Hull Damage Read online

  He pretends not to notice Odisseus' withering glare for a few moments, until the cart’s lack of motion forces him to acknowledge the surly Ortok. “What? He’s a mate of mine,” he justifies. Muttering, Odisseus throttles the driftcart and it lurches forward, Two-Bit nearly dismounted in surprise.

  “Bloomin’ jabberheads,” Odisseus concludes.

  –––

  Moira’s first kick is a Stinging Spith, an acute and incisive jab. When delivered to the nape of his neck, he’s violently proned from his squatting position, crashing pedipalp-first to the filthy floor and diffusing green gaming marbles in every direction. Moira’s second kick is a dirty brawler’s clout, an underhanded heel smash. When delivered to his right kidney, he’s hurtled onto his hunched back, skirring more marbles and finding himself face-to-face with malicious Moira, towering above in a punitive pose, promising pure violence.

  Heeko hawks a wad of celadon slobber and garbles through bruised palps. “Mother’s first fucks.”

  “Where’s my planet, Heeko?” Moira opens with her classic question. He wheezes, spraying gouts of green spittle over his nettled gut.

  “You eats red shit, Quissilver,” he scrapes together. Moira blandly places her right jackboot, the bad cop of her favorite pair of “baby-stompers” as Nemo had taken to calling them, atop Heeko’s blubbery, vibrissal gut.

  “Where’s my planet?”

  “I isn’t stupid, you bleeder. You wants I to does you more favors,” he burbles, haltingly shaking his unshapely head. Slowly beginning to shift her weight to her right, Moira begins a gradual stoop towards the blenching Myyrigon.

  “What I want, Heeko, is the legal indenture for Kuzu Minor and until I hold it my hand, you will do exactly,” she illustrates by shoving her heel into Heeko’s diaphragm, “what this bleeder wants. Savvy?”

  Tens of thousands of fungibly worthless planets, galaxywide, were available for purchase through the acquisition of their individual deeds, the gaseous ninth planet of the Kuzu system among them. Moonless, devoid of any beneficial resources and even lacking direct warp access, Kuzu Minor was of exactly no use to Moira Quicksilver, saving as leverage against the wretched and indebted Heeko.

  Moira extracts her boot from his midsection and he convulses in response, spewing another mouthful of expendable slime. She indifferently nudges a chance marble with her wingtip, herding it towards the gutter. “Thought I told you to stick clear of these places, Heeko? That you’d only get yourself in deeper shit?”

  She’d engaged his unpleasant services on three previous occasions since he’d wagered a forged planetary voucher on an Iniquity table four years ago. For each episode, she’d been forced to delve deeper and deeper into the galaxy’s gaming underground to exhume him for her purposes. This time, it was the mangiest marbling den in the Third Ring’s malfunctioning sewage system, a distinction of certain prestige.

  “You isn't no boss of I, Quissilver.” His cadence adjusts, adopting a borderline rancor in place of his injured dismay. Moira sniggers derisively and idly arches her back, the grips of her paired pistols jostling in her shoulder holsters and glistening in the viridian light.

  “What you never seemed to understand, Heeko, is that I am the boss of you until one of two things happen – you hand me the deed to my planet or,” Heeko blinks four of his six eyes and she's leveled Lefty, a vintage, six-cylinder double action extension of her right hand, between his two forward facing eyes, “I shoot you in the face out of general boredom.”

  Venom drips from the Myyrigon’s languidly unsheathing fangs. “You gonna shoots I this time?”

  Moira favors him with her flintiest smile. “Save your poison, Heeko. I got you a job.”

  –––

  Odisseus theorizes that, in the utopian fiction in which he comes into the possession of any free time, he could amass a veritable fortune practically overnight, if only he sold his services to Velocity, repairing Takioro's shoots every fifteen minutes.

  Equipped with nothing but the meager assembly of tools he'd belted before heading to his late meal, he crouches clumsily at work before the shoot's primitive control panel in the cramped former lift tube, a space that would have been crowded for a solitary Ortok, never-mind its additional three passengers. A pair of chittering Chook engage in feverish, interruptive discourse, an impatient Gordian drums three talons against the floor in increasing irritation and a vexed Ortok toils over retrograded elevator machinery with oversized engine repair equipment. All bottled in a free-floating cylinder, the motley assembly drift in the open space between the First and Second Rings until either Odisseus could rigidify the graviton lock or the tube wandered, forlorn, into the endless night beyond.

