Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  The bombard shield performs admirably, deflecting and bouncing away whatever comes crashing down to batter them. For the most part, they're pieces of nondescript teltriton, too mangled and burnt to be recognizable. Here and there, Flask sees the fractured hulk of a dropcraft or even the odd harness, its servos spasming wildly as it twangs off the ship's shielded bow. After each significant impact, the bombard shield's stretched dangerously thin. Flask is run ragged, modulating the energy levels and attempting to stave off disaster.

  When approximately half the torpedo chain has exploded, that's when The Unconstant Lover, guided by Nemo's steady hand, first enters the makeshift tunnel the explosives have carved through the station.

  The fit's a little tight. Grasping talons of jagged metal caress the edge of the bombard shield. Gouts of open flame, extinguished in seconds by the exposed vacuum, lick against the freighter's hull. Always Nemo is tilting and spinning the Lover to some new angle to better thread the Briza through the corridor of demolished decks they've made.

  Flask catches occasional and horrifying glimpses of the station they've shattered their way through. Crewmembers scream and stumble about. Rooms and chambers are rent to ribbons, fire spreads hungrily. For months, he'd lived in constant fear of discovery on a section of this station identical to the one they're now flying impossibly through. To see the place brought to ruin in an instant, Flask cannot decide if he feels revulsion or relief.

  The last few torpedos find the climatic station's last few decks. Through the flames, Flask gets a glimpse of the planet's upper orbit, the blockade and the stars beyond. All sound seems to be sucked away at this sight, this hopeful glimpse of escape and freedom.

  To reach this point, however, Nemo must guide the Lover through the last few openings his torpedos have blown through the station and these're easily the most harrowing.

  The Briza Light Freighter dodges to port and jukes to starboard, the ship squeezing through doorways created three seconds ago and by explosives. Flask feels every near miss in his bones, the whole Lover shuddering with each scrape and scratch.

  When Flask comes back to his senses, they've cleared the last hurdle and are blasting into open space. The whole universe seems to open up on either side of The Unconstant Lover as she escapes Gi's clutches. This is the first sensation he's aware of – the vastness to either side, the curvature of the pale planet below them.

  The second sensation he's aware of is all the chaos and commotion of the shielding station. A cursory scan of the flashing alerts and bleating alarms spells out exactly how dire the situation's become. “Shield's critical!” all his screens warn him. “Shield power at 0%!”

  His third sensation is the sight of the looming capital cruiser, moving sluggishly to intercept the Briza's flightpath. He sees its great bulk, casting an ominous shadow across the Lover's viewport. He sees its many cousins, fellow Consortium capital cruisers, summoned by the action on the planet. He sees its broadside batteries take aim and fire, a ditrogen storm opening in the great ship-shaped clouds overhead.

  “Shields critical!” the station reminds Flask. “Shield power at 0%!”

  CHAPTER 20

  Moira didn't expect the pinkskin to escape her chokehold simply by standing on her tiptoes.

  Standing on one's tiptoes, while wearing a harness, activates the ankle's flamejets. The pinkskin goes rocketing upward, knocking Moira's heatblade wide. To escape the roaring flames, Moira scrambles back. The second the skyrocketing ranger's clear of Moira, the other two open up again with their Dominos. Moira's careful to land in a crouch, to spare her weakening ray shield as much fire as possible.

  The pinkskin's maybe eight feet off the ground when she both summons her own assault rifle off her shoulder and makes one pivotal mistake. She's neglected her facing, so concerned with escaping Moira's grasp. Even though she's far above everyone's head, she's exposed her unprotected backside to Moira and, more importantly, Lefty.

  With a well-aimed shot, the Lawman strikes the harness' motivator clasp. The whole exoskeleton goes into overdrive, its servos spasming this way and that, the ranger's limbs twisting in ways they certainly weren't meant to. She swerves harshly to starboard, disappearing over Moira's shoulder and crashing with a crunch against the cargo hold's wall.

  Moira's in no mood to celebrate. Those Dominos are still firing at her and her ray shield's on its last leg, flashing 2% power in her visor.

