Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  All things considered, Nemo keeps his cool commendably – better than Odisseus does. “How can we help you, officer?” he asks sweetly.

  All three of the Umijo's eyes are narrowed suspiciously as she closes to conversational distance. “Can you two not see than this deck's been evacuated? Captain's orders.”

  “Well, yes,” Nemo replies, with a gesture towards the hundreds of literal warning signs all around them. “And we’re evacuating. Lower atrium.”

  The spice ranger makes no immediate reply, her two eyestalks swerving between the pair of disguised pirates. Odisseus wonders whether the spacer's tales are true, whether or not an Umijo's third eye, the one in the middle of her forehead, can see through fur and skin and muscle, can see how quickly her prey's heart is beating. This one can, Odisseus is certain of that, that third eye piercing straight through them.

  “Names, ranks, idents,” she requests after a moment. Reluctant to submit to his own imprisonment, Odisseus slowly raises a claw to tap his own ident badge, expanding the hologram all the larger for the ranger to see.

  “Gwraawroogaralox,” Odisseus recites as best he can. “Gunnery Tech First Class.”

  A section of her harness extends, like a mechanical spider crawling across her forearm, and nestles comfortably into place around her wrist. From a contraption here, a fresh hologram appears and the Umijo, utterly bored by this marvel of modern technology, enters the data with quick fingers. “Ma'am,” she acknowledges with a nod, before turning to Nemo.

  Odisseus nearly opens his mouth to object but she's shifted gears too fast.

  “Calman Tasq,” Nemo answers with utter surety. “Gunnery Officer Second Class.” For all the doom and gloom that's roiling around inside Odisseus, there's not a single hint of anxiety anywhere in the Captain's face, voice or posture. He couldn't, in that moment, be more convinced that his given name is legitimately Calman Tasq.

  With utter antipathy, the spice ranger starts to enter Nemo’s falsified information. The Ortok knows the data’s outdated, incomplete and even contradictory; he knows anything more than a cursory examination would blow them wide open. Yet, to see the lax way the Umijo runs their particulars, he tricks himself into believing, for half a second, that they might actually be cleared to proceed.

  All at once, the spice ranger's fingers quit moving.

  She stares at Nemo's ident, all three eyes locking on that wavering portrait.

  “Bloom me,” she stares to mouth. Nemo, seeing this, just has time to sniff twice. “You're–”

  Before the words “the Galactic Menace” can escape that fanged mouth, Odisseus swipes with a claw, aiming directly for the spice ranger’s stunned face. Caught mid-revelation, she’s far too slow to dodge, parry or counter the strike. Odisseus feels the sickening sensation of his claws sinking into the meat of the Umijo’s face, feels her flesh tear, feels the claws rake across her jawbone.

  The force of the blow sends the surprised ranger tumbling back, gasping agonized breaths. She slams against the nearest wall and would have screamed in pain, were it not for the four lines drawn in bloody rags across her face. A territorial snarl escapes the Ortok’s lips, his muzzle peeling back to reveal a mouthful of his own fangs.

  “Yeah,” interrupts Nemo, taking hold of the hovering crate’s handle. “I’mana go.”

  “Probably smart,” Odisseus agrees, staring down the spice ranger. “Catch up with you.”

  With that, Nemo bolts down the corridor, the crate shoved ahead of him, headed toward the lower atrium. Step by step, Odisseus follows, walking backward down the hallway, growling all the while and never taking his eyes off the recovering spice ranger.

  He knows he too should tuck tail and go running like his cowardly saltbrother. Something primal, however, that biological imperative in his Ortoki genetics, tells him to linger, to fight to his dying breath to prevent this vastly superior foe from killing his unarmed saltbrother.

  A little way up the hallways, the Umijo spice ranger clambers shakily back to her feet. Her wound spills cerulean blood all down her neck, torso and harness. For a moment, they stand staring at each other, the distance between Ortok and Umijo growing greater and greater, by each incremental step backward Odisseus takes. Then, without warning, the ranger’s harness fully activates.

