Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  Both sabers drawn, Moira leaps over the gnashed hull and lands in the inverted spacecraft, ready for anything.

  This R-Type 621 Dropcraft is divided into two clearly demarcated sections, both currently flipped on their heads. Moira lands on the triangularly sloping walls of the ship's lower section, the passenger bay, comprising the vast majority of the ship's overall size. Where once orderly seats were arranged to ferry spice rangers to the surface, now there's utter disarray, the explosion shaking loose seats, cushions and safety straps.

  The jagged stump of an access ladder points like an arrow to Moira's destination – the sealed hatch that leads to the Dropcraft's conical bridge. She moves to hustle along the vessel's interior ridges, headed straight for that hatch, when some movement in the wreckage stops Moira in her tracks.

  She spins precisely in time to see the spice ranger, a member of some humanish species, crawling wounded from the rubble all around him. His leg twisted at a disquieting angle, his heatblades nonetheless come alive at the sight of her and Moira drops into a defensive stance, feeling the sudden weariness in her bones.

  It's a strange terrain to battle on, this topsy-turvy spaceship interior, full of ridges and platforms that make no sense when flipped at this angle. The ranger solves this problem simply by leaping across the short distance on his flamejets, forcing Moira to scramble back, lest she be incinerated. There's almost nowhere to go, however, and Moira's immediately confronted with a hard surface – some console or another – against her back. With no other choice, she instead lashes out with both sabers, hoping to complicate the ranger's landing such that she might gain a superior footing.

  All this proves moot, however, when the report of gunfire echoes in the Dropcraft's hollow shell. In mid-flight, the spice ranger is riddled with streaking green ditrogen and he falls limp. His flamejets, still afire, pitch his body at a rakish angle and he crashes into one of the vessel's further corners.

  Nemo and his Domino stand in the jagged opening, the sandstorm raging behind them. Pulling free his oxygen mask, he strikes a patriotic, Brock Rocket-esque pose. “Are you not impressed?”

  “I'm impressed,” Moira confesses, “that you've got any ammo left on that thing.”

  He breaks his pose to peek at something on the weapon. “Uh, this says '003'. What's that mean?”

  Moira's already moving, an arm's reach from that hatch. “That there's one for each of us.” With a finger against the access panel, Moira shrieks the teltriton door open. “For when everything goes tits up.”

  Nemo spends a moment to count on his fingers. “Well, not quite.”

  Tipped on its side, the Dropcraft's bridge is another bizarre geography of consoles and dashboards. Their gamble, that an explosion detonated at the foot of the vessel wouldn't damage too much of the internal machinery at its top, appears to have paid off. Compared to the wrecked and ruined passenger bay, the bridge is more or less in one piece.

  By the time Odisseus manages to wrest and wriggle both his bulk and the potted plant through the wreck and into the bridge, Moira's popped open several panels and is on her back rummaging around in the mechanical innards. The breathless Ortok wastes another minute arguing with Nemo, over something petty Moira pointedly chooses to ignore.

  “Whenever you feel like,” Moira reminds him, fingering through a series of wires, “coming over here and helping me out.”

  With a sigh, Odisseus comes padding across the ship's cracked viewport, waving Moira away with a paw. “Outta my way,” he starts to cajole her, “before you hurt yourself. If it's gonna be anywhere–”

  “–it's gonna be attached to the sensor package.” Emerging from beneath the instrument panel, she gives him a perturbed glance. “I read the Attaché.”

  “Then what're you doing,” wonders Odisseus stoically, “under the nav mainframe?”

  “...looking for the sensor package.”

  “Good luck.” Dropping to his haunches before a panel Moira already threw from its hinges, Odisseus roots around with his free paw and, after some grunting, unearths exactly what they'd engineered all this death and destruction for – a field exemptor.

  Like every other supposedly important piece of machinery the caper depends on, the exemptor's an ugly thermosteel doohickey, the one that'd reputedly save their bacon.

  Not particularly sophisticated, these Dropcraft are unshielded, warp incapable and designed simply to ferry spice rangers from the cruisers above to the planet below. The only thing they possess, however, that The Unconstant Lover, desperate to escape Gi, doesn't is the field exemptor.

