. Nevertheless, occasional and semi-audible snatches occasionally pierce through the cacophony.

  Among shouted requests for signatures and the occasional simple scream for attention, variants of "Where we headed?" and "Who's next?" and "Yime or Ikoril?" are the most common. This slice of evidence, plus the overwhelming presence of holocorders, first tips Odisseus to the inescapable fact that there may, in fact, be some sizable percentage of press, squeezed unobtrusively in between the legitimate pirates.

  In all honesty, however, the Ortok mechanic would vastly prefer the presence of hidden reporters, obvious security snafu that might represent and all, to the lurking presence of more bounty hunters. He couldn't imagine what absurd feats of suicide the IMIS's generous, new, galactically-menacing hike to Nemo's previous reward might tempt Bad Space's headhunter population into attempting.

  The remainder of their trek through Pirateton is unsurprisingly nightmarish. Any detour Odisseus could possibly speculate rapidly clogs with pushing pedestrians before the thought to deviate that direction even occurs to him. Anyone among the shapeless mass of spectators could be a humble hoodlum, a vexatious reporter hungry to squeeze some scoop from the mere act of the Menace walking past or a bevy of ambushing bounty hunters, lying in wait to kill or capture Nemo. Two-Bit's obviously useless at driving the droves any further back, unironically signing his fair share of autographs with his own inkjetter produced from nowhere.

  Their progress through the ocean of Nemo-worship is agonizingly slow. They've barely reached the halfway point between Lover and council chamber before the least shy and least disguised reporter elbows his way brashly forward.

  The dreadlocked Duutho thrusts the muffle of his microphone scant inches from Nemo's mouth. His eye socket, Odisseus notes, happens to sport another example of that fashionable holocorder augment Dusty Dimick's pet camera crew employed.

  "Carak Sotak," introduces the Duutho with gravitas, as though his nonsense name is meant to evoke any response from the Menace or his pair of wing mates, "Galaxy Gossi–"

  Five hundred pounds of orange-clad Ortoki bulk insinuates itself between extended microphone and Menace's mouth. A throaty growl offers a veiled promise of unveiled violence soon to follow should the Duutho decline Odisseus' generous offer to stop pointing unknown objects at his saltbrother.

  Unable to adequately argue with this kindest of requests, Carak Sotak shifts his footing, dreadlocks dangling with each step and poses the question again, from a considerably more respectful distance.

  "Carak Sotak, Galaxy Gossip. What're you thoughts, Nehel, on being named Galactic Menace? Anger? Rage? Wrath?"

  For once in his wretched existence, that weasel Two-Bit Switch sidesteps to the rescue, motivated certainly by ego, greed and the typical glory-hogging behavior that turned the tiny tyvorka wheel he utilized for a brain.

  "Well, he's chuffed, isn't he?" Two-Bit answers, Sotak swinging the microphone before the jabberhead's own statement, in want of even the slightest reaction from an autograph-occupied Nemo. "Chuffed the galaxy at large's taking a notice, yeah, and chuffed everybody seems so blooming excited about it all."

  "Would you say," the Duutho addresses towards Nemo, keeping pace for all Odisseus' efforts to hustle the Menace along, "that there're political undertones to these attacks? Why is Valladia the target? Have they–"

  "Sure, sure," extemporizes Two-Bit, pulling a concerned face as though he has many learned opinions regarding interstellar politics or the galactic economy. "Valladia's makin' inroads, as they jabbed, and if the buck don't stop here, you know, where's it gonna stop and all that."

  Whether these answers serve to satisfy Sotak or his audience, starving for some manner of dialogue with the newly-minted Menace, the Duutho doesn't stop the questioning. He simply yanks the microphone back to his own mouth to ask his next question and thrusts it vaingloriously back towards Nemo's uncaring face the second he's done.

  "And where's the Freebooter Fleet headed next? With only Ikoril and Yime remaining as potential targets, clearly the Captains must have decided by now?"

