Galactic Menace

by Timothy J Meyer

  Her headlong charge doesn't slow when she hurls her lefthand electrobaton at the leftmost of the two marksman, a humanoid male who appears understandably astounded by the sparking projectile whizzing end over end toward him. Whether or not the tossed baton suitably distracts or even comes close to hitting him at all, Moira can't say. She immediately has the second guard, a Sybolo wheezing methane through a breathing apparatus and wielding a baton of his own, as a more pressing concern.

  A precision strike to his wrist clatters her enemy's weapon to the floor. Before he reacts, Moira's seized the ecotplasmic prison guard by the scruff of his collar in one gauntleted fist and pressed the sparking end of her baton neatly beneath his chin, as though holding him at sword point. The Sybolo attempts physical protest, but the hissing tip of Moira's baton reminds him exactly how fragile his respiration equipment could be.

  At this moment, killing this idiot wasn't her main priority. Closing the gap between herself and either of the two remaining assault rifles was.

  The roar of gunfire somewhere behind the Sybolo indicates to Moira the trigger-happiest of her armed opponents. She thrusts forth the unwilling guard as a squishy pink meat shield and advances toward the shooter and his precious assault rifle. The continued sound of his firing, contrasted against the yielding wet sounds of the Sybolo's skin popping, further indicates to Moira that this Gantor shares few of his former comrades scruples against shooting one's co-workers.

  By the time she's taken five steps, the Sybolo is little more than a ragged hunk of dead flesh, rent body armor and transparent blood, supported only by Moira's fist around his collar and Moira's baton at his throat. Thankfully, she hears the telltale click of an empty magazine.

  Moira commends the Sybolo for his sacrifice by pitching his corpse unceremoniously aside and risking the home stretch fully exposed. At sight of her, the Gantor rifleman, another tall, cadaverous razorback in riot armor, just manages to cram a second clip into the SV7's awaiting chamber.

  He levels the firearm point blank at her. Moira, a million mottibles away for all her electrobaton can avail her now, tries her hardest to contort her body in such a way as to minimize the grievous internal damage the oncoming laser bolt is likely to deal.

  The Gantor squeezes the trigger. Supercharged ditrogen plows a hole through her midsection. Moira Quicksilver, unsure if her fourth and possibly final gamble of the evening had actually paid off, crumples to the deck.

  Odisseus has, over the course of his forty-two hour incarceration, become intimately familiar with every nook, cranny and physical facet of his cramped cell. From the piss-scented corner paradoxically opposite from the chamber's tiny toilet, to the disconcerting mosaic of unidentifiable stains that spans the breadth of the floor, to the patternless claw marks marring each of the three walls, Odisseus knows it all. He had, however, resolved himself early on not to spend any more time pondering the specifics of the room's previous tenants than he absolutely must. Temporary as he intended his stay to be, he imagined there were certain matters it simply didn't help to dwell upon.

  Hence his excitement at the unprecedented arrival of three pieces of random claptrap in his otherwise commonplace cell.

  They were cheap Imperium trash, each one; the manufactured vomit of drone-operated assembly lines on Dubos or Epar and barely worth the fuel spent to ship them across the galaxy. To the eyes of Odisseus, sequestered from all mechanics for nearly two full days, they looked positively shiny, as though they'd been handcrafted by mythical creatures and left on the Ortok's doorstep overnight. Moira, in her wildest get-up yet, had delivered them and departed not fifteen seconds ago.

  Franky, Odisseus would love nothing more than to sink his proverbial teeth into his trio of new toys, were it not for the electromagnet shackling him to the opposite wall.

  Micne and multe are two of the galaxy's oddest metals. Both found in prodigious abundance in Hivu's crust, it had taken scientists centuries to discover their queer little symbiosis that made them so invaluable to jailers and turnkeys everywhere.

  Should one send an electric current through a substantial amount of micne, they would find that any amount of multe, no matter how trace, would be immediately drawn to its sister metal by an irresistibly potent magnetic force. This learnt, the Endless Imperium happened, in a seeming instant, upon the most oppressive and subjugating possible application of this fascinating technology; electromagnetic manacles.

