Hull Damage

by Timothy J Meyer

  She was an alumna of an industry four decades older, when the Endless Imperium still managed a flaccid grip over a fragment of the warp routes and shipping lanes of the Outer Ring, when Smerdyakov Svetlova was an entry-level thug on the boulevards and dry-docks of Shavshoka, when Takioro Federate Station was a brilliant new beacon of commerce and enterprise beyond the Inner Sectors. Abraham had called those “the days of yore”.

  Then came the mercenary transport corporations; Valladian Shipping, the Ring Confederacy, the impregnable Gitter Consortium and their fleets of both affiliated and freelance teamsters, whose tenuous security attracted hordes of pirates too incompetent to clash with the Imperium in the Midworlds. In turn, the victimized cargo companies were compelled to conscript the least scrupulous of these pirates as bounty-privateers to safeguard their new business interests, which succeeded in finally fracturing the Outer Ring into the shambolic, lawless territories known colloquially as Bad Space, utterly bereft of government, legality and restraint.

  Takioro Federate Station was ideally situated to monopolize commerce in the Outer Ring, at a junction between the most efficient routes to the standardized Imperium resource worlds, such as Pequod or Baz, and the key shipping lanes of several of the independent cargo firms. Unfortunately, it was exactly this prosperity that drew the eye and the successive pillaging of opportunistic pirates. Half a decade of repeated reaving and Takioro’s grand goals of intergalactic entrepreneurship went the way of its smashed and dysfunctional central spire.

  Nowadays, the Station’s three rings were tethered to a local asteroid, the nearest possible object capable of anchoring them. Nowadays, Takioro Defederate Station was a nest of malfeasance, bloodshed and debauchery and its Depot-Commissioner was a vintage picaroon impersonating a gangland queen.

  “My point here, Nemo, is that now I got the Ring Penal Authority and all her bounty hunters to deal with,” Velocity continues, reactivating the holopen and returning her implacable concentration to the goldfish at hand.

  Nemo’s face bursts into his first smile of the meeting. “Bloom me out, Vel, we’ll take care of the bounty hunters.”

  “It’s not a problem,” Moira utters.

  “That’s where my problem starts. You get scooped up by a bounty hunter, it’s over for you. You’re lookin’ at life in a cold box – you think you wouldn’t sell my skin for yours?”

  “The bounty’s only 78 thou – he hasn’t drawn any real heat yet,” Moira denotes.

  “Hey, now–” Nemo begins but Vel diverts her attention for half a moment to regard steely Moira.

  “And when he does?”

  Nemo kneads the brow beneath his bowler. “It ain’t gonna happen, Vel–”

  “Lemme explain something to you, Nemo, alright?” Her right hand absently sweeps a few bluing hairs behind her horn as she explicates. “You are a pirate, not a fucking revolutionary. You don’t got to, in fact, you’d best not take such romantic fucking glee out of shooting down the bloody cops. You take a job from me, I want it done quietly.”

  Two-Bit throws his hands wide. “We were fucking kuckled!”

  The holopen snaps silent. Her voice, one Two-Bit doesn’t doubt could scatter spacers when shouted above decks, suddenly expands to fill the chamber, meeting and overtaking his own. “You’ll keep that jabberhead in polite fucking comportment or by all the moons, I’ll stitch “bitch” across his forehead and you’ll pay for the ink.”

  Nemo peels the hat off and drops his elbows to his knees, apparently prepared to pacify. “What would you have preferred?”

  “I would have preferred a little fucking discretion. Smuggler has the misfortune to get boarded, I appreciate a tactful resolution – a few bills in the right hand, a little strong-arming, if absolutely necessary. What I don’t appreciate are motherfucking executions.”

  “I–”

  “Weld it up now, boy, I’m talkin’ here.” The Buja’s breast is forgotten as Velocity aligns the full force of her ire at the quickly cooling Captain. “You might be able to butcher up a batch of customs officers without thinkin’ twice about it, but all you’re doin’ is passin’ the hurt along to me. Likely never occurred to you as to where I’m supposed to unload this cargo now.” She rotates the chair back in rank with her patron, squeezing the holopen into operation. “Leave it to Cap’n Nemo to chase all my legit contacts in the Ring ConFed back down their holes with his hot flagged freight.”

  Nemo’s become brusque by now, ashen anger flooding his cheeks. “Your point?”

