Hull Damage Read online

  Rooster scuttles out of the aftmost passenger dorm on six slippery feet, clutching boxes of tackle in two hands and offering a wave to Nemo as he weaves to his port and another to Odisseus as he passes on the starboard. Someone shaggy and reeking of powerful narcotics nosily vomits in the agape water closet, soliciting a sour cringe from Nemo as he glides genially by. Anchorage, leaning carelessly in the doorjamb of the bowmost passenger dorm and chatting amiably with Moira’s redskin, extends a trunk in greeting to the converging Captain.

  “Who let this drunken motherfucker on my ship?” Nemo begins, seemingly to the redskin, garnering only a polite snicker in response. Anchorage’s playful pat nearly bowls Nemo over.

  “How you been, you crazy stupid bastard?”

  Nemo staggers under the weight of the trunk’s dreadful wallop as he answers. “You know. Shivering timbers.”

  “Guess we’re both shivering ‘em this time, eh?” Nemo reciprocates the pat on Anchorage’s shoulder and starts to depart, heading towards the mess as the Aurik adds, “Hey, what’s with the hat?” Nemo percolates a chuckle as he strolls onward, Odisseus continuing to dog behind.

  After throwing a “How’s your shoulder?” down the medbay and receiving an unkind expletive in return, Captain Nemo moseys into the mess hall. Originally constructed for a crew much larger than five, most days the mess boasts little but loose crumbs, discarded food wrappers and vacancy. The crew’s dining room table, a grizzled, battle-scarred veteran of scuffed, ale-stained hardwood, lends the scent of aged Ujad mahogany to the accumulated aromas of stagnating groceries, crusted condiments and the smoky stench of the treacherously backfiring chiller, wafting in from the galley.

  Nemo draws a folded leaflet from within his jacket as he crosscuts the mess towards the galley, frowning at the room’s empty expanse. “Guess we’ll have to unlatch those spare tables, huh?” Odisseus tarries at the doorway as Nemo arrives in the homely kitchenette of a galley, abolishing his bowler on the counter and heading straight for the chiller.

  “You understand we can’t warp like this, right?” He tinkers with the charred helix with a foreclaw as he reminds.

  “I mean–” Nemo dangles.

  Odisseus cranes his neck forward. “What? You mean what?”

  Nemo stoops before the closed chiller door, seizing the sides as if to steady himself in his search. “Is it possible that we only have two magnets?”

  He’s answered by a shout emanating from down the hall, possibly even the medbay. “He’s not hanging it up, is he?”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure he is,” Odisseus responds.

  “By all the moons, Nemo–”

  Withdrawing a second sheet to his face for further examination, Nemo renders his verdict. “These yogurt coupons are eight months expired. I’m stealing their magnet.” Denouncing the defeated to the garbage and stamping the victor to the door with an air of nefarious satisfaction, Nemo rises out of the stoop and aimlessly pitches open the chiller, who wheezes exhaust in protest. “Gotta add magnets to the list,” he adds, distractedly.

  Odisseus shakes the riven helix in place of a clenched fist. “What about adding a pressure helix to the list?”

  “What the fuck…?” Nemo’s aghast, but certainly not on behalf of the helix. Peering back at Odisseus from between the galley’s assortment of hanging pots, he plasters on an affronted frown. “Somebody ate my leftovers.”

  “What?”

  Insult abdicates to indignation as Nemo’s shakedown of the chiller apparently goes south. “Yesterday, I had half a cup of sporefin bisque in here and now,” he deduces, burying an arm to the shoulder amid the clatter of bottles, “it’s gone!”

  “Bloom me out. Moons forbid, the bisque,” Odisseus mutters, seemingly to the scorched helix. Nemo, after banging the gasping chiller closed and remounting the bowler, blusters from the galley and breezes purposefully past his grumbling mechanic. Odisseus spins to follow, meekly uplifting the dismantled part in offering. “Nemo, the–”

  “Moira!” Nemo splays himself across the medbay’s entry. “Did you eat my leftovers?”

  Her reply is as obvious as it is peeved. “I was with you.”

  He seems to envisage this a moment, before repelling off the doorjamb. “Yeah,” he reckons and turns a consequent eye to Odisseus. “Abraham.” He’s off at once, loping back down the corridor with the obstinate abandon only he was capable of.

  “So, we’ll just blow up, then?” Odisseus proposes, renewing the pursuit afresh.