  While his left paw is free, Odisseus' right paw is clapped in a stiff shackle of pure multe. That shackle has spent the entire forty-two hour journey aboard the Surimiah irrevocably magnetized to the thick bar of electrified micne that ribbons his and every other prisoner's cell. Beyond that, the Imperium appeared relatively conservative in the use of micne. The security cordon that encircles every floor and deck of the ship and its detainment column was pure micne. More painfully, the very tips of its guard's electrobatons were made from micne, allowing the hired help to manhandle an unruly captive at stick's end.

  For the most part, Odisseus had only found the micne-multe dilemma to be a supreme annoyance rather than a serious detriment to the overall plan. He's at least enough personal mobility within his own cell to use its only two amenities; the bed and the toilet.

  Staring at the remote activator, the percussion cap and the call request transponder, arrayed pleasantly just inside the door of his cell and just conveniently out of paw's reach, Odisseus thanks all the moons of Jotor for the length of his tail.

  Several protracted moments of awkward jostling and flopping later, Odisseus holds in his only available paw the three ingredients he needs to play his designated role in the escape. Both completely dissimilar in function and messily salvaged from three diametrically opposed systems, they were obviously incompatible. Simply by turning each scrap over in his paw once or twice, Odisseus can discern precisely how he'll cobble together the necessary device.

  Assuming its success, this jury-rigged device would not only loose him from his magnetic bonds, but also disable the deflection door of his cell.

  All of this would amount to a lengthy but relatively simple procedure with two free paws. With his primary paw glued to the wall, it might not even be possible, a contingency for which the Ortok hadn't accounted.

  The work, as predicted, is excruciating. A constant juggling act between hind paw, left paw and encapsulated right paw is the only way Odisseus can achieve the finer points of tinkering. In some instances, his right paw clasped the makeshift device to the wall, while the left monkeyed about as necessary. Other times, a hind paw or his tail would serve this function, if his pinned paw could not.

  With this utter forfeiture of precision came the desperate need for caution. Moira, likely responsible for the terrible ruckus the Ortok hears further down the corridor, didn't have the time or the inclination to scrounge him up another batch of parts should he carelessly break one.

  Thusly, work that, with two paws, would have taken Odisseus a number of minutes to complete drags on over an hour and more. By the time he's nearing what he believes to be a working prototype, Odisseus can no longer hear the clamant sounds of struggle around the column's bend. He's left to assume that, whatever the outcome, Moira ended up on one winning side or another.

  Even for all the trial and tribulation of slaving one-handedly over a hot jury-rig, Odisseus cannot help but derive some simple aesthetic pleasure from repair and reconstruction. He'd suffered five meals of synthetic fish paste, an extremely unflattering haircut and nothing else to occupy his time save running mental maintenance on his faraway spaceship. Uncomfortable as it is, Odisseus revels in the experience of furrowing his brow, biting his tongue and getting grease between his claws.

  Much ado and the odd bout of strangled cursing toward his restraints passed before a sweaty and cramping Odisseus has finished. With his own one and a half paws, he's constructed the nearest facsimile to a remote wave emitter that scrap metal, three-quarters of an ace mechanic and an hour and a half can realistically ma
ke. It's unwieldy, highly sensitive and tremendously fragile but, for Odisseus' purposes, he predicts it'll have to serve.

  If it doesn't, he was looking down the barrel of a life sentence in the famously unfriendly Vorse Imperial Penitentiary, a fate he'd only wish on Garrok Brondi.

  With the wave emitter placed gingerly on his meager mattress, Odisseus spares a glance up and down the hallway to confirm the necessary lack of interruptions. This done, he peels back a sizable sheet of floor plating with the unbridled force of his hind paw. He'd made several attempts to loosen this particular plate during off-hours and lulls between guard patrols but it still comes away from the floor with a sickening squeal of unhappy teltriton.

  Wasting as little time as possible, Odisseus collects his masterpiece off the mattress. He crouches toward the naked cables and wiring revealed by the displaced plate and sets about inserting the device as something of a stopgap along the main feed conduit.

