Hull Damage Page 19

  “What a cunt.”

  “Agreed.”

  After Moira issues a string of urgent instructions, Anchorage and Ebeneezer, hollering obscenities, jointly paint the Captain's perch in covering fire and Taré's retinue retreats behind their makeshift shelter. Danbonte doesn’t hesitate to shuffle Salo’s corpse aside and snatch up the Culminator, his machine gun drooping like a forgotten handbag as he struggles to load another warhead. Moira and Heeko scoot toward the derelict driftcart, ducking errant gunfire and forcibly yanking both limp Mruka from their seats.

  “Not really sure how to drives one of these, Quissilver,” Heeko stipulates as he climbs behind the steering levers.

  “Unless you’ve got my planetary deed on hand, I suggest you learn fast,” Moira ultimates before clambering into a Poised Hukia stance atop the drift cart's tailpiece. After a few lurching moments of Heeko dimly investigating the drift cart's elementary guidance system, he manages to motor the hovering vehicle onto the elliptical path Moira had outlined, with Quicksilver herself riding shotgun atop the cart’s rear quarter.

  As they falteringly trundle across the embattled hold, a hidden, multidextrous pirate, who reveals himself to be a bandoliered Zibbian, breaks cover from atop his mound of crates to unload three pistols at the passing driftcart. Heeko careers the craft aside on instinct and Moira persuades the assailant back into hiding with a little unloading of her own, the second shot pummeling the MI 14B Curveball cleanly out of his tentacle.

  “Oh, uh, Marco wants to know if you see his littermates?” Nemo refers.

  The Zibbian, astonished at his improbable disarming, receives an iridescent yellow bolt squarely in the forehead. “Yeah, I think I stole their driftcart,” Moira attests, with a brief appraising glance down toward it.

  “Did you? What kind?”

  “TransHaul, I think. That’s the one with the magnetic clamps, right?”

  “Ooh, those are nice.”

  A cerulean flash streaks scant inches from Moira’s head and instead bursts into a patch of exposed machinery at the cart’s stern, which proceeds to frizzle fumes and flames forebodingly. “Moons,” Moira breathes and scrambles several feet to the cart’s port before the driftcart’s stern quarter explodes.

  With one rear motivator afire, the conflagrating driftcart tips hard to starboard and the recoil bucks Moira fiercely from her post, though she muddles together a half-staff somersault and escapes with minimal bruising. Heeko, however, is not quite so fortunate.

  Scraping its inert half sparklingly along the hold floor, the crippled driftcart whips into an oblong turnabout, pitching the Myyrigon out of his seat and spilling him harshly to the floor, before, deprived a driver, it sinks into a harmless amble and budges listlessly into a cluster of crates. Pistols in hand, Moira dashes to Heeko’s prone from, scattering covering fire to hinder the pack of opportunists, emerging from cover to encroach on the decumbent Myyrigon’s position from three directions.

  As Heeko blearily recollects his inconsiderable wits, Nemo bemusedly interjects. “What was that?”

  “It crashed,” Moira clarifies, deflating the distended chest of an Ufaki gunslinger with a single streaming shot to his sternum.

  “Oh,” he reflects. A beat before he inescapably asks, “Were you driving?”

  “No,” she flatly denies. Matched shoulder wounds flounder the oncoming Etrook rifleman to the floor.

  “Well, that's good, at least.”

  Heeko staggers to his clawed feet and scatters the remainder of the entrenched thuggery with a spray of his machine gun. Over the peal of the discharging gunfire, he bluntly comments. “I tells you, Quissilver.”

  “You did. Get back to the others. I’ll manage from here,” she commands directly and, without another urging, Heeko shambles backward, in the general direction of their temporary base camp, flailing the firearm about to obscure his exit.

  Scurrying towards the comparative safety of an interposing crate with close calls whizzing harrowingly near, Moira steels herself for her culminating assault on Taré's looming pyramid, as Nemo, his comm apparently still transceiving, converses with someone on his end.

  “Hey, turn it up,” he eagerly appeals and, on cue, the background of indecipherable music increases in volume.

  “What're you listening to?” Moira inquires insistently.

  “That Cosmic Vomit album I got.”

  “Oh, by all the moons–”

  “What?” Nemo challenges.

  “I don't know how you can listen to that shit.”

