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  UNCONSTANT LOVE

  Timothy J. Meyer

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2016 Timothy J. Meyer

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  BAD SPACE TRILOGY

  HULL DAMAGE (2012)

  GALACTIC MENACE (2014)

  UNCONSTANT LOVE (2016)

  www.badspacebooks.blogspot.com

  To Steven,

  the original Captain

  "How many lives had that treasure cost in the amassing, what blood and sorrow, what good ships scuttled on the deep, what brave men walking the plank blindfold, what shot of cannon, what shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive could tell.”

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

  Table of Contents

  PART I: Her Hull Shot Through

  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: Rent To Ribbons Too

  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: Her Poor Damned Crew

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Fifth Interlude

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Final Interlude

  Chapter 30

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART I:

  HER HULL SHOT THROUGH

  CHAPTER 1

  Moira rolls the dice.

  She knew the odds. She'd calculated the probability. Eighty-five percent of the spreads she could possibly throw would turn over in her favor; a piddly fifteen percent wouldn't. Raw numbers were strongly on Moira's side; only a small sliver of bad luck stood against her. If she could only finagle a positive roll from the utter shitshow of her previous few throws, Moira would win a fighting chance to recoup some of her grievous losses.

  The dice clack three times across the board and eventually skirr to a standstill, three fateful faces pointed upward.

  Three frowny faces.

  “Bugger me,” is Moira's immediate reaction. The more she stares at those hateful red frowns, glowering up at her from across the board, the more illogical the profanity that spills from her mouth. “Mothercunting son of a bleeder's bloody red twat. Balls.”

  Her opponent sours his expression. “Pottymouth.”

  With a careless sweep of her hand, Moira snatches all three traitorous dice in one fist and thrusts them across the board. “Go. Your turn.”

  “How many turns is that now?” her opponent wonders, scowling down at Moira's forlorn yellow piece, where it languishes near his bare right foot. “That you've been stuck, I mean.”

  In response, Moira only rattles the dice in her fist, eager to shift the attention away from her incredible ability to defy all laws of chance and probability. Her opponent, meanwhile, continues to consider her piece when an idea dawns, with painful slowness, on his face.

  “Wait,” he realizes too late. “You gotta zoombox, right?”

  “Can you just–” Moira pleads helplessly, thrusting the dice at him again and shaking them back and forth with even more fervor.

  “You do,” he says, pointing to the pitiful collection of plastic pieces assembled at Moira's feet. The faded orange one he indicates is certainly meant, in some child's fancy, to resemble a starship's engine. “Trade in a zoombox, you hate being stuck so bad.”

  “When I require your opinion–” she starts to snarl.

  “Like, am I wrong?” he seems to ask the whole mess hall. “Can you not trade in a zoombox to escape the Stickyslick?”

  “When I require your opinion,” repeats Moira, with gentle insistence, “I will shoot myself in the head.”

  “Okay, sure,” her opponent agrees, obviously unaware of what he was agreeing to, “but if you trade in a zoombox, you can–”

  “Because,” Moira snaps, yanking back her fist to keep from punching him in his stupid face, “it's an unacceptable risk. Look at your fucking position on the board.” She points that same furious fist at various areas across the board. “You're sitting there, within pissing distance of the Launchpad, and he's–” she adds, jabbing her thumb to the side, towards the figure hunkered behind the atmosphier, “–right blooming behind.”

  When he still somehow doesn't take her meaning, she spiderwalks her pointer and middle fingers across the board, spelling out the mental math with exaggerated slowness. “If I sacrifice my zoombox, then I gotta schlep my sorry ass one-two-three-four–,” she continues counting, staring angry electroblades at him the entire time, “–seven-eight-nine spaces all the way back here and, I don't know, suck this guy's fucking dick for a pair of smiley faces.”

  Her opponent's eyes follow her angry pointing towards “this guy”. The faded cartoon depiction of Speedy Sprog, a frilled Akishi caricature of a chipper junk dealer, beams back up at him.

  “Smiley faces I've been mysteriously unable to roll for what, four turns now?” She finishes by once again jabbing the dice angrily outward, a gesture that's more than half a too-short punch thrown at his face. “Make sense?”

  “Mysteriously?” A breeze of sudden offense blows through Moira's opponent and straightens his spine. “The fuck does mysteriously mean?”

  “It means mysteriously, dipshit,” Moira returns, with a snarl of equal strength. “It means that, statistically, it should be blooming child's play to summon two smiley faces on these dice and extricate my ass from this shithole. The math works out. But,” she smiles bitterly, her eyes locking onto her opponent's enviable position near the game's goal, “for some reason, the numbers won't fucking cooperate.”

  “And?” he bates, an edge announcing itself in his voice.

  “And how fucking convenient it is,” Moira declares, unable fully to stop the rant, “that I can't budge for four whole turns, exactly enough time for somebody to get all their shit together and haul bloomhole over to the moons-forsaken Launchpad.” She pauses, giving the idea adequate time to penetrate his famously thick skull. “Is what it means.”

