Hull Damage Read online

  To Nemo's credit, the street bustles blatantly about them. Driftcarts, laden with load, amble along the lane, gasping green exhaust in their wakes. A Braaca pet peddler paces between passerby, jangling squawking, hissing and mewing cages of Crandish rat-canaries, Yonite scorcher lizards and every breed of jborra kitten imaginable. A limping Etrook gallivants down the street, whistling tunelessly with an anti-spacecraft ballistic warhead buttressed over his shoulders.

  They stood in the shade of the distinctive striped awning of a Pickle Planet kiosk, one of the three-dozen the megacorp threaded throughout Takioro's Second Ring, sharing a triple order of “Pickled Pacho Paws.” The feet of these seven-foot rodents, when properly prepared and served on a stick, had skyrocketed Pickle Planet into a household name galaxywide.

  Garrok Brondi, smuggler, scoundrel and celebrated egotist, wanted to discuss “business” with Nemo who, in a rare moment of clarity, realized that meeting Brondi without a bodyguard probably wasn't the wisest of moves. Odisseus didn't trust Marco, his recently conscripted adjunct, in the engine room alone, however, and consequently sent the Mruka to the Third Ring for gear, before meeting his saltbrother and his smuggling rival for a bite and a glower, respectively.

  “Rooster heard through the grapevine that you're mustering guns for a big gig.”

  “Could be that's so.”

  “Well, it is,” Brondi swallows a mouthful of paw before continuing. “The Rose is blown half to Jotor and I need capital to fix her up.”

  “And that's where we come in?” Odisseus concludes. Brondi opens his mouth to speak something puzzled, but Nemo translates.

  “You wanna work merc on a pirate ship? Little below your lofty standards, ain't it?”

  Brondi shrugs his marinated paw. “It's a starting point.”

  “Three percent,” Nemo forewarns. “Like every other swinging dick.”

  “Yeah?” Brondi slides into his comfortable expression of unruffled self-assurance. “What's the ship?”

  “Teamster off Alor. The Hourly Wage?”

  Brondi snorts. “Good ship. Captain's a douche.”

  “Most are,” Odisseus opines. Nemo elbows him lightheartedly.

  Brondi patronizes Odisseus with an affable smile before turning back to Nemo. “Six percent.”

  Nemo's scoff outweighs Brondi's. “You think?”

  “I know the ship. I know the captain. You'd be paying for information.”

  “I'd be paying double for information,” Nemo repudiates by tearing into the meat of his pacho paw, “is what.”

  “Five percent, then. Take Rooster too. Boy's a bloomin' surgeon with explosives.”

  Nemo waves the gnashed foot at the humanoid smuggler. “You know, you gotta nasty habit of ordering me around.” Odisseus publishes a throaty growl.

  “Or not,” Brondi relents.

  “Four percent it is,” Nemo pronounces. “We cast off in three hours. #1118. If you're late, you get zero percent.”

  Both Odisseus and Nemo pitch their bones in the trash and begin to depart when Brondi mentions, “Oh, a question?”

  Nemo turns. “Yes?”

  “What's with the hat?”

  –––

  Two-Bit Switch blinks against the smoke spray emanating from the mountainous bouncer standing literally across the first-level entrance to the Astrobounce Gentlemen's Club. He frolics his fingers and a third banknote materializes in his hand.

  “Well, suppose then that I'm a very, very generou–”

  “No doin', I'm afraid,” the bouncer interjects, inserting the protuberant cigar back into his mouth. “'Ppreciate the offer, acourse, but Mr. Gozzer was real specific that these four,” he pinpoints the poster behind with a thumb, quartered by unflattering sketches of Nemo, Moira, Odisseus and, of course, Two-Bit himself, “ain't not to be admitted until further notice.”

  “Any flash as to when this 'further notice' might be?”

  The behemothic bouncer strokes the hooked horn interrupting his chin as though a goatee. “Somethin' 'bout a percentage?”

  Two-Bit vanishes the cash at a motion and passes a stymied hand through his wiry hair. Nemo's plan was to convene the crew at The Bloody Afterburn for a customary carouse before weighing anchor and with only an hour to spare, Two-Bit had yet to wench.

