Hull Damage Read online

  Anchorage, Danbonte, Salo Shouldermount, Garrok Brondi, Ebeneezer, Heeko and ringleader Moira Quicksilver bristle with shoulder-slung machine guns, pocketed pistols, bandoliers of subsequent ammunition and entire bushels of grenades. As The Unconstant Lover skirts obliquely between the ice floes and implicitly towards their target – the cargo bay’s deployment doors – they count down seconds, fiddle with ripcords and imagine what three hundred thousand in hard Commercial currency looks like.

  “Stand by,” Moira commands over the comm, The Damn Shame’s haft sliding swiftly pass their view. “Whatever else you do in there, clump together and cover the Corgassi. Understood?” The congregated raiders respond with grim nods and gun barrels tapped in salute against helmets. Moira flexes her fingers around the customized stocks of Righty and Lefty as she includes, “An extra two hundred cred to anyone who doesn’t sing.”

  The chorus of patched sniggering nearly conceals Nemo’s preparatory instruction. “Strike team, stand by,” the Captain repeats over the comm, Moira silencing her squad with a pistol signal. “On my mark,” he teases as the Lover inches further starboard to accommodate the bulge of the Shame's cargo bay. Moira spies, several seconds ahead, the gleaming purple of the embarkation shields. Coiling her leg muscles beneath her for the impending pounce, Moira silences the blenching terror that invariably grips her before each spacejump, before deliberately heaving herself into the untenable powerlessness of the void, when Nemo’s summons come. “Go!”

  Moira pounces, jettisoning herself off the lip of the boarding ramp and into open space, her stomach clambering up into her throat. She counts off four terrifying seconds of enervated floundering as she coasts towards the embarkation shields, her squad in approximate formation behind her, before yanking her jetpack’s ripcord with a frantic jerk. The piece of markdown junk sputters once and goes ballistic, rocketing Moira raucously forward and through the shivering discomfort of the embarkation shield.

  A brilliant purple semi-permeable membrane of emitted deflection, an embarkation shield, typically installed over a cruiser’s hangar door, allowed objects to pass through from one direction, while restricting ingress from the other. Nemo had gambled that Dijiqi would dial her embarkation shields to resist high-heat expenditures like laser bolts and most types of torpedoes, but would recognize slower-moving, more static objects like stolen prototype starfighters and, in this case, small handfuls of pirates with used jetpacks.

  Moira Quicksilver doesn’t cast lots to determine who spearheads her boarding parties. The shield transgressed, Moira elbows the jetpack’s disarm, tautens herself into an aerial modification of the Wheeling Tvorka double somersault, alights to the scummy hold floor in a half-tented crouch and mercilessly murders the first two crewman in sight, an appropriately astounded Akishi and a bodily baffled Buja, with a mated pair of glaring yellow headshots from Righty and Lefty.

  While the rest of her squad had been instructed to pack as much firepower as they physically could, Moira herself only carries her fraternal twin revolvers, vintage double-action, top-break AccCo 665 Lawman triple-cartridge six guns. Standing from her squat, she polarizes both in a gunfighter’s spreadeagle, clouting another two more reactionary crewman straight to the floor under the combined brunt of a pair of bolts apiece.

  Having briefly pacified the point of her landing, Moira wrests the face mask onto her forehead and sweeps the vast docking bay for as impregnable a corner as she could reach, while maintaining line of sight to as many of the glossy, anomalous starfighters as she could.

  The cargo hold of The Damn Shame is, first of all, colossal. Three stories high at its epicenter and not quite one hundred and fifty feet in diameter from embarkation shield to embarkation shield, the disc-shaped bay is speckled, stacked and surrounded by droves of waist-high industrial cargo crates. Despite this, the bay still retains ample space to store the full squadron of sleek, modernized prototype starfighters that haphazardly dot the enormous place.

  Her confederates deactivating jetpacks and setting down all about her, Moira gestures briskly towards a cluster of clumped crates and engages her wristcomm’s timer, fully aware she’s less than four full minutes to wholly destroy fourteen brand new starfighters before the literal army of baneful, besieged pirates thunder into the docking bay and kill her where she stands.

