Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  Invariably, of course, she’s not halfway across the nursery before she feels something sharp puncture the back of her calf. Moira wobbles a second, her pant leg impaled by the sapling and she goes toppling to the ground. In the fall, Lefty, her favorite, goes soaring from her hand to splash somewhere out of reach. With a splash of her own, Moira crashes her ass to the marshy ground.

  Dazed, she lies there too long, considering the plump Gitter sapling she tripped over. Meanwhile, the few remaining cactoid savages close the gap – burnt, broken and still advancing. Moira hardly has time to swing Righty, her only remaining and second favorite pistol, to bear on the Secondseeds before they’re upon her.

  Her finger fires irresponsibly fast, throwing away valuable ammunition to sizzle against the sinkhole’s far wall or into the green flesh of defeated foes. The cactoids smolder, reel and stagger away, menaced by hungry yellow fire. Only one remains, its fellows blasted and burnt. Before Moira can squirm away, something strong and spined has wrapped around her ankle. After a short drag through the slime, she’s hoisted clean off the ground.

  Dangling upside down, Moira has only a moment before the remaining limbs of this deformed Gitter monster tear her to pieces. It’s Righty who comes to her rescue. On instinct she shoves the weapon forward until its snub slams into the cactoid’s trunk. Throttling the trigger, she blasts a hole straight through the creature’s body.

  Seconds later, ditrogen is burning through its innards like a fever. The cactoid drops Moira painfully back to the ground and lurches away. It flails its limbs wildly a moment before it too drops to the ground, to die amongst the blackened bodies of its ilk.

  There Moira lies, crumpled awkwardly on the nursery floor like a discarded toy. Her leg is pierced and bleeding from a dozen thorns, her favorite pistol lost somewhere amid this swampy shithole. That’s the moment, when her dignity’s at its lowest, that her stomach decides to finally give up the goods. She vomits noisily into the mud, thankful there’s no one around to watch.

  Somewhere distantly above, Moira can hear the sounds of the battle raging onward. Somewhere nearby, a deformed Secondseed goes blundering about the nursery, somehow blinded and still burning. In no immediate danger, Moira takes her sweet time regaining her feet, wiping her mouth of vomit and surveying the scene.

  Blasted bodies lie strewn all about, some still squirming, most lying still. Save the one straggler still staggering about, Moira’s more or less vanquished the horde of malformed Secondseeds that descended on her. Who or what these creatures were, why they descended on her with none of the reverence most Gitter have shown offworlders, Moira doesn’t know or care. All she wants, at this particular moment, is out of this sinkhole.

  She locates Lefty in a wet puddle, tossed completely clear of the melee. Retrieving her discarded darling, Moira spends a few minutes polishing the poor thing, eyes still scanning the nursery for a promising specimen.

  Neither botanist nor gardener, all these damn plants look the same to Moira Quicksilver. She ultimately chooses the one nearest her as the plant that will shake the foundations of the galactic economy.

  It’s a fat shrub, ugly and bulbous, ridged from top to bottom and sunken deep in the moist loam. The spikes are superficially different, grouped in little clusters, from those of the Skyscratch and this, Moira supposes, is what gives the Splitspine their name. At the tip of the bulb, perhaps a foot off the ground, is a closed bud, a flower that will one day open to provide both spores and spice.

  Moira plants a bootheel into the center of the gray disc Odisseus gave her. With a series of clicks, the disc pops into its true shape. It’s a beveled pot, approximately a foot and change deep, the sort of pot ideal for transporting a sapling from place to place.

  Neither botanist nor gardener, it’s a messy, imprecise job for Moira, to extract a living plant and install it inside her waiting pot. With much grunting and cursing, she makes do, marvelling at the strength of the sapling’s deeply seeded ball of tangled roots.

  Moira spends a moment prodding and adjusting the sapling, expecting some obvious sign of life. When no such sign comes, Moira packs in an additional layer of soil, for good measure, and climbs to her feet. She stoops to retrieve the pot and stalls a moment, surprised by the sheer weight of the thing.

