Galactic Menace Read online

  “Little bleeder.”

  “Following that first blip, another pops up every coupla months. Carjacking, vandalism, petty larceny, vandalism, vandalism, even an arson count or two. All within a five year span, all in Gallow's Worldshine District. Would Gallow, then, be a safe extrapolation for homeworld?”

  “More or less.”

  “More or less? Anything you wanna add there? No? Then, from there, you drop off the grid somewhat. Word 'round the campfire is, you were a mercenary jockey for a spell, started flying starfighters for a living. Didn't take much latteral detection to correlate the Raptors new hire, this callsign Osprey, to your sudden departure from Gallow. Couldn't get a bead on any of your old quadron mates for an interview, of course, but were I a gambler, I'd wager there ain't too many left alive, are there?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Here's the interesting part. Three years ago, a remix freighter, about 90% Briza, 10% who knows, is unexpectedly sold at the Mannimar Scrapyards and your Condor, of all things, is suddenly up for sale there.”

  “You found Hook, huh?”

  “A few months pass, you're spotted on Vollock, spend some jailtime of Vhase and, after you nearly bushwhack yourself on No'tiukki, The Unconstant Lover takes to the skies for the first time. Fast forward three years, three years of gunrunning, piracy, brigandage, prison breaks and, of course, enthusiastic corruption of the galactic good, and, you know, here we are. Well? Anything ring false in there?”

  “Not really.”

  “Nothing you wanna shed any further light on? No profane comments?”

  “Nah, I'm pretty jig with the galaxy believing all that's true.”

  “Cryptic.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Here's maybe a better question. Where would you prefer to start?”

  “Piracy is pointless.”

  “Uh huh. You're saying the rumor's true?”

  “There's a rumor? About me?”

  “The rumors about Eyer, I mean. That this, all this, even occurred in the first place because of what he said? Because of one bad sound bite?”

  “Yup.”

  “It's no more complicated than that?”

  “Nope.”

  “I absolutely refuse to believe that everything, everyone's cooperation, all this chaos and bloodshed, arguably the single most pivotal event in the history of Bad Space, could possibly have nothing more at its roots than 'piracy is pointless.'”

  “Who's telling this story?”

  “Fair enough.”

  Chapter 4

  Moira knuckles open the helm door's access button, this visit a flimsy pretense to harass him as much as anything, and instead finds him asleep. Their destination plainly visible through the viewport, Nemo is bodily, encompassingly asleep. The traffic lights of the customs checkpoint paint him and the helm's back wall warning red in variant splashes. His hands droop flaccidly from the armrests, his bare feet are fully splayed and his head is lolled backwards over the top of the helmsman's seat. He snores the tranquil snore of the utterly irresponsible – entirely oblivious to the forces of law, order and immigration lurking only two spaceships further up the queue.

  Moira opens her mouth to protest, to shout him from his slumber, when she's promptly shushed by a disembodied voice to her immediate port. She flicks her eyes aside, mouth still dumbly open, to catch sight of a bloated, loathsome shape punishing the communicator's seat beneath its cumbersome bulk. It removes a calabash pipe to press a fat finger to its fleshy beak. “Poor tyke be all tuckered out,” it whispers, almost apologetically.

  “From what?” she whispers back, despite herself. “Sitting on his ass since Qel Qatar?”

  Abraham shrugs warty shoulders. “Evidently.”

  An idle red light, blinking on the off-beat to the crimson brake light that douses the helm every ten seconds, snags Moira's attention. She points a finger in realization toward its source: the “missed call” indicator light on the comm dangling off Nemo's belt. “That would be why he's not answering,” she appreciates.

  “Ye need something, missy?”

  Moira imperceptibly shakes her head, keeping her answer in hushed tones. “Mostly came up to hear whatever ridiculous alias he was gonna use to get past customs.” She questions out of politeness more than honest curiosity. “You?”

  The Grimalti wheels the chair partially about, as though in dramatic reveal of whatever machinations he hunkered over at the communicator's station. “Oh,” he comments casually, “ponderin' which ridiculous alias be best to get us past customs.” One member of the Lover's modest library of scramble codifiers is plugged into the dashboard before Abraham, via various unofficial-looking cables and connectors. At a glance, Moira's not certain which one he'd chosen. “Been a comet's age since we used The Finder's Keeper. Figger what's good against Snakeeyes oughta be good against the most bribable way station in the galaxy.”

