Galactic Menace

by Timothy J Meyer

  “Bloom no!” cries the spokesperson in disgust, before savoring an especially disingenuous drag on the cigarette's end and sneering, “These're mine.”

  No sooner has he made this utterance than Yellowtooth's logo and disarmingly honest slogan materialize across his face. As more and more camera crew go rushing past on either side, the reception immediately worsens. Nothing but pure static, complete with a harsh and irritating wheedling sound, fills the HV's screen.

  Unable to be bothered, Odisseus just continues, confident in the knowledge that, high atop the warp gate, Abraham has severed the final strings that connect Kuzu Minor to the remainder of the galaxy.

  The final advert, in its dying breath, proves successful. Odisseus glances up to spot Moira Quicksilver tapping out a fresh cigarette from a packet she produces from nowhere.

  She dallies several moments striking a match, inhaling a few puffs and reclining further back in her wooden seat before she poses the innocent question. “You remember his birthday party, don't you?”

  Odisseus ceases chewing. Some sliver of the sentient beneath the beast bubbles to the surface and he swallows to reply, the scales, fish and oil clinging to his whiskers. “The one Nemo threw?”

  “The one Nemo threw,” Moira confirms, dragging deeply on her Yellowtooth. She doesn't make eye contact, seated across from him. Instead she's pointed her body ninety degrees away, towards the doorway and the now-spastic holovision.

  “I remember,” Odisseus squints, as though he could spot the memory, out of focus, across the mess, “a birthday cake frosted with laxatives.”

  “You don't remember party hats?” Moira questions in stride.

  “Oh, I remember party hats. What I remember mostly, though, were laxatives on birthday cakes.”

  Moira hovers the cigarette's filter an inch from her lips. “He suspected something, as I recall.”

  “Of course he blooming suspected something,” agrees Odisseus heartily, swiping aside another ravaged tin to accumulate on the growing pile. “Nemo was being unsubtle as fuck. The question was just what.”

  “Well, and no one else was eating any cake, too,” Moira makes the admirable point.

  “I suppose, yeah.”

  Both first mate and mechanic relish their respective vices a few long moments. Moira sucks tiny inhalations on her cigarette, as though attempting not to frighten or injure it. Odisseus, meanwhile, engages in precisely the opposite behavior, gnashing fish with tooth and shearing metal with claw.

  “Moons,” marvels Moira moments later. “He moved into the water closet that night, didn't he? That became his house.”

  “And there's Nemo, of course,” Odisseus remembers, with equal fondness. “Cackling and clapping and wearing that party hat like some kinda berserk thirty-year-old toddler.”

  Lolling her head three inches to her right, Moira makes eye contact for the first time in the conversation. “Comeuppances came the next morning, though, you remember?”

  Odisseus meets her gaze, gripping a fresh tin in one paw. “When he was too hungover to remember the cake was frosted in laxatives?”

  “Yeah.” Moira waves her hand ever so slightly to encourage some smoke away from her face. “Yeah,” she repeats and another question crosses and creases her face several seconds before she wonders aloud. “I don't think that was his real birthday, though, was it?”

  Odisseus shakes his shaggy head. “That was the whole thing. He's an orphan – nobody knew, Two-Bit included, when his actual birthday was. Nemo just went off the handle one morning and thought 'let's throw him a party.' And, of course,” he adds, with a short, secondary shake, “he asked me to actually bake the fucking cake.” When no reply comes, Odisseus hangs his head once more, as though focusing on his current tin of jiihu, before mentioning quietly. “He asked to borrow your book.”

  “Hm?”

  “Your phrasebook. He asked to borrow your phrasebook.” Odisseus locks his gaze straight downward, at the pilfered pressurized fish, floating in its saline solution. “And he built that stupid droidvox. All to try and understand me.” His chest tightens suddenly and he clamps his jaw hard, in some vain attempt to prevent the next statement from escaping his mouth. “I coulda run faster.”

  “I know how to escape those handcuffs,” returns Moira a heartbeat later. “He asked me how. Last year, on Qel Qatar, he asked me and I didn't tell him how.” She allows a silence of her own to pass, cigarette smoke and holovision static the only objects in motion throughout the entire mess hall. “I was being smart.”

  Odisseus plants a slimy paw on the slimy neck of the Gitterswitch bottle at the exact same instant that the mess hall doors clatter open.

  In swaggers none other than Nemo, the Menace gone missing in action these past few days. His hair is a mangy-pelted animal, dead atop his scalp. His clothing is sweated completely through and only partially buttoned. His gait is uneven and unstable. He resembles, more than anything, the wreck of a humanoid Odisseus discovered in the Surimiah's galley, purloining Liwwo's eggrolls and endeavoring to see Moira's naked ass.

  In his stained and besmirched hands, he clasps something, a reflective metal rectangle, across his heart as he marches unsteadily inside.