  Two-Bit chuckles as coyly as he may, as though he's toying with telling, as though there were not very real consequences that would land his all their heads should the powers-that-be learn where the Council of Captains had next set their sights. "Ah, but that would be jabbin', eh? Specc we'll all just have to diddle and vizz, won't we?"

  As though summoned, Nemo quite abruptly completes his most recent signature, blindly hands the relevant firearm to an irrelevant crowd member and meanders closer to the Duutho, seemingly noticing the newshound for the very first time.

  Odisseus stops walking immediately and tenses, should Sotak try anything. Beyond stammering some at the sudden approach of the galaxy's most wanted asshole, the Duutho does little more threatening than pose his next question.

  "Talk about–" Carak Sotak commands moments before he's shot. Nemo's cagey pistol creaks out of his leather holster and lets loose a solitary canister with plenty of time for a more prescient sentient to notice or perhaps even relocate. With an expression somewhere between surprise and agony, the Duutho tumbles to the sand with a purplish billow, his microphone landing with a soft thud inches from Two-Bit's feet.

  Before Nemo's even returned the still-smoking murder weapon to his sheath, every outlaw on every street in the nearby vicinity explodes into cheering. The sight of their beloved Menace committing a flagrant and unjustified homicide seems to instill, rather than horror, some strange mixture of further glorification and further devotion.

  Moments later, Nemo's returned to his previous activity of blowing the crowd kisses, Two-Bit seconds on his heels. Only Odisseus is left to ponder Carak Sotak's smoldering corpse, unceremoniously trod upon by the following footsteps of Nemo's fanbase.

  Moira Quicksilver parries high, ripostes low and converts the upward parry into a downward chop forceful enough to bend the baton from sheer velocity. Her opponent, though, is surely too skillful to be so easily swatted. The swing therefore misses by a mottible and all Moira buys with her overextension is distance.

  Distance, however, is no impediment to a halfway competent whipsaber wielder. In the face of several snapping strikes, Moira backpedals seconds ahead of punishment.

  Socorro Charybdis, unfurled whipsaber to right, glistening feziko to left, makes her play. She windmills the whipsaber in an six-foot-wide arc over her head, compelling Moira into a duck. Short of being skewered by the ready blade of the feziko, she rolls into a Wheeling Tvorka somersault, the bounty hunter hoping to tumble somewhere within the Trijan's guard. A miscalculation admittedly but Moira, realizing this instantaneously, doesn't quite anticipate the price her blunder will cost her.

  Lunging fruitlessly with both batons at Charybdis' fastly-repositioning knees, Moira's rewarded for her hubris with an embarrassing smart across the lower back from the flaccid whipsaber, brought easily from its wild spin into a harmless and humiliating tap on her unguarded torso.

  The referee – or Trijan equivalent thereof – melodically awards Charybdis one point.

  Both fighters return to their respective corners to collect weapons and wits, dropping their tensed combat stances with the mechanical nonchalance of career martial artists. For her part, Moira retracts both electrobatons and re-establishes her breathing regimen. Charybdis, meanwhile, rigidifies then slackens, rigidifies then slackens her whipsaber by humming a specific sequence of notes, another example of the Trijan's growing cool-down tic.

  Moira is ex
actly ignorant enough of Trijan culture to be patently surprised at discovering a spacious dueling ring installed betweendecks aboard The Dishonorable Discharge. The sanctimonious little chamber at the junk's exact center even comes with its own food court, surrounded by its barroom-height table and its crewmen chowing down.

  Obviously, certain assumptions were made when Captain Charybdis invited Moira Quicksilver and both her batons to a few friendly sparring bouts, citing her growing malaise towards squaring off against the same roster of swordsmen over and over. Among them, Moira's erroneously imagined the scrimmages would take place in the Discharge's hold and one as grimy, galvanized and inglorious as the Lover's.

  She didn't anticipate the miniature opera house of warfare, situated at the stained-glass heart of The Dishonorable Discharge.

  Talos II's ordinary sunlight is made masterpiece by the triangular panes of semi-permeable solxite that all the spacecraft's hull and walls are comprised of. Wedges of full-spectrum rainbows paint incredible geometric patterns across the floor, the table and even the diners. Those diners, a score of disinterested Trijans parsing and parting their noodles, are each full naval careers beyond even noticing.

