Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  Three nights from now, they'd touch down on Karvela and make contact with some smuggler baron of Flask's extended acquaintance, someone potentially interested in taking the Ortok's pet sapling off their hands. Paranoia had driven them from their first choices, either Qetapi or Pursma, for fear that the trillion some viewers of Galactic Airwaves would be hastening there even now, hoping to catch or simply catch sight of the Galactic Menace.

  The rational part of Moira's brain knew that, ten to one, they'd encounter trouble on Karvela and that part of her brain was determined to meet any trouble with a traditional, no-nonsense arsekicker haircut. The irrational part of Moira's brain agreed but also wanted to get smashed on gas station gin, listen to her music at full blast and do the deed with a live laser.

  Moons forfend, of course, she be left in peace to shave her head and get drunk and listen to some actual fucking music for a change.

  Neither the stomping and hollering of Cannonball Dogs nor the scalp-scorcher can completely drown out his entrance. “Bloom me out,” he announces at full volume as he appears in the medbay's open doorway and the corner of Moira's eye. “Don't know how you listen to this buhoxshit.” He flits past her, all shag and baggy clothing, appearing for a milisecond in either side of the mirror, before he hops onto the surgical bench and wiggles this way and that.

  “And look,” remarks the Captain, pointing a finger her direction. “Your ears aren't even bleeding.”

  The alcohol's banished any witty retort she might have used. “I like it,” she answers instead, a little petulantly, a little unsteadily. “If you don't, then you can go and get fucked.”

  He extends a grubby finger. “I already did.” With a drunken lurch, he hoists something from his waist – a partially-full bottle of his own, the acid blue contents sloshing about inside. “To fucking off,” he toasts, “and getting rid of all this blooming hair.”

  Moira actually can't find argument with that. Switching the scorcher off with a thumb, she too raises her own bottle and they clink too loudly together, neither party quite judging the distance accurately. This is followed by a bunch of guzzling, bottles pointed to the medbay ceiling and all conversation paused. When Moira brings her tossed-back head down to earth, the whole universe lags a few seconds behind, her brain made sluggish by all this poison and scrambling to keep pace.

  At a glacial speed, a question starts to dawn on Moira. She turns to better face the Captain, to better put that question to him. “You're shaving your head too?” She'd never considered the possibility before but, looking at him, she can't deny it would noticeably improve the bedraggled mess she's looking at.

  Over a week's passed since they left the surface of Gi. The dust, in small patches, is still caked to his body. The late bathrobe that once belonged to the late Gella Borsk hangs off his shoulders in piss-yellow tatters. Torn by wind and stained by sand, it's been transformed into a shabby shawl, the kind worn by crony Adrogi fishwives on their way to market. The flimsy Pirateton tee sports a few open sores, exposing bare chest beneath, the fabric far too shoddy to withstand the vigors of wasteland, Fernhollow and pitched battle.

  That hair, though, is his most egregious offense. Mingling with the beard, it's become one great black ring that wraps wholly around his face in a matted, tangled mess.

  The sight of him standing there brings to Moira a sudden flash of another scraggly humanoid that she, years ago now, tended to in this very medbay. Then the underturret crushed him with all the weight of the ship.

  “My head?” Nemo recoils, confused. “Bloom no. I'm no maniac.” Instead, he loops a few fingers through his beard, that untamed beast that clings to his chin, and makes a fist. “All this shit's coming off. Gotta be presentable, if we're gonna go meet the crowned heads of Flask's holodex.”

  To accomplish this, he produces from a robe pocket a hair flenser, a gunmetal gray hunk of machinery that looks like it might have fallen off one of the jetboosters. Its mouth is a vortex of blades, now inert, that're sure to become a whirring hole of destruction when activated. The thick brown hairs that bristle from the flenser's nozzle immediately tell Moira where Nemo pilfered it from.

  May the moons have mercy on Nemo's soul when Odisseus discovers his flenser both stolen and, invariably, broken.

  “You know this first contact of his?” she asks as she reactivates her scalp-scorcher. “This Turquoise character?”

  “Know she's a Gronqo. Know she's supposed to be some big-shot smuggler.” Nemo gestures gamely with the Gitterswitch as he talks. “One of the contacts he inherited when Abner passed. Guy we usedta peddle our buhoxshit to, back when we was tykes.”