  Nemo's reply is brusque generalization. “Yeah, but you don't like anything.”

  “I like Cannonball Dogs,” she opines defensively before retrieving both of her belted coups de grâce, one of which she adroitly palms, the other she brutally unpins between her teeth and, prepping Lefty, hurls in a sidelong arc towards the crate mountain.

  The grenade tumbles languidly through the air, Lefty’s snout tracing the course of its trajectory until, at the opportune moment, Moira clenches the customized trigger and pops the explosive like a combustive metal bubble.

  “Okay, so, you don’t like anything good,” Nemo amends compromisingly. Her vantage to Taré shrouded by the grenade’s smoky discharge, Moira tears her jetpack’s ripcord and pounces forward, the miniaturized thruster enkindling behind her and granting her considerable, albeit wavering, lift.

  “Well, what was that one thing you played on the way to Iogo last month?”

  “The Spacers? They’re okay, I guess.”

  “I liked them.”

  “Everybody likes them.”

  From beyond the haze of evanescing exhaust comes Moira Quicksilver, gifted fragile flight by a secondhand jetpack, with twofold pistols ablaze, splattering the brunt of Taré’s garrisoned bodyguards under the cruelty of her citrine crossfire. Veering her torso sharply left with her jetpack scuttling to keep pace, she floods ammunition on the remainder of the ruffians, claiming necks, knees, hearts and foreheads.

  “What’s that sound?” Nemo questions obliviously.

  “I’m using the jetpack,” Moira tersely returns, escalating to the level of Taré’s perch and squeezing a few introductory shots at her, the last of which spears her stomach, clattering both the woman and her weapon to the cratehead with a shrill shriek. The cold corsair Captain doesn’t cry or quail like Barso, however. She, agonized, rather sneers as Moira awkwardly alights before her, elbowing the jetpack dead.

  Wasting absolutely no time, Moira gyrates Lefty on her trigger finger until she grasps its barrel and activates her second coup de grâce; Cogden Moore’s pilfered bombard knuckle, nestled tightly against her right palm. Glistening membrane blinking into being beyond the butt of the handgun, Moira delivers the most brutish pistol-whip of her career, crunching both Taré’s jaw and the shielding array in the process. The woman crumples to the cratehead and Righty pities her with a swift bolt in the brain.

  “Oh, okay,” Nemo interjects calmly from the wristcomm. “Let me know if it blows up.”

  “Will do.”

  As Moira kneels to collect a blood sample from reputed outlaw Captain Dijiqi “Snakeeyes” Taré, the rampageous mayhem of gunfights, grenades and exploding starfighters behind her, something curious catches her analytical eye.

  The round that perforated Taré’s temple had dislocated her hat, uncoupling the clip of her spacer’s cap with the brute force of the bolt and revealing a smattering of bloodstained blue beneath. Prying the cloven helmet off the corpse, Moira looses a brilliant confusion of incandescent blue hair, smeared with gore.

  Seizing her lifeless and mangled jaw with an urgent hand, Moira dials both of Taré’s eyelids closed to unearth the most damning evidence – mottled tattoos, in the pattern of faded green sunbursts, etched incriminatingly on both of her eyelids.

  –––

  Two-Bit, desperately clasping his armrests to prevent himself from toppling out of his seat, discerns the exact moment when the aftside ray shields, assaulted under the buffet
ing chorus of pursuant laserfire, falter and short out. “Well, there goes the edgies. Goodbye, edgies,” he laments as he, fully aware that a seatbelt is a pitiful defense against imminent explosion, buckles his nonetheless.

  The innermost fringes of Lzura Minor’s primary ring tumble clumsily past the averting Lover, which narrowly absconds between the thinning field of jostling spacebergs and the thickening cloud of harrying laserfire. The portending planet itself engulfs the viewport entirely with its cobalt effulgence, only blotted by the silhouettes of the meteoroid ring’s outermost members.

  Nemo grunts, accosted now not only by track four of the new Cosmic Vomit album, but also by blaring klaxons and blinking alerts that caution with ominous messages such as ‘vital system failure’ and ‘defensive grid offline’. “Huh.” He catches Two-Bit with an askance glance. “Well, that’s no fucking good, is it?”

  “No, Cap’n, I hazard it ain’t,” Two-Bit vigorously agrees.

  “Hm. Okay. New idea.”

