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Her excuse apparently landing, Moira commiserates without a flinch in her expression. “My sentiment–”

  “Ooh!” Nemo hoots like a bride-to-be in a jewelry store and points an exuberant finger past Moira's shoulder. She spares a glance behind, perfectly timed to spot a glossy blank screen, a full circle of reflective holographic plexishield, stumble into the hold proper, gripped on either side by enormous purple mitts and sprouting a pair of khaki-panted legs. “Yes. Perfect,” Nemo congratulates Two-Bit's purple bouncer behind the plundered screen.

  Moira sighs and prowls past, making for the airlock which is still swamped in swirling black smog, seething and simmering along the hold floor. “And will someone turn off the fucking smoke machine?”

  Chapter 6

  Odisseus struggles against smirking. The rest of his companions hoot and howl in response to the latest explosion, catapulting the dash’s rider a clean sixty feet into the air in corkscrewing circles. The assembled marauders jointly wince or applaud as the rider plummets back toward the ground at such a velocity that, when he lands directly on his dismayed head, he’s messily decapitated. The camera cranes forward in a wild, unfocused zoom to catch the cavorting head, sloshing blood onto the sand. The mercenary crew, seeing this, wallop tankards together, exchange insults, chump change or playful punches and otherwise flood the mess hall with the raucous clamor of piratical triumph.

  The holovision set was a nice touch. With Port Authority closing in, the Lover's crew had precious little time to properly ransack The Hourly Wage and was forced to rapidly prioritize their efforts. Warping out mere minutes ahead of Danboowui’s scrambled response squad, they’d managed to abscond not only with Xo’s medical supplies, which consisted of four enormous and unmarked cylindrical tanks, but also the ship’s substantial purse, the contents of her larders and the GalaxComm 99D Acute-Def Holovision Imager, complete with 36 inch diameter photon-display screen.

  So, in addition to the petty cash and weaponry looted off their rival mercenaries, the marauder crew enjoy the spoils of their recent brigandage simultaneously. They feast on saturated Peki macaw, salted duzzum rinds and vintage Borsk brandy while gambling away their ill-gotten booty on various episodes of Quuilar Noxix Wants You Dead or Alive, streamed in through an outlaw feed and onto the purloined holovision imager, furnished like a trophy above the mess hall doorway.

  The hill’s king reclines on two legs of his Ujad mahogany throne, heels crossed on the head tabletop, pirouetting his bowler with one hand and savoring a stout stogie like a Rhakese mafioso in the other. This laudatory debauch had obviously been his brainchild, down to the programming choices, and practically the entire crew took him up on it, all tightly packaged into the mess, rollicking, slobbering and exalting. Only Moira and Garrigan, the former tending the latter’s wounds, declined the Captain’s invitation, along with Abraham who continues charting their idler’s course until Xo made contact.

  Normally, after executing any form of spaceway robbery, they’d make a dirty jump into unspecified non-linear space and recalibrate a heading but, with the pressure helix on the fritz, Odisseus had thoroughly refused such a option. Ever the improviser, Nemo had downshifted into the slightly more pedestrian tactic of plotting an idler’s course – warping randomly about, via clean leaps, between nearby systems, in no particular order, to shake off pursuit from any hounding law enforcement or bounty-privateers that might have shadowed them off Danboowui.

  At present, they were slated for the exhaustively uninteresting Wask system, from which they’d leapfrog somewhere else and somewhere else again until Huong Xo received word of their success and deigned to make contact with their lowly peons. Until then, Odisseus was content to monkey with the malfunctioning inertial dampener, snack on his imitation dubix and sample the ship’s new supply of burglarized brandy.

  “See, the thing about that is,” Nemo opines around the stub of his cigar, “it’s not like Noxix is actually doing anything like, remarkable to take these guys out.”

  Two-Bit, savaging his meal across the table, ceases masticating his macaw wing to squint confoundedly back at the Captain. “The bloom you mean?”

  “Well,” Nemo explains, plucking out the stogie and tracing the finer points of his argument with trails of green smoke, “putting aside even the mine-cam trick, he rigged a coupla dash to explode. I’m not Quuilar Noxix. I can do that.” He shrugs theatrically and reinserts the cigar. “Big whoop.”

