Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  Abraham plays dumb. “In?”

  “Taking the thing off my hands,” Nemo suggests. “For a price.”

  Abraham needs all his restraint to keep from snorting at the suggestion. Centuries of practice, however, have given Abraham the galaxy's greatest poker face. Before he makes any actual reply, the Grimalti clambers from the recliner and waddles across the swaying cabin to his keg. “Another?” he mutters to Nemo and, with a moment's reluctance, the Captain passes him his tankard.

  “I couldn't possibly afford ye,” Abraham shouldn't need to point out. When the keg dwindles down to dribbles, the Grimalti moonshiner wraps an arm around the great wooden thing and tips it forward, draining the last juices from his personal batch.

  “There ain't a beating heart in the galaxy can afford us anymore,” Nemo dismisses, though it visibly pains him to say so. He takes the tankard wearily. “I know for a fact, though,” he adds as the Grimalti harrumphs back into his chair, “you ain't broke. You got stashes across the galaxy.”

  Over a foaming stein, Abraham considers his guest. “Could be that's so.”

  “You were the thriftiest bastard of us all,” Nemo remembers cautiously, “especially during the Freebooter business. Even Odi spent his capital on indulging the ship. You, though. You're a hoarder – always have been.” He lets the supposition hang in the air a few moments. “You always were holding out on us a little.”

  Abraham sucks the foam from the top of his drink. “Could be that's so.”

  “You think about it,” Nemo keeps pitching, scooting forward on the creaky cot, “that's really the ultimate moonshiner score, right?” His smile is a devious thing, a devil tempting the unwary to sin. “No more squeezing seaweed and quorki shit into the recipe. This is the real deal, all ready for mass production.”

  Abraham wipes foam from his beak with a hand. “How much?”

  “Not 68 million, of course,” Nemo acknowledges and that's when the desperation creeps into his voice. “Something more reasonable. You gotta understand; I got maybe one more chance at this before they all fucking mutiny on me.”

  That's when the realization strikes him then. Nemo leans a little backward. “Before you get what you wanted.”

  Abraham allows this idea a moment to stew and maintains his poker face. That realization, impossible to expunge, creeps outward to fill the Captain. Though they maintain eye contact, Nemo seems to stare straight through Abraham, gazing back across all his actions since the Trija Tragedy and seeing, for perhaps the first time, the sense behind them, the foreknowledge that lead the Grimalti here.

  He makes his excuse, perfectly reasonable and nowhere near the truth. “Yer outta me league,” he explains, shrugging sadly. “Even were I to give ye everything I've stashed, think they'd still mutiny on ye, considering everything they been through.”

  “Makes sense,” mutters Nemo, lost in his daydream where his ship, his crew, his infamy crumbles away to nothing. “This,” Nemo supposes, seeking to clear the air, “is because I marooned you, right?”

  Abraham sighs again and considers the depths of his drink. “Once saw a blighter marooned above Jotor.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Once ye dropped in orbit 'round that planet, ye never hit the ground, legend goes. Bastard's up there still, I shouldn't wonder,” Abraham speculates, imagining the horror pleastered on that dead Ismoda’s face. “Another one of Jotor's million moons.”

  “What'd they do?” Nemo poses, a little dangerously. “This blighter you saw marooned.”

  Abraham scrunches up his face. “Ain't sure that I recall now.”

  “Sabotaged the ship, maybe?” Nemo suggests, a little more dangerously. “Started pulling pieces off the warp drive mid-fucking warp, you think?”

  Abraham is a patient parent with their temperamental teenager. “I paid for that crime, did I not?”

  “You woulda, for sure,” Nemo sputters a little, “if I had my way and we'd dropped your bloomhole on Kagno. This place?” He scoffs bitterly. “This slimeball ain't no punishment for you.”

  “I had my reasons,” is all the more explanation Abraham will offer.

  “I'm sure that you did.”

  Over the years, Abraham Bonaventure was connected to an uncountable number of pirate captains, of every possible species and temperament, rising stars all. Each one, in their own way, gave the timeworn Grimalti hope that maybe they, of all the candidates, would usher in his hallowed age of high piracy. To a soul, however, they either had that same shattering fall or that one unwise decision or that ballooning arrogance or that trick of circumstance that brought them low and exposed their true unworthiness.