  “Good thought,” Moira concurs with an impassive nod.

  Gallow, the lonely, wanton moon of Criia, dominates the helm's viewport. The Lover and all inbound traffic faces the moon's outer and currently darkened half, known as Dockside in local parlance, as soon as they drop warp in the system. From here, Gallow resembles nothing so much as a black hole punched clean through the blue-and-pink planet it orbits.

  Remote green lights on the nearest side indicate the continent-sized starship lot. Here was where all Gallow's trampers and tourists parked their millions of craft. From here departed the hyperspeed drifttram that would take them straight through the moon's cold core and into Worldshine, Gallow's signature sordid side.

  Before any of that, of course, before earning the right to land on Gallow itself, one had to pass through customs. Wicked as it may be, Gallow still orbits Criia, and Criia still considers itself a member world of the Endless Imperium.

  In a most singular and telling display of Imperium red-tapery, each day's arriving traffic, thousands upon thousands of eager spaceships, was fluted down into one prodigious, dottibles-long queue of tedium and dismay. Spacer lore abounded with exaggerated tales of teamsters going postal after whole fruitless days wasted in the customs queue.

  On the whole, though, they were mostly weekend gamblers, hungry merchants, impatient deliverymen and refugee families from the Imperium's war in the Haliquant Quadrant. With the help of Abraham's scramble codifier, “The Finder's Keeper” ought to blend seamlessly in amongst them.

  “Ever been?” Abraham offers, noting the direction of her gaze.

  “Years ago. On business.”

  Bounty hunting had brought Moira Quicksilver into Gallow's seedy bosom on two previous occasions, both times on the trail of two separate and distinct bounty-heads. The first, a vainglorious bankrobber, she apprehended by her third morning there. The second, however, a deserter from a major syndicate, she'd frittered weeks away on ultimately losing his scent. The experience had taught her several valuable lessons, chief among them that the squalorous slums beneath Gallow's Underglow district weren't to be treaded needlessly or flippantly.

  To the aristocracy of the Inner Sectors, though, to those who don't dare delve any deeper than Worldshine's glitzy veneer, Gallow is nothing more than an urban playground. A garish, gambling haven of bright marquees, burlesque shows and palatial blocks-wide casinos, Gallow shames all the dicing dens and chance houses of the greater galaxy with its opulence. Indeed, the moon's very lunar cycle accommodates this wastrel lifestyle. The sixteen-month “day” is divided into two equal but opposite seasons – night season's eight-month drunken bender and day season's eight-month bleary hangover.

  The Unconstant Lover's forthcoming sojourn on Gallow was simultaneously wildly off-agenda and not devoid of a certain degree of fugitive's sense. A confusingly good idea from the Captain, Nemo's notion seemed to be that, as soon as Huong Xo sussed out that the Surimiah's subsequent scuttling was no mere coincidence, they'd immediately begin plumbing the depths of the Offchart Territories in search of the absconding pirates.

 
; Backwards logic, then, seemed to suggest they hole up as far from Xo's assumed hunting ground as physically possible. It was also Nemo who suggested Gallow – corrupt “as fuck,” his childhood home, a solid fixture in the Inner Sector's inner sanctum. None of the Lover's crew could muster an appropriate objection.

  “In which season?”

  “Night,” Moira supplies. “Both times.”

  “Well,” Abraham finishes his fiddling and adjusts his posture to better face her, “ye be in for a shock, then. Oughta be day season when we touch down. Swear to the moons, they be two different cities, all depending on where the sun's at.”

  “Originally, you're all from there, right? All three of you?”

  “No, actually.” His crooked eye subconsciously glances past the viewport. “We were each of us raised there, but in truth, ain't a one of us were born there.”

  Moira scowls. “I thought...” The end of the sentence catches quietly in her throat. “No,” she realizes, “I guess I just assumed.”

  Specific references to their pasts were few and far between. Moira could recall several instances in which Nemo, Odisseus and Abraham each evoked their individual youths misspent among Gallow's gutters and alleyways. Moira had taken these to mean that Gallow served as their shared home satellite. Sketchy as the details were, she supposes it was possible she'd misconstrued their meaning somewhat.

