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  The unwise dither at this while the observant keep quiet. “Now, Abraham’s got the gate dialed to take us to Danboowui before tomorrow night but, before we make way, there’s one little hurdle we gotta overcome.” He gestures absently behind, signaling Odisseus and Two-Bit. “Ain’t nobody sleeps on my ship that hasn’t shared a tap with me. Savvy?”

  Two-Bit and Odisseus begin to distribute the alcohol amid a general murmur of concurrence. Only after several of the blackened turbine caps, brimming with frothy liquid, have been dispensed does the first question come.

  Moira's Myyrigon sloshes its contents listlessly. “Glass is dirty.”

  “Yeah, what gives, Cap’n?” Anchorage vocalizes.

  “It’s a turbine cap,” Marco identifies. “Junk part off an afterburner. Fuel scorchin’ means you gotta replace ‘em after each jump.”

  “We don’t seriously gotta drink swill outta this, do we?” Ebeneezer appeals. As soon as each marauder holds a sooty tumbler of Gitterswitch, Nemo hoists his own in toast.

  “Only by the strength and speed of the vessel under our feet are we afforded the life we lead. By drinking her fuel, you chart a brigand’s course of pillage and plunder, all at the suffrage of The Unconstant Lover.”

  They need no further instruction. Hoisting sudsy flagons of their own, just as Two-Bit and undoubtedly Odisseus, Moira and Abraham once had, they reprise in slipshod unison. “The Unconstant Lover!”

  Chapter 5

  Captain Barso ardently hopes to drown out her next question by drumming vigorously on the dashboard and cranking the astropunk riffs up to eleven so they practically rip through the ship's speakers.

  Incorrigible as ever, she persists anyway. “Captain?”

  Barso begrudgingly lolls his head to the side. “What?”

  “Six letter word for Ujadi jungle predator.” She cranes innocently up from her creased volume, making eye contact. “Fifty-four down.”

  Aubra Whipul, former freelance fighter jockey turned current freelance freighter jockey, possessed an abhorrent predilection toward mindless distractions. His first mate for four years and his second pilot since terminating his contract with Valladia and flying professional, she could paint portraits with exhaust and catch sunrises before their time zones could. The kicker to this, of course, was her unfathomable interest in the banalest of activities. She perpetually fiddled with something - knitting needles, puzzle cubes, word finds or marble mazes and never quite took the hint that she was, among the crew, utterly alone in her passion for tedious contrivance.

  The last six runs she’d sat, legs crossed, tail tapping the teltriton, in the swoop-back pilot’s seat, absolutely occupying every moment of her attention not spent actually flying the ship with a dog-eared and much-maligned book of crossword puzzles. To Whipul, every question was a profound mystery whose solution was a star-shattering epiphany. So invariably, every four or five clues, she’d stump herself and involve the Captain in the ascertainment of its answer.

  With a submissive sigh, Barso extracts his crossed boots from the dashboard and leans forward in his own swoop-back towards the transceiver, usurping the grungy astropunk refrain in favor of a burble of abrasive static with a twist of his forefinger on the dial.

  “Arlaxi,” he relents, cranking the dial in quest of suitable music. “A-R-L-A-X-I. Fifty-four down.”

  She furrows her brow and glances back to her booklet. “Huh. Fits.” She scrawls the inkjetter down the column. “Didn’t know they were on Ujad.”

  “They’re on a lot of places,” Barso replies, attempting not to count the seconds until she posited another inquiry for collective contemplation.

  Danboowui blushes bloody crimson through the windshield, eclipsing half the viewport with its orblike curvature. Outside, the petroleum drone hums in contentment that corresponds to the gradual spiking of the fuel gauge’s shaky needle. The fragrances of industrial high-octane starch soap and Kukane’s latest weapons-grade apple goulash waft in from down the hallway as the foul-mouthed quartermaster advances, by sud and scrub, his crusade against dirty dishes.

  It would nearly be a moment of domestic serenity, one of those few so difficult to seize from the chaos and clamor of a smuggled existence, if Barso could only find a halfway decent radio station.

  Only more static rewards his efforts, however, as he ranges the digital dial. Occasional snatches of music or dialogue breach the tangle of white noise, but never anything even vaguely decipherable. Barso frowns.