  Unaccustomed to the radiant phenomenon, Moira finds the environs to be somewhat distracting, a handicap not to be undervalued when dueling a whipsaber master for the first time in her life.

  "Tell-me-where-you-come-from," requests or demands Charybdis, incorporating the unconscious humming that straightens or loosens her whipsaber into her choral command.

  Watching her opponent's fluid weapon transform from stick to snake to stick again, Moira perks one shoulder higher in the laziest example of a shrug. "Anglia."

  "Long-way-from-home," observes the Captain with a thoughtful tune.

  "Speak for yourself.”

  “Where-I-come-from,” she clichés, “isn't-more-than-three-jumps-away.”

  Moira shrugs one shoulder. “Maybe physically.”

  The referee belts his soprano starting pistol and this, the sixth consecutive round, begins anew. With a piddly pair of points against Charybdis' champion four, Moira's presented with both tailspinning momentum and home field advantage to overcome. To accomplish this, she's armed with two sheathed batons and only what minimal element of surprise staring with them both sheathed affords her.

  Nevertheless, Moira shifts into her practiced Poised Hukia pose and invites the Trijan to come try her luck.

  Charybdis responds in kind, solidifying her whipsaber into a stiff truncheon of approximately baton length with the corresponding three-note key tone. Hefting the now hafted weapon high, she advances a handful of cautious paces forward, feziko held frontwise to best defend.

  Once again, Moira's Tebi-Gali plus electrobatons proves an ill-suited match for the tradition Trijan school of fencing with whipsaber and feziko. A specialized stabber's sword, the feziko is superior to a baton in strength and sharpness, while the whipsaber is superior in range and obviously whiplash.

  This truth is thwacked achingly into Moira for a fourth time. She attempts to circumvent this pattern by borrowing a page from Nemo's honored book. As soon as Charybdis scoots into leapable reach, Moira bounds brashly forward with a mad banzai jump and both batons snapping open. As she sails toward a momentarily bewildered Charybdis, she ardently hopes she'd somehow correctly extrapolated the distance between them and also hopes, with equal ardor, that Charybdis misextrapolated that same distance.

  Of course she lands three steps short. Of course her first baton's overextended swing is slapped away by the feziko's flat. Of course her second baton's downward chop is parried perfectly by a punctual whipsaber and of course three notes uttered from Charybdis' lips coils her weapon completely about Moira's baton. Her right weapon thusly entangled by the sword-come-snare, Moira slices vainly wide towards Charybdis' midsection with her left baton, to create a bubble of empty air between their bodies and to complicate the Captain's footing.

  "Mother wanted," Moira relates throatily with the first stymied swing, "me to be a trained bird," she continues with the second, "and I wanted to be," she jabs the baton's non-electrified tip straight towards the Trijan's pelvis, "anything else."

  In response, Charybdis emits the merest grunt of acknowledgment. With a flick of the wrist so jarring only repeated cultural tradition could have hammered the motion so hard, the Captain plucks the trapped baton from Moira's grip. Humming her three notes, Charybdis straightens her own weapon again to send the baton skittering across the floor.

  Twisting into a standard fencer's posture as quickly as her reflexes will allow, Moira's still seconds too late to outpace the forward-thrust feziko. Its cold solxite blade bonks Moira bloodlessly on the chin and lingers, for a nanosecond, over her available neck.

  "Tell me where you come from," returns a panting and partially-insulted Moira Quicksilver when she, point awarded and round called, stalks moodily back to her own corner.

  Not remotely perspiry, Socorro Charybdis resumes her humming ritual, unchallenged by Moira's mood or moxie. "Well, Trija," the Captain supplies. "Tovoqqa-Province."

  "Nice place?" poses Moira companionably.

  "Was-nicer," Charybdis is forced to admit through a shimmer of perverse pride, the caliber of which Moira's only observed on the face of a very different Captain. "Decided-to-scorch-the-place-off-the-face-of-the-planet, turns-out."

