Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  Odisseus slaps frustrated paws to the tuskwood table, rattling all his odds and ends. What was once a functional device is now splayed across the improvised workspace, a thousand tiny pieces from one. “You’re all aware,” he snarls, interrupting his work to better harangue his unappreciative accomplices, “that this thing was originally designed with blooming asteroids in mind?”

  During their search of the Skyscratch nursery, they’d made one lucky find, among all the saplings, bones and burnt cactoid bodies – an unexploded shield projector. The fist-sized hunk of machinery must have been scavenged by a Skyscratch water-hunting expedition while the Lover’s crew were wandering Fernhollow below. Indeed, it never occurred to Moira to wonder what became of the hundred or so dummy ray shield projectors, rigged to dud out rather than explode when triggered remotely.

  Their spacebergs long melted, Moira imagines the unremarkable pieces of tech, lying abandoned in the midst of the ceaseless desert.

  One such projector, however, wound up in the Ortok’s paws. Too desperate to ignore any potential advantage, no matter how thin, Odisseus was immediately put to work, all to the betterment of Nemo’s latest large-scale suicide attempt.

  “You’ll figure something out,” Nemo answers automatically, too absorbed in his scheming to offer his saltbrother any more encouragement than that. “That all?”

  “Buncha broken spears and shit. A Gitter warrior who can’t lift a sword. If all goes according to plan,” Moira caveats, not intending to sound quite so sarcastic but willing to admit how thin their chances of success actually were, “these sixty-one Secondseed guys.”

  “Plus,” Nemo reminds her plaintively, “our secret weapon.”

  “Well.” Moira cocks her head a little. “Let’s not count our lonktonks.”

  “And the opposition?”

  “Three 621 Dropcraft. One hundred spice rangers. The full military and technological might of the invincible Gitter Consortium.”

  This stops Nemo up and he squints quizzically at Moira. “How many rangers?”

  “Ninety-six,” Moira shoots back. “Assuming the whole troop’s here. Which three ships means they are.”

  Nemo points a patronizing finger at the Dominio she clutches. “Ninety-five.”

  “Best case scenario,” Moira growls, peeved at his petulance, “we’re still substantially outnumbered. And outgunned. Our swords’re made of glass. Theirs’re made of fire.”

  “And our guys,” Odisseus pipes up, “would be made of wood.”

  “Whereas theirs,” Moira adds, “would be made of spice ranger.”

  None of this seems to stop Nemo in his pacing, a look of intense calculation etched onto his face. It’s into this momentary silence that Stalkchopper interrupts.

  {Mine own spores}, it relays to them, {can only placate them so far. They wish}, it explains, stepping accommodatingly to the side, {to hear Badass Supreme speak}.

  Nemo sighs, accepting his grim responsibility as the Vesselborn’s crazed spokesman. He pointlessly brushes a layer of dust from his dust-encrusted bathrobe and slowly mounts the tuskwood table, all the better to address the masses down below.

  Odisseus looks up as he passes. “You’re not gonna lie to them,” he presumes, more a statement than a question, “about their chances?”

  Nemo shakes his head. “No, I don’t think so.”

  At the emergence of their mad prophet, returned from beyond the veil of death, the cactoid crowd suddenly stills. The aggregate haze of their spores falls away a moment, indecision washing over them.

  “He gave you the skinny, I assume?” Nemo wonders, thumbing towards Stalkchopper. The pacified warrior has scooted completely to the side, to allow Badass Supreme more room to pontificate. “So, yeah.” Nemo’s hands slap against his thighs. “Things ain’t looking so great for you or for any of us.” He points a finger towards the nursery’s entrance and the trampled heap of ash. “All your dudes are dead. You don’t got nobody to hang around here and guard your booty. Sooner or later, somebody’s gonna come along, somebody bigger and badder, and they’re gonna squash you. They’re gonna squash all your saplings, same as you did to those other sorry bastards.”

  Threatening, in even an oblique way, the safety of their saplings seems an odd way to start this speech. There’s a tide of sporic anger, of protective fury, that rolls across the nursery and into everybody’s nostrils. Moira’s grip on the Domino tightens as, heedless to the danger, Nemo continues on this line of thought.

