Hull Damage Read online

  “–repeat, ordered to cut your engines, power down your weapons and prepare to be boarded. This is your last warning. Under the authority of–” the clutched voice of an undoubtedly first-tour naval officer anxiously berates over the suddenly open comm.

  “She be open as a wench’s wet thighs, Cap’n, but gimme–” Abraham begins to request, but Nemo crashes in.

  “This is Captain Nemo of The Unconstant Lover, hereby ordering you to fasten your seat belts, stow your tray tables and prepare to be fucked sideways. That was your last warning,” Nemo diatribes, unable to entirely mask his apparent mirth.

  “Nemo!” Odisseus bellows, harshly peaking the comm’s audioceiver.

  “Cap’n, I–” Abraham attempts to interpose, but now Nemo’s on the rampage.

  Without another word, he pumps the throttle to the floor and hurtles the Lover forward, rattling the length of the ship with the unadulterated force of raw acceleration. The gyroscopic seat jangling wildly in response, Moira watches the first corvette rapidly dilate in size directly through her viewpoint at the tremendous speed of Nemo’s headlong charge. She’s setting her sights on the practically invisible ray shield gap surrounding the first battery when the orders come.

  “Dorsal, ventral, pick targets on the second corvette. Rooster, open it up,” Nemo dictates over the unrepentant rumble of the Lover's blazing boosters, Rooster jabbering an unheard response. After several moments, Moira spies, jettisoned from beneath the Lover's nose point, a procession of miniscule projectiles, backlit by faint blue afterburn and streaking towards the incoming corvette. Her smile thickens.

  The vanguard Chaperon actually manages to unleash a volley from its primary batteries, bruising the Briza's curtain of shielding with bloated red laser blasts, before Nemo banks the Lover hard to port, Moira scrambling to zero a target among the second corvette’s line of relevant batteries.

  The first torpedo quakes the first corvette’s ray shield, weak warding against the piercing solidity of missile weapons, while the second crumples the shield completely. The third and fourth torpedoes hammer hard against the hull, detonating ferociously into the bridge. It’s the fifth and sixth torpedoes that truly doom the blitzed corvette, the former perforating the main bridge viewport before erupting, the latter bayoneting the previous wound as it burrows deep into the cruiser before discharging, literally sundering the entire craft in two shorn pieces. The seventh and eighth torpedoes promptly conclude the matter, both roaring into the exposed belly of the uncoupled corvette, a cross-section of severed decks and unfortunate crewmen suctioned into open space, before rupturing the entire mess into an enjoined and horrific explosion.

  With the push of three buttons and over the span of fifteen seconds, Nemo’s “overture” had simultaneously cost the ship and her collected crew over thirty thousand credits in replacement munitions and destroyed a heavily armored capital cruiser.

  Over the unchained thunder of the combined blast, the blizzard of interruptive static where the corvette’s comm transmission once was and the clamorous din of the zooming boosters, Moira swears she hears someone whooping in startled exuberance.

  Awaiting no further invitation, Moira levels the turret’s three muzzles toward the last and understandably shell-shocked corvette left floating before she opens her fire, Antagonist steadily jouncing with the punchy release of its ammunition in brilliant green bolts pyramidaly arranged. In brief successive bursts, she bull's-eyes each battery’s shield gap, riddling the capital turret beneath with exacting laserfire, and in short order, she’s pacified the corvette’s starboard side, like sliding four weaponized fingers neatly into a glove.

  “What’re ya waiting for, Glive?” she gibes into the headset.

  “…the Captain said–”

  “Jocks!” Two-Bit cries, attempting to wrestle his dispatch above the booster’s blare. “Whole squad, cracklin’ in at 33 greez dorsie off starboard bow! Ray edgies janked out flush!” Moira watches as, after a moment, the scintillating membrane blanketing their ship anterior blinks itself along her full frame, albeit considerably less substantially. At Two-Bit’s shouted coordinates, Moira indeed discovers a dozen swooping starfighters, Spur-Class, apparently cast off by the looming column of the Pylon and hugging to a tight check-mark formation at a breakneck engagement speed.

  Boxy one-man Fjoran craft, Spurs were lightly shielded, heavily armed and highly mobile assault fighters generally deployed in droves and fond of swarm tactics. While not as utterly defenseless as their Xendo dive-bomber counterparts, they claimed an askance flight angle, a host of laser cannons cresting the end of a stunted belly wing and a single homing torpedo, mounted like a lance at the corner of the cockpit.