  Driven by some mad whimsy, Nemo belts the Lover starkly to starboard, scarcely skirting certain collision against a craggy meteoroid by a margin too mean for Two-Bit to comfortably calculate. Mere moments pass before the freighter clears the gap and tears into the vacant patch of space between Lzura’s many rings, the hounding fighters accelerating into proper engagement speed, finally free of the churning icy chunks.

  Four of Xo’s commandeered prototypes had given merry chase across the clattering expanse of Lzura’s primary ring, as Nemo’d baited them to. Two of said starfighters had met unpleasant ends attempting to match the impetuous speed of The Unconstant Lover's feigned retreat and subsequently dashed themselves to tiny pieces in the endeavor. The remaining pair, however, were canny enough to follow more discreetly, only hastening when given an unobstructed route to their clunky target.

  For all Nemo’s maneuverability, though, Taré’s pilots had been far from silent. A consistent torrent of brilliant blue laserfire had hassled and harassed the Lover the entire loop. While Garrigan and Rooster poured copious amounts of ammunition in discouragement, the icy impediments proved a more effective shield against the smaller starfighters than the bulky Briza.

  Now, with less than a minute remaining until Moira’s designated withdrawal point, the prototype starfighters, like hounds rushing from dense thicket into open meadow after an abruptly exposed hind, gain and gain on the fleeing, defenseless Lover as she plunges toward the gaseous beryl ball of Lzura.

  Blithely undeterred, Nemo snaps several switches and slightly tilts the ship starboard on her axis. “Abraham, concentrate a target jam on the forward fighter for me. Dorsal, ventral, try to establish as hard a lock as you can on that same ship. Two-Bit, you oughta swap full power to bombard shields. Should probably angle ‘em double forward too and Odi? How’s about prepping a starboard clubhaul on my signal, huh? Think you can do that for me?”

  Amid a bout of comm chatter, Two-Bit bounces the gyroscopic rig forward, screwing dials and tuning frequencies while the shield reconfigures as a practically opaque coif of shimmering double-folded deflection. “You, uh, vizzin’ to wend back into the brim? Coop Moira maybe?”

  “At some point, yeah,” Nemo pleasantly concedes. Several investigative blue bolts whizzing past the viewport from somewhere far abaft seems to motivate Nemo into hustling Odisseus. “How’s that booster coming, buddy?” A gnarled reply, the disagreeable bastard of ambivalence and affirmation, returns the question, though Nemo appears contented by it. “Motherbloomers try and catch me now,” he mutters viciously to the bleating instrument panel before signaling. “Flip her over, Odi!”

  On cue, the muffled bellow of the boosters is halved as Starboard promptly extinguishes and The Unconstant Lover limpingly pirouettes, coming confusedly about on two proverbial wheels – a classic gimmick among stick-shift fighter jockeys. The moment the ensuing starfighters appear in the viewport, however, Starboard kickstarts, sluicing the Lover brutally forward under the concerted thrust of the re-established booster and Nemo’s unrepentant pumping of the clutch.

  Finally achieving a decent visual on these fighters as they sprint towards them, Two-Bit readily admits they’re sweet little models, with contoured chassis, effective frontal fire arcs and ample ascension power in their trim turbines. They decelerate their approach in response to both the Lover's turrets, and seemingly Nemo’s cackle, opening their fire.

  A bifurcated bombardment from the two barking turrets batters the anterior starfighter’s sophisticated shielding. While its wingman hangs in reserve, the craft retorts against the barreling freighter by dashing forward to meet it, lancing out with its own sapphire salvo to participate in this shipborne joust. Blue bolts, utterly undeterred by the forward-facing bombard shield, nick, pocket and scrape the Lover's nose, but Nemo doesn’t lessen their heedless momentum in the face of oncoming enemy fire, chortling cordially the whole way.

  The two starships, one unwieldily cumbersome but torqued beyond reason, the other glossily aerodynamic but smaller in size, meteorically plummet towards each other like a contrived math problem, disgorging gouts of green and blue laserfire across the dwindling expanse. Within seconds, both ships had clenched the gap to engagement distance but neither the starfighter, its advanced ray shield wobbling under the pressure of both Antagonist cannonades, nor the Lover, her bare hull bruised and abused from its consistent bashing, falter or deviate from their collision course.