  To the best of Odisseus' knowledge, the main feed conduit on a Mercy-class craft of the Surimiah's build runs the entire length of the detainment column, supplying each deck with both electricity and power. Unless Odisseus grossly missed his guess, the conduit was fed directly, via a series of interconnected relays, into the ship's reactor core. Assuming both the equipment and his handiwork were reliable, Odisseus' wave emitter could theoretically send a counter-signal along the same channel and into the core, “theoretically” being the operative word in that sentence.

  The installation is slapdash, the emitter itself is precariously positioned and Odisseus can only scoot himself so far away from the contraption, thanks to the electromagnet clamping him in place. With the cannibalized remote activator in his paw, the hemmed-in Ortok cringes as much of his bulk away from the emitter as he can.

  He extends a blanket prayer to all the moons, the leviathan deity of his homeworld and any latent engineering gods that might be listening and, clenching his fangs, he presses the button.

  Less than encouraging is how Odisseus would describe the immediate reaction. The emitter hums, coughs a few sparks out of unsecured wires and overall disappoints its maker a few anxious seconds. Odisseus considers pressing the button again, a solution his saltbrother certainly would have tried, when the overhead lights, the rumble of the distant engines and, fatefully, the deflection door all flicker.

  It's brief enough that Odisseus doubts he actually sees it. Before long, though, a second and a third flicker follow, accompanied by the agonizing moan of everything electronic aboard. A rapid series of following flickers, together with the unfortunate side effect of awakening every sleeping inmate, build to a spastic climax in which the wave emitter combusts and the Surimiah, as if in grief, promptly dies.

  The overhead lights click off. The engine's rumble beneath his paws gradually peters out. The deflection door before him fizzes once in frustration and finally retreats back into its wall-mounted projectors. Most heartening to Odisseus, however, the tremendous ache in his strained right arm abates suddenly as the electromagnetic cuff fastening him to the far wall relinquishes its forty-two hour hold.

  The Ortok wishes he had more than a moment to either appreciate this sensation or congratulate himself on his latest mechanical victory. Need, however, impels him forward.

  Odisseus tromps out of the ineffectual cell and onto the Seventeenth Deck's main hallway. “Auxiliaries activated,” a dulcet droidvox coos repeatedly over the ship's internal loudspeaker. Emergency lighting – no doubt part of the Surimiah's auxiliary package, along with life support, inertial compensation and several other necessities – bathes the corridor faded fuchsia, casting immense and eerie shadows into every corner.

  Lingering in the corridor's center a quick moment, Odisseus feels a bitter draft, likely displaced air from the now-inoperable service elevator, rifle through his considerably shorter fur and the Ortok shivers. With no time to contemplate the indignities of his new prison-demanded haircut, Odisseus shuffles his bulk down the hallway, grateful at least for a little exercise.

  All around him as he plods down the corridor, Odisseus watches his fellow prisoners come to terms with the drastic shift in their surroundings. Convicts of every shape, stripe and species rouse themselves and peer curiously through the conspicuous gap where their cell doors once stood. All the bipeds are dressed in those trademark yellow jumpsuits while those with less accommodating anatomies, Odisseus included, were generally down to their skins.

  Some still snore, most engage in guilty, hushed conversation like truant schoolchildren. Odisseus observes at least one scuffle, threatening to break into a true brawl, even on his short jog to the service elevator.

  He passes, as he nears his destination, the obvious scene of some altercation or another, to judge from the presence of two freshly-minted corpses, sprawled dramatically on the floor. One, a Gantor heavy, proudly displays his cause of death, in the form of some heinous head trauma. The other, some pink sentient whose actual species Odisseus might have been able to determine had he been left in one piece, is strewn in several wet pieces around the area, as if someone had attempted to disassemble him with a semiautomatic firearm.

  “Moira,” Odisseus mutters, a suspicion confirmed by the discovery of a third splash of blood, humanoid by the color, Moira's by the smell. The Ortok's bemusedly impressed at her body count, wonders absentmindedly for her safety and waddles into the ajar service elevator.

  He has an unbecoming moment negotiating his paunch through the available crack the doorway affords him. After considerable and cumbersome efforts, Odisseus squeezes himself out onto the lip of the elevator shaft.