  “Dorsal, ventral, take targets and go!” Nemo ardently tasks, though only Garrigan requires the prompt. Exploiting the advantage of superior range, Moira tears into them first, zeroing the leader at the lowest point of the check and letting loose. Her ammunition window briskly dials down as she pricks the leader with a pair of bolts, tumbling the fighter straight into its wingman. The Lover, for all her reckless alacrity, putters ahead when the squadron screams past, expelling a literal rain of screeching red laser fire, which buffets and pockets itself against the ray shield.

  What the starfighter wing doesn’t seem to anticipate, however, is the exact toll they’ll pay for entering Glive Garrigan’s fire arc. Eight months of indigence, rampant addiction to virulent narcotics and an splintered leg seemingly hasn’t damaged his inexhaustible aim at all, tagging three stragglers as the squadron messily attempts to reform under the Lover and directly in Garrigan’s sights.

  “Edgies at 82%. Six dotts from Pylon’s max gamut,” Two-Bit chimes.

  “Abraham, start in on the Pylon. Two-Bit, swap, what, 52% power off the shields and into the turrets. Twenty-five or whatever a pop,” Nemo recklessly resolves.

  Two-Bit hesitates a moment. “You facting?”

  “I am 'facting,' as a matter of fact.” Odisseus inserts a wary comment, the specifics of which Moira suffers under the peal of Garrigan’s gunfire, though Nemo remains typically unfazed by it. “Dorsal, ventral, you gotta take out the trash before we get in range of this big bitch. Savvy?”

  “Aye aye,” Garrigan complies between the bluster of his ablaze turret.

  Moira wrests the pilsner from its holster and, pausing before she drains it, comments inattentively, “You feeling generous?”

  “Don't spend it all in place.”

  As Moira hastily shelves her glass of gin, the fighter squadron resurfaces into her fire arc and she squeezes of a volley with the one hand while the Lover staggers in impact from their streaming weaponry.

  “Edgies at 28%,” Two-Bit gratingly apprises.

  As if on cue, the turret’s power barometer scrolls skyward and she responds by wheeling the gyroscopic seat about and sweeping the Antagonist with it, abruptly augmented autofire alight. Three of the fighters, clipped by Moira’s cannonade, tailspin apart and succumb to private explosions, including the newly elected squad leader. The remaining four Spurs veer individually off, Moira spraying gunfire in one’s wake and, as it crosses into his reach, Garrigan harassing another.

  “Inside the Pylon’s gamut in one dottible. Stamped to re-tragg the ray edgies?” Two-Bit requests significantly.

  “Nah,” Nemo derides. “Lemme try something.” Odisseus balks another objection, but it’s Abraham who attempts to rationalize Nemo.

  “Cap’n, we still got plenty ‘a power in the main systems – ain’t time fer the haymaker just yet–” he urges, but Two-Bit hastens to the warning.

  “Inside Pylon’s gamut!” No sooner has he issued the alert before the Exacting Counterattack, the vast scepter of a bulk Pylon-class capital cruiser, nearly thirty times the Lover in sheer length, initiates its firing sequence. A cavalcade of quadroturret batteries calibrate and loose a volley outward, an ocean of red laserfire hurtling towards them – the unbridled power of an Endless Imperium warship’s port broadside.


  Bellowing partially in panic, partially in elation, Nemo pitches The Unconstant Lover brutally to starboard, boosters careening drunkenly and navigational instruments scrambling to ascertain their surroundings. The torrent of enemy fire whooshes narrowly past, leaving the Lover skidding to compose herself, the unalloyed might of the evasion nearly capsizing the ship.

  The comm backfires with screamed chastisement, mostly terror-stricken and all addressed harshly to Nemo, who seems beside himself with the rabbity euphoria of a first-time spacejumper. Before anyone can stop him, however, the Exacting Counterattack adjusts its aim, Moira braces for impact and Nemo wrenches the freighter as callously to port as the much-abused yoke allows, screaming like a banshee.

