“Well, what'd be the advantage presented by Greatgullet?” Abraham ponders, striking an old-fashioned stick match against the warty surface of his stomach. He applies the flame, amid several huffing movements of his cheeks, to the pipe's full bowl and the smell of woody tobacco swamps about the stairs. “What's his use in all this?”
“I will advance good credit,” Odisseus wagers, “towards the belief that he disembarks this ship today with somebody's million-credit share in his hand.”
Moira grunts. “Him and Velocity both, huh?”
The Ortok curls his muzzle in an expression Moira recognizes as polite disagreement. “Velocity I think's a stretch. I mean, remember,” he reminds pointedly, “he'd rather stuff his asshole with repellent and light a match than pay Vel any favors. Who I don't consider a stretch, however,” he continues, with a toss of his chin towards the unmoving double doors, “is Two-Bit.”
Abraham's whistle is a gruff, throaty sound. “That's devious.”
Moira frowns in helpless agreement. “That's Nemo.”
“Hence my thoughts about pressure and its application to Two-Bit,” Odisseus relates. “Nothing drastic, obviously, but I can't imagine a little growling wouldn't open a few–”
Voices, muffled somewhat by distance and mostly by closed teltriton doors, interrupt the Ortok midstream. Succumbing instantaneously to a guilty silence, the conspiring crewmen each downshift into stereotypical methods of looking busy. Abraham scratches a suddenly urgent inch on his hanging wattle. Odisseus uncovers a most captivating ceiling plate. Moira enthralls herself in the semi-poisonous depths of her spacer's tea.
A booming laugh sounds just within the entrance to the betweendecks corridor. The laugher's unrecognizable to Moira but it's the precise medicine to erect both slouching Gungi'noojians to some semblance of an attentive posture. Moments later, the doors themselves skate apart with a hiss and a scrape.
Tapping contentedly on his clutched Attaché, Two-Bit Switch is the first into view. As he precedes both Captains through the door, he's utterly ignorant of the five figures actively attempting not to watch him.
Without further fanfare, Nemo and his guest stride abreast into view. The former is several minutes into the throes of reciting, for the umpteenth time, the overwrought account of his victory over a certain Yheum bounty hunter. The latter digests each word with great belly laughter and greater gusto.
He's more than earned that nickname, Moira cannot deny that. The Rule of Thumb's imposing figure of a Captain possesses a mouth that, when pledged to the act of a full-blown guffaw, could, on the level of raw square footage, rival most spaceship harbors. With his beady black eyes, his hairless skin slick with slime and his four pair of fleshy barbels, drooping from his lipless maw, the Obax's resemblance to a whiskered bottom-feeding fish is unmistakable.
His entire ensemble, from purloined pants to scavenged shirt, stands as a prismatic collage of the spoils of piracy, all festooned with totems and trophies. Ten fingers sport ten rings, a clanking host of bracelets blankets both wrists and the bounty hunting licenses of his vanquished enemies dangle off the beaded tips of his many beards.
The nondescript satchel he carries in his beringed mitt is doubtlessly large enough to accommodate a substantial amount of their cash, possibly even a clean million.
When Greatgullet laughs, a startlingly glottal sound, his toothless maw is darker and deeper than a black hole. His mucus-lined gills squelch apart and all his pendant licenses flap and clatter against each other. “Moons,” he remarks, “I woulda cut ten thousand throats to get another shot at that spindly bastard.”
Nemo's visibly astounded. “Episode eighteen. I forgot about that.”
“Wanna see the scar?” Greatgullet volunteers brightly. Before Nemo can nod his enthusiasm, the Obax's wrinkled up his shirt to reveal a sizable blemish, a whitish puckered thing healed all wrong, against the scaleless swarthiness of his midsection. Nemo whistles his opinion. “Ain't no great number,” Greatgullet mentions, considering his own harpoon scar, “of us breathin' in this galaxy can say we rumbled with Noxix.” Moira makes a deliberate show of slurping her tea. “You snag his license?”
When Nemo withdraws the Lover's ignition keys from his trouser pocket and confers it onto the Obax for closer examination, Moira is surprised to discover two new items looped onto the keyring she didn't recognize.