  “And I bet y’all blame me,” he assumes, planting a hand on his chest, “and us for some of that. And, hey,” he admits with a shrug, “we don’t make half-bad targets for your blame. We’re the infidels, right, we're the heretics, we’re the ones that cascaded all this buhoxshit down on you and your peaceful way of life. It was definitely us that set you against the Skidstains, it was us that got Foreplanter killed.” He lets out an anxious laugh, a little carried away with the self-incrimination. “You could even say, I guess, it was us that got all your goons massacred up.”

  A second wave of anger sweeps across the nursery. Nemo, however, shows no signs of stopping his depreciating tirade.

  “I ain’t gonna beat around the bush here – we’re pretty squarely on the hook for that shit.” He traipses back and forth along the table a little, wavering this way and that as he recounts the whole undignified chain of events. “You thought we were gods, turns out we ain’t really gods so much, we blew your culture into tiny little pieces and I would naturally expect you’d be looking to repeatedly stab somebody vaguely Vesselborn-shaped on account of all that.” He throws his hands up, a gesture of utter surrender. “Who could blame you?”

  On cue, the first few rows of Secondseeds surge forward, overcome with righteous fervor. It’s Moira’s pure gunfighting instinct that saves them, the Domino spreading a few bolts across the sand and scorching it black a few inches from the running row of cactoids. She’s priming a second burst when she realizes the horde’s momentarily hesitated and Nemo’s recovering from the shock.

  This took the Captain completely by surprise. He stares astoundedly at the small murderous army he’s just inspired. “Whoa, hey,” he cajoles them, looking offended. “Gimme a second, though. Like, bloom, I didn’t mean me, for Jotor’s sake. I meant fucking them.” He thrusts a finger far back over their heads, pointing west – out of the nursery, through the glassrock hills, across the wasteland, to that stranded spaceship and those that surround it.

  Confusion and stymied violence ripples through Nemo’s audience. The Captain grimaces. “Can I break something to you guys? You’re boned. The most boned. Like, ‘mechanic-caught-you-masturbating-in-the-engine-room’ boned.”

  This all-too-specific reference provokes a profound scowl from Moira and a sad, confirming nod from Odisseus.

  “Like,” Nemo shamelessly continues, “there’s no tomorrow, the sun’s gone supernova, kiss goodbye to your loved ones and stuffed animals. You know what I’m saying?” Confusion persists among the Gitter as long as Nemo persists with these references destined to fly straight over their flowery heads. “You guys might be able to go water-hunt today, but you’re no fucking Firstfucks or Tallasses or whatever. Sooner or later, some other group of cactus baddies is gonna come along and smear you or, what’s worse, smear all your little babies here.”

  The destruction of their saplings invoked a second time, the Secondseed’s confusion gives way to bubbling anger, a familiar scent in Moira’s nostrils.

  “That’s a fact,” Nemo, oblivious as ever, assures them. “Sure as I’m standing here. I can’t save you from that. Whoever Up There,” he points out with a literal finger to the sky, “can’t save you. You can’t save you. And whose fault,” he poses, almost rhetorically, “is that, really?”

  {Thine}, comes the unanimous response.

  “Oh, right, yeah, sure,” recalls Nemo. “In one, sorta immediate way, yes, this is all our fault. In another,” he deflects before they can dwell on this first fact, “
more institutional way, this is all whose fault?” To his credit, Nemo makes good use of their moment of confusion, to throw another westward point over their heads. “Theirs. Fucking theirs.”

  A deathly pall of silence falls over the audience, a sudden breeze seeming to whisk away all their collective spores.

  “Those bloomholes,” Nemo starts to snarl, his voice filling the figurative silence all the more, “roll down from the fucking Starsea or wherever. They harvest your motherblooming organs. They act like their shit don’t stink and, when somebody’s actually got the stones to stand up to them, they massacre whole scads of you. To keep you in your fucking place.”

  Moira hears his panting breath between stages of the tirade and spares Nemo a brief glance. He’s adopted that dangerous aspect, the one with the slight tremble to his lips and fingertips and the cold fire behind his eyes. Angry as he seems, in that moment, Moira can sense his exposure, his vulnerability to the words he’s saying.

