Hull Damage Page 7

  In truth, the adjustments to weight and maneuverability were so severe that The Poetic License, in its current state, would have been practically unflyable, were it not for its second major conversion.

  Against all rationality, someone had extracted the standardized orbital bar engine and, for some equally inscrutable reason, replaced it with a pair of interdicted Nautiloid JR1 Yeltain jetboosters.

  Warhorses of a space age nearly two centuries antiquity by now, the JR1 had originally been intended as an auxiliary accelerator to help Shell-Class Blockade Cruisers, capital ships as archaic as they were gargantuan, achieve engagement speed. Shortly following field testing, however, the booster was slapped by IntraGalaxy Transpo’s most dreaded veto: interdiction – deemed too consistently jeopardizing to sentient life to condone mass production. The file Hook uncovered was sketchy on details, yet he was able to glean that the JR1s apparent fascination with spontaneous combustion was likely at fault.

  Yet, here were a relatively intact pair of the dinosaurs, protruding out the License’s rear end as if someone had tried to shove a man-of-war up her aft and got bored three-fourths of the way through.

  Barring both the near-perpetual maintenance they would require and the random explosions, installing a pair of jetboosters as potentially powerful as the JR1s on a freighter as obese as the License might be enough to make her at least spaceworthy, but she’d be untenable. The IZ36’s steering column would be woefully inadequate to support the raw unbridled force of a single capital ship jetbooster, never mind two. In such a state, she’d be utterly impossible to maneuver, simply begging for a breakneck collision of titanic proportions, had it not been for the third and final harebrained scheme her mysterious benefactors employed on her behalf.

  The steering platform system, effectively the practice of plugging a high-powered engine into a turntable and riveting it to the rear of one’s ship, had briefly been tested on certain prototypes of low atmosphere driftcraft, deemed too unpredictable for mass consumption and given the hasty kibosh. Before the cancellation order's ink had dried, however, a few dozen freighter-sized platforms had been constructed and apparently fitted to a few dozen cargo freighters. All Hook's evidence suggested The Poetic License was among the last surviving graduates.

  While flying the License through the use of such a device was technically possible, from a purely physical standpoint, the level of ability needed to meaningfully navigate the craft anywhere but into a bloody mess was such that Hook the Handsome, an Ufaki who’d spent the majority of his adult life dealing with expert albeit eccentric pilots, had never met its like.

  In short, The Poetic License’s major problem was that she exceeded her maximum weight limit three times over, which was circumvented via a pair of illegal, oversized and spontaneously erupting jetboosters which, in turn, were her second major problem subsequently diverted through the use of an enormous, spinning rudder which, unsurprisingly, was her third major problem and that, by Hook’s estimation, had never exactly been overcome.

  On that single occasion Hook ventured into The Poetic License, he prayed to all the moons he’d never have cause to ever, ever again. Once inside, the Ufaki salvagier made a paling discovery – large portions of the License’s interior; several corridors, the lower crew dorms and the hold, were exhaustively plastered, floor to ceiling, in at least a decade’s worth of petrified lonktonk droppings. It carpeted the deck. It enameled the walls. It clung to the ceiling like stalactites. The cargo hold was a cavern of chalky, petrified poop.

  A belligerent and degenerate fowl originally native to the fourth and fifth moons of distant Yon, the lonktonk was the staple of the Outer Ring poultry business and, as a result, was shipped between and off the planet’s eight moons in staggering quantities. Using this information, Hook managed to deduce that, no sooner than ten years ago, his brand new IZ36 Briza Light Freighter began her life as a Yonite lunar lonktonk hauler. Somewhere between her maiden voyage and the ill-fated auction on Talos VI, however, someone had doomed her aground with a trio of nonsensical modifications and painted “The Poetic License” unevenly across her hull.

  Complete with an engineering deck apparently built for a three-foot mechanic, absolutely no ray shield projector to speak off and a paint job the unbecoming color of stale piss, Hook assured himself that he would have achieved the precisely same effect if, rather than purchase The Poetic License, he’d eaten all 112,071 of his credits spent. Hook could peddle scales to a Saurian and blue to a Braaca, but he could say, without a shadow of a doubt, he would never move this ship.

