“The ship’s crews,” assumed Two-Bit. “The spice rangers.”
“And the ruling family.”
“That’s still, what, thousands of people, though,” scoffed Two-Bit. “I mean, those gantines’re big–”
“What you’re missing,” interrupted Borsk impatiently, “is that, among those thousands of people, less than 1% have any idea what’s actually happening on the surface of that planet.”
“The spice rangers.”
“One troop, matter of fact,” Borsk complimented, with a slight nod. “The Stargazers.”
The very word sent a shiver of fear through Two-Bit Switch. Very rarely seen in the galaxy at large, the Stargazers were nonetheless the most revered of spice ranger troops – the very best of the very best. Those lucky rangers that excelled at the qualifying exams were reputedly whisked away to join their elite number and were never seen in the galaxy again. It came as quite a shock to Two-Bit, in scanning the files she’d sent him, to discover that the Stargazers were more than mere myth but evidently, a very deadly reality.
Borsk continued, undaunted by the rangers’ fearsome rep. “Barring the ruling family, only those spice rangers specifically charged with making planetfall and retrieving the goods know diddly squat about what’s down there.”
Two-Bit Switch shifted his gaze from Borsk and her explanation into the Attaché’s drifting hologram of assets, maps and clearance codes. This answer, surprise surprise, did not satisfy him.
“That’s all the more help I can be, I’m afraid,” Borsk informed him quietly, something like genuine sympathy in her voice, “on that particular matter.”
“I mean,” Two-Bit started a few moments later, “ain’t there anything at all you can jabb me?”
“That it’s hot,” Gella answered immediately. “That it doesn’t support animal life. That, under those extremely hostile conditions, the Consortium’s able to maintain the ideal incubated ecosystem to grow the peaches.” She shrugged her own robed shoulders. “As far as my business was ever concerned, that’s all I was deemed worthy of knowing.”
That was Two-Bit’s cue to insert a lengthy pause into the conversation, one his hostess exploited by tearing into her zugofish omelette, possibly for the first time since they’d taken their seats. For his part, Two-Bit kept staring at the flowchart, hoping the various floating items would arrange themselves in some startling, revelatory way.
“You know,” he mentioned a minute or more later, “that don’t really solve my crunch.”
“Well,” Borsk supposed, shrugging her fork of rigidified ice, “that’s why I’m paying you 68 million credits. To solve that crunch for me,” she explained, dropping the jabberterm like it was a stinking turd.
Two-Bit sighed, considered his own omelette where it steamed beneath the heat shield and reached for more horseradish sauce.
CHAPTER 7
Odisseus is wriggling onto his back, to gain better access to the main electrical conduit, when he feels the first tremor. Of course he's sandwiched inside the freighter's crawlspace when it hits. Of course Odisseus has zero wiggle room to either side and no avenue of escape except crawling forward or somehow backward. Wedged in amongst the very blood and bones of the ship, the Ortok’s trapped in the worst possible place for this to happen.
Who knew how much damage he would inflict, to his body and to the ship’s systems, were he caught here, unsecured, when The Unconstant Lover is dropped from high orbit above Gi, to crash onto the planet below?
The orlop deck that runs through the belly of the Briza is little more than a service tunnel. A cozy two feet in diameter, the walls, floor and ceiling of the crawlspace are all open machinery. Each one of the ship’s major systems – electricity, water, life support, antigrav – were all piped through the orlop deck, allowing a mechanic theoretical access to any potential snags or bad wiring.
On the best of days, it's a claustrophobic nightmare to crawl through. Today, the worst of days, it may prove to be the Ortok's tomb.
It started so innocently, the first link in the chain of events that would eventually see the Ortok pulverized beneath the Lover’s deckplates. Something would break, Odisseus had predicted, soon as system power was returned to the dormant Lover, a side effect of the ship sitting idle too long. A bored Odisseus had braved the cramped crawlspace to run some diagnostics, flashlight clenched in his teeth.
This awkward window they languished in, four days of inactivity while the GCF Franchise got its lonktonks in a row, seemed as good a time as any to do some preemptive maintenance.
