This final line delivered, Nemo puts a decisive foot forward, presumably to end the recording. As he does, Flask sits backward, anticipating the hologram to abruptly freeze. Instead, it continues a few more awkward, voyeuristic seconds, as Nemo clearly thinks he's done recording.
He stands there a moment, his hands dropped to his hips, appearing uncertain what to do with himself, his empty spaceship and his newfound millions. “First things first,” he decides with a great sigh and starts to undo his pants.
With lightning speed, a disgusted Flask moves to cover his eyes at the same instant his cousin drops trow. His gaze averted, Flask can only listen in horror as the Captain keeps stripping his clothes away, sighing contentedly as they hit the floor.
It's Odisseus who eventually objects. “Can we–”
Quicksilver makes some gesture, reaching for the holodeck. “It goes on another minute,” she informs them clinically, “but that's all he says of any value.” A tapped finger against the central emblem and the holodeck goes inert, its broadcasted message fading away.
They pass the next moment in silence, absorbing this twist of events. Outside their sheltered booth, the sleepy cantina could care less about these developments, the privacy screen not completely silencing the bustle of drinks and servers. Most likely, one of the cantina's dozen patrons has made them by now, put the equation of bullet-headed bounty hunter and hulking Ortoki together. Without the Galactic Menace nearby, however, it was quite the brave bounty hunter willing to pull a pistol on these two dangerous looking characters.
In their current mood, no member of The Unconstant Lover would turn down the opportunity to pummel some halfwit wannabe bounty hunter to paste.
“The fook're we dawdling for?” an insistent Flask wants to know. “Every bleedin' second what passes, he puts more and more distance betwe–”
“There's no finding him,” Quicksilver states evenly. “Not that easily, anyway.”
“And why do you say that?” Flask demands. Something in her cold tone, though, gives credence to the creeping suspicion in the back of Flask's mind. “'cause he was shootin' his mouth off in th–”
“I told you,” she reminds him calmly, somehow keeping her cool. “His comm's off the grid. The ship's too.”
“So?” Flask scoffs. “He switched the blooming thing off.”
“Off the grid,” repeats Quicksilver. “Not offline. Neither of the freqs I dialed were even recognized as ever being legitimate.” She gives her head the slightest shake. “I dunno what wizardry he or Two-Bit cooked up but it's serious shit. Don't know how far it reaches either but, for the moment, it's fair to say he's untraceable.”
“So, what, that's that?” exclaims Flask, throwing his hands in the air. “We fought and bled and murdered and got chased twice around the galaxy for that fooking money and, simple as that, he gets to waltz away with fat pockets and that fooking smile on his face?”
“That's not what I said,” Quicksilver states, her voice razor sharp. “All he's done is ensure he can't be traced by traditional methods. He may be able to cover his tracks but he can't turn invisible and he can't power the ship by spunking into the fuel tanks. He'll need to use gates and fuel the Lover and appear on security cameras like everyone else.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning he can hide,” Quicksilver summaries, “but he can't disappear.”
“Then we find him,” Flask concludes. “We find him, we shoot out his kneecaps, we take the money, we leave him for dead.” Neither makes any immediate response to this and Flask clenches his teeth in further frustration. “I do not see how there's any other line of thinking here.”
“There's nothing we can do,” Quicksilver disagrees. “There're things that I, as a professional bounty hunter, can do to track him down but those're not things I can do with a pair of groupies along for the ride.”
Flask's breath is coming in heavy and ragged. “You ain't bleeding serious.”
“All three of us,” argues Quicksilver, her whole plan sketched out before she'd even come to them with the hologram, “will flag him from systems away. I'm the best and only chance we have of getting that money back and I cannot bounty hunt and babysit.”
“Maybe you're not understanding,” Flask endeavors to better explain, leaning forward on the table and thrusting a finger at the dour Quicksilver in a way that he knows is very unhealthy for the future of that finger. “I spent six fooking months, deep undercover in the motherfooking spice ranger corp to get hands on my share of that loot. There ain't nothing in the blowbagging galaxy gonna keep me from throttling the life from that slimy bastard – personally.”
