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  HULL DAMAGE

  Timothy J. Meyer

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2012 Timothy J. Meyer

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  BAD SPACE TRILOGY

  HULL DAMAGE

  GALACTIC MENACE

  UNCONSTANT LOVE

  www.hulldamage2012.com

  To Daniella,

  the original First Mate,

  "I am not what you'd call a civilised man! I have done with society entirely, for reasons I alone have the right of appreciating. I do not, therefore, obey its laws and I desire you never to allude to them before me again!"

  – Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea

  Table of Contents

  PART I: Crew

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  First Interlude

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Second Interlude

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  PART II: Captain

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Third Interlude

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Fourth Interlude

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  PART III: Crew

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Fifth Interlude

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Final Interlude

  Chapter 27

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  GALACTIC MENACE Preview

  Chapter 1

  Moira takes the next punch directly in the face. She unexpectedly buckles, as if all the moons had suddenly lent the greenskin’s sloppy closed-fisted cross the velocity of a comet, and she lurches backward, only the bar top’s slippery lip saving her from forfeiting her balance completely. She heaves a breath, eyesight sputtering in and out and her teeth expressing a hitherto unheard desire to pop out of her gums and escape. Her clock is nearly cleaned with all the veracity of a spaceship crashing on her head.

  Between hazy blinks, she spies her opponent, a spunky humanoid with patchy malachite flesh and flared incisors. He bobs like a prepubescent imitation of a pugilist, utterly incapable of concealing that frivolous snigger.

  Moira Quicksilver devotes at least three hours a day to rigorously rehearsing her Tebi-Gali stances, strikes, counterstrikes and combination incapacitations and she’d just been knocked practically to her flat ass by a hundred pound weakling with arms like wet Jowna noodles and a sneer like her Captain’s.

  A pump of her elbows returns her to the balls of her feet as she attempts to dissect his stance, acrid pain of his paradoxical punch radiating in her skull. Under the biostrobe lights, he carries himself like a hologram signal, complete with deep blue aura. His swaggering stance is mockable at best: wavering spasmodically, fists tightly clenched and face fully exposed. She’d fenced fists with a dozen similar back-room brawlers, thugs educated in form and footwork by public access telewave simulations and delusions of grandeur.

  Moira deftly ducks the original punch’s ugly stepsisters – another pair of stumbling, embarrassing crosses, the greenskin apparently enough emboldened by his single score on Moira’s cheek to waltz right into her counterstrike. His right cross blazing overhead, she weaves beneath and raises a crooked elbow, ramming it into his own exposed elbow joint with a tearing crack. The greenskin sprawls back, yowling, to the greasy floor, his arm suddenly an obtuse angle and his framing shifting from optimistic blue to cautionary green. A hasty heel stomp to his temple, a comical rebound off the plastolieum and he’s out cold or dead, Moira doesn’t care which.

  Her jaw pulsing in electrified pain, she inspects her face with three prudent fingers, offering a silent prayer to all the moons that her brittle and much-abused jawbone wasn’t broken. Anglians, famed for prissiness, needlepoint and hollow bones, weren't terribly suited to the delicate art of being punched in the face, a fact always brought poignantly back to Moira whenever separated from her precious revolvers by a hundred feet of nightclub and a gun detector.

  She prods the punch's impact zone with a thumb and bites back a curse.

  Moira Quicksilver had been beaten, bruised and blackened by a menagerie of goons, even thrashed by a horny bull arlaxi on one instance and she had never known a punch to exude agony like this. Something, she reasons, is afoot.

  Ninety seconds had upheaved the second floor of the Astrobounce Gentlemen’s Club into a riotous mess. The whole joint is on its feet, half embroiled in the brawl, half seeking cover or escape. The talent, meanwhile – two-dozen striprobats who represent half the bipeds of the Midworlds – weightlessly clamber in orbit about their poles behind the safety of the observation bubble as the fight rampages on around them.