The anxiety aboard The Unconstant Lover only continued to rise, day by day, as they awaited any sign that they’d been discovered. In the absence of spice rangers storming aboard, however, the crew was forced to assume that Mayhem did its work and did it admirably. In the meantime, while the Franchise recovered from its catastrophic damage, the Lover’s crew had more or less reverted to their old habits, now much improved by access to the rest of their home and spaceship.
They couldn’t risk main power for fear of alerting some suspicious sensor operator. They’d gambled on internal scrubbers, allowing them the profound luxuries of oxygen and central heating.
Odisseus spent much of his time in the medbay, with Moira making occasional visits to administer to his wound. In his entire career as a professional pirate and semioccasional murderer, the Ortok had never experienced pain like that heatblade had drawn across the stomach. At all times, he went about the Lover wearing a wide swatch of rejuv-bandage, an expensive remedy Moira thought to purchase upon hearing of Gi’s extreme heat. Still, it was made clear to Odisseus that he would bear an extremely unflattering burn mark across his stomach for the rest of his days.
It certainly made shuffling his bulk through the cramped crawlspace an interesting and painful experience – particularly when the asteroid encasing the ship started to fall from the sky.
With no inertial dampeners active, there's nothing to stop The Unconstant Lover, all her crew and all her contents from pitching and yawing about. Inside the tight orlop tunnel, Odisseus is treated especially roughly, thrown about like tumbled laundry. Every few seconds, his back or neck or elbow is slammed into a hunk of machinery or becomes tangled in a mesh of cables. He yelps in sheer panic and struggles against the rising contents of his stomach. At this point, a regurgitated lunch of dubix trout is the absolute last thing he needs sloshing around in here with him.
After a few moments of flailing about, Odisseus manages to use tight confines to his advantage. By positioning his tail and his hind paws, Odisseus jams his body within the crawlspace, blunting the spinning asteroid’s further attempts to toss him around. Through some more fancy maneuvering, he wrests free his comm and dials the necessary frequency. There’s a pause, filled with hissing static, before the other end answers.
The person who answers is unquestionably Nemo and he’s unquestionably screaming his head off.
“Hey!” barks Odisseus, unable to quite bring the comm to his mouth. The only response is more incoherent screaming, peppered with panicked attempts at half-words. “Hey! Is this it? Is it happening?”
Whether Nemo makes some intelligible reply to this, Odisseus has no idea, considering all the crashing and clanging on both sides of the transmission.
“All the moons,” he mutters. With great effort, he manages to scroll to another frequency. He waits through the static, bracing against the fearsome rocking of the ship.
“You rang?” an oddly calm Moira answers.
“They dropped the spacebergs, didn’t they?”
“Would be my guess,” she confirms. “I mean, I don’t see what else this could possibly be.”
“Bloom,” curses Odisseus between gritted teeth. “What I wouldn’t give for sensor visual right now.” Moira makes a sympathetic noise. “Where are you?”
“The topturret. All strapped in,” she replies, a little too proudly.
“Yeah, see,” Odisseus informs her bitterly, “I’m still in t
he crawlspace.”
Her pause is a profound one. “...oh, shit,” she mutters in a small voice.
“Yeah, I–”
A harsh electronic ringtone, too cheery considering the dire circumstances, interrupts them both. Odisseus scowls. “Hold up a second. Nemo’s trying to buzz me back.”
Another moment’s juggling allows Odisseus to patch into the incoming call. The moment he does, though, he’s only greeted with more incoherent screaming.
“Bloom me out,” mutters Moira, soon as she hears this.
It takes all the Ortok’s legendary restraint not to start tearing at the Lover’s mechanical innards all around him in sheer frustration. He takes a calming breath, resolved to put very justified rage aside and instead make an attempt to save his and his saltbrother’s life – yet again.
“Nemo! Nemo!” When this garners no response, however, his patience boils immediately over and Odisseus simply screams in bestial fury. “Nemo!”
The screaming abruptly stops, the space filled with more static. “...yeah?”