“You can throttle him,” relents Quicksilver. “Lemme catch him first.”
Flask's anger subsides a little, seeing the futility of his rage, and he slumps backward in his chair. Odisseus makes the next move, reaching a paw towards his untouched glass of Gitterswitch Gin. With a swift motion and a slow series of gulps, the great taciturn Ortok downs the whole glass and slams the empty pilsner back onto the table.
“That's decided, then?” presses Odisseus, turning a glance towards his two companions, Flask on the one side and Quicksilver on the other. “We're done?”
Flask doesn't quite feel qualified to answer the Ortok's question, still vibrating with bottled rage. That task falls to Moira Quicksilver who, with one hand pressed flat to the table, stares down into its woodgrain.
“Yeah,” she agrees, in a strange and small voice. “I think we're done.”
FINAL INTERLUDE
Two-Bit Switch couldn’t sleep.
It took some work to rearrange his pillows properly, allowing him to lean back against the headboard. An arm stretched to the left retrieved his Attaché and a thumb against its activation pad spilled welcoming blue light into the darkened room.
In defiance of all the elegance and luxury of the rest of her headquarters, Gella’s bedchamber was surprisingly spartan. The room was small, the decor simple. What furnishings she had bothered with were sleek and minimalist, her bed comfortable but not lush or ostentatious or draped in silk curtains like he anticipated. It belied a sensible core to the woman, something certainly hidden from anyone who did anything but the most intimate business with her, a harsh practically that laid substrate to the airs she put on.
The bedroom’s main feature were its massive bay windows, looking out on Gella’s beloved arboretum. From outside, the faint purple glow of the Ysinsa fruit made soft competition with the blue light of Two-Bit’s Attaché through the partially-dimmed plexishield. These were a particular favorite of Gella’s for this reason, her having instructed her gardeners to plant a small grove nearest her bedroom’s window, so that she might admire their innate glow.
After dinner, they’d taken a postprandial stroll through the lush gardens. All the while, Two-Bit’s host took great pains to point out every species of tree, all exotic, many extinct, that she’d planted and cultivated here, a fertile oasis on an otherwise lifeless planetoid.
It wasn’t hard for Two-Bit to see the yearning in her – all this effort to collect every rare tree in the galaxy, while the one she truly wanted remained ever out of reach.
Tomorrow, Two-Bit would leave all this comfort and luxury behind. The same scrappy transport would ferry him back to Takioro Defederate Station, back to his humdrum life of crime and grime. His weekend away drawing to a close, he would soon be about the caper’s real work. He spent the past three days daydreaming with Gella Borsk; tomorrow, he’d be slogging through the arduous actualizing phase, wrangling all the logistics behind each of their daydreams.
It would be a stark transition between the Gella’s posh lifestyle and the grubby terminals of his home station. Two-Bit would, despite the strangeness and the near-constant paranoia that dogged him these past days, look back fondly on his time spent with Gella Borsk.
She hadn’t, after all, conspired to kill him – quite the opposite, in fact.
One cue, there was some shifting in the sheet
s to Two-Bit’s immediate right. A few seconds later, she was propped up on an elbow, silver hair falling across her face, and considering Two-Bit in the soft glow of his active Attaché.
“Can’t sleep?” she croaked, her voice crawling back to coherence.
“Nag,” he replied with a subtle shake of his head. “Never could, really. Never had much use for it.”
Sleep was something that never came comfortably to a station waif. When did it come, it was always grabbed in brief fistfuls and never held onto for long, as predators and paranoia were far too prevalent. Even now, a decade and more removed from those desperate days, Two-Bit could not sleep for more than an hour at a time, his prey instincts too ingrained.
“Speak for yourself,” Gella felt the need to contest him. “Some of us have a very strict sleep regimen, to ensure we actually get shit done tomorrow.”
“I’m keeping you up?” Two-Bit considered, glancing at her. “There’s lots of blooming other rooms in this squat. I can–”
“You’re fine,” she assured him, with the slightest suggestion that he wasn’t. “I’m grandmothering you, is all.”