  Fitful bursts of the biostrobe lights alternate between plunging the club into pitch darkness or limning the healthy in indigo, the wounded in emerald and the unconscious in crimson. The house music, a listless disaster of seismic beats, is tempered with shattering bottles, the most ribald of the Captain’s cursing and the frantic dithering of the automated bartender. A ragtag cadre of aromas – cheap booze, fight sweat, imported tobacco, spilled blood and forty-five years of the galaxy’s dried semen – vanguard an assault on Moira Quicksilver’s nose as she re-calibrates her wits against the bar top.

  She hadn’t had anything to eat, drink or snort since they’d strode into the ‘bounce like the corsair kings of old. She certainly didn’t feel drugged, though the atmospheric cocktail of odorous effluvia could possibly be masking an airborne agent of some kind, maybe even a paralytic. It was just as possible that the underlying rhythm of the house music, piped loud enough through the club’s subwoofers for Moira to feel the vibrations on the back of her neck, contained a subliminal frequency, specifically designed to wreak havoc on her senses. Both options seem highly unlikely and nearly impossible to prevent even if true.

  All physical evidence suggests that she ought to be performing at peak efficiency, yet here she stands, clutching her bruised jaw and watching the crew brawl these mystery goons like a shell-shocked spectator. Three Mruka ruffians have stalked Odisseus back against the glass wall of the bubble, but they’re still clearly outmatched. Two-Bit’s on his knees across the room, throttling the life out of his proned Saurian, who returns the favor with snapping jaws and black spittle. Barely a grenade’s toss away, however, the Captain cheats by whatever means possible to ward off his three grotesque assailants – a Prul in a bowler hat, a Walkeen plastered in jailhouse ink and a Kezzerak sporting a nicotine halo.

  This was what he paid her for, after all.

  Four steps took her straight to the Kezzerak’s exposed back and she takes them as running strides, two on the grimy floor, one up a chair and the fourth a springing bound off a wobbly tabletop. One great leather boot stomps onto the goon’s chitinous left shoulder, the other hooking around its segmented neck. The mantis-man flounders in response to Moira suddenly riding shotgun on its plated back, spitting a shower of buzzing curses through its mandibles. Four spined forearms flail about in a frenzied attempt to dislodge Moira, who grabs her hoisted boot by the ankle and yanks hard upward, cracking the chitin. Temporarily blinded by the displaced nicotine halo spewing excess fumes in every which direction, she jerks
her bootstrap once, twice, three times before the exoskeleton splits and the whole head cleaves off in a burble of blue goo.

  Insectoid legs crumbling and twitching all around her, Moira Quicksilver falls to the puddle of innards in a tight crouch, just in time to miss the wooden chair swung wildly over her lowered head. The Walkeen, a hulking tripod of a thug, follows through with his two-handed swing, clobbering the nearby table and all its souls in a shower of wood, glass and alcohol.

  Not quite seven feet of bruised magenta muscle, hoisted on three swollen calves and splattered with wisps of its history of incarceration, the Walkeen spits a guttural challenge between its tusks. In the strobe’s flicker, it’s a phantom silhouette, a child-gobbling nightmare made flesh and flash. The goon adjusts the hefted chair in its enormous mitts, preparing to continue the arc back as Moira kips up, extrapolates the distance between each leg and braces for impact. The chair returns and Moira, nearly bowled over in the process, snatches it stopped with a leg in each palm, titanic recoil absorbed by her half-tented Hukia stance.

  She muscles back, wrenching the chair from his alarmed grasp and heaving it back over her shoulder with a clatter on the plastolieum.

  He answers with a meteoric left, rifting the boozy air inches from Moira’s shoulder, who sidles left herself and delivers a double-barreled kick to the Walkeen’s forward kneecap. She’s rewarded with exactly no purchase from the monstrous knee, as if she had instead kicked a hull support beam. Pivoting two steps backward and out of range, Moira attempts to recalculate when the spitting, hacking cacophony of the upturned nightclub is interrupted by a squealing alarm.

