Galactic Menace Read online

  “That's cold,” Two-Bit appreciates.

  “Buh-dum tssh.”

  Odisseus scratches the close-cropped fur of his muzzle, murmuring another question about “problem” and “the other.” Two-Bit susses his meaning well enough.

  Nemo bites, without removing his eyes from the terminal. “Which other?”

  “What to do with the eight hundred and ninety six other crazy murderin' sons of bleeders runnin' wild down abouts the detainment column?”

  Nemo plants an arm across the back of his chair and turns his head. “Hm. Good question.”

  Brov is pretty sure it's a meteor. A humble aggroworld on the uncouth border between Midworlds and Outer Ring, the planet Hazro is no stranger to meteor activity. Brov, country bumpkin, quorki-wrangler and dirt farmer extraordinaire, has never had the misfortune to receive a meteor in the provincial hills and pastures where he drives his flock. Judging by the trajectory of this one, now only a point of growing shadow against the aquamarine sky, that's all about to change.

  His jborra is not yet two years of age and still unaccustomed to flaming objects falling from the sky. She arches her back, hisses and cowers behind Brov's left leg. For his part, the quorkherd only squints skyward, shifts his weight to his deactivated prod and attempts to predict where, precisely, the thing's likely to fall.

  As it nears and nears, however, his previous supposition about it being a meteor is beginning to seem less plausible with each approaching second.

  What does hit the ground, minutes later and a quarter of a mottible away, appears to be paradoxically a skyscraper. Its fall cushioned by a convenient patch of bog, the thirty-story meteor-building tilts awkwardly, looking starkly out of place among the pastoral fields all around it.

  Brov stands staring for many long minutes, too curious to avert his gaze but too uncertain to approach any closer. The jborra, however, seems to share no such misgivings. Bounding away across the tall grass toward this strangest new addition to its habitat, the striped feline disappears quickly from sight.

  As he watches, multifarious beings clad in queer yellow jumpsuits begin stumbling drunkenly from their wreck of a building. A safe distance away, Brov still has no idea precisely how much trouble said obelisk would spell for the quiet farming world of Hazro in the months to come.

  Moira's ass hurts. A dull throbbing, on the underside of her right cheek, marks the needle's entry point. It twinges with each sulking step she takes through the scrapbarn, staying a respectful distance behind the client, Two-Bit Switch and his hundred-yard sales pitch. To distract herself, she indulges in a Yellowtooth cigarette, the first since their capture and captivity on Sozzor, and spews out mouthfuls of foul black smoke to match her foul black mood.

  “Overall,” Two-Bit appraises, “she's in ace condition – externally, especially. Inside, a few damaged bulkheads, little ditrogen scoring, nothing you ain't, um, accustomed to.” He spreads his pointer and pinky fingers apart to indicate the ship's various airlocks. “Four sallies on the main body, plus the big mother underneath.” He smirks. “Field-tested.”

  The client, this dumpy Moza junk jockey with the unlikely name of Gasbox, plants a fist to either side of her overalls and cranes her gaze toward the cruiser's underbelly to better examine the ventral airlock.

  The HIN Surimiah is the sorest of thumbs in the second stall of Gasbox's scrapbarn. A sleek, glossy Terro Fleet Systems vessel perhaps three years off the factory floor, its environs are dusty, decrepit dilapidation decades old and more. The ship squats on its stubby landing legs and shines in the rank green light, exuding a palpable monetary worth that dwarfs the entire scrapbarn and its contents ten or twenty times over.

  The trick, as far as Moira's limited powers of salesmanship can deduce, appears to be convincing their rube of a buyer of this fact. Gasbox, to her credit, seems to be resisting this tactic with all her might.

  “She give you any trouble?” Moira hears Nemo ask, pacing ten paces behind her.

  “Near abouts,” answers Abraham, after withdrawing that ostentatious pipe from his mouth. “Before ye showed, she was ten feet this side of slapping a 'for sale' sign up on yer old heap.”

  “How much do you think I could get for her?” Nemo suddenly proposes.

  “Had ye asked me last week, just shy of five hundred thou.”

  “That's a good point,” Nemo comments, before raising his voice in an obvious question forward. “Moira, you checked the postings yet?”

  “Go fuck your father.”

  He's momentarily speechless. “Fair enough.”