  He'd been so damnably preoccupied with recruitment he'd plain forgotten his more carnal requirements and now, with the clock ticking, he'd apparently been denied access to the Astrobounce on account of today's scuffle with the bounty hunter and his boys. His options for an affordable lap dance swiftly slimming, he'd be forced to float an off-duty moll an extortionate fee for a piece of action, assuming he could even find one in the next sixty minutes or, more frighteningly, christen the incoming dry spell this caper would instigate with an ignominious jerk in the appalling squalor of a Takioro public restroom.

  “Gaff me a minute. Is there bugger-all you can do to get me in that clip joint?”

  The giant furrows his singular brow. “My shift's up in ninety minutes.”

  “Fuck. Well–” he halts mid-resigned salute. “How much Gozzer jank you?”

  The giant furrows his singular brow further. “What?”

  “For minding the door. For keeping villains like me out. This weekend, say. How much he janking you?”

  Gathering his husky arms into a knot, the bouncer frowns the three feet down to the dwarfed Two-Bit. “You ain't tryin' to swindle me, is ya?”

  “If I was, you'd paste me right between the floorboards, wouldn't ya?”

  “Fair bet.”

  “Then no, I ain't.” Two-Bit unfastens his fists and persists. “How much for the weekend?”

  The hulk deliberates a moment before replying with an air of pride. “Nine.”

  “Huh,” Two-Bit mocks impression.

  He squints his sole eye. “Nine's good pay for doorwork. Gozzer treats me well. What're you pissing about?”

  Two-Bit shrugs suggestively. “Maybe I have need of a geezer like you. Somebody what jabbs plenty just by standing, if you take my meaning.”

  “Not interested,” the colossus rumbles.

  “Four?”

  “Definitely not interested.”

  “Well, thousand.”

  The bouncer feigns disinterest but Two-Bit peruses his curiosity like a well-thumbed book. “What sorta work?”

  “Pillage and plunder under the black flag. You wanna jank four thousand crackin' skulls this weekend?”

  He sniffs mightily and plucks out the cigar. “My shift's up in ninety minutes. Where do I go?” Two-Bit hides a complacent grin behind fabricated recollection.

  “Um, Docking Port #1118, unless I'm very much mistaken. We'll unmoor soon as you show.” He gives the titanic cyclops a parting assessment as he takes three backward steps. “What's your handle?”

  “Ebeneezer.”

  “Nice, uh, handle,” Two-Bit manages, finally finishes his resigned salute and hastens off in search of a willing woman.

  –––

  Moira has never, in her arguably short and assuredly hazardous lifetime, been as afraid of getting shot as she currently is. Moira Quicksilver, who had sneered down the barrels of loaded firearms pointed at her face, who'd stood the high street with some of the best gunfighters in the industry, who'd been shot, on numerous occasions and walked away with little but burnt biceps or scorched flesh wounds, couldn't sit quietly at their classic corner booth in The Bloody Afterburn and enjoy her quiet gin without whipping a glance over a shoulder every thirty seconds to see if someone had leveled a piece at the back of her head.

  “Relax, dollface,” Nemo, next to her, japes. “We're supposed to be celebrating.”

  “Nemo, I swear to all the moons, I will gun you down here and now and no soul could begrudge me.”

  Across from Nemo, Odisseus hurls an inarticulate growl her way, whose threat, unlike its wording, is undeniably clear. Moira disparages back in his direction before affirming the Afterburn's four exit points again and noting t
he new entrants.

  The Admiralty was Takioro's rowdiest tavern, the Pistol-Whip its most exclusive, but The Bloody Afterburn, thus named for the enormous sanguine-stained turbine furnished off the barroom ceiling with collider chains, held the vile accolade of being its dirtiest, both in dealing and in hygiene. Owned and operated by a throaty Trijan appropriately named Unhappy Roger, here the grog was cheap, the company churlish and the floor a sickening shade of saffron; all of which naturally meant it was Nemo's favorite.

  Moira Quicksilver had patronized The Bloody Afterburn on exactly nine separate occasions and, on exactly nine of those visits, she'd been shot. Ordinarily, they were mere stray bolts during one of the pub's not entirely sporadic knockdown, drag-out brawls, but often enough, she'd been bird-dogged specifically by vendettas of a personal or professional persuasion. She'd blame Nemo, but three of those wounds had been inflicted before they'd met and only one of the nine actually came from his gun.