  “I guess,” he surrogates as a reply.

  “Nemo, I’m taking that bounty poster down!” Moira threatens.

  “I’m demoting you down to scullery maid!”

  “You already demoted me!”

  “I’m demoting you again!” Nemo elbows the door release and jaunts back into the overwrought light of the hold. Odisseus dashes up behind as swiftly as his stunted hind legs and his significant paunch will allow, managing to squeeze through before the double doors rattle to a close.

  “You wanna explode? I can go pull some other things off the engines, if–” Odisseus chastises up the companion way.

  Ascending the stairway to abovedecks, Nemo about-faces and takes three stairs backward to posit, “You don’t think you’re maybe overreacting?” before rotating forward again. Cursing his bulky tail as it thumps up each grated stair, Odisseus gives chase up the companionway, increasingly weary from the hunt and Nemo’s flagrant disregard. He activates the release, the double doors fizzle in complaint and he hounds Nemo down the abovedecks corridor.

  “Abraham!” Nemo challenges, yet is met by no reply. He forks starboard, groaning open the gundeck door and disappearing within. Odisseus splutters in exasperation and begins to tromp up the hallway, hoping to intercept him before he reaches the helm and quite possibly massacres not only the entire crew, but also, more importantly, the ship herself.

  An observation ceiling, an unbroken window of contoured, reinforced plexishield, spanning the full length of the corridor, crests the main abovedecks passageway. While voyaging, especially while warping, it afforded a reverential vantage point of the careening cosmos as the Lover lurched between worlds, but here, in port, it only saturated the hallway in the embarkation cylinder’s ocherous light. Odisseus, undeterred, pounds down the passageway and rounds the corner, expecting to head off Nemo but encountering someone else.

  Two-Bit’s cornered into the corridor’s crook by the newest recruit. Zella rubs noses and giggles, Two-Bit’s errant hands making the indelicate acquaintances of various parts of her anatomy. Odisseus would bother averting his gaze had he necessarily been surprised. Rather, he administers Two-Bit with another patented glower. “Two-Bit.”

  Zella hard at work on his neck, Two-Bit recognizes Odisseus with a slight nod of his chin. “Odi.”

  “Abraham?” Nemo, leaning out the mouth of the interior hallway, surveys up and down the accordion fold of the corridor, cringes at sight of Two-Bit’s bawdiness and informs, “I threw your coupons away.”

  Two-Bit scowls. “What?”

  “Nemo–” Odisseus signals with the splintering helix to snag Nemo’s attention, who attempts to hold him at bay with a gesture and before turning to Two-Bit.

  “Where’s Abraham?”

  “I think he’s up at the chair. What’d you do with my vouches?”

  Nemo immediately bestrides the six stairs to the helm door. “I threw them out. The yogurt ones.”

  “What'd you do that for?”

  “They were expired andIneededthemagnet!” Nemo manages to quash together before the helm door sputters and slaps closed behind him.

  Zella demurs a moment. “You eat yogurt?”

  Odisseus thrusts both paws in the air, bewildered. “Does no one care that this just fell off the engine?”

  Zella redirects her puzzlement. “Is that important?”

  Two-Bit raises a timid hand. “I care.”

  By this point, Nemo has long departed, vanishing into the helm in quest o
f his culprit. Odisseus sighs out a hindered sigh as he deliberately mounts each step, taps the entry button with his middle claw and shuffles into the helm.

  Dirty dishes dot the dashboards. Crumpled clothes, laundry left in the lurch, collect in corners. A bottle of blue booze bides abandoned on the counter. Dowdy and cluttered as such, the place resembles a disheveled artist’s studio more than a starship bridge, though Odisseus, the Lover's de facto custodian, would never hazard to tidy up the place.

  Perched six feet atop abovedecks, the helm presides over The Unconstant Lover like the eyes of a frog. Trapezoids of orange decant through the partitioned viewport, submerging the dials, the buttons, the inset screens and the myriad of other related reins and controls arranged across her consoles, in brazen copper light. Deactivated like this, she looks lifeless, harmless.

  Only a single screen, the route regulator on the navpanel, is afire, piercing the russet illumination with palpable green. Abraham, bulbous face flushed verdant, scrunches over said read-out and peers, displeased, within. Nemo, at hand, leans against the support bar between the co-pilot’s seat and the door.