  Moira'd come to her senses four nights previously in a bridge full of corpses, with no pants, a smarting sore on her ass and precisely zero short term memory of how she'd ended up there. Her last salient recollection had been collapsing unconscious in Lockdown Control. The only thing concrete following that was the revolting taste of eggroll in her mouth.

  She'd subsequently been able to glean, from the scandalous smiles of her comrades – particularly Two-Bit and especially Nemo – that the narcotic plozine she'd suffered under during the Surimiah's commandeering had cost her a significant amount of face. She reasoned the best remedy to this loss of face ought to be sour silence for them all generally and potential violence on their persons individually.

  After humiliation, incarceration, hospitalization, anesthetization, liberation, further humiliation and, most recently, indigestion on behalf of an expired eggroll, Moira's simply glad to be returned to her own clothing, her own cigarettes and her own personal effects.

  Two weeks abroad on this circuitous scheme were enough to remind her how dearly she missed Righty and Lefty.

  “Aw, now there's a pretty spaceship,” Nemo coos, stopping in his tracks on their encircling, Two-Bit-led tour of the Surimiah and her manifold virtues.

  At first, Moira assumes he's voicing some harebrained corroboration to strengthen Two-Bit's pitch. Glancing behind, she notices his adoration pointed exactly away from the Surimiah and into the adjoining third stall.

  An eye less honed than Moira's would never have recognized her. The Unconstant Lover's dented nose is only partially visible through the doorway's narrow gap. Whereas the Surimiah stands in stark contrast to these mountains of musty machinery, the Lover chameleons cunningly into these ignominious surroundings, part and parcel of the crew's decision to stash her here.

  Upon spotting her, Moira instinctively recognizes her home and starship. She's forced to inwardly admit that jackboots, Yellowtooth cigarettes and 665 Lawman revolvers weren't the only things she had missed.

  Odisseus will eat all the anchovies forever. Odisseus would indeed like to extend this blanket offer to all citizens of the known galaxy: should any of them no longer desire their anchovies, he volunteers to eat all of those anchovies, completely free of charge.

  He doesn't care how greasy, how slimy or how synthetic. To the thinking of a piscivore so long estranged from his homeworld, anchovies, paws down, are the undisputed champion among pizza toppings. Also to his admittedly-biased thinking, nobody, in all of Bad Space, could boast better anchovies than Nanosecond Pizza.

  A distant third to the Consortium's unchallenged supremacy over alcohol and the ravenous, galaxywide conquest of Pickle Planet, Nanosecond Pizza had nonetheless cornered a very specific but universal fast-food market; the post-warp munchies.

  Nanosecond Pizza was founded on the principle that, following a lengthy faster-than-light zip across the galaxy, something hot, something unhealthy and something not cooked by their crewmates was at the top of every space-faring individual's mind. Installed at thousands of Warpgate Service Junctions throughout the galaxy, Nanosecond Pizza Parlors offered the perfect solution in the form of a steaming hot pizza pie ready the very instant one warped into system.

  The crew of The Unconstant Lover were far from immune to this phenomenon. While they'd only hopped up from planet rather than warped in from some distant system, Qel Qatar's Warpgate Service Junction possessed just the Parlor to satisf
y their mighty, emancipated hunger.

  Nemo, seated characteristically at the corner of Moira and Odisseus, devours a grimy slice of the stuff with enough fervor to perhaps even rival the Ortok's own. “Current assets?” he proposes between greedy, anchovy-studded bites.

  Two-Bit Switch's concentration is unswervingly planted on the Attaché before him and its new attachment. Even Odisseus can't recognize it – some manner of feedback reader so rusty and so ancient that it must have originated on the shop floor of Gasbox's scrapbarn. “Gantine's fund,” Two-Bit stipulates around the sodden breadstick dangling from his mouth, “oughta come to little less than a quarter mil.”

  “Current bounty?”

  Moira peels a pair of anchovies off her slice and plops them onto Odisseus' corner of the box. “Far as I can tell, zilch. Nothing offered by anyone, anywhere.”

  “Current state of the ship?”

  Odisseus immediately scoops up Moira's castoff toppings and munches them happily. “Surprisingly, one piece.” The attachment jutting from the top of Two-Bit's Attaché makes a whirring sound. “No major repairs–”

  “IT IS AMAZING ONE PART,” a harsh, humorless robotic voice suddenly drones from the device's tinny speakers. Unanimously taken aback, the rest of the crew, even the Glothi cashier at the Parlor's counter, stare bemusedly at the Attaché and its owner. “ABSCENCE OF THE MAIN REPAIRS.” Two-Bit smiles sheepishly into the resulting stunned silence.