  Panels open. Sections of harness separate and lengthen. Cables and spring-loaded machinery go crawling and creeping across the ranger’s biceps and thighs, clicking into place at each elbow, knee, wrist and ankle joint. Soon, the Umijo is wearing an exoskeleton of unattractive whirring machine parts and loose cables. To see the thing actually unfolded, it looks absurdly fragile but Odisseus knows, from long reputation, the hidden power the harness grants its wearer.

  The ranger’s fists close on the pair of throttles the harness provides, not unlike those found on the handlebars of a dash racer. With a rehearsed motion of her wrist, the spice ranger torques the right throttle hard. Spraying outward from her hand comes pure fire, with a white-hot core and licking blue flames.

  A flamethrower sprouting from each wrist would be deadly enough. To make matters infinitely worse, the gout of jetting flames, on the Umijo’s command, narrows to a keen edge, two feet long, no wider than her knuckles and nearly transparent.

  The true terror of the harness, the true terror of the spice rangers, were their heatblades. A sword of concentrated heat, wielded from the wrist of the harness, a heatblade could slice through stone and metal as easily as it would shear their fur, flesh and bone. A spice ranger armed with the proper training and two heatblades could barbeque and serve practically any living being in the galaxy.

  Against a wounded ranger with only one of her blades extended, the three-hundred pound Ortok, a veteran of ten dozen scraps and armed with cruel claws and tearing teeth, stood no chance.

  The Umijo advances calmly, full of assured victory. All three eyes remain locked on Odisseus, heatblade shimmering the air. Odisseus momentarily stops backpedaling and plants his hind paws. He attempts to gauge the best way to approach or even retreat from this invincible and oncoming enemy.

  Thankfully, the ranger’s guided by wounded rage, rather than killer instinct, when she closes the distance. Her first wild swipe of the heatblade is child’s play to avoid. The Ortok cranes backward, adjusts his footing and keeps searching for that vital opening. Soon as she’s realized her error, however, the Umijo’s changing tactics. She chops three more times, in quick succession, hoping to take advantage of Odisseus’ uncertain footwork.

  Odisseus shirks the next pair of swings – a downward hack and an upward slash – by shuffling to the Umijo’s left but the spice ranger quickly predicts this strategy. The next swing – a stomach-level slice – draws the heatblade viciously across the Ortok’s stomach.

  To be cut by a heatblade is a bizarre new sensation for Odisseus. With no weight or tangibility behind the stroke, Odisseus doesn’t quite realize he’s actually struck until his knees give way beneath him and he’s collapsing onto the floor. The spice ranger falls back a step, certain the Ortok’s defeated before he’s quite understood that he’s been hit.

  In an awfully specific arc, straight across the center of his stomach, the Ortok’s skin starts to itch. Looking down, he sees a blackened line, all the fur burnt tight against his blubbery skin. In the next seconds, the itch becomes irritation, the irritation becomes pain and the pain becomes agony. An honest-to-moons whimper escapes the Ortok as he writhes on the floor of the corridor.

  Two more steps and the Umijo’s standing over him. There’s an expression of near sadness on her fanged face as she draws her arm back, heatblade briefly disappearing as she aims the point directly at his neck.

  That's when Odisseus hears a charming little hissing sound.

  The hardwood ceiling, immediately above the Umijo’s right eyestalk, dissolves before the Ortok’s eyes. Coolant trickles through the smoking hole in the ceiling and then trickles directly onto the spice ranger’s eyestalk.

  The inhuman s
ound the Umijo makes as the acid devours its eyestalk is all Odisseus needs to hear. Clamping his teeth together against the pain in his stomach, Odisseus scrambles away on all fours, harrumphing back down the corridor and towards his long-gone saltbrother.

  Times like these, Odisseus reflects, are times when it’s nice to have Moira Quicksilver around.

  Moira pushes her chair away from the table and stands to stretch.

  “Well,” she comments, in that conversational way. “About that time.”

  “Yeah?” wonders Frebb, not looking up from his console. “Back to the grind?”

  “Looks like.” Moira pushes in her chair and retrieves the Attaché from where it rests on the table. “Bosses back on Gunnery'll wanna know what's up, where I'm at.”

  “Sure,” Frebb agrees. “What with all the...” He draws a quick circle in the air next to his head, as though to indicate all the commotion outside the breakroom.