  As a Grimalti, Abraham conceivably would have been birthed on stormy Grimalt, but this meant that if the Captain and his Ortoki saltbrother weren't native to Gallow, they were native to somewhere else. She had never heard of any planet called Ortok.

  As one, the communication matrix at both Nemo's and Abraham's posts click alive with a burble of neon green. The Grimalti navigator replaces his mottled pointer finger at his beak in an earnest appeal for Moira's continued, silent cooperation. With a swift gesture on the control panel, he answers the customs cruiser's incoming hail and opens the comm channel live.

  “V&B FF2 Hulk Transport The Finder's Keeper,” the excruciatingly bored voice of a customs officer comes clean through the comm, “you are entering Criia system space. Please stand by–”

  Nemo explodes awake, whole body convulsing into action. He snaps his firearm instinctively from its holster and yammers out an indecipherable string of vowels and obscenities.

  “–for processing.”

  For once, Moira Quicksilver and Abraham Bonaventure share an impish and bad-natured chuckle at the Captain's expense.

  Two-Bit grimaces. Lifetime patron of gas station and vending machine, connoisseur of all things greasy, grimy and overly processed, Two-Bit Switch had enjoyed chocolate oysters, pickled omelets and lonktonk waffles across the galaxy without even a twinge of indigestion. A literal chum bucket overflowing with slimy, squashed fast food, this “Bucketa Burgers” steaming before the three diners might, however, prove the exception to the rule.

  At first blush, Two-Bit had assumed the phrase “Bucketa Burgers” was nothing more than another of the menu's colorful colloquialisms. He was to be quite gruesomely proven wrong upon their meal's actual arrival. At first bite, however, Two-Bit Switch of the cast-teltriton stomach, opted to leave his own buhoxburger rather solidly on the napkin, a napkin it proceeded to almost liquify with its mysterious secretions.

  The awning is all that remains to suggest this eatery once resembled a respectable restaurant. Obviously meant to cheerily represent a bright orange burger bun, it was now stained and besmirched practically beyond recognition.

  Word of mouth purports the scummy place to be called “Garbageburger.” The only actual signage is emblazoned upon the awning's rim in runny, green fractal paint. Whether the phrase “eat here or fuck off” is meant to signify the joint's ostensible motto or possibly even its intended name, Two-Bit's no idea.

  Despite the flagrant disregard for curb appeal, the uncommonly rude Garbageburger had achieved a cult following amongst Underglow’s most courageous residents. Enough diehard regulars swear up and down by the joint to keep its proverbial doors open.

  Two-Bit shares this Bucketa with two such regulars. Like a star-crossed lover, the Captain consummates the reunion between burger and bowel with great mouthfuls. His erstwhile cousin, despite his own recommendation, altogether forgoes the sodden meal in favor of a cigarette and a paper cup of chococino.

  Lunch was the first order of the day, after arranging accommodation at some squatter's nest Nemo and Odisseus picked out specifically for the occasion. Two-Bit and his Captain braved the seven-block walk to Garbageburger, through a slumland so despoiled as to give even the desensitized eyes of Two-Bit pause.

  Directly across the chasm, two Fivvite brutes armed with electrobatons, badges and police uniforms assault an elderly Swumese vagrant for fun or profit. Two stories above, Two-Bit spies the gutted-out carcass of a crashed driftambulence, protruding ominously from the side of the starscraper. A seven-member street gang, all variably armed, tattooed, chain-smoking or undressed, but all universally under the age of five, create a wide berth among the pedestrians on the catwalk adjoining the restaurant.

  Watching these ankle-biting ruffians from a safe distance, Two-Bit Switch has several unanswered questions about the Captain's, and how his cousin's, demeanor and desires suddenly answered.

  “Tell me what you think of this, like,” Flask, seated to Nemo's right, separates the paper cup from his lips to announce. “5.6 million.”

  “5.6 million,” Two-Bit, seated to Nemo's left, repeats. “What, cred?”

  “Yes fooking credits,” Flask confirms with vigor. “I'll say it again; 5.6 million credits.”