  Moira is doubtful as she swoops the scorcher down the side of her head, cinders falling on her shoulders. “Think she's good for 68 million?”

  “Fuck if I know,” Nemo resolves into the bottle, the answer echoed strangely within the little grass prison. “It'll work out. We'll find somebody. Damn thing's the most valuable piece of green in the whole blooming galaxy.”

  Moira can only scoff. “Yeah?” She switches the scorcher off again and brushes ash from her hand and wrist. She reaches for the bottle, down to its dregs, before she adds, in a bout of grim humor, “Then what?”

  “Hm?” grunts Nemo into his gin. “Whazzat?” he asks only a little clearer once he's surfaced.

  “Then what?” Moira wants to know, doing her best to maintain eye contact in the mirror, despite how woozy she's become. “Say you're right and everything works out in short order. This Turpentine person or the guy after her or the girl after him,” she explains, aware her mouth is running a little ahead of her mind, straining at its leash, “fronts the cash we want, we sell them the tree, we somehow dodge the Consortium and everybody else with a loaded gun and empty pockets in the galax–”

  “Right,” mutters Nemo.

  “Then what?” Moira shrugs dramatically, tossing blue booze about inside her bottle and, were the scorcher active, slicing some meat off her thigh. “The bloom do we do then, with all that money and all them enemies?”

  On instinct, Nemo starts to shrug. Halfway through, he stops suddenly, keeping his shoulders high and tense, as he realizes he doesn't have an adequate answer. “Lay low, I guess,” is what comes out of him, as a reflex, before his shoulders fall. When that answer fails to impress anyone present, not even the electromonica solo in the middle of Devil's Dowry, he goes digging for something more satisfying. “And that’d just be, you know, temporary. Heat'll die down. Always does.”

  The only response Moira can make is activating the scorcher again and prepping another – the last – row of scalp-scorching.

  “The money we're gonna make, though,” Nemo reminds her as he hefts the Gitterswitch again. In lieu of continuing, Nemo simply buzzes his lips, beside himself with his own cleverness and daring.

  “That's gonna depend,” Moira points out, “on what happens with Flask's Gronqo friend.”

  “Well, sure,” Nemo allows before taking a hefty draught of the gin. That fact that he now knows how the proverbial sausage is made, that he's drinking the mashed up bladders of sentient cactoids, doesn't seem to bother him – or her, Moira supposes – any, guzzling happily away. “But, I mean,” he starts to stipulate, “no reason we gotta accept chump change. Assume we clear 50 million, easy–”

  Moira stops the scorcher an inch from her hairline and attempts to divide 50 million into four equal shares. Try though she might, her boozy brain simply won't make the numbers dance the way they need to.

  “–that's gonna leave us tons of options, you know.”

  “Options,” Moira repeats dryly, less paying attention to the conversation and more parroting the last thing he's just said.

  “For the next thing,” Nemo explains casually. “What we do after we lay low.”

  She doesn't dignify this with any response other than running her laser through her hair with a smoking hiss.

  “Thinking about it,” Nemo starts to speculate, a little conspiratorily, like some
one might overhear them through all the Cannonball Dogs, “what I hear about Gertie these days, they might be one and the same thing.”

  It takes all Moira's concentration to send the scorcher on a number of strafing runs around the ear, scraping away all those pesky hairs that refuse to stay tucked.

  “Rumor has it,” he mentions, sounding more and more like he's telling spooky stories around a campfire somewhere, “after all the Freebooter business went tits up, she'd gone to ground somewhere deep Lhvargo Quadrant, just inside the Offchart's border out there, right?” He pauses here to add an ounce of unnecessary dramatic heft to his pitch. “And she'd bagged herself a planet.”

  Moira snaps the scorcher off and, once again, starts scattering the soot that's accumulated on her wrist. For good measure, she dunks both hands into the basin and splashes them around a little, her mind swaying drunkenly from topic to topic.

  “You know what I'm saying? Boss Ott style. Except,” he goes on quickly to clarify, leaning so far forward, he looks poised to fall off the surgical bench and flat on his face, “this time, the planet ain't one the Imperium gives two shits about. Some real boring rock, you know, south of Huoin or someplace.”