“You need to get to the helm,” Odisseus explains, his voice trembling with rage. “Somewhere with safety straps.” Before Nemo can make any objection, Odisseus presses the reminder hard. “The inertial dampener’s offline, remember? When we make impact, the g-force’ll be so strong, it’ll break every bone in your body.” This actually succeeds in shutting him up. “You have seconds. Go.”
There's a quick pause, when the Captain clearly debates saying something else, before the interrupting frequency drops out.
“Where're you gonna go?” wonders Moira into that silence.
“Forward, I think,” theorizes Odisseus, grabbing the castoff flashlight with a paw and sweeping it forward through the darkness. “Gotta find the nearest duct. Unless I miss my guess, I'm under the hold right now.”
“There’re those emergency impact seats,” suggests Moira. Odisseus realizes he’d been imagining those seats as salvation, smuggled up against the laundry mainframe, since shortly after the tremors began.
“Exactly.”
Moira's next question sounds casual but carries, Odisseus knows, a subtle significance. “Think you can make it?”
“Sure,” he bluffs, as breezily as he can. None of them really had any idea how long it would take The Unconstant Lover to plummet from the Franchise’s cargo bay, through Gi’s atmosphere and crash onto the surface below. It could take an hour, it could take a heartbeat.
However long it takes, Odisseus refuses to be pulverized while crawling through the Lover’s intestines.
It requires yet more awkward contortions to deactivate the comm. Swapping the flashlight to his teeth, the Ortok starts his slow and painful progress, wriggling forward towards the nearest access duct.
There were ducts littered all throughout the spaceship, allowing theoretical repairmen – really Odisseus – access to individual sections of the crawlspace from anywhere aboard. Some of the larger chambers – the hold, the mess, the belowdecks crew quarters – came equipped with several duct access points and all Odisseus needs is one.
All he needs is some method to escape the confines of the crawlspace, preferably with enough time to sprint to a good set of safety harnesses.
The great bundle of electrical wiring that hangs over the Ortok’s head suggests that his gamble paid off and he's likely a few feet beneath the cargo hold. There oughta be, then, a number of ducts along his route, any one of which would surface him in the cargo bay and save his proverbial bacon.
The question is whether or not he’s passed them all already. The very thought of wriggling blindly backwards through the crawlspace churns his stomach with nausea.
The progress is predictably slow and painful. As the spaceberg and the spaceship inside roll and tumble in freefall, Odisseus is tossed jarringly to port and starboard or vertiginously to bow or aft. More than once, Odisseus must clamp his claws against the sides of the orlop tunnel to prevent sliding forward or backward at a sickening angle.
While one paw clutches the comm, he’s left with only one forepaw to drag himself along, his tail and hindpaws less than useless in the claustrophobic space. All along the way, his own words of warning to Nemo ring in his head, unable to shake thoughts of his skeleton liquifying on impact with the planet below.
He’s giggling with delirium when, a few feet ahead, his flashlight bounces against a vertical shaft that shoots straight up from the crawlspace. After much effort, the Ortok manages to twist his torso and hind quarters completely around and slither partway up the duct. Pawing blindly about with his claws, he locates the back of the access panel and digs his claws around its hinges.
With all his strength and terror, Odisseus shoves and shoves against the unrelenting teltriton plate. Only by thinking of idiotically screaming Nemo and the raw pain of his recent belly wound can Odisseus find frustration enough to break free.
On the opposite side of the panel, Odisseus hears the sounds of the rivets popping free and clanging to the deck. The duct door bends sickeningly and, with a growl of triumph, the enraged Ortok peels the panel away, like the flimsy lid off a tin of some canned sporefin. He gulps a few breaths of glorious fresh air, his neck and one shoulder jutting awkwardly from the duct’s opening.
To his surprise, he’s not in the cargo hold. He’s in the water closet.
Compared to the crawlspace, the water closet has suddenly become very spacious. Only a bathroom in the broadest sense of the word, the water closet is little more than a toilet, a sink attached to the back of the door and a fractured mirror, no doubt damaged in another of the Lover’s countless crashes.
