Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  Recovering from the shock of their release, Moira's attention is more focused on something else, something even more problematic than their headlong collision with the planet below.

  There's still a morsel of dropcraft stuck, by one persistent docking clamp, to the Lover's starboard side. Moira brings the Antagonist back around but, from her angle, she can't line up a clean shot that won't deal as much damage to the Lover as it would her metallic parasite.

  It's not lost on Moira what manner of ship component – a boarding-lock – clings to tenaciously to the Briza's side.

  Most of the spice rangers aboard that kamikaze dropship, Moira knows, went down with their ship. With all the exhaustive ship-to-ship boarding procedures they'd need to undertake, there's no more than a handful of rangers inside that boarding-lock.

  A handful of spice rangers, however, could easily kill everyone aboard, reclaim the Gitter sapling and end this whole caper in a matter of minutes.

  Sheer instinct moves Moira to unbuckle the straps of her gyroscopic seat and hurry down the gundeck's access ladder. She does this despite all the wild pitching about that still plagues the ship and despite the trembling in her hands and heart.

  Moira Quicksilver knows what must be done and she knows it must be done alone. From the shouting match that still fills the Lover's interior comms, it's clear there's not a warm body aboard the ship to be spared. The task – one more suicidal than all of Nemo's harebrained schemes and daredevil getaways – falls to Moira and Moira alone and she's got maybe two minutes to prepare.

  That's assuming, in the next thirty seconds or so, they don't actually slam into the planet's surface and die in a humiliating fireball.

  Is it terror, one might ask, or excitement that's clasped a hand around Moira's heart?

  Given two minutes, there's only one precaution she has time to take before company arrives. To accomplish this, Moira runs – as fast as jackboots will carry her – to the medbay, to retrieve from the body of the dead Umijo spice ranger the one piece of equipment that might help her repel those boarders.

  She gets to wear a harness, rejoices Moira's inner twelve-year-old. She gets to die in a harness, reminds her adult pragmatist.

  CHAPTER 19

  Flask has never survived a shipwreck. As The Unconstant Lover drops to her death, corkscrewing through the air like an Okberrian maple seed, he has zero idea what to expect when the impact does come. Maybe he'll be shredded to bloody ribbons by torn metal. Maybe he'll crack his skull open against the helm's ceiling. Maybe, hopefully, he'll be instantly incinerated in a ship-sized fireball like in the Brock Rocket holofilms.

  None of these horrific fates seem to concern either of his two companions. Flask then remembers, in a burst of clarity, that they've both professedly survived no less than three shipwrecks over the course of their careers. They don't, Flask observes, look too worried about a fourth.

  “Oh, hey,” mentions Nemo, peering at a readout. “We're balanced. Whatever it was let go.” He snaps a switch near his comm transceiver. “Topturret, that you?”

  No reply comes from Quicksilver; simply static on the comm.

  “Huh. Weird. Well,” Nemo resolves with a shrug, ignoring the spiraling peril all around his freighter, “no reason to stand on ceremony.”

  With his right foot and his right hand, the Captain pumps some pedal and cranks the clutchlever forward. If the ship is intended to putter sorrowfully and keep plunging towards the ground, this is a wild success.

  “That's no good,” Nemo notices, a little put-out. He tries again but the ship's engine groggily refuses to start. In response, Nemo pouts his lip a little and eventually throws a glance over his shoulder. “Odi?”

  “IMPACT IMMINENT,” reminds an alarm patiently. “T-MINUS 20.”

  “Yes'm?” comes the peeved growl from somewhere beneath the communicator's dashboard. An Ortok's only partially visible down there, as an abdomen, hind paws, a toolbelt and tail, that sway back and forth with each sickening swing of the spaceship.

  “Boosters don't wanna turn over,” Nemo complains, a little mystified. “I'm all over the clutch and the–”

  “IMPACT IMMINENT. T-MINUS 17.”

  “And the intake pedal?” poses Odisseus archly, his reply muffled beneath the instrument panel and all the screaming alarms.

