Frebb, it seems, could not care less about the welfare of his spaceship.
One of two things must happen to save Moira from this gruesomely pedestrian fate. Either Frebb’s designated break must end or the mayhem will reach such a dire level that it’ll drag the Ondo into the mess.
The progress bar reads 32%.
Odisseus refuses to budge on this point. “It's an unnecessary risk.”
“An unnecessary risk? Listen to yourself. What's the worst that could possibly happen?”
“Um, a lot of things. I can think of like, ten.”
“Such as?”
Odisseus decides to budge a little. Not on his point, per se, but to avoid the spray of acidic coolant that's about to spray all over him and his saltbrother.
Whenever a main coolant valve is about to rupture from excess pressure, it makes a charming little hissing sound. Years spent belowdecks and beneath hoods have taught the Ortoki mechanic to recognize this sound a zottible away. When he hears this familiar bubble and hiss from somewhere overhead, Odisseus stops in his stride, sidesteps and even has the afterthought to hoist Nemo by the waist and swing him away from the danger as well.
Exactly on schedule, a patch of the swanky hardwood ceiling disintegrates a few feet above where the pair of pirates were standing. A gushing spray of coolant, completely transparent and completely lethal, splashes onto the deck approximately six inches from the Ortok’s hind paw. Within seconds, the sizzling liquid has smoked through the marble and is working its way hungrily through the teltriton beneath.
Odisseus wonders idly whether it'll eventually chew its way through the ship's outer hull and vent the whole Franchise into open space. Not really his problem, he supposes.
The pair of them stand there a second, seeming to contemplate their own mortalities. To see his death so narrowly avoided, Nemo can only whistle low in his throat.
“Such as,” Odisseus elucidates as they continue on their jog down the gunnery deck's corridors, “buzzing the local locksmith and having him roll out to the scene with half a hundred bounty hunters on his tail. What locksmith where is gonna service us?”
“So we shoot him afterwards,” Nemo suggests breezily. “Big whoop.”
“Despite what you might assume,” Odisseus finds himself growling, “a canister to the head is not the solution to every problem.”
“Every problem, no,” Nemo concedes. “Many problems, yes.”
“I can think of one right now,” remarks Odisseus, too low for Nemo to hear above all the commotion.
The GCF Franchise, stem to stern, is in a state of uproar. Blinding red warning lights and shrieking alarms compete for urgency in her corridors. Crewmen, of dozens of species and ranks, go rushing past, all wearing identical uniforms and expressions of panic, confusion and terror. Malfunctions are rampant, wherever Odisseus turns. Monitors flicker and fritz, doorways snap open and closed, a thousand holographic warnings flash against the ship's polished Casqorin hardwood.
In a word, it's mayhem.
Amid all the mayhem, it's a breeze for the Captain and the Ortok to slip past unnoticed, having adopted the uniforms, the frantic expressions and the frantic gait of everyone else aboard. To any other unsuspecting crewman, there's nothing suspicious about the pair of spacers, pushing a cargo crate hastily through the halls.
Were they paying an iota more attention, they might notice something irregular about these spacers, that all they were somehow able to predict every little catastrophe before it struck them. To the trained eye, it's clear they moved through the chaos with well-rehearsed, almost preternatural, grace.
“Quit being so overdramatic,” scoffs Nemo, banking the drifting crate hard around a corner.
“Quit being so cavalier,” retorts Odisseus, circling around his right side.
“How long we been flying together?” Nemo questions, flush with the unearned confidence of an imagined victory.
“Six years,” Odisseus answers by rote, deeply troubled the moment after he does so.
Nemo doesn’t notice the Ortok's moment of existential dread. “And in those six years, how many times have I locked the keys in the ship?”
“Four?” This Odisseus deliberates over a moment, certain he’s misremembering. “No, five. I forgot that time on Yon.”
“Yon?” Nemo screws up his face. “I have no memory of Yon.”
Odisseus rolls his eyes. “Of course you don't. Oh, this is us.”