  To attempt to fly through the climatic field without disabling one of the barriers would be tantamount to suicide; the ship's internal systems would short and overheat and the Lover would be adrift, target practice for all the blockade's broadside batteries. With the field exemptor installed aboard the Lover, they could reroute a particular coded sequence to the climatic field and open a gateway to outer orbit and the galaxy beyond.

  That was the only hope for escape from this planet, escape from this caper and escape from the parched fate of dying, unknown and unmourned, on this asshole's errand.

  “Um...” stammers Nemo from behind them, too stupid or too surprised to sniff twice like they've always agreed, and both Moira and Odisseus turn in unison.

  Moira is somewhat less surprised to discover a spice ranger standing on the bridge's threshold. With the clack of harness against teltriton, he comes to stand across the opening – coated in dust, stance wide, Domino Heavy Autofire in his hands.

  Moira's eyes, however, fall from that sand-splattered weapon to the ignored potted plant, easily within the spice ranger's reach.

  Jag blips his comm once – long.

  The interior of the toppled Dropcraft is still as a tomb, despite all the sound and fury outside. Out there, the sandstorm still howls, the battle still unfurls, chaos still reigns. In here, however, a muted calm has fallen over the scene, in the wake of a disaster large enough to upend the whole vessel, toss its furniture about and litter corpses across the floor.

  Jag can hear their voices, though, if he listens.

  Muffled by the ajar access hatch and the underlying thrum of the sandstorm, Jag hears them bickering some yards ahead and goes creeping across the expanse, to confront them.

  At his feet, the ditrogen-riddled form of a fellow ranger – Crex, by the look of him – makes a gargling sound and reaches a few bloodied fingers towards Jag. He pays his comrade no heed, however, stepping delicately across the wreckage strewn across the passenger bay.

  Strain though he might, he can't actually put a finger on what they're arguing about. One half of the conversation's conducted in Ortoki, which doesn't help, but the other half, he knows, is conducted by the Menace himself, from his wheedling, complaining tone. There's eventually the interruption of the third voice, confirming Quicksilver's here with them too.

  He makes no pretense at stealth, soon as he's arrived. Standing across the access hatch, he surveys the scene before him and is almost instantly spotted.

  In the inverted bridge, the three most wanted sentients in the galaxy go about, wrecking up the place. One stands guard – apparently the Galactic Menace, despite how shaggy and unrecognizable he is – while the other two rip open instrument panels and dig through their component wiring. One is the first mate, splattered all in yellow dye and the other is the Ortok, splattered red as blood and up to his elbows in machine parts.

  With a slow deliberate motion, Jag raises a hand from the stock of his Domino and presses a smallish button on the side of his helmet. With a hiss, his visor retracts, the heads-up-display vanishing with it and the world becomes that much more tangible to Jag.

  “What,” he growls through gritted teeth, “happened to the fooking plan?”

  In unison, both the first mate and the Ortok point accusatory fingers at the Menace.

  “The fuck?” Nemo expectorates. “We got fucking executed, okay, is the reason we're late? How the blo
om can you pin that on me?”

  “It ain't about being fooking late,” Jag snaps back. “What happened to the rendezvous, like? What happened to the fallback? What happened to any of the fooking protocols we spent bloody months–”

  “He locked the keys on ship,” the first mate tattles.

  Nehel Morel, Galactic Menace and Jag's jagoff cousin, crosses his arms and leans heavily against a nearby console, like a scolded teen. “One time and now–“

  “Five times,” snarls the insistent Ortok. “Five times.”

  “You mean,” starts Jag with a murderous slowness, “we can't get onto the fooking ship?”

  “We can,” Odisseus assures him, paws extended. “Technically.” He grimaces a little, breaking some bad news. “It's just gonna be, well, uncomfortable for somebody.” A realization slowly crosses those animalistic features. “It's gonna be me. They're gonna make me do it.”

  “You know what?” Jag thumbs over his shoulder. “I think I might go back undercover, actually. Think those guys've gotta much better–”

  “Yeah, man,” Nemo wonders amiably, “how's that going? You making friends and everything?”