  “And the intake pedal, yeah,” a nodding Nemo finishes. “I tried–”

  Odisseus braces one paw against the communicator's seat as a particularly bad shudder wracks the ship. “You tried giving the clutch a second to breathe first, right?”

  “IMPACT IMMINENT. T-MINUS 14.”

  “Yes,” Nemo supplies, his demeanor increasingly less pleasant the thinner his patience wears. “I tried giving the clutch a second to breathe. I'm not an–”

  Flask raises a tentative finger. “Not to interrupt.”

  “How about goosing the ignition a second time?”

  “IMPACT IMMINENT. T-MINUS 11.”

  Nemo's mouth opens to object, only to close again with a contemplative frown. “That I did not try,” he allows. With a grandiose gesture, he takes hold of the dangling keys that bounce from the ignition.

  “See if that don't work for you,” adds Odisseus, nearly under his breath.

  “That alarm,” Flask starts to point out, “are–”

  “IMPACT IMMINENT. T-MINUS 8.”

  “Yep, that's the one,” Flask appreciates with a nod. “It means we're abou–”

  Nemo cranks the ignition once. Something snarls and sputters far beneath the helm's deckplates, something suggestive of a jetbooster's roar, and then falls disappointingly silent. The ship still spins, flips and tumbles through the sky. The raging sandstorm grow still closer in occasional flashes through the viewport.

  “What now, smart guy?” Nemo wants to know, slapping a hand against his thigh in frustration.

  The Ortok's temperament is unchanged by either the clear and present danger or by his saltbrother's bad attitude. “All at the same time. Pedal, clutchlever, ignition.”

  “IMPACT IMMINENT. T-MINUS 5.”

  “Itmeanswe'regonnafookin'crashlike!” Flask screams, the words vomited from his mouth in a paroxysm of terror.

  Nemo, the galactic champion of ignoring people, pays this no mind. Instead, he scowls confusedly at the controls. “How's that even–”

  With effort and the creative use of his elbow, Nemo manages to accomplish all three – twisting the ignition, pumping the clutchlever and pressing the intake pedal to the floor.

  “IMPACT IMMIN–”

  This is met with immediate success. There's an ungodly sound in the bowels of the ship, the boosters sighing heavily as they reluctantly agree to ignite. There's a newfound buoyancy to the freighter, bopping pleasantly as though dropped onto the surface of still pool.

  Miracle of miracles, The Unconstant Lover stops falling.

  Now that's the vessel's stopped spinning mad circles, the view through the viewport normalizes. Flask can see the upper clouds of the rampaging sandstorm, still scouring the planet's surface, as they rise up to lap at the Briza's underside. The sandstorm's rippling dust clouds almost appear as a silk cushion to break the Lover's fall.

  She hangs there a second, almost peacefully. She's fallen so far that the throng of harrying dropships are nothing but teltriton glints high above. In that second, the Captain takes the time to slowly turn and consider his saltbrother. “I stand corrected.”

  The Ortok, still buried beneath the instrument panel, idly scratches an inch with his hind claws and makes no other response.

  As the storm's upper winds buffet The Unconstant Lover like a jborra with a rat-canary, Nemo tilts the yoke back skyward. The ship soon pointed back towards orbit, the climatic field and the fleet of dropcraft. “You know what they say,” he resolves with a sigh. Before anyone can ask, he supplies the answer. “Second time's the charm.”

  Flask doesn't feel the need to correct him, fearing a dreaded third run at the climatic field. The clutchleve
r ratchets all the way forward and The Unconstant Lover leaps into her second atmosphere exit.

  Moira anticipates smoke grenades and is proven almost immediately right.

  A pair of them come clunking into the cargo hold, spewing whitish smoke in every direction. It'll take more smoke than two grenades worth, Moira knows, to completely cloud the Briza Light Freighter's expansive cargo bay. At the very least, the rangers will cover their own entrance through the ship's starboard airlock.

  It's an assumption that'll cost them precious lives.

