Hull Damage Read online

“He could have hit you.”

  Nemo shrugs. “Would have been preferable.”

  Another pair of iridescent orange bolts, both claiming victims among the racked brethren of Nemo's destroyed bottle pierce the fine mist of spilled indigo alcohol.

  “Orange muzzle flash. Makes it a Halisdro. Most likely a holdout. Probably bonded fibers,” Moira postulates.

  “Probably,” he replies offhandedly, tossing the severed head of the bottle aside. He twists, affixing her with a quarter-moon smirk. “Race ya?”

  She scans the expanse of weightless carnage. Following a loose trajectory to her right, Moira could, with a lessened line of sight to her attacker, blaze a trail to the hunkered Prul’s position – a makeshift barricade constructed of an upturned table, complete with telltale bowler hat peeking just into view. The majority of the floating debris on all other routes towards the Prul’s improvised fortification was either too sparse or simply too small to serve as an adequate screen from laser fire. Only by hugging to the rightmost path, along the observation bubble, could she avoid being a vulnerable and obvious target to the full clip of ammunition the Prul would be able to unload before she reached him.

  She regards Nemo with an indirect glance.

  “Left or right?”

  Nemo squints the thirty yards to the garrisoned gunman, who squeezes off another embarrassment, flying fifteen feet wide. He shrugs.

  “Left.”

  “Deal. Ready?”

  “Just about.” Nemo snakes an arm behind the bar and fingers an idle decanter of frothy blue Gitterswitch, yanking it up to his grasp. He tosses back a gulp, cants his gaze to Moira and splinters into his most malignant grin.

  “Go.”

  Moira watches him scurry off, immediately drawing fire from the Prul and current route equipped with little or no sufficient cover. To his credit, he’d at least learnt to crouch a little when facing uninterrupted enemy fire. When she was certain the Prul had focused his attention entirely on stopping the charge of the one-man idiot brigade, Moira slinks off, unnoticed, to the right.

  Two strides and she’s airborne, sliding off the ground and sailing along the rim of the observation bubble. She scuttles the length of its glass face like a beetle, perpetually gyrating striprobats on her right, string of floating, dismembered corpses and furniture on her left. Between gaps in the debris, she catches brief glimpses of the jowly, behatted Prul, body pivoted away from her rush, shooting madly in the other direction and utterly unaware of her imminent threat.

  The bolts only berate the oncoming Nemo, however. Liquor hiked to his lips, he scampers across the club floor, determinedly draining the bottle as laserfire darts miraculously by. Moira decides not to bother calculating the statistical improbability of Nemo’s accidental evasiveness as she approaches her destination.

  She skates the remainder of the distance along the bubble’s convex, aligns and musters her legs beneath her as Nemo closes the gap from the left. The Prul, unnatural terror clouding his double-chinned face, rises and squeezes off the last two shots his sidearm will allow before the chamber clicks empty.

  On cue, Moira pounces, pulling herself into a Snarling Jborra stance and swooping silently towards her oblivious foe. Nemo, bottle empty, hurls it oblique, catching the Prul on the right hand and clattering the empty pistol to the ground. In response, the Prul steps forward and clocks Nemo absolutely in the face with a closed fist, plowing him to the ground and haphazardly skipping him across the floor.

  Moira descends, instantly flattening the Prul beneath her knee, landing in a hard squat atop him and finally dethroning that moronic hat. They briefly wrestle, the frantic Prul attempting to thrash her off while Moira grapples to grasp a hold on his chin. She yanks him wickedly, his neck shatters and his fluorescent emerald border flickers into a deep crimson. She exhales.

  After confirming the kill, Moira shifts her weight to her other knee and reaches for the castoff piece. She'd been right – a Halisdro sidearm. A miniaturized bootleg of an MI model, it was small enough to conceal in a shin or wrist holster, carried a magazine of sixteen off brand vapor cartridges and appeared to be woven and cemented from reinforced, low-tensile shobo silk. Organic weaponry was the number one answer to metallic-based firearm sensors, such as those the ‘bounce employed. Even a holdout this small would have been useful, if Nemo’s bottle hadn’t cleaved the whole thing in two, leaving the barrel dangling from the chamber by a handful of wiring. She flings it dismissively and it breaks on impact.