  Moira only has time to grunt “understand the impulse, I guess” before the referee sings the song that starts the seventh round.

  Aboard a decommissioned Trijan war vessel, about to engage a disgraced Trijan naval officer, wielding time-honored Trijan weaponry, in a supposedly sacrosanct rite of Trijan ceremonial combat, Moira's level of casual knowledge toward Charybdis' foresworn culture is called that much into question. The sum total of information Moira could levy concerning or against the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija, its three-thousand year history or its billions of black-skinned citizens was less than impressive.

  She knows about solxite and their solar-based technology. She knows about their societal obsession toward husbandry and heritage. She knows about their fierce isolationism in stalwart defiance of all the Imperium's attempts to annex their star system.

  In addition, Moira now knows that they, as befits the monopolistic manufacturers of the whipsaber, make excellent whipsaber fighters.

  "Queen-wanted," Charybdis copies and modifies Moira's phrasing, stomping implacably forward and snapping her unrolled weapon about with vicious intimidating cracks, "me-to-be-a-trained-dog," she continues, inverting her grip on the feziko to better facilitate a stabbing motion, "and-I-wanted-to-be," she lashes forward, extending her body and saber to their ultimate reach and quite nearly welting the cheek of dodging Moira, "anything-else."

  "A privateer?" Moira finds herself muttering as the whipsaber's absolute tip whistles past her face and she, with a quick click, extends her right electrobaton.

  "A-free-woman," returns Charybdis instead, stepping boldly forward and attempting to paddle Moira punishingly with her sidearm.

  Even with only one electrobaton unsheathed, Moira's still able to stake out some standing space. In one motion, she forces Charybdis to reconsider her footwork and pivots position to within arm's reach of the Trijan's unprotected backside. Unable to spend more than a heartbeat aligning her aim, Moira points the still-retracted righthand baton towards the back of Charybdis' neck, a minute chink in her defenses. With her thumb hammered down, Moira ratchets out the second baton.

  Some clairvoyance, some inexplicable combat intuition, whispers in Charybdis' ear to cant her head aside. By a fraction of an inch, she avoids the blow.

  The whipsaber next comes screaming around to drive Moira away. It's all her Tebi-Gali reflexes and training can accomplish to scoot her, remaining as much as she can on the balls of her feet, out of harm's elastic way.

  As she's turning about with her weapon, Moira and Charybdis pass eye contact for a second. The ex-privateer nods an acknowledgement and the ex-bounty hunt
er simply glowers with disappointment that she can't seem to land a blow on the cocky bleeder.

  Sweat slimes the grips on both her batons and her breath comes all the more raggedly. Moira reasons now might be an appropriate time to begin cheating.

  "I-wore-the-uniform-for-sixteen-years," Charybdis chants, swapping her whipsaber back into a shillelagh and motioning to her outfit, in all its tattered and moth-eaten glory, with her chin. "I-wore-the-wig-for-nine," she continues, eyes glinting strangely and eyebrows peaked upwards to indicate the ratty tangle of muddied brown hair that adorns her pate. "I-display-nothing-but-devotion-and-decorum-for-half-my-lifetime-and-none-of-that–"

  Moira's not content to allow the diatribe much more breathing room and takes three assertive steps forward. "–factored-into-their-decision–" sings Socorro, unwilling to relinquish her remembrance on account of some electrobaton-wielding murderer striding towards her with obvious ill-intent. Moira lobs one laughably timed feint right and prods cruelly left, earning a parry and a shuffle from her opponent in addition to several more bars of musical complaint, "–to-fucking-exile-me."

  Moira repeats her tactic with opposite hands, feinting left and prodding right. This time, when Charybdis executes a textbook parry of the low-swung left, Moira taps the electricity on, a sudden violation of their previously-agreed upon terms of engagement.

  The second of hesitation she earns is enough, the Trijan suddenly shocked to see this unexpected wellspring of sparks springing from Moira's weapon. Moira corkscrews her wrist and twirls the feziko from Charybdis' grasp.