Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  “Pretty sure,” Moira reflects, “there was a ‘horseshoes’ in there somewhere.”

  “Moira. Moira.” Odisseus starts snapping his claws – a harsh, clicking sound – an inch from Moira’s contemplative face. “How many guards?” he asks again, very deliberately.

  “Some. Many.” Moira answers automatically and scrunches up her face, attempting to make math behave in her head. “A number.” When this somehow fails to mollify Odisseus, she starts waving frustrated gestures in summarization. “There’s dudes spaced out like, all around the sides and there’s a buncha dudes,” she flaps her hand towards the Firstseeds, “all up there in the front. The dudes around the side are smaller dudes, the dudes in the front are bigger dudes.” Her report complete, she makes a small bowing gesture, offering up all the information one could reasonably gather from the situation.

  “Mission accomplished,” congratulates Odisseus flatly. “Good work, Moira.”

  Taking the compliment genuinely, Moira plants her hands on her hips and gazes backward at the crater behind her, like an optimistic contractor surveying a construction site. “Can totally sneak around the side, though, while all the hullabaloo’s going on up here.”

  “You think?”

  “Pssh. Cake.”

  “Okay,” Odisseus tentatively agrees, recalling Moira’s drunken competency in the past. “So, Nemo fires up the Gitter, they go charging in, make a big-ass distraction–”

  “A hell-and-horseshoes,” offers Moira, looking immediately displeased the moment she says this.

  “What’re you doing during all this?” quizzes Odisseus.

  “Keep my distance,” recites Moira robotically, “find an opening, climb down there, grab the goods, go.” She snaps her finger as something strikes her. “You got the thing?”

  “How hilarious would that be?” he ventures, fetching the item from where it’s looped on his toolbelt. “If I forgot it in my tent? Or worse, back on the ship?”

  In his paw, Odisseus clutches an uninspiring gray disc. Taking it from his grip, Moira spends a moment examining the disc, running her fingers along its three concentric grooves, each one smaller than the last, that shrink towards its center. “What’re you doing during all this?” she asks suddenly.

  Odisseus shrugs. “Keeping Nemo alive, I thought. You know he’s gonna try his damndest to thrust himself into the thick of things.”

  “Good ol’ Nemo,” remarks Moira fondly, earning her the strangest of looks from Odisseus.

  “So,” he continues after a moment, “you now have the thing, you and the thing climb back out, meet up with us somehow and then what?” He raises his paws in a mock shrug. “Wait to see who wins?” he proposes, his pitch rising with his uncertainty.

  “I mean, at that point,” Moira starts to theorize, full of sage wisdom, “we’ve already got the thing, right?” She thumbs over her shoulder, away from the nursery and into the open desert. “Head back to the ship.”

  Odisseus is skeptical when he follows her point. “Ship’s that way?” As one, they both twist to gaze in that direction, as though they expect to see The Unconstant Lover parked patiently there.

  What they see instead is an unflinching expanse of blank white sand, like an artist's untouched canvas, without a spec of terrain in sight. The mountains dim shadows back the way they’d come, Odisseus hadn’t the foggiest where they, the ship or really anything else was. He did know they didn’t have the time, the supplies or the sheer remaining sanity to go wandering off in some random direction across a hostile alien planet.

  “Is this a terrible idea?” Moira proposes suddenly, as she spins back towards him. “Is this a terrible idea that’s gonna get us all killed?”

  “Oh, I think it is,” Odisseus confirms with a few vigorous nods. “I think we might be looking at the worst one.”

  “Really?” Moira blows out an exasperated breath. “Did I actually endorse the worst of Nemo’s terrible ideas that’re gonna get us all killed?” Something in the Ortok’s expression must convince her that she has. “I’m normally so good at spotting those.”

  “If you’ll recall,” Odisseus feels the need to remind her, “I spotted this coming fuc–”

  There’s quite suddenly a terrible commotion from somewhere behind the Ortok. Among the chaos, he hears rattling weapons, creaking leather and the stampeding of many, many rooty feet. When the wind changes, Odisseus catches a new wave of spores – rage, terror and bloodlust, all the ingredients for full-blown battle frenzy.

