“It's gone.”
Nemo shrugs significantly. “I mean, we knew there was a decent chance of this, right? Like–”
“It's gone.”
“Yeah,” allows Nemo, “but it'll be back–”
It's Moira who sums things up best. “In three weeks.”
To a pirate, they're stunned, struck speechless by how narrow a margin they evaded rescue and by what that portends for the days and weeks to come.
CHAPTER 3
Moira Quicksilver praises all the moons of Jotor that she, the only woman on this crew, wasn't born an Ortok, speciesist as that may sound. Had she been, she'd be facing a fate even more gruesome than gory death by tooth and claw.
“He still there?” whispers Nemo, stuffed buhox clasped tight against his chest.
She starts to peek over the lip of the table, to confirm his fears, then stops to turn and scowl at him. “I mean, of course he is. Where the fuck else could he be?”
“Well,” stammers Nemo, caught off guard, “what's he doing, then?”
Fingertips curled around the table's edge, Moira peeks as little of her face into view as she can and surveys the greater mess hall. “Ripping your mattress to shreds.”
“Still?”
“Still.” Very suddenly, she slides back behind cover and presses her back against the hardwood. “Fuck. I think he saw me.”
Nemo's eyes somehow bug out even more. Moira twists to the side and presses an ear flat against the gin-stained tabletop. Even through the thick Ujad mahogany, she can hear that sound – long claws tearing the mattress systematically to ribbons – stop suddenly. A moment later, it's replaced by the sound of those same claws scraping and stabbing through the carpet of garbage, headed directly towards her.
A subsonic growl, more vibration than noise, comes with it.
Moira works hard to keep the panic out of her whisper. “He's coming.”
Nemo does no such hard work. “Whadda we do?” he pleads.
“This.”
Quick as she can, Moira reaches aside and retrieves another helping of canned fish. Cranking open the tin with a thumb, she's nearly gagged by the reek of sudden sporefin. The growl growing all the louder, she scoops the whole mess from the tin and, with a vicious pump of her elbow, tosses the wet handful of fish across the galley.
They both listen, in breathless anticipation, as the sporefin splashes quietly against the far wall. They both listen, with a simultaneous exhale of relief, as the growling monster at the door takes the bait. With a fresh snarl and more crashing through the undergrowth of trash, their antagonist stalks off in the opposite direction.
“Good thinking,” congratulates Nemo, completely sycophantic to her superior wisdom during these matters of life and death.
“Sorta,” Moira reminds him. “It's only gonna buy us another minute.”
They've done their best to barricade themselves inside the Lover's small galley against the predations of an Ortok gone mad. They've propped the mess hall's dining table, that reliable plank of Ujad mahogany, against the entrance. A row of stools offer feeble protection against attacks from aboe, stacked atop the counter with their long legs stabbing out like a palisade's spikes. In preparation for a long siege, Moira, at least, had the foresight to toss what remains of their food in here with them, giving them plenty of Ortok lures to lob around the chamber as needed.
Moira thought she felt cramped before, confined to the Lover's mess hall for six straight weeks. Now, Moira's positively claustrophobic, jammed bloomhole-to-elbows in the kitchenette with her very favorite person in the entire galaxy.
Her options, however, were not especially legion. She could either hunker in this flimsy shelter with a smelly Nemo or go out there and get eviscerated by a horny Odisseus.
Beyond the barricade, Moira overhears the Ortok savaging the tossed sporefin. Her eyes, gluttons for punishment, fall down to the package she's ripped open, wondering how long it will take him to come sniffing around their fortress again, looking for more.
For all their achievements as a sentient species, there’s a swath of Ortoki genetics that's ultimately more animalistic than humanoid. While fully sapient, they couldn't, as a culture, shake every one of their baser, more primal tendencies.
Never is this more apparent than during their mating season. A few days every year, an Ortok's wild side bubbles to the surface as they, males and females both, go into heat, seeking a willing mate. During this period, all the Ortok's pretenses to higher thinking apparently melt away, in favor of something decidedly less friendly and housebroken.