  Clutching his buhoxburger inches from his mouth, Nemo stammers for an appropriate response. “Uh, I like it.”

  “I really like it,” Two-Bit adds.

  “We both really like it.”

  “It's an incredible mathematical,” Two-Bit spreads his hands wide. “What the bloom are we talking about?”

  Armed with fresh knowledge since their last meeting, Two-Bit finally sees the family resemblance between Nemo and Flask. Though possessed of blonde hair, green eyes and full-blown Gallwegian accent in place of Nemo's black, gray and hint of one, the reputed pickpocket shares the Captain's distinct cheekbones and broad brow. They weren't close enough for siblings, perhaps, but they were certainly close enough for cousins.

  Whereas Nemo's dressed as the recently arrived spacer, Flask, with his unzippered windbreaker, his cigarette pinched between finger and coffee cup and his husky, occasional cough, is the very picture of the career urbanite.

  “Bank job I been planning. Goes down next week. Got all the numbers lined up just this morning and, hear me on this, the take's coming in at 5-point-fooking-6-million credits, like.”

  Two-Bit scowls. “Vault job pulls in seven figures?”

  Flask nods enthusiastically. “This city? You bet your bollocks, it do.”

  “Jotor's moons,” Two-Bit appreciates with a skyward glance. “Where's this filthy bunghole been all me life?”

  “Told you you'd like it,” Nemo grunts around his meal.

  Two-Bit approximates a hand shake or a pat on the back with a vague waving gesture. “Well, gratz are in order, then, mate. Job like this, what's your greez vizz like?”

  “I charge a nice, modest fifteen percent for me premium services. And that's casin', plannin', and retirement advice, if necessary.”

  Nemo swallows. “Hitting Ozwo Capital again?”

  Flask grins beneficently. “IIC, actually.”

  “Imperial Intergalactic Credit?” Two-Bit susses out. “The feds?”

  At this, Flask's smile only deepens.

  Nemo grunts into his dripping burger. “Why, cousin, what big balls you have.”

  “Everything goes according to my genius plan,” Flask prefaces, plucking the cigarette back between his lips, “nobody's even gotta fire a shot.”

  “How'd you scheme that?” Two-Bit wonders.

  “Well, goes like this,” Flask scoots himself severa
l inches forward on the counter, to better shield his story from the Myyrigon burger-flipper before the grill. “As is always the sorta thing happening this time of season 'round Worldshine, these banks and these casinos be back at each other's throats again, like. One casino shutting another down, one bank buying another up. All corporate warfare, you understand me, all elbowing each other for position and real estate before them high rollers come back in time for the night season.”

  “Granted,” Nemo allows.

  “Now, I got me a little bird in a financial planning office topside and she tells me IIC,” he asides towards Two-Bit, “biggest bloody banking firm in the Sectors and on the moon, yeah?” he turns back to Nemo, “is fixin' to make a move on this piddly little bank what went tits up last season. Classic corporate take-over, you get me?”

  “A square job.” Two-Bit nods. “Sure.”

  “Most of the time, they take fooking everything but the fooking building and most of things they take, they take digitally. The clients, the credits, all that.” He inches still closer to his two confederates. “But there's one thing they gotta move the old-fashioned way, one thing they ain't found a work-around for. The lettuce. The jangle. The hard stuff.”

  Nemo chews cluelessly. “...which means?”

  “Means,” Flask feeds, “they actually gotta send a physical fooking car around to pick up all the physical fooking money.”

  “Means that,” Two-Bit finishes, “for however long it takes to joy between them two vaults, all that physical fucking jangle's gonna be in one spot.”

  The notion finally clicks behind Nemo's eyes. “All 5.6 million of it.”

  Flask rewards himself for his brilliance by craning back in his seat and enjoying a prolonged drag on his cigarette. “That's more or less the fooking gist of it, yeah.”

  Admittedly predicated on very little personal experience working with him, Two-Bit would have best described Flask as a criminal fixer. He ran interference, he made introductions and he gathered supplies on any number of simultaneous jobs. Any fixer, Flask included, brought home their bacon by keeping as many fingers in as many profitable pies as physically possible, all the while avoiding as much of the actual limelight as they realistically could.