  Time passed. Dust collected. The Poetic License, parked on the back lot, withered from a financial tragedy to a mere curiosity, from a conversational oddity to a piece of ill-begotten subconscious. Hook walked beneath its landing feet each day without thought to what stood above him.

  Thusly, it was a particularly surprising weekday when, nearly six years after purchasing the License, Hook’s first customer of the week parked a highly customized assault starfighter on the pad and strode into the main office like he owned the galaxy.

  “Nice ship,” Hook offhandedly greeted. The customer popped an astonished smile, thumbing over his left shoulder.

  “You know what that thing is?”

  Hook shrugged. “Concord Industries Personal Fighter. Z-Type? 333?”

  “327. Very good. She’s fully customized – enhanced turbine, control reception, double-charged weapons. Baby like that’ll go for 500 thou, easy. The whole nine yards.”

  “The whole nine yards. Very nice, sir.”

  The customer slapped a key ring down on the barrelhead. “Want her?”

  Hook scoffed. “Sure. For what?” The customer pointed a gloved finger beyond the Ufaki, through the open postern door and onto the back lot.

  “That.”

  Chapter 4

  Moira Quicksilver applies further pressure to her smarting shoulder. The meager washcloth she'd borrowed from Roger as provisional gauze had drank its fill of her blood and was now thoroughly drenched, but until she was back betweendecks and granted access to the medbay, it would have to do.

  The wound certainly wasn't lethal, nor especially debilitating nor even overly painful yet it was humiliating in spades. An unrelated quarrel three tables over had earned her the tenth gunshot-related injury within the luxurious walls of The Bloody Afterburn, in the form of a blood-splattering ricochet across her right shoulder. Only her pride and possibly the skull of the still-snickering Nemo were liable to be seriously injured as a result, however.

  She can't match his increasingly jaunty gait as Docking Port #1118's harborage gates roll back and he canters ahead, leaving the three of them behind.

  Takioro's First Ring was devoted entirely to double-deckered rows of embarkation cylinders – enormous hexagonal airlocks that behave as the Station's Docking Ports. For a flat rate, these ports are rented for the manifold spacecraft of Takioro's transients, ranging in size from small capital-class frigates to individual starfighters, often stored in squadrons.

  In the cylindrical light of Docking Port #1118, The Unconstant Lover appears almost legitimate. Her more hideous plasma scarring is obscured by the striated shadows along her haggard hull. At this angle, barely a handful of her pockmarks are visible, whose absent hull plates expose machinery and contrivance beneath. When striped by shade, she's nearly disguised as an honest ship, who might be flown by honest men, who might work for honest pay.

  Nemo casts his arms out as he approaches her. “Who's a pretty lady?”

  Her boarding ramp was extended and the area adjacent scattered with the assorted detritus of supplies yet to load, including crates of rations, spare parts and ammunition, as well as several barrels of spare fuel. Milling about the unstowed equipment, either engaging in quiet conversation or preparing provisions of their own, were the new recruits – a discrepant muster of unlovely hoodlums, dispassionate Danbonte, huffy Heeko and groggy Garrigan among them. Moira flattens a gainsaid glare at Garrok Brondi, le
ering at her over his decapodian first mate's topmost shoulder, before she levels up on Nemo's left quarter.

  “Is that Brondi over there?”

  Nemo follows her eyeline and snorts. “Guess he decided to show after all.” He turns beneficently back to her. “How's the shoulder?”

  She envenoms immediately and breaks eye contact with him. “I don't know why you like that shithole.”

  “Brondi? I don't.”

  “The Afterburn.”

  “Oh, I don't know. It's cozy.”

  “I got shot.”

  “I know,” he answers, with a disturbing air of innocence.

  Odisseus waddles past, making for the supplies and growling gruffly at one of the mercenaries, a bandoliered Corgassi stacking an alarming number of tackles atop each other, though if the transparent ichthyoid comprehends Ortoki, he gives no outward sign. Two-Bit, on the other hand, shakes a few hands, pats a few backs and otherwise mingles amongst the assembled marauders.