  “And?” cues Moira, the direction of this discussion quickly sobering her.

  “And she runs the blooming place!” Nemo exclaims, his exuberance splashing a small amount of Gitterswitch on the floor. “Sure, she's 'laying low',” he makes the point with big obvious air-quotes, “but half of everything I heard's true? They worship her as a goddess out there.”

  Moira runs a hand satisfyingly across her scalp, in search of any spots she might've missed. “Been there,” she reminds him. “Done that.”

  Nemo ignores her, too absorbed with his own alcoholic fantasy to remember she's even in the room. “And all that's out there for the fucking taking, man. All's you gotta do,” he theorizes, full of sudden and sage wisdom, “is find the right planet. Someplace far enough out, right, that everybody ain't recognizing you, that bounty hunters ain't always hanging on your dick.”

  Moira does her best to sweep the loose pelt of crisped hair off her neck and shoulders. When this isn't enough, she staggers towards the emergency chemical shower in the medbay's bow corner, dragging her Gitterswitch along with her. Walking suddenly unmoors her whole drunken body, reminding Moira exactly how smashed she is and how urgently she needs the sturdy teltriton wall for support.

  “But not someplace so far out,” Nemo supposes, “that you can't beam in halfways decent holovision or find a Pickle Planet that's actually open fucking late or whatever.”

  With a toss of her head, Moira tips back her bottle and drains the rest. The dreggy peach guts that always linger on the bottle's bottom are like pungent paper on her tongue and teeth. She takes a page from Nemo's book and drops the bottle, where it thunks hollowly against the floor and rolls away.

  “Think maybe Haliquant's the key,” Nemo considers. “You go far enough out, most people ain't gonna bother braving the real wartorn shit to come find you. What's out there?” he wonders abruptly. “Nuvoon, I know and Quorom, I think too.”

  Her head hung, it takes Moira a few attempts to blindly grab the shower's chain. With a yank, the showerhead sputters to life, a little temperamental at being roused after so long. Freezing cold water piddles from the emergency shower and Moira stands back, letting the truly stagnant stuff drain out before she dares dunking her head under its flow.

  “Bloom,” remarks Nemo. “I think Spithax is out that way too, you go far enough.”

  When the time's right, Moira douses her head and lets the water spatter off her. It's still cold as fuck but it feels unspeakably refreshing after scorching her scalp within an eighth of an inch of its life.

  “Well, wherever we go,” resolves Nemo, starting to inch off the surgical bench, “I feel like that's what's next. Find the right boondock, shoot the dude with the shinest hat and hang up our shingle there for a spell.”

  Moira lets the water and his words wash over her. She knows he's only speaking from self-preservation; when faced with the unavoidable threat of failure, destruction and ignominy, one makes concrete plans for the future, to combat the fate all but assumed.

  These drunken plans, she knows, will never actually come to fruitition, considering the Captain's ability to become distracted by new and shiny ideas. Maybe he will run off to become King Shitlicker of Buttfuck Nowhere; bully for him, if he does.

  The thought of accompanying him on that fool's errand, on any more fool's errands, makes her physically ill.

  This was supposed to be the curtain call, the last hurrah, the one last job. In memory of Two-Bit Switch and not much else, they were all committed to seeing this accursed shitheap of a caper through to its conclusion. Though it typically went unsaid, Moira thought it was mutually understood that they would all take their leave the moment the cash hit their pockets.

  Abraham – crafty bastard – didn't even last that long. Contriving to have himself thrown off the caper was a masterstroke, a piece of genius foresight. So recently shat out the bloomhole that was Gi, the Consortium's rigors and Two-Bit's caper, Moira would happily trade places with the fat Grimalti geezer, wherever he was.

  Memories come unbidden, then; meeting Abraham in the Junction above Kuzu Minor, that grim ghost the buccaneer had become, the ultimate fall he seemed certain they were, all of them, rocketing inexorably toward.

  For six plus years, Moira'd been chained to the shipwreck that was Nehel Morel. If this storm didn't capsize him, the next one or the one after that or the one after those would.

