Unconstant Love Read online

  Nemo, an insensitive prick as a rule, snorts.

  Rather than turn and gawk at the infuriated and embarrassed Ortok, Moira swings a booted leg over her mattress, sits heavily upon the saggy springs and examines her prize.

  The tiny round tin chills Moira's bare skin as she reaches to crank it open. Its emblem of a moustachioed fop greedily stuffing his face with food curls and crinkles and the smell of cured fish-eggs rises to her nose, her stomach growling insistently.

  This far from the Inner Sectors, high quality caviar is impossible to come by. Bathtub quality caviar, however, could be found at affordable prices on every supermarket shelf across Bad Space. Gourmet Gorgers, an especially classless brand of grocery store garbage, made their millions by peddling Inner Sector delicacies – caviar, escargot, peki macaw – as cheap canned goods to the ignorant Outer Ring palette.

  While Moira may long ago have strangled the prissy little Inner Sector rich bitch she once was, there were certain aspects of her former life – her fondness for fancy foods among them – that she couldn't exactly extinguish. Running away from home, of course, meant Moira was forced to abandon most niceties, top shelf caviar among them. Out here, in the lawless black, Gourmet Gorgers was as close as she could come to the genuine article, for an occasional skinny dip in the waters of childhood nostalgia.

  Silverware is another nicety that Moira, in her current circumstances, could not afford. Pressing the freezing cold tin against her lips, she tilts her head back and allows a generous helping to roll into her mouth. All the while, she does her level best to isolate and ignore everything else – particularly the argument in full bloom behind her – and doesn't quite succeed.

  When no one does comment or challenge Odisseus after his spill, the Ortok seems to feel the need to cue them. “Well?” he demands.

  Someone, presumably the Captain, inserts a titanic pause in the conversation here, failing to suss out that he's being spoken to. “Well, what?” he finally relents.

  This is followed by an additional pause, long enough for the Ortok to be properly flabbergasted. “Can we, if we're finished playing the game, put the fucking thing away? So people don't need to trip over it?”

  Moira doubles down, fighting the instinct to make the suggestion that's brimming on the surface of her brain. She shakes the caviar tin back and forth instead, to wrest loose those persistent eggs that always stick to the bottom.

  “Well,” Nemo contradicts for contradiction’s sake, clearly bored of the argument already, “what if I wanna play another game?”

  The triumphant Odisseus snorts. “Do you?”

  Moira's scooping the individual eggs from the sides of the tin with a sticky finger when her better angels call it quits. She half-turns, peering over her shoulder at both sides of the argument from where she squats on her mattress.

  "I mean," she starts to volunteer, to her eventual chagrin. “I'd play another game.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Odisseus swims in his sleep.

  The open ocean wheels wide all around him, an indigo immensity that promises no corners, no seams, no restrictive walls, no matter which way he swims. To add more speed, the Ortok cracks his mighty tail back and forth, stronger than a starship's jetbooster at full throttle. To steer and twist and somersault, he extends his paws, hind and fore, with webbed digits splayed, performing unnecessary and thrilling aquabatics on every whimsical impulse.

  To be somehow transported to the pristine seas of his homeworld, to be dropped back into his native element with a splash, Odisseus feels weightless, of body and of soul.

  A dark streak snakes past on Odisseus' right. With a flash of instinct, both swimmers peel away from their previous trajectories to inspect one another. Both are sleek of fur, long of tail and perfectly maneuverable beneath the waves. Odisseus recognizes the blotchy pattern of white fur on his counterpart's throat as that of an ally, a trusted comrade, a hunting partner. The pair of Ortoks spin quick underwater circles around each other, nipping and playing, before both rocket onward again.

  A greater purpose than horseplay brings them together in these waters.

  Speeding off in opposite directions, the epicenter of their circular swimming is a vast sphere of swirling, undulating, shimmering silver. What, at a casual glance, would first appear to be one great gelatinous creature is, instead, thousands of smaller ones – a populous shoal of coastal fish, all swimming and swerving with one mind. As he races along its curvature, Odisseus can occasionally make out individual members of the school. They are dreamfish, a vague composite of a dozen different species that defy precise description.

