Galactic Menace

by Timothy J Meyer

  Once Heeko met his sanguinary end, she wrongfully assumed her days of squeezing some absurd advantage of out the worthless little world were over. Who knew Kuzu Minor, boondock of boondocks, would turn out to the galaxy's greatest hiding place?

  The planetary deed Heeko wagered may have been forged, but there was technically nothing preventing Moira, arguably the planet's rightful owner, from warping there all the same. More accurately, the only thing that could technically prevent Abraham Bonaventure from warping there was its broken warp gate.

  By no means is Kuzu Minor's warp gate the only one to malfunction across all of known space, of course. Unlike Bohor's tendency to warp ships in upside down or Vollock's tendency to warp ships directly into the shattered remains of its moon, nowhere else can be found a warp gate that's broken, abandoned and utterly derelict.

  Nowhere except Kuzu Minor.

  Among the Endless Imperium's obviously sinister machinations, they'd long kept the vital secrets of warp technology, everything one would require to construct their own such gate, very seriously under wraps. As the primary choke point through which all galactic civilization is advanced, the warp gate is a staggeringly useful piece of technology for a totalitarian state to abuse.

  When a gate does fatally crash beyond all hope of repair, one can reliably count the hours until an Endless Imperium warship drops warp in the system and proceeds to clean up the mess. Moons forfend some nosy outsider's granted the opportunity to lift the gate's proverbial hood and see how its motor runs.

  Part and parcel with their utter abdication of the Outer Ring, however, came the precise bureaucratic oversight that saw Kuzu Minor, a certifiably worthless gas giant, slip between the cracks.

  For reasons now lost to time, some well-meaning switch operator must have attempted to warp a small planetoid into Kuzu's orbit, possibly in an effort to furnish the pointless planet with some manner of satellite. The ensuing mishap both littered Kuzu's atmosphere with the planetoid's debris and shattered an entire arm of the warp gate's spaceship-encompassing loop.

  More importantly, the specific damage inflicted to the gate blipped the entire stop – Junction, planet, everything – straight off all the standard navigation grids.

  To any other warp navigator, these disastrous effects would make warping to Kuzu Minor impossible. To Abraham Bonaventure, it was simply made very, very difficult.

  By bouncing off another, fully functional gate, the Grimalti sailing master was still technically able to reach the unreachable Kuzu Minor. What's more, with his passing knowledge of the machinery involved, Abraham claimed, given a few hours and unfettered access to the warp gate's controls, that he could prevent even the most skilled navigators from warping in themselves.

  In short, Kuzu Minor was the single greatest hideout in the entire galaxy.

  Its Warp Gate Junction, abandoned for decades, could maybe use a little sprucing up, though.

  In search of the traffic control office, Moira pads between freezers full of spoiled food, beneath partially collapsed bracing beams and across the occasional skeleton of maintenance crew or trapped commuter, she isn't sure which. The fact she doesn't float, freeze or asphyxiate, however, means the oxygen filters are re-engaged, the life support's chugging along and even the artificial gravity's been restored.

  Once she crosses the carpeted lobby and descends the stairs to the traffic control office, Moira discovers who's responsible.

  "Moons," she remarks, leaning against the office's doorjamb. "When Odi mentioned you'd still be over here, I didn't think he was being serious."

  Hunkered beneath some control console or another, Abraham keeps at his work, doesn't turn to answer or acknowledge her. "Weren't no secret."

  There's a moment of silence, filled only by the clanking of tools and the soft hum of the Junction's many machinery, as the conversation stalls on the runway. "Are we having fun yet?"

  "Won't be having the real fun 'till I coagulate the coolant chamber." He nudges his chin, his wattle waving in response, over the consoles and towards the office's great bay viewport. "Out there."

  The distant sun glows feebly blue, a somewhat brighter speck against the blackness than the innumerable other specks that comprise Kuzu Minor's night sky. The sunshine is interrupted by the occasional piece of tumbling space rock, the fragmented remnants of that very same planetoid which smashed its way through the gate's further arm.

  The warp gate's arching red arm yawns above and beyond the span of the traffic control office's viewport. From where she stands in the doorway, Moira can spot the hole that the incoming asteroid made – a toothy bite taken from a gigantic teltriton donut, complete with cloud of metallic crumbs hovering about the missing area.

