Galactic Menace Read online

  From his humble pickpocket beginnings, Flask maintains a reputation as a top-flight middleman for any underhanded dealings in the Inner Sectors. Although they'd only collaborated on one gunrunning stint several years in the past, Two-Bit could vouch nothing but professionalism for the Captain's cousin and childhood playmate.

  Plus, all reports indicated Flask had quick fingers, decent aim and a steady enough hand at a driftmotor to make even Nemo take note, all three valuable virtues indeed for a hoodlum.

  “Wow,” Two-Bit comments. “Gotta fess, that's right clever of you.”

  “Best part is,” Flask continues from his reclined position, “day of a bank transfer like this, they would have just finished unmarking all those bills. Shit's gonna be fooking untraceable.”

  Two-Bit grunts in half surprise. “I suppose that's one of them Inner Sector crunches I ord so much about – traceable jangle and law enforcement and such.”

  “Lemme guess,” Nemo resurfaces from the cheesy quagmire of his burger long enough to ask, “you dug up Stubb and that girlfriend of his, whatserface with the mandibles, to pull the job for you?”

  Flask reaches for his chococino. “Fooker's dead. Two years back.”

  Nemo halts chewing. “You're blasted. What got him?”

  “Whatserface. With the mandibles.”

  Hunger, rather than grief, is the Captain's next visible emotion. He returns to his lunch, pausing briefly to attach the addendum, “You know, I warned him,” before devouring what remains of his burger.

  “So,” Two-Bit advances into the gap, “what you're jabbing is...”

  “Normally,” Flask returns to his more secretive position, depositing what remains of his beverage and propping both forearms against the counter, “this kinda work, I turn to Bash and his boys.”

  Two-Bit masterfully masks any disappointment. “Good brunos?”

  “The best. But, as it so happens, Bash recently got himself pinched and the rest of the boys are under 'federal investigation' until further notice.”

  “Oof,” Nemo remarks. “Bad luck.”

  “So,” Two-Bit repeats, mimicking Flask's earlier posture and nudging himself further up the counter to better conspire with Nemo's cousin, “what you're jabbing is...”

  Gazing into its chocolate depths, Flask swills his coffee in tight circles, as though to shake something loose from the paper cup's bottom. “Looking at a four-man crew. Action-capable, but, like I said, hopefully that won't be necessary.” Dissatisfied with his spinning, he returns the cup to the counter and pops the cigarette into his mouth instead. “For the plan to work, we're gonna need approximately a week's prep time and somebody who knows his way around a cutting beam.” He coughs inwardly, shortens his cigarette of its ashes into an available tray and reaches again for the paper cup. “Spotter with a police-band radio wouldn't hurt fooking either.” He pauses before quaffing the remainder of his chococino, makes direct eye contact with Two-Bit and smirks suggestively. “Know anybody?”

  An overenthusiastic toddler spotting a puppy through the pet store window, Two-Bit ardently tugs Nemo's sleeve. “Pretty please, Cap'n?”

  “Hmm,” Nemo intones around a mouthful of buhoxburger. “You know, I'd love to, Flask, but hiding out was kinda sorta supposed to be the whole reason for coming here in the first place. I agree to another job on the sly, Moira'll eat my heart.”

  “Fuck Moira! 5.6 million!”

  “Yeah, fuck Moira, 5.6 million,” Nemo caves.

  Flask chuckles in earnest. “You fooking scumbag,” he directs toward Nemo. “Do I know you or what?”

  “This kinda jangle can lavender us for months! Xo'll keel over from blooming boredom before they snuff us out!” Two-Bit slaps Nemo on the sleeve. “He's my new blooming favorite of your cousins.”

  Flask winces and makes a tiny pinching gesture with the hand not occupied with his cigarette. “One tiny snag.”

  “Hoo boy,” Nemo reacts before stuffing a truly prodigious portion of the soggy burger into his agape mouth.

  “An Ortok, most likely, is gonna arouse too much suspicion,” Flask relays, a certain degree of regret and even apprehension present on his features. “The plan unfortunately requires our big furry buddy to be benched, and four robbers of a more or less humanoid persuasion. Which'll be you, you, your bounty hunter girlfriend–”

  Nemo freezes solid, terror in his eyes, mouth further agape and morsels of hyper-processed buhoxmeat tumbling out. “She's not my girlfriend.”

