In the dim light, it’s nearly impossible not to make that mistake. With no facial features, one Gitter cactus is pretty much indistinguishable from another, with only height, harness and number of arms to separate them. This intruder stands a “head and shoulders” shorter than Stalkchopper, wears a simplistic harness and carries no weapons. Otherwise, it’s perfectly identical to the hundred other cactus-men encircling them.
Nemo recovers from his blunder with divine grace. “Oh. Sure. Right.” He shuffles back towards his seat, all fight stolen from him, and waves dismissively at Foreplanter. “Do your thing, man.”
Still scowling at Nemo, Odisseus also returns to his seat, as Foreplanter approaches the captive. {What brings a lowly scrub of the Splitspine to the sovereign territory of the Skyscratch?}
The captive doesn’t seem to acknowledge Foreplanter at all. Instead, it drops to its spiny knees and makes a grandiose gesture towards the great tuskwood table. {May Badass Supreme, most lordly of Vesselborn, know–}
With a blur of motion, one of Stalkchopper’s many blades severs one of the kneeling captive’s unsuspecting limbs. With a wet crunching sound, it lands in the sand, a whitish liquid gushing from the open wound. The olfactory equivalent of a scream – pins-and-needles inside the Ortok’s nose – fills the canyon.
{Thou shall not spore at the Vesselborn, infidel!} roars Stalkchopper. {They shall not bear thine scent–}
{Would the Skyscratch, in their arrogance, claim sole mastership over God Beyond’s messengers?} spews back the captive, with a surprising amount of grit for one so recently dismembered. {More groves than one wander the wastes. Do they too not deserve heavenly favor? I am come bearing a message from the Foreplanter of our gro–}
{What message}, scoffs the distant spores of Firstseed Flamescar, {could the honorless chaff of the Splitspine have for the mighty Skyscratch?}
{The message is not for thee nor thy tyrannical ilk}, hisses the captive. It makes another gesture upward and toward the tuskwood. {I bear a message for the Vesselborn}.
At that moment, Nemo’s pointer finger is halfway up his nose.
{Thou were warned}, threatens Stalkchopper, raising its weapon, {about sporing nonsense to thine betters}.
{Speak thy message, then}, commands Foreplanter, {and have done. Do not trouble the Vesselborn overlong with thine mitherings}.
After a moment of hesitation, the captive capitulates. {When rumor reached our grove that the Vesselborn had heaped another blessing upon the Skyscratch, our Foreplanter sent me to ascertain the truth. Were I to discover the presence of God Beyond’s messengers, I was bid to ask, ever so humbly, why they have forsaken those of the Splitspine grove? Many moons have come and gone with no word or sign from above. Our fruits grow atrophied and overripe. I beg you, enlightened Badass Supreme}, the desperate captive implores, {have we displeased God Beyond somehow?}
There is silence in the grove a moment, a stray breeze wiping the scene clear and allowing Firstseed Flamescar the space to ask its question.
{What says the Vesselborn?}
This time, Nemo’s actually paying attention. His thumb removed from his nose, he plants both hands on the table top and turns his head ever so slightly, just enough to smile nefariously at both Moira and Odisseus to his either side.
That’s all the warning Nemo gives before he leaps to his feet. Like a mad prophet, he spreads his hands wide, the sleeves of his desert-stained bathrobe flapping open. “Displeased?” he howls, his voice filling the canyon. “Why, yes! The Skidstain grove has displeased the all-powerful Whoever Up There!” He follows this declaration with a twisting point up towards the darkened sky and its three luminous moons.
Anxiety and apprehension disperses through the assembled cacti. Overcome with passion, the Galactic Menace scrambles clumsily atop the tuskwood table and, once he’s mounted, he’s able to scream down at his congregation from an even higher vantage.
“Too long have they spurned the grace and majesty of we, the handsome Vesselborn!” He prowls back and forth before the cactoid host, in much the same manner that he might have before a Pirateton crowd years earlier. “Too long have they been, like, way shorter than you taller guys!” he accuses, throwing a finger toward Foreplanter and nearly losing his balance in the process, a hardshelled nut rolling away beneath his foot.
