Hull Damage Read online

  “What’s the diagnosis?” he endeavors from across the room.

  Moira thoughtfully dunks both hands in the purifying basin as she considers the answer. “I’m gonna say three weeks until hindered ambulation, two months until unhindered.”

  A beat before the clarification comes, a little daunted. “That long?”

  Moira snaps her wrist, scattering the excess water into the basin. “You’re fortunate. That powered plate saved your life.” She taps the appropriate button and the fluid grinds into the drain. “Two months is good.”

  He furrows his unibrow. “What do I do until then?”

  She rotates back to him, propping her elbows against the basin’s lip. “Rest, I guess.” His expression doesn’t betray any confidence. “Don’t worry – I'll be here.”

  –––

  Two-Bit Switch is up the proverbial creek. He smiles expectantly and drums three fingers on the sheer plastolieum of the crate’s head as he reviews the five-act farce clutched before him, as if somehow a winning grin and a blasé comportment can conjure forth something worthwhile.

  The Doxy of Truncheons, the Third of Stilettos, the Fifth of Nooses, the Drunkard of Stilettos and the Fence of Fisticuffs – utter inanity, not a single salable card among the whole absurd lot. Splayed brazenly on the cratehead, his previously played Picaroon of Truncheons and Highwayman of Stilettos simply beg for a Fence of Nooses or a Brute of Fisticuffs but, acknowledging the uncoordinated mess in his hand, Two-Bit could do nothing to oblige them.

  If he could downgrade his Fifth for a Third of Nooses, he could combine it with Salo’s two Doxies and Anchorage’s Hooligan of Fisticuffs for An Unhappy Wedding Reception. If his Drunkard could wield Truncheons instead of Stilettos, he could at least elect Danbonte’s Pickpocket of Stilettos into A Misunderstood State of Intoxication, but he’d not prepared any legerdemain for this particular shuffle and his allegedly nonexistent set of false-facing cards were safely stowed in his cabin.

  As it stood, there were two possibilities to wriggle out of this predicament. Folding wasn’t exactly considered proper for ungentlemen on the second hand, which allocated only the second option, and consequently Two-Bit’s favorite – bluffing. With fourteen hundred of Danbonte and Anchorage’s coinage already in play, the best way to effectively feint in the game of Iniquity was to drastically raise the stakes.

  “Well, brunos,” he initiates, stooping right and fetching up his gambit from the depths of his boot holster, “time to hazard up.” He slaps a small sidearm shaped like a brass knuckle, a personal yet completely replaceable favorite of his, square onto the centralized pot of anted cash, most of which had been recently looted off the Wage’s Szarzarr guards.

  “Hell is that?” Anchorage offers, squinting across the crate.

  Distended eyes still perusing his apparently fascinating hand, Salo glibly responds. “AccCo 511 Uppercut Concealable Pistol. Four-round magazine. Triggers in the finger holes respond to pressure. Little pigeonhole piece.”

  Rooster sounds skeptical. “Yeah? What’s its estie?”

  Salo shrugs once, rearranging a card in his retinue. “Market price – probably about twelve hundred.”

  That garners a brief whistle of impression from the gathered goons, all hovered around their impromptu table, fashioned of an empty cargo crate, one the dozens of similar such that border the edges of the Lover's hold, forgotten or abandoned after freight runs gone sour or contracts messily terminated.

  “What’s the rumpus, Two-Bit?” Rooster theorizes. “Feeling a little rangu?”

  “I imagine the pistol’s hot?” Danbonte insinuates none too subtly.

  “Probably,” Two-Bit attests. “Though, if any one of you salty blighters gets clinked, the sheet on this wheel’ll be the least of your crunches.” This draws murmured agreement from his opponents and Two-Bit feigns stifling a yawn as he redirects. “So, what, are we gonna hazard here or chavel around?”

  The game, like every other he’d played since departing Danboowui, began following yet more of Two-Bit’s loud and public boasting in regard to his apparent ingrained skill at any form of card-based gambling, but especially Iniquity. It was a tried tactic to acquire some action – no self-respecting hood with half a tumbler’s worth of wit didn’t fancy himself a fast hand at Iniquity. Plump from their latest conquest, the Lover's conscript crew were ideal targets for a sharp like Two-Bit – overconfident, bloated with petty cash and none too bright. Apparently, they’d figured Nemo’s previous warning about Two-Bit’s famed underhandedness was merely a jest.