On the corridor's port side, a varnished wooden doorway slides open without being asked. Odisseus shoves Nemo into the chamber and hustles inside, the moment before the door slides back shut. Soon as the door's sealed and latched, Odisseus plants an ear against the hardwood, listening for the exact moment when it's safe to venture back into the corridor.
The inside of the chamber appears to be a sensory bay, filled with sleek monitors set into luxuriant consoles and dashboards. At the moment, the chamber is unoccupied, most of the crew having evacuated the gunnery deck to perform vital services elsewhere.
Outside the chamber, Odisseus hears nothing but a fierce suctioning sound, so violent that it tangibly shakes the door, the door frame and the whole wall. Soon as the corridor they were walking down ceases venting oxygen into open space, they'll be free to continue on their way.
Not to be interrupted in the middle of his thesis, Nemo drums fingers impatiently against the crate's head. “Of those four times,” he continues, however inaccurately, “the worst that's happened is what, Two-Bit got to practice his lock picking skills and we were a little late back to the rendezvous?”
Ear still pressed to the wood grain, Odisseus perhaps takes a little too much pleasure in explaining precisely how Nemo's wrong. “The worst time was on Kyth, six months ago, when I hadta smash the viewport to get back into the helm and you hadta fly her blind all the way to orbital anchor with a low-atmo tarp over her windshield.”
“That was kinda fun, actu–”
“How about the first time, then,” Odisseus continues, without missing a beat, “on Takioro, when the only guy available was Velocity's guy and she reamed us in the bloomhole because she was still sore over that mess with the engine lubricant?”
“That's hardly my–“
“Or there's always the time on Yon, when we had to track down somebody else who still flew a Briza, kill them, take their keys and cross our fingers they would even fit in the ship's lock.”
“Oh, yeah,” Nemo remembers in a small voice. “That one was pretty bad.”
On the other side of the door, Odisseus hears the open airlock sealing shut again, the dreadful vacuuming sound falling silent. Moving quickly, Odisseus releases the catch on the crate and pulls forth a pair of oxygen masks. Tossing one to the Captain, his stuffs his own, in an extremely dignified and fetching way, over his muzzle and behind his ears. The damn thing is both uncomfortable and humiliating but it’s certainly preferable to both continuing this conversation and, to a lesser extent, asphyxiation.
Nemo fights being silenced to the last breath. “I will say, in my defense–” is all he manages to utter before the Ortok literally shoves the mask over his nose and mouth. Soon as those straps are secured around his head, Odisseus steps back, the door slides open on its own and the pair of them head back out on the mission.
As they make their way further and further along the gunnery deck, Mayhem continues to oblige them – opening doors, sealing doors against potential threats, conveniently accessing coded or restricted sections of the spacecraft. For every danger it shepherds them through, there's another obstacle or impediment that Odisseus recalls a few vital seconds before it rears its head. He always manages to squeeze not only himself, but the Captain and the crate, through the danger but it’s occasionally – such as with the berserk autoloader – a little too close for comfort.
It's a well-rehearsed dance, the Ortok and the virus working in concert to navigate the utter shitshow that the GCF Franchise has become.
The last leg of the obstacle
course they traverse without oxygen or gravity, the ship's inertial dampeners deactivated. It’s an awkward ballet between the two of them, Odisseus and Nemo passing the floatig crate back and forth like a skooshball between teammates. Considering the precious cargo it carries, Odisseus is understandably a little nervy every time the crate falls back into reckless Nemo's hands. After all, the entire caper, not to mention their very lives, hinge so crucially on the contents of that crate.
Before long, however, Mayhem guides them to their destination. Odisseus digs claws into the side of the relevant doorway and catches Nemo by the wrist. With a scrambling motion, Nemo snags the crate before it slides away down the corridor. Once they're all safely inside the chamber, the fabled munitions depot of song and story, Odisseus almost regrets pulling off the unpleasant oxygen mask, for one reason and one reason only.