“Well,” Two-Bit supposed, glancing around at how much chic bedroom is visible in the low light. “You’re the one that’s running a galactic slosh empire, the one with the extinct fucking Ysinsa tree outside your vinder. You probably know what you’re jabbing about.”
“You oughta listen to me more often,” Gella agreed, flopping back onto her pillow.
“It’s a fair cop.”
“You working?” she asked the ceiling.
Two-Bit sighed and gave her a glance. “Yes and no.”
Gella Borsk’s silver hair splayed out against the blue satin of her pillowcase and, from this angle, those few lines and wrinkles that betray her age had vanished. Two decades older than his usual partners, Two-Bit had nonetheless come to bed at her insistence. It wasn’t hard to imagine how lonely her existence might become out here – managing the business year round, in utter secrecy, with no time nor people to fuck. His senses somewhat dulled by brandy, he’d agreed readily enough, in between paramours as he was, and he was pleasantly surprised by her skill.
For an older lady, she knew how to tussle.
“Yes and no?” she wanted to know.
Two-Bit made a waffling gesture with his hand. “I’m sorta teasing out a theory, I guess you’d jabb. Had a coupla things flash on me when I was supposed to be snoring. Wanted to run some digits.”
“For the caper?”
“Indirectly, yeah,” Two-Bit admitted. “I hink there might be a way to incorporate another little pet project of mine, to solve one of my crunches.”
Gella rolled over, to better examine what he was playing with on his Attaché screen. “Do tell.”
“For starters,” Two-Bit began, swiping through hovering holograms to return to one of the first windows he’d opened, the best place to begin his lengthy explanation. “I don’t specc you’re too cozy with the way grabees – security holocorders – work, are you?”
“Let’s assume I’m not.”
“Fair enough,” acknowledged Two-Bit, preparing to speak a little slower and clearer, ranging outside his usual jabber parlance to help communicate the bigger ideas to her. With a few more swipes, he summoned the relevant data file he’d compiled, scads of scrolling text speckled with occasional boring loop of security footage. “Facial recognition is the basic backbone of security corders, yeah?” He tapped one loop and the hologram enlarged, showing a pair of generic security employees patrolling down a nondescript hallway. “Corder knows there’s two blokes there and that those two blokes’re supposed to be there, because it runs their faces against a database of faces it recognizes as permitted in that zone.”
Gella nodded slowly. “Right.”
“Now, if you’re a professional slambreaker, like I is, this’ll put a stop to your professional slambreak before you’ve put your wozzers on in the morning.” Two-Bit extended his finger theatrically. “Unless you got the right solution.”
“Deactivate the corders?”
“Nag, that’d flag the whole system, usually sending a clinker into lockdown.” The recording minimized, Two-Bit instead enlarged a square of coding, all streaming digits. “There’s a simple cypher, something we call a masquerade, that’ll boozle the software into accepting new faces into their database.”
“Sure,” accepted Gella. “That way, the corders recognize your face and don’t trip the alarm.”
“Bingo. Downside is, only works on a closed circuit. Every time you wanna infiltrate a joint, you gotta cook up a new masquerade to trick the new mainframe. Pain in the bloomhole, really.”
Gella spiked an eyebrow. “Are you worried about the corders aboard the Requisition?”
Two-Bit shrugged. “Not particularly. You’re familiar with a scrambler, yeah? Scramble codifier,” he corrected himself.
Confusion at the sudden transition crossed her pink features. “In theory. Why?”
“‘Cause they’re sorta a big pain in the bloomhole too, ain’t they?” Both hands working, Two-Bit went swiping through the thicket of holograms floating above his Attaché, to find another particular window. “You gotta keep buying new ones, right, once the old idents are burned through. Plus, the ship you’re using ain’t never gonna really look like the one you’re pretending to be so any mouthbreather with peepers is gonna make you on the first look-see.”