A gaudy “I Heart Takioro” keychain is present, but also, a cumbersome holocard, identical in size and layout to all those bouncing off Greatgullet's neck and shoulders is among their number. “Keep it close to my nuts,” Nemo waxes sentimental.
Lacking lungs and lips, Obax aren't really capable of whistling, but the sound that burbles out of Greatgullet's gills must surrogate the same emotion in their culture. “Powerful jealous of this trinket here,” he admires, turning the license over in his hand as though some kind of precious treasure. “Right clever of you, though, gettin' that video on the record 'fore coming to meet me, else I'd just be pullin' this off your corpse right now, like as not!”
This joke somehow fails to amuse Odisseus nearly as much as it does Greatgullet and even Nemo, both sharing a shoulder-slapping laugh. The merest rumble of an Ortoki growl finally draws the Captains' attentions off each other and onto the uneven circle of onlookers overhearing their conversation.
While Nemo pays his saltbrother a puzzled expression, it's Moira who unwittingly captures eye contact with Greatgullet. Recognition almost immediately floods those fishy features. “This is, whatsername, Quicksilver?”
“Moira,” she supplies.
The Obax thrusts a thick thumb over his left shoulder. “We're just done watching the episode in there,” he explains, before returning his fist to his belted hip. “Bloom, but you gave him one fuck of a fight. Sure were lucky this blowbag,” he chortles, pummeling Nemo across the upper back with a companionable blow, “were to hand, save your ass, huh?”
Moira's careful to keep her expression painstakingly neutral. “Sure was.”
“Everything drongo out here?” Two-Bit extends warily, twisting his multe bracelet on his wrist. As a rule, Two-Bit's zottibles less oblivious to Moira's murderous deadpan than Greatgullet, complete stranger or even Nemo, longtime companion.
“Peachy,” she returns placidly, planting the empty mug onto an empty space of thermosteel-grated companionway stair with a soft clank. “Shooting the shit with these two fine gentlemen.” She nods towards the still silent Gungi'noojians, blank stares that follow their Captain's movements dully. “Not sure I caught their names.”
Greatgullet's shrug is the epitome of crass ignorance. “Fuck if I know. I call 'em Boogers and Teeth.”
Satchel in hand, he stomps past with all the swagger accrued from years and years of leading by violent example, his newly-named shadows falling into place habitually behind him. “Bonaventure,” he acknowledges to Abraham with a respectful decline of his broad head.
“Cap'n,” Abraham acknowledges back with a similar, if perhaps shallower, nod.
“Good luck out there, Gull,” Nemo well-wishes with an upraised palm.
Even halfway across the hold and without his turning around, Greatgullet's chuckle is visible in his shoulders. “Got good looks and a winning personality.” He twists his thick neck around to expose a great crevasse of a grin. “No need for luck.” Six more strides and the three hulking hooligans cross the threshold from cargo bay to airlock tunnel. The Obax throws a parting “See you on Talos, boss,” towards his hosts and rams the door release button with a balled fist hard enough to dent it.
“Gull?” comments Abraham first.
“Boss?” repeats Odisseus second.
“Talos?” speculates Moira third.
Two-Bit fans his Attaché once. “That went off without a crunch.”
Moira archly raises an eyebrow. “Did it?”
“It did,” Two-Bit confirms cautiously, with a careful eye to the Captain. He sniffs peremptorily, an overture to an excusing sigh. “Well, if y
ou don't mind–”
“Talos, huh?” Moira conjectures innocently. “Which moon?”
Two-Bit spreads open palm and Attaché with equal innocence. “Me hatch is battened.”
“Oh, yeah? It is?” Moira shifts her weight testily, always eager of late to pursue this particular line of inquiry. “Seems it was battened when we left Gallow and then it was battened on Takioro and now it's still battened here in Veraspo.”
“I've noticed,” Odisseus chimes in, as though to Moira exclusively, “it does unbatten awful quick in front of complete strangers, though.”
“Vel's no stranger,” Nemo ventures somewhat defensively.
“So that were Vel, then?” Abraham, the most purely curious among them, pounces.
“Uh,” Nemo stalls, suddenly glancing to Two-Bit for reassurance, “all the things that apply to his hatch also apply to my hatch.”
Moira's unsurprisingly the one who cuts to the chase. “Can you answer one question for me?”
