The proceedings pass in almost unchallenged silence, six ears straining to glean whatever details they could from the distant exchange. The interaction they observe is a pitch perfect cutting from an espionage holofilm: a covert handoff in an undisclosed location between supposedly enemy operatives.
With satchel passed from Nemo to Trijan and scarcely a word uttered between them, they part in peerless synchronicity. They're a pair of cloak-and-dagger paragons until Nemo grimaces, thrusts a hand into his trousers and adjusts the hang of his crotch.
“The bloom's he truckin' with Trijans for?” Two-Bit dangles significantly.
“Who knows,” snarls Odisseus through clenched fangs. This said, he closes his eyes and grinds his molars in anticipation.
“ANYONE TO KNOW HOW,” the droidvox supplies glibly, until some internal mechanism skips a beat and begins clicking erratically. “ANYONE ANYONE ANYONE ANYONE”
“Uh,” Two-Bit stammers helplessly, as his pet project yakkety-yaks off the deep end.
“ANYONE ANYONE ANYONE ANYONE”
Odisseus sighs and gestures towards the device with a beckoning paw. Having no doubt awaited the Ortok's offer of assistance with the device since he'd scraped it off the floor of Gasbox's scrapbarn four months ago, Two-Bit eagerly slaps the Attaché and attached droidvox into Odisseus' capable paws.
Giving the whole affair a few perfunctory sniffs, Odisseus turns the Attaché and its attachment over in his paws a few times, checks the connection and quite delicately unclasps the droidvox from its perch above the device. After a second or two of further examination, Odisseus suddenly whips the droidvox dismissively aside, where it clatters against and eventually falls over the rim of the nearest geyser.
Two-Bit nearly screams an objection, but Odisseus' remorseless stare dares him to comment. A moment later, the geyser erupts in an expelled gout of steam, sulphur and boiling liquid. As the smoke settles, Odisseus politely returns the Attaché.
Nemo, flicking something off his finger with obvious disgust, closes the gap. “You fix the droidvox?”
“Yes,” Odisseus returns flatly, his answer succeeded by nothing but joyous silence.
Moira tips her temple towards the decamping Trijan, climbing toward the open canopy of his mystery ship. “How's your friend?”
“Hm?” Nemo shoots a glance over his shoulder. “Oh. Quiet.” Parting the folds of his duster, he splays both hands against his waist and considers his stomach a moment. “Bloom me out. Anybody else like, super starving?”
“Where to next?” presses Moira.
“I don't know – I'm thinking oysters? Is that weird?”
“Which planet?” Moira, fully anticipating his digression, restates without missing a beat. “What's the next stop on our round-the-Ring tour of mysterious buhoxshit? Talos?”
“Oh,” Nemo barks his sudden understanding. “Mannimar.”
Swallowing this with a mixture of puzzlement and resignation, Moira champions her wearied cause. “Gonna tell us why?”
To his credit, Nemo at least frowns in concentration before confessing, “Probably not,” and traipse back up the boarding ramp, his mind occupied not by Trijans, Mannimar or the abysmal morale of his crew, but undoubtedly only by oysters.
Chapter 10
Odisseus should be able to puzzle this out. From the Gallwegian bank heist, to Velocity and the Quuilar Noxix footage, to Greatgullet and eventually Talos, plus Two-Bit Switch's involvement and, seemingly, an anonymous someone amongst the ranks of the Trijan Radiant Armada – he was missing something.
Plus, where did all these airlocks fit in?
The latest thicket of evidence stands staggered, like a pantheon of towering trash, under Mannimar's pale green sun. All these factors swirled about the solution, each clue connected only tangentially to another, but in no discernible pattern, weaving no readable web, at least not from where Odisseus stood.
Yet still, the Ortok palpably understood how thin the pretense was rapidly becoming. Circumstances now forced Nemo to approach Odisseus for his technical expertise. Try though he might, the Captain couldn't quite exploit the Ortok's knowledge base and ingrained spaceship appraisal without tipping his saltbrother off about the scheme's true nature. Odisseus knew it only required one verbal gaff, one slip of the tongue on Nemo's part and all the conspiring and conniving would be, at last, laid bare.
“First things first, they're perfect,” Nemo opens, exhibiting his skills as the galaxy's worst haggler. “I mean, don't wanna speak too soon, but,” he appeals up to Odisseus, “I think I've seen all I really need to see here. Why don't we take–”
“I'd strongly advise against that,” Hook counters with his own galactically worst salesman routine. “These, uh, items would've been discontinued pre-Expantionist Conflicts, unless I'm very much mistaken. You're gonna wanna examine these more closely – individually, if possible – before you make another, uh,” his eyes flick to the Lover, the ship enjoying a heartfelt homecoming surrounded by her childhood junk, “impulse buy.”