  “Bloom. Me. The Fuck. Out.” Moira looks up and left to find, slumped like a child’s abandoned toy, her Captain, scraping himself off the club floor. Thrown clear by the Prul’s blasphemous blow and sporting a fashionable green tint from the biostrobe, he arduously labors to his feet, wheezing and spitting out blood. His face is bitter mush – bruised, bloodied, by all rights, broken. Even looking at him, Moira could feel her own battered head throb. “I think I lost a tooth back there.”

  “That’ll be expensive,” Moira deadpans.

  Nemo throws on another of his quick shrugs. “Depends. I know a guy.” He uses both thumbs to ladle some of the blood from his eye sockets. “Antigravity can suck its mother’s cock.”

  Moira scowls. She rises off the corpse and flips it with the edge of her boot. He's repulsive, even by Prulish standards. His gristly jowls are slack, spilling across his face and pooling on the plastolieum. His scalp only boasts a smattering of bristle, the same vibrissa that coats his bulky biceps and corrugated knuckles. His cloth is characterless – a sleeveless vest, an appropriately sized wrist holster and the same unexceptional shirt and breeches found on every transient spacer in Takioro Defederate Station. Her boot’s edge serves the same purpose in rolling him back, face plant to the floor.

  “Recognize him?” Nemo asks, having achieved relatively stable footing. Moira deepens her scowl and shakes her head. Nemo makes the voyage back to the body of his assailant, wincing with every other step, and stoops before him, grasping a few fingerfuls of barbed hairs and examining the face.

  “Any idea for a motive?” Moira inquires.

  “The usual ‘no good reason?’”

  “Sublime.”

  Nemo unhands the Prul’s head and grimaces, glancing about the carcass of the nightclub. “Looks like the festivities are breaking up.”

  Moira fires a peek over her shoulder. Order, however relative, did seem to be returning to the second floor of the Astrobounce Gentlemen’s Club. The pumping music had wound itself down, secondary and tertiary inertial compensators began to re-route and the majority of the brawl’s combatants were either fleeing the ensured justice of the house brutes, bleeding out or, in the case of the truly idiotic, panting and wiping their brows amid the floating jungle of collateral damage. Such was the case with both Odisseus and Two-Bit Switch, the former picking amber Mruka fur out from the cracks between his fangs, the latter hunched, checking the vitals of the asphyxiated Saurian.

  “I imagine Gozzer’ll be none too happy about this,” Moira muses.

  His exhale explodes out of his lips as Nemo answers. “No, I imagine not.” He regards her incredulously, thumbing over his shoulder. “Did you decapitate that Kezzerak?”

  She sniffs. “He was asking for it.”

  He furrows his brow. “How do you figure?”

  “Damn mantis-men don’t wanna get dismembered in fistfights, they should grow some blooming bones.”

  Nemo’s eyebrows polarize. “Fair enough.”

  “I assume we’ve no idea what happened to Xo’s representative?”

  Nemo purses his lips. “Correct.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Seconded.”

  With a string of electrified cracks, the biostrobe is usurped by successive blasts of garish industrial lighting, flooding the club floor in uncompromising illumination and heralding the approach of the incensed management. In a few seconds, the joint would be lousy with Gozzer and his hired heavies – a dissimilar handful of saw-toothed Triomman thugs wi
th profoundly trigger-happy dispositions. As the last of the weightless furniture awkwardly alights on the ground, Moira wonders how Nemo planned on cajoling their way out of this one.

  “Sometimes, I wish we could just play nice with all the other criminals.”

  Nemo musses up his face. “Whaddya mean? I'm nice.”

  “By all the moons, Nemo, if I find out you’re in back of this!” comes the heavily accented clarion call from across the nightclub. Nemo’s eyebrows bounce back into place.

  “That’ll be Gozzer. Wish me luck.” He stands, scoops up the stray bowler hat and spins it onto his head in a single motion, stalking off towards the sound of Gozzer’s voice.

  Moira sighs. “You’re kidding me.”

  He twists his torso to answer, continuing his stride uninterrupted. “What?” he teases. Moira rolls her eyes and shifts her attention elsewhere as he saunters off, Two-Bit and Odisseus falling in behind him at a motion.