  “–and someone else,” Flask finishes.

  Two-Bit opens his mouth to respond, but Nemo's a second too fast. “You've got ideas, I take it?”

  “I've a list of potential candidates, if that's what you fooking mean.” Flask counts on fingers. “There's Pierro. There's Lummox. Cile Clunk does have that club foot, if you remember–”

  “–but Jotor's own right hook,” Nemo evaluates.

  “Hang on,” Two-Bit interjects. “What're you doing?”

  Flask crinkles his brow. “Pardon?”

  “You. You schemed the thing, didn't you? You know the ins and outs. I mean, why bother scoring us another wank, why jank up the take even further, when there's always you?”

  Nemo scoffs, spewing beef across his corner of the counter. “Oh, he doesn't do the heavy lifting. Flask doesn't get his hands dirty.”

  The party in question shrugs helplessly. “Personal rule.”

  “Buhoxshit,” Two-Bit protests. “If he gets to squat out, I get to squat out.”

  “Are you bein' thick? I planned the fooking thing, I earned the right to 'squat' out.”

  Popping the remainder of the burger into his mouth, Nemo pushes back his stool and rises suddenly to his feet. “Nobody's squatting out.”

  “But, he–”

  “Hey, now–”

  “I'm going.” The Captain points respectively. “Two-Bit's going. You're going.”

  With a protestant scoff, Flask's suddenly all petulance. “We're not eight fooking years old anymore,” he appeals. “We're not spray-painting tiny little pricks onto the headlamps of Officer Drofka's fooking squad car.”

  “Aw, you remember that?”

  “Point is,” Flask counters Nemo's finger with his own, “you're not the fooking boss of me no more.”

  “Oh, yes I am,” Nemo snarls with childish relish.

  Quick as a flash, he shuffles behind his cousin's chair and suddenly ensnares Flask by the neck in a sloppy imitation of a wrestler's headlock. With surprise and the dread of great familiarity, Flask flails to escape. Caught unawares, he cannot displace the implacable Nemo, who's already begun to knead the top of his cousin's skull with the bony part of his knuckles – a “noogie” or a “scalper” by Takioro station waif parlance.

  “Who's the boss of you?” he chides with playful menace.

  Flask thrashes. “Youse fooking cunt, you!” The burger joint is momentarily usurped by the clamor of creasing leather, scraping barstools and immaturity. With a creeping smile, Two-Bit bears witness to a six-second reversion to their previous dynamic, a dynamic they'd established two decades younger and two feet shorter.

  “Three little words! Who's the boss of you?”

  “You're the fooking boss!” Flask relents chokingly. Nemo relents a second later, releasing his hold on his cousin and chuckling companionably. Flask flops to the counter, massaging his neck and muttering unknowable obscenities.

  “See? How hard was that?”

  “What caffles me about it,” Two-Bit remarks to both, though neither is probably listening, “is the bloomin' synchronicity of it all, you know?” He weaves his fingers together for emphasis. “I mean, you couldn't bugger for better timing than this, even if you tried!”

  Two-Bit gapes. “What?”

  “I cannot believe you fell for that,” Moira, in the aisle seat two rows ahead, intones.

  “You cannot believe I fell for what?”

  Seated across the aisle and only one row ahead, Odisseus listlessly turns a broch
ure over in his paws and grumbles something about “coincidence.”

  Occupying the same row as Two-Bit but the opposite end, Abraham does his level best to speak around the mammoth pipe brimming from his fleshy beak. “Ye're suggestin' what exactly?”

  “He's suggesting,” Moira supplies, “Flask didn't just have a spare caper lying around. And we didn't just come to Gallow for no good reason. And somebody very deliberately wanted this to happen.”

  A sinking sensation made its presence known in Two-Bit's stomach. “Who? The Cap'n?”

  Odisseus growls an affirmative. A weighty silence passes between the four crewmates.

  “Explains,” Abraham supposes at length, “why we ain't lamming it on Nym or Bril or some other Offchart rock right about now.”

  “Also explains,” Moira adds with evident derision, “why he was so uncharacteristically chipper at the prospect of hiding out for bloom knows how long.”