  Seventeen decks tower above him and thirteen more plummet below. The Ortok's claws keep a firm grip on the outcropping behind him as he ponders the heights and depths before him. The draft he'd felt previously is increased tenfold at its source as it whizzes past him. He shivers again, cursing his confoundedly trimmed fur.

  Glancing upward, Odisseus is pleased to discover that whomever had last used the elevator had ridden it straight to the top of the detainment column, granting the Ortok a clean climb up the shaft's service ladder. Gritting his fangs against the breeze, Odisseus puts his first paw to the cold teltriton rung and begins the seventeen floor ascent to reunite with his comrades. With each step, he curses Imperium penal procedure.

  Moira Quicksilver awakens with the sort of skull-cracking headache that could kill a fully-grown arlaxi troopmother. The thudding pain behind her eyes is her first conscious sensation, dull awareness of her environs the second.

  Starchy bedsheets, she apprehends. Industrial lightning in muted purple, she observes. Frantic dialogue, passed back and forth across the spacious chamber she apparently inhabited, she overhears. She's able to crane her neck aside in both directions, catching sight of a plastolieum divider flush against her bed on the right and a deactivated apparatus of blank screens and dead panels on the left.

  Moira's regulated her breathing, taken stock of her unimpressive physical status and memorized the patterns on the galvanized ceiling before she registers the freshly-patched hole in her abdomen.

  Streams of agony, dulled somewhat by anesthetic, creep up her torso, down her thigh, around her side, across her belly and outward in every direction from the initial wound. She clenches both fists to the bedspread to absorb the brunt of it but it's made thoroughly clear to Moira Quicksilver that she isn't going to be capable to the task at hand without a great many more painkillers.

  With a herculean effort, she rears her head off the pillow to confirm her hypothesis. The main infirmary of the HIN Surimiah is located not in the detainment column, but in the main body of the ship proper. A sizable chamber of predictably stark, military accommodations, the ship's medical bay serviced all her injured or sick aboard, prisoner and crewman alike. Automatic restraints serve to keep the former in line.

  Now, however, with the Surimiah's current technical difficulties, these restraints dangle limp and ineffectual off the side of her bed. The only thing keeping
Moira from misbehaving is the cocktail of pharmaceuticals swimming through her bloodstream.

  She wanders her hand off the mattress and investigates to her right, whereupon she discovers not only a small nightstand, but an old-fashioned steel-backed clipboard. Hoping she's unobserved as she does so, Moira discreetly palms the clipboard aside and half-tucks it beneath her body, shielding it and her perusal of it from any unfriendly eyes that might happen to glance in her direction.

  “14 fl. spz. of narcotic plozine” is her prescribed poison, according to her physician's chicken-scratch. Another dosage would certainly make her woozier than a bloodless Baziron, but the imperative pain in her abdomen, she imagines, was only going to be neutralized with still more drugs. The dermal sealant had definitely been applied by now, as evinced by the great swatch of bandage that still cinctured her waist.

  Despite this, Moira felt confident that, unless she was too careless and ripped her organicon stitches, another helping of “narcotic plozine” would be exactly what the doctor, in this case herself rather than the clipboard's “Surgeon Ixen”, ordered.

  Moira bides her time for several long minutes, hoping to snag the attention of the nurses, surgeons and other medical staff that come flittering past. The more extant problem of the ship's electrical failure, however, has captured the infirmary's attention rather decidedly.

  Impatient, she opts instead to nudge an idle container of saline solution off the nightstand and onto the floor, landing with a dull thud and spray of spilt fluid. Lying entirely still and faking her best unconsciousness, Moira's rewarded several moments later when a Fjoran nurse in a spotless white frock scuttles over to investigate the disturbance.

  No sooner has she arrived, however, than the professedly catatonic Moira's burst back to action. She strikes the nurse fiercely in the temple with the clipboard's steel corner, worried momentarily that the blunted tip of her improvised weapon will be rendered toothless by the Fjoran's ridged exoskeleton. To the clipboard's credit, though, the nurse stumbles backward, slips comically on the saline and smacks the back of her head against the floor's teltriton with a disquieting crack.