  Another grunting, cursing effort is needed to hoist the pot off the ground and balance the thing against her hip. She stands there, panting a second, debating how exactly she was expected to escape this sinkhole with the baby cactus in tow.

  Odisseus breathes a little easier to see The Unconstant Lover still in one piece. He'd entertained any number of fatalistic nightmare scenarios – the ship destroyed, the ship disappeared, the ship discovered – about what they would find when they returned to this particular patch of wasteland. He gives a long relieved exhale when that glint of teltriton on the horizon eventually materializes into their unharmed spaceship.

  There stands the freighter, for the first time in her life looking almost regal against the stark, primordial landscape. Her hull gleaming in the sunlight, their beloved Briza stands defiantly against all around her, her metallic shell immune to all the sun's wrath. Soon enough, the Ortok would be sequestered inside, the coolant units on full blast, this wretched desert hellscape behind them forever.

  Even beneath the shade of the palanquin, high noon on Gi is enough to make Odisseus want to crumple to the earth and die. The Ortok cannot imagine the ordeal of walking back to their distant vessel – the wasteland would surely have claimed all three of them. Fortunately, the Captain was able to leverage his divine favor to convince four strapping young cactoids to bear their godlings across the desert in shade. The palanquin is a makeshift thing – wooden slats and ferny canopy – and it's a bumpy, uncomfortable ride but it's zottibles better than slogging on foot.

  For once, Odisseus is strangely thankful for Nemo's laziness, sparing them a death-march across the desert.

  Squeezed together atop the jostling palanquin's platform, Odisseus and his two companions share space with a fourth passenger, the newly arrived sapling. The most precious plant in the entire galaxy is nothing much to look at – squat, heavy and spiny – and Odisseus has to hope this is what Gella needs to start her new boom crop. There is no way, no matter what she says, that he's ever coming back to this blooming fireball of a planet.

  The four escorts carrying the palanquin make no comment or complaint as they trudge across the blasted landscape. Hardly an expert, Odisseus nonetheless detects that things among the Skyscratch grove are a little up in the air at the moment.

  The grove's victory over the hated Splitspine was all but assumed. It was a simple enough matter for the taller, mightier and more numerous Skyscratch to mete out a swift and bloody extinction on the supposed infidels and blasphemers of the Splitspine.

  The victorious grove did, however, suffer one grievous casualty and that was Foreplanter.

  Slain under rather “mysterious” circumstances in the midst of the battle, the succession games, a contest of strength and skill among all the eligible Firstseeds, commenced immediately. The Vesselborn, in their infinite wisdom, decided it was best to make tracks from the scene, before anyone considered too closely what had actually felled the mighty Foreplanter.

  Nemo's interest in the cactus-men vanishing the moment Moira laid the sapling at his feet, the last the Lover's crew saw of the Skyscratch grove, they were embroiled in their own intrigues, attempting to determine who would replace Foreplanter as the new Foreplanter.

  For his part, Odisseus was only too happy to meddle no further in the cultural affairs of the hapless Gitter. Moira, meanwhile, spent most of the morning groaning, puking and bellyaching about how she didn't feel so good.

  As soon as they've arrived a respectful distance from the freighter, Nemo tut-tuts to be set down and freed from the wobbly palanquin. His paws on the ground again, their spaceship a few hundred feet away, Odisseus thinks they can finally be rid of these cactus bastards once and for all.
/>   The Captain, meanwhile, cannot turn down an opportunity to grandstand.

  “We return now,” he shouts to his small audience, his voice booming across the flatland, “onto the bosom of the heavenly Place Above, never to return!” The cacti make no immediate move or response to his proclamation, standing stock still. “Your sacrifice,” he announces, attempting to heft high the sapling and grunting under the failed effort, “will we bear unto the Grand Pooba Guy and he shall decide whether or not your offering is found wanting. I warn you,” he hisses suddenly, a finger swept across the four of them, “should that prove the case, it shall go ill with the Skyscratch. Big Daddie's wrath,” he warns, “shall be both terrible and immediate. His Great Resplendent Member will piss down streams of avenging heavenfire like–”

  “Okay,” interrupts Odisseus, cuffing his saltbrother on the shoulder and striding towards the spaceship. “We're done here.”