“Probably not,” Nemo admits.
“Where's the harm? In telling us, I mean. Flask knew. You say Velocity knows. Greatgullet, whomever the bloom he is, apparently knows.” Moira sweeps an expansive gesture towards the airlock door. “What do you stand to lose–”
“Except our loyalty,” Odisseus pipes up.
“–by keeping us in the dark?”
She'd expected another cheap evasion, another shoddy shirking of the honest question. What Moira doesn't anticipate, when it suddenly arrives, is the straightening of Nemo's resolve and the confrontational aspect he suddenly adopts. “You wanna know why?”
“Yes. I asked.”
He breathes once, twice before compiling, the words falling out of him in a sudden petulant rush. “Because you wouldn't understand and you'd say no without even thinking about and it's not worth it.”
“But Two-Bit understands?” Odisseus presses.
“Two-Bit's,” Nemo points a pouty finger towards his accomplice, but his eyes remain locked on Moira, “not mean to me all the time and he thinks it's gonna be super badass and he's not a total butthead like some people.”
“Er...” Two-Bit stammers, visibly uncertain whether or not to ally himself to this unexpectedly juvenile defense.
“I'm going to my room!” Nemo announces abruptly, shoving past his chastised first mate and mechanic to clomp childishly up the companionway. Upon reaching the topmost stair, he suddenly twists around and addresses Abraham in a casual tone. “Can you set course for Xathik Major? Cool.”
With that, the abovedecks corridor coughs open and their Captain disappears from sight.
It's upon Two-Bit that the crew settles their collective confusion. Nemo's baffled co-conspirator still stands with hands and Attaché spread in a latter-day gesture of his blamelessness. “I literally have no flash,” he's quick to renounce.
Odisseus was frankly underwhelmed by Xathik Major. A lonesome moon orbiting a lonesome gas giant on the most lonesome end of a particularly lonesome sector of the galaxy, Xathik Major could at least lay claim to one solitary virtue. A point of primary pride that elevated the ignominious rock every so slightly above the many pointless planetoids and navigational hazards of its ilk – Xathik Major boasted a breathable atmosphere. A thin and vaguely queasy one, albeit, but Odisseus, staunchly opposed to the humiliation presented by donning a vacuum suit, was unlikely to begrudge the moon any of its atmospheric caveats.
“24.1% oxygen, 0.7 degrees substandard gravity, geothermal instability” read the full transcript of the local travel advisory's entry on the moon. Surveying the scenery arrayed all around him, Odisseus couldn't necessarily elaborate on this description any.
A featureless gray horizon in every direction, broken only by unimpressive craters and insignificant mounds revealed to be open geysers by one alarming explosion after another, Xathik Major was the textbook definition of nowhere. Its utter triviality was the only salient asset Nemo could possibly hope to be milking with this latest and most stereotypical of rendezvous.
The Captain loiters an uncomfortable distance away, twisting the handles of his satchel around his fist for lack of any other available affectation to distract himself with. His mechanic, his first mate and, unexpectedly, his accomplice tap toes and twiddle thumbs at the foot of the Lover's boarding ramp, staring across the negative space for the eventual appearance of Nemo's mysterious meeter.
The distance, of course, had been the Captain's insistence, demanding a demeaningly twenty-minute exercise of call-and-answer to establish the outer reaches of their respective earshots. Denied traditional methods of eavesdropping, Odisseus is relegated to his sight and smell to glean what clues he could to the unseen contact's identity. Unfortunately, the former remains poorer than piss and the latter is fatigued beneath the onerous stench of the geysers, consistently venting sulphur into the air at annoyingly frequent intervals.
The newest development involved Two-Bit Switch and his alleged ignorance of this next portion of their plan. Despite all the vociferous protestations about his having been excluded from Nemo's inner circle, Odisseus and Moira had privately discussed the remarkable dichotomy between previously out-of-the-loop Two-Bit, sullen and sulky, and currently out-of-the-loop Two-Bit, vocal and vaudevillian.
The notion of a fully-informed Two-Bit, potentially on Nemo's orders, pleading ignorant wasn't necessarily beyond the realm of believability. When pondering such possibilities, however, both Odisseus and Moira were forced to acknowledge the inevitable onset of paranoia when dealing with so many ulterior motives and unspoken intentions.