  This is about when Moira realizes how bloomed she actually is. By standing on her tiptoes, that damn pinkskin's flipped Moira’s advantage completely on its head, depleted her ray shield and left her completely exposed to the firing squad. She can envision very few scenarios from here that won't see Moira gunned down, the rest of the crew slaughtered and the Gitter sapling recovered.

  With no more compelling options, Moira goes charging at her two remaining foes. She activates her own flamejets to transform her run into a twenty-foot pounce. She comes down hard between the two rangers in the moment before her ray shield evaporates.

  Once she touches down, she takes a wild swing – her last action in this galaxy, Moira's convinced – towards the humanoid, the nearest of the two rangers.

  The very kind of stupid luck that loves to hover around the Captain grants Moira a small boon. The scintillant edge of her heatblade happens to catch the very snub of the ranger's Domino as it peeks from behind the ray shield's cover. One slice later and the humanoid's simply holding a smoking replica, a piece of very expensive equipment that only resembles an assault rifle.

  Then the gunfire comes.

  The Hazric's Domino barks somewhere behind Moira and she, not for the first time that second, anticipates the end. There's instead a sudden heat and pressure in her shoulder, hot claws poking holes through her flesh. Moira watches, in muted astonishment, as green ditrogen bursts through her shoulder and sizzles against the humanoid's ray shield.

  In the next moments, instinct takes total control of Moira's body. It's instinct that drops her to her knees, in pain or preservation, as the humanoid's next swing goes sizzling over her head. It's instinct that thrusts Lefty towards the Hazric, doubtlessly readying her Domino to fire again, to fill her heart and lungs with ditrogen. It's more dumb luck, however, that happens to slip the pistol, held at arm's length, past the Hazric's ray shield. When the shot comes, it claims the ranger in her finned chin, snapping her head back and tossing her body to the deck.

  Then Moira, from her kneeling position, is dealing a savage kick to the humanoid's shin. He cries in pain but Moira cries in surprise when, in the midst of her kick, she accidentally activates the foot's flamejets with a tweak of her ankle. The kick, therefore, has a fiery chaser and the unintended effect of skidding Moira a dozen feet away, in awkward stumbles and agonizing thuds against her wounded shoulder.

  She wants to leap to her feet and bring the battle back to him but her shoulder, past numbness and into sheer pain, refuses. Moira is sprawled, panting, for too long and expecting the inevitable gunfire to smear her across the hold floor. It never comes, however; Moira instead gazes across the ship to discover the humanoid ranger, his knee a mess, his Domino useless and his twin heatblades drawn.

  Moira takes her time, then, climbing to her feet, sheathing her heatblade and drawing Righty from her shoulder holster. She takes an immense pleasure in raising both 665 Lawmen and starting to shoot, unimpeded, at the ray shield of the last remaining spice ranger aboard their vessel.

  At full charge, the ranger's ray shield accepts the shots greedily and without diminishment. Moira's in no hurry; the pistols have plenty of ammunition and her quarry's going nowhere fast, with a leg broken and burnt. All she has to do is keep her distance and this should become a simple war of attrition, chipping away at his ray shield until the ranger's fully exposed.

  The humanoid seems to understand this, his weathered face cast with determination. He stands still a moment, eyes flicking about the hold as he debates his options. Instead of advancing to meet her in melee, he bears
the agony of kickstarting his flamejets and starts to rise, a little wobbly, into the air.

  Moira stays put, hoping the wounded ranger will misjudge an angle and give her an opening to exploit. No idiot, he's very careful to keep the shield between them and, rather than swooping down on her, he reels backward a little, heading towards the bow. Keeping him in comfortable range, Moira paces a few steps forward, Righty and Lefty shooting all the while.

  That's when she sees his intention and a new dagger of fear pierces her heart.

  He slackens his upward thrust and eventually lands atop the companionway stairs with a clang. He reaches a hand behind and the double doors behind him grumble open. Two steps backward and the doors, irritated at being bothered, gratefully close.

  Now, there's nothing that stands between the last spice ranger and the helm.