Somehow, this laughable rhetoric seems to work wonders on the watching Skyscratch. The cacti below are visibly thrumming with fervor. Their wordless spores, reeking of genocidal rage, come pouring into the Ortok's nose. In his signature way, Nemo’s stumbled into a deep-seeded and ethnically-charged schism between these otherwise indistinguishable cactus tribes.
“This,” Nemo barks, tossing his hands wide in a glorious spreadeagle, “is the divine mission of the Vesselborn.” He throws back his head and stares straight into the inky black sky, made starless by the climatic field that encircles the planet. “That Dude Upstairs has sent us to punish these blasphemers for their unspeakable crimes and, what’s more,” the Captain lurches suddenly forward, sweeping a finger across the horde, “to capture from them the ultimate sacrifice.”
He holds up that single finger and, though his back is turned, Odisseus knows precisely which smile his saltbrother’s wearing. “One sapling. The price they must pay for all the gnarly shit they’ve been up to.”
Demented as his methods may be, Odisseus sees the cunning in Nemo's plan. How much easier will the Skyscratch find capturing the child of an enemy than to surrendering one of their own offspring?
However, it’s confusion, rather than bloodthirsty enthusiasm, that follows Nemo’s declaration. Something about Badass Supreme’s decree doesn’t quite translate for the Gitter. The Captain, sensing this, chooses not to linger on this point.
“In exchange for our sacred water,” Badass Supreme offers, making his final play, “who among you giant cactus assholes will join the invincible Vessleborn in glorious battle against these infidels?”
The reaction of the crowd is a feast for the senses both frightening and bizarre. The cheering cactus crowd explodes into motion – throwing weapons high into the air, clanging blades against blades, stamping spear hafts against the ground. At the same time, they themselves are eerily silent, not a single voice raised in agreement or anger. It’s the tide of spores that most concerns Odisseus, washing over him with bloodlust and bravura and crusading fire.
{To arms!} Foreplanter cries, ordering his warriors about. {To arms! We march this very hour!} The applause comes from Moira, also wrapped up in the crowd's enthusiasm.
The makings of zealous tribal war as a tableau behind him, Nemo spins around, considers his companions and brushes both imaginary and actual dust from his hands. “Problem solved, then,” he announces and, in the process of hopping down from atop the tuskwood table, nearly loses his balance.
Moira rounds the corner of the environtent and discovers him puking his guts out.
He even pukes like an idiot, she’s unsurprised to find. He’s not standing, doubled over, and allowing the vomit to fall away from his body. Instead, he simply squats and leans, hands clutching his stomach and blue slime drippling down his chin. To make matters still worse, it gets caught in his beard, dying the strip of scraggly hair between his mouth and his chin a shade of sickening sapphire.
All he’s eaten today – trail rations and succulent fruits – makes this an especially unpleasant sight. What’s so bizarre is that, even without any actual alcohol in his system, the spores still inspire the same climax that a drunken bender might have – an unbecoming barf in the bushes.
To look at him, Moira realizes that, sooner or later, the same fate awaits her too.
For a moment, she forgets the entire reason she sought him out in the first place. As she watches him heave and retch, his back partially turned, Moira discovers that Lefty has somehow appeared in her hand – pointed at the back of Nemo’s unsuspecting head.
There were no witnesses. One pistol shot would never be heard over the cl
amor of the crowd. She can feel the weight of the vial she’d use in her pocket. An instantly sober Moira realizes how painlessly she could end the reign of the Galactic Menace and claim his bounty.
Three-quarters of an hour ago, the Captain sought refuge behind the three environtents they’d pitched on the nursery’s outskirts, citing a sudden bout of nausea. Three identical domes of inflated nyloplast, the environtents were the pirates’ intended shelter, purchased at Moira’s insistence, for their trek across Gi’s inhospitable terrain. After a long night of simulated drinking, Moira would normally have retired long ago to the climate-controlled haven of her private environtent.
Instead, Nemo sought to lead the Skyscratch on some ginned-up genocide against their mortal enemies, the Splitspine, this very night. Rather than laying her head down to rest, Moira would soon be marching off to war.