  “Can’t say as I’ve any idea what yer talkin’ about, Cap’n,” Abraham acquiesces.

  “Bisque, you fat bastard. Sporefin bisque.”

  “Don’t know what that is.” He scrolls a dial between his forefinger and thumb and continues to ponder the monitor. “She be havin’ a hard time coagulatin’ a lock on Danboowui. Lemme try and widen the sweep.” Fiddling with a keypad for several seconds, he turns a squinting eye the Ortok's direction. “Odisseus.”

  He reciprocates a polite nod, but sharpens his efforts against the Captain. “Nemo, seriously, you can’t try to warp out of here withou–”

  “It’s soup.”

  Odisseus clenches his fangs. Abraham ceases scrolling and passes a skeptical glance over his shoulder.

  “What?”

  “Bisque. It’s soup. I had half a thing of it in the chiller. Did you eat it?” Nemo pontificates with a series of increasingly exasperated gestures.

  Abraham brackets an imaginary soup tin. “Little container. This big?”

  “Yes.”

  “I ate that.” He returns aloof to the navpanel. “And it was more like a quarter of a thing.”

  “It was mine!” Nemo gripes. “You can’t–”

  He resumes transcribing his code into the regulator, unremitting. “Didn’t have no name on it.”

  “But, I’m–” Nemo wrestles for a righteous response, but Abraham persists.

  “No name? Fair game.”

  Nemo begins an objection, but a buzz from his belt interrupts. He unloops his comm and answers. “Nemo here.”

  “Freight’s all stowed and she’s trim, Captain,” The warbled voice of Moira reports.

  The comm hisses. “All ready to cast loose down there?” Nemo inquires.

  “Aye aye.”

  “Tell the crew I wanna chat. In the hold in ten.”

  “Aye aye.”

  “And dig Two-Bit up. Tell him to roll out the last keg.” Nemo quiets the comm and re-loops it. “You get a lock?”

  “Will have. How soon afore ye put her at the gate?”

  “Usually about seven minutes.”

  Abraham frowns approvingly. “Should do her.” Odisseus advances to Abraham, hoping to appeal to his increased sense of mariner’s prudence.

  “Can you do me a favor and tell Nemo that he really, really doesn’t wanna warp without a pressure–”

  “This came offa which one?”

  “Port.”

  The Grimalti plucks at the outstretched helix with a few flabby and investigative fingers. “Probably ain’t mucha cause for alarm, really.” Odisseus affixes him with a perplexed look.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oughta be a pretty clean jump. Just hopping gate-to-gate. Danboowui’ll handle all the decel themselves.”

  Odisseus balks. “You wanna warp somewhere without functional brakes.”

  “Gate’ll take care of all that, like I said. We was jumpin’ dirty, I’d agree with ye straight down the hatch. But this ain’t that.” He rises from the stoop and offers a conciliatory shrug. “’Sides, it’s quick one anyway. Should be there by tomorrow night.”

  “But–”

  Abraham plops a palm to Odisseus' shoulder. “Trust me, lad. I’ve seen worse boats than this ol’ girl make it farther with worse wounds.” He taps twice and totters past. “Pressure helix’ll keep.” He tosses a glance over his shoulder, wattle swinging in response. “I’ll go make contact with the gate. Seven minutes?”

  “Six,” Nemo replies, prying loose his second boot. The door stammers open and Abraham’s gone, wobbling toward the warp room. Odisseus turns the wrenched helix over in his paws as Nemo unburdens a concealed smile of fraternal recognition. He topples into his cherished chair, the harried helmsman’s seat, tapping his emancipated toes against the floor panels.

  “You don’t treat her well, she’ll kill you,” Odisseus admonishes. Nemo privates the smile to a smirk as he wheels the chair about in three twisting strokes.

  As he aligns forward, the yoke reaches to Nemo and pulls him in, his fingers rooting in furrows eroded by two years of hairpin turns and accelerations violent enough to shudder the ship. They hold hands, in a manner of speaking, a manual weaving of intimacy, even to Odisseus’ contextual observation. Nemo's smile blossoms.

  His hands dance affectionately across the apocryphal controls like fox-trotting spiders – twisting dials, snapping switches and adjusting keys as the helm resurrects in burbles of green. “You worry too much, brother,” he intones as the first of the driftjets ignite.