  “–damage to observation bubble outer shell. Inertial dampening unit activated at 15%. Warning–” chimes the passive-aggressive droidvox over the ‘bounce’s house comm while Moira instinctively feels the changes in both her own weight and the room’s pressure. She whips a glance to her right, towards the enormous observation bubble dominating the floor’s center to spot the comically spread-eagled form of a Mruka, impacted vehemently enough into the glass wall to crack and spiderweb it.

  Broken bottles, torn napkins and loose teeth reluctantly wander off the floors and counters. The steady spill of mingled blood and booze tires of dripping off tables and meanders into open air. The patrons, Moira included, suddenly feel an indefinable weight lifted off their persons. The Walkeen lumbers forward, shambling stomps suddenly springing steps, as he curls a fist for reprisal.

  Apparently, Moira observes, the Astrobounce is equipped with a gravitational counterbalance system as regards its central observation bubble. Following damage to the glass shell, the entire club would even out the levels of weightlessness, saving the strippers a nasty forty-foot free fall when the interior of the bubble depressurized, at the cost of lowering the gravity to the main bar floors.

  She could exploit this; what a normal brawler would either attempt to ignore or possibly even be hindered by, Moira could manipulate. She didn’t have enough raw strength to even blemish the blubbery flesh of her attacker, but with a decrease in the club’s friction, it would be a simple matter of finding a way to launch herself with enough velocity in order to break his knee.

  Reverse somersaults were tricky enough on a clear field, but on a floor besieged with glass, cadavers and injured furniture, they were practically impossible, even to one as practiced as Moira Quicksilver.

  Inertia, on the other hand, could care less.

  Double barrel-rolling backward, a scant inch above the cluttered ground, Moira exits the roll and lands in a vertical crouch against the bar. She braces her legs beneath her, preparing for a pounce at her approaching adversary, who currently clambers over a pulverized table in an effort to charge her.

  The Walkeen clears the furniture, Moira catapults off the counter and the shrieking alarm changes pitch. Mid-flight, Moira twists her body and pulls her knees to her chin, flexing for a donkey kick straight to the thug’s own exposed knee. The Walkeen is caught nearly by surprise, with only a second to brace for impact and curl a fist, both combatants dimly aware of the automated message beaming over the club.

  “–dampening unit increased to 35%. Warning: Conditions un–”

  Moira unexpectedly accelerates in the increasingly lower gravity, rocketing through a cloud of corpses and chair legs, towards her gigantic foe. She’s attempting to recalculate the instant of her attack when the Walkeen, with the full force of an unleashed ballistic torpedo, uppercuts her in the stomach.

  Instantly changing directions, she hurtles upward like a cartoon character until she makes vicious and unrepentant contact with the ceiling. Her stomach detonates in black, vomiting agony for a split second before the leftover momentum from the Walkeen’s blow bounces her straight back to the ground. Moira lands prone, stomach and spine screaming and her limbs practically jolted into paralysis, as she languidly drifts off the club floor and into the steamy air. She flounders feebly, attempting to quell the bloody rebellion of her panicked nervous system, as the Walkeen’s gargantuan shadow grows over her.

  A few cursory gasps of nervous breath indicate that her fragile ribs remain dubiously unbroken. Her previously cobalt outline, courtesy of the biostrobe, turns coat and adopts a sickly olive hue. As her eyes wheel to focus the blurry hulk, outlined in strobe and preparing a finisher, Moira, with a titanic effort, reclaims the use of her unwilling appendages and manages to gain some distance on her pursuer with a few frenetic flailings of her legs.

  Desperately attempting to recalculate, Moira backstrokes through the ocean of drifting alcohol droplets and fine grains of shattered glass, the Walkeen lumbering after her. As much as she can, she attempts to interpose floating pieces of furniture, corpses or whatever other aerial flotsam and jetsam she can between herself and the grimacing brute, only to have them swatted out of the way by great swings of his fists.