  –––

  Two-Bit Switch tools the jouncing gyroscopic chair about to face Nemo as his sensor monitor ignites with the indicative red triangles. The Captain, deftly correcting the yoke in response to the tempest of ice particles in swirl about the ship, whistles gainfully, as if placidly trimming the verge on a weekday afternoon rather than engaging an illegally weaponized capital ship in a high-density planetary ring.

  “Cap’n?” Two-Bit competes with the unintelligible astrogrunge clamor growling out of the helm's overtaxed speakers. “You dellied me to delly you if they cast any jocks off?”

  Nemo darts an absent eyebrow up. “Yes’m?”

  “They cast jocks off.”

  Tipping the Lover harshly to starboard, in order to circumvent a misshapen meteorite, grants Nemo an excuse to make eye contact. “How many?” he evenly inquires.

  “Three,” Two-Bit affirms, glancing back towards the read-out, only to miscalculate. “Er, four.”

  “Mmkay,” Nemo gauges in stride as he returns the ship to her previously even keel. “Abraham, how long you figure until those cannons find themselves gunners?” he conjectures while Two-Bit watches the four pyramidal icons, like red arrowheads against the green of his screen, fall fleetly into a loose formation, the fourth faltering a few dottibles behind as it clears the embarkation shield.

  “I’d say we be lookin’ at half a minute, likely less?” the gristly voice of the Grimalti sailing master reckons through the comm.

  “Mmkay,” Nemo repeats and, as Two-Bit haltingly notes, crawls his hand towards the clutchlever. “Dorsal, ventral, you got visual on these buggers?” Garrigan, at his customary seat in the underturret, and Rooster, substituting Moira in the topturret, both weigh in with affirmations as Nemo continues. “Good. Take targets and prepare to open up on my signal. Abraham, keep sensor jamming firm on the Shame, lest those batteries come online and smear us. Two-Bit, dial down bombard and angle ray shields sternside at 70%.”

  Two-Bit exchanges these orders with a measuring glance. “You sure you want bombard zilched?”

  “Sure,” Nemo agrees appraisingly. “I got it.” He gestures half-heartedly towards the billions of gamboling ice chunks, jostling and colliding through the viewport. Unwilling to pursue argument, Two-Bit re-dials the specifications into the deflection grid and, on cue, the enfolding bombard shields wane to allow the rearguard ray shields to wax.

  Eight months of riding shotgun to Nemo’s low impulse control served as sufficient education towards the Captain’s eccentricities, specifically in regards to sensible nautical maneuvers and the impolite ignoring thereof. In truth, though, three capers into their acquaintance, Two-Bit had essentially distinguished Nemo’s proclivity for peril, his egregiously good fortune and his impunity against prudent broadside tactics. To Two-Bit’s honest thinking, however, as long as they warped free with the goods in tow, it didn’t make much difference whether or not the Captain was a little deranged. A moderate amount of maniacal laughter befit a hoodlum, especially a pirate captain, and Nemo’s penchant for piloting, however pernicious, was worth a certain degree of lunacy.

  Knowing all this and not flinching when the Captain barrel-rolls directly into a barrage of homing torpedoes were two entirely different matters, however.

  “Cap’n?” Abraham interjects. “Buzzer be goin’ wild down here – the barque’s still tryin’ to comm ye.”

  Nemo distractedly sibilates his lips. “Patch it through.”

  “–no idea who you think you are, but I assure you, I work for some powerf–” an incensed female voice, seemingly Taré herself, seethes from the Shame, but Nemo wastes little time in disrupting her chain of antagonis
m with his own.

  “Listen, bitch, you could work for a bucket of hot drongo poop for all I care. I’m just here to destroy your starfighters and make a ton of money doin’ so.”

  A pointed pause before, “Kiesha send you?”

  “I sent me,” is Nemo’s flaccid attempt at negotiation, before he appears to weary himself and terminates the frequency with the flat of his palm. “Nobody seems to understand,” he comments, largely to himself as he re-calibrates the scramble codifier back to the Lover's proper moniker, “that sometimes, I just wanna blow shit up.”

  The Finder's Keeper was a V&R FF2 Hulk Transport by make, a bush-league tramp salvagier and occasional middleman to Taré’s pirate gang by trade.

  Employing Marco's superlative information, Two-Bit had managed to, during their layover in Ganad Major, barter the ship's penultimate bottle of Borsk brandy with a passing scrap dumper for a particular scramble codifier, a scramble codifier that would falsify The Unconstant Lover's ident tags in order to, with a little tinkering, read her as a rather particular V&R FF2 Hulk Transport.