  Moira is calm, parental condescension. “Two-Bit.”

  “Yes, Moira?”

  She points. “What the fuck is that?”

  Two-Bit props several fingers beneath the Attache's underbelly, to better display its latest addition to his bewildered crewmates. “It's a droidvox, isn't it?”

  Frozen with fresh slice of pizza dripping inches from his open mouth, Nemo scowls. “Okay. Why?”

  “To, eh,” Two-Bit's eyes flick unconsciously to Odisseus, “better facilitate, you know, understanding.” When this explanation garners no visible response from anyone assembled, he simplifies somewhat. “So I can understand him.”

  “I'm speechless,” Odisseus admits.

  “I AM WITHOUT SPEECH,” the droidvox, after contemplation, translates.

  “Did this seem like a good idea at the time?” Moira theorizes, almost fascinated.

  Two-Bit fiddles, somewhat bashfully, with the attachment. “Obviously, there's still some crunches to be ironed out,” he confesses, immediately busying himself with the potentially impossible task of ironing out said problems. Everyone else, meanwhile, in some combination of offended, amused and baffled, returns to their quickly cooling meal.

  Even when thousands of zottibles away, the crew of The Unconstant Lover naturalistically fall into the same seating arrangement they'd silently allocated two years ago on that first visit to The Bloody Afterburn. Their customary corner booth is substituted with the wobbly table nearest the holovision set and four foamy Gitterswitch Gins are replaced by a single shared anchovy-and-quorki-cheese Planet Pan.

  Captain Nemo slurps his Bubble Blue and challenges the reflected viridian orb of Qel Qatar to a staring contest out the nearest viewport. Moira Quicksilver picks pettily at the surface of her pizza, forfeiting the finest share of the toppings and suctioning residual cheese off the tips of her fingers. Two-Bit Switch now ignores the stack of breadsticks beside him, save the one still drooping from his mouth, in favor of perfecting his glitchy new toy.

  Odisseus, on the other hand, savages slice after slice, stacking the surrendered anchovies sky high on each piece. All the while, he keeps a weather eye to the haywire droidvox and its murmuring palpitations.

  Around the jabberhead's right wrist, the Ortok notes the clamped and continued presence of his multe bracelet. The rest of the crew had their deactivated and removed shortly after jumping warp to Hazro, while Two-Bit Switch, somewhat inscrutably, elected to keep wearing his. He cited this as some manner of “fashion statement,” something the perennially naked Ortok would know nothing about, but Odisseus wondered if there wasn't a more sentimental reason behind his decision, a souvenir to commemorate the Surimiah Slip.

  “So.” Nemo returns his gaze suddenly from the window. “With the exception of that spooky thing,” he prefaces with an open-palmed gesture toward Two-Bit's Attaché, “we should be all jig, right? Nobody wants us dead, we owe nobody money or jobs and shit is good?”

  Moira shrugs her left shoulder. “By all appearances.”

  Miraculously, no one voices a brand new litany of complications to drag them back into public infamy. Honestly a little aghast at the realization how free and clear they were, Odisseus' saltbrother makes a very poor show of hiding his disappointment. Indeed, he merely paws up the remote control in his idle hand, grunts a “Huh” followed closely by an apathetic “Okay” and unmutes the holovision set.

  Nine months ago, The Unconstant Lover and her crew fell within the power and protection of Boss Ott, Galactic Menace. Seven months ago, word of Boss Ott's death reached the insidious ears of Huong Xo and all the tenuous security afforded by his blessing ran completely aground. Shadowed cabal of Yheum crime lords and silent puller of puppet strings galaxywide, Xo saw Ott's empire sundered by infighting, his holdings dispersed, his campaign on Baz become a bad joke and, for themselves, a golden opportunity.

  Tendrils of the Outer Ring's most influential syndicate crept into nearly every uncivilized corner of Bad Space. Rest for the wicked, then, specifically those wicked enough to earn top billing on Xo's proverbial “shit list,” began proving damnably elusive.