  Nemo extends a brief point towards the Corgassi’s largest parcel, an irregularly shaped instrument case, festooned with kitschy travel stickers from various systems and other assorted memorabilia. “What do you play?”

  He squints his bulbous eyes before answering with a half-hearted gesture of the case. “Uh, rocket-propelled grenades?”

  “Oh. Cool.”

  “Get yer thumbs out yer bloomholes and stow this freight, ye shit-lickin' sluggards!” heralds Abraham's disembarkation, the conscripts peering about for the source of their rebuking. At sight of the craggy old Grimalti harrumphing down the landing ramp, however, they promptly clamber about their duties, lest they face further haranguing from the belligerent buccaneer. “Handsomely now, gents, handsomely now!”

  “Abraham,” Nemo greets.

  After cuffing listless Heeko across the back of the head, the Grimalti directs his attention to Nemo. “Cap'n.” He purses his fleshy beak before acknowledging Moira. “Missy.”

  Adorned only in greasy workman's trousers and the ocean blue bandana swaddling his lumpy forehead, he currently brandishes his disenchanting custom of striding about the ship utterly shirtless, blubbery belly slumping plainly into view. With a magnitude of ink and scarring only to be accumulated by centuries of sailing the ungoverned black in the company of indecent men painted across his torso, Abraham's exposed chest is a map of interstellar piracy and her cruelties, charting all the prominent picaroons of yore and the steep price of insubordination aboard their galleons.

  Beneath that venerable skin, however, dwelt only a washed-up swabber steeped in antediluvian vernacular, anecdotal portends and archaic notions regarding women before the mast.

  “Have we a heading?”

  Nemo turns to Moira and proposes. “Danboowui? Take them within sight of the client rather than the supplier?”

  Moira nods. “Sounds fine.”

  Abraham levels Nemo with a gauging glance. “Ye get the advance?”

  “There was no advance. Huong Xo,” Nemo shrugs. “One sixty on delivery, though,” he adds brightly. Abraham bitterly shakes his head, wattle wobbling beneath his chin.

  “Tell ye, practice like that don't hold water. Bloomin' Yheum bastards.”

  Nemo's shrug deepens. “Well, what're you gonna do?” Abraham retorts with a discouraged sigh and begins to totter away, before turning an incredulous eye back to Moira.

  “Ye carouse at the Afterburn again?”

  Moira simmers with annoyance. “I'll be in the medbay.”

  “Race ya!” Nemo’s cutting capers into the hold before Moira’s taken a single step, running his fingers along the boarding ramp’s support pylons as he saunters up, like a boy with a stick against a picket fence.

  –––

  Odisseus glowers at the rent and blackened pressure helix, as if the pure force of his undiluted ire could weld the mechanism back into place. Peering through the abruptly vacant hole in the jetbooster's engine, the equally blackened Marco crests his grimy eyebrows.

  “You wanna ask him now?”

  His reply is all baleful gall. “Yeah. I'll ask him.”

  Odisseus respects nothing so much as endurance; the galaxy, to his viewing, is brimming to the rim with junk. Manufacturers are interested solely in profit, chiefly achieved by unleashing shiny new products with larcenous sticker prices onto an unsuspecting market and hastily updating to a newer and shinier model before the customer realizes that the vehicle they’ve just flown off the lot would generously be qualified, at least in Odisseus’ professional opinion, as motorized compost.

  Ergo, despite their unsightliness, that disquieting rattle they seemed to perpetually exude, even when powered down, the gouts of red smoke they erratically emit, their tendency to burst into unprovoked flames and their general impracticality on a ship of this size, Odisseus’ second and third favorite things in life were the Lover's two Nautiloid, Shell-Class JR1 Yeltain jetboosters, lovingly nicknamed Port and Starboard. The quickest and most surefire way to find oneself sloppily mauled was to insult these two gawky babies within earshot of the Ortoki mechanic. At least three people had met their individual ends this way.