  “Cap’n, fun being fun, mayhaps I could advise ye to pull just a wee bit up?” Abraham, undoubtedly watching the sensor with as much incredulity as Two-Bit, attempts to lovingly cajole. Ahead, the starfighter, perhaps a dottible out, seems to reassess his verdict regarding this claptrap pirate clunker and its apparently kamikaze Captain by slackening his initial thrust and emptying his ammunition at the Lover from crying cannons. This shift of tactics, however, has little effect on Nemo’s own singular strategy.

  “Cap’n, you ain’t gonna horn them,” Two-Bit blankly hypothesizes, no manner of question in his probing voice. Half a dottible beyond the viewport, the starfighter pilot, in some drastic escape maneuver, attempts to wrench his craft away from the impending crash, exposing his sleek underbelly at a perpendicular angle to the Lover's diving nose. With the prototype swelling rapidly before them, Nemo’s reply is purported soberly, even reasonably, which only succeeds in disconcerting Two-Bit’s better judgment all the more. “He’s a starfighter. He can suck my spaceship’s dick.”

  In the exaggerated second before collision, Two-Bit recalls the yelping embitterment of Odisseus peaking the comm channel, the honking “IMPACT IMMINENT” alarms flooding every helm screen and the petrified visage of the screaming Suraaqi starfighter pilot, visible even at an oblique angle between both besmeared viewports and the hyaline sheen of the Lover's bombard shield.

  The Unconstant Lover bumps into the inverted belly of the hapless prototype like a battering ram against wet wood, buckling the Briza’s beak into a brutal concave and shearing the starfighter into scrambling scraps, scattering against the bowside bombard shields. The whole freighter jerks instantaneously forward and strangulates her crew with inertial kickback, Two-Bit’s stomach backflipping into his mouth and his heart skipping a handful of beats. Abruptly jolted into concussion, The Unconstant Lover idles limply, all systems dead, both boosters drained and its whole crew numbly recoiling as shiny shorn starfighter wreckage dances lightly about her broken nose.

  Shellshocked and cursing the fearsome spaceship whiplash his recently applied seatbelt had gifted him, Two-Bit watches as the second starfighter, vulturelike in its prudence, stalks forward, seemingly to inspect the carrion. Splashed comically against the dashboard, Nemo appears in little condition to repel boarders. “Er, Cap’n?” Two-Bit manages, wheeling the rig about to rap the back of Nemo’s head with his knuckles. “You likely wanna vizz at this.”

  Coughing hoarsely, Nemo peels himself off the control panel and gazes blearily about at the deactivated screens and lifeless instruments, as i
f awakening in an unfamiliar location after a drunken bender. “Well, how about that?” he comments vaguely, snagging his uncrowned bowler, replacing it on his head and peering down the crooked nose of his beloved freighter. “Probably not my best idea ever.”

  “I groof the sentiment, Cap’n, but, uh–” Two-Bit acknowledges with a nudge of the head towards the approaching starfighter.

  “Right. Space,” Nemo corrects himself, creaking his back and aligning his elbows with simultaneous cracks, seemingly in preparation for some miraculous amelioration of their drifting vessel.

  The Captain wallops the comatose dashboard jarringly and the inert instruments hiccup half-alive a moment, flutter and fall dormant again. A second smack garners less response but on the third attempt, the ignition computer gooses, the boosters spurt and The Unconstant Lover gloomily grinds herself back into operation.

  Welcome screens click into place on the helm’s manifold monitors as the Lover's various cannibalized computer systems reboot – propulsion, sensory and communications. As the internal comm channels recycle, roaring Ortoki, presumably threats and vexations, pipes into their headsets mid-stream and Nemo wastes little time dialing the engine room's individualized volume to a more manageable level.

  “Nemo? Nemo, do you copy? Oh, for bloom’s sake, don’t fucking tell me,” the scraping voice of Moira, patched through the reformatting transmission matrix, distinguishes itself in pitch, but not in tone, from Odisseus’ remonstrance.

  “We’re here, Moira, sorry,” Nemo responds indistinctly.

  “What the fuck happened? I’ve been trying to buzz for minutes.”

  Nemo and Two-Bit both glance to the Lover's furrowed forepart before exchanging furtive looks of their own. “Er, we had a little, erm–” Two-Bit begins.

  “Collision,” Nemo concludes honestly.

  “You’re blasted.”