  Never had one come so close to achieving that ideal as Nehel Morel did. Despite the freshness of the wound, that deserves Abraham's respect.

  He extends the tankard and the frothing mug of moonshine hangs there a moment, its foam settling as Nemo understands his intent.

  “To The Unconstant Lover, eh?” offers Abraham, along with a genuine smile.

  Still sunk halfway into his next funk, Nemo has the grace to smirk and raise his own tankard, to thud quietly against Abraham's. “To The Unconstant Lover.”

  Odisseus works with both paws. One paw wrangles the twisted pieces of teltriton back into place with the neticgrappler. The other paw welds them as flush as he can against the Lover's hull with the fusioner.

  “Her sheets all rent to ribbons too.”

  This is far from a perfect or permanent solution. Considering the utter lack of teltriton to be found on Pok, it's the best Odisseus can currently do to repair some of the grievous hull damage the Lover suffered on her escape from Thaksu.

  “Ne’er felt I fear, yet shed one tear.”

  He leverages the next metal spike, jagged and charred, with a powerful yank of his forearm. He then takes a moment before bothering with the fusioner, tongue lolling from his mouth from the exertion.

  “To clap eyes on her poor damned crew.”

  As he stretches, Odisseus gazes back across the Lover's dorsal deck, at everything he's accomplished this evening. Since early this afternoon, here Odisseus squatted, painstakingly bending and blasting the Briza's shredded hull back into place. In all those hours, he's repaired maybe five feet of damaged hull. Odisseus is exhausted, frustrated, sitting on a heap of awaiting repairs and sick half-to-death of that same depressing sea shanty. He's about ready to call this a night.

  Moonlight streaks between gaps in the oppressive tree boughs, lending aid to the Ortok's meager lantern. In this light, The Unconstant Lover is a strange topography of exposed machinery, peeling yellow paint and patches of worrying rust, leftover from the ship's six week stint as a spaceberg. Beyond the ship stretch the swamplands of Pok, lit by drifting motes of multicolored light that could be insects, plants or something still stranger.

  Down at the water level, a pack of stilt-legged Poki, overseen by their singing Grimalti foreman, scamper about the tangled nnokoss roots, in search of the choicest botanicals. Three nights running, they've come out at this hour, when the fast-growing ttoksiis plant glows its brightest blue and is the easiest to collect.

  As was his wont, Abraham's taken a supervisory role. Installed atop the swampskimmer, he bawls out his piratical shanties for inspiration and points out, with his somehow so keen eyesight, the odd patch of luminescent weed his native underlings have missed.

  Flask and Nemo have both disappeared inside the ship, one vanished at the merest suggestion of manual labor and the other still sulking after his private chat with their Grimalti host. No one among the crew knew precisely what went down but, if Abraham's sunny disposition and Nemo's stormy one were any indication, it did not bode well for the Captain's continuing mood.

  Only Moira, then, among the Lover's remaining crew sought to take advantage of the fresh air, no matter how muggy and thrumming full of insects it might be.

  “For a maroon,” she comments from a dozen feet behind him, “he certainly doesn't seem too miserable.”

&nb
sp; “No,” Odisseus agrees, watching the Grimalti fumbling with his pipe, “he doesn't.”

  He glances over his shoulder to see Moira at her own workstation. She too wields a fusioner and blasts away at the cracked shell of her turret's viewport. Pok's oppressive humidity was finally enough to do away with her restrictive black attire. She wore instead her exercise outfit and, for once, no holsters nor pistols for ease of labor.

  “He told me,” Odisseus adds, “he even had some chances to leave.” He shakes his head a little, considering their former crewmate down there in the muck and the slime. “Cargo ships, you know, looking for supplies or directions or whatever. Says he coulda commandeered them, had the manpower but he just...”

  “Just?”

  “Didn't wanna,” concludes Odisseus. He pops the visor back over his eyes, so he needn't look at Abraham anymore. He's reaching to reactivate his fusioner, to solder that errant piece back into place, when he catches a scent that stops his paw.

  {Thirdseed is uncomfortable}.