  With his back still turned, Odisseus just closes his eyes in frustration. “Are they–”

  “Oh, yeah,” Moira, facing the right way, can confirm. “They’re totally attacking.”

  “Nemo too?”

  “Looks like.” Moira scowls and cranes forward. “I can’t see him too good. Kinda short, really, compared to everyone else over there.”

  The more Odisseus listens, the more he can hear the one humanoid amid all the clamor back there, hurling about imprecations and ditrogen bolts.

  It is with a great reluctant sigh that Odisseus spins slowly around and lays eyes on the disaster unfurling behind him. Nemo’s easy to find among the chaos, the Skyscratch berserkers long outpacing him on their mad dash towards the Splitspine nursery. At an incredible pace do the Gitter of the Skyscratch grove go racing across the sheer white sand. In response, the Splitspine forces move to receive them. More than a hundred naked glassrock blades are unsheathed to glisten in the morning light and soon, all souls upon that dry wasteland will be imperiled.

  “I really should let him go fuck himself,” Odisseus realizes heavily.

  “Except…?” dangles Moira, a little uncertainly.

  “Except he’s my saltbrother and he’s definitely gonna get chopped into very tiny pieces if he’s allowed inside that thing.” He points a claw towards the empty stretch of sand between both parties of cacti, soon to be their battlefield. “And he’s our only ride.”

  “Yeah,” Moira appreciates. “I was thinking about that earlier.”

  Odisseus yanks free his Wreckingball from his hip holster with another reluctant sigh. “Well,” is the only farewell he gives Moira before he starts shuffling off towards the soon-to-be battleground and his likely evisceration.

  Odisseus hustles towards the dust cloud and the cactoid hordes and the spot where they’re most likely to meet in pitched battle. Up ahead, the Splitspine defenders decamp down the sinkhole’s slope a few yards, extending a long row of bristling glassrock spears to better welcome the charging invaders with. The Skyscratch, meanwhile, show no sign of slowing or stopping and instead increase speed with a suicidal abandon that the Captain, Odisseus imagines, would heartily approve of.

  The two sides clash when Odisseus is still approximately a hundred yard away. The lines of taller cacti smash violently into the thicket of glassrock spearheads arrayed for them. To the Ortok’s amazement, this hardly seems to blunt the Skyscratch charge at all. Their front ranks fight on, unimpeded, with half a dozen spears thrust straight through their trunks and midsections.

  The very next moment, everything in the Ortok’s line of sight is swallowed in a cloud of white dust. Despite the stifling heat, Odisseus cannot help but imagine a blizzard has descended from nowhere to engulf the battle. Within moments, the Ortok’s submerged fully into the dust cloud, forced to navigate the towering, twisting shadows and silhouettes that give bloody battle in every direction.

  As stiff and cumbersome as they might appear, the Gitter are nothing but graceful in battle. They whirl like dervishes, simultaneously attacking and parrying with half-a-dozen weapons each. In the haze, though, Odisseus can only catch occasional glimpses, gargantuan blurs that wheel past, blades shimmering, with barely enough notice for the Ortok to shirk a trampling and duck beneath a stabbed weapon.

  Determined to carve a path to Nemo, Odisseus simply blasts anything or anyone that comes too close with his Wreckingball’s explosive shells. At that range, the Imperium-minuted shotgun is a de
vastating conclusion to anyone’s life span. Against the Gitter, creatures composed of dry, flammable wood, its use practically constitutes a war crime. With great bellowing blasts, the Ortok blows away any potential opponents, cactoids one can only assume were Splitspine, their broad bodies bursting into vibrant red flames the moment they’re struck.

  What’s weirdest about the battle is certainly the silence. The swords and spears and savagery, plus the occasional gunshot, are all present but there’re no screams or shouts or gasps of agony. Instead, the whole place reeks, overpoweringly so, every individual's spores boiled together into a heady soup of fear and anger and panic.

  That means that, among all the battle and butchery, Nemo’s extremely easy to locate. The occasional bark of his firearm helps but it’s really his shouting – curse-riddled strings of laughter and screams that could only originate in a truly psychotic mind – that gives him away.

  He’s trapped beneath the collapsed and writhing corpse of a mostly limbless cactus when Odisseus comes upon him. His firearm he fires sporadically and with great relish, a few shots coming dangerously close to the approaching Odisseus. The Ortok’s Wreckingball makes short work of the carcass, exploding it into flaming smithereens and freeing his saltbrother from beneath.