  The main mechanical problem involved the replacement router coupling and its desperate need for a grading-and-guidance computer. Worse still, the definitive problem, the root of all the shoot's malfunction, was irreparable, considering Takioro's pervasive state of disrepair. Unless some truly bizarre turn of events led the Station to somehow acquire a new central spire, travel between the Rings unhindered by mishaps, such as the one Odisseus was currently facing, would remain elusive.

  Years ago, when the antecedent pirate lords hoisted their colors over the three uprooted Rings of Takioro, the issue of inter-level transit was circumvented, naturally, through the use of very big guns. In place of the sophisticated lift traffic system, some industrious pirate mechanic fashioned a rather different scheme: effectively elevator cannons coupled with enormous magnets.

  When any given tube departs a level of Takioro, an obsolete and disemboweled planetary bombardment cannon launches the blackened lift in the direction of the intended ring, where a converted proximity magnet snags it and reels it back to the underside airlock. Passengers taking a shoot ride between levels were subjected to a nauseating six-second jaunt of desperate speed and furious flames out the viewport before arriving at their destination.

  Moreover, in the event of a misfire or similar accident, each tube was armed with an individual graviton projector, which could form enough of a magnetic lock to barnacle against either the intended ring or even the adjacent asteroid, until a fetcher could swing by and retrieve them.

  Such a device Odisseus was currently struggling to repair and, seeing as these projectors were deteriorated, fifth-hand things, bought cheap off salvage from any junk peddler in Bad Space, he wasn't exactly hopeful.

  Someone behind him issues an impatient sigh. Odisseus rewards the Gord for the dispensation of his opinion with a choleric snarl. The restless passenger recoils in response and immediately ceases the tapping of his talons.

  If Odisseus had a real grievance against working as a mechanic, it was undoubtedly the attitude every non-mechanic seemed to regard him with. They overwhelmingly mistook starship repair as some form of augury – that with a few thrown bones or innards smeared in dirt, a jalopy could be ameliorated into a perfectly functioning vessel.

  He'd been advertised as some sort of mechanical exemplar, mostly by Nemo who loved to demand comprehensive restorations in an impossible timeframe and then abandon the Ortok to the engine room with a quip about “rushing art,” but Odisseus was little more than a tireless worker. What the Lover truly needed was a team of mechanics, as even an additional pair of hands could accomplish her necessary maintenance in practically half the time.

  Ortok, unfortunately, don't necessarily play well with others.

  “You know, you could re-route all that.”

  Odisseus freezes. “What?”

  “I imagine you're probably trying to jumpstart the coupling? You can re-route around it.” Odisseus lowers his tools and turns a glance over his shoulder to spot, elbowing his way through the knees of the clustered Chook, a russet-furred male Mruka, garbed in a combat vest and standing a characteristic three feet off the ground. Having emerged from the curtain of legs, he folds his fleecy forearms pertly. “If it's an older model Grav2, there's no need for a coupling. Not for a short jump like this.”

&n
bsp; Odisseus creases his forehead. “You're suggesting I,” he handles a wire, “just re-circuit this here,” he concludes, plugging an open socket with the cable's head. A few beats pass before the tube seems to hum to life with a flicker of the overhead light. The Mruka shrugs expansively. Odisseus contemplates him.

  “What do you know about Briza?”

  “I practically invented her.”

  “And you speak Ortok.”

  “Apparently.”

  Odisseus rises from his crouch and overlooks the miniscule feline, who loses nothing of his cheek with his loss of height.

  “Docking Port #1118. Half an hour. You bring your fusioner. I'll bring sandwiches.”

