Unconstant Love Read online

  Seconds drag on. The Ortok, unperturbed, continues puttering about through the atmosphier's innards. A throat is cleared.

  "This counts as a pass, right?" Nemo attempts to bargain with Moira from across the board. He raises one reasonable hand in a vote. "All in favor?"

  "Aye," agrees Moira.

  "Wanna asphyxiate?" proposes Odisseus instead, hooking a significant looking wire with his pointer claw and yanking far enough away from the atmosphier to stretch it taut. "No? Then, how's about we all hold onto our moons-damned jetboosters a minute and lemme finish."

  The look of frenzied desperation in the Ortok's eye, the same look one would find in the wide eye of a suicide bomber, doesn't leave much room for negotiation. All Moira can do to kill the time is sit quietly and wait for Odisseus to take his turn. All the while, her resentment at the unfairness of the universe seethes within her. What's all the more galling to Moira is how little of a shit the Ortok seems to give about the game in general, when compared to her simmering ball of obsession and paranoia.

  Durig most of the dozen of so games they'd played, Odisseus remained solidly in the middle of pack, performing admirably but unremarkably. With only a handful of wins under his belt, it's clear that the Ortok plays more to stave off the mounting heights of boredom than to stoke the flames of competition. Barring some divine intervention, however, Odisseus was nearly as likely to walk away the victor as Moira was, mired in the Stickyslick.

  Why not simply pass the turn then, wonders Moira, as her wait grows all the more onerous with each passing second. When Odisseus is finally ready to return his attentions to the board, Moira's two seconds away from lodging one of Lefty's canisters in his beloved atmosphier and sentencing everyone aboard to a slow, gasping death.

  The Ortok straightens his spine, waddles the atmosphier a few feet out of his way and receives the dice from Nemo. He then proceeds to rub his paws together and consider the board and everyone's position, squinting down like a nearsighted old man to better view the situation.

  Despite his doddering posture, these days Odisseus resembles more and more the unthinking beast that most of the galaxy mistakes him for. Like Nemo's own unruly hair, the Ortok's thick pelt is shaggier by a factor of ten these days, causing him to constantly brush fur from his eyes with a swipe of his claws. His mouthful of fangs, whenever Moira does glimpse them, have all been yellowed by plaque and malaise.

  At the moment, he's even unclipped his customary toolbelt and left it strewn nearby, increasing his resemblance to some naked animal all the more.

  This is all undercut, Moira supposes, by the tiny set of smiley face dice he clutches in his padded paw. His paw opens, the three dice jostle against each other and then crash onto the board. Everyone's eyes follow them, eager to see what pointless result they'll turn up.

  Three smiley faces.

  An identical look is traded back and forth, from Nemo to Moira and Moira to Odisseus. Everyone continues to scowl in confusion as the mechanic reaches his paw towards his red figurine. Pinching it between his foreclaws, Odisseus counts each square from Dizzy Dnara and her pile of shiny steersticks to the same square Nemo's token occupies, on the threshold of the Launchpad.

  This done, the Ortok then hovers his paw uncertainly above his figurine. He glances at Moira, the unofficial arbiter of the game's sparse rules. “Triples means I get to–”

  Moira nods dumbly. “Yep.”

  A slave to these unpredictable circumstances, Odisseus scoops up the grinning dice, shakes them amid the stunned silence of the mess hall and throws his congratulatory roll.

  Somehow, Moira's heightened sense of irony detects the Ortok's victory before the dice even land. She catches a brief glimpse of the smiles as they bounce past her, mocking her with their cheeriness. The sickening feeling of retribution denied washes over her as the dice skid to a stop, perfectly for the Captain's perusal.

  One grumpy face, two smiley faces.

  “I win,” Odisseus mutters. “Huh.”

  A confused Nemo keeps staring downward, still attempting to squeeze some meaning from the dice cast before him, like an auger who disagrees with the innards he's just smeared through the dust.

  “You cheated,” he resolves at last, under his breath.

  “I'll be in the pantry,” Moira decides violently, rising immediately from her crouch.