  “And He shall pull down His High Holy Trousers,” continues shouting Nemo, as he's hauled away from his bemused worshippers, “and shit upon you an endless meteor shower of flaming tur–”

  Odisseus nods his snout towards the sapling. “Moira, can you–”

  “Ooga booga booga, you fucks!” adds Nemo, waggling his fingers above his head for good measure. His faithful so chastised, the Captain spins back around and marches a few feet proudly forward, towards his awaiting spaceship.

  It's this – “Ooga booga booga, you fucks” – that actually seems to convince the Gitter to depart. Leaving the palanquin where it lies in the dirt, all four spin on their own heels and march away, headed eastward and back toward the gray smudge of the distant mountains.

  Odisseus watches them leave a moment, so robotic and unquestioning in their movements, and he spares a thought towards the sapling and who that tree will grow to be, considering the circumstances that await its future.

  “Guys,” ventures the Captain from somewhere behind him, his voice laced with uncertainty. Odisseus turns back towards his two companions and their spaceship to discover one bent double in the dirt and the other patting down his bathrobe for spaceship keys. A look of bottled anxiety, threatening to burst into true panic at any moment, is plastered all over Nemo's face as he locks eyes with Odisseus.

  “I think–” he ventures trepidatiously.

  “No,” snarls the Ortok, refusing to acknowledge the depths of his stupidity.

  “I'm pretty sure–”

  “You're pretty sure fucking what?” growls Moira, the hangover coming fast and hard now.

  “I locked the keys in the ship,” Nemo blurts out, throwing his hands up immediately, as though to excuse himself from any potential blame. His two companions, the priceless sapling between them, stand there, blinking at him, as he offers no further explanation except one half-hearted, half-apology.

  “Whoops.”

  PART II:

  RENT TO RIBBONS TOO

  CHAPTER 11

  Moira's skull is about to go supernova.

  Make no mistake, Moira Quicksilver has had her fair share of killer hangovers. The worst in her long history were potent enough to drive lesser beings before them, howling in pain from every bright light and every loud noise. Her current hangover, however, is unlike anything she's ever suffered; this one is special.

  Huffing alcoholic spores for sixteen hours straight is enough to create a hangover undreamt of in any philosophy. What's happening in her skull right now would easily lay low any creature, even the alcohol-breathing amothsquall from Xego Minor, for a good long while.

  All the same, she's still forced to squat here, in this intolerable heat, and thumb through whatever technical data the Attaché's got on, of all things, The Unconstant Lover. The more she does, however, the more Moira's discovering thing she never knew about the spaceship she'd called home the past half-decade.

  For instance, she never knew that the crusty old Briza Light Freighter still uses outmoded fuel-conversion nozzles, the kind outlawed on every civilized planet because of how tremendously pollutant they are. Moira never knew that each of the Lover's gun batteries were individually powered and could, with a fresh breaker, accept twice the system power they currently do.

  Most gallingly, Moira never knew that the Captain was hiding a private bathroom from the rest of the crew, sequestered behind a wall panel inside his quarters. This revelation is chased by the horrifying image of that bathroom, used only by Nemo and therefore uncleaned for six years and running.

  Nowhere among all these fascinating discoveries, however, does Moira find a way to short, decouple or somehow disrupt the manual lock on the ship's external boarding ramp. How in all the blessed moons of Jotor they were going to remedy this, Moira has no idea. All she wants is a gallon of chococino, a hundred cigarettes and for someone to shoot her in the head with a dozen ballistic torpedoes.

  Instead, she has this Attaché, this hangover and the screaming match unfolding behind her.

  “Because where,” Nemo wonders, windmilling his arms about in exasperated panic, “in this uninhabited wasteland were we gonna find a locksmith in the first place?”

  An equally exasperated Odisseus nonetheless maintains his calm. “You're deliberately misconstruing what I'm saying.”

  “Of course I am!” exclaims Nemo. “You're shouting at me!”

  “I am decidedly,” clarifies Odisseus, as calmly as he can, “not shouting at you.”

  “Yes! You are! Listen to yourself!”