  Flask screams until his throat's gone raw.

  From the comfort of a bar stool or a cargo crate in some dingy hideout, Flask has personally planned a hundred or more smuggling operations over the course of his career. Some of those operations would have involved a blockade run very much like this one, the one The Unconstant Lover was attempting in its escape from Gi. Whenever the need for one arose, the smugglers in question would always smirk, make some quip and betray no fear at the dangers involved.

  Never, in all his years as a criminal fixer, did Flask imagine that a blockade run would be this terrifying.

  A spray of laserfire misses the unshielded nose of The Unconstant Lover by an inch, leaving a black scorch across the viewport as a souvenir. For a moment, Nemo's forced to duck and weave the freighter about, seemingly at random, to avoid assumed laserfire. While the scrubbers take their sweet time clearing the view, Flask can see nothing but green flashes and he's forced to imagine how close they've come to annihilation each time.

  A consumate professional, Nemo handles this with aplomb. “I can't see!” he screams. “I can't see! I can't see! I can't see!”

  “Look out!” Flask screams back, pointing a desperate finger out the viewport towards a particularly bright flash, coming straight at them.

  More a flinch than an evasive maneuver, Nemo cranks the yoke in a random direction. Remarkably, this does seem to avoid whatever was shooting them by virtue of the fact that they're not immediatey exploded. In fact, the ship goes on existing another few seconds, careening away whichever direction until the scrubbers manage to clean the viewport.

  A Consortium cruiser – the Liquidation at a glance – swallows the viewport for a moment. Its gunbanks and portholes slide past at an askance angle as The Unconstant Lover circles around its port side. The freighter ducks beneath the belly of the great capital ship, the Liquidation's cannons spitting green fire inches from its wake all the way. As the Lover starts to rise on the cruiser's opposite side, she's greeted by another pair of identical cruisers – the Requisition and the Entrepreneur – and their batteries are eager to open up on the defenseless Briza.

  Beyond those cruisers, Flask can see the distant stars of freedom, of escape, winking at him.

  Nemo's only idea to avoid this newest danger is simply to spin the Lover endlessly on its axis and hope that this somehow dodges all the incoming laserfire. To hedge his bets, he also throws in a shouted string of idiocy over his shoulder, towards his saltbrother and the shielding mainframe.

  “Shields! Do we have shields? Where're the shields? We need sh–”

  “The shields aren't made of magic!” comes the Ortoki reply, packaged with a good deal of Ortoki bile. “I'm not some kinda space wizard that can wave my paws and make everything all better again! There are procedures and protocols that–”

  All the ship's spinning simply sends the co-pilot's seat into a tizzy. Flask can only catch the occasional glimpses of the mechanic and all the hopeless work he does on the defunct shields. The primary cabinet's been thrown wide and a great tangle of wires and conduits dangle out like spilled noodles and sway with each movement of the ship. Odisseus stands, bothering with no safety restraints, as he yanks more and more strands of bundled cables from the mainframe, like a magician producing scarves from his sleeve.

  At this, the Captain risks a glance behind and sees the utter disarray the station's become. “Moons alive,” he remarks. “Didn't ask you to rebuild the thing from scrat–”

  “Nemo!” Flask shrieks, pointing about another flash out the viewport.

  This seems to grab his attention and the Captain reverses direction to barrel-roll the Lover past a new flurry of fire from the Entrepreneur. As long as Odisseus continues his field surgery, all Flask's screens and devices are dead and lifeless and his only responsibility seems to be screaming at Nemo to warn him about incoming blasts.

  Apart from the occasional dodge to eithe side, The Unconstant Lover continues racing forward. With her boosters fully open, it's only a matter of moments before they've actually reached the next two cruisers, the blockade's last line of defense. All they need to do is circumvent these last two crusiers without incident – a big ask, Flask understands, with no shields – and they'll be home free, free to warp out at their leisure.

  Flask's heart stops.

  “We got coordinates?” he throws at Nemo. The Captain emerges from his barrel-roll and balances the freighter precariously on her vertical axis, to better weave between the approaching capital ships.