  The Unconstant Lover banking uncontrollably away, Moira’s bucket seat whirligigs like a carnival ride, dragging the Antagonist with it. Snapping oppressively around, she spies the fighter squadron, ameliorated from their previous botched strafing run and closing fast in a predatory pounce. Cascades of capital class laser fire blast past, Moira anticipates the forthcoming starship slalom and, as Nemo vomits the Lover tactlessly back to starboard, she surfs the centrifugal force of the swerve to perfectly position the turret in an unforeseen flank to the squadron of Spurs.

  Strangling the trigger, Moira punishes the surviving starfighters for attempting to withstand against her anti-starfighter cannon by pouring gunfire into the first target she sees. Dismembering the craft with lancing precision, she's subsequently rewarded by a burble of Nemo’s sheepish laughter. The wing mates reflexively divert, however, when the Pylon opens fire again, flooding the imaginary causeway between them with gunfire of its own.

  This time, they heave to port in tandem, Nemo lurching the whole craft turbulently athwart to circumvent a hail of destruction, Moira coasting the rowdy momentum to catch their pursuers off guard. While the remainder of the Lover's crew undoubtedly scrambles and screams about the ship in protest and revolt, Nemo and Moira operate in stark concert. As she composedly collapses a starfighter cockpit under the brunt of her barrage, she imagines Nemo on the bridge – barefoot, sleeves rolled to the elbows and absolutely frazzled in felicity. Again, the leftover fighters peel off lest they be caught in the merciless crossfire.

  Inch by inch, The Unconstant Lover advances its evasive approach until, to avert the increasingly accurate battery fire, Nemo yanks the freighter upward, rocketing half a dottible above the Exacting Counterattack. The hounding remnant of the Spur squadron, caught unawares, requires little help from Moira to dispatch itself, swatted down amid the chaos of the Pylon’s bombardment. Liberated from its starfighter tail, the Lover enters a momentary nosedive to effectively hurtle the crest of the Exacting Counterattack, clearing the blockade and jetting towards the lusterless white expanse of Baz. Nemo chokes the comm with his exonerated cackling. Moira exhales.

  The Pylon’s starboard batteries, however, aimed at the planet’s surface and rendered useless against the Lover's portside approach, open fire on the unsuspecting freighter.

  A buffet of impacts racks the Lover's port quarter and Moira instantly recognizes the dreaded alarm signifying utter shield failure.

  “Edgies gone–” Two-Bit hollers against the wailing of the alarm and the ship’s violent shake, but Nemo preempts the comm.

  “Gun it, Odi,” Nemo commands. Whatever discontent previously bayed from the engine room, Odisseus apparently distinguishes the immediate danger of the situation and promptly gooses both jetboosters. A moment of backlash before the Lover taps undiscovered thrust, springing downward into Baz’s atmosphere at full burn and belching twin wakes of exhaust. Even over the astounding outcry of the howling engine and Nemo’s terrified caterwaul, Moira barely manages to discern Odisseus’ final complaint as The Unconstant Lover empties its fuel reserve to the core in its frenetic flight.

  “This Ott motherfucker better not give us any trouble.”

  –––

  Odisseus thinks this Boss Ott character smells like all kinds of trouble. Only very occasionally had the Ortoki mechanic, girded with his superior sense of smell, encountered a specimen whose distinct musk he couldn’t dissect and analyze, generally as a method towards assessing their specific ranking on the laundry list of individuals Nemo shouldn’t associate with but inevitably does anyway. This Boss Ott, with his trifurcated cocktail of mystery aromas, had earned himself a place in the top tier.

  He stinks of three contradictory stinks, all amalgamated into a single dubious odor. The first is a tangy and invasive fragrance, accented with a flavor akin to, yet markedly dissimilar from, iron. The second is something sulphuric and caustic, possibly some form of explosive, though decidedly organic in origin. The third, of course, is the unequivocal stench of ambition – sharply unlike Nemo’s own furious, illogical yearning, but more cold-blooded, more methodical. Even from a cursory sniff, Odisseus recognizes Ott as a schemer, the sort of biped capable of capriciously sacrificing loyal underlings to the whims of his alleged great cause.

  He raps his mottled blue knuckles inspectingly against the smelted steel of the first enormous, unmarked cistern, recently deposited at his musing feet by the suddenly perspiry trio of Anchorage, Ebeneezer and Heeko, and elicits a blunt, occupied thud from the receptacle in return. He frowns in supposedly profound review as he circuits about the driftcart, likewise auditing each tank aloofly, before plunking both of his lower arms pensively to his girthy waist while keeping the upper pair contemplatively crossed. He pleats his broad brow into an ascertaining scowl.