  Contrary to that adoration, however, ran the occasional bout of supreme irritation Odisseus harbored at the boosters' apparently detestable timing. Were he to select an ideal time for a vital engine part to spontaneously dislodge, it would have been during their twenty-hour sojourn in port, the majority of which he spent here, in the engine room, actively repairing the jetboosters. It would not have been now.

  It was likely, in fact it was certain, that Port and Starboard had genuinely caused more accidents and mechanical failures aboard the ship than they avoided, but there was literally no freighter in the galaxy of the Lover's size and weight capable of the wildly improbable feats of maneuverability that she could squeeze out when need pressed her. Even these were only possible when coupled with Odisseus’ constant careful paw and Nemo’s malicious talent for flight.

  In a perfect galaxy, Nemo would understand and appreciate the former as much as he did the latter, but after twenty-three years, Odisseus had learnt that the words “perfect galaxy” didn’t belong in the same paragraph as the words “Nehel Morel.”

  The engine room’s only means of ingress, a two-foot high orlop tunnel, required Odisseus to wriggle through on his belly and while he’d prefer not to openly demean himself in front of his precocious Mruka intern, he didn’t exactly have much choice. His chagrin swells still further as he worms his way back toward the ladder, at which point Odisseus makes the executive decision to direct all his antagonism towards the self-proclaimed Captain.

  He clambers up the access ladder, squeezes out of the manhole at the base of the rudder platform and scrambles out into the thankfully more spacious hold, just in time to spot his victim, stepping off abovedecks and onto the companionway.

  “Nemo!” he bellows, but the cry goes unheeded among the clamor of the boarding and bantering mercenaries, stowing freight, inhabiting the passenger dorms and trading playful punches. Odisseus ambles across the Lover's prodigious registration number, emblazoned in ten lusterless blue digits across the hold floor, as Nemo begins his canter down the companionway steps.

  When they anchored at Takioro, she’d been stockpiled practically floor to ceiling with consignment on behalf of Velocity, but now the Lover's belly, though currently choked with chartered crew, rests relatively barren, embarking as they were. Only the disused Beggarman stowed in the starboard corner, the rudimentary supplies, a few surplus crates, the seven sacks of shipborne garbage, haphazardly piled beneath the lip of the companionway, that Nemo’d both promised and neglected to space and the crowd of cavorting criminals occupy the hold.

  The ceiling cathedrals up towards the dorsal gun turret beyond, buttressed by a quartet of riveted teltriton rafters that girder the hold’s outer walls and clasp together, like a pair of covetous hands. The boarding ramp lingers ajar and splashes the brassy light of #1118 across her floor, where it pools and mingles with
the squalid overhead illumination of the hold’s incomplete lighting. Today, she stinks of fresh ditrogen, stale trash and the new musks of the congregating mercenaries. Today, the hold echoes with scraping, stomping and the shot breeze.

  Possibly by his own design, it takes Nemo three shouted names for him to notice the approaching Odisseus, as irritated Ortoki roars adequately serve to hush any adjacent marauders. Snapping his fingers jovially, Nemo alights on the hold floor and turns to regard the mechanic, nonchalant. “Everything trim?”

  “No,” is all Odisseus can grumble.

  Nemo ceases snapping to splay his fingers. “…okay?”

  Odisseus hefts the cleft helix. “This fell off.” Nemo blinks in recoil, not exactly the reaction the Ortok had hoped for.

  “Where?”

  “Port.”

  “Huh. Things are always falling off that one, right?” Odisseus responds through the use of a judiciously timed glower, which Nemo seems miraculously immune to. He squints. “What is that?”

  “It’s a pressure helix, Nemo.”

  Nemo punches the release button and the double doors behind him clatter open. “Oh,” he comments and, resuming his snapping, traipses away down the betweendecks corridor.

  “Nemo!” Odisseus yelps, doddering after him.

  All the doorways on the lower hallway have been thrown wide as Nemo struts past, Odisseus in shuffling pursuit. The second and third hanging bulbs seem to have flickered dead again, which bathes the hallway jointly in spotlights, from the two still operative ceiling bulbs, and floodlights, from the exposed side rooms. Only the light glinting off its struts reveals the underturret's access ladder, ensconced in its clear plastolieum pillar.