  “That I'm cheating,” is his blunt summary. “It means you're accusing me of cheating and we're back to square one.”

  “For the umpteenth time,” the game's third player drones monotonously from where he squats behind the partially-disassembled atmosphier. “Game can't be cheated. Rules're too elementary. There's literally no way.”

  “Maybe you're not cheating, per se,” Moira allows, the strength of her argument becoming more threadbare by the second, “but there's something you're fucking doing.”

  The rational portion of Moira's brain is all too aware how unhinged she sounds. Several times now they'd run the gauntlet on the aggravatingly simple rules that governed this game and how, from a technical standpoint, everyone playing the game was necessarily playing the game fairly.

  The irrational portion of Moira's brain, however, howled from the sheer injustice of this whole farce. Try as
she might to be cold and logical, she couldn't stop her rising rage at the thought that, with another good roll, this garden-variety idiot would thoroughly trounce Moira Quicksilver, master tactician, at a game of even such infantile strategy.

  “I'm sitting here,” that game's uncontested champion accurately proclaims, gesturing towards his crossed legs.

  “You're too close,” she immediately decides, sinking her teeth into the first theory, however implausible, that she can reach. “Maybe it's leaking down, your bad juju or fucking whatever, and it's fucking with my turns.”

  To further sell this point, Moira reaches down, snatches the edge of the board and, with one hasty spin, twists the entire game one-hundred-and-eighty degrees around. When the dust settles, most of the tokens have rolled away, the board's in general disarray but at least Moira's own token is safe from his poisonous influence.

  Far from even perturbed by Moira's sudden tantrum, her cocksure opponent calmly collects his token and plants it delicately down before the Launchpad, on the cusp of another victory. “You wanna know what I think?”

  “No,” is Moira's only response.

  “I think you're a sore loser is what,” is his big theory, simply put. “I think we found a game that you can't puzzle out from every fucking angle and therefore suck at. I think that because I'm winning and you're losing, that I've gotta be cheating or have bad juju or something.” He leans forward, as though to share some trade secret he doesn't want his saltbrother, still easily within earshot, to learn. “I think, truth is, Nemo rules and Moira drools.”

  The next sensation Moira appreciates is Righty, her cherished Lawman revolver, weighty in her right hand and aimed unerringly at his tiny green token, where it stands before the Launchpad. All her instincts urge her to pull the trigger, to atomize the wooden token and so too his chances of winning, of beating her again. Something, a nostalgic nagging, keeps her trigger finger frozen stiff.

  The trigger finger of Nehel Morel, 34th Galactic Menace, however, merely points towards the board's missing corner. In its place, there's only a blackened scorch mark, Righty's handiwork from three games past, and the final resting place of his original indigo token.

  Her violent impulse stunted, Moira instead pitches the dice cattily across at Nemo and, with a twist of her wrist, returns shamed Righty to its shoulder holster. She then hunkers down all the more, determined to brood over her dilemma until she devised some miracle strategy to prove Nemo humiliatingly wrong.

  Four consecutive turns Moira's spent mired in the Stickyslick. To her obsessively analytical eye, the arbitrary “jail” construct, meant to represent an oil spill, served no mechanical function that Moira could divine, save to punish unlucky rollers. Here she'd been entrenched, utterly powerless to compete, her freedom contingent on a laughably easy roll. By now, the face of Oily Ozko, the Slick's buffonishly grinning Zourim mascot, looks less cartoonish and insipid and more sinister and conspiratorial.

  Nemo and Odisseus, meanwhile, had run roughshod over the rest of the board. Rolling regular – or suspiciously favorable, in Nemo's case – results, they were free to gallivant across the game and assemble their miniature plastoleium spaceships with impunity.

  When compared to those of her opponents, Moira's own spaceship is hardly recognizable as same. It rests unsteadily before her black leather wingtip, a barren wedge of outer hull, missing half the shiny doodads and worthless gewgaws that adorn the completed vessels of both her crewmates.

  Nemo's ship, by comparison, positively bristles from all its brightly colored plastic attachments – the orange zoombox, the green steerstick, the pink electrozapper. During the first playthrough, they'd all, Odisseus the hardest, scoffed at these ludicrous names for things as pedestrian as engine, yoke and turret. Now, over a dozen games in, the whirlywheel was a vital ship's component not to be mocked or gainsaid.

  Moira's outlook, therefore, is bleak. Unless she could magically transport her sorry token from captivity, pay profitable visits to Dizzy Dnara, Wacky Wooxer and Pretty Pyzema and arrive first to the Launchpad, Moira Quicksilver would lose this, her fifteenth game, of Silly, Silly Scrapyard.

  One victory is all Moira truly wants. She wants, one time, to snatch the knowing smile from the Galactic Menace's face and crush it underfoot. She's desperate to prove that her superior tactical mind has bearing in all situations, even within the confines of this literal game for children.