  A favorite tactic among juvenile Ortok, shoaling gave inexperienced hunters an opportunity to snag a catch equal to their small strength. More importantly, it taught the Ortoki the value of teamwork and allowed them to practice their swimming and pursuing skills. By working in concert, the young hunters coordinate and trap the fish in a smaller and smaller sphere of water, taking turns making strafing runs and diving through their dense ranks.

  As adults, they'd be unchallenged, in all their homeworld's wide oceans, at this tactic. As juveniles, they need to make quick work of the shoal, less a predator larger and more voracious be attracted by all the schooling prey.

  Odisseus makes a complete circuit several more times, brushing up against and weaving between his fellow Ortoks again and again. All the while, Odisseus savors what sensations he can from the rich supply of nostalgia the ocean holds for him. He savors the freezing water that slides off the slick strands of his specialized fur. He savors the salty taste of brine on his muzzle and whiskers. Most of all, he savors the company of those like him, of fellow Ortoks, of creatures of his own description, outlook and experience.

  Together, the ocean's greatest hunters press the shoal tighter and tighter together, forcing them ever upward and towards the surface. With the only the lapping waves above them and a pack of hungry Ortoks below, the school of dreamfish are trapped, frenzied with panic. One by one, his fellow Ortok take their turns, diving through the sphere and bursting out the opposite side, meals clenched in their fangs.

  Then his turn comes.

  Odisseus swoops directly below the shoal and then blasts directly upward. The fish peel away before him, forming a bubble of empty water all around the charging Ortok. Momentarily blinded by the movement of shining scales, Odisseus snaps out once, twice, three times with savage bites. To no avail, however, as the dreamfish go darting past so swiftly he can't gain purchase on a single one. Before he realizes what's happening, the water grows instantly lighter and lighter and he's bursting through the sun-dappled surface and into the open air.

  All the rules of physics change in that instant. Surrounded by droplets of shining spray, all the Ortok's momentum drains and he starts to drop, slowing to a crawl, back into the churning water below. For an instant, Odisseus is granted a vision of his homeworld, as once he'd seen the place, unspoiled, in his youth.

  Of course he surfaces during that magic hour of sunset, which paints the planet's waters and skies in radiant purples and greens and oranges. Infinite ocean stretches in a panoramic view, all rising and falling waves as far as the eye can see. The only break comes from the odd landmass that dots the horizon, idyllic islands unmarred by industry or machine.

  For the laughs, he spins a happy axel in the air, filled with the ecstasy of his own freedom, of this return to his primal existence.

  “When evil men flee the law!”

  A scowl comes appears on the Ortok's blissful face. The disembodied voice – half sung, half growled – is so fundamentally at odds with his current surroundings, Odisseus can't begin to pinpoint its source of origin.

  “There's only one man that you can call!”

  A supremely confused Odisseus drops heavily back into the ocean, amid the teeming chaos of a thousand terrified fish.

  Sinking his proverbial teeth deep into the fantasy, Odisseus tries his damndest to sink his literal teeth into one of the hundreds o
f speeding fish that go tearing away from him as he smacks back into the water. Within seconds, he's free from the roiling shoal, a target acquired, and they spiral deeper and deeper into the muted blue nothing that spans away beneath them.

  Behind him somewhere, his hunting partners make their own runs against what remains of the shoal but Odisseus only has eyes for this one fleeing fish. The dreamfish ducks and weaves, its tailfin flapping fiercely this way and that, swimming for its very life. All the while, Odisseus gains and gains, confident that if he can only catch this prey, he can remain here, remain in these sacred waters a little while longer.

  “He's Quuilar!” insists the gravelly voice, accompanied now by a raucous underpinning of twangy rock-and-roll. “Noxix!” Even underwater, the invading melody is somehow not muffled or muted in any way; if anything, it's become all the louder, blotting out the dreamscape the more and more urgent it grows.

  Desperate to stay within the dream, Odisseus extends his neck and lashes out with his fangs at the rabbiting fish. It remains elusive, tauntingly just beyond the Ortok's reach. His prey so near and yet so far, Odisseus is overtaken by the swelling theme song.