  They'd carried on in this fashion for hours. During that time, Gi's malevolent sun had swung across the sky and tossed some helpful shade across the starboard side of the parked Lover. That's where Moira huddles, attempting to keep the glare off her screen and out of her eyes. Odisseus eventually followed suit, slumped against an inappropriately protruding foot of the Lover's mistimed landing gear.

  Nemo, meanwhile, paces and prowls beneath the open sun, too engrossed in his diatribe to notice something as trivial as the brain-melting heat. He'd been carping and caterwauling like this ever since the keys were discovered missing, flush with the supremely defensive air of someone entirely at fault.

  In a stroke of injustice, the task of ascertaining some method out of here fell solely to Moira, definitely the most hungover of the three. It was the Ortok's idea to run through the Attaché's auxiliary files, searching for any weakness in the Lover's security panel. Of the three of them, it was really Odisseus – by far – who was the most qualified to discover the miracle solution. By now, however, Odisseus was embroiled too deep in the customary pointless and circuitous argument with Nemo. In lieu of her head exploding from the combined forces of heat, boredom and hangover, Moira took on the grim task herself.

  Really, this whole mess could conceivably be blamed on Two-Bit Switch. It was his bloody dying wish that even saw them on this sun-scorched bloomhole of a planet. What's more, as a professional jailbreaker, Two-Bit had been appalled by the Lover's lack of security and made improving all her locks his little pet project. All three of the Lover's entrances – boarding ramp and both airlocks – had been exhaustively Two-Bit-proofed.

  For all intents and purposes, they were then impossible to crack. For all intents and purposes, the three pirates were forever locked out of own their spaceship.

  Every time Nemo'd locked them out of the ship, it was a profoundly irritating waste of everyone's time and patience but it could hardly be described as the end of the universe. This time, with the Lover the only functional spaceship on the entire planet, a planet so hostile it couldn't sustain long-term animal life, it was pretty much the end of the universe.

  The sun overhead is passing its zenith, starting to slant away towards the late afternoon. This is when the heat's the most merciless, punishment radiating up from the sand as much as from the sky. Crouched here in the shade, enameled in DermEndure, sweat has nonetheless crusted Moira's clothing to her skin. Nemo, directly under the sun, sweats oceans, his face a swampy expanse of sunburnt skin and matted beard. Odisseus too is slumped in
the shade, his tongue lolling, his consciousness threatening to flee at the slightest provocation.

  At paw's reach sits the treasure, the booty for which they'd weathered all this hardship, toil and eventually ignominious death. An ugly plant sits in its ugly pot, unconcerned about either heat or plight.

  “I think,” the Ortok ventures weakly, “I understand the core of the problem.”

  “Oh yeah?” scoffs Nemo. “And what's that?”

  “The key rack's,” he explains, wandering a woozy claw up towards his standing saltbrother, “not nailed to your fucking skull.”

  “Makes no difference,” Nemo admits, his arms akimbo. “I categorically refuse to hang my keys on that blooming thing. Especially now.”

  Odisseus' paw drops back to the dry dirt. “Well, that seems like a good hill to die on.”

  “Oh, fucking please.” Nemo dismisses his saltbrother with a wave and staggers a few feet away. “Everything's blooming dehydration and death to you.”

  “Do not go down this road with me,” warns Odisseus, a little growl underneath his words. “I am about ten minutes from a fresh batch of heat stroke and you are full of nice, refreshing blood.”

  “Them's fighting–”

  A sudden unexpected smell brings Moira's head up. “Oh, whoa.” Before she can make any warning to her crewmates, a quartet of fifteen-foot tall, green skinned figures round The Unconstant Lover's corner. “What's up, guys?” is the amazingly stupid thing that comes from her mouth, the moment she sees the four cacti emerge from where she least expected them.

  Moira doesn't know how four enormous, stink-ass cactus dudes could sneak up her but she's very ready to blame her hangover. It's immediately apparent, from one whiff and one glance, these are the same four Skyscratch that bore their palanquin across the desert and indeed, they march immediately towards the conveyance where it stands in the sand, collecting dust.