  Before anyone can object or demand she help disassemble the game, she stalks away, stomping across the ruinous squalor of the mess hall, and makes for the ship's pantry. What trash she encounters – dry food packaging, dishes weeks unwashed and loose articles of discarded clothing – on her unwavering way, Moira swats aside, kicks away and stomps on, anything to cover the sound of her squabbling crewmates behind her.

  The mess hall of The Unconstant Lover is a sty.

  Silly, Silly Scrapyard's improvised arena had been erected on a circumstantial scrap of bare floor in the mess hall's starboard corner. To reach the pantry, Moira must cross the entire breadth of the large chamber and navigate the cluttered wasteland that three weeks of marooning had inevitably created.

  First, she must weave between the three fold-up couches that Nemo's colonized into another one of his nests – all blankets, booze bottles and orphaned Noxix holodiscs. In deference to the mattress he'd been provided, the Captain preferred, in his selfless way, to pollute an ostensibly public space with his filth, lounging around there like some vagabond duke.

  Secondly, Moira crosses through the galley, less a functioning kitchen in these bleak times and more a forlorn monument to what meals not lukewarm might once have tasted like. To encourage honesty, Moira's arranged all their rations across the Ujad mahogany dining table, with everything plainly in the public eye. The galley's sink, the counters and everywhere else so overflow with dirty dishes that even the deactivated chiller has been stuffed and stacked with the revolting things, its door hanging slightly ajar.

  Lastly, before she can reach the pantry and blessed privacy, Moira passes through the bank of chugging machinery that's keeping everyone alive. To her port, the torridity unit thrums and vibrates with barely contained fury, appearing always to be on the very verge of exploding. To her starboard, the inertial hub is substantially calmer but even Moira feels her movements become noticeably sluggish, so close to the artificial gravity generator.

  In the moment before she manually slides open the pantry door, she glances over her shoulder, back towards the chiller and the great green timepiece that’s magnetized there.

  16.46 hours remain. Moira makes a mental note.

  Inside the pantry, it's utterly dark, the automatic light meeting a similar fate to the automatic door control. Not that Moira minds. She savors each moment of darkness as another moment she doesn't have to look at her depressing-as-fuck surroundings or her aggravating-as-fuck companions. She understands the exact dimensions of the pantry – its empty shelves, its sparse furnishings – well enough to seat herself without groping blindly in the dark.

  Following an early incident of thievery, all the actual food was emptied from the pantry and subjected to Moira’s new rationing regime. All that remains now is the one cargo crate, jury-rigged into a makeshift toilet. Via a complex series of secondary depressurizing tubes and a funnel that vent the waste into open space, Odisseus had managed to cobble together an inelegant, if effective, lavatory for their use.

  More importantly, the pantry served double duty as a de facto rage chamber. This is where Moira is forced to come whenever her fiercely introverted nature demands four solid teltriton walls between her and her confederates.

  Here, Moira is resolved to sweat out what few hours remain until their forthcoming rescue.

  The Unconstant Lover drifts lifelessly through deep space. For twenty-one days, seven hours and sixteen minutes, she and her desperate crew have awaited a passing ship to discover and deliver them from this waking nightmare. To better conserve the ship's power during this interval, the crew has sequestered themselves within the mess hall and k
ept themselves alive through remote auxiliaries – the atmosphier, the torridity unit, the inertial hub and suchlike.

  Week one was cramped and messy but novel. Week two was claustrophobic and damn near macabre, the novelty now a fond memory. Week three, with a combined weight of over 500 consecutive hours quarantined inside the Lover's mess hall with only scumbag motherfuckers for company, was enough to make Moira Quicksilver think soothing thoughts of a double murder-suicide.

  Planted on the edge of the crate, Moira spends a few moments to regulate her breathing, to regain her composure. She'd spent years taming this part of her personality, the bratty teenager she long ago suffocated to survive in the big, bad universe – and now it was reading its ugly head again.

  Moira Quicksilver, bounty hunter, professional killer and the most dangerous woman in the galaxy, would not allow her ironshod demeanor to be fractured and compromised because she lost a board game.