  Two-Bit had largely entertained himself with such games on the week and a half flight from Wask and, having just dropped warp in the Baz system during the last hand, Two-Bit hoped to conclude at least the current hand before touching down. Indeed, he’d played so much Iniquity that, overall, he’d actually lost more money than he’d won, such as it is with the duplicitous game.

  Of the six thousand he'd earned from planning and executing the Kapla Caper, minus the twenty-five percent squared away for the expense account for another, much more ambitious caper down the line, minus the other twenty-five percent stashed for undisclosed personal reasons, Two-Bit'd only been left three-thousand some credits in pocket change to fritter away on games of chance, with barely half that remaining after fifteen days of straight playing.

  He didn’t mind, however – it helped dissuade him from fretting about Zella and the thorniness of her unceremonious death. Despite his best efforts, his sleep remained unruly.

  He hadn’t been overly attached to her, any more than any of his other stripper-turned-two-night-stands, and he certainly wasn’t unaccustomed to the premature deaths of teammates and crewmembers in this line of work, but her inexperience was what truly perturbed him. Obviously Nemo had hired her on a lark, mostly to irk Moira, and she wasn’t without a certain spunk, but Two-Bit had found himself unofficially appointed to the role of her minder and couldn’t extricate himself from the notion that she could be here now, massaging his neck and whispering in his ear had he accompanied Moira to the Wage’s bridge instead of her.

  To his immediate left, Salo Shouldermount, still rearranging cards with as dissatisfied an expression as a Corgassi can wear on its cartilaginous face, tosses in the small bevy of folding money he’d kept on the cratehead and unsheathes a blunt firearm from his hip.

  “I’ll see your twelve hundred and raise six of my own,” he antes, finally tearing his eyes from his cards to extend the weapon to the pile. “Halisdro Quick-Action GB8 Staccato Semi-Automatic Pistol. Customized stock. Sixteen round magazine. Bloody near impossible to jam. Market price – fourteen hundred.”

  Two-Bit fights the instinct to purse his lips and taunt Salo. Rather, he remains silent, drumming his fingers with skillfully crafted counterfeit contentment, as the other players examine the supplemented weapon.

  “I’ve been vizzing for a glossy wheel. Half-ratter, even,” Rooster comments, pinching up the chunky pistol in spindly fingers, while another two hands shuffle his deck and another two redistribute the order of his hand.

  “Hands off,” Salo commands, reaching across for it and returning it brusquely to the pile. “All of ‘em.”

  “Oh, a wank joke. Glossy,” Rooster interprets wearily and returns his attention to his cards. Anchorage careens back in his seat, stretching his husky frame while his trunk keeps a harsh vigil over his cash and cards.

  “You girls can argue over my new pistols all you want,” he bestows lazily. “I don’t mind.” Two-Bit flatters him with a fabricated smile, brimming full of phony beneficence. Danbonte contorts his ruby expression into the scowl of a shrewd consumer.

  “I assume we’d be inheriting a sheet on this one too?” he inquires.

  “Well, yeah,” Salo verifies. “I mean, it’s not like I used it on Bubble cans in the backyard or nothing.”

  “Rooster?” Two-Bit addresses. “You gonna buzz something in?”

  “Gimme a mite, gimme a mite…” he stalls, shambling
forward a sizable roll of freshly pilfered funds before fishing into his pocket and contributing three fist-sized orbs of black ordinance, complete with top-mounted twist pins, to the ever-increasing pile. “That oughta be, uh, twenty-one to your eighteen. Twelve hundred in gritty rhino and the apple boomers’ll come in around three.”

  Salo scrutinizes one at a distance. “ArmaTech Type B Fizz-Crack Hand Grenade. Twist pin. Rooster’s right – market price’s a little over three hundred cred a pop.”

  “Bloody hell am I gonna do with grenades?” Danbonte objects.

  “I don’t know, chavel ‘em up your shitter?” Rooster suggests amid a chorus of chuckles. Anchorage offers a detached shrug.

  “Like I said, doesn’t really matter since they’re my grenades anyway.”

  “Big talk,” Salo chides calmly.