“Those’re for ships, though,” a scowling Gella endeavored to understand. “Were we not talking about the security corders aboard the–”
“We are,” Two-Bit agreed, “and we aren’t. My ringer is,” he continued, heedless of her confusion, “why shouldn’t it be the system that’s rigged, rather than the ship? There oughta be a way to sweet talk the scanners themselves, you know, on a warp gate or a docking bay or bloom, even another ship, that there’s nothing to see here, chaps, move along.”
Gella opened her mouth to voice something but instead only scowled.
“And such a thing does exist,” Two-Bit reminded her, “but on a very small scale. It is possible to trick one individual warp gate into misfiling a ship on its registry but, in theory, all the warp gates in the galaxy jabb at one another, right? That’s how warping even works.”
“You’re very much losing me, I’m afraid,” Gella eventually confessed.
Two-Bit started to count on his fingers. “There’re a buncha ways to wink a retina scanner but nine-times-outta-ten, you gotta wear a doofy contact in your peeper. There’re these data holes that you can, with some elbow grease, drop your comm’s freq into, meaning you can make outcoming buzzes but cannot receive incoming ones. I once knew a guy, a real prick, actually, that managed to squeeze into the Ring ConFed’s mainframe and swap his mugshot with some other berk’s.”
“Shall the point,” wondered Gella, “be arriving anytime soon?”
“The point,” announced Two-Bit, “is that these’re all, for lack of a better term, two-bit fixes. They work, you know, in their own way, but they’re small-time, unambitious workarounds. I’ve been scheming a way to take all these disparate tricks and tools, right, and combine them all into one, like, package or virus or what-have-you. Something I might sell, you know, as a service, or something I might use myself, should the need arise.”
“And what need is that?”
“The need to lavender. To, er, disappear,” Two-Bit summarized and turned to consider her. “Everything goes according to the plan, the plan that we spent all this time constructing and fool-proofing, the entire blooming Consortium’s gonna come down on me head. And, assuming I’m the one what does the undercover bit, they’re gonna have my bleeding picture, my retinas, my genetics, all that.”
“Hm,” Gella grunted. “That had occurred to me.”
“What I need’s some insurance, you get me? Something that can keep my bloomhole outta the clinker, you know? Lemme stay in the lavender as long as I need to.”
“This’s something you�
�ll fabricate on your own?” Gella’s tone is completely neutral, not conveying neither confidence nor skepticism. “This insurance?”
“Well,” Two-Bit considered, “suppose it’ll mostly be a virus, something to infect the galaxy’s mainframes. Probably have to bring my Zibbian in, the one that’s cooking Mayhem for us. Won’t be happy about that, I expect, which’ll drive the score up.”
“Oh?”
Two-Bit waggled this hand this way and that. “Might’ve left him high-and-dry the last time we collaborated. Things on Balaria went a little sideways and I hadta make a quick hoof.” He glanced at her, a little apologetically. “You know how it is.”
“Indeed I do.” She shifted her weight, brushing a few errant locks of silver from her eyes. “Who do you imagine will be footing the bill for this insurance of yours?”
Two-Bit gave her an irresponsible grin. “I suppose you could jabb,” he made the point, “it would be in your best interest to invest in such a thing.”
She didn’t blink or flinch at this. “How do you figure?”
“You don’t want me getting scooped up by the Consortium now, do you?” He blinked innocently at her. “How long do you think this pretty mug’d resist a spice ranger interrogation?” He tapped his temple a few times. “Awful lotta valuable intel in here, you know, about somebody’s whole operation.”
“That somebody,” Gella supposed, planting a finger against his opposite temple, “could always put one through your brain. A pretty surefire way to ensure you don’t squawk.”
Two-Bit smirked. “Listen to you. Squawk.” He shook his head, rueful grin still spread across his features. “You’re not the type to waste a valuable asset, I don’t think. And trust me, love – I’m much more valuable without any holes in my head.”
“That is most certainly true.” With a sigh, Gella rolled back onto her pillow, her gaze falling back at the ceiling. “Talk to your Zibbian. Get a quote. Open the discussion with me then.”
Unconstant Love Page 59