  The Attaché is proud to show Moira the progress bar it's completed, glowing a brilliant and accomplished green. Frebb, meanwhile, sits scrolling through hologram after hologram, obsessively refreshing the feeds to see if they've magically changed in the past five seconds. Outside, things have reached a fever pitch, despite the breakroom’s subdued vibe.

  In moments, Moira would be out among the mania, her errand here accomplished.

  “Good luck out there,” comments Frebb idly as she passes him on her way out the door.

  “Hey, you too,” she offers back. “Don't let Lexubor push you around too much.”

  “Heh. I'll try.”

  The malfunctioning door only opens on Moira’s fourth try. “See ya.”

  “Have a good one,” waves Frebb behind her, his attention still fixated on the feeds.

  With that, Moira Quicksilver steps into the corridor and its panicked red lighting, wondering about what manner of trouble her accomplices have gotten themselves into by now.

  CHAPTER 6

  Odisseus gallops down the corridor on all fours. Ortoki anatomy, unfortunately, is designed with swimming and pretty much only swimming in mind. This means he's anything but graceful. With each lope, his body flops comically back and forth. His fore and hind paws slap and scrabble against the slick marble and his great heavy tail drags behind, slowing him all the more.

  What's worse, the running does his fresh wound no favors. Every time his body contracts, another dagger is thrust through the Ortok's midsection and he fights back a yelp of new pain. The primary advantage, Odisseus reflects, of being struck by a heatblade is the wound's instant cauterization. The primary disadvantage, he's all too aware, is that it smarts like all the moons of Jotor. Odisseus needs medical attention and he needs it sooner rather than later. Adrenaline is all that's keeping him from passing out from the sheer pain.

  Up ahead, Nemo squats exhausted at the edge of an adrogi goldfish pond, panting heavily. He barely looks up as Odisseus approaches, his words escaping in breathless gasps.

  “Oh, hey. You made it.”

  Odisseus stops and draws to his full height. “She called me ma'am!”

  Nemo glances around his saltbrother, to peer down the corridor. “She still coming?”

  “She,” repeats Odisseus between clenched fangs. “Called me. Ma'am!”

  “Did she?” wheezes Nemo, leaning against the bobbing crate for support. “I didn't really–”

  From far down the corridor, back the way Odisseus came, something explodes. Wood panels shatter and a sudden swell of orange fire blots the view behind them.

  Odisseus, his outrage momentarily forgotten, points a claw in the opposite direction. “Maybe we should–”

  “Yeah,” Nemo agrees.

  They take off running, still so winded but unwilling to stand around and get exploded for their trouble. This time, Odisseus elects to jog a few feet behind Nemo, staying upright and sparing his poor stomach the pain.

  The chaos that infects the Franchise is advanced and malignant. Everywhere the two saltbrothers go, Mayhem has worked its diabolical magic. Coolant now streams freely from the walls, in rivers of hissing acid and coiling smoke. The ship's internal sprinkler system has sprung into useless action, partially flooding one section of the gunnery deck. All along the way, the holograms they pass are inchoate, babbling nonsense warnings, their programming damaged or tampered with.

  As they run, Odisseus takes a moment to pop open his ident tag. The hologram hovers before him, bobbing up and down as he hustles along.

  “It does,” he discovers in a disbelieving tone. “It says I'm a female.”

  “Make sense,” Nemo supposes.

  Odisseus is suddenly suspicious. “You do know that I'm male, right?”

  Nemo shrugs. “Well, it depends on the day, doesn't it?”

  “Depends on the day?” Odisseus is affronted. “What, in all the moons, are you talking about?”

  “Well, you're a Quarg, right? Or you're supposed to be.” Nemo glances at him, as though the answer's staring him in the face. “They change genders?” he suggests significantly. When Odisseus doesn't offer an immediate response, Nemo recoils. “Tell me you knew that.”

  “I did not,” Odisseus is forced to admit.

  Nemo raises both eyebrows. “Wow.” He lets out a low whistle. “Speciesist much?” Before Odisseus can swipe that superior expression off his face with all claws extended, Nemo spots something up ahead. “Oh, hey. We're here.”