  The first two rangers come right on the heels of their grenades, stalking forward in a loose formation. Rifles up, shields engaged, visors down, they're a humanoid and a Moshi, the one much bulkier than the other.

  They've come with triggers half-clicked, ready to murder anything aboard this vessel. Desperate these commandos might be, their ship might be destroyed behind them, but they're still the best trained killers in the galaxy. Now, they're on a sacred crusade, the holiest of holies – retrieving a Gitter sapling that was nearly stolen out from under their sacred paymasters.

  Moira can't decide. One part of her champions the idea of attacking immediately, as soon as she's got clean shots to her targets, to hopefully bottleneck them inside the airlock. The other part, the more prudent voice in Moira's already prudent head, says to wait, to maintain the element of the surprise and consider their numbers.

  Oddly, it's the former plan, guided by Moira's killer instincts, that triumphs. She knows, one way or the other, this whole thing will end with ditrogen-riddled corpses. Her life, she is determined, will cost them as much as her years of training and preparation can buy her.

  Two shots, one in the head of each ranger, is Moira's opening play. The first one's the easiest. Armed with complete surprise, Righty can puncture his skull whenever it wants. The second, immediately following, is the more critical. She must catch the humanoid still unawares, despite the shriek of laserfire and the death of his compatriot. This is Lefty's task and it performs admirably, catching the second ranger straight through the side of his surprised face.

  Neither of the rangers were expecting their first pirate to be squatting atop the airlock door, pistols ready and aimed at the back of their exposed heads.

  One after another, both rangers thud onto the cargo deck. The first two boarders in the Lover's history are dead inside of three steps. There's a moment of stunned shock that Moira feels palpably from the rest of the airlock's unseen troops – wholly unprepared to see their invincible vanguard dispatched in the first four seconds of the boarding action – and then all hell breaks loose.

  The next two rangers, an Alortan and a second humanoid, come scrambling backwards out their airlock. Fully swaddled by their ray shields, their Dominos are uplifted and blazing the moment they pass the threshold. This too Moira anticipated and is already calculating her next series of angles and trajectories, even as her own ray shield absorbs the brunt of their fire.

  The longer they keep shooting, of course, the weaker and weaker that shield'll become and thus, Moira's not long for her perch. The next three seconds see her relocated to another vantage, somewhere Moira can exploit the second phase of her surprise – that their first and only opponent is wearing a harness too.

  There are no words that can adequately describe Moira's elation when she leaps from her crouch, cranks her ankles back and feels the flamejets spring from her feet. To fly across the cargo hold transforms the dump into somewhere wholly new, with fascinating new vantages to all the grime and mold and rust.

  There's no time to enjoy this, however. She's a little too busy controlling the twist and contortion of her body as she soars above and around the spice rangers. They open fire, peppering her half-shell of ray shield with sporadic bursts from their Dominos. Personally, Moira is saving her ammunition, well aware that she'll need each and every one of those canisters before this is through.

  Through a carefully controlled motion of her feet, Moira keeps her shield interspersed between herself and her adversaries the entire flight until both feet touch down on the hold floor.

  Less surprised than the first two, this pair of spice ranger boarders easy follow Moira's flightpath with their fire. For the most part, they too keep their own shields between Moira and her Lawmen. For the most part, however, is not all and a careful eye's able to spot a few telltale places the rangers, their bodies twisted awkwardly around, leave exposed.

  The grayskin's right shoulder peeks ever so slightly into view, as does the Alortan's taloned ankle. Righty tags the first, the humanoid screaming and spinning aside. Lefty tags the other, the Alortan squawking and thudding heavily to the deck. In their pain and surprise, both rangers open themselves up even further and it's simple work for Moira to bury a bolt in one's back and the other's throat. Two more rangers drop, dead or wounded, to the deck, their harnesses hissing spasmodically.

  This maneuver's price, however, is steep. Now, Moira's element of surprise is spent and her position revealed. A casual glance reveals another four spice rangers, crowded into the airlock's tube – all with deadshots to Moira and her weakened shield.

