Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  “I do,” Moira realizes.

  With a push of her knees, she swings the topturret around. Heavy like a pendulum, it's happy to go, pointing its barrel back toward the planet's surface. From this angle, it's easy to see what's happened. There's a smoking crater in the ship's hull, a trail of black smoke pointing like an accusing finger towards the guilty party.

  Scavengers to the capital cruiser's apex predator, the cloud of dropships are closer than ever thanks to Nemo's aerial acrobatics. With the ray shields angled across the freighter's bow, there's a clear shot to The Unconstant Lover's exposed backside.

  On their own, their anti-infantry weapons are too puny to pierce the Briza's exhaustively thick hull. In the dozens, with coordinated fire, they'd be more than enough to swat the freighter from the sky.

  This explanation receives mixed results amongst the Lover's crew.

  “That sounds,” gasps Nemo, flattening the freighter against the horizon, “like another problem,” rolling her twice over to the starboard, “for Two-Bit,” and goosing the jetboosters for all their worth to outrun the next barrage, “doesn't it?”

  “If you're jokin' with that Two-Bit buhoxshite,” Flask warns dangerously, “it ain't funny and it ain't helpin', like.”

  “You can at least,” counters an Odisseus frantic at the prospect of repairing all that hull damage, “redistribute the ray shields, though, can you not?”

  “And what?” Flask snaps back. “Get plastered by them fookers up there?”

  “It's that,” Moira explains, staring down the quickly encroaching dropships, “or get plastered by these fuckers down here.”

  “Nah, it's fine,” promises Nemo blithely, pitching the vessel erratically this way and that. “I'll just dodge them all, shall I, simultaneously, with no eyes in the sensor room and no,” he pauses to grunt and strangle a curse, “margin of error.”

  Sandwiched between two destructions – one from a great number of smaller ships, the other a massive ship many times her size – the trap the Consortium's laid starts to close. Chances were, The Unconstant Lover would drown in the swelling ocean of ditrogen long before she could reach that climatic field, open space and escape beyond.

  Moira Quicksilver aligns an enemy ship down her ironsights. Thumbing the Antagonist's triggers, Moira resolves to take as many of these sanctimonious, application-rejecting spice rangers down with her as she can.

  Odisseus connects the coupling and is rewarded with zilch – no power, no sparks, no static. With a sigh, the Ortok sniffs around the relevant wires, searching for the scent of ozone, a burnt conduit or fused connector. He scooches this way and that beneath the communication console, to better examine each converging thread, and discovers nothing amiss. Setting his jaw firm, he returns once again to the coupling, simply yanks loose the stud and plugs it back in again.

  For no discernible reason, this works. The ship's system power reroutes from her exterior comm and instead brings the field exemptor to sporadic life. That perpetually dead series of little rectangular indicator lights, so tiny and so hateful, that the Ortok's been studying for the past ten minutes or so, blink a wavering blue. His work here – sprawled on his back beneath the least spacious of the helm's instrument panels – is done.

  Odisseus wriggles free from the cramped workspace and returns to the larger doom and destruction that's unfolding all around him.

  Through the viewport, the climatic field eclipses all. It's a great firmament of rippling yellow, honeycombed by hexagons of gray teltriton. Each hexagonal arm shelters docking bays, monitoring stations and shield projectors the size of cities.

  Beyond that shimmering, impenetrable field, their capital ship tormentor is finally visible. It's some Consortium Corporate Cruiser or another, its broadside batteries glittering like fireflies. Now and again, a missed shot from below, from the fleet of dropcraft in hot pursuit, will zip past the viewport, a constant reminder of how narrowly they're avoiding fiery death with each passing second.

  To survive each passing second, the Captain must subject the ship to maneuvers she's never performed, especially not under these increasingly hostile conditions. Attempting a planetary ejection at this speed, her ray shields hanging by a thread and hounded by laserfire from both directions, would outright kill a lesser vessel – even flying in a straight line. Instead, Nemo dances the Lover back and forth, testing the patience and power of her boosters above and beyond what any machine, even overachievers like Port and Starboard, could be expected to perform.