  “I have a surprise for you,” he announces to the room, the melancholy in his voice, attitude and expression evaporated.

  Moira's nonplussed. “You have a surprise for who?”

  Nemo seems dumbfounded by such a puzzling question. “Whomever wants one, I guess,” he admits. “You. All of you. And Abraham.” He glances, with further puzzlement, about the chamber and seems to expect Abraham, like some boggart, to leap from hiding at mention of his name. “Is he still fucked off to someplace else?”

  “That is my understanding,” Moira provides.

  “Huh,” he grunts. “Well, here.” With a callous attitude, Nemo chucks the reflective hunk of metal into the center of the table, narrowly avoiding the monument to fallen fishes Odisseus has unwittingly constructed from his stacked-up tins. In one smooth motion, the Captain levels up on the Ortok's right flank, snatches the Gitterswitch bottle with preternatural quickness and throws back one long chug.

  “Hey–” Odisseus starts to snarl.

  In response, Nemo pries free his lips from the bottle's mouth, sloshes the remaining contents and gasps, “Oh, get fucked, Fishballs. Has my name right there.”

  There, indisputably inked onto the bottom of the bottle is the word “NEMO”, complete with comically backwards “E,” hopefully written while drunk. Swallowing another mighty gulp, the inexplicably good-spirited Menace scowls suddenly at the holovision screen, continuing to buzz and hum with static. “The bloom're you watching?”

  “I'm so surprised,” comments Moira, drawing everyone's attention once again to the table and the object Nemo so neglectfully tossed amid the sardines. Two-Bit's Attaché is unmistakable, seen from this angle and aided by the familiar hologram suspended some inches over its screen. The hologram in question, “PASSCODE REQUIRED” and its five attendant blank boxes, Odisseus remembers only too well.

  “Oh, sure,” remembers Nemo. Depositing the bottle within Odisseus' reach once more, he cranes over the Attaché to speedily fill in the five damnably empty boxes with “3–S–I–E–S.” The hated “PASSCODE REQUIRED” screen quickly vanishes, swapped instead for some manner of electronic paperwork. “There,” Nemo proclaims with satisfaction.

  Several seconds of staring at the document, hovering there at the center of the table, brings no surprise or epiphany to Odisseus. “What is this we're looking at, exactly?”

  “This,” Nemo illustrates, stepping aside and beginning an obnoxious pacing route that swings him around and around the mess hall table, “is a weekly statement for a savings account at Wytex Savings & Loans, a prestigious bank on Tysu, a planet for prestigious banks.” He pauses, clearly to ramp up some imagined drama. “This is also Two-Bit Switch's ghost account.”

  Odisseus and Moira, the former still chewing, the latter still smo
king, exchange confused glances. “Turns out,” Nemo elaborates, rounding about past Moira's left shoulder, “Two-Bit has been–”

  “Embezzling?” guesses Moira.

  “Squaring away,” corrects Nemo, “a percentage of his winnings from every job he's pulled since he was, what, nine years old?” He makes a gracious gesture of allowance. “Not a large percentage, mind you, but considering a few very profitable scores, and fifteen years interest, he's accrued almost four million ICC in this covert account.” He makes a condoning gesture towards Moira. “I first saw the thing, I assumed embezzlement too, you know. He certainly was the type.”

  “Not to,” Odisseus interrupts, “speak ill of the dead.”

  Nemo doesn't seem to take offense at his saltbrother's sidelong comment. “Now, that may not sound like terribly much money, considering all our current affluence, but four million is about thirty-thousand credits shy of the budget for this bad bitch.”

  Nemo cranes once again over the Ujad mahogany and drums his fingertips against the Attaché's touchscreen. The weekly statement instantly swallowed, what the Attaché projects forth next couldn't be more anticlimactic.

  A flowchart floats above Two-Bit's Attaché. The series of either boxes or bubbles are interconnected by either solid or dotted strands and all labeled with boring bureaucratic names like “assets” and “expenses” and “liabilities.” At first blush, the whole thing looks like an escapee from a tedious board meeting between stuffed shirt investors.

  It falls on the Ortok to press the necessary point. “Okay,” he establishes, provoking no immediate elaboration from Nemo. Sighing, he spells out further, “What is this we're looking at, exactly?”

  “A caper,” Nemo couldn't possibly be more pleased to announce. “The caper-to-end-all-capers.”

  With that, his fingers spasm into more typing. As he speaks, each specific item, typically an aforemetioned box or bubble will enlarge, peel open and highlight vital passages, images, sequences of numbers, before its swiftly replaced by the next summoned visual.

  “Floor plans, schematics, schedules, key codes, a comprehensive amount of all the normal stuff, you know. Plus,” he adds, fascinated, “there're a half dozen completely three-dimensional aliases, with references, biographies, all that.”