  It was Odisseus who originally unearthed the game. Apparently smuggled aboard by one of the Lover's enigmatic previous owners, the Ortok stumbled across the pasteboard box behind a wall panel in the galley, wedged between two rotary pipes he needed access to.

  To judge by the date of copyright, Moira surmised it to be nothing but a mothballed relic from a bygone age of entertainment, that queer gap between the proliferations of space travel and holotechnology.

  At first, perhaps from some superstitious dread of the thing, they'd roundly shunned its cheery colors and heartfelt promises of “Fun For Ages 4+”. Then, as the mind-numbing tedium of their situation settled in and their individual activities lost their luster, morbid curiosity demanded they pity the poor pathetic game one ironic play. Now, fully ensorceled by its dark power, they gambled thousands of credits, brooded overlong upon its lack of strategy and even brandished weapons – all at the behest of their new god, Silly, Silly Scrapyard.

  The game's infantile “narrative” would see each of its players marooned on a junkworld the back of the box straightfacedly named Trashax. To free themselves from the hellish nightmare that is actual gameplay, players wander the board in search of pretend junk dealers willing to sell them pretend ship's parts that they might fly their pretend spaceships off this pretend planet.

  The undisputed overlord of this perverse universe are its custom dice. Basic mathematics deemed too dense a concept for the game's target audience, the dice were stamped with, rather than numbers, either smiley, frowny or grumpy faces.

  With only seven potential outcomes, any tactical element the game might have had went straight out the window and all play was governed by the sheer luck of the dice. Luck that, in defiance of all reason and good sense, went unanimously to Nemo's victory, time after time, game after game.

  How she had blasphemed against their new god of pastimes, Moira knew not but, if all her devotions couldn't conjure her one damn smiley face, she would apostate herself in the privacy of the pantry and enjoy a good long sulk.

  For all the tumultuous emotions that roil just beneath Moira's surface, Nemo continues to look positively chipper. That's not to say, Moira amends, that he doesn't look like a shipwreck, as they all no doubt d0, each in their own personalized way.

  The longer their marooning drags on, the more his black mane slowly saturates with filth and grease before Moira's very eyes. Time and neglect conspire to grow him a great black beard that, in his contrary way, he'd become quite taken with, thinking it only increased his resemblance to a dread pirate of old.

  Unlike his cherished swashbuckling archetype, he wears baggy sweats and a novelty t-shirt. The latter is a natty, booze-stained affair that once, in an earlier epoch, read “My Captain Joined The Freebooter Fleet And All I Got Was This Lousy Shirt.” To everyone's continued disgust, he now keeps his feet habitually bare, his toenails appalling.

  The finishing touch of this entire ensemble is, of course, that accursed bathrobe. Weeks of continuous exposure to Nehel Morel's repulsive lifestyle had quickly worn the silken garment into beige tatters, threadbare and ragged at the edges. Moira imagines the Duuthese wise-women who wove that robe from precious xasana silk throwing themselves from their mountainous retreats to see the state of their handiwork now.

  The monogramed pocket, with the initials “GM” in graceful cursive, endured, though, and therefore so did Nemo's love of the ratty thing.

  It's his eyes and his demeanor that don't seem to understand the look the rest of him is going for. Unbothered by Moira's childish chucking of the dice, he calmly collects
them from where they're scattered, an anticipatory smile growing on his lips.

  “You gonna go,” cues Moira after a moment, impatience coming to a head, “or...?”

  She follows Nemo's halfhearted point to the side. “It's Odi's turn.”

  “A second,” grumbles the Ortok, further speech impossible with the row of rivets gripped in his whiskered jaws. The machine he operates on, the remote atmosphier, is partially undressed, with several of its thermosteel plates left revealingly open and their rivets missing. Thankfully, the cumbersome device continues to churn as the Ortok makes the necessary repairs somewhere beneath its metallic skirts.

  It's Moira's unvoiced opinion, however, that the atmosphier's actually in perfect condition, as evinced by its continued humming, and Odisseus was only disassembling the thing for the yuks. Normally, of course, Moira couldn't be bribed to care how the ship's mechanic whiled away his personal time. When the particular device he puttered with was the only thing keeping the three of them breathing, however, then Moira became perhaps a smidgen more concerned.

  With the ship's primary power deactivated, life support – oxygen, atmospheric pressure, temperature and running water – all became the burden of Odisseus to provide and maintain. To this end, he employed a fleet of battery-powered auxiliary systems that, to Moira's eye, resembled nothing so much as speakers and subwoofers. As long as they were each kept running smoothly, however, this small corner of the Lover would remain – at least temporarily – habitable.

  This, of course, made the sight of the atmosphier in pieces all the freakier.

  According to Odisseus, this is unfortunately the only way to perform its routine maintenance. By shifting its internal components around and always keeping the motor running, Odisseus could replace the filters, check the wiring, reseal some loose caulking and, as long as they were all careful, nobody need turn purple and die. His first and only joke about everybody holding their breath while he worked was poorly received.