  –––

  Two-Bit Switch narrowly avoids spilling both tankards as he shirks the inebriated punch. Liquor dribbles down his fingers as he deposits both beverages on a handy table and proceeds to smash the assailing drunkard in both ears with his gin-soaked hands, a favorite tactic to incapacitate an attacker. The lush's twin mouths both bellow as he plummets to the ground in a slippery mess. Whether an attempt to abscond with his drinks or whether he was simply too sloshed to determine passerby from foe, Two-Bit is unsure as he scoops up both tankards and watches the barfly flop on the floor.

  “Moons,” he mutters and stalks off to find the object of his search.

  The Admiralty was too rough for Two-Bit, Nemo, Odisseus or Abraham and probably even Moira. Reports claim that, rather than being merely predisposed to abject brawling, the rowdy bar and grille hosts a perpetual one, a never-ending orgy of fisticuffs, intoxication and collateral damage. Certainly the copious amounts of alcohol purchased and spilled were to blame for the tavern's continued success, despite the devastating amount of destroyed property.

  Brawlers of normally sedentary species fly. Brutes strapped in body armor serve drinks. The odd firearm, whose discharging is considered vaguely distasteful here, sounds into the ceiling. Two-Bit traipses through a tempest of tussling tosspots, wary waitstaff and flung flagons. Once the conscientious canteen of touring Imperium naval officers, these days, the Admiralty is afire with the joined tumult of swearing, spitting, bone-snapping frenzy–a mild afternoon.

  Two-Bit discovers his quarry choking a drunkard with his left hand, strangling another with his trunk and using his right arm to alternatively punch the first in the face and elbow the second in the stomach. Two-Bit politely seats himself at a nearby table and sips placidly at his gin until both men slump suitably into unconsciousness and the strapping Aurik takes stock of his surroundings.

  A toothy grin breaks out beneath the swaying trunk. “Switch?”

  “Anchorage.”

  “What's a pickpockin' motherfucker like you doin' in here?” As if to articulate his point, a crazed boozehound rushes the Aurik, bottle hefted on high and screaming a string of obscenities. His trunk hooks the biped's wrist and yanks the surprised ruffian's snout plump into Anchorage's firm and flying fist, plowing him to the ground as if struck by an asteroid.

  Two-Bit sidles the stein across the table. “I went and got you a gig, Anchorage.”

  He paws a handful of adorned and bedraggled dreadlocks from his eyes. “Didja?” He entangles his trunk across the neck of a threatening Triomman and with a vicious tug, feeds him an upraised knee, clearly enough to lay the brawler low and possibly break a few fangs on the way down. This achieved, he siphons up a trunkful of gin and brings it to his mouth. “What job might that be?”

  Two-Bit swabs his lips with a sleeve before answering. “Nemo's runnin' a reave. Vizzing for some brunos.” Anchorage's about to inhale his Gitterswitch when a Saurian slithers up in his shadow. Two-Bit begins a warning, but Anchorage twists and, seemingly on instinct, empties his trunk, showering the Saurian in boozy spray. It reels, sibilating and flaring its forked tongue. A fist blow to its skull and it enrolls in the celebrated ranks of drooling sentients at Anchorage's feet.

  “I'm in,” he endorses, meeting yet another challenger with a mated pair of savage headbutts that both flummox his dreadlocks and buckle the charging Moraj into the heap.

  Two-Bit screws up his face. “Don't you wanna hear the take?”

  Anchorage matches his expression, before bearing an embarrassed grin. “I suppose, yeah.”

  “Three percent,” Two-Bit offers, raising his mug in toast.

  Anchorage hoists his own mug in the prehensile tips of his trunk. “Sounds good,” he replies, somewhat obliviously. At a signal, they both pitch their tankards back. Only as its lip whizzes scant inches past his face does Two-Bit realize Anchorage had upended the empty table by hurling his next opponent, a now thoroughly unconscious sporoid, into its opposite end. Two-Bit, agog, droops the empty mug. Anchorage jumbles his headlocks with an abashed mitt.

  “Oops. Sorry.”

  –––

  Moira Quicksilver submerges her nose beneath the brink of her shoulderless sweater, lest she inhale the interior air and perfectly ravage all six of her senses. Appropriately armored, she withdraws the drapery dangling from the truncated doorway and stalks inside.