  The truth Moira works hard to deny is that she was compromised weeks ago. A creature of brittle habit is Moira Quicksilver, shaped to her current form by rigorous routine and slavish devotion to detail. A single grain of sand in her inner workings could dislodge Moira completely.

  To share such an enclosed space with two she so despised was, to her, akin to dumping all the deserts of Waveen into Moira's mental clockwork.

  She could and would rise above this, of course. She would recuperate here, recharge her batteries and enamel herself with a fresh coat of impenetrable armor she before braved the mess hall and its noxious company again. If possible, she would wile away what time remains to her, until one of their bladders demanded she give up her death grip on the shared bathroom.

  To this end, Moira empties her mind, keeps her breathing steady and permits time to drip by unquestioned. In that small space, Moira carves a square of control amid a storm of circumstances far beyond her power.

  Then her stomach rumbles.

  To Moira's credit, she staves off her hunger for what feels like an admirable length of time. With only darkness and silence to distract her, however, she's nothing to dwell on but her own growling stomach. Try though she might, matter eventually wrestles down mind and Moira discovers herself standing and reaching for the door handle.

  When she does emerge, at the absolute end of her willpower, her blinking eyes first land upon Odisseus' timepiece, to see precisely how much time she's whittled away in her exile.

  16.31 hours remaining, it reads – 14 stupid minutes.

  “Since when?” the voice of Nemo wonders petulantly from somewhere to Moira's right.

  “Since always, Nemo,” Odisseus informs him with a strangled sigh. “Since the beginning of time.”

  The mess hall only adds to Moira's growing ennui by looking virtually unchanged. In a quarter of an hour, her crewmates have hardly moved an inch. Nemo's relocated three feet and onto the couch, whereas Odisseus has returned to his previous work on the disemboweled atmosphier. Neither of them even turn to acknowledge her entrance; they only continue their traditional bickering apace.

  “Ah, you're full of shit,” Nemo decides, crunching into a ball of dry Jowna. After an eternity of spattering himself with tiny noodle fragments, Moira thanks the moons that he's now learned the trick of eating his meals over his dinted cooking pot, to better catch all the crumbs.

  “I am not,” Odisseus is firm. “I did too provide all the dishware and crockery. You told me to empty my entire apartment on Vollok, remember? That I wasn't ever coming back and might as well bring everything?”

  Her stomach at least Moira could satisfy, if not necessarily her need for seclusion.

  Ten strides takes Moira to the great wooden circle of the dining room table. In line with to her rigorous doctrine, all its wares were strictly compartmentalized, by crewmember and date, into prescribed little sections. She spends a few seconds straightening – stacking piles that have collapsed, scooching packages about – and auditing – mentally doublechecking everyone's remaining supply, to ensure no one's pilfering again. This done, she's free to peruse what's left of today's options.

  She could choose from either dry Jowna noodles or canned Gitterpeaches in syrup.

  Or, Moira supposes, she could risk the deep freeze.

  “Okay,” Nemo relents, when faced with cold, hard historical fact, “but it's my pot. Everybody knows that.”

  “It's your pot,” explains Odisseus, “because you stole it.”

  Nemo scowls, taking his stand against Odisseus' superior logic. “That's not the way I remember it.” He pauses, waiting for the Ortok's cue, which never comes. “The way I remember it,” he continues all the same, “it was a loan.”

  To reach the deep freeze, Moira must first cross the wilderness of garbage that’s accumulated across the mess hall’s teltriton floor. Guided more by muscle memory than sight, she picks her path carefully between the heaps and hills of detritus. To circumvent around Nemo's claimed couches, she must pass within a nose's reach of Odisseus. As she does, she catches one sustained whiff of his signature musk and nearly gags. Three weeks of unwashed Ortok is about as unpleasant a smell as Moira's ever experienced and she works hard to keep her expression neutral as she passes close by.

  She really can't blame Odisseus, denied access to soap and running water like the rest of them.