  Menace abruptly evaporated and supplanted by her characteristic composure, Vel busies herself in the hoary eye of the undermost fish. “My point being, you wanna keep earnin’ enough scratch to keep that rattletrap afloat, you’d best change your fucking colors.”

  The crew’s six eyes swerve to the Captain, drumming four fingers along the rim of his grasped billycock. Two-Bit had personally seen Nemo inexorably gun down a dozen souls for slander against the ship, but he only splits open a tight smile and continues drumming.

  “You ain’t thinking of stiffing us, are you?”

  Vel scoffs. “Ain’t worth the trouble.” She aims the butt of the holopen over her shoulder, beyond Odisseus and into the smaller studio. “Traasha’ll take care of you on the way out.”

  The Captain climbs out of the chair and holsters his hat. “Will that be all?”

  A trio of truncated holopen stabs and Velocity leans back, chair creaking in protest. “Very nearly.” She taps the Buja briskly on the shoulder, utters an offhand remark in what Two-Bit assumes to be Bujese and the customer lopes out of the parlor, holographic fish looping their very first circuits. Velocity tilts a glance at the standing Nemo. “Who’s the new client?”

  His paltry smile corrupts into a proper sneer. “Huong Xo.”

  She spends a long moment negotiating the imaging goggles past the stubs of her once immense horns and onto her cleft brow, unearthing eyes as azure as an afterburner.

  Odisseus had passingly referred to her as a native of Vollok, a boondock world known for its endless steppeland, tricky jump point, subsequent fields of wreckage and natives whose fantastically impractical antlers had to be basically sheared off if they ever hoped to even board a starship. Looking at her though, even Two-Bit, whose personal preferences favored a slimmer and stupider model, had to admit that for an aging, battle-scarred cervine, she wasn’t without her charms.

  Of course, it certainly wasn’t worth any effort. Barring the particular batch of abhorrence she held for Two-Bit, she’d, in Abraham’s “days of yore,” sculpted such a reputation as the sort of scurvy, cutlass-swinging buccaneer to freeze his hard-on before it started. One could fill junkyards full of wreckage from the tankers she’d tossed. Her birth name no one on Takioro had ever heard, but her given name referred to an especially famed game of chicken her now-defunct freighter, The Gypsy Laddie, had once played, dropping full throttle into Borkun VIII’s atmosphere, against an anti-aircraft installation.

  Today, though, her moniker was just a nickname, her namesake just a legend, her cruiser chopped up for parts and her history of violence and crime nothing but an uninherited legacy. Today, she ran a tattoo parlor on Takioro’s lowest ring, held an ostensible title and spent her days humoring crooked merchants as they elbowed each other for real estate space.

  Her cerulean eyes narrow. “You’re fucking me.”

  Nemo vents his palms. “You’re not paying me enough for that.” Two-Bit quells a snigger as the Captain suffers under her burning blue scrutiny.

  “Xo hired you?” Her words ooze incredulity. “To do what?”

  “Pirate. Presumably.”

  They leer at each other, the entire studio suddenly sodden with gunfight tension. Something, the instigation of an emotion, crosses behind Vel’s eyes for the briefest of beats, but its fluttered away before Two-Bit can decide whether it was murder or appeal. Nemo, however, is all arrogance, thumbs cocked in his broad black belt and face plastered with that excessive expression t
hat suggests he’s about to start whistling.

  Gaze still firmly fixated on Nemo, Velocity reaches her left hand to her surgical tray, pinches a greasy gray rag and wipes the gristle from the tip of her holopen. “You go play with the big boys, then. See how it’s done.”

  Nemo’s beam is both derision and delight. “Will do.”

  Odisseus is the first to leave, with a single huffy snort before waddling out of the studio. Nemo follows after him, strutting like a gunfighter with Moira sliding off the counter and into step behind him. Two-Bit furrows his brow as he notices, apparently for the first time, that at some point during the meeting, the straps that secured Moira’s twin pistols in their shoulder holsters had mysteriously unclipped themselves. Two-Bit shoves himself off the wall to fall in after Moira, when Vel calls over her shoulder.

  “Heard back from my brother, by the way. Says he’s still got that job waitin’ for you on Rith. You wanna take care of that when you get back?”

  “Sure,” Nemo exclaims from the other room.