  Scrambling through the confused tangle of hovering detritus only buys her time and sooner, rather than later, she’s cornered. Back to the liquor cabinet’s fourth shelf, jointly assailed by both the wailing of the automated bartender and the looming threat of her pursuer, Moira Quicksilver wraps her fingers around the neck of a racked bottle of gin, chambers her best poker face and extrapolates the heft needed to crack open the Walkeen’s skull with a single throw.

  What she doesn’t extrapolate, however, is the effect of a breakneck collision between the Walkeen’s unprotected backside and a flying, flailing humanoid, seemingly launched from across the ‘bounce at an improbable speed. With a chain of flabbergasted cursing, the humanoid topples backward into the unsuspecting bruiser, scattering both of them to the floor. Midway through the forward fall, the Walkeen just manages to catch his bloated chin against the bar top and with a vile crack, his snarl wilts and his massive form sprawls on the ground. Moira blinks and lowers the bottle.

  “Bloom a fucking blighter on a whore’s ass cheek,” comes the last of the profanity in husky coughs as the humanoid assembles himself from the wreckage of the downed Walkeen. Moira rolls her eyes.

  His favorite jacket, a mud-brown maltreated aviator’s duster of scuffed, stained and carbon-scorched leather, sports a fresh slash at the shoulder seam, uncovering a shirt twice as threadbare below. One of his hands, whose knuckles are gashed martyrs to his slipshod and unprincipled brawling philosophy, clasps his stomach as he wheezes, while the other impulsively shuffles through his waifish black mane. Despite the visible bruises, cuts and scrapes, despite his ninety-foot flight and its curt conclusion, despite the cascade of blood coursing from his smashed nose and dying his teeth scarlet, the Captain's smile wrecks his face.

  “What? No,” replies Moira disgustedly.

  Nemo gestures towards the clasped bottle. “Pass me that, willya?”

  She gives it a toss, he snatches its neck with his left and has it uncorked at his lips in the space of a blink. Moira floats from the cabinet shelf to the bar top and crouches down, surveying the panoramic ruination of the Astrobounce Gentlemen’s Club.

  T
wo-Bit’s stranglehold on his attacker appears to have reached a hitch with the club’s partial weightlessness, suddenly allowing the Saurian the use of his previously pinned and considerably hefty tail. Tufts of multicolored fur wafting about their heads, the final Mruka squares off against the glowering, bloodstained Odisseus.

  “Who hit you?” she intones.

  Nemo resurfaces to answer. “The Prul.”

  “Halfway across the room?”

  “Son of a bleeder knows how to close a fist,” he shrugs, hoisting the bottle. “I guess.”

  “Fucking anti-gravity.”

  “Fucking gun detectors.”

  Moira probes about her abdomen with her fingertips, uncovering a remarkable extent of cruel and future bruising. She chokes on a curse.

  “Any sign of Xo’s man?” she offers.

  Alcohol upraised, Nemo returns a noncommittal shake of the head. She sighs and rubs the bridge of her nose with a frustrated forefinger.

  “Promise me we’ll never do business here again.”

  With his teeth a nauseating violet from the red of his blood and the blue of his booze, the Captain Nemo waxes a sporty, sidelong grin and sloshes the gin’s remnants.

  “Onwards and upwards.”

  As if on cue, Moira spies a muzzle flash across the joint. With a piercing shriek, an orange blaster bolt streaks narrowly between them and instead shatters Nemo's lifted bottle, dispelling a cloud of glass shards and indolently drifting liquor into the air.

  Moira instantly tenses and scoots back behind the bar top. “Your Prul?” she suggests from cover.

  Nemo regards the bottle’s splintered neck as a slain comrade. “Oh, by all the moons of Jotor,” he breathes. “What’re the odds, even–”