  “Fucking boonie rocks.”

  “Hm?” Whipul resurfaces from her brainteaser. “You say something?”

  Barso clicks the transceiver left and drops back into the chair, returning his heels to the dashboard. “Ninety zottibles into Bad Space, can’t beam in a single fucking station.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I don’t know,” she hesitates a moment and Barso drops his head to his hand. “Four-letter word for Offchart frontier moon. Eleven across.”

  From the perch of his palm, Barso is finally fed up. “What exactly is the point of a crossword?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, let’s say, hypothetically, that you have just completed a crossword puzzle. What’s your next move? Start another one?”

  “I don’t follow you, Captain.”

  Hoisting his head up, he out-turns both wrists and makes his pitch. “Ostensibly, and correct me if I’m wrong here, but ostensibly, when you’ve completed a crossword puzzle, you’ve learned something that you didn’t previously know, right?”

  She squints, apparently attempting to decipher his tactic. “Sure.”

  “I mean, you now know, for example, that Gren, G-R-E-N, is a four-letter word for an Offchart frontier moon–”

  “Oh,” she remarks, dropping the inkjetter back to the page.

  “–but, my point is, how could you have learnt that information without someone to pester? They don't give you the tools you need to answer the questions.” He pokes his armrest in casual accusation. “You couldn't do a crossword puzzle alone. You couldn't ask me.”

  After completing the “N” of eleven across, Aubra Whipul affects her most unrelenting deadpan as she regards her Captain. “But I'm not alone and I can ask you.”

  Barso blinks. “You're not listening to me. That's exactly–”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Barso can see, by way of the rearview imager, the petrodrone as it explodes, a turbulent fireball of escalating detonations. He’s barely time to blink before the whole Hourly Wage is pitched violently starboard, unseating both Barso and Whipul and casting them vehemently to the deck. Wailing sirens and screeching damage reports assail Barso as he groggily heaves himself off his stomach to discover Whipul has recovered significantly quicker; she's astride the pilot’s seat, flipping dials and terminating alarms.

  “Captain, we’ve got 33% damage on the port quarter, as well as total non-communication with the petrodrone or–,” she frantically toggles a set of apparently non-responsive switches, “–or our own fuel tanks, sir.”

  Barso clambers into his seat, disarming klaxons and alerts as steadily as he can manage. “Convert to emergency fuel supply and take us forward half a dott.”

  “Affirmative, sir.” She grapples the yoke in hooked fingers, repeatedly taps a trio of diminutive red buttons and rockets forward, pulling the ship away from the warp gate and the smoldering ruin of the petrodrone. “What, you think an accident?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. What’s the fuel reserve?”

  “Oughta last twelve, maybe fifteen minutes.”

  “Fuck. Not enough to put us on the ground. Buzz ahead, contact Port Authority for assisted re-entry. I’ll tell Kukane to–” he peels out of the swoop-back as she interjects.

  “Why don’t we just dock at the warp–”

  “Gotta deliver the goods to fix the ship,” is Barso’s only justification as he jogs back down the hallway. Two seconds of dizzy scuttling brings him to the handrail and he shouts below. “Kukane!”

  Down the kitche
n well, prone Kukane glares indignantly up from a pile of spilled and sudsy dishes. “Fuck was that, Cap’n?”

  “Tell the crew to strap in – we’ve got a bumpy landing coming up!”

  “Captain!” comes Whipul’s shout back up the bridge. Kukane scampers to his feet, offers a brief salute and dashes off, hollering obscenities with every step. Barso wheels around and darts back into the bridge, where Danboowui swells in the viewport.

  “What is it?”

  “We’ve got a ship, coming off the warp station and closing, sir. She’s offering a hail.”

  Barso scowls. “Double fuck.”

  Whipul quickly pales, snapping back to the disquieted Captain. “You don’t think–”

  “I don’t know. What’s her model?”

  Whipul dials the ident matrix rapidly, whizzing through a dizzying array of various starship outlines. “Uh, I’m reading her as a, uh,” the computer settles on one, a burdensome asymmetrical junker. “Light Cargo Freighter. Briza – Model IZ36.”

  “Huh. Well, she’s no reaver. Probably a scavenger, flying a heap like that. Bring her up, see if we can’t negotiate something.”