  According to every sensory input aboard The Damn Shame, the craft that had just deposited a team of mercenaries in her hold and was now currently whizzing about the meteoroid cloud had been, until several moments ago, their trusted accomplice, The Finder's Keeper. By virtue of the dedicated scramble code, coupled with both a convincing alibi and Nemo’s elliptical approach vector, specifically designed to elude any of the Shame's major viewports, the Lover was free to execute her opening maneuver before Taré could muster an adequate welcoming party for Moira and her cadre of spacejumping commandos.

  The ruse revealed, however, the Shame remains a fully equipped capital ship, manned by vengeful pirates and armed with a compliment of recently stolen, highly expensive prototype starfighters.

  The proximity monitor brays in Two-Bit’s earpiece. “First three jocks are cracklin’ in at -72 greez ventrie, off starboard stern,” he reports in reminder.

  “Right, right,” Nemo collectedly recalls and fiddles with his headset as he issues a new batch of instructions. “Abraham, do me a favor – flash the Shame our colors. Dorsal, ventral, take your targets and go. Oh, and Odi? You on comm?” Several moments pass, ruptured by the sound of the turrets’ rattling gunfire, before Odisseus grants a begrudgingly growled reply. “I’mana clutch her in a second here – you wanna gimme a little more starch?” Another snarled expletive through their headsets before Nemo crinkles into a complacent grin, strumming fingers against the brittle grating of the abused clutchlever, the yoke’s distant cousin. “Much appreciated, brother.”

  Without apparent consideration to potential rending oblivion at every inch, Nemo suffocates the clutch and The Unconstant Lover bulldozes headlong into the broil. Infinitesimal particles impact harmlessly against the viewport as Nemo threads the fortuitous freighter through the frigid thicket of collisions with trifling twitches of the yoke. The Lover opens her trajectory astray of the Shame, flashing her skirts to coax the fighters to chase and, as Two-Bit spies on sensors, they’re hooked, peeling off to pursue in an amateurish diamond formation.

  Nemo, rapt with the paradisiacal panic of spacer’s adrenaline, suggests above the enjoined thunder of the roaring turrets and the screaming boosters. “So, who’dya figure’ll get their's first? Moira or us?”

  –––

  Moira jackknifes Righty and Lefty mostly for show and pounds rounds out of their chambers and into the skulls of both dreggy Mruka driftcart drivers, slumping them simultaneously in their seats as their craft simmers to a stop. She scours a panoramic view for more nearby hostiles, revealed or hidden, and, only discovering opposition too distant or fortified to dispatch from her current position, crouches to cover to signal her marauder squad as laser fire splits the air about her.

  Across the scummy expanse from their previous embankment of crates, Danbonte receives her signal. With a fierce nod, he initiates the charge towards Moira’s next improvised bunker, each of the six brigands, save Salo, blanketing the opposing pirate’s main bulwark with bouts of covering fire as they scramble over the trail of corpses left in Moira’s wake. Bastioned gunners from various posts throughout the hold potshot at the transversing squad. Moira swivels her pistols about, Lefty and Righty remonstrating the only way they know how, until Danbonte and his followers slide to the relative safety of their substitute stronghold.

  “Whadda we got?” Danbonte barks over the riotous din of the gunfight as the arriving squad arranges themselves into their rehearsed formation.

  The Damn Shame’s cargo hold is infested with laserfire – a coruscation of polychrome bolts bandying about the bay as both parties engage in fearsome trench warfare. The home team, a formidable coalition of wrathful buccaneers proper, crewman who happened to occupy the hold at the moment of Moira’s boarding and several press-ganged technicians, assault Moira’s improvised redoubt from a myriad of fronts in nearly every direction. The greatest concentration of the Shame's repellers, though, had infixed themselves atop a crate mountain at the bowside end of the bay and shower a steady stream of gunfire from those relatively impregnable heights.

  For all their inferior numbers, however, Moira’s marauder squad manages to match ammunition at a prodigious rate with the cruiser’s defenders, blazing machine guns begrudging the enemy every bolt and every inch. By Moira’s design, the bulk of her brigade, Anchorage, Ebeneezer, Heeko, Danbonte and Brondi, function as the frontline, spraying the hold in abrasive gouts of cover fire and lobbing the occasional grenade to scatter problematic clumps. Moira, meanwhile, troubleshoots, zeroing and eliminating potential hazards before they develop and threaten the effectiveness of the “handbasket’s” haymaker – their rocket-powered artillery.