The preparations for war continue at a dull roar behind her, among the nursery’s bones and awnings. Moira hears the sharpening of blades of glass, the creak and rattle of leather harnesses and the muted thunder of war drums.
Above all, Moira smells them; the rage, the anxiety, every wordless emotion a pack of armed plants might experience before they march off to kill another pack of armed plants. All this, Moira senses dimly, like the smells of someone cooking an aromatic meal several rooms away.
For an hour, the Skyscratch made ready their war party and, for three-quarters of that hour, Badass Supreme’s been absent, disappeared behind the envirotents. It fell to Moira to undertake the sacred duty of fetching forth the Skyscratch’s divine avenger, that he might lead his glorious host to victory, from where he squats puking.
Here, in the shadow of the environtents, no one would possibly chance upon them. Here, she could commit her quiet mutiny unmolested.
Her pistol unerringly steady in her hand, Moira flashes on the litany of indignities and offenses she’s suffered at Nemo’s hand. She recalls another shipwreck, years earlier, when his lunacy saw the Lover’s underturret – and undergunner along with – crushed to a pulp beneath the freighter’s weight. She recalls another vomiting of his, years earlier, when he’d ruined her only skirt and her only moment of vulnerability to barf all over her lap.
She recalls another Menace she’s stolen upon, years earlier, with pistol outstretched and no witnesses to be found. A different pistol, she acknowledges, and a different Menace.
Pure vengeance nearly clenches her fist and pulls the trigger.
Soon as Moira thinks on the fall of the house of Ott, however, reality comes slamming back to her. Of course she can’t kill and claim Nemo’s bounty; it dawns on her sober mind how phenomenally stupid a moment this would be to strike.
The evidence would stack hilariously high against her. Were Nemo found dead, shot through the brain, what other culprit could possibly be named – here, in this barbaric wasteland?
Of the four firearms on the planet, two were in her possession. There is nowhere she could secret a vial of blood that the Ortok’s questing nose wouldn’t eventually sniff out. Chief among the impossibilities, of course, is that Moira is currently trapped on this remote and hostile world, with Nemo the only pilot of sufficient skill who could free her.
Not to mention the Ortok, insane with grief and murderous rage, nor the entire tribe’s worth of fanatical barbarians, that she, killer of god and saltbrother, would have to face.
At the end of the day, this is a suicidally stupid window, however opportune, for Moira to make her show-stopping ploy. Other, less dangerous opportunities would arise, she assures the calculating part of her brain. She should bide her time, as always, and not reveal her position or her intentions so hastily.
With a certain subconscious reluctance, Lefty returns to its sheath.
Meanwhile, Nemo’s nearly at the end of his puking, now simply groaning and spitting onto the sand. The moment ruined, Moira fills with a sudden, unreasonable impatience for all his posturing and his buhoxshit. She shifts her weight and clears her throat significantly – anything to get his attention and end this errand, that she might go brood somewhere in peace.
“Everybody’s,” she ends up announcing flatly, “pretty much ready.” To this, all the Galactic Menace does is groan a little more. “You might wanna get out there or else Foreplanter’s liable to leave you behind.”
“Yeah,” is all Nemo manages. “Yeah. Okay. Gimme–”
Moira slaps both thighs with empty palms. “Just so you know.”
Her message delivered, Moira stalks away and back into the nursery, the sand crunching beneath her boots and a thousand unuttered curses dying on her lips.
CHAPTER 10
Odisseus is worried this might be the one, the big kahuna, the granddaddy of them all.
For the past six distressing years, Odisseus has borne witness to a menagerie of Nemo's bad ideas. He went plunging into the bloodthirsty jungles of Baz, tangling with aboriginal tribes, native predators and Insurgent Company. He launched a pointless attack against the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija that saw his pirate fleet destroyed, his ambitions shattered and his friend disintegrated.
This one, though – inciting a race war between two unsuspecting factions of humongous cactoids – might be the most problematic, irresponsible and downright stupid of Nemo's sordid history of terrible, in every sense of the word, ideas.