  Two-Bit lingers a second in the nearly empty parlor, offers Velocity an open palm, a cheery smile and a skulk out.

  –––

  Odisseus was continually dismayed by the level of complacency he’d cultivated as regards synthetic fish, more specifically in their consumption. Certainly, in his years hobnobbing between the sort of scanty dives and greasy spoons Nemo seemed to prefer, he’d ripened a ravenous gluttony for authentic seafood, of any size, recipe or color, but only when faced with a truly doleful replication did he come to understand exactly how deep he’d sunk his standards.

  The dappled orange fillets laid out before him, so distended with boiling yellow oils that the flesh crackles and oozes like magma, had been billed as “poached jiihu tongues” and came garnished with fungal shavings and simmering in a heavy heated broth of associated distillations. As far removed from fresh seafood as Odisseus had become, the beleaguered Ortok desperately wanted to believe his dish’s authenticity, but there was no fooling a sense of smell as fastidious as his own.

  “I tried to hum it to her, you know, that just ‘cause I can delly a skin is flimmy don’t mean I prod it, or even delly who did, but she wouldn’t ball it up.” To Odisseus’ right, Two-Bit Switch, through a mouthful of fronded fixings, regales to no one in particular, possibly his hoisted pinks-and-greens sandwich. His succession of incessant complaints concerning Velocity and her cantankerous business practices had dominated the crew’s conversation on the twenty minute walk, shoot ride included, between Dujic’s Holo-Ink Parlor and The Boiler, though if any of his three companions were paying any heed at all, they gave no outward sign.

  What certainly didn't help the matter, of course, was Two-Bit's ingrained predilection towards Jabber, that peculiar dialect of rhyming slang, technical shorthand and confusing idioms. A spacer's cant developed by lonely starship crewmen months and months out of port, Jabber was the lingua franca between fighter jockeys, space station waifs and those with teltriton beneath their feet more often than terra firma. Working an Outer Ring chopshop for three years had taught Odisseus enough Jabber to scrape by with his comrade's queer vernacular, though Two-Bit himself could hardly claim the same, with barely six months of Ortoki exposure under his belt.

  Odisseus gazes inattentively out the window, at the combined hurly-burly of Takioro’s Second Ring, as a six-pack of a Saurian hatchling street gang saunters past, spitting hisses at passerby. Likely as ignored as Two-Bit’s continued remarks, Odisseus nudges his exceedingly frothed fish with a claw and observes quietly, “They left the mushrooms in.”

  “Send it back,” Moira asserts, seated slantwise across the table.

  “She’s just got in it her maggie that’s she’s an agger proper, you know, so she’s gotta be all fuckin’ hinky now. That’s the lot of it,” Two-Bit clarifies as he gulps down a mouthful of his reuben.

  Odisseus gestures a half-hearted paw in the direction of the besieged Zibbian waiter, six out of eight tentacles hurriedly taking orders from impatient diners. “I don’t want to bother him.”

  Halting her milk’s advance to her mouth, Moira answers, unrelenting. “It’s his job.”

  “Ain’t no allbee for that kind of wankery, though,” Two-Bit obliviously mutters through a mouthful.

  “I don’t know – he seems busy,” Odisseus replies, apprehensively licking the brimming broth from the dipped tip of his foreclaw. Unlike the enormous and rowdy Astrobounce, with its literal army of waitstaff, The Boiler was a five-table, two-Zibbian noodle counter, one of the anonymous dozens of similar joints underlining the lower level of the Second Ring. Boasting little more than a varied menu, its eponymous penchant for poaching and the indigent charm of a struggling greasy spoon, it was undermanned, ill-stocked and overmatched by the encroaching intergalactic megaconglomerates like Pickle Planet, portending an assured defeat beneath the wheels of its mighty culinary conquest.

  This, of course, is precisely why Nemo ate there.

  “Do you think they’d mind if I send them a picture?” he declares directly across from Odisseus, mere moments after messily slurping a jungle of Jowna noodles into his mouth. He wafts the creased bounty posting as he speaks, relegating the pasta to the left side of his mouth, so as not to stem his flow. “I mean, I’d be helping them, if nothing else, and I really think it’d look better with a picture.”

  Moira winces as she swallows and kneads the left side of her jaw. “That’s what he’s paid for. It’s his job.”