  “–in the mouth of a dead Qhemish hooker!” he concludes, the centerpiece to his latest improbable curse, and clambers to his feet.

  “Can I ask,” Odisseus posits, screaming at full voice amid all the noise of the battle, “what in the ever-fucking moons you were thinking? Starting all this?” He waves his paw and his shotgun about emphatically.

  “I dunno,” Nemo screams back, with a shrug, as he levels a pistol into the dust storm. “Got bored.” He fires and something, hopefully a Splitspine cactus, bursts into a column of striking blue fire some distance into the dust cloud.

  “And it would have killed you,” Odisseus continues, turning to obliterate the flaming cactus as it lumbers towards Nemo, threatening death at the end of six or more sharp instruments, “to, I don’t know, ask me first?”

  Nemo’s expression is almost hurt. “You were all the way over there.”

  “Coulda buzzed us,” Moira offers helpfully.

  At her comment, Odisseus nearly leaps out of his pelt. He spins indignantly around and discovers Moira standing there. She’s a little dustier, perhaps, but otherwise, she’s standing exactly where she had been when Odisseus left her, looking innocently up at him. “The bloom are you doing here?”

  “I came with you,” she mutters, scowling a little.

  “Do you not remember? This is the big-ass distraction?” They’re forced to part a moment as the flame-riddled, shotgun-blasted cactus comes to a crashing heap between them, splattering further apart as it hits the ground. “The hell-and-handbasket?”

  “Bloom me out!” Moira exclaims with sudden remembrance. “The hell-and-handbasket! That’s absolutely what he called it.” She pauses for a moment to consider. “Dunno where I got ‘horseshoes’ from. Thank you!”

  “Anytime,” growls Odisseus. “Now, if you don’t blooming mind–”

  Moira nods, backing cheerfully up a few steps. “Oh, sure. Okay. Be right back!”

  The next moment, she’s spun completely around and gone skipping back into the skirmish, Righty and Lefty suddenly in her hands. A moment after that, she’s disappeared completely in the dust and the destruction.

  “Question,” Nemo inquires once she’s gone, pointing a finger down at the remains of the Gitter warrior smoldering between them. “Does that look at all like Foreplanter to you?”

  Moira Quicksilver is on a secret mission.

  Given a concrete task – retrieve the thing from the bottom of the place – she’s finally able to quiet the drunken nonsense some. In her current state, Moira’s spore-addled conscious mind is more liability than asset. To see the mission accomplished, she must turn off her thoughts and operate entirely on instinct. As long as she keeps her goal – retrieve the thing from the bottom of the place – foremost in her mind, Moira’s training and her muscle memory would see the deed done.

  Righty and Lefty cut a careful path through the battlefield, relying heavily on Moira’s innate autopilot to steer a course between the gamboling shapes of fighting cacti. Unlike Odisseus and his Wreckingball, Moira may be a little more discerning in her shooting but she’s no less effective. Her instincts at the wheel, she shoots swords from grips, blasts spiny kneecaps and plants streaking yellow bolts where hearts, eyes or vitals might be on a normal humanoid.

  Even a graze from one of her ditrogen weapons is more than enough to completely incapacitate a Gitter, sometimes to destroy them utterly. More than once, Moira assumes she’d missed her target amid the swirling sand, only to see, moments later, the cactus collapse to the ground, their trunk lined with blistering yellow flame.

  Leaving her two companions behind to continue their argument, Moira trots the remainder of the way through the battle, ducking to avoid sword swings and spiraling out of the way of thrown spears. Soon, Righty and Lefty are enough to buy her plenty of berth, the occasional warning shot all she needs to scare enemies and allies alike. None of the Gitter are foolish enough to provoke the divine wrath of such weapons of heavenly might.

  That’s how she escapes the main fray so easily, hustling past the last few stragglers engaged in private duels, on the combat’s western side. She jogs a little ways away, to gain some distance on the slaughter and the commotion.