  “Also also hums it,” Two-Bit finally supplies, a hand tossed up in frustration, “why he couldn't be mithered to jabb a fucking word at that eatery yesterday.”

  For his part, Odisseus mutters something about “spooky” and the crew, for several more seconds, stew in joint embarrassment.

  “And if you look to your left,” the Byori woman blares through her megaphone “you'll see the R. Jalton Grand, home of the galaxy-renowned TripleXXXettes, Gallow's second-largest all-sibling burlesque show.”

  The ongoing search for Nemo-proof locales to conduct these covert crew meetings in continued apace. This time around, the Lover's four lieutenants each shelled out seventy credits a head to congregate in the last three rows of a local sightseeing driftbus circumnavigating Gallow's spectacle-studded Worldshine District. Accompanied by a single bemused tourist couple and an underwhelming Byori tour guide, Gallow Uptown Tours completed a ninety-minute closed loop of the Arrival Tier's greatest attractions and amusements.

  Odisseus' idea originally, they each prayed they'd found absolutely the last place a native born Gallwegian ought to bump into his errant officers and the ideal locale to discuss the merits of Flask's proposed bank job.

  Despite the matter at hand, Two-Bit, always latently guilty about having never visited Gallow, cannot help but indulge in a little peripheral sightseeing himself. Their double-decker craft obliges him, ambling between city starscrapers made topless from height and bottomless from depth.

  Crowds, confinement and claustrophobia are the most apt descriptors of Takioro life, where the only expansiveness is horizontal and where even that is something of a vain pretext. Here, though, verticality is the order of the day. The city abounds ten thousand feet below the driftbus' current position and ten thousand feet above it, a panoramic urban immensity that encompasses a full fifty percent of the moon's surface. Even from his limited vantage atop the humble tour bus, Two-Bit is struck by the idea that he could wander Gallow's boulevards in any direction for months before reaching the city's outer limits.

  Ten weeks into the day season, however, Two-Bit looks upon Worldshine for the first time at its most lusterless. The sky perennially overcast, its advertisements are disarmed and the whole city seems suffused with a vague sense of stagnancy, despite its obvious vastness.

  Denoting points of reconstruction like scar tissue on otherwise unmarred flesh, steel and canvas scaffolds bristle from facades of every starscraper, complete with the combined chorus of whining power tools and chattering day-laborers. Presumably designed to be read exclusively in darkness, the many billboards, marquees and storefronts Two-Bit sees are rendered almost invisible by daylight, their wares unadvertised, their promises unheeded. For all the limitless industry and endless manpower it would require to build everything within the mere view of Two-Bit's vision, he sees precious few actual people, barring the workmen on their scaffolds and the occasional passing pedestrian. The streets and catwalks more or less abandoned, Two-Bit can only imagine how jam-packed with people Gallow's upper reaches would be during the day season's wasteful sister, the night season.

  “Why specifically a bank job on Gallow?” Moira poses. “What's his interest?”

  “Well,” Two-Bit, somewhat flustered by embarrassment, scrambles to save face, “'cause it's a gritty ace gig, isn't it? We pull this job, it stands to be the most profitable we ever pulled.”

  Abraham plucks the pipe from his mouth. “Are we pullin' it?”

  “Are we not?” Two-Bit challenges, inching slightly forward in his seat. “Key here is how solid the caper is. Sure, maybe Nemo wasn't exactly facting upfront about it but, by all rights, the Cap'n should have no jazz in a bum job. We know he ain't flipped, that's for blooming sure,” he denounces with a dismissive wave. “Way I vizz it, we play along, we blag this bank and we ask ringers later.” He props up a reasonable shrug. “Sound feez?”

  The clear opposition to all things risky, Odisseus rumbles out a minutes-long sequence of involved phrases Two-Bit doesn't quite follow, but that certainly contains the words “Surimiah,” “suspicious” and “asses.” After the Ortok concludes, Two-Bit makes a non-verbal plea to his left for translation.

  “He's, quite naturally, suspicious,” Abraham supplies.

  “Course he is.”

  “He worries,” the Grimalti asides to Odisseus a moment, “I'mana just directly quote ye on this,” he cocks his bloated head back toward Two-Bit, “'that Nemo's obvious ulterior motives are gonna come around and bite us when our asses least expect it.'”