  Odisseus pricks up his whiskers. “I heard you.” He gingerly brushes some mushroom slivers from the body of the dish and into the stewing broth as Nemo continues.

  “I also noticed,” he observes, “that none of you seemed to have made the cut.” He jumbles the Jowna with his fork a few flicks before amassing another bundle. “There’s no ‘known associates’ listed. Not even you, kid.”

  Moira’s expression crinkles as she lances a peach cube. “You understand you’re basically a bathroom break, right?”

  “Hm?”

  “78 thousand is a chump change bounty. Odds are, you’re gonna have to murder a lot more customs officers than that before you’re generally considered worth the trouble.”

  “That right?”

  “’Fraid so. That Prul was probably even hunting beneath him.” She pops the indigo cube, like a chaser, into her mouth.

  Nemo cants his head right, considering. “You'd be the expert, I suppose.” Chewing, she perks up an eyebrow, more than enough prompting for Nemo. “'Course, if I'm a bathroom break and you work for me, that'd make you, what, ass grease? Shitty toilet tissue?” He jabs his own pasta wad into his mouth, which he thereupon smears with a convivial and sauce-stained grin. Two-Bit winds up his husky laugh and even Odisseus upturns his muzzle.

  “Go shit a grenade,” is her only rejoinder, between bites of blue peach.

  Two-Bit points decisively at Nemo with two-thirds of his dripping, saturated sandwich. “I’ll tell you what that would make the dregg of us – a bloom of a lot beedier if we narmed you in for the sweets.”

  Odisseus glowers, issuing a deep growl from behind closed fangs. Moira ceases chewing. “Don’t get smart, Two-Bit.” Ladling out a portion of jiihu with three curved claws, Odisseus snatches the morsel in his jaws and rends it with his harsh rear molars. As he wipes the syrup from his muzzle with a tufted forearm, Moira scowls across the table. “You’re not sending it back.”

  He swallows the poached tongue and gives his low shoulders a sheepish shrug. “I’ll be okay.”

  Moira rolls her eyes and returns to her fruit. Nemo looks up from the bounty, eyeing Odisseus’ piping lunch. “What, did they forget to take out the mushrooms?”

  Rapidly ruminating the sandwich in his mouth in an effort to speak, Two-Bit proposes, “Say, jabbing as we were about jangle, what’re the tosses we’d be able to get our jank of the rhino right now?”

  Reaching for his porringer to combat the calescence of his broth, Odisseus regards Nemo, cockl
ing his coveted notice and securing it within his inside duster pocket. Normally, Nemo waited to disperse a particular job's winnings until the entire crew, Abraham included, was present, but Odisseus was always glad of an early paycheck. He’d neglected to restock on canisters for his Acathi before the Kapla Caper, reasoning three full clips would be more than ample ammunition for a relatively painless smuggling run and not anticipating the surprise inspection, subsequent boarding action and resulting firefight. His unexpectedly depleted store consisted of only two canisters, leaving Odisseus understandably anxious to reload his supply before his quarrelsome Captain over-engaged them for the second time this week.

  Nemo traces a middle finger along the white fleck of the gunshot scar staining his cheek, a forming habit. “Bloom it. I don’t see why in the moons not.”

  Odisseus' toothy grin leaks oil. Two-Bit gives one hard clap in elation. Even Moira, draining her milk, nods appreciatively. Nemo withdraws the sheaf of cash from within his inside coat pocket in two pinched fingers and begins thumbing through broad bills. All attention is pinpointed on the fluttering currency as he parcels out four equal stacks of tender before his bowl of slimy saffron pasta.

  He doles out the three’s payment, half a dozen thousand-credit marks a piece, sets aside six of his own and re-creases the remainder of the cash, stashing it within the folds of his jacket: six thousand for Abraham and one-third of the total take, fifteen thousand in this case, for the Lover's repairs, refueling and general maintenance.

  Two-Bit lunges over half the table to snatch his share. Moira palms her portion, discreetly checking Nemo’s math before securing it somewhere beneath her signature shoulderless black sweater. Odisseus scoops up his slice with one paw, raising it to his nose for closer inspection.

  Six tattered Imperium banknotes, four of which emblazoned with the emerald image of Prash and her three moons, the other two sporting Greva’s bleak sigil, would purchase several new clips for the Acathi, a week’s supply of frozen imitation dubix trout and possibly even a replacement neticgrappler.