  At odd intervals, one of the larger chunks of intervening asteroid spins at the right angle to expose The Unconstant Lover where she clings like a beetle. All but her most vital lights activated, she's a yellowish stain against the earth brown stone.

  Abraham cranes a glance over his bandaged shoulder. "Care to join me?"

  "That would be how I die," Moira predicts.

  With a "suit yourself" shrug, the Grimalti returns to his apparently fascinating work in the shadow of the control console. As he turns, Moira's afforded a brief look at the bandage that still swaddles his shoulder and, even briefer, the one that still swaddles his left hand.

  According to the Uvhog sawbones aboard The Dick Magnet, Abraham wandered exceptionally close to bleeding out from the combination of the two disfiguring wounds he'd earned during his time as Captain of The Loose Cannon. While some peculiarity of his Grimalti immune system seems to have been his savior more than any medical arts of the Uvhog, he continues, days recovered, to look thinner, paler, and more haggard.

  He's been the ghost of Abraham Bonaventure ever since, as though he truly did die inside that ejector.

  She hasn't the heart or stomach to question whether he's still capable of his duties with six of eight fingers. Considering he still warped them to Kuzu Minor successfully, arguably the most difficult dirty jump in the galaxy, she's inclined to say yes.

  Instead she asks, "You're not interested in Odi's help?"

  "Bless his heart," Abraham stipulates, as a precursor to future disparagement, "but Odi don't know squat about astral physics. Did ye drive the maintenance drone over here?"

  Moira bristles some. "I did."

  "And it's still in one piece?" he poses archly.

  "It is."

  "Wow," he grunts. "Guess I'm meant to be impressed, eh?"

  Moira chooses not to dignify the comment with a response. Much as her “skills” as a pilot were favorite fodder for the crew to poke fun at her, the day she couldn't fly a guided maintenance drone a quarter of a dottible would be the day she checked herself into a nursing home.

  She paces a few steps away from the doorjamb, into the substantially cozier traffic control office. When he'd initially offered to temporary cut off their escape route, Abraham described his work as requiring "a few hours." To judge by the exhaustive state of the office's rehabilitation and repair, he'd doubtlessly spent the majority of his four days over here, as opposed to sequestered in his quarters, like everyone else.

  "You know," she admits, "I'll be honest. Spooky as this place may be, you've definitely wasted a lot of time unspooking it."

  "Aye," Abraham comments dispassionately. "Make yourself at home." He adds a belated second before Moira discover this herself. "Choco's on."

  There, percolating contentedly atop one of the office's various industrial counters, is the Lover's absentee chococino maker, the one Two-Bit pilfered from the break room at Kiesha Shipyards. Moira'd noticed its disappearance but, not much of a choco drinker herself, wasn't especially heartbroken.

  She still reaches for a polystyrene cup all the same.

  "Now," she forewarns, "I've had the misfortune of having tasted your moonshine. Should I once again be concerned for my health?"

  "Was there some reason ye came to visit me?"
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  Abraham's cutting to the chase stops Moira's hand in its tracks, reaching for the chocopot's handle. She sighs, plants a palm onto the countertop and stares into the bottom of her empty cup.

  "I don't know," she confesses. "Ship's been pretty gloomy, past few days, you know. I–" Abraham doesn't respond or react to her buhoxshit, however, and Moira gambles on getting to the truth faster. "Sometime ago now, you asked me this question, you asked me–"

  "Why ye ain't a bounty hunter no more," Abraham supplies. "Why ye joined up with us pirates."

  "That. Yes." Moira collects the remainder of her thoughts as she unlatches the chocopot, fills her cup and clambers up onto the counter, neglecting many perfectly serviceable chairs, in favor of the room's highest impromptu seat.

  "The answer, I think," she begins, before sidetracking herself immediately, "and I think that when you asked me, everything with the Fleet was just starting and where we were headed was incredibly difficult to see or predict, but I think now, I think removed from that, the answer is that I'd no other options left to me."

  Abraham furnishes no judgment, opinion or answer.