  Thusly, she was understandably dodgy about returning for any reason, especially something as ostensibly inane as Nemo's “bon voyage debauches,” as he referred to them. She shifts her feet, pirouettes her tumbler between her left thumb and forefinger and keeps her right hand planted as casually as she can on her left shoulder, poised to draw and fire Lefty in nothing flat.

  Contrarily, Nemo's awash with his restless energy, drumming his thumbs on the lip of the table in syncopation to some unheard rhythm. He's blithely heedless to even Odisseus' portentous grumblings about engine failure and unfinished maintenance, gleeful thoughts bent solely towards his prospective acts of rapine and skullduggery.

  “Oughta put us at fourteen, we four bastards and Abraham included,” Nemo calculates, briefly ceasing drumming to tally, only to start again fresh with this completed.

  “Put us at zero when the boosters boil from the inside,” Odisseus mutters into his grog.

  Nemo interrupts his percussion, mutating his mirth into mischief. “There's no women,” he declares.

  “Yes. Besides me.”

  “Because of you?”

  “Yes. Because of me.”

  Nemo anchors a miscreant's smile on Moira. “You think we need fifteen?” Moira attempts a protest, but Nemo's zottibles ahead on this new notion.

  “Excuse me. Excuse me. Miss?” He careens over the table and yanks at the waitress' blouse. After a few rough tugs, she desists her gyrations and twists to Nemo, pert fuchsia locks swinging in response.

  “Um, yes?”

  Two-Bit appears from behind the waitress. “What gives?”

  In his most original chauvinism yet, Two-Bit Switch had recognized one of the Afterburn's on-duty waitresses as an off-duty stripper at the Astrobounce and, in exchange for a genuinely deplorable volume of cash, purchased himself one last dry hump, which he deigned to classify as a “lap dance”, right there across the table. Moira'd been too engrossed in ferreting out potential attackers to offer anything more than cursory remonstrance, but as Nemo plays his ploy, Moira divines it immediately.

  “Excuse me, miss, I was wondering–”

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  “Never mind my associate. What I was–”

  “Fuck off an arlaxi.”

  “She's just a little–”

  “Fuck off in space.”

  “What's your name, dearie?” Nemo champions her with a benevolent beam, transparent only to Moira. The wench affords Moira a disconcerted frown before answering Nemo's question.

  “Zella.” Nemo augments his grin with more mischief than Moira previously thought possible and she sags back in the booth, abandoning the whole sordid affair to its own devices.

  “Well, Zella, my name is Nemo and I captain a pirate ship and I was wondering if you've any experience in brigandage.”

  Zella doesn't blink. “I'm wanted on Cedano for three counts of armed robbery?”

  “Good girl,” Nemo tags in. “You free this weekend?”

  “I work.”

  He spreads his hands and executes the gambit. “You wanna clear your schedule and come, uh–” he gestures beckoningly at Two-Bit.

  “Pillage and plunder under the black flag?”

  Nemo claps in recognition. “That was it.” Moira rolls her eyes.

  Zella eyeballs the beguiling Nemo, the relinquished Moira, the sullen Odisseus and finally, the shrugging Two-Bit before offering a shrug of her own. “Fuck it. Why not. Sure.” Two-Bit emits a husky laugh, Odisseus grunts in recognition and Moira is forced to amend her earlier assumption even further as Nemo alights his moonlike face on her again, his expression a monument to all villainy.

  “Fifteen.”

  Moira engages his devilry with deadpan. “Go. Fuck yourself.”

  “Probably later.” He heaves his tankard, frothing with indigo Gitterswitch Gin, and proposes, “A toast?”

  Cheerless Odisseus asks the superfluous question. “To what?”

  He simpers. “To The Unconstant Lover.” Captain Nemo offers his booze to the center of the table. Odisseus, dour with disappointment, is the first to meet it. Moira Quicksilver, smoldering in spleen, converges next. Two-Bit Switch, obviously occupied by purchased advances, is the last to arrive and the four glasses nearly don't clash.

  First Interlude

  Trash was the sole province of the Mannimar scrapyards. Should one find oneself in a blistering desire for a faulty, flat-lined BB882 auxiliary inertial compensator or an eviscerated anti-vehicular F-19 fragmentation grenade launcher or even the besieged carcass of an ancient capital Gond-class cruiser’s exoejection boarding-action airlock, Mannimar could always provide. In the enervated business of intergalactic mechanical compost, it was an inexpensive option for the damaged, the obsolete or the ineffectual.