  Normally, Odisseus would balk at all this abuse to the jetboosters. In this case, however, the Ortok's wise enough to understand that sparing the ship is pointless if they're all incinerated in the process.

  In this case, all Odisseus wants is to escape this sinkhole of a planet.

  The engines, worked to the absolute brink, have it easy compared to poor Flask. Moment to moment, he's scrambling to spin dials, snap switches and constantly calibrate something. The criminal turned spice ranger turned co-pilot looks ten years older than he did before he strapped into that gyroscopic rig.

  To his credit, the ship has yet to explode in a fountain of ditrogen and scrap metal, so he must be doing something right.

  Odisseus, meanwhile, simply stands back and watches the pretty lights. He stands at a remove, watching these fateful events, the crux point of all their labors these past two years, fall into place, one by one. He's done his last duty – the field exemptor is successfully installed. With the simple act of connecting that last conduit cluster, he's gone from a collaborator to a spectator, a passenger on this runaway train to riches or rubble.

  The next time Nemo swings the Lover heartbreakingly to starboard, he gets a glimpse of Odisseus standing idly behind him. “Working hard,” he breathes, weaving the freighter through another cloud of laserfire, “or hardly–”

  “Exemptor's all connected,” Odisseus replies with a strange calm. “Establish a comm connection with one of the relays,” he explains, pointing a claw over his saltbrother's shoulder and out the viewport, “and the thing'll fire up.”

  “Well,” Nemo mentions offhandedly, sweat pouring down his face, “unless you're too busy with your claw up your bloomhole, would you mind maybe doing the honors? Idle hands're kinda at a premium right now.” As he's making his request, he's tilted the Lover sixty degrees, twisted the yoke to make her go rolling away starboard and plunged her so suddenly that the Ortok's twin stomachs wrap around themselves in fright.

  It is with a heavy and disappointed sigh that Odisseus thumps back into the communicator's chair, activates the broadband scanner and sweeps for available signal-ports. How naïve he'd been – as long as The Unconstant Lover was an unexploded spaceship, as long as Nehel Morel's heart still pumped warm blood, there'd always be one more task for Odisseus to do.

  It's child's play to calibrate, of course. He chooses a likely relay and then hovers his claw over the execute button. Soon as he presses the button, the climatic field would accept the connection, interpret the broadwave the exemptor sends and then open the doorway for them to zoom through.

  Timing is key here. There is a chance, if deactivated quick enough, they may be able to catch a few dropcraft unawares. They each came equipped with their own field exemptors, certainly, but in the confusion, the Lover could maybe shake a few poor pilots by an unexpectedly re-appearing climatic field.

  “Say when,” cues Odisseus placidly.

  There he hangs for the next few moments, as the Lover rocks and rumbles all around him. All the same noise and nonsense – incoming laserfire, terrible engine strain, that “shields low” alarm – continue their song and dance around Odisseus. The Ortok, however, exists in a bubble of quiet serenity, staring at the communicator's console and unable to invest in all the lights and colors and explosions.

  All he's waiting for is the signal from Nemo.

  “How's about...” Nemo starts, panic bubbling at the edges of his calm, “...now?”

  His claw punches the butt
on, the communications monitor comes alive with scrolling digits. Odisseus leans back in his chair to get a better view of the disappearing climatic field.

  The climatic field does not disappear.

  Odisseus is speechless, mouth open, brow furrowed. All the viewport is the sparking, shimmering climatic field, an impassive yellow barrier that'll fry every system aboard The Unconstant Lover, should they dare come too close. She's still hurtling closer at full burn even now, with only seconds to spare.

  “Um,” screams Nemo, “ideas?”

  “This wouldn't happen,” Odisseus mutters, gazing at his paws. “This can't happen.”

  “This is happening!” reminds Flask.

  Nemo's positively apoplectic. “Can you fix it?”

  “There's nothing to fix!” Odisseus insists in a frenzy of self-doubt. His eyes dart all over his console, paws held helplessly in the air. “It's all wor–”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Not immediately,” Odisseus admits, snapped from his reverie and bursting with renewed urgency. He scoots off his seat and squirms back beneath the communications panel, uncertain exactly what's gone wrong down there.