  Nemo spares a moment from his panic to turn and blink at Flask. “Coordinates?”

  “To warp,” Flask supplies, his cousin's confusion not boding well. “To warp away from here. The coordinates Abraham cooked for you.” There's nothing but blankness on the Captain's face. Flask thrusts a finger past the cruisers and into deep space. “For when we get there!”

  “Um.” Nemo's eyes go flitting across the controls and instruments, in obvious search of something. He raises a great cloud of dust when he takes one hand from the yoke to pat down his pants and robe, looking for the completely intangible warp coordinates. “They're around here somewhere...”

  “Who's gonna–” a trepidatious Flask starts to ask, terrified of the answer. At the exact moment he starts to ask the dreaded question, a broadside battery scores a lucky graze off The Unconstant Lover's port side. The ship jerks violently to starboard, its metal whines pitieously and the recoil dashes the rest of Flask's words right out of him.

  “Guess that's you, buddy,” Odisseus sighs, taking a moment from his digging through the mainframe to fix Flask with a significant glance.

  “Oh!” exclaims Nemo, a sudden ray of brightness. “Found them.” With three nimble fingers against the keys, he beams something across to Flask's nearest monitor. It's a warp drive interface, Flask can assume, that'll send them to Bennevikos, the designed post-caper rendezvous.

  He can feel his hands trembling, even in all the chaos and insanity of that helm, the individual beads of sweat as they slide down his face. Manning the shield station is already far over Flask's head. Warp engineering, on the other hand, is reputedly more delicate and difficult than actual rocket science by a factor of ten.

  In theory, a prepackaged set of coordinates, like those scrolling on Flask's screen, should be perfectly primed to punch and go. Still, there were untold ways Flask could miscalculate; he could factor the information wrong, he could mix up the procedure's proper order, he could forget to account for gravitational drift. The consequences of such a failure, even in this extreme situation, were hard to ignore. The horror stories – warping through a black hole, directly into a planet's surface, even into the dead space between systems, far too far to make contact with another gate – were legion.

  There were a thousand possible deaths, all much less immediate than exploding, awaiting Flask on the other side of those warp coordinates. To judge the distance between here and open space, he's got less than a minute to execute them properly.

  With still trembling hands, Flask unbuckles his restraints, rises from his chair and heads to the warp room, to decide the fate of everyone aboard.

  Moira
comes flying at full throttle, flamejets open, the moment the abovedecks doors give her enough space. The spice ranger's wounded leg prevents him from anything but shambling backward down the corridor and he's made little progress by the time Moira descends on him.

  With both heatblades engaged, her plan is simply to land and gut him with a few quick strikes. This plan is thwarted somewhat by a shooting pain in the meat of her right shoulder. She does land and does make an attack but her righthand swing is a feeble thing, so weak he hardly needs to dodge out of the way.

  His counterattack is all fury, lashing out with his own two heatblades in a murderously fast Qarmeo Quills. To properly avoid this, Moira must flatten her body against the portside wall, his swords boiling the empty air.

  Her next tactic has no name. She lashes out with a vicious street-fighter's kick to the kneecap, hoping to complicate the humanoid's injured shin and topple him to the ground. Her aim's a little off and his reaction's a little too quick. Her kick instead lands against the machinery of his harness and twangs uselessly aside.

  The ranger's response is an inelegant stab at Moira's own wounded shoulder. She's able to twist away and further down the corridor but still winces to see the heatblade puncture a thin slit straight through the teltriton wall. There's a heartbeat's hesitation from them both, waiting to see if he's actually breached the hull and whether the outside world will come sucking greedily at them.

  When there's only the sizzling of burnt metal, both combatants leap back into the fray simultaneously, each attempting to outpace the other.

  They battle this way for an indeterminate stretch of time – both wounded, both tossed about whenever the ship pitches this way or that, both careful not to rend the ship around them to pieces. As the fight drags on, the ranger keeps giving ground, falling back further up the corridor and closer to the helm. Moira's attacks become all the more frantic, eager to prevent him from reaching the helm and causing more chaos in there.