  “Jabbing of which,” Two-Bit concludes, “if we’re all about termed–”

  Anchorage casts a wary eye about the room at his five adversaries. “You chaps certain you wanna do this? Last chance to turn back.”

  “Let’s just delly those faces, you big blatherhead,” Two-Bit challenges with a concocted air of composure. His original stratagem rapidly fled, he’d underestimated one of the major tenants of the game, particularly when played against competitors as audacious and arrogant as these four cads: a presumptuous player will always bluff in favor to fold, especially during the game’s opening hands. Two-Bit’s main hope, at this juncture, was that all four of his opponents were possessed of as terrible hands as he was, in which he might be able to ransom himself a victory from the veritable mayhem of cards about to be played.

  Taking his Doxy of Truncheons in hand, Two-Bit prepares to employ his Picaroon in order execute a Shorthanded Press Gang, probably one of the lowest-tier incidences in the entire game of Iniquity. Hopefully, however, that won’t matter.

  On cue, all five players buffet their cards to the cratehead and several feverish seconds pass as they each attempt to register the full weight of the complete hand before, characteristic of a multi-man Iniquity round, they mushroom into impassioned argument.

  Anchorage leaps to his stumpy feet, brandishing an alled sovereign combination, The Bottom of the Bay, firmly over his head and rejoicing its superiority. Danbonte gives fierce battle to Salo, the two combatants veritably lunging with card collections and riposting with disaffirming hand gestures. Seven of Rooster’s limbs engage themselves at various fronts on the cratehead, counting cards, gathering others and advancing allegedly killer incidences. Only Two-Bit reclines, abdicating himself from the worst of the fray and hectically scanning the breach of fluttering and emphasized cards for the exact perfect maneuver. The hold overwhelms with the commotion of jostling, aggrandizement and denial.

  As the strident claxon of the Lover's “all hands” alarm besieges the rowdy altercation, Two-Bit Switch has never been quite so pleased to answer Nemo’s pressing summons as he is at this exact moment. The quarrel winding itself down in deference to the blaring alarm, Two-Bit submits a playful shrug as his only explanation, as well as an “all hazards are antwacky,” before scampering up the companionway and towards the helm.

  He encounters Moira in the abovedecks corridor, stepping from the rattling doors of the gundeck and equipping herself with a freshly dour expression upon catching sight of him. Two-Bit waxes on his most artless smile. “Afternoon, love. Whaddya suppose all the rumpus is about?”

  “Offer still stands, Two-Bit,” Moira intones.

  “Oh yeah? Which propo was that?”

  “The one where I bifurcate your manhood,” she annotates with the same implacable bearing with which Two-Bit imagines she brushes her teeth.

  “Ah. That propo. I think I’ll schew on that one,” he declines as they convolute the corner and jaunt up the six steps to the bridge door.

  “Shame,” she croons, before punching the access button. The helm doors jounce open and she slips cleanly within. Two-Bit rolls his eyes and follows on her heels.

  Whether Abraham and Odisseus arrived first or had accompanied Nemo at the helm when they’d dropped warp in the Baz system an hour ago, Two-Bit Switch hadn’t known nor, at this particular moment, did he especially care. What he did care about, at this particular moment, is scarcely visible through the gaping viewport, arraying itself in an unbroken line around the tepid, achromic silhouette of the immeasurable planet, presumably Baz, like a child’s toy drifttrain against a field of ghastly white.

  Nemo, barefoot, sleeves rolled to the elbows and bowler hat askew, rotates his chair completely around to attend Two-Bit and Moira’s entrance. He chews his lip and spikes his eyebrows to their zenith as the garbled voice, crackling through the Lover's comm, continues its tirade.

  “–hereby orders you to power down your engines and prepare to be boarded. I repeat, you have entered Baz system space and are therefore violating official Imperium sanctions. Admiral Dreffek of the Imperium Naval Cruiser, the Exacting Counterattack hereby orders you to power down your engines and prepare to be boarded.”

  “The fuzz?” Two-Bit reasons apprehensively.

  “Yes, Two-Bit,” Nemo assures, “the fuzz.”