  “And he wants you...” the singer sustains, stretching out that last word through a rising crescendo. As he does, the fabric of the dream's reality stretches and tears in half, the shoal and the fish and all that gorgeous ocean replaced in an instant by blinding yellow light.

  Odisseus snorts awake. One by one, his senses come cascading back to him, in order of importance. He smells stale sweat, spoiled food and the stench of animosity. He feels the lumps and crumpled springs of his depressingly familiar mattress beneath his bulk. He sees a hazy vision of the mess hall's ceiling, its flickering lights unforgiving and garish.

  “Dead or alive!” he hears, the completion of that theme song, much tinnier now and unforgivably loud in this enclosed space.

  “Do you not,” Odisseus moans towards the ceiling, throwing his body this way and that on his mattress, “have blooming earjacks?”

  “I stepped on them,” Nemo admits, from somewhere within his ring of couches. “They're broke now.”

  Unwilling or unable to contest this argument, Odisseus responds with nothing but feral snarlings that even he would be hard pressed to translate. He rolls as far away from the theme song as he can and claws desperately at the threads of dream so cruelly torn from him.

  For the first time in over a decade, dreams of his homeworld visit Odisseus. Not since that aimless year of his youth, misspent wandering the galaxy in search of his truant saltbrother was the Ortok bothered by such memories. In truth, he hardly ever dreamt – if he did, they always faded to wisps of nothing upon waking. Even as he lies there, restless on his mattress, the details of this dream refuse to fade and instead remain crystal clear, if frustratingly out of reach.

  Thoughts of those cool oceans, of those rocky shores, of those plentiful tidepools did not often trouble him. Ever since their imprisonment within the Lover's mess hall, however, and the return of these strange dreams, his mind would, given an idle moment, invariably wander back beneath that multicolored sky and among those cresting whitecaps.

  To dwell on such a place and such a time was folly. Both were as bygone as his squandered youth. In his waking hours, Odisseus could set his mind to tasks, the many chores needed to keep all three of them alive.

  His dreaming hours, however, could not be so easily tamed.

  The longer he lies awake, the clearer it becomes to Odisseus that only by some moons-damned miracle would he return to peaceful sleep. The third episode of the fourth season of Quuilar Noxix Wants You Dead or Alive is now in full swing, after all, and the mess hall rings with the howling chorus of one of Jai Kai's famous windstorms. Odisseus knew, from repeated exposure, that the titular bounty hunter would, within minutes, catch first sight of his quarry and an even louder gunfight would soon ensue.

  With a tortured sigh, the Ortok levers himself off his creaking mattress and makes the executive decision to be awake now, he supposes.

  Taking in his surroundings again, Odisseus discover that the mess hall is, big surprise, still messy and a hall. Nemo's exactly where Odisseus left him, squirreled away on the couch, his face plastered with rapidly shifting colors from the HV he's watching within the voluminous folds of his blanket burrow. The row of machinery chugs along as always, thanklessly providing them all with fresh air, electricity and gravity, free of charge. The lambasted remains of Silly, Silly Scrapyard still lie scattered about the starboard corner, following Moira's most recent tantrum and her laying about with jackboots.

  There's something different. Moira's nowhere to be found.

  “She in the pantry, or...?” Odisseus wonders aloud, running claws through clumped and matted fur.

  “Nah,” Nemo answers, over the sounds of Dranab's narration. “Went for a walk, I think.” He gestures vaguely in the direction of the sealed bulkhead.

  “Ah.”

  “Oh, um.” Nemo seems to realize who he's talking to, now waving vaguely towards the machinery in the far corner. “Something was making a weird noise. Maybe an hour ago.”

  Odisseus furrows his brow. “A weird noise.”

  “Yeah.” Nemo nods sagely. “An hour ago.”

  With another sigh, the Ortok plants both hind paws beneath him and begins his slog across the hall to whichever device he can ascertain to be responsible.

  He passes the galley and newly ingrained habit draws his eyes immediately to the chiller door. 3.69 hours remain, the clock informs him pleasantly – well within the margin of error. Their rescue is near-t0-hand, thank the moons.