“–in my defense,” continues a gasping Nemo, “I'd had rather a lot to drink that day.”
Moira can’t believe Lexubor would say that to Frebb.
“He said that to you?”
Frebb nods enthusiastically. “He did. Right to my blooming face.”
“Bloom me out,” Moira breathes. “The nerve on that guy.”
“I know, right?”
By now, Moira's leaned more comfortably back in her chair, to better digest the Ondo’s tales of workplace woe. The Attaché, meanwhile, thrums contentedly on the table, presumably still working its way through the upload. Frebb, standing, leans back against the counter, his arms crossed and his head shaking, in disbelief at his own anecdote. The world beyond the breakroom is still muffled insanity; alarms, screams, chaos.
“And I'm like, you outrank me barely.” Frebb pinches his fingers together, to illustrate the miniscule gap between their two positions. “You're not the admiral, you're not the captain. You're not even the fucking deck super. You don't have the authority to go ordering me around.”
“You said that to him?”
“Well, no,” Frebb admits. “I was thinking it.” He glances to the side, looking down at his boots. “He does technically outrank me.”
“See, that's my whole thing too,” agrees Moira, pointing eagerly in his direction. “Every time the turret gets clogged, there's–”
Moira's story squeals to a stop. Without fully realizing what she was saying, she'd stumbled into a gripe about Odisseus and life aboard The Unconstant Lover. She couldn't, in good faith, dead-end her story here, however, without making Frebb unduly suspicious. Nor could she, on the other hand, continue ahead in her narrative and bitch about how the Ortok aboard her pirate freighter always turned up his whiskered nose at the personal repairs she made to her favorite Antagonist.
What Moira must do is tread carefully – something she's much better at physically than conversationally.
“There's?” cues Frebb, raising an eyebrow.
“There was,” Moira clarifies, hoping to play off her momentary lapse as tense troubles, “this guy, back on the Trademark, who would always come, right, to unclog the turret–”
“From Repair Dispatch?” Frebb nods, supplying her with a deliciously necessary detail. “Yeah.”
“Yeah. And he was always giving me this guff, you know, about the way I treat the thing. And you gotta understand, I was a saint with this turret. I put in twice the time and ten times the love any of the other,” she stumbles over the details a little, tripped up by the past tense and lack of fellow gunnery crewmembers, “uh, people did. And still, he treated me like a child.”
“Did he outrank you?”
Moira shakes her head slightly. “Nah, but he knew the Captain, actually, pretty well, so.”
“Right,” comments Frebb, with vague antipathy. “That sucks, man.”
“Yeah.”
Conversation lulls for a few moments. Moira's eyes drop naturally down to the Attaché, peacefully uploading its destructive virus into the Franchise's mainframe.
The progress bar reads 86%.
Odisseus doesn't wish to be misunderstood.
“What, then, are you proposing, exactly?”
“What I'm proposing is that we institute some sort of two-key system.”
“Blech. Sounds complicated.”
“It's delightfully simple. Allow me to explain.”
After all that trouble, the munitions depot turns out to be little more than a glorified supply closet for explosives. Cases upon cases of canisters, ballistic shells and other intimidating gray strongboxes are stacked in the chamber's various corners, narrow pathways carving through them. Holodisplays hover an inch before each crate, case or cask, detailing their contents.
Odisseus moves between the holograms, running a claw along their subject lines, searching for the exact specifications that match the crate they've carried all this way. In his capacity of an extremely helpful layabout, Nemo lounges atop the crate near the doorway, his arms crossed and his expression skeptical.
“We get a copy of the Lover's ignition keys made,” the Ortok explains in his most reasonable tone. “You carry one, I carry one.”
“Hm.”
“That way,” Odisseus elaborates, before Nemo can categorically reject the idea, “should you accidentally lock them aboard, there's always my copy and no need for headaches or murders.”
“Hm.”