Palisades of mismatched “merchandise” subdivide the Mannimar scrapyards into nebulously-defined departments, such as acid-damaged refuse and backfired weaponry and haphazard hunks of miscellaneous metal. Once section in particular was the subject of Nemo's entire sojourn on this, the planet of the Lover's rebirth. Odisseus couldn't fathom a single reason why the Captain would be so interested in these obsolete airlocks, beyond simple contrariness.
The three of them – the shopkeep, the customer and the customer's saltbrother – stand before column upon crooked column. This grove of upright airlocks, jutting tipsily from the surface sand, are little more than forty-foot teltriton tubes capped on each end by a pressurized door and a suite of driftjets. The copse of Gond-class exoejection airlocks resembled nothing so much as a tottering temple to some bizarre junkyard deity, a collection of slanted monoliths meant to monumentalize an obscure ritual.
Under any other circumstances, Odisseus would've been less than impressed and voiced same immediately. Under these circumstances, the Ortok was far too preoccupied racking his brain. He knew there was some pathway that connected the dots between these airlocks and Velocity or these airlocks and the Quuilar Noxix footage or these airlocks and Greatgullet.
Nemo, meanwhile, busies himself by putzing about with Two-Bit's borrowed Attaché, jabbing and smearing his thumb against the touchscreen to seemingly little avail.
Hook, in that Ufaki way, somehow manages to cross all three of his arms in a manner Odisseus can't precisely parse. He stands several feet aside, as though to distance himself from these proceedings and to wash all his three hands of the sale he was reluctantly about to make.
The dichotomy between Odisseus' mental image of the Lover's original peddler and the Ufaki standing to Nemo's right is astounding. Somehow, whenever Nemo mentioned Hook, Odisseus imagined a cunning charlatan, who paid his bills by duping naïve patrons into exchanging perfectly serviceable vessels for perfectly unserviceable jalopies.
Never, in all four years since their reunion on Vollok, had Odisseus imagined that Nemo could've been the main aggressor behind the negotiation. Instead, he'd always inwardly cursed and blamed this Hook character for installing this romantic notion of The Unconstant Lover's infallibility in the Captain's brain.
Nothing, it seemed, could possibly be further from the truth, with Nemo one-hundred-percent committed to buying these decrepit artifacts and Hook, in fact, the voice of reason, evidently against his better vendor's judgment.
“Well, brother,” Nemo addresses to Odisseus, before peeling his eyes from the Attaché's screen, its contents in indecipherable by the sun's emerald glare. “Shall we indulge him?”
Odisseus exchanges glances with Hook, an immediate kinship kindled between mechanics against the oblivious customer. The Ortok shambles the short distance forward and clicks claws against the corroded teltriton of the nearest airlock. “Correct me at any point here,” he tosses toward Hook as a courtesy, “but these're Gond-
class, aren't they?”
“Mostly,” Hook confesses, shades of embarrassment visible on his face. “A handful near the back actually predate Gond, if it can be believed.”
“My admittedly dim understanding was,” Odisseus allows, “that these pre-graviton airlocks would actually be stuffed full of marines and magnetized to the side of a capital ship. Then, once the cruiser closed to engagement distance with another capital or, more likely, a space station, they were, what, launched off towards the enemy's airlock?”
“Model depending.” Hook spews a saliva bullet onto the sand inches from Nemo's unnoticing feet. “These newer ones here,” he untangles an arm to make a generalized wave that encompasses the front half of the standing airlocks, “have been retrofitted with driftjets for basically that purpose, but those?” A second gesture indicates the smattering of pre-Gond boarding craft. “Magnetic grapplers and not much else.”
“Even with driftjets, though,” Odisseus stipulates, weaving his footpath between the tottering teltriton tubes like a lumberjack inspecting each trunk for an ideal candidate to chop down, “you'd be looking at such small fuel reserves that one outta five shots, they're gonna be too far away or miss their mark entirely or clamp harmlessly onto some random patch of the target's hull.”
Memories of Takioro's defective shoots, who employ effectively the same strategy, suddenly flare up. Odisseus momentarily imagines the cylinders chock full of long-dead boarders that must be floating somewhere in the expanses between planets. “Space travel being the blooming grab-bag it was back then, one outta five must've sounded real jig,” Odisseus muses, withdrawing his paw from the airlock's surface and imagining the tube suddenly stuffed to the brim with skeletons.
“Lucky graviton was invented when it was,” Hook agrees, “else we'd still be boarding with these. Not much call for 'em, as you'd imagine, ever since.”
Nemo's attention bubbles to the surface, yanking his eye contact from the evidently confounding Attaché. “Where'd we land on this? Yes or no?”
Hook is comparatively polite. “I think, what, 'no', was decided?”