He’d somehow overshot his mark, crawled too far along the crawlspace and surfaced here, in the next chamber over. All things considered, though, Odisseus is simply happy to still be alive.
With a great heaving effort, Odisseus starts to squeeze his body through the duct’s narrow opening. This is perhaps the most embarrassing and excruciating portion of the whole ordeal and he’s thankful there’s no one here to witness his shame. He curses wildly, flaps his limbs about and, with an anguished cry, tears the now-tattered bandage completely free in the process.
Who he wouldn’t strangle for Two-Bit Switch’s peerless ability to dislocate his own shoulder – a useful skill for squeezing through small spaces and for grossing people out, mostly – as he struggles his body through the duct.
Soon as he’s through, Odisseus collapses to the wet floor with a sigh of immense relief, all his extremities vaguely numb and tingly. The moment he does, however, the Ortok’s instantly bashed about the place. In the sudden absence of gravity, Odisseus is tossed hither and thither about the water closet – once into the opposite wall, once against the ceiling, once back to the floor. In his frantic airborne flailing, Odisseus manages to hook claws beneath the rim of the sink and cling on for dear life.
By some miracle, the ship’s toilet came equipped with safety straps, now flapping about like the tentacles of some mad anemone. If he could only reach that seat and fasten those straps, he’d actually have a chance to survive the crash that’s overdue any moment now.
It’s at this moment that the Ortok’s senses attune and Odisseus catches a fetid stench, the unmistakeable smell of humanoid urine. His eyes are drawn naturally toward the bowl and, when the lid flaps up, Odisseus is horrified by what he sees.
Profound indignation simmers within the Ortok and, soon as his comm whips past, he snatches it from the air with a paw, that he might harangue the guilty party.
“Who didn’t flush?” he snarls over the comm.
“Uhh...”
“What do you mean, who?” Moira points out. “How is that even a question?”
“By all the moons, Nemo–”
Despite all the peril, the Captain becomes immediately petty and defensive in his response. “Well, I can't flush, can I? The thing doesn't work!”
“The water main's deactivated,” the Ortok reminds him, for the umpteenth time. “That means y
ou're not supposed to use the blooming water closet!”
Moira's question is full of arch confusion. “What're you doing in the water clos–”
Without warning, the Lover’s center of gravity swings in the opposite direction and Odisseus sees his chance. Dropping the comm to clatter in the sink, he launches his body towards the toilet. For a moment, he’s stuck, grappling with the thrashing strands of seatbelt but eventually, he manages to wrestle each one into submission. After a few painful smacks with the whipping buckles, Odisseus is successfully strapped onto the toilet.
No sooner has he done this, of course, than The Unconstant Lover crashes to the surface.
When the impact does come, it comes from a completely unexpected direction – above. Evidently, it's an upside-down Unconstant Lover that makes first contact with the planet. In response, the Ortok is throttled violently against his restraints while everything else in the water closet is dashed against the floor. The sheer shock pops the mirror clean off its hinges, shattering into glassy shrapnel and spilling the contents of the medicine cabinet everywhere.
Miserable as the experience may be, it’s far from the first time Odisseus has ridden The Unconstant Lover to a bumpy landing. Despite the unpredictable direction, he was more or less braced and prepared for the force of impact when it came.
Odisseus is taken by surprise, then, when the ship bounces.
Like a stone across the surface of a pond, the whole freighter skips up and off the ground, spins a few lackadaisical circles and slams, once more, into the earth. This is accompanied by another tremendous impact, this time from the Lover’s port, and another general exodus of the water closet’s everything – rivets, Ortoks, glass shards – fiercely to the starboard.
To the Ortok's continued delight, this is repeated four more times, each with progressively weaker impacts and from innovative new directions. In addition, each time the ship rebounds, there’s the sickening sound of something shattering beneath her. For his mental health, Odisseus is forced to assume this to be the thick coating of ice that envelops the Briza. He cannot fully banish the laundry list of potential damages that continues to rack up higher and higher with each bounce.
Unconstant Love Page 14