  “We’ve got an Etrook crackerman at fourteen degrees,” Moira briefs to her contingent, popping her pistols forward and shimmying out the spent casings. “Least a coupla shooters behind with Concord Ind pieces, but I ain’t gotta visual. Green muzzle flash,” she answers before anyone asks. “Two Helker with ratatats are gonna be your big concern from starboard, back behind that wreck and I think we’re looking at a Dho, or at least a Zibbian, up this stack here. Too much fire and not enough voices,” she concludes, shoving fresh moonclips into Righty and Lefty’s wheels before folding them back whole. “I trust you boys can handle the messy details?” she adds amid a chorus of cheeky confirmations.

  As Moira assays the defensibility of their bearings and the relative threat of nearby resistance, she spies, over her shoulder, the Corgassi planting another swollen shell into the spigot of his signature shaped-charge launcher. “We gotta flyboy back here,” he informs in a half-shout before supporting the stock against his eponymous shoulder and training the weapon towards the aft.

  Salo Shouldermount squats like a statuesque soldier, sighting a bulbous eye down the shapely length of his MI 53B Culminator Unguided Anti-Vehicular Rocket Propelled Grenade Launcher. The warhead’s spear-tip aims directly at the sputtering engines of a mid-ignition sequence starfighter, its pilot desperately attempting to escape the deliverance of Salo’s detonating justice, as four previous fighters had been destructively unable to avert.

  Moira allows herself the mundane joy of watching a starfighter sloppily explode inside its own hangar bay as Salo’s missile streaks unerringly towards its target, tracing its wake in dusty exhaust and shattering the prototype into a horrific, blistering mess. Her squad exalts a ribald cheer, addled with expletives.

  One minute into her boarding action with five fighters already relegated to smoldering hulks, Moira trusts Nemo to handle the four prototypes whose pilots had been near enough at hand to scramble before her strike team could mount an effective offensive against them.

  Browsing the brouhaha for the next sentient unfortunate enough to earn her crosshairs, Moira spots her. Apparently vanguarding the resistance from aloft the bowside citadel of crates, this one, a sinewy dame, complete with dusky desert duster, sculpted spacer’s helmet and antiquated
hunting rifle, purports herself like a Whuudi war chief. Squatting on supple shanks atop her stacked fastness, this one deploys her troops with succinct military hand signals. This one, Moira deduces, must be the Captain, Dijiqi “Snakeeyes” Taré.

  Busying herself with the informal dismissal of an emerging Saurian grenadier, Moira locks a weather eye on the supposed Taré, as she extinguishes the reptiloid before he’s the chance to hurl the explosive, which discharges in his dead claw and demolishes both his cover and his cowering confederates with a refrain of stupefied screams. An opportunistic salvo from Heeko’s machine gun disposes of the scrambling survivors when Moira’s wristcomm chirps.

  “Your jetpack didn’t blow up, did it?” Nemo’s warbled voice solicits unenthusiastically, assaulted by the characteristic hum of the Lover and beset by another, less familiar ambiance.

  “Not yet. Have you crashed into anything?”

  “Nothing like, big,” he denotes. “Not yet, anyway.”

  Before Moira can respond, the whine of extremely proximate laserfire ushers another, less familiar sound – a burble of moist deflation, somewhere over her left shoulder, causing her to twist and pale.

  Salo Shouldermount slouches inertly forward, perforated cavity in his lolling head bleeding translucent ichor in fizzy gouts. His suddenly orphaned rocket launcher, slumped against his sinking shoulder, spews its inserted missile straight into the chamber’s ceiling and showers the squad in sparks and buckled deckplates.

  “How’s the boarding action going?” Nemo cheerily checks in.

  “Well, Salo just took one in the head. You be the judge,” Moira grimly reports. Nemo responds with one of his bared-teeth winces.

  “Yeowch. Who got him?”

  Moira traces the trajectory of the killshot and pinpoints the sniper’s position, only to discover none other than Captain Taré herself at the delivery end, cocking the literal smoking gun. “Snakeeyes.”