  "I was low," is Moira's justification. "As you said, I was breaking my back on these chump change bounty-heads. I couldn't accumulate any kinda savings and freelance work, especially in that profession? It can be very," she hunts for the proper word, "let's say, isolating."

  She gestures aside, subconsciously towards the viewport and the Lover, with her chococino cup. "And here's Nemo, you know, and he's offering me this position and I know he's buying time, right, squirming to get free of me but, at the same time, I'm out there in the woods, at this point and, I don't know," she stops to consider the chocolatey depths of her untasted beverage, "he's like a life preserver."

  She scowls a second later, her metaphor less elegant than she intended. "That doesn't make any sense, I realize–"

  Abraham's first response is a quiet scoff. He follows this with a sidelong comment. "He ain't a life preserver, missy. He's an anchor."

  Moira scowls, her drifttrain of thought derailed. "How do you mean?"

  "I mean," Abraham repeats insistently, "he's headed for the bottom and we're all of us – you, me, the ship – going too."

  Moira's scowl only deepens. "Weren't we always, though? How's this different from, you know, every other day?"

  Abraham shakes his head slowly, fatefully. "Ain't no coming back from this. Boy's sunk us sure as he's tying that anchor 'round our legs."

  "What the fuck're you talking about?" Moira challenges flatly.

  "Two-Bit went first. Captain might as well've tossed him overboard hisself." As he predicts doom and gloom, Abraham continues his work all the same, as though discussing astral weather or everyday warp drift. "Come to speak on it, Two-Bit's lucky in a way. Don't have to see the water rising all around us. Gotta meet his end thinking we'd weather the storm."

  Moira's the textbook definition of incredulous, finger quotes and all. "So, what, you're saying there's a 'storm' coming now?"

  "Storm's already here, lass," sing-songs Abraham. "Storm be sitting right over there, locked in his room and wearing the Cap'n's coat." He points the circular grip of his neticgrappler through the viewport, towards the asteroid the Lover's clamped onto.

  "Don't mistake incompetence for malevolence. He's a moron, not some force of nature."

  "He sure used to be," remarks Abraham wistfully. As he begins his yarn, the Grimalti adjusts his posture, to better turn and acknowledge Moira where she sits on the countertop. "Seems so long ago now, the skies were clear and the Fleet were whole. He'd done it, ye understand. He'd pointed us, all the scattered bastards of Bad Space, back in the right direction. Towards the real enemy."

  He gestures with his left hand, the bandage a useful visual aid. "He were hacking off all ten of the Imperium's fingers what were trying to choke us out. He were smashing down every spineless privateer in' motherbloomer what swore loyalty to the man and there weren't one bigwig in this whole galactic underworld could touch him."

  The Grimalti shrugs his wounded shoulder, still somehow amazed. "He'd done it. He truly had. I'd finally put me shoulder to the right wheel."

  "Until?" Moira supplies, her voice quieter now.

  "Until he weren't no more," Abraham finishes, with a sudden disappointment. "Dunno what happened. Maybe he just ran outta ports to plunder. Maybe it were that damned interview. Who's to say?"

  His expression, once cast in fond remembrance, has hardened teltriton hard. "Point is, he led us astray. He set freebooter against freebooter. He put that...mutineer on the Council and, truth to tell, he made mutineers of us all."

  He gestures vaguely with his good hand, an attempt to rationalize. "By then, I'd plumb stopped believin' he could do wrong. I thought he were the days of yore, come again. Besides, he gave me a ship and a command and a big blooming hat."

  There's a lengthy pause, his face drooping every second he doesn't speak. "I were wrong, though," he admits quietly. "I were wrong about the whole damn thing."

  With several arduous adjustments of his bulk, Abraham returns progressively to his workstation. His voice, when next he speaks, echos eerily off the inside of the console. "Two-Bit were first, aye, but mark ye my words, he won't be the last."

  Odisseus thinks they might as well deposit a baggie of flaming buhoxshit on the doorstep of noted mafioso Smerdyakov “the Scar” Svetlova, ring the doorbell and run like hell because, at this point, why the bloom not?

  At the current moment, the Endless Imperium, Valladian Shipping, the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija, Huong Xo, GalaxCom Interstellar Media and now, seemingly, Garrock Brondi, would each shell out a Galactic Menace's ransom for the crew's four heads, neatly arranged on a platter. Come to mention it, they'd likely shell out half that much even for information that would result in their four heads, neatly arranged on that platter.