  Odisseus sighs and glances up from his work towards Thirdseed. There the little potted cactus sits, on a rare level patch of hull, supervising Odisseus and Moira's work as much as Abraham supervises his own underlings. It's obviously expressionless and motionless but Odisseus swears, to look at the squat seedling, there's something contemptuous about it.

  “Well, I'm sorry,” Odisseus answers under his breath. “It's this or the ship again. Your choice.”

  The cactus makes no immediate reply and Odisseus has no time to wait for one. He snaps on the fusioner and sets back to work, sparks flying. Soon as he has, however, he smells those pheromones shift and provide him Thirdseed's opinion.

  {Thirdseed stays here}, it resolves, stinking of resignation.

  “Thought so,” rumbles Odisseus, his answer inaudible over the fusioner's hiss.

  It takes only arduous labor, rather than any great skill, to weld the twisted tooth of metal back onto the hull. All the while, Odisseus feels the proverbial eyes of Thirdseed on him, watching him, wondering what they're doing here and why it's so humid and why must it dwell forever in this restrictive ceramic prison. It's possible he only feels this way because of some latent mind-controlling element in the Gitter's spores but, regardless of their source, Odisseus feels the guilt and regret all the same.

  When they found a buyer, they were going to press this little creature, this newborn lifeform, into a lifetime of captivity and walk away with money in their pockets. It was slavery under Gella and it would be slavery under whomever else actually wound up signing on the dotted.

  “Kinda makes you wonder,” Moira starts to wonder, soon as Odisseus has switched off his fusioner and waddled a few inches further along the ship's dorsal deck.

  Not particularly interested in Moira's musings at the moment, Odisseus bites nonetheless. “What does it make you kinda wonder?”

  “If this was somehow all his doing,” wonders Moira, glancing about at the idyllic wilderness all around them.

  Odisseus is skeptical. “You think he marooned himself? You forget,” he reminds her, “I was there. Definitely was Nemo who marooned him.”

  “Marooned him here, though,” Moira points out. “He was a moaning sack of buhoxshit for months and months, wasn't he? The whole time above Kuzu Minor.” She shrugs a little. “Coulda sabotaged the warp drive at pretty much any point there.”

  “Nemo wanted to maroon him on Kagno, though.”

  “And you stopped him.”

  Odisseus scowls at this. Moira's assertions that he's some manner of master manipulator are immediately undermined by the cantankerous sounds of his singing and shouting in the background. “Why Pok, then? The bloom makes this mudhole so special?”

  “Damn fine place,” smirks Moira, “to be a moonshiner.”

  Odisseus twists to see him down there, the ringleader of his weird little circus. The Poki, with gobs of ttoksiis in their puny arms, go speeding back across the surface of the water on those absurd feet of theirs, depositing the heaped weeds back aboard the swampskimmer. Abraham, meanwhile, keeps fiddling with his pipe and humming around its stem.

  “Let's assume,” stipulates Moira, “that all my paranoid reaching's true. Doesn't tell us why.”

  “Why?”

  “Why go to all the trouble,” she explains, standing to lean an elbow casually against the triple-barrel of her Antagonist. “To plan all this, devise such a complex blooming scheme.” She shrugs again, turning back to Odisseus. “Easier ways to leave the ship.”

  Odisseus has the answer without thought. “Makes Nemo angry. Means he won't come clamoring back, weeks later, begging him to sign on to some shiny new stupidity. Keeps him away for good.”

  “Almost,” grunts Moira but Odisseus isn't paying her any attention, focused instead on the sight of Abraham down below.

  The Grimalti reclines against one of the swampskimmer's contours, nursing his calabash pipe and watching the nameless motes flit through the air around him. Too distant to read his expression, Odisseus reads everything he needs to about his demeanor in his pose – he's carefree, leading a life unfilled with gunfights, broadsides and wanted posters.

  Baby-stompers against the hull snap Odisseus back to reality. Moira strides past, walking with undue grace across the Lover's sloped and uneven hull. “Headed back in, I think,” she mentions, replacing the fusioner she borrowed on the spread cloth containing all the Ortok's tools. “You stay out much longer, the real nasty fucking bugs're gonna find you.”