  –––

  Two-Bit Switch can’t decide whether they look bloodthirsty or ridiculous. Certainly the ten sentients lined up, port to starboard, in the Lover's hold were a roster of truly mean cocksuckers, armed head-to-toe with grit, gristle and gunmetal. They’re scuzzy, tattooed, chain-smoking, drug-addled, alcoholic mongrels, each with records of misdeed and violence on every round planet past the Midworlds, yet the more Two-Bit considers them, the harder it becomes to shake images of a circus sideshow from his head.

  Ebeneezer is an eight-foot tall, royal purple cyclops with a stunted horn sprouting out of his chin. Odisseus’ vice-mechanic, apparently named Marco the Mange, is a shabby Mruka grouch, barely three feet from the floor and seemingly beset by some irritant form of skin condition. Rooster has ten limbs. Salo has transparent skin. Anchorage has a trunk. Processed out before the pacing Captain as they were, Two-Bit couldn’t honestly decide if they were about to rape and ravage or all pile into a tiny driftcar.

  “I ain’t overly fond of rules or regulations,” Nemo opens, “so, I imagine this’ll be brief.” He halts between Moira’s redskin and Garrok Brondi, thrusting out a thumb. “First, respect my officers. In the case that you’re an idiot and haven’t figured out who the officers are yet, let me introduce you.”

  He approximates that thumb toward Two-Bit, resting the heel of his boot against the larder’s last keg of gin and leaning forward on his knee. He extends a hand, fingers flanged, in greeting. “Two-Bit Switch. Normally, he serves as the onboard cutpurse-copilot-jailbreaker-mouthpiece, but I’m making him your quartermaster. You gotta problem, bring it to Two-Bit. He’s good people, hard as a coffin nail and twice as sharp, but whatever you do, no matter what he tells you, do not play cards with him.” Two-Bit flashes a loutish smile and cracks the fingers of his right hand against his thumb.

  “My most trusted mechanic and boon companion, Odisseus, is our ship’s engineer and de facto bosun.” If one chose to qualify a slight shifting of haunch weight and a narrowing of his gaze as an acknowledgment, Odisseus, standing to Two-Bit’s right and clasping the box of turbine caps in both paws, acknowledges the marauder crew. “Yes, he’s an Ortok. Yes, he understands but doesn’t speak Commercial. Yes, he’s the best in the biz and yes, if you break anything motorized on the ship, even the bloomin’ blender, tell him immed
iately or we’ll all probably die or something.”

  Nemo enlists his middle finger. “And, of course, you’re all very afraid of my first mate, Moira Quicksilver. Deadshot. Ex-bounty hunter. Femme fatale. Party-pooper. Probably always agree with her and never, ever go near her quarters or,” he cranes forward, dilating his eyes and fluttering his fingers like a birthday party magician, “she’ll murder you.” To Two-Bit’s right, Moira exhibits a cold bristle, arms crooked and hip popped.

  Flicking his fourth finger, Nemo concludes austere. “My sailing master requires less introduction than I’ve just given him.” Sitting an empty crate ten feet beyond and steeping the swabbies in his askance scrutiny, the qualifications of Abraham Bonaventure, eminent picaroon of yesteryear, were evident to every dastard on Takioro and, as Nemo’d asserted, demanded no elaboration.

  “And then there’s me,” he concludes, tossing his hands with ten fingers splayed, as if raining confetti burst from his wrists. “I’m the Captain and I’m responsible for all this mess. If any one of these four gives you an order, assume that it came from me.”

  “The second rule,” he treads a little further down the line, between Rooster and Zella, and expounds, “is something of a catch-all, summarized thusly: Don’t be a fuck.” A few of the assembled snigger. “I ain’t gonna break your balls about nothing specific, but basically, don’t get caught stealing, don’t get caught cheating and try to refrain from killing each other, at least until the job’s done.”

  “What do we do if wanna fuck?” Zella poses, snaring Two-Bit in a leer.

  “Not tell me about it,” Nemo replies, without missing a beat. Two-Bit breaks eye contact by pretending to knead his temples with thumb and middle finger. “And finally, the most important rule, the only rule that’s truly inviolable, should you value your stinky hides.” Two-Bit spies that chronic morose fire reclaim the Captain's eyes as he predicates. “This ain’t the navy and we’re none of us sailors. Atop my deck, beneath my colors, you’ll all say ‘aye aye.’ Wanna get shot? Say ‘affirmative.’”