  The ceiling within is unusually shallow, abruptly halting four feet off the floor. Most who entered likely did so prostrate or crawling – Moira's exercised limberness grants her the freedom to steal about in a comfortable crouch. The chamber's occupants didn't seem to mind the abbreviated canopy, however, sprawled and decumbent about the place, utterly heedless to the architectural oddities of their environment. Only the haze of listless miasma inundating the room seemed to capture their rapture.

  Very little could ever probe Moira Quicksilver into entering a Vapid den willingly, though Garrigan's disappearance apparently proved enough. They were stacked ten and twenty, like honeycombs, on the lower rung of Takioro's Second Ring, in what were once storage compartments intended for crates and luggage. They were roundly avoided by the majority of the station's patrons, those who didn't wish to plaster their pores with enough intoxicant to justify literal days of mindless capitulated inactivity.

  Absurdly addictive, undividedly debilitating and fully potent from only a whiff, Vapid was a Mantrian herbal-fungal admixture that, when boiled in a steady broth, proved to be one of the galaxy's most drastic narcotics. While snorts of Spicion or even tranqs of pure Gitter might intoxicate a person, even a hint of Vapid would totally invalidate them. Customarily stewed in miniature vats, it could flounder bulwarks of men into quivering gunk. Abraham himself bore a special torch of hatred for the junk, as it was responsible for the ignominious deaths of several illustrious buccaneer captains of old, drowning in ponds of their own accumulated drool.

  Moira, impromptu mask clutched over her nose and mouth, holds her breath all the same as she sifts through the hopheads, praying to all the moons that she'd even recognize Garrigan if she found him. They were knotted together nearest the threshold, as most of their motor functions likely fell prey to the haze before they took three steps. The true fiends and the more desperate of the repeat customers were sequestered at the back, malnourished, parched and sleepless. Grasping scalps to check enervated faces and rifling through already emptied pockets, Moira slinks out of the compartment, unearthing no evidence of Garrigan between the amateurs and the professionals.

  Once outside a safe distance, Moira removes her makeshift veil and wheezes wildly, glad even of the putrid malodor of Takioro in deference to the creeping paralysis within. Given a few moments to square herself, Moira reapplies the lip of her sweater, pulls away the next den's mesh shroud and hustles inside.

  Thus it went for the next thirteen dens, each lousy with Vaps, each mired in virulent fog, none containing Garrigan or his opium-addled remains. She'd gleaned from a credible contact that he was in station yet hadn't shipped out with any crew she'd questioned in over four months. Considering his appetites, this meant he was doubtless dead or near it in some Vapid haunt and Moira had precious little time to find and sober him before Nemo wanted to shove off.

  She's practically left the fourteenth when she spots his
corpse, face partially deluged in a percolating cauldron near the screened entry. She almost exhales in frustration and prowls alongside to check his vitals. As she retrieves his head from the froth, he barks awake, eyes dilated and oozing salts.

  “Petty Officer Glive Garrigan, Unit BB87 – Triumph Compa–” he sputters, drool and Vapid broth both decanting out his mouth. As if under interrogation, he continues warbling his rank while Moira silently lifts him beneath the armpit into a medic's shoulder hoist.

  This achieved, she struggles his inert form out of the den.

  –––

  Odisseus strips the excess flesh from his last toe. He jaunts his head back and casts the briny sinews into his mouth. He'd long ago discovered the only way his piscivorus palette could possibly stomach terrestrial meat involved steeping the flesh in such generous helpings of vinegar that his sensitive taste buds couldn't recognize them anymore and, to the Ortok's thinking, that made Pickle Planet the ideal venue for a business lunch with Garrok Brondi.

  Nemo peels a layer of sodden skin off his paw. “Yeah, that's a bitch.” He suctions in a wayward strand, adding, “That's why I, you know, dodge torpedoes.”

  Brondi, munching on his own limb, shoots looming Odisseus a cautionary appraisal before employing his apparent gambit, a sterling example of why Nemo had requested the Ortok's presence in the first place. “Look, you gonna make me beg here or what?”

  Nemo leans bitingly forward. “What was that? I couldn't quite hear you,” he thumbs an inattentive gesture over his shoulder. “Does Garrok Brondi wanna become a fucking pirate?”