  Another yank silences the shower and Moira can once again hear both Nemo and the screaming refrains of Cannonball Dogs, now looped back to the album's start. He's still talking, she knows, while he fiddles with the hair flenser and it takes all her Tebi-Gali focus to drown out his nonsense with the sound of her own breathing.

  Moira has charted her own course, one dramatically different from Nemo's daydream, one that would rewrite all four of their futures, Odisseus and Flask included. She would bide her time a little longer, wait out that potential payday and, when the time was right, she would shoot him in the skull and claim his bounty.

  A towel across the familiar frictionless curvature of her head remids her who she is. Even plastered on Junction gin, she is still Moira Quicksilver; gunfighter, bounty hunter and nobody's friend. She's played pirate for entirely too long and it was time, after all these years, to go back into business for herself.

  “Oh, there.” The moment she's ironshod her resolve again, Nemo's inane comment manages to pierce all Moira's defenses. The flenser roars to life, its whirlpool of vicious blades singing their barbaric song of metal on metal. “That's got it.”

  She's a step away from the medbay door, unable to stomach his noxious presence another second, when he calls out to her. “You mind if I change the tunes?” Moira stops in the doorway, unwilling to turn and show him any scorn. “I listen to this crap another second, my head'll probably fucking explode or something.”

  “You can do what you want,” she mutters and stalks out. She's headed down the corridor and back towards her quarters, towel over her shoulder, scorcher in her hand and purpose in her stride.

  Moira reaches the hold's double doors when the beard hits the fan, Nemo screaming in sudden terror. “My face! My face! It's eating my fucking face!”

  CHAPTER 22

  Flask can fix this.

  Back on his feet, Flask and his Domino lay down another layer of suppressing fire. It twangs against the lobby's tables and holoslots and just generally misses its many hidden targets. At the same time, two sharp blasts of yellow from his right manage to prick an exposed elbow, spilling its Venewla owner to the ground in a fountain of orange blood.

  Quicksilver, at least, knows the value of covering fire.

  Soon as his Domino's chamber clicks empty, Flask scoots back into cover behind his own holoslot machine before any of the assembled thugs get their act together enough t
o return fire. “Last chance, Turq!” Flask hollers in the momentary lapse of gunfire. “Tell your bozos to drop their guns and you can still walk away from this in the fooking black, like!”

  “SURRENDER?” snarls the unseen droidvox of his former friend and smuggling contact. “BUDDY BOY, YOU MIGHT WANNA RUN THOSE NUMBERS AGAIN.”

  “We got more,” informs Quicksilver, making a motion with her revolver towards the lobby's pillared wings. “Bloom me out, I thought you said she ran a smuggling ring, not a home for disenfranchised fucking goons.”

  “Go way back, you said,” mutters Odisseus, squeezed behind the same sparking and deactivated holoslot machine. “Like a grandmother to me, you said.”

  “I can fix this,” Flask attempts to argue. “We shoot enough of her blokes, she'll see the wisdom of making a deal and then, bam, we're–”

  A streaking bolt of red ditrogen impacts against the machine a few inches from Flask's throat, shot from a surprising new angle. Before Flask can react, Odisseus has hefted his Haymaker and carved a new cavity in the chest of a Chellar in the process of flanking the four besieged pirates from behind.

  “You were saying?” cues the irritated Ortok.

  “Come on now,” the Captain calls over, from where he crouches next to Quicksilver. He's been transformed from the hairy creature they'd found on Gi and once more resembles an actual person. His bathrobe's been replaced with his partially-atomized leather duster and there's a swatch of bloody bandages where his beard once grew wild and free. “Let's be reasonable here, Turquoise. What would old Abner say, were he to see us like this?”

  “I AM ACTING PERFECTLY REASONABLE,” the Gronqo answers in a calm voice, made all the more calm by her speaking apparatus. “JUST BECAUSE YOU WENT AND GOT ALL FAMOUS,” she makes the point with all the sagacity of the grandmother Flask pegged her for, “DOESN'T MEAN I'VE GONE AND GOT ALL STUPID.”

  There's another lapse in the conversation here, the silence broken by the occasional gunshot, near miss and the casino's ambient muzak. “Meaning?” Nemo wonders.