  The task of repairing the nine or ten machines that maintained their fragile existence here aboard the derelict Lover fell to Odisseus and all the other volunteers, namely no one. The best days, ironically, were those when something went wrong, something that required his immediate and drastic attention. Among those, any repairs or maintenance that the enormous molecular strip required were the Ortok's absolute favorite, as they necessitated his venturing out to the Lover's hold for some extreme privacy.

  By contrast, the worst days were those, like today, when the whole makeshift ecosystem is running smoothly and without complaint.

  Odisseus only manages to whittle about .52 of an hour, running diagnostics on the half a dozen machines, searching for Nemo's mysterious “weird noise.” When he's finished and everything's back to peak efficiency, he discovers nothing troublesome or even out of the ordinary among them and still 3.17 hours remaining.

  Odisseus is bored.

  Instinct wanders the Ortok back towards his mattress and he catches a glimpse of his saltbrother's miniature screen as he trudges past. By now, Quuilar's rounding up his quarry's henchmen as furious winds blow all about him. Sensing his eyes over his shoulder, Nemo twists around to explain. “It's the one with the–”

  “Doomsday cult,” finishes Odisseus blandly, walking past without pause. “I remember.”

  In the moment before he flops back onto the springs, Odisseus' eye is caught by a tepid green light, blinking softly beneath his disheveled sheets. He unearths his handheld scanner, having gone to bed with the thing placed on the pillow, should its alert go off while he slept.

  An uninspiring hunk of gunmetal gray, the scanner is a pretty primitive and therefore pretty reliable piece of technology. During these long weeks, the Ortok had taken to clutching the thing like a talisman. With its antennae fully extended, its colorless screen would render a low-resolution version of the ten dottibles surrounding the scanner, a respectable distance for so humble a device.

  All Odisseus sees now, as he watches, are the other asteroids of the Kzelos Cloud, spinning inert circles around each other. Soon, in approximately 3.17 hours, a new dot would appear on the edges of the scanner and that unassuming green light would blink red.

  That dot would represent an incoming spaceship and their salvation.

  With literally nothing better to do, Odisseus makes a solemn pact. He w
ill sit here and watch this scanner's screen until that new dot appears, whether he waits three hours or three hundred hours.

  Odisseus watches the little light flash green and then green and then green.

  Moira should be clomping heavily down the betweendecks corridor. In the vacuum of the deactivated Unconstant Lover, however, there's an eerie absence of the ordinary clomping sound one expects each time Moira's teltriton-soled graviton boot clangs against the deck plates. Under normal circumstances, these boots were burdensome and unpleasant to wear, a far cry from her beloved baby-stompers. Here, however, considering the ship's current weightlessness, she doesn't really notice. Moira would even go so far as to describe her gait as bouncy, despite all the extra pounds of exosuit.

  To describe the betweendecks corridor as a true vacuum is somewhat inadequate. Dust is the primary occupant of this micro-atmosphere, the result of the ship sitting idle for a month and change. Every step she takes kicks up a fresh cloud and, seen through the triple beams of her HUD lights, Moira feels faintly that she's treading the undersea wreck of some sunken ship.

  Excluding the pantry, the other, more extreme form of privacy Moira could seek out involves taking a spacewalk through the abandoned corridors of The Unconstant Lover. Donning and doffing the complete spacesuit may be a colossal pain in the bloomhole but, for three hours of very literal alone time, Moira considers the hassle more than worth the effort.

  In her thickly-gloved hand, Moira carries one companion – a remote battery unit. Taken from the massive heap in the mess hall's port corner, these humble power packs were responsible for running everything currently working aboard the Lover, from the vitally important atmosphier to Nemo's vitally unimportant holovision.

  Today's spacewalk is more than an idle stroll. Today, she went venturing into the main body of the derelict Lover with a purpose.

  Along her route, Moira passes chambers she once thought pedestrian – the medbay, the crew dorms, the water closet – and peers inside them with renewed interest, after such a lengthy spell spent cloistered in the mess hall. When she reaches the corridor's main entrance, she opens the door by its manual hatch, a process made all the more cumbersome by her bulky metal suit.