  Whipul slaps the comm transceiver with the meat of her palm and cranes forward, submitting the greeting. “Unidentified Briza Light Freighter, this is TFS F9 Heavy Cargo Hauler, The Hourly Wage. We’ve come into a circum–” she freezes and inches back in recoil, as if being struck.

  As though on cue, the comm screen shorts out and displays a static image, followed swiftly by every other screen in the cockpit – where once blazing alarms, damage assessments and vital statistics scrawled, now only a single symbol remains, grinning wickedly at them from every corner of the bridge.

  Skull and crossbones: a bleached, three-eyed skull against a gray field, propped up by a pair of crossed emblematic pistols – the dreaded Jolly Roger.

  No one breathes on the bridge for a beat.

  “Buhoxshit,” Whipul is the first to utter. “Ship like that, with no–”

  “Get me visual,” Barso flies into his seat, jabbing buttons and screwing dials wildly, to seemingly no avail. Buttons only click, dials only twist – nothing seems capable of dismounting the sneering skull from its roost on their monitors, surrounding them, enveloping them. “Get me visual!”

  “I got nothing, Captain. They’ve jammed us with something – it’s in the mainframe. She seems to work fine, but–” she yanks the transceiver in both directions and receives only static. “–I’m getting squat on sensors. No targeting, no imagery, nothing. We’re blind up here.”

  Barso clenches his jaw and thrusts a determined finger towards the expanding sphere of Danboowui. “See that? The ground. That’s your target.”

  “But, without any way–”

  “Don’t argue,” Barso persists. Scooting forward in the swoop-back, he punches the comm button while Whipul tears into the emergency fuel, affixing Danboowui directly in her sights and plunging the ship forward. The Hourly Wage belches towards the planet, inertial compensator struggling to keep up.

  Barso taps the comm button urgently. “Port Authority, do you read me, Port Authority? This is TFS freighter Hourly Wage, requesting assistance, do you copy?” No response among the snarling static, the Jolly Roger smiling derisively in retort.

  Biting his tongue hard, he fiercely wheels the co-pilot’s seat ninety degrees to port and, prevented against angling the ray shields by the chorus of scornful skulls, activates an evenly spread field across the entire ship. “Ray shields up at maximum,” he informs coldly.

  Steepling his fingers, the Captain Barso kicks meditatively back into his seat, swoop-back groaning in response. As Danboowui sharpens in gradual detail through the viewport, he steels his nerves and snaps on his wrist comm.

  “Kukane.”

  “Yes, Cap’n?” comes the warbled reply.

  “Man the turret. Send a team to the torpedo tubes.”

  “We got trouble, sir?”

  “Of a sort,” he replies coldly. “Pirates.”

  Barso hears the grin in the quartermaster’s voice. “Fuckin’ A,” Kukane answers. “Picked the wrong motherbloomers to mess with, didn’t they?”

  “Agreed. Arm the irregulars while you’re at it.”

  “Loud and clear, Cap’n,” he confirms and the connection fizzes out.

  Whipul’s an accomplished enough pilot to simultaneously plummet in a controlled dive towards Danboowui and douse the Captain with an evaluating glance. “Want I should extend the turret?”

  Barso loses the battle against smiling. “Do it.” She wrenches the appropriate pedal with a harsh clack and somewhere on the Wage’s dorsal deck, a double-barreled MI Model V14 Handmaiden Laser Turret submerges from beneath a hidden panel, soon to be operated by one of the Szarzarr mercenaries; deadeye Daco in all likelihood.

  “IZ36 is a tough broad,” Whipul cautions. “Think Daco’ll be able to dissuade her?”

  “You worry about breaking atmo. I’ll worry about the pirates.”

  “Affirmative, sir.”

  A few anxious moments pass as the Wage careers onward, like a swimmer fleeing to the shore, filled with a certain knowledge that an unseen shark stalks not distantly behind, before a chirruping voice buzzes through Barso’s wrist comm.

  “All in place, Cap’n. Target acquired,” Daco affirms.

  Barso regards Whipul with the flinty, self-satisfied grin of a man about to throw the first punch as he answers.