  Second Interlude

  Odisseus harbored no illusions that his saltbrother was anything but an exceedingly, if not inspiringly, stupid man. The realization was not initially forthcoming, however. It had been years, nearly a decade, before the notion of Nemo's potential imperfection struck him as starkly as it did today – standing there, suddenly in the Ortok's maintenance stall, with that fulfilled expression he'd become famous for, the look of a loyal pet who's just deposited dead vermin at one's feet.

  The first such instance had arisen eleven years ago, during their collective childhood on teeming Gallow – lone wolf or rotten apple of the Inner Sectors, depending on one’s outlook. Pubescent Nemo, professional delinquent, had requested juvenile Odisseus, budding machinist, to remove the stabilizers from a freshly purloined drifttaxi in order to augment its maximum speed. At the time, Odisseus didn’t imagine anything especially problematic with this – he assumed his saltbrother and boon companion completely comprehended the risks involved. While he certainly fretted over his safety, Odisseus obliged his request all the same.

  It wasn’t until Nemo’d spectacularly crashed his third destabilized drifttaxi that Odisseus began to suspect his audacity extended somewhat beyond mere imprudence.

  All the same, here he was, as if he hadn’t heedlessly boarded a galactic transit cruiser bound for the lawless Outer Ring, bent on the mad caprice of seeking his fortune as a mercenary fighter jockey and abandoning Odisseus to his fledgling and suddenly aimless repair business. Years later, the bereaved Ortok would undertake an unavailing manhunt across Bad Space in pursuit of him, only to beach himself on distant Vollok without the necessary funds to continue the search. He would endure bankruptcy, entry level employment at Dirty Djembe’s Discount Engine Repair, discrimination and minimum wage for three years only to have Nehel Morel stroll in one afternoon with a rattletrap remix at his heels, chatting offhandedly about thrust capacity and steering columns and all manner of subjects he was cluelessly incapable of evaluating with any degree of confidence.

  Odisseus required every ounce of restraint to keep from strangling him with elation.

  “I think, I think the real issue is gonna be this section here.” He partitioned an abbreviated section of the starboard booster’s rear mainframe between two palms. “If we can prevent the afterburner complex from applying more than minimal drag–”

  “Well, hold on,” Odisseus exhorted benignly, inching several feet back towards the steering platform on his broad hindquarters. “Whenever you buy a used spaceship, no matter how recently the ticket says it’s been serviced, you’re gonna wanna replace the majority of the mainframe and probably some of the anterior wiring. Believe me.” He uncoupled a hatch with the unpromising shriek of worn teltriton and clawed through several of the thicker strands of electrical tubing. “Most of the time, you’ll uncover
some light patching, maybe even a few chewing-paste-repairs that the dealer wasn’t exactly forthright about. As–”

  Altogether flabbergasted, Odisseus uncovered and withdrew a live wire, frayed into nothing but fizzing and foaming electric discharge. “Where is the rest of this?” he questioned evenly.

  Nemo was entirely listless confusion. “I don’t know.”

  “This is a main input feed. You flew here like this?”

  “Well, sure. I mean, there’s another one like that, right?” he supposed, craning forward on his toes to examine the booster’s innards from afar.

  They squatted in the absurdly truncated engine room, Odisseus nearly reduced to all fours, to examine the freighter’s alleged propulsion system. They’d, so far, been at it for nearly three hours, talking shop up and down the length of Nemo’s latest acquisition, as if it was merely another hijacked drifttaxi he intended to soup up for a weekend’s worth of back alley racing.

  Odisseus had spent his morning recalibrating the magnetic matrix on a HAZtanker’s apparently acid-damaged cargo yoke, his afternoon disemboweling, hosing down and reconstructing the interior of an F19 mercenary police cruiser after a mishap with a flock of gracko geese and was only too happy staying late in order to hunker down in the uncomfortable engine room of this disavowed wreck with Nemo.

  The ship itself, a contravened and monstrous abomination of a scow, seemed entirely averse to even powering up, never mind the apparently woebegone strains of lifting off, maneuvering, atmospheric entry, re-entry or interstellar warping. Even a cursory glance indicated to Odisseus that The Poetic License was cripplingly asymmetrical, perhaps three times heavier than a skyworthy ship of her size, possessed far too ineffectual of a steering column, platform included, for the mated pair of backfiring malfunction factories haphazardly plugged into her stern, was never even originally intended for spaceflight in the first place and its interiors, horrifically, appeared to be savagely painted in bird droppings.