Odisseus is no exception to this universal law of his people. Once a year, the ornery Ortoki mechanic they'd all come to tolerate would be swapped with a semisentient animal, given to irritability, inarticulate growling and laying about the place with claws.
In past years, the embarrassed Odisseus simply confined himself to quarters stocked with enough canned fish to sustain him and the Lover went a few days without a mechanic. This year, their timing happened to be calamitously bad. This year, Moira and Nemo were sealed inside the mess hall with a ravenous monster, denied anyone else to kill or fuck.
To add insult to injury, he's far muskier than ever, presumably with the aim of attracting interested females. To Moira, so thankful she's not an Ortok, the mess hall now stinks of someone, infected with Xwollese tract fever, pissing on a garbage fire.
“Our only hope,” bemoans Nemo, way too loudly, “lies in Operation Thunderstrike.”
“Operation Thunderstrike,” scoffs Moira, “is a disaster wa–”
“Hey,” Nemo warns gravely, gesturing emphatically with the stuffed toy in his hand. “Respect the cow.”
“Don't hog the cow, more like,” Moira retorts. With a quick snatching movement, she grabs the bundle of ratty felt and polka dots clean out of his hand.
“You–” starts Nemo's objection.
“Operation Thunderstrike,” Moira repeats, confident now in the righteousness of her purpose, “is a disaster waiting to hap–”
“You don't know that,” whispers Nemo defensively.
As a warning, Moira threatens him once with the buhox, its tattered head lolling forward. “I do know that,” she counters. “We've got three hours tops on those exosuits before the atmosfilters give out. Even if we could somehow get to them and get dressed in them without his noticing, we'd–”
“The cornerstone of Operation Thunderstrike,” Nemo asserts confidently, “is a good distraction. Obviously.”
“Will you–” snarls Moira, repeating her previous gesture with the cow, only more insistently this time. “And what kind of distraction, exactly?”
“I don't know,” Nemo admits. “Shoot him, maybe?”
“Shoot him?” expectorates Moira. “Shooting him's not gonna do fucking squat. History has repeatedly shown that shooting an angry Ortok–”
Nemo's aghast. “Not to kill him. Moons. To distract–”
Interrupted again, Moira's patience goes off the rails. “Moira has the Neezer!” she hisses, throttling the ineffectual stuffed cow back and forth. “That means it's Moira's turn to speak!”
Week four was a near-perpetual argument, the crew unable to cope with the harsh reality that they'd be stuck together like this another three weeks. Week five was virtually silent, all three retreating into privacy and selfish brooding for days at a time. Week six saw true pandemonium take center stage, brought to a fever pitch by Odisseus, driven mad with lust, prowling around their shared space and looking to maul anyone who came too close.
Despite the chaos in bloom all around her, Moira refuses to succumb to madness and depravity. To look at Nemo now, her closest ally in this struggle against the frothing beast, she sees nothing but a raving madman. Pieces of garbage are speckled throughout his frazzled hair. The grime and grit of two unwashed months are caked and streaked across his face. His lips, eyelids and fingertips each tremble and twitch to some strange internal rhythm, a clockwork device out of alignment.
Nemo crosses his arms like a scolded child. “What's your big idea, then?”
“Lock him in the pantry,” she reminds calmly. “'till everything blows over.”
Nemo stares, disbelieving. “Operation Stupidplan? Are you kidding me?”
“That is not what it's called.” Feeling her anger rise, Moira takes a calming, cooling breath. “This'll work. If you'll listen.” To her surprise, Nemo does sit quietly and listen, suddenly the most respectful audience imaginable. “We lure him in there somehow, probably with these.” She taps a finger twice against the lid of the nearest tin of sporefin. “While he's distracted, somebody pulls the–”
“Who?”
“Fucking somebody! I don't know! You!”
Moira doesn't immediately realize what she's done, that those words actually came from her mouth and at a volume much closer to a shriek than a whisper. Nemo's widened eyes, however, and especially the lack of sucking and eating sounds somewhere beyond the walls of their barricade make her realize her error.