  Originally the hopeful investment of a junk baron cabal in the Midworlds, the scrapyards were an attempt to recreate Mox for the galactic aristocracy; to monopolize used part trafficking at the Inner Sector’s backdoor with a junkworld of their own. To this end, staggering amounts of funds were poured into habituating Mannimar’s worldwide corrosive sea. Unfortunately, this act would eventually bankrupt the cabal, as the planet’s surface proved utterly recalcitrant to the expensive effects of terraforming.

  The Mannimar scrapyards were born – a square of technically habitable earth, fifty mottibles on a side and overflowing with all of the galaxy’s third and fourth rate salvage. Meadows of rusted hull plating rose to mountains and foothills of burnt battery boxes, which sloped down to beaches of melted terraforming equipment, lapped at incessantly by the acidic oceans. Dwarfed in size by the steppes of distant Mox and trumped in price by the direct back lots of the bigger manufacturers, Mannimar was doomed to oddity and obscurity, patronized by the lazy and the strange.

  The dealers here were beleaguered, freelance desperadoes, backs to a wall three feet this side of unemployment. They bought their bread by peddling defective parts to solar locals and those with bad, bad taste in machinery. They, a motley collection of midworlder mechanics, shipwrights and engineers, scratched out an anxious living from beneath the proverbial fingernails of the retail trash trade. To them, a functioning engine was a windfall unforeseen and, against all odds, an operative spacecraft a godsend unknown.

  In this fashion was Hook the Handsome pushed past mere cynicism and into full-blown misanthropy at the realization that his newly acquired mystery markdown freighter was effectively a piece of flying bird shit.

  Ostensibly the butt of some callous cosmic joke, the Ufaki salvagier had, via a suite of reliable brokers, purchased an allegedly serviceable spacecraft off chopshop auction on Talos VI at an absurd discount. Fully anticipating the vessel to be a total junker, he was dismayed upon delivery to discover The Poetic License not only in ghastly disrepair but also, in point of fact, a “remix.” Such was the polite term for a custom, homemade mash-up whose various parts and interfaces were plundered from any number of separate, often dissimilar ships and messily welded together. Dubious in control, vulnerable to practically all forms o
f attack and openly dangerous in most cases, a remix was only regarded as an actual spaceship in deference to any other viable option.

  Generally speaking, the only people in the entire galaxy with any interest in remixes were bored engineering hobbyists and the marooned.

  A wasted week’s worth of matrix diving and Hook had finally at least identified the component parts to his revamped monster. First and foremost on his list of discouraging diagnoses, The Poetic License was a scow – a heavy cargo tanker built for atmospheric cargo traffic and never intended for anything beyond limited spaceflight. Her chassis, by Hook’s best guess, betrayed her as a revoked freighter by a now-defunct manufacturate. The last act of Briza Astroballistic, before going completely bankrupt, involved recalling their IZ series of orbital freighters, citing irreconcilable steering flaws. At least one Model 36, however, seemed to have escaped the chopping block.

  As a result, she was bulky, cumbersome and ungainly to the point of being unsalable. The hindrances of her own docking peculiarities had even gone to the trouble of ensuring that she was asymmetrical, as if she required further disfigurement. Beyond that, her cockeyed frame meant that she would lean unflaggingly to port, in the speculative fiction that anyone ever flew her again.

  Hook remained blissfully ignorant as regards large portions of the ship’s personal history but he’d deduced that, at some point in her wretched upbringing, someone had obviously attempted to retrofit The Poetic License from a simple moonhopper into a proper and spaceworthy cargo freighter. This was attempted mainly through the application of two different and seemingly contradictory methods.

  The first involved the fortification of the outer hull, presumably in preparation for the rigors of interstellar warping. However, in the case of The Poetic License, the hull was well, well past sufficiently strengthened. Contrasting the downloaded specs against the junker parked on his back lot, Hook surmised at least a 300% increase in hull strength between The Poetic License and the regulation IZ36 Briza Light Freighter. It didn’t end at the outer hull, however. During a brief and unnerving jaunt inside to inspect the tanker’s interior, Hook uncovered, among other things, a bolstering of the interior walls by a similar margin as well. Whoever had supervised these sloppy modifications, by Hook’s logic, was either exceedingly paranoid or schemed to fly the ship somewhere exceedingly suicidal – possibly both.