Tapping contentedly on the touchscreen of his Attaché, Two-Bit bulldozes the conversation forward. “Any flashes what's in the sack?”
“Cash,” Moira provides. Standing between them, she renders herself as cushion to protect Odisseus' composure and Two-Bit's neck. “By weight, somewhere between 750-thou and an even million.”
“You hink?”
“Stands to reason. Same size, same weight as the one Greatgullet carried off.”
“Oh yeah?” Two-Bit's voice betrays no confirmation or contradiction. “Certainly weren't interested in my opinion on the subject, that's for sure.” When neither of them takes a swipe at his low-hanging fruit, Two-Bit feels the unwelcome need to reiterate. “Really gets me goat.”
“I can only imagine.” Odisseus sets his jaw in the aftermath of the unwise comment and bides through the sound of the grinding servomotor.
“I CANNOT DOUBT,” the droidvox translates and is met with another all-pervasive silence. In all fairness, the device adherent to the top of Two-Bit's Attaché had markedly improved since its last appearance in the pizza parlor above Qel Qatar. Even with veritable buckets of its owner's elbow grease, however, the kitbashed droidvox was unlikely to ever manage a passable grasp of subtext, idiom, irony or colloquialism.
Instead, the flavorless drivel it spewed forth in place of language conferred no true translation to Two-Bit and nothing but vexation to Odisseus.
Moira's buzzing comm offers blissful interruption. “Options?” she answers.
“Precious few.” Odisseus can barely discern Abraham's lilt through perpetual static and the interruptive explosions the geysers provide. “Whatsoever this bird be, she don't come equipped with a reg number. Far as IntraGalaxy Transpo be concerned, she don't exist.”
“Of course not.”
“Wanna pick his brain? Some notion of a make and model would help zottibles.”
Moira considers Odisseus across her shoulder. “Can you manage make and model?”
The first and primary conundrum associated with identifying the spaceship parked two full earshots away, supposedly flown by Nemo's enigmatic contact, was the metal.
Generally speaking, the number of metallic alloys in the entire galaxy capable of withstanding all the peculiar rigors of spaceflight could be counted on one paw. Teltriton dominated this market, entirely thanks to the tireless efforts of the Endless Imperium to stomp out any research or competitors tha
t might challenge their monopoly. As a result, nearly every craft airborne was made of teltriton and subsequently stamped in the Imperium's records.
This boat, all angular plates and panels akimbo, wasn't made of teltriton, however.
Iridine, the primary shipbuilding material of the defunct Hesko Planetary, was a coarse, copperish alloy, currently embargoed beyond belief. Solxite, the exclusive technology of the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija, was a hyaline material with the auspicious ability to transmute reflected solar energy directly into shipborne power. Classified by size as only shuttle or starfighter, matte black within an inch of its life, and devoid of decal, insignia or manufacturer's mark, Odisseus would honestly be hard-pressed to definitively determine which of the two metals the ship was actually made from.
While not especially copperish, had the ship in question been constructed of solxite the merest glint of sunlight should have refracted off its surface in a billion brilliant colors. Failing that, and given the extreme unavailability of solxite as a building material, iridine and Hesko Planetary were declared the uncertain victors.
“If my options are Trija or Hesko,” Odisseus stipulates gruffly, “at gunpoint I'd say Hesko. Don't quote me, though.”
“No on the make or model,” Moira returns with equal or greater gruffness. “He–”
“IF ARE MY OPTIONS TRIJA OR HESKO BY FORCE OF ARMS I WOULD LIKE TO SAY HESKO.”
Moira impatiently resumes, “He says either Heskite or Trijan, and it's–”
“NOT CITATION ME UNTIL.”
Moira stabs out each word deliberately. “Not. Trijan. So.”
Before Abraham can warble any disappointment, the canopy seal on the whatever ship hisses broken. There, clambering out of the cockpit, comes a Trijan.
The three crewmen gawk confusedly at the disembarking pilot. Humanoid, male and bald, he's melanistic as all his people and attired head-to-toe in the epaulletted finery of a Trijan naval officer. None among the Lover's crew is willing to advance this newest and most preposterous theory that Nemo was somehow in cahoots with the Radiant Armada.
Galactic Menace Page 19