“He heard you,” Nemo breathes, quieter than she's ever heard him speak.
They're entirely silent for a handful of heartbeats, too frightened to move, speak or even draw breath. For many of those heartbeats, Moira starts to believe they're perhaps safe, that there's more sporefin left to devour and that her blunder wasn't so terrible.
A scraping sound, a shifting of ponderous weight and, what's more, a familiar growl proves her wrong.
“Look what you did!” Nemo snaps, as quietly as he dares. “Look what you did! This is exactly why you don't deserve the Neezer!”
“You're the one who–”
The growl swells in volume and clarifies in direction. He's approaching from the other side of the galley counter, the weakest section of their improvised stockade.
“Operation Thunderstrike,” Nemo declares with sudden decisiveness. “Now or never. It's the only choice.”
“What?” Moira recoils with shock. “Are you blasted? How're we gonna get the fucking exosuits–” She's interrupted this time by a wheedling sound, so shrill it makes her skin crawl. Only when it repeats does she recognize the sound of curved claws scraping the counter's thermosteel. “It's Operation Stupidplan or nothing. Gimme the fish.”
“See?” Nemo cries triumphantly. “That is what it's called.”
“Gimme the–”
A tremendous weight thuds atop the counter. One of the stools clatters over the side and crashes into the kitchenette, landing amid their piles of supplies. Nemo seizes the moment of confusion to reach across and yank the stuffed buhox from Moira's unsuspecting grip.
“Now I have the Neezer,” he announces at full voice, “and I say it's Operation Thund–”
Moira's not paying attention. She's spun around, staring upward at the stretch of empty counter, the gap left behind by the fallen stool.
A pair of huge hairy paws, wet with fish slime, dig deep trenches in the counter's woodgrain. With the slow confidence of a predator who's successfully cornered his prey, the great Ortoki head and neck rear up and into view. Blackened lips peel fully back. Masticated sporefin pieces dangle from his clenched fangs. A snarl gains strength in his throat.
A moment later, Nemo follows Moira's gaze and his victory speech dies on his lips.
The creature that was once Odisseus roars. The dishware shakes with his sheer volume and he spews a mouthful of putrid beast breath straight in their screaming faces. In that insane moment, all of Moira's mettle is forgotten. As one, she and Nemo only scoot back against the opposite cupboards, screaming like terrified children all the while.
For a moment, the mess hall of The Unconstant Lover echoes with the roar of one monster and the screams of the galaxy's two most dangerous outlaws.
The next moment, The Unconstant Lover lurches violently to port.
Caught completely off guard, everything and everyone aboard is pitched aside. At a stroke, the entire improvised fortress is destroyed; the table rolls aside, the stools clang and scatter, a rain of dishware crashes all around them. Moira slams her shoulder into the thermosteel counter. Nemo is tossed unceremoniously and halfway into an open cupboard. Odisseus is thrown clear with a yelp and an explosion of trash somewhere out of sight.
To everyone's groaning delight, this is repeated two or three more times, first to starboard, then back to port, then back to starboard. The galley fills with a shifting tide of packaged food, sloshing back and forth. Moira calls upon her Tebi-Gali training and does her best to brace her body from impact in the kitchenette’s corner. Groping on hands and knees to recover the lost Neezer, Nemo's yanked this way and that, slamming painfully into either counter with each unexpected pitch of the spaceship.
The whole scene eventually comes to a standstill, jostled by the occasional minor aftershock. A second silence gradually takes hold over the Lover's mess hall, broken by the occasional beeping sound.
A quick inspection reveals Moira's only bruised and not broken anywhere. Nemo is splayed awkwardly within the lifeless chiller and looks far worse than she does – but he does grasp the buhox triumphantly in his fist.
“We hit something?” Moira whispers, uncertain whether Odisseus is still lurking about.
Nemo shrugs as best he can. “Bloom if I know.”
“It's the scanner,” offers a third voice, an Ortoki voice, from the main mess hall.