  Quuilar Noxix Wants You Dead or Alive is an extremely popular and highly illegal reality holovision program broadcast to every wicked corner of Bad Space. A cult classic among semi-legitimate mercenaries, provincial militia and the more masochistic of the criminal element, the show follows the galaxy’s preeminent bounty hunter, Yheum titan Quuilar Noxix, about the Outer Ring as he stalks, apprehends and wholesales those few hoodlums both malicious and unfortunate enough to find themselves slaughtered on intragalactic holovision. A tattooed and ritualistic hunter, Noxix has little regard for the escort of crewmen and camera operators that seem to assiduously dog him wherever he goes and appears to continue his hunting in laconic silence, solidifying his place in the ranks of galactic badassery.

  This week, Noxix had apparently dragged his sensationalist reality holovision crew out to the seventh moon of Talos, the colossal gas giant whose eight moons could collectively qualify as the single most dissolute, riotous and ungovernable entity in the entirety of Bad Space, a dishonor not to be undervalued. Having only visited VII’s major port on a single, three-hour engagement, Odisseus could safely assert that, beyond any shadow of a doubt, Porttown 7 was nothing but a slumland of shanties, squalor and sorrow, notable largely by its prodigious homicide rate.

  Noxix had arrived on the scent of a notorious dash bandit and his loyal pack of witless biker hooligans. In order to dispatch of his quarry’s unscrupulous retinue, he’d employed a tactic Nemo seems to consider somewhat insipid – booby-trapping each thug’s parked dash with a remote mine. Following an altercation at a nearby saloon, the dash gang piled onto their bikes and tore off, with Noxix and his flunkies hot in pursuit on The Wendengo, Noxix’s signature, mortar-mounted driftscull.

  The next dash combusts in an expectant fireball, soliciting both agonized wailing from its rider and elated bellows from the wagering marauders. The real ingenuity behind these particular remote mines, however, involved the miniaturized cameras installed on their faces, designed to catch the last horrified expressions of the bikers before their dash erupt – gruesome, unethical and extremely entertaining.

  Nemo leaks smoke between his teeth and braces both arms behind his head. “Toys for children,” he comments distractedly.

  Back on The Wendengo, terse Noxix hoists his peerless weapon – a shoulder-mounted, heavily-personalized harpoon rifle, complete with automatic reel and spearhead-mounted camera – towards the expeditious retreat of the lead dash bandit, a begrimed Helker with piercings in all six of his ears. Much to the fascination of each individual spectator, save maybe Nemo, Noxix deliberates several painstaking seconds in targeting and lets loose.

  For three seconds of pure exhilaration, the audience hurtles in tandem with the spearhead at impossible speed, in tireless pursuit of the harpoon’s quarry before plunging viciously deep into the Helker’s unprotected backside. The biker is jerked violently from his saddle, the dash careers off, collides with an adjacent accomplice, detonates in a magnificent explosion and the crowd of hired thugs bursts into acclamation.

  Amid the chaos and clamor of the roaring mercenaries, Two-Bit considers his Captain down the length of his macaw drumstick. “Can you do that?”

  Nemo’s briefly dumbfounded. “Well, okay,” he concedes, “that was pretty awesome. My point is, no tricks, no games, no harpoon guns.” He gathers his boots underneath him and declines forward, propping both elbows on the hardwood table. “Guy’s got maneuvers, sure, but he’s very much lacking in actual grit. You lock me and Quuilar Noxix in a room and you see who walks out.”

  “We�
�re not locking you in any rooms with Quuilar Noxix,” Odisseus clarifies.

  The recognizable yet piqued buzz of a handheld comm shakes them from their revelry. Nemo snatches out his cigar and recovers his belted and blinking comm, raising it to his lips.

  “Nemo here.”

  Abraham’s leathern voice is further gnarled by the comm static. “Orders came in, Cap’n. Ye’d best come abovedecks’n see this.”

  Two-Bit peels away the remainder of the leg’s flesh between clenched teeth. “Bloomin’ hell, that was cracklin’.”

  “Could that possibly sound more ominous?” Odisseus observes.

  Nemo stands, retrieves and replaces his bowler and offers yet another heedless entry in his cavalcade of shrugs and smiles. “What’re you worried about?”