  This effect somehow seems to translate to the Secondseeds, for they listen without interruption, without a single spore in the air.

  “You don’t know me super well – and you pretty clearly shouldn’t trust me – but trust me.” The next two words, freighted with meaning, hang in the air a moment. “I know.”

  He takes a few more ragged breaths and starts to elaborate. “I know what happens when your planet is claimed as the sovereign property of somebody with no fucking right to it. I know what it means to have your way of life bulldozed by the whims of galactic supply and demand. I know what a planet looks like when it’s leeched of everything still good and unshitty it has left.”

  He opens and closes his hands, slowly, squeezing tension from the air. “It’s a super fucking powerless feeling, to see all the wheels and shit of the universe moving to crush you.” He holds a finger aloft, wagging it slightly. “Something I learned a long time ago. It’s infinitely better to die biting and clawing and gnashing your teeth, than it is to die in an orderly fashion, at a time and place preordained by some cunt.”

  Moira’s actively lowered her weapon, to see him in this state. Over her shoulder, Moira can see that the Ortok’s paws are still, his tinkering forgotten. She spares a glance behind, to see him and, even on his somewhat unreadable Ortoki features, Moira is taken aback to see something similar, a pale copy, to the very expression Nemo wears. It’s a vulnerability, something essential to their saltbrotherhood laid bare in the sunlight.

  “Two options,” Nemo breaks the reverie by extending two fingers, “you’re left with, then. Stay here, stay outta the Vesselborn’s way, die slowly and pointlessly, feeding their corporate engine. Or die now and die fast, die throwing yourself into the gears, hoping that, even for a second, you might jam the works.” He snaps his fingers and claps them together hard. “Up to you.”

  His bathrobe whipping around him, Nemo spins and hops off the tuskwood table, not waiting for a reaction. The cactoid confusion persists another few seconds, long enough for Nemo’s boots to reach the sandy ground, before they make their verdict. In so doing, they seal the fate of everyone, Gitter and offworlder alike, in that canyon.

  Rooty feet stomp the ground, the very earth trembling. A hundred glassrock weapons are thrown high, jostling and clacking. Though no voice is risen, the air is thick with the scent of Gitter cheers, all crying for death and glory and a bloody end.

  Nemo wipes imagined dust from his hands, his companions staring dumbfounded at him. “Played my trump card,” he explains. “Hope that things’re ready,” he mentions, inclining his chin towards the ray shield projector, forgotten on the tuskwood, “‘cause we’re off to battle.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Odisseus blips his comm four times – long, short, short, short.

  The raging sandstorm, it occurs to him then, may affect his reception. He's uncertain what effect a planetary sandstorm might have on handheld communicators because he has, in fact, never survived a sandstorm.

  To be clear, if he does not survive this particular sandstorm, it may not actually be the sandstorm's fault. There is an equally likely chance that he might be gunned down or dismembered by heatblades or tortured to death in some nameless Consortium prison someplace. If he somehow survives all this, then there's always trusty old heat stroke, his constant companion during their sojourn on planet. That could still very likely kill him.

  To walk through one of Gi's sandstorms is to walk through a white-hot inferno. Gale-force winds whip the sandy dunes into a frenzy all about them. Each step becomes a labor, against such oppressive winds. Visibility is dwindled to a paltry handful of yards in every direction, the white haze swallowing everything in sight. All noise, too – conversation, footfalls, even the Ortok's own echoed breathing inside his vacuum mask – are blotted out by the howling of sand and storm.

  As terrible a development as this might seem, the sandstorm may actually have been a boon, sent down from the benevolent God Beyond. In these harsh conditions, their adversaries were grounded, neither their vessels nor their rangers able to take to the air until the winds calmed somewhat.

  A niggling part of Odisseus wants to know how The Unconstant Lover, a vessel much bulkier than the slim Dropcraft, intends to fly in this storm, once they reach her. He cannot worry overmuch about that now, however. They would have to cross that bridge when they come, through battle and bloodshed, to it.