  Moira releases a yawn, which is accompanied by a blistering pain, characteristic of a cracked bone, on the left side of her jaw, precisely where the greenskin scored his lucky hit. She gives the point of contact a judicious massage with a thumb and reminds herself to obtain a few bottles of osteocaulk before they shoved off.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Moira spots something – a meek point of red flash, emanating from beneath the pudgy hand of the dead Prul. She edges his wrist with her boot and reveals a handful of crumpled machinery, complete with tiny, cracked transponder, likely broken in his fall. She reaches to his other hand and inverts it, uncovering a similar transponder nestled in the palm, though it displays a steady green light, rather than a flashing red one.

  Moira plucks up the device for closer inspection and watches the air four inches beyond it quaver and distort. She wheels it about for a moment, smirking in recognition.

  It seems this Prul, along with the greenskin and probably the Walkeen she’d previously faced, had been equipped with manual shielding arrays, better known in these circles as “bombard knuckles.” When planted in a palm and properly activated, the transponder projected a fist-sized swath of buffer comparable to a shipborne bombard shield. Being struck in the face by an assailant wielding such a device was akin to being rammed by a starship, albeit considerably smaller and slower. The mystery of the greenskin’s disproportionately powerful punch suitably solved, Moira continues her search.

  A hard heel kick to the corpse’s abdomen and it flops to its back again. She bends over the body and pads down its pockets. He was unarmed, save for the sundered silk sidearm, though the shoulder holster suggested he’d logged a pistol at the door – a medium chamber, short muzzle weapon, possibly an O9 or a V2. His clip was unimpressive, hosting a small hodgepodge of bills, which Moira discreetly palms, along with the one working bombard knuckle. His forward trouser pockets contained, along with a surprising number of empty chewing paste cartridges, a clearance card for Docking Port #2187 and an expired ident tag.

  “Cogden Moore,” the tag named him and granted him second-tier bounty hunting status under the Ring Penal Authority. Rifling through the vest, she found something folded and stashed in the rightmost breast pocket that Nemo would likely be very interested to see.

  “Look what I found,” Nemo calls from behind. Moira half-turns as he swaggers towards her, elbows cocked up and forefingers pinching a sliver-thin piece of tech.

  “You square everything with Gozzer?”

  “More or less. Two-Bit’s closing negotiations. Looks like he might be entitled to eight percent off our next job.”

  Moira extends a hand. “You gotta stop offering percents – bigger jobs we take, more money we lose.” He passes her the card, emblazoned with the familiar Hong Xo insignia. “Business card?”

  “Holodeck. Looks like they left the offer after all,” he tilts his head and smirk sideways. “See? I done good.”

  Moira glowers and tosses him the folded leaflet. “Right breast pocket. Cogden Moore. On contract from the RPA. Carrying a license and everything. My bet is,” she spares a consideration for the full splay of fallen thugs all about her, “he bought himself some untalented muscle for the takedown. Check their pockets, oughta find cash minted from Psabo and Yime, just like his.”

  Nemo's smirk disappears as he busies himself with the unfolding and scrutiny of the flyer, only to evolve tenfold into a jubilant grin upon realization.

  “You’re serious?”

  “I’m serious.”

  The odd elated snicker besieges his recitation. “Eighteen counts of murder in the first degree, three counts of piracy, one count of brigandage and one count of enthusiastic corruption of the galactic good. 78,000 Commercial. Dead or alive.” He tears his eyes off the posted notice, childlike wonder in his face. “So, he’s a–”

  “Yes.”

  “And we just–”

  “Yes. Mind you, this Moore is no Quuilar Noxix, but that’s a notice you can be proud of. Trust me.”

  He motions emphatically at her with the half-crumpled handout. “You do understand, of course, this belongs on the chiller. It’s a necessity.”

  “That seems a little–”

  He’s thrust the notice into the air, in a gesture of mastership and dominion over the inebriated wrecks, irritated administration and inner sanctum of his crew, exclaiming across the second floor of the Astrobounce Gentlemen’s Club, in the voice of a conquering warlord. “Attend me, galaxy. I, the nefarious Captain Nemo, have successfully vanquished the first bounty hunter you fucks could throw at me. Eat shit, long arm of the law!”