  The perpetual parade of amateur and professional bounty hunters, all attempting to fill the Noxix-shaped hole in the market, inspired something very insensible in the beleaguered Captain. Hiding out, by Nemo's admittedly backwards logic, would never be enough. Sending bounty hunters packing back to Xo with sore asses and holes in their heads would only further forestall the inevitable. The only way to ensure that no one collected their two point five million-credit bounty, ironically, was to collect it themselves.

  “We gotta get caught,” is how Nemo'd first phrased it, standing second in the express lane of a Galaxmart on Dragnoor four months ago. At the time, it hadn't eluded Nemo's saltbrother that, while he'd done Moira and Odisseus the courtesy of introducing the idea in their presence, Two-Bit, fast assuming the role of de facto mastermind, was the true party to sell. Assuming he could spark Two-Bit's felonious interest, the marriage of Nemo's impracticable plan with the jabberhead's practiced planning would be the only recipe, everyone was painfully aware, that could spell success for such a topsy-turvy venture.

  Luckily for everyone involved, Two-Bit Switch wasn't overly difficult to motivate.

  The authorities – a crack response squad of IMIS' finest, led by a certain Jhironese bounty hunter – happened upon the nefarious Captain Nemo in a cheap hotel room on Sozzor. Captured along with his three accomplices, the known outlaw was awaiting them patiently, conveniently unarmed and more than willing to cooperate. After their arrest and capture, they were hastily detained aboard the nearest Mercy-class hauler, the fateful HIN Surimiah.

  One jailbreak later, the pirates had earned themselves a few well-deserved weeks off the grid. It was Two-Bit's prediction that Xo would take their sweet time in realizing the Surimiah went missing en route, sifting through Hazro and Qel Qatar and any other remaining leads and coming up lonktonk eggs as to their whereabouts.

  By then, Two-Bit predicted, the Lover's crew, their bounties erased, would hopefully be halfway to Yarba or some other moons-awful backwoods that would kill bounty hunters, outright, from sheer boredom.

  The pixelated melody of a familiar ringtone interrupts the conversation's lull. Popping the rest of the crust into his mouth with a snap of his jaws, Odisseus reaches down, retrieves his ringing comm from its pouch on his tool belt and answers. “Yeah?” he barks around the crust, the droidvox mewing distortedly in response.

  “Be the Cap'n there?” Abraham's husky voice questions through
the static. “He ain't answerin' his comm.”

  Without removing his eyes from the infomercial blaring above Odisseus' head, Nemo unloops his own communicator from his belt and spares its blinking red light the merest of glances. “I suppose I'm not.”

  “Might I trouble ye for a heading, Cap'n?” Odisseus' comm presses.

  A listless sigh blows through Nemo's lips. “Hadn't given it much thought.”

  Moira, as though cued by her Captain's lassitude, gestures with her stub of a pizza slice. “I can't imagine staying here would be the wisest course of action.”

  “Soon as word gets out the Surimiah never reached her destination,” Odisseus poses, “we'd best be somewhere dark and deep.”

  “SOON IN PROPORTION TO WORD LEAVES SURIMIAH NEVER IT REACHED ITS DESIGNATION WE THE BETTER WOULD BE SOMEWHERE DARK AND IT IS DEEP.”

  The silence that follows is pure and deafening, heightened by the sound of the blazing HV overhead.

  “Who was that?” Abraham, likewise perplexed, demands.

  Odisseus plants his forehead in his paw so deeply it might sprout flowers. “Two-Bit.”

  “A PAIR OF TWEEZERS.”

  “That don't sound like Two-Bit,” Abraham contends.

  “It also doesn't sound like a pair of tweezers,” Moira points out.

  “Wait.” Abraham pauses, as though he's somewhat embarrassed or terrified by what he's about to ask. “Ye ain't...replaced Two-Bit with some manner a' 'scary death robot,' have ye?”

  His attention returned to the holovision, Nemo shrugs. “Thinking about it.”

  “You were jabbing?” Two-Bit reminds, desperate to further the discussion. “The heading?”

  “How's about we make contact with Tarson?” Abraham suggests. “Throw him a buzz, say we'd like to meet, see if he's any ideas as to where?”

  Nemo hefts his Bubble Blue unenthusiastically. “I'll drink to that.”

  “Cheers,” Abraham concurs and the comm clicks dead.

  After stashing the device, Odisseus proceeds to peel the closest slice of pizza free from the saturated box with a wet siphoning sound. “No particular hideout in mind?”