  “Am I crazy,” wonders Moira Quicksilver, her voice barely audible over the rattling gunfire, “or is the climatic field getting awfully–”

  Whatever cutting remark she was about to make, the galaxy would never know. In deference to plunging the ship through the field and certain doom, Nemo performs some blasphemy on the ship's yoke. At a speed and angle that threatens to liquify the organs of everyone aboard, the jetboosters reverse direction. In one sickening swing, Port and Starboard send the freighter careening downward again.

  They're suddenly headed back – back to the planet, back to the sandstorm and the wasteland and the spiny green barbarians, back to the pack of pursuing dropcraft.

  On his paws and knees beneath the instrument panel, Odisseus has no visual on what's happening outside the ship. The Ortok endures each jostle, each tilt, each manic maneuver of the yoke as best he can. He imagines the swarm of spaceships that The Unconstant Lover must somehow plow through as she regroups from her disastrously failed run at the climatic field. A few of the shakes, Odisseus recognizes to be impacts, with the telltale pitch to the side and whine of bent hull plates.

  Odisseus has no idea what Nemo's plan could be, how he intends to circumvent the sudden shutting of their escape route. All the Ortok's mental energy is going towards this accursed field exemptor, this ordinary metal box, and wondering what wire he mistakenly left unplugged or kinked or slotted into the wrong slot.

  The next impact he feels, Odisseus knows immediately, comes from no laser bolt. The force of the blow throws the Ortok forward, crunching against the loose machinery and exposed wiring of the communications panel. When the tremors that rock the Lover last more than a second or two, when the boosters start to make a high-pitched keening sound, the Ortok's frustration and embarrassment transform into genuine terror.

  The next thing he knows, Odisseus is leaping from beneath the console to discover what's happening. What he discovers is that the helm's equilibrium is completely off-balance and he nearly spills back onto the floor. One glance at the smoke that comes pouring from the inertial compensator tells him only part of the story. As he collects his footing against the communicator's chair.

  Odisseus shoots a glance out the viewport, to see what he might see about this newest disaster. The climatic field is there one second, disappeared the next, reappeared the second after, as The Unconstant Lover tailspins through Gi's upper atmosphere. Intercut with those flashes of the climatic field, Odisseus can see the faraway sandstorm on the surface of Gi.

  Second by second, the climatic field is shrinking and shrinking, the ground below growing and growing. Far as he can tell, The Unconstant Lover and all her souls are plummeting inexplicably from the sky.

  “The bloom is happening?” he roars.

  “Summat hit us!” Flask roars back, scanning frantically across his screens for a more elaborate answer than that.

  “You think?” yelps Odisseus. “What happened to the shields?”

  “Shields're fooking steady at 15%,” Flask shoots back. “Weren't a laser weapon what hit us. Gotta be something else.”

  “A collision?” wonders Nemo, straining against the yoke with all his strength.

  “You could say that,” comes the reply from Moira. “Funny thing is, it's still attached.”

  Moira's not quite sure what happened there.

  One moment, they were rocketing through the atmosphere, a minute or less away from deactivating the climatic field and sailing through into open space. According to all the helm's comm chatter, the exemptor was installed and ready to fire, backed by the Ortok's best assurances.

  The next moment, Nemo'd flown the Lover through a sommersault, severe enough to send the topturret spinning. Now, they were plunging back towards the surface again – straight into all the dropcraft that'd been snipping at their tail feathers.

  Soon as she'd recovered, Moira'd done the best she could with the Antagonist, laying about among the swarming starships. Three or four, she knew for certain, she'd smeared into smoke and spare parts. In seconds, though, they were overwhelmed, the sky about them blotted out by teltriton on all sides.

  Before she could react, one of the dropcraft rammed smack into the Lover's starboard side.

  The force of that impact quite nearly throws Moira from her seat, the threads of her safety straps starting to tear. She spends too long – three seconds or more – collecting her wits from the sheer whiplash. When next she looks, The Unconstant Lover is crashing back towards the planet's surface. More interestingly, she'd somehow sprouted a dropship.