  “Good. On my mark, open–”

  The shrill clatter of unfamiliar laser fire, an abrupt, jolting pitch to port and pure static, piping through the wrist comm all jointly interrupt Captain Barso’s command.

  “Daco! Daco, do you copy?” he barks in reply, but nothing returns for several agonizing seconds. Beyond them, the repeated rattle of laser fire explodes again, as the invisible enemy presumably opens their own fire. The ship shudders from the unrelenting impacts, hammering almost ceaselessly somewhere at the Wage’s port quarter.

  “Captain, we’re taking significant damage on our–” Whipul bellows above the clamor.

  “The turret! They blew up the–” comes Kukane’s patched revelation through the wrist comm.

  “Shield won’t hold out–”

  “Gotta seal the–”

  “Orders, Captain?”

  “Captain? Captain? Fucking orders?”

  In the space of Barso’s next breath, the thudding fire from abaft intensifies, rumbling the freighter with fresh and fractious vigor. As Whipul screams something about fuel reserves, a concussive blast detonates on the port quarter, the centrifugal force of which effectively clubhauls The Hourly Wage, careening her sharply around in a wild about-face. This rollicking turnabout succeeds at two things: jerking the ship into apparent lifelessness with every screen on the bridge shorting out to blank black and wheeling the Wage into accidental eye-to-eye with her pursuer.

  The Briza just ceases the offending salvo when the Wage peels around. It’s armored in piss-yellow plating, this shark, and armed with a pair of dorsal and ventral mounted teeth – turrets of some kind, spewing a trifurcated spray of green laser. It comes creeping forward, sliding ahead either with the discerning caution of a circling predator or the confident assurance of a confirmed kill.

  Striding from the sepulchral darkness of his dead freighter’s bridge, the Captain Barso finds himself stomping steadfast down the spiral staircase, on an eventual warpath with his first mate hot on his heels. Before he understands precisely what he’s doing, he’s marching between Kukane’s abandoned dishes, scattered forlorn on the galley floor, and shoving shells into the chamber of his shotgun. Only as the cargo bay doors grind open and he spies the remote and doomful airlock, with Kukane and his dozen Szarzarr legionnaires in tow, does the gravity of coming events truly seize Barso.

  Three minutes ago, he captained a fully functional vessel, a stone’s throw from yet another profitable payoff. Now, he's here, kneeling behind an empty crate on the greasy floor of his hold, as he
deploys mercenaries, racks his timeworn shotgun and steels himself to repel a boarding action from an unknown number of pirates of unknown capability or appetite, all of whom lie in predatory wait behind one door, that door. Barso battles to bolster his quivering trigger finger.

  That’s when the singing begins.

  At first, he isn’t certain he hears anything – blood thumping in his ears, some shipborne mechanical malfunction, a cruel jest on his nerves, but the harder he strains, the more evident it becomes. Someone, or someones, beyond the airlock door sings, though in truth it sounds more akin to chanting than music proper – staggering, boozy verses and a guttural, dissimilar refrain.

  With thrice the fortification of any other door onboard The Hourly Wage, now the airlock door couldn’t possibly be thick enough.

  Taking uneasy aim at the thus far unmarred door, Barso catches the odd word, “eviscerate,” “mutilate” and “ruinate,” generally hooted at the conclusion of a line and emphasized with dreadful zeal. He glances to Whipul and Kukane, looking for any manner of solidarity they can offer, but his officers appear as baffled as he. It seemed as if, against all sanity, bloodthirsty buccaneers, eyes blackened by patches and daggers clutched in wicked smiles, had clawed their way out of storybooks and sea shanties to scuttle his ship.

  He contemplates addressing his own crew, bulwarking them against fear or despair, when the airlock buckles and bursts in a contained explosion. Fire belches from between its hinges before it tumbles clear, bent brutally convex as it clatters to the floor. Black smoke oozes out the smoldering portal, like the nostril of hell, the chorus only aggrandizing in volume and fervor. In the last hanging second, Barso ardently hopes anything but demons pour from his ship’s bleeding wound.

  That’s when the shooting begins.

  One of his own, a blenching Szarzarr with an automatic pistol, is the first, loosing a pair of bolts into the smoky breach. No reply comes for several excruciating seconds before the pirates truly instigate the hostilities.