  From this distance, it’s clear how drastically the battle is swinging towards a Skyscratch victory. The taller cactoid forces press the defenders further and further back, eventually up the nursery’s slight slope. Moments from now, the Splitspine defenders will be caught between a rampaging horde and a steep drop into the sinkhole below. This desperation shows; the remaining Splitspines are the fiercer in their fighting.

  For the moment, a stalemate seems like a safe bet. In the meantime, then, Moira will turn her attention towards the nursery, its defenses and the galactic treasure that awaits Moira at the bottom.

  The outcome she’d hoped for – the circle of Secondseed sentries rushing to the aid of their embattled tribesmen – pans out before Moira’s eyes. As the Skyscratch gain ground on their rivals, Splitspine re-enforcements come to the rescue, threatening to box the attackers in between three walls of swinging glassrock weapons. Disastrous as this may prove to the Skyscratch and potentially her crew, it creates the perfect window for Moira to make her play.

  None of the Secondseeds pay Moira, squatting in the sand a hundred yards from the nursery’s perimeter, any mind. As the dust clears, the way before her is obvious, unguarded and dead ahead.

  At an unhurried pace, Moira advances to the edge of the sinkhole. She climbs the small rise and leans forward, peering down into the nursery’s depths. Deeper than she’d anticipated, the sinkhole descends into blackness, not helped by the feeble light of Gi’s violet dawn. Whistling a little tune, Moira unloops a sparker from her belt, ignites its fizzing end and drops the torch an arm’s length from the rocky walls of the sinkhole.

  The sparker lands with a thud and a spray of harmless sparks. The ground below is muddy, the sparker nearly extinguished by the pool of shallow water it lands in. A small voice in Moira’s conscious mind remarks on how odd this is, to see standing water, collected in muddy puddles all across the sinkhole’s floor, on the surface of Gi.

  Moira’s subconscious mind only has eyes for the saplings.

  Dozens of squat little bulbs are planted in a chaotic spread all across the sinkhole’s bottom. Not nearly as numerous nor well-tended as the Skyscratch young, the Splitspine saplings look, from Moira’s overhead vantage, runty and unwholesome.

  She swallows a sudden aversion to scrambling down that wet hole. That is her task – retrieve the thing from the bottom of the place – and she reflects a moment that those sickly weeds are the most valuable commodities in the entire galaxy.

  As far as unsecured free-climbs go, Moira’
s done more dangerous. She’d scaled the rocky foothills of Mand, three days straight, with nothing but sturdy gloves and sturdier boots. Climbing up’s the easy part, of course. It’s climbing down, particularly on the moist walls of the sinkhole, that’ll get her killed.

  More than once, she almost loses her balance, when her rational brain claws its way to the foreground and she thinks too hard about what she’s doing. Falling into her breathing routine, Moira can eventually quiet her mind and reach the sinkhole’s bottom without serious injury to body or dignity.

  She comes to ground within arm’s reach of the sparker and she stoops to retrieve the almost guttered thing. Igniting the device again fills the nursery with artificial light and, what’s more, reveals the circle of aggressors shambling towards Moira.

  They emerge from shadowed crevices in the sinkhole’s outer walls, advancing toward Moira and her sparker with obvious ill intent. At a glance, she’d assumed they were Secondseeds but there’s something different, profoundly wrong, about them.

  They wear no harness and they bear no weapon save their many spined arms. Their trunks are twisted – withered in places, malformed in others – as though they were shrunken or grown incorrectly. They slog through the mud between the saplings, hobbling and lurching, their limbs ill-formed to bear their weight.

  They hardly seem sentient, without even the most barbaric of clothing. Reaching towards Moira with their too-many arms, she’s not exactly overflowing with sympathy or compassion for their crippled plight.

  The sparker drops back to the muddy ground. Righty and Lefty are back in her hands now, hunting targets among all those that converge on her. The shriek of laserfire echoes strangely off the surrounding walls as Moira opens up on the approaching cacti. Each shot strikes true with a blinding yellow flash, blowing away a limb or smoldering a hole straight through a trunk or dropping an entire Secondseed to its thorny knees.

  Despite her terrible barrage, the cacti keep coming, unfazed by the ditrogen she blasts through their bodies. To buy more space, Moira starts to pace backward, pistols afire, and attempts to navigate the circuitous maze of spiky Gitter saplings as best she can.