  The only way Odisseus could possibly be more relieved to see a pair of elevator doors would be if they were made from stacked anchovies. They skid to a halt before the closed marble doors and Nemo leans heavily against the call button. Odisseus, meanwhile, spins back around and scans the passage they've come down for any sight or smell of the spice ranger.

  After pressing the button approximately six hundred times, Nemo shoots a glance back over his shoulder towards Odisseus. “Think we should buzz Moira, maybe? At this point?”

  “Not worried about them intercepting the transmission?”

  “At this point?”

  “Yeah. Fair.” Odisseus digs his character's comm from his character's toolbelt and dials one of the three frequencies it's programmed with. The call lasts half a ring before it's answered.

  “Thought we weren't supposed to buzz each other,” comes the patched voice of Moira Quicksilver, a balm to some of the Ortok's terror.

  “Hey, you're alive,” he remarks gratefully. “You missed the rendezvous.”

  “Got detoured. Blooming spice ranger in my way.”

  “Know the feeling,” grunts Odisseus. “Where're you now?”

  “At the rendezvous. Tapping my foot and hoping this virus doesn't vent me into open space.” Static fills her next pause. “Want I should come up?”

  “We'll come down.” Odisseus makes a gesture towards the lift she certainly can't appreciate. “We're just waiting for a ride down. Hey, did you know that Quargs change–”

  Nemo reaches out and grips the Ortok's sleeve. “You hear that?”

  “Hear what?” wonders Moira over the comm.

  Odisseus cancels the frequency to better listen. He has to strain his ears to hear, over the wailing alarms he'd long ago tuned out. It's a scream, to be sure, but not one of pain or surprise, like Odisseus might expect to hear aboard the Franchise in such a state.

  This is a scream of rage and it's coming closer.

  Around the corridor's far corner comes the Umijo spice ranger. Her harness blasts four jets of open flame, from two wrists and two ankles, enough to lift her off the ground and send her rocketing down the hallway. She's too far for Odisseus to do anything but imagine her expression but the one he does imagine is bent in righteous indignation, her one eyestalk a cauterized stub.

  At this speed, Odisseus predicts, she'll be here in less than a minute, slicing them to smoking pieces.

  “You seeing this?” the Ortok mutters to his saltbrother.

  “You know, I am,” Nemo is sad to confirm. “Moons, I want my gun so badly right now.”


  Instinct interposes Odisseus between Nemo and the incoming danger, the Ortok prepared once again to purchase with his life a chance for his saltbrother to escape. What minimal damage the Ortok can do against this flying angel of retribution and her flaming sword, Odisseus doesn't know. It's that biological imperative, however, that won't allow him cowardice, not while Nemo's life is in danger.

  The Umijo keeps closing the gap, transforming her righthand flamethrower into a sheer heatblade, all the better to skewer the stupid Ortok standing in her way.

  Behind them, the elevator dings and the doors sigh open.

  Without thinking, Nemo shoves the crate into the open elevator and scrambles after, turning to yank Odisseus by the tail. Taken wholly by surprise, Odisseus stumbles backward. All the while, he's spewing bestial curses in Ortoki, partially from embarrassment, partially from outrage at this breach of etiquette. Nemo's not listening, however, too busy ramming the elevator's door close button.

  In no particular hurry, the elevator doors slowly start to glide closed. Slumped on the ground, Odisseus watches the spice ranger arrive, precisely as both marble doors clink back together. About to breathe a sigh of relief, his breath is stolen the moment the sizzling point of the heatblade thrusts straight through the marble and stops within an inch of the Ortok's nose.

  Above, the mechanism engages. The elevator starts to plummet downward. The heatblade shoots upward, gashes straight through the marble and disappears into the ceiling, leaving a smoldering scar in its wake.

  The elevator drops at incredible speed, whisking the pair of them down to the lower atrium, several decks beneath. Nemo exhales deeply, as though they'd escaped all the danger and are somehow now in the clear. Odisseus, meanwhile, keeps an eye upward, through the glowing red wound the heatblade's made in the ceiling.

  So high above them it seems quaint and far away, Odisseus watches a pair of heatblades, with a few horizontal slashes, make short work of the marble doors. Chunks of sliced stone come plummeting down the elevator shaft and crash into the ceiling above them. The whole elevator is jostled this way and that with each impact.