  Odisseus makes some noncommittal grunt and turns his attention back to the work at hand, discouraging though it might be. Were he to patch the whole thing, every scar the Spur squadron punched into the outer hull, he'd be neticgrappling and fusing until dawn. It was another day's work or more up here, to repair all these holes and keep the ship from peeling open like a tin of sporefin the next time she jumped warp.

  As he reaches for the neticgrappler, he spares a glance toward Thirdseed. He's struck then, in the sporadic light of his lantern and the wispy motes that drift past, by how haggard and sickly the cactoid looks. When they'd left Gitter, it was green and vibrant and rotund, a near-perfect sphere of spines, topped by one fluttering blue flower.

  Now, its skin is substantially more gray, its ridges more pronounced, its body mass reduced by a third or more. It still reeks of its signature pheromones but there's no denying that the plant's not faring well aboard spaceships and among alien climates. He's no horticulturist; Odisseus has no idea how much longer the sapling will last under these unfriendly conditions but he cannot imagine it's a promising diagnosis.

  {Thirdseed is uncomfortable}.

  CHAPTER 28

  Flask is pretty sure he's got everything.

  Dubix trout, Yellowtooth, Carcinocrisps, copious quantities of Gitterswitch Gin – the gang's all here. His driftshopper runneth over with The Unconstant Lover's bare essentials.

  All he needs to do now is escape this crowded Galaxmart without getting recognized, arrested or murdered.

  Any one of the people surrounding him – the elderly Lrissi couple unloading their groceries ahead of him, the Ruuvian cashier with the imbedded scent dampener, the punky humanoid that's so impatient behind him – could be a bounty hunter, a spice ranger or an Imperium agent. He almost smirks at the idea that they're one of each.

  Unlike the disaster at Arzenka, however, this time Flask's had the foresight to go incognito. Incognito, in this case, means a Kelkian Targeting Helmet, bulky enough to disguise the shape of his head and fearsome enough to discourage anyone from messing with him. Once the property of a dumbass bounty hunter of Quicksilver's acquaintance, Nemo took a shining to thing and, ever since, the helmet's collected dust on an upper shelf of the ship's galley, like an antique cookie jar. Today, it was precisely what Flask needed to sneak in, buy supplies and sneak back out undetected.

  Once they made planetfall on Vabob, the pirates split up to run their very necessary errands. It was Flask's task to purchase the
groceries, the freighter's larders so diminished after running hither and thither across the galaxy.

  Where they were headed next, none of them knew but wherever it was, they universally agreed they would need junk food there.

  “Thuwo Minor,” the Ruuvian cashier mentions to Flask when he's counting his change.

  “I'm sorry?” stammers Flask.

  “Thuwo Minor,” he repeats. “Uklio Quadrant, I think.” Flask is staring at him, too shocked to reach for the pistol sheathed at his side. “He says he'll meet your price, if you meet him there.”

  Utterly dumbfounded, Flask somehow manages to conjure a reply. “Who says?”

  The Ruuvian extends his three fingered fist to Flask, clutching a handful of change. “Have a nice day,” he requests cheerfully.

  Taking his change, a stunned Flask leads his driftshopper from the aisle and out the door, eyes wide, mouth partially open and targeting helmet hiding them both.

  Moira doesn't know what to think. “What did he look like?”

  Flask stalls a little, scanning the Lover's companionway stairs like he expects to see the guy he's describing standing there. “Ruuvian. Short. Wrinkly. That weird browny-purplish color. You know. A Ruuvian, like.”

  “He smell?” Odisseus cues.

  “Nah, he had one of those stink suppressor things,” Flask replies, making an approximate gesture around the side of his head. “So, only a little.”

  “And his exact words?” Moira demands again. “Take your time.”

  “Well,” Flask starts to recollect, “he just goes 'Thuwo M–'”

  “Carcinocrisps!” exclaims a delighted Nemo, tearing through the plastic bag on his lap to discover them. It is with great relish that he yanks free the sickly green-and-yellow package and examines it, like a proud uncle to his newborn nephew. “Aw,” he bemoans, in sudden disappointment, “Nicotine & Onion? Honey Mustard Gas, I said..”

  Everyone else – Moira, Odisseus and Flask – has the good sense to ignore him.