  Against the protests of the jubilant pirate horde, Nemo and his entourage exit the tumultuous mess hall and leave the carousing thugs to their celebration. As he always does following any successful act of piracy, Nemo comports himself like a lion as he saunters up the companionway, belly full from his latest kill and his pride feasting happily below.

  Abraham awaits them in the cramped sensor room, armed with dire countenance and tankard of grizzly moonshine. Four enormous display screens, each one streaming in a local broadcast feed in rotating intervals, bookend the sensor room's more modest consoles employed with navigation and shipborne perception. One monitor exhibits the third triad of a collegiate skooshball game, another the opening credits of another tired zugaxploitation genre flick, another the call-and-answer portion of a Oubanese cooking show and the last showing Noxix himself, scalping the screaming Helker with an blunt electroblade, before blinking out in favor of an infomercial on behalf of kitchenette gravitons.

  “Abraham, what’s the good word?” Nemo accosts.

  “’Tain’t nothing good ‘bout it, Cap’n, but I suspect it’d be best to hear it for yerself,” the spooked Grimalti reports and activates the ground-level hypercomm projection pad, hijacked off an Imperium surveyor craft not three weeks before. Half a moment of consternated fluttering and chirping before the lustrous personal logo of Huong Xo glimmers into focus at Odisseus’ chest level, approximately eye level for most humanoids, and the droidvox begins its contented cooing.

  “An extension of greeting and most sincere gratitude to you, Captain Nemo,” the recording purrs. “The Most Gratified Huong Xo has received tidings of your diligence and discretion in the completion of your task. It is with boundless pride that Our Contented Overlords bid you migrate towards Baz to accept your agreed-upon recompense for these deeds. Coordinates shall follow.” Abraham freezes the recording as a series of digits Odisseus recognizes as some form of planetary coordinate blips, suddenly petrified, into view.

  Only Nemo seems appeased, green smoke still eddying from the butt of his cigar. “Great. So, what’s the hold-up? Abraham, why are we not setting coordinates for–”

  “Exceptin' maybe Jotor herself,” Abraham interjects, jowly scowl half-cast by the pearly light of the recording, “ Baz be the single most dangerous planet in all ‘a Bad Space.”

  Nemo jettisons both eyebrows. “Oh yeah?”

  “Oh yeah,” Two-Bit confirms, entwining his arms decisively. “I ord all kinds of gashouse orries about Baz. Ball it up for me.” He shakes his head twice, dismissively. “You do not wanna be wending there, mate.”

  Impeded, Nemo drops both hands to his hips and attends Two-Bit with a stubborn glare. “And why not?”

  “Bloodsucking monsters. Random chemical explosions. Imperial quarantine.” Odisseus admonishes.

  The Ortok had never met anyone who’d actually touched down there, but enough spacer lore shrouded the fourth planet of the Baz system, mostly about trackless anemic jungle or droves and droves of hemotaphagus wildlife or topsoil infused with an unknown compound so volatile it was prone to tremendous mottible-wide explosions, that even a milkrun there seemed like an astonishingly bad idea.

  Recognition alights and sculpts Nemo’s glower into slow assessment, stogie only clinging by moisture to his lower lip. “Oh, you mean, this is the planet with–”

  “Yes,” Odisseus confirms grimly.

  “Which means that, if Xo set the rendezvous here, we’re probably doing business with–”

  “Probably,” Odisseus confirms still grimmer.

  Abraham, hunched over the tracking monitor, weighs in across the crowded chamber. “Aye, these coordinates seem to indicate a berth a few degrees off the northern pole.”

  A moment of cagey silence passes between the four brethren.

  “Boss Ott?” Nemo finally voices.

  “Vizzes like it,” Two-Bit evaluates.

  Nemo catches the cigar drooping out of his mouth, eases back the brim of his billycock with a palm and scratches the crease of his forehead with a thumb. “Well, it’s either that, or we don’t get paid.”

  Another unspoken minute as all four freebooters recognize the weight and urgency of the hard place in deference to the rock.

  Nemo tokes long on the stogie, exhales a gout of green smoke and shrugs defiantly. “It’s unanimous then. Set course for Baz, I guess.”

  –––

  Moira Quicksilver scaffolds the corner of unhinged flesh on his left thigh with three forceful fingers, in order to keep it from flapping open and squiggling the incision. Glive Garrigan continues his agonized wheezing, all but rending the rolled-up rag to ribbons within the unbridled force of his bite.