  Like an arrow jutting from a wounded beast, the angular dropship juts awkwardly from the Lover's starboard side, crunching all the teltriton at the point of impact. Moira's keen eyes catch the three docking clamps – jagged spears of metal – imbedded in the Briza's backside, anchoring the dropcraft at its untenable angle. It waggles there, battling wind and gravity and good sense but holding tight nonetheless.

  Unsurprisingly, The Unconstant Lover isn't meant to fly with a piggybacking buddy. With that much extra weight, no fancy flying from Nemo or exhaust-spewing effort of the jetboosters will keep the Briza airbourne. Like an asteroid dropped from high orbit, both ships go plummeting towards the surface and a fiery grave, corkscrewing madly the whole way down.

  There's another screaming match in the helm, Moira can hear. Meanwhile, in the topturret, she's attempting to brace her feet and somehow stop all this spinning without snapping her kneecaps clean off. By the time she's stabilized her gyroscopic seat, they're no closer to discovering the truth of what's happened and why they're dropping like a derelict from the sky.

  “A collision?”

  “You could say that,” Moira provides, the problem staring her in the face. “Funny thing is, it's still attached.”

  “Still attached?” shrieks Nemo. “The bloom does 'still attached' mean?”

  “I'm getting in the engine room,” resolves a woozy Odisseus.

  “You're not going blooming anywhere!” Nemo savages back. “Your one job is that bloody field e–”

  “What does 'still attached' mean?” Flask, on topic, demands to know.

  “As in 'still attached to the hull and dragging us back to the surface'!” Moira explains, in as plain Commercial as she possibly can.

  Flask is beside himself with disbelief. “Why the fook would they–”

  “It's a boarding party.”

  However they might respond, it's drowned out beneath the Antagonist's roar.

  Moira's no idea why the field exemptor didn't work. There's practically nothing she can do about that, all the way up here in the topturret. She allocates, then, a smaller, perhaps more important task for herself – to keep the ship from crashing.

  Her window of time to save the ship is rapidly closing. It is Moira's intention to pour so much laserfire into
the cause of this calamity that there will be nothing left but a ditrogen whisper.

  With the ship pitching about, it's no easy task to keep the cannon properly aimed. Moira wastes precious time with each shot, spinning the Antagonist this way and that. Much of that ammo goes wide, some even comes close to hitting the Lover but that small percentage that does find its target is devastatingly effective.

  The rattling Antagonist gains immediate purchase on the unshielded side of the dropcraft. The hull buckles and punctures, laced with green fire. With each successive hit, Moira imagines she can feel the dropcraft's grip on the Lover slip and weaken.

  This both emboldens her and further frustrates her whenever the ship's whipping momentum tears the Antagonist away from its target. Moira's forced to spend too much strength and too much time muscling the turret back into place. The next time she's thrown off target, Moira makes a special effort to brace both legs against the turret's side, to better lock the swiveling seat in place.

  This done, Moira's free to rain firepower onto the dropcraft's vulnerable side and she takes great pleasure in doing so.

  Half a clip is all it takes, the Antagonist chewing through the last of its ammunition just in time. All that ditrogen unleashed onto an unshielded starship reduces teltriton to cinders in moments. The laserfire crumbles, curls and blackens the hull, exposing its interior to the drunken gravity and the green flame, ripping open the ship's rooms and chambers.

  More crucially, Moira watches the docking clamps start to slacken, their hydraulics spasming with each hit. Eventually, with a cataclysmic burst of fire from the dropcraft's bridge, the docking clamps judder and withdraw. Like a dead bird falling from a branch, the dropship flexes its claws once and spirals away from the Lover, disintegrating as it falls.

  For good measure, Moira and her Antagonist follow its fall, peppering what's left with more laserfire. A little distance away, it explodes properly in a green-flecked ball of orange flame.

  The effect on the Lover is immediate and immensely satisfying. Her equilibrium, with some effort, starts to balance out and Moira can rest her aching knees from their braced position. Her downward momentum, however, doesn't seem to cease. From where she sits, Moira can see the boosters spewing nothing but black from their turbines.