  The adversary is invisible through the sandscreen but Odisseus and everyone else knows they're out there. Now and again, someone up ahead fires a Domino their way – a green spark of laserfire in the maelstrom – only to see the ditrogen deflected harmlessly away. Odisseus wonders whether they've pieced together the puzzle yet, how their motley Gitter warband came to be protected by a planetary-class ray shield, or whether they’re frightened and mystified by the approach of this seemingly invincible army.

  There was no way to know the spice ranger's exact fortifications, with their line-of-sight so shortened. The Secondseeds, with their sensitive roots, claimed the “Vesselborn were arranged all before us, encamped around the base of the largest Vessel” Armed with so little intelligence, it is imminently possible, Odisseus knows, that they could all be walking into a trap, a killbox carefully prepared for their arrival.

  He takes small comfort in the knowledge that they too have prepared a trap for the Stargazers, one of a very different stripe, one that only Nemo could've concocted.

  The centerpiece of that trap and indeed this whole plan is Stalkchopper. The great impassive Firstseed stands a dozen yards behind Odisseus and, when the Ortok turns, is only faintly discernible through the sandstorm. Affixed, center mass, to the cactoid's torso is the kitbashed projector, responsible for enveloping the entire Skyscratch warband in its ray shield dome. Protected from sniping laserfire, the Secondseeds could, long as they remained within a certain radius to the crippled Firstseed, safely close to sword's reach with the rangers, without fear from their almighty firearms.

  This is the first phase of Nemo's attack plan – use the ray shield to reach melee range, let slip the cacti of war, pray for the best. It is the second phase of Nemo's attack plan, the one that's kicked off when his trap is sprung, that worries Odisseus the most.

  Considering they were all marching to their own deaths, the Secondseeds look positively eager. As per Gitter custom, the warband stand in no formation, save a loose and disorganized cluster around Stalkchopper and his ray shield canopy. Each one is exhaustively overarmed, with swords, axes and spears, wearing the harnesses intended for Firstseeds like children in cardboard armor. They've blown the dye budget too, each one smeared red and yellow and blue in disparate patches. Their spores tossed about by the fearsome winds, Odisseus can nonetheless smell their terror, their rage, their thrill.

  His companions look no less barbaric. To one side, a Moira Quicksilver plastered head-to-toe in yellow dye and adorned with a tribal fetish intended to bring about berserker fury, tests the heft of two glassrock sabers she's chosen as her weapons of choice.
To the other, Nehel Morel, the one responsible for all this mess, is dyed a bright sapphire blue, wears a makeshift crown of flowers that once decorated Foreplanter's head and nervously twiddles his fingers against the stock of the Domino, likewise dyed and fetished by the fervent Skyscratch.

  Odisseus is no exception. His pelt is smeared with scarlet dye. He clutches a long-hafted glassrock spear in his paws, one of three that he carries. He wears a harness of green leather, festooned with clacking shells and bones, that compliments his toolbelt.

  The Ortok, however, bears one extra accoutrement. Hovering on a driftpack's retrofitted motor and tethered a few feet from a transponder in his belt, is the seedling, caked white by the whipping dust. Wherever Odisseus moves, the little floating potted plant follows and, even through the maelstrom, the Ortok can smell its primitive spores.

  {Afraid}, it reminds him and Odisseus cannot help but agree.

  The Ortok's comm blips back three times – short, short, long – and Odisseus places a hand on Nemo's shoulder.

  On cue, Badass Supreme hefts the Domino high into the air and loses a few rounds. These disappear into the sandstorm but they succeed at getting him attention. The Captain, inside his vacuum mask, screams something, a few words of inspiration that Odisseus is certain contains the phrase “cuntmunchers”, but through over the howling wind, his meaning is completely lost or garbled.

  Without waiting another second, Nemo charges forward.

  The entire warband is immediately on his heels, a great green tide of tall bodies, running limbs and shining glassrock weapons. There's a split second, the Secondseeds rushing past, when Odisseus and Moira lock eyes, before she too hastens once more unto the breach, leaving Odisseus to trundle behind, spear in hand and sapling floating nearby.