  Turning back towards the hatch, Jag's eyes land on the small shape, sitting abandoned in the center of the wall-turned-floor. It's, against all odds, the potted plant, a piece of weird domesticity dropped in the midst of the gunmetal gray militarism that's swallowed his life the past months.

  In point of fact, Flask notices, it's a potted cactus.

  “You got one,” he mentions dumbly, complimenting this banal statement with a banal little point towards the houseplant where it sits idyllically.

  “'course we did,” Nemo answers breezily. “Think we'd be here, if we hadn't?”

  “I'd gone and assumed,” Flask explains tonelessly, “that everything'd went tits up. When they found your guns, when we found your ship. I assumed if we found anything whatsoever, it'd be your blooming bones or summat.”

  At this, Nemo only scoffs, but Flask can see Moira and Odisseus nodding knowingly. “Never thought,” he continues, stooping to better examine the cactus and its one blooming flower, “you'd actually bag one of the things.”

  He's not squatting here more than a moment before he crinkles his face. “Moons, they stink, don't they?”

  Odisseus makes some untranslatable Ortoki noise of annoyance at this but Nemo only chuckles companionably. “Yeah, how's about that?” he asks a moment later. “How soon'd you know the trees were actually, fucking, like people?”

  “Like, day fooking one, tell you the truth,” Flask replies, slapping his hands against his thighs with a complaining squeal of his harness' servos. “It was practically in the orientation holo–”

  “And you didn't think to, I don't know,” Odisseus starts to snap, “mention–”

  “And fooking compromise all the–”

  “Dickwads!” Quicksilver’s snapping her fingers to interrupt the budding argument. “You don't think we've maybe got blooming bigger fish right now? We gotta ship to break into, a blockade to run and, don't any of you fuckers forget,” she warns dangerously, “my pistols to find!”

  “Oh,” grunts Flask and taps out a sequence on the thigh of his harness. The hidden holster activates, grinding away with a hiss of machine parts and revealing a number of sheathed sidearms, easily accessible for quick draw purposes. “Here ya go.”

  One by one, he yanks two AccCo Lawmen and one Carbon Industrial antique from where they're secured at his sides. The first two he tosses to an astonished Quicksilver, who catches them like a shell shocked mother reunited with her kidnapped children. The last one he throws towards Nemo, who fumbles the catch and lets the weapon clang to the floor.

  “Apologies,” Flask offers to Odisseus with a helpless shrug. “There was no sneaking yours outta there without somebody noticing.”

  Odisseus, the climatic exemptor to one hand, the potted plant returned to the other, shrugs.

  “We about ready, then, to–” Flask starts to turn about, considering the best path towards the parked Lover, only to throw a glance back around at the blank, sanctimonious face of Quicksilver, visibly experiencing a storm of emotions at her reunion with her firearms.

  Nemo, meanwhile, is continually unable to recover his gun off the floor, the thing somehow noisily escaping his grip again and again and destined to fatefully misfire any moment now.

  “–or do you need a minute?”

  FOURTH INTERLUDE

  Two-Bit Switch couldn’t rightly tell the difference.

  To be completely objective, he smelled both samples again and he tasted both samples again. He even gave both samples a little twirl inside their snifters, as though this might dredge up the truth, as he considered either option. He was about to confess his ignorance when, smacking his lips, Two-Bit actually did detect a subtle irregularity in the taste of the second sample.

  Borsk was keen to this whole scene, watching Two-Bit makes his assessment with a wry smile on her face. “Well?”

  “They ain’t the same,” Two-Bit admitted with a slight nod a moment later. “This one,” he continued, waggling the sample in his right hand, “is a little flatter, you might jabb staler, I guess, than this one.” He shrugged a little as he sniffed them both again. “Tell you the gritty, I never, ever woulda noticed if you hadn’t jabbed something first.”

  “That’s sadly not the case,” sighed Gella, taking both glasses from him, “with the rest of the galaxy.” She too took a moment to glance into the indigo depths of the second glass, the one that’s different-tasting in some discreet way that’s impossible for Two-Bit to nail down. “This one’s a clone.”