They both freeze. Moira and Nemo both peek, over the counter or around the corner, to see the speaker. Amid the carpet of detritus, Odisseus is likewise sprawled on his back. He's propped himself up on his elbows, however, and is now squinting across the mess hall. Anything monstrous about his personality is suddenly gone, vanished without a trace. All his humanity's come instantantly back to him, as though the turbulence shook their old companion free.
“What about the scanner?” asks Moira tentatively, expecting some trick.
“It's beeping.” He points a claw across the room. “Look.”
Moira follows the point of his claw and spies it. There, indeed, amid the ripped and tattered ruins of the Ortok's designated corner, a feeble red light is blinking.
A pregnant look is exchanged between all three marooned. Moira's eyes fall next to the timepiece where it lays, smashed against the floor for uncounted days. Then, their previous peril instantly forgotten, all three crewmembers of The Unconstant Lover go galloping across the mess hall, converging on the scanner.
Odisseus gets there first and lays paws on the device with one swipe. Once again, Moira and Nemo are forced to peer over the Ortok's hairy shoulder to even get a glimpse at the thing. It's a strong testament to how desperately she craves rescue that, this close to a musky Ortok, Moira doesn't really notice how profoundly rancid he smells.
When she is granted a good look at the scanner, she can barely believe her eyes. Once again, there is a tiny red triangle, perfectly identical to the one that visited their scanner three long weeks ago. This time, however, the triangle's located smack dab in the center of the scanner's grid, precisely on their own coordinates.
“What does that mean?” Nemo's the first to wonder aloud.
“That means,” the surprisingly cogent Odisseus starts to speculate, “they must've grabbed us. See how there're no other asteroids around? It pulled in everything nearby and that includes us.”
“All that, then,” Moira realizes, gesturing at the wreckage around her, “must have been their graviton.”
“Pulling us in,” Nemo finishes, nodding ever so slowly.
Odisseus matches his nod. “Which means now–”
“We're in their cargo bay? With the other asteroids?” posits Moira.
“Must be.”
For no good reason, all three of them gaze upward and around, as though expecting to see anything but the hated and familiar wall
s and ceiling of the Lover's mess hall.
“Which,” Nemo takes a moment to clarify, “is where we wanna be, yes?” At this question, Moira and Odisseus both turn scowls at their Captain, throwing up his hands defensively. “What? I'm just asking!”
“If this is the ship I think it is–” muses Moira.
“Really the only ship with any reason to be here,” Odisseus adds.
“Then, yes,” Moira confirms, injecting as much scorn into the following sentence as she can. “This is exactly where you want us to be.”
The scanner in the Ortok's paws bleeps unexpectedly, drawing all their eyes. Out of nowhere, a snowstorm of static floods the scanner's screen, the phrase “CONNECTION LOST” wavering back and forth in bold red lettering.
Moira opens her mouth to word a confused question, but Odisseus supplies its answer first. “They've jumped warp,” the Ortok informs them. “We're on our way.”
“Correction.” Nemo points an appallingly dirty fingernail toward Moira. “This is exactly where Two-Bit Switch wants us to be.”
Odisseus feels much better now.
The shock of their unexpected rescue had worked wonders on his psyche. In truth, Odisseus still didn't quite feel one hundred percent his old self. His temper's mottible-long fuse, he could sense, is still substantially shorter. To judge from the sour expressions of his companions, his heady musk was very much still in effect.
All in all, though, he can speak and reason and no longer necessarily feels an all-consuming need to fight everyone to death and fuck his own brains out.
Besides, their rescue well underway, there were far more important things to do now.
“Franchise,” mutters Nemo, flicking through holographic pages with his fingertip. “Franchise, Franchise. Ah. Okay. Bingo. The GCF Franchise.”
A hologram of a sizable starship leaps into existence and hovers above the dining table, rotating seductively to display its full figure. As it hangs there, more and more specifications and infodumps pop into view, spilling out an abundance of technical data on the ship at hand.
Unconstant Love Page 5