  Chapter 2

  Two-Bit Switch had conducted business as a freelance cutpurse, a hired gun and, most recently, a professional jailbreaker for the past thirteen years, operating entirely out of Takioro Defederate Station. On only two separate and unrelated occasions had he been summoned before the old lady herself, Takioro’s Depot-Commissioner: the first relating to an in-station counterfeiting ring that he, to this very day, denies any involvement in and the second, this exact moment.

  Dujic’s Holo-Ink Parlor wasn’t owned or operated by any Dujic, nor had it been the entire time Two-Bit had plied his trade on the Station’s circular streets and blackened barrooms. Whatever Dujic’s origins, his namesake was a dank, unkempt outlet on the First Ring, possessed of fourth-hand tattooing equipment, a musky, disagreeable clientele and the particular distinction of serving as the Depot-Commissioner’s base of operations.

  A lack of available office space between the station's querulous merchant bigwigs had damned old Vel to the lodgings she’d held before ascending to the undesired position of Depot-Commissioner. Something in her demeanor, however suggested she preferred it that way. The Parlor’s unimpressive square footage relegated the dozens of daily malcontents to briefer and smaller audiences, lest they wished to endure the cramped, reeking confines of her lair for more than a few minutes at a time. All cloistered within as they were at present, Two-Bit could sympathize.

  The four of them, crammed into corners and crouching on counters, plus Vel and her current customer, made even the larger of the two studios stuffy. Despite their proximity, Vel was forced to shout over the sound of the whirring holopen; though in all fairness, she’d probably be shouting anyway.

  “Gozzer’s been chompin’ my ear off all morning,” she protests, attention planted firmly on her patron’s left bare breast. Today’s specimen, a balding Buja beauty with a thousand-dottible stare, was emphasizing the shape of her nipples by having holographic adrogi goldfish inked in, swimming lackadaisical circles about them. Two-Bit battles the impulse to stare, but Vel seems unmoved. “Says you’re fixin’ to welch on his damages.”

  The Captain, still sporting his purloined bowler hat and spinning halfheartedly in the room's only other chair, opens on the defensive, giving his hands a partial spread. “Welch nothing. I promised him eight percent.”

  “Off what?” Vel answers, not missing a beat.

  Nemo scans the room for the crew’s confirmation. Two-Bit
, cross-armed and propped against an expansive wall-poster, shrugs one shoulder. Moira, squatting near the sink, gives a curt, closed-eye nod. Blocking the doorway with his broad tail leaking into the next studio, uncomfortable Odisseus doesn’t even respond.

  “Off the next job.”

  “You got another job?” Vel hesitates to retouch a shimmering scale on an errant fish’s streaming dorsal fin. “Some other misguided blowbag hired you after that last debacle?”

  Consternation crosses Nemo’s features. “The Kapla Caper?” Two-Bit stifles a smile at the term he, the crew's designated heist namer, originally coined.

  “If you wanna call that mess a caper,” Vel responds.

  Consternation gives way to frustration. “We delivered the freight, didn’t we?”

  “After you got boarded by a customs frigate.”

  “Doesn’t tie back to you.” Moira monotones.

  Vel adjusts her lopsided imaging goggles. “As soon as some bounty hunter pinches your freebootin’ ass, you bet it does.”

  Odisseus snarls an abrasive reply, but Vel doesn’t flinch or even spare him a glance as she answers.

  “I think if I’d just hired me a smuggler instead of a trigger-happy pack of–” Vel begins, but annoyance overtakes Two-Bit and he interjects, before his better angels can dissuade him otherwise.

  “Look, it’s a hustle-and-cuss operation, isn’t it? Anybody with a spaceship and two lollies is gonna have a gashouse time fangling that clean, customs frigger or no.”

  The holopen deactivates. The Buja coughs. Two-Bit untangles his arms and dangles them about his hips. Vel regards Nemo civilly, even courteously. “Tell your boy not to interrupt me.”

  “I think what he was getting at–”

  “I don’t care what he was gettin’ at. He’ll speak when spoken at or you can chain him up outside.”

  Nemo catches Two-Bit’s eye as he replies. “Fair enough.” Two-Bit sniffs and coils his forearms back together. If Velocity wanted to play queenpin in her parlor, let her. To the greater galaxy, she was nothing by a racketeer with delusions of standing, but here on Takioro, on her station, at the unruly, dissolute heart of Bad Space, she was cream on the upper crust.