  Two-Bit screwed up his face at that. “A clone?”

  “Well,” Borsk immediately contradicts, shooting down her own poetic metaphor. “A contradiction in terms, perhaps. You cannot, after all, clone a beverage.”

  “Not that I ever ord,” confirmed Two-Bit, now considering the snifter of allegedly counterfeit Borsk brandy in his hostess’ hand. “Though, I’d be the first to fess that I ain’t exactly a bleeding expert on the subject.”

  They’d strolled into the private wine cellar of Gella Borsk, booze baroness of her eponymous brandy, twenty minutes earlier as a prelude to their actual discussion. Two-Bit Switch wasn’t even thirty seconds through the doorway, however, when he knew the place was a fake, a polite forgery for the sake of her guests. It was entirely too cozy, with sandgranite walls and wine racks of aged wood.

  There was no way Gella Borsk’s surviving supply of Borsk brandy was stored in these precious little chambers. This was a small piece of theater, meant to impress any potential guests with Borsk’s presumed modesty. In truth, Two-Bit imagined that, somewhere beneath their feet, in the moonlet’s core, was an expansive warehouse – industrial and unrefined – where the dwindling supply of Borsk’s livelihood was stashed, under much better security than this.

  Under no circumstances would he, Two-Bit Switch, career criminal, be allowed near the genuine article.

  “It’s a molecular replication, then,” Borsk corrected herself. “An attempt to cook Gitterswitch Gin in a lab, more or less. The science exists,” she assured him, setting both glasses down on a convenient table. “More complex substances than Gitterswitch have been effectively ‘cloned’ via this method.”

  “But?” Two-Bit dangles.

  “But,” Borsk sighed, inclining her head towards him in acknowledgment, “you can taste the difference. It’s subtle, like you say, almost indescribable, but that actually exacerbates the problem. People aren’t sure why they dislike the replica – they just do.”

  “They can delly,” theorized Two-Bit, “that it ain’t Gitterswitch.”

  “Just goes to show,” Gella remarked with a helpless shrug, “how irreplaceable of a substance Gitter actually is.”

  “Means, if you wanna stay in the green,” Two-Bit summarized, mimicking her helpless shrug, “you gotta score some dodgy bloke to go and blag you one.”

&nbs
p; “Precisely,” Gella smirked, circling around Two-Bit to commence their little stroll through the wine cellar.

  As she passed, Two-Bit Switch dawdled a moment, considering the two snifters where Borsk’d set them on the end table. Caught in the conversation, he hadn’t necessarily grokked which glass was which, which was authentic and which fabricated. Making his best guess, he snatched one, took a sniff and turned to follow his hostess.

  This was shaping up to be the single strangest weekend of Two-Bit Switch’s short life. That’s no small achievement, considering that Two-Bit once spent a weekend imprisoned by Kemetra insurgents in the gizzard of a living zurompta beast. Still, as a gunrunner, jailbreaker and criminal mastermind, one came to expect a certain amount of danger and strangeness in their life. What one didn’t expect was wealth and luxury.

  Following their initial meeting over brunch, Gella Borsk proceeded to wine and dine the shit out of Two-Bit Switch. Every hour or so, it seemed they were sharing brandy and cigars on her pressurized veranda or playing holopolo on her well-manicured lawn, all the while serenaded by her quartet of Tinxa musicians. Every time, Two-Bit knew, it was a thin pretense to discuss some new element of the caper, as though Borsk couldn’t possibly broach a topic without also throwing a minor garden party to celebrate.

  His hostess pacing a few steps ahead of him, Two-Bit Switch knew, the moment before she turned her head, what she would bring up.

  “I spent the afternoon,” she mentioned, as offhandedly as she could, “familiarizing myself with your notes. With your proposed plans.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Two-Bit posed, not attempting to sound surprised in the least. “And?”

  “Ingenious, in many places and respects,” she acknowledged. “Reminded me why I commissioned an outsider, rather than attempting the feat myself.”

  Considering all her haughty bearing, an honest-to-moons compliment was not what Two-Bit Switch was anticipating. “Hey, uh, thanks. That–”