  Truth be told, Moira's frequently thankful of the lack of mirrors within the Lover's galley, considering how horrific her own hygiene's become under these dire circumstances. Like Odisseus' unshorn pelt, Moira's hair, normally kept almost invisibly short in a harsh military buzz, is approaching dangerous levels of length as well, giving Moira actual resistance when she runs her hand across her scalp. Moons only knew how her teeth must look or how rancid she too must smell.

  “Well, exactly,” snorts an exasperated Odisseus. “A loan implies that you eventually return the pot.”

  “And sure,” Nemo grants with a shrug, seeing his opening. “Someday I will.”

  “Who's full of shit now?”

  “You don't even need it, that's the thing,” complains Nemo between bites of his noodle ball. “This's become like, my primary Jowna pot. If it's suddenly your pot again, then where the fuck'm I gonna cook my Jowna?”

  “A different fucking pot?” suggests Odisseus helpfully. “One that's not already mine?”

  Moira moves, as quickly and as quietly as she can, past the bickering saltbrothers, for she wished no part in their ongoing quarrel over absolutely nothing. Fresh from her pacifying sojourn in the pantry, Moira Quicksilver had since risen herself above all this squalor and depravity. She refuses, not for the first time, to stoop to their level.

  Before long, she arrives at her destination – the mess hall's main entrance. Resisting the impulse to reach for the automated door control, Moira instead slides back the panel to access the manual latch. With one smooth motion, she uncouples the latch, cracking the doors imperceptibly apart and sending the first wisps of arctic cold whistling through the hall.

  “Name one thing,” demands Nemo, turning to face his sparring partner, “you've ever even cooked with–”

  Moira plants her feet and shoves the mess hall doors open wide.

  No matter how much she prepared herself, the unbelievable cold of deep space always stole the breath straight from her lungs. Moira stands dumbstruck a moment, while nearly subzero temperatures wash over and around her to snake their way into the cozy mess hall. Both Odisseus and Nemo react audibly, at this sudden invasion of forces so frigid.

  “Bloom me–”

  “Moons alive, woman!”

  Ignoring their protests, Moira buries her hands in her armpits and strides into the deep freeze.

  In the case of total systems failure, The Unconstant Lover engaged all its emergency bulkheads, one after another. Spaced at strategic points throughout the vessel, the bulkheads would, in the unlikely event of a hull breach, seal tight and hope to prevent the vacuum of space from sucking any unfortunate crewmember to an icy, gasping death.

&nb
sp; When the Lover lost power amidst the Kzelos Cloud and her crew made their last stand in the mess hall, a small section of the betweendecks corridor, a functionless square of twenty-foot hallway, became their cold storage. The freezing death of interstellar space was only kept at bay by the Briza's triple-thick hull. The crew, therefore, could take only seconds-long excursions into the deep freeze, to retrieve their frozen food items, before suffering lasting damage.

  Unsafe and impractical, this method was still preferable, in Moira's mind, to eating nothing but dried goods, day in and day out, for three weeks straight.

  With one shuffling stride, Moira reaches the stacked pile of goodies designated for her and retrieves the nearest one. Hustling back to the mess hall's safety, she works quickly to yank closed the doors, secure the latch and seal in the remaining heat.

  When Moira turns, she's greeted by the ornery expressions of her comrades, Nemo peeking out from beneath a threadbare blanket and Odisseus seeking refuge behind the couch.

  “Do you mind?” wonders Nemo significantly.

  In his bestial way, Odisseus grumbles something in coherent about “the torridity unit” before rising to his hind paws and wandering over in that direction.

  Moira's response involves nothing but her middle finger. She threads a path between the portside couch and the overworked torridity unit, her frozen prize wrapped tightly in her sweater sleeve.

  Her back is technically turned when Odisseus, also on his way to the torridity unit, loses his balance and she therefore doesn't see exactly what got underfoot. To judge from the skirring and clattering sound of tiny pieces of plastolieum, sounds that herald the enormous whump, the Ortoki cursing and the scattering of loose garbage, she can make an educated guess.

  “All the moons,” he pleads to no one, clambering back onto his hind paws. Once he's upright, Moira can hear him huffing and puffing, daring anyone to comment or challenge.