After an entire journey’s worth of worrying, Odisseus was honestly expecting the Splitspine nursery to be much more formidable than this. Granted, this is only the second Gitter nursery that Odisseus has ever seen and he’s hardly a qualified expert on the matter. Somehow, in his mind, he’d imagined a redoubtable stronghold, something the Skyscratch would throw themselves against in droves, like waves crashing against the rocks.
He hadn’t imagined a gigantic hole in the ground, covered by a big leafy tarp.
There’s no shaded mountain canyon for the Splitspine. Exiled to the featureless wasteland, the beleaguered grove was forced to convert the only landmark for mottibles around into a very makeshift shelter for their saplings.
A great sinkhole interrupts the sun-scorched landscape with its jagged, toothy rim. The Ortok’s best guess would say this was maybe once a geyser, long ago dried and desiccated. High atop this, the Splitspine have stretched a canopy of plant matter, to offer more permanent shade to whatever’s kept below. Only at dawn does any sunlight creep beneath that canopy, to color the nursery walls the royal purple of Gi’s strange sunrise.
As soon as the warband’s arrived at a safe distance to the enemy camp, Odisseus sends Moira on a scouting mission around the nursery’s perimeter. She doesn’t even bother attempting to sneak, as she departs on her reconnoiter of the sinkhole, what with zero cover in the unbroken landscape. The wasteland in every direction is painstakingly flat, not even a shard of glassrock here or there to provide a sliver of protection from sun or sentries.
Odisseus stands a healthy distance from both the nursery and the Skyscratch raiding party, the latter still stinking with violence and holy terror from Nemo’s stirring speech. The entire warband, some hundred in number, has come in full force for this raid, armed with glassrock sword and spear and poleaxe.
The distant silhouette of Badass Supreme stands at the head of the host, limned in hazy purple sunrise against the utterly flat horizon. He cuts the perfect picture of the mad prophet – scraggly beard, tattered robe, liberal spattering of desert dust. From this distance, he looks even more manic, conducting a full-voiced and one-sided argument with a gargantuan cactus, albeit one dressed like a barbarian chief.
The whole while Moira is scouting Odisseus is fidgeting, pawing idly at the Attaché and fretting idly. The entire ride across the benighted plains of Gi, atop the litter Nemo demanded they construct for his use, Odisseus was quite vocal about his objections to this particular plan. Here, presented with an actual tribe of thinking, breathing sentients, about to be slaughtered on such a dodgy pretext, his anxiety’s at a fever pitch. Sobered much quicker than his companions by all this
worry, he’s constantly gazing about the surrounding area, like he expects to find a convenient escape route.
He’ll know the full scale of the calamity soon as Moira returns but, from where he stands, Odisseus is able to determine the only most basic data about the nursery, its fortifications and its defenders.
Stationed along the sinkhole’s perimeter are cactoid figures, inarguably sentries, that, even from this distance, stand much shorter than the towering Skyscratch marauders. These, Odisseus must assume, are Splitspine Secondseeds, only ten feet tall to the Firstseed’s fifteen.
More noteworthy to the invading Skyscratch are the small crowd of Splitspine Firstseeds, armed and harnessed, standing arrayed around the northeast edge of the nursery. Standing at a remove, Odisseus can’t quite get an exact figure but he knows they’re drastically fewer than the number of marauders the Skyscratch brought. All the same, he expects the Splitspine warriors to fight tooth and nail to defend their homes against an incursion on such shaky moral ground.
The sheer numbers, however, tell Odisseus this is liable to be a Skyscratch victory and, what’s more, a Splitspine bloodbath, a fact that makes him all the more uncomfortable with this plan.
Her intelligence gathered, Moira comes trooping back his direction. She’s striding as straight as she can, attempting to keep her cool, but Odisseus can tell by her uneven gait that all she wants to do right now is fall down and puke everywhere.
“Looks pretty standard,” she calls, her voice carrying perfectly over the flat terrain. “One of Two-Bit’s, um, hell-and-horseshoes.”
“Yeah?” Odisseus grunts, still glancing anxiously past her at the nursery and its defenses.
Moira scowls the moment the words leave her mouth. “That doesn’t sound right. Hell-and-horseshoes.”
“How many?” presses Odisseus, not overly concerned with the specific nomenclature Two-Bit Switch, were he here, would have used to describe the situation.
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