  “Course he does.”

  “But Xo is his main concern,” Moira clarifies. “He doesn't see how coming to Gallow changes anything. He says, even if they haven't read between the lines about the Surimiah thing, intentionally dropping us back on Xo's radar, which, he claims, is exactly what this bank job will do, is just about the dumbest possible course of action he can imagine.”

  Two-Bit chews his lip. “No squeak you've checked our postings, Quicksilver?”

  “Not recently,” she admits.

  “Well, until Moira's checked and we're certain Xo's back on the warpath, there's no razz we can't be prepping for the future. Case you all blanked, we've less than a quarter mil in the gantine's fund and, at our current crackle, that'll be fumes in three months, probably less.” Two-Bit conducts a brief visual survey of his crewmates. “Vault job like this, quick and hoovy, high risk, sure, but higher sweets – could be just what the stitch ordered.”

  Both undeclared crewmembers match glances, attempting to gauge the other's stance.

  “And on your right, you'll see Highroller Mac's, the very same nightclub where Nivvie “The Vannaphant” Ganti gunned down Marmos “Three Thumbs” and his men in the famous Temperance Day Massacre.”

  “All things being equal,” Abraham first stipulates, “I'd agree with Odisseus.” An unusual expression, one Two-Bit doesn't quite recognize on the Grimalti's withered mug, crosses Abraham's normally champion pokerface. He detects traces of mirth, anticipation and uncertainly all equally present. “But, me better devils have me curious. Boy's plannin' something. Don't know what it is. Mayhaps I got a vested interest to find out.” He re-inserts the pipe and casts a moody glance towards the passing city beyond. “We don't follow along, may never find out.”

  Odisseus fails to stifle a faint growl of frustration. Two-Bit, the bigger man, sticks out his tongue. The Ortok tosses a question in Moira's direction, one Two-Bit manages to translate as simply “And you?”

  After a moment of apparent internal debate, Moira offers a reluctant shrug and a reluctant reply. “I'm actually kind of agreeing with Two-Bit?”

  His obvious disbelief betraying his meaning as simply, “You can't do that,” Odisseus appears momentarily baffled.

  “Much as I'm repulsed to admit it, 5.6 million makes a convincing argument. Assuming this isn't a terrible idea and assuming Nemo hasn't gone well and truly off the deep end,” Odisseus makes some snorting comment at that, “a million a head ought to be more than enough to cover our tracks for life. Not that I'm suggesting this,�
�� Moira allows, “but that's retirement.”

  Two-Bit commits several seconds on his fingers to mock arithmetic. “Lemme just do the mathematicals on that; three in favor, one opposed.” He locks eyes with an inwardly fuming Odisseus. “Vizzes like we're knockin' this bank over, then.” In order to perfectly combine insult with injury, he reposes back in his uncomfortable bus seat and plants hands behind head. “Democracy works.”

  “Now, if you look directly overhead, you might just catch a glimpse inside the 66-million credit summer home of feedfilm star Dein Drisco through the kitchen's stylish Voyeuro850 TranspoFloor.”

  “No excuse for lettin' yer guard down, though,” Abraham warns after a sizable silence. “Keep yer peepers peeled, keep yer ears to the ground for the first sign of trouble out of the ordinary but, I think the lad's right there. Long as we stay one step ahead of the Cap'n, no harm, no foul, far as I can tell.”

  Sorest of losers, Odisseus makes some snarling rebuff with paws tossed futilely in the air. Two-Bit leans inches towards him.

  “Sorry?”

  Moira's translation manages to capture ten times the portend of Odisseus' actual comment. “He says we're clearly not one step ahead. He says the real question is how no one could see this coming. How did Nemo, of all people, pull the wool over each and every one of our eyes?”

  This successfully strikes a grim chord within all four of them. Nemo's confidantes chew the ominous silence that so often concludes these backdoor meetings of theirs.

  Duplicity, tact and other tools of delicate social manipulation were better left for finer minds; Nemo was quite clearly more a being of bold strokes and boastful intentions. Despite this, however, he'd somehow managed to clandestinely arrange an entire off-the-record caper, appear completely surprised, even reluctant, upon the job's unveiling and finally puppeteer his hesitant crew into nearly unanimous acceptance.