  Armed with the mechanical haste of long practice, Moira finally retires the osteocaulking gun to collect the dermal sealer, wrapping its cord thrice around her wrist. This accomplished, she briskly applies the sealer’s nozzle to Garrigan’s first cut and activates the device. With a shrill hum matched only by Garrigan's squelched squealing, the dermal sealer sprays beige cement, smearing the incision in a dappled organicon sealant.

  The semi-biotic compound would serve as mortar to amend Garrigan’s rent flesh and while it would effectively adhere immediately, the dermal sealant would stain his thigh with balmy off-white residue for several days while the molecular cement acclimated to the specific pigment of his skin.

  Moira traces a deft outline of Garrigan’s self-inflicted wound with the sealer, depositing a wake of discolored discharge and fastening the flap of loose flesh in place. As she deactivates the device, Garrigan prods the residue with an inspecting finger. “Best not monkey with it,” Moira rebukes.

  Yanking the gnashed dishrag from his mouth, Garrigan levels a wry glare. “I thought I locked the door.” She disentangles the cord from her wrist and shoots the door a subconscious glance as she answers.

  “You did. You also apparently thought you didn’t need my help,” she sneers in retort.

  “Well, so did you last time,” he replies distractedly, flexing his thigh muscle and grimacing in response.

  “That was a scrape and a hairline fracture,” Moira blusters, rising nonchalantly off the swivel stool.

  “Exactly,” Garrigan deadpans.

  Moira crinkles her nose and pokes him hard on the thigh, eliciting a harsh whimper, before striding apart and towards the basin.

  A super-charged shotgun round had punched a brutal hole through the upper portion of Garrigan’s thigh during the boarding action on The Hourly Wage and while the grateful crew had presented the offending shotgun to him as an additional bonus for services rendered, the injury itself had not been quite so simple to amend.

  His phebos, the upper leg bone on Criian humanoids, had four separate fracture complications following the initial injury and according to the medbay’s admittedly outdated 612th Edition of Kyokik’s Anatomy, an extensive adherence procedure could have rectified Garrigan to optimal motion capacity in a matter of hours.

  Such a procedure could cost upwards of 90,000 credits and required immediate medical attention.

  Barring that, however, every other underfunded medical facility in the galaxy, Moira’s meager medbay included, seemed to favor the use of osteocaulk,
a relatively inexpensive bone cement designed as a catch-all remedy to any manner of skeletal fracture imaginable. Osteocaulk was useful to an amateur medic in the same fashion that a firearm was useful to an amateur hoodlum – the chance for catastrophic operator failure was still proportionately high.

  Fortunately, several paling blunders in her past as regards the application of osteocaulk to wounded bounty-heads had instructed Moira in the extreme importance of adroit precision and unadulterated caution in such matters as these. Thusly, she was more than capable of dressing Garrigan’s wounds and overseeing his eventual recovery.

  Following a lengthy gluing session, she’d applied the dermal sealer to reset the errant flesh of his thigh. While the impromptu operation itself had been completed smoothly, it would be weeks before Garrigan reclaimed any useful function out of his left leg and likely months before he’d be capable to another boarding action, the latter of which Moira didn’t mind so terribly. She hadn’t originally recruited Garrigan to reave, though looking at him now, she couldn’t help but question the judgment behind excavating him from that Vapid den in the first place.

  Eight months of malnutrition, addiction and rampant facial hair had mangled him nearly unrecognizable. When last they’d parted, Glive Garrigan appeared as archetypal as a dishonorably discharged Imperium naval officer could appear – jarhead haircut, swath of rugged stubble browning his jaw, insignia freshly torn from both biceps of his unbuttoned naval surcoat.

  Who squats in his boxers on the edge of the exam chair now is a scabrous, threadbare mountain man – pallid, gaunt and feral. Unshorn scruff, dangling down in greasy tendrils across his eyes, nomadizes down either side of his scalp and across his chin in lush bristles. In place of his blue-and-gray regimentals, he dresses like a common tourist, with floral pattern shirt and mildewy khaki shorts, both garments so sodden with decay they practically became camouflaged with rot. Dotted across his sallow skin are the odd curdled pustules, agape sores or sloughing carbuncles, the steep penalty his skin has paid for months of ceaseless Vapid abuse.