  Why not, Odisseus reasons, incur the irrational wrath of every one of Bad Space's powers-that-be? Ding-dong-ditch the Scar, teepee the Zibbian Federation, give whomever ran the Ring ConFed a swirly – why not bring all possible heat down upon their heads at once?

  This, Odisseus imagines, is as close to a nightmare scenario as he'd ever assumed his saltbrother could possibly drag him into. Everyone and their uncle was sniffing out every dark bloomhole in search of Nemo, his spaceship and his crew. According to Moira's matrix-diving, the bounty, when all complied, approached fifteen million ICC. That much raw cash could easily purchase a middling-size planet or, failing that, three Imperium-class capital warships.

  The fortunate bounty hunter who inevitably manages to trace their steps to this moons-forsaken nowhere could, with one visit to a collection agency, transform themselves from itinerant headhunter to planetary governor overnight.

  Kudos, though, belonged to Moira for her recommendation of Kuzu Minor as The Unconstant Lover's likely permanent hideout. As soon as Abraham's labors clambering about atop the warp gate were complete, the drawstrings would be fully cinched and they'd officially be unreachable. Realistically, they could remain sealed in hermetic isolation for some months, until either the ship's supplies dwindled or, more likely, Nemo went unquestionably cabin-fever-bonkers and murdered everyone aboard for good sport and fine amusement.

  This second option was the one Odisseus was holding out for. He's content to kill the intervening time eating anchovies.

  A prodigious, almost embarrassing, amount of canned seafood remained. After Flask's drug smuggling ploy on Gallow, the pantries and cupboards of The Unconstant Lover's mess were stacked to the ceiling with them. While they garnished practically every meal he'd eaten since, the Ortok was only marginally closer to diminishing the stock pile they'd accidentally accrued.

  An unapologetic binge was called for, by no one besides the Ortok's stomach. Moira Quicksilver, with nothing more engaging to do, elected to watch, with grim fascination, the disgusting smorgasbord.

  They share the crew's primary table within the mess hall. Moira's att
ention wafts between the Ortok, his spoils, one of her two identical pistols that she twirls listlessly on the tabletop and the yammering holovision overhead.

  Odisseus, on the other paw, hardly wavers his attention from this sudden orgy of comfort eating. Employing both paws to savage effect, Odisseus shells each tin apart with one set of curved claws, scoops, chomps and ladles out the salty contents with tongue and teeth and shoves the empty containers aside with his other paw.

  Upon the odd occasion, one paw, his discarding paw, will wander aside in search of the handy bottle of Gitterswitch Gin he swigs from to cleanse his palette and dull his senses. This particular bottle Odisseus recovered from one of Nemo's supposedly “secret” stashes, one of those he doesn't imagine the Ortok onboard can smell from seventy paces and two decks away.

  Assuming the Captain discovered this fact, he'd no doubt visit his galactically menacing wrath upon the Ortok's head. No one, Odisseus included, has laid eyes on Nemo in nearly two days and the Ortok figures he'll take his chances.

  Besides isolation and inaccessibility, the one criticism Odisseus can comfortably level at Kuzu Minor as a future port of call was its abysmal feed reception. Despite how expensive and top-shelf their pilfered holovision might be, the only honest programming choice they could access, this far removed, came down to an endless loop of infomercials.

  For the past eight packages of sporefin, Moira and Odisseus were treated to an exhaustive treatise on the wonders of the “Grasshopper,” a specialty exercise apparatus marketed exclusively towards Kezzerax. With that now concluded, they both endure a particularly piercing advertisement for Yellowtooth Cigarettes.

  “Hey there, Switch,” rejoins the HV set. A fuzzy, poorly-discernible greenskin approaches a familiar-seeming spokesperson on the staged streets of Pirateton. “Any chance of you bumming me one of them Yellowtooths?”

  In true Two-Bit fashion, the spokesperson promptly extinguishes his cigarette scaldingly against the dayplayer's cheek. The actress' agonized scream suddenly summons a film crew from beyond the fourth wall to rush to her aid.