  “And you appropriated these off The Hourly Wage, correct?” he questions blankly, as unaccountable as if his indigo countenance had been sculpted of steel.

  “…yeah, that’s right,” Nemo ventures distractedly, hands lodged firmly in jacket pockets and bowler hat thumbed up off his brow. Understandably a little winded following the harrowing and partially improvised events of the blockade run, Nemo attempts to collect his scattered breath, though Odisseus recognizes the defense mechanism inherent behind his saltbrother’s nonchalance. Apparently even the incorrigible Captain couldn’t help but be disquieted by this most surrealistic of rendezvous.

  Xo’s coordinates indicated a point somewhere down a meandering canyon on the northernmost of Baz’s expansive polar continents and, after an hour of Nemo adroitly circumnavigating the Lover between precarious chasms of icebound bluffs, the crew was alarmed to discover, cunningly concealed amidst the enclosing cliffs, a vast and intricate fortification where they had expected, at best, a circle of inclement tents.

  Only visible to the naked eye from an oblique vista and inexplicably invisible to the ship’s own sensors, Ott’s high command was an impregnable citadel beseeming an ancient warlord, a militarized redoubt shaming the back alley alehouses and dicing dens of the galaxy’s other ostensible kingpins and mafiosoi. Fortified against assault or intrusion by unyielding ramparts of ice and stone, jointly concealed from scrying eyes by sensor scramblers and the hazardous arctic ravine, astray amid thousands of mottibles of trackless, blank wasteland and crowning what is universally considered to be the second most perilous planet in Bad Space, succeeded only by Jotor itself, this headquarters proved a castle; its master proved a king.

  Authorized for a landing atop the roof of the citadel’s main stronghold, they were ushered to touch down through one of the larger apertures in the edifice’s peculiar perforated canopy, which Odisseus belatedly recognized, upon exiting the ship and hearkening to the whirling wintry wind, as a Vollocki symphonic ceiling.

  A swooping mosque of molded malachite, like the shell of a titanic stone tortoise, the aboriginal inhabitants of Vollok riddled the roofs of their cathedrals with thousands of keenly crafted cavities, ranging from microscopic to gargantuan in size, in order to flute the ceaseless gales of their steppeland homes into a choir of ethereal and discarnate voices. To this day, renowned Vollocki composer-architect Thyybuk Legaro, pioneer of modern breeze-baroque, continues to tap the inexhaustible depths of dynamic ventilated plainsong,
his work enjoyed galaxywide by meditators, ambitious choral instructors and insomniacs.

  Here, however, buttressed atop the Galactic Menace’s private fortress, this masterpiece is starkly out of place, especially contrasted against the surrounding bleak badlands. Nevertheless, Odisseus finds it difficult not to at least appreciate the grandeur of the squally symphony belting overhead, as extrinsic as it might be.

  Accompanying this philharmonic splendor, however, is no stately Inner Sector babelopera house, but rather a smirched and slushy landing bay, attended by a handful of carbon-scored starships and an appalling pile of wheezing machinery, diffusing orange smoke from corroded spouts and burst capillaries. Odisseus, after a moment, identifies this as a centralized torridity unit, which maintains the partially encased roof at a balmy temperature, in defiance of both the veritable blizzard outside and the heavy winter gear worn by the disembarking crew.

  They had stood in an awkward knot at the foot of the Lover's boarding ramp, mistrustful Odisseus, emotionless Moira, impressed Two-Bit and sweating Nemo, along with the adjoined company of Anchorage, Ebeneezer and Heeko, when Ott first appeared, ascending up the hexagonal shaft on an ample lift platform at the center of the breezedome, with his own retinue in tow.

  Overdressed in the paradoxical heat of the landing bay and with no notion of what to specifically expect or even who among the kaleidoscopic posse of thuggish sentients to address as Ott, the pirates had interposed themselves, weapons loose in their holsters, before the commodity-laden driftcart, like a herd of vigilant herbivores. They had, to a being, been surprised to see the blue-skinned and heavyset dockhand proceed forward and ingloriously introduce himself.