Odisseus waits a pregnant length of time for Nemo to expand on this answer. “Thoughts?”
“What locksmith where,” poses his saltbrother thoughtfully, “makes the copy?”
To this, Odisseus can only flick his whiskers once in annoyance. Thankfully, a discovery saves him from making an immediate reply. “Found it,” he announces, waving towards Nemo with a paw. “Bring it over.”
With the laborious sigh that always comes when manual labor is required of him, Nemo scoots off the crate and shuffles the floating thing over. As he does, Odisseus wiggles an identical crate out from its place in the stack, places it very carefully on the floor and engages the latch with a hiss.
Odisseus peers down to confirm the contents of the crate, the sole objective of this entire ludicrous reconnaissance mission aboard the Franchise.
Packed like merchandise inside the crate are ugly blobs of beige machinery, a far cry from the chic design aboard the rest of the Franchise. From the routing wires, the capacitor couplings and the amplifier-disks, Odisseus can positively identify them as miniaturized ray shield projectors. Much smaller and single minded than the relay system the Lover employed, these models could project a very powerful barrier for a very limited time, burning through their power source a mottible a minute.
The Ortok notes the vicious hooks on each projector, all the better to anchor in solid ice.
Soon as Nemo arrives with the dummy crate, it's a simple matter to swap the holodisplays from one to the other, shove the fake into the authentic crate's place and be on their merry way. Now, whenever the gunnery crew came to plant the shield projectors on the spacebergs, they'd unknowingly be installing the doctored ones Odisseus cooked up, rather than the genuine article.
Odisseus much prefers this outcome, as the genuine article was specifically designed to explode the asteroid and all its unwitting contents a few hundred feet above Gi's surface.
Their mission accomplished, all that remains for the two saltbrothers is to strap on their masks and navigate the chaos back to their disguised ship, the authentic crate of explosive shield projectors in tow. Moira still inexplicably missing, Odisseus resolves to wait until they've returned to the lower atrium, the designated rendezvous, before he'll risk any comm transmission with her.
Nemo seems to have wholly forgotten about Moira, lost in his own private contemplations as the pair of them depart the munitions depot.
They cross the inhospitable sections of the gunnery deck in necessary silence, though Odisseus senses that Nemo is pondering something mightily the whole way. Soon as they’re free to remove their oxygen masks, Nemo uses his first breath to ask, “Who carries the original?”
“Does it matt
er?” wonders Odisseus, the question taking the Ortok somewhat by surprise. The dark look on the Captain’s face, however, inspires Odisseus to amend his answer, worried the fate of his whole “two-key system” might hang in the balance. “Well, I guess you do. You’re the Captain.”
“Yeah,” Nemo agrees at length. “Only makes sense.”
They hustle down a switchbacking corridor that runs the length of the Franchise's gunnery deck. The words [EVACUATE] flash in holographic lettering against every wall, from every monitor and blare over the ship's internal comms, in case anyone could've somehow missed the memo. As they haul bloomhole around each corner, Odisseus elects to take over crate duty, to allow Nemo to consider the Ortok's proposal with his full attention.
“So, you agree?” Odisseus dares to ask, his patience draining away by the time they reach a familiar patch of coolant scarring.
Nemo waggles his hand back and forth. “We'll see. It's under advise–”
“Excuse me?” interrupts a polite voice from down an adjoining corridor. The pair stop dead in their tracks, like children caught at mischief. Both heads snap to the side to see a figure approaching at a brisk pace, holding up a hand for them to stop.
She's an Umijo, discernible even at this distance from the eyestalks and the lanky proportions of her arms and legs, dashing any hopes this might be Moira coming to join them. She's dressed in military fatigues, the Ortok is unnerved to discover once she's closed the distance a little more. When the flashing lights glint off her harness, Odisseus wants to go bolting down the corridor in terror but cannot will his hind paws into motion.
They're caught, he knows at the bottom of his heart. What's worse, they're caught by a spice ranger.
Unconstant Love Page 10