  Six personality profiles motor past his view, easily as detailed as Nemo's passing description, followed by a globular map of an unknown planet. “There's these maps of planets I've never even heard of.”

  Two taps and the mystery world is gone, usurped this time by a number of organizing units splaying out clandestine images of some nature. “There's leverage on three high-ranking government officials. There's even,” Nemo giggles, smearing his fingerprints against the screen to activate one of the still images into motion, “a series of faked security recordings in here.”

  As the short video, featuring alarms and running security officers, fills the mess hall with tinny, poorly recorded audio, Nemo scoots several feet away from the table, too excited to continue handling the device. “Are you beginning to understand?” he poses, refusing to pause long enough to allow any answer.

  “Apparently,” he summarizes, resuming his pacing anew, “in complete and utter secrecy, Two-Bit was in the planning process for what, after only a few hours of perusal, I can safely call the greatest, most ambitious heist in galactic history.” He smirks, awash with newfound pride. “Riding around in his pocket.”

  “For the record?” Odisseus raises a dripping claw. “'Greatest' and most 'ambitious?' Not the same thing.”

  Whether he's ignoring or countering Odisseus' point, the Ortok's not certain, but Nemo steeples both hands before his mouth and makes his offer through almost clenched teeth. “You wanna hear the take?”

  “Not especially,” deadpans Moira.

  “Assuming the whole thing goes off relatively hitchless,” he stipulates first, the direct cause of Moira and Odisseus' knowing snort and rolled eyes. “68 million. And then some.”

  The sound of the holovision's white noise goes uncontested, by word, breath or even heartbeat, in The Unconstant Lover's mess hall for half a minute.

  “And then some,” Moira repeats, even more deadpan.

  “Yes,” Nemo answers glibly. “It's complicated, but yes. And then some.”

  Odisseus throws both paws off the table. “Who was he robbing?”

  “The Gitter Consortium,” drops Nemo without irony.

  Such flippant terms have never, Odisseus imagines, been used to describe robbing this most peerless of Outer Ring corporations. For hundreds of years, the Consortium's maintained a the monopolistic stranglehold over the galaxy's entire alcohol trade.

  The center of Moira's brow dips into a tiny black concave. “What was he robbing?”

  This time, Nemo's momentarily stymied on wording. “A tree?”

  Buzzing holovision static enjoys another sizable moment of stunned silence over which to reign supreme.

  “I know,” assuages Nemo with appropriate hand gestures. He points a finger towards the Attaché and its splayed, holographic contents. “The earliest entries on this thing, you can check the time stamps, date fifteen years back.” He makes eye contact with Odisseus, the buffaloed Ortok rising to meet his gaze after an awkward handful of seconds, and answers his belated question. “What we're looking at here is the life's work of Two-Bit Switch.”

  Nemo shuffles two steps backward, opening both arms emphatically. “Everything's here. All it needs is a crew.”

  “Correct me if I'm wrong,” requests Moira, her tone tart and her point petulant. “Are we not hiding out here in the galaxy's bleeder, is Two-Bit not disintegrated, because of the last stupid idea you had?”

  “You're missing the point.” The trap thus baited, Nemo cracks a smile. His expression is one part sinister satisfaction at the knowledge that he's, however reluctantly, already convinced the pair of them and one part earnest excitement at the prospect of avenging his friend's death through the best means possible – highly profitable crime.

  “This stupid idea doesn't belong to me. It belonged to Two-Bit Switch.”

  Acknowledgments

  To my loyal band of fans and followers, for enjoying my nonsense enough to queue up for a second helping.

  To Chris Allio of The Hydrilla, for his stellar cover design.

  To my family, for still understanding when I drag manuscript pages and red pens to my sister's law school graduation.

  To Charles Matthew Smit, for the continued use of The Poetic License, The Poetic Justice and the very concept of Quuilar Noxix Wants You Dead Or Alive.

  To Dan Glaser, Steven Molony and Maddisyn Carter, for their selflessness in helping to promote the dumb book in the first place.

  To Hallie Clawson, for literally everything.

  About the Author

  TIMOTHY J. MEYER is wanted on seven counts of piracy, three counts of interstellar smuggling, four counts of brigandage and one count of enthusiastic corruption of the galactic good. He is to be considered armed, intoxicated and exceptionally dangerous. If you have any information regarding his whereabouts, please contact the local planetary branch of the IMIS (Imperial Ministry of Interstellar Security).

  OTHER WORKS BY TIMOTHY J. MEYER

  Bad Space Trilogy

  HULL DAMAGE (Bad Space, #1)

  GALACTIC MENACE (Bad Space, #2)

  www.badspacebooks.com

  Bad Space on Facebook

  Bad Space on Twitter

  Year of the Horse (2014)

  BATTERY LOW (January)

  SHARE EVERYTHING (February)

  THE COLOSSUS IN CLAY (March)

  BAD SPACE: DELINQUENTS (April)

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