Odisseus is baldfacedly rude. “'No' is where we landed on that.”
To his credit, or discredit, Nemo is categorically unconcerned by their joint judgment. He mutters a token “Shame” before the Attaché captures his attention again. “Answer me a question, Odi?” he poses between the staccato of pokes against the screen.
Odisseus pads between the airlocks, back towards his bemused saltbrother and the clutched source of his confusion. “Two-Bit's notes are a little sketchy on these details.” Nemo whips the device around and Odisseus squints against the glare to better read what's displayed there. “What kinda airlock is this?”
He tilts the tablet ever so slightly upward with an extended claw to better view what the screen, for some reason not in hologram mode, evinces. Blueprints, Odisseus discerns, blueprints of, unsurprisingly, an airlock of a make and model he immediately identifies.
This done, he feigns deliberation for as long as Nemo's likely to believe, as he frantically scans the proffered Attaché for any conceivable clue that he can glean. The airlock in question, highlighted and enlarged, dominates the display, but several running tickers and cornered tags betray the title and outline of Qabb 8 – a jackpot of a savory specific.
Whether Nemo catches wise or not, Odisseus is too preoccupied with scanning the screen to determine certainly. When the Captain inverts the Attaché to resume punching with his fierce pointer finger, the Ortok offers his prognosis. “V&R IE5 Series II.”
The information is as meaningless to Nemo as weather patterns on Greva would be to a sunbather on Criia. “And can a V&R EI5–”
“IE5,” Odisseus corrects.
“–mate with one of these?” Nemo nods halfheartedly past Odisseus.
The Ortok pays the stand of ancient airlocks an unnecessary glance over a furry shoulder, as though requiring visual conformation of their uselessness. “Uh, no. Like we said, there's practically a hundred years separating these two technologies.”
“Fair,” returns Nemo.
Reading anything into Nemo's nonchalance is always a double-edged electrochette. Odisseus' keenly aware that it could as easily denote disappointment as it could excitement.
At the very least, Odisseus could count the unearthing of Qabb 8 as an untarnished victory, one he'd doubtlessly mull over and over in the company of Moira and Abraham at the earliest possible opportunity. The twenty some floating fragments of the formerly unfractured planet Qabb sported little beside a smattering of inset trading posts – Qabb 8 amongst them. Now, in light of the recent developments, they also sported some role, important or insignificant, in Nemo's unveiling scheme.
“How about this one?” Once again, Nemo inverts the Attaché for Odisseus' perusal. Once again, the Ortok is forced to hem and haw over the angle and distance like some sightless old litterbearer.
“TFS Civilian N4 and no,” Odisseus reports after devoting another few seconds to scrutinizing. The airlock in question, another spinning schematic, plays through a brief repetitive animation, slotting recurrently into the side of a spindly space station, complete with the helpful label of Yime Orbital.
Notable for its unchallenged monopoly on buhox meat, leather and milk, Yime and its lonely polar space station were the foremost staging points for the exportation of beef across the galaxy. The only parallel to be drawn, unfortunately, between Yime and Qabb, however, were their relative proximity, on either end of the Uklio Quadrant.
“Same problem?” Nemo supposes once the Attaché is returned to him to poke at. Odisseus barely has time to nod his reply, let alone ponder the ramifications of all this new intel, when a third rendering is thrust before his squinty eyes. “This one, finally?”
The image brandished before Odisseus could, in a younger, happier time, been a dead ringer for Takioro Federate Station, back before she'd added the fashionable “De–” suffix to her middle word and lost her dependable central spire. The subtle, yet noticeable differences, between this hologram and the sordid space station the Lover called home help Odisseus distinguish its actual identity.
Ikoril Federate Station was the Outer Ring's second and less successful attempt to create an omnipopular merchant hub, afflicted by its poor location and subsequent obscurity.
The airlock Nemo wishes classified is child's play, following that. “No and AirTite 918 Adjustable.” His mind awhirl with possibilities, Odisseus publishes only mild skepticism, for appearance's sake. “You should be sensing a pattern here.”
Nemo's mouth is an uneven line, neither frown nor smile, as he returns to his Attaché. “I unfortunately am.”
Qabb, Yime and Ikoril must all intersect with the various other pieces of Nemo's ongoing gambit – Greatgullet, Trija, Quuilar Noxix – in some, albeit esoteric, manner.
The connection between Ikoril, Takioro's twin, and Velocity, Takioro's Depot-Commissioner, seems too blatant to ignore. When no other piece of evidence presents itself for connection, however, Odisseus is forced to entertain alternate theories.
Qabb 8, Yime Orbital and Ikoril Federate Station are all, obviously, space stations. Qabb, Yime and Ikoril are all located, however variably, within the Uklio Quadrant