  This is about as far as Moira'd planned, hoping that only a tiny portion of the dropcraft's rangers survived to board the Lover. It's time, she supposes, to improvise.

  To their credit, the remaining rangers don't hesitate a second at the sight of another two wingmates gunned down like punk-ass trainees. The front two – a pinkskin and a Hazric – drop instantly into a firing crouch, Dominos raised. When combined with the two rangers standing behind them – an Uvhog and a fourth humanoid – they create a perfect firing box.

  To minimize her shield's surface area, Moira too drops to her knees, in the heartbeat before they open fire. She's almost forced backward by the sheer strength of their barrage, the hold ringing with the exact type of gunfire that slew all the warriors of the Skyscratch grove. This time, however, it's all aimed at one kneeling target, her shield seconds away from failing and with zero ideas in her head.

  In the timeless gap between canisters, Moira reviews her options.

  Her first thought lands on grenades but that's not really feasible here. A grenade thrown inside the Lover's hold might wreak untold damage against not only her attackers but, more importantly, the freighter herself. The last thing Moira wanted was to blow a screaming hole in the Briza's starboard side, even if it yanked all her boarders out in the process.

  For another thing, Moira doesn't actually have any grenades, so.

  Her second thought involves charging forward, closing to melee and forcing the rangers to switch from rifle to heatblade, exploiting that nanosecond of transition. Beside the general Nemoness of this plan, Moira rules this too. While the kneeling rangers might require that window to swap weapons, the two rangers behind them would feel no such need and could easily fill Moira full of holes five steps into her charge.

  What to do, wonders Moira, what to do.

  Fortunately, The Unconstant Lover provides her own answer. In the instant before Moira's ray shield evaporates, something bucks the freighter hard to port – a laser blast, Moira suspects. It's the ship's faulty inertial dampener that catches the spice rangers by surprise. Like the bridge crew on those hokey Brock Rocket specials, the boarding party is pitched forward and bowled to the side, their fire flying wildly in every which direction.

  An old hand at the Lover's fits and starts, Moira instinctively braces a leg to keep her balance. Seeing her foe's collective stumble, she seizes her opportunity.

  From her crouch, Moira leaps straight into the air and gains as much vertical as she can before she kickstarts her flamejets. A trail of Domino fire follows a few seconds too late in her wake but Moira keeps rocketing towards the cargo bay's high ceiling, debating her next move.

  She's airborne when her comm's transceiver goes off, ducking back and forth to avoid the uncoordinated laserfire. “Gee,” wonders the Captain's voice over the broadband comm, “anybody know what happened to our bloom
ing air support?”

  Odisseus must be missing something.

  All the cables are connected. The blue indicator lights are lit. The box's even warm to the touch, the surest sign that something's fully operational. He can't seem to wrap his head around what could have caused the field exemptor to crap out on him like that.

  It's honest embarrassment, less the fear of death and destruction, that's making the Ortok so paranoid. In any other circumstance, this would be a routine procedure, no more complex than installing a scramble codifier or autotranslating incoming transmissions.

  To be fair, one could hardly fill a cocktail napkin with everything Odisseus knew about these field exemptors. The principle behind a comm interrupter is far from a foreign idea to the Ortok, resident gearhead aboard a pirate freighter for six years and counting. For this exact reason, he'd neglected researching the exemptor enough, during the planning phases. Here was that neglect, biting him in the bloomhole.

  “Something,” responds Moira over the broadband, “came up.”

  “What something,” Nemo is quick to respond, “could possibly have come up?” Another impact from starboard arrives to accentuate his point. Everything aboard the Lover – the exposed cables and wires beneath the communications panel included – quakes. “Bloom me out,” Nemo starts to snarl. “Shields–”

  “Are doing the very best that they bloody can!” Flask hollers back. So many unhappy alarms are ringing around the co-pilot's seat, Odisseus is inclined to guess that shields' very best may not quite be enough to keep them unexploded. “Sure would be peachy,” opines the poor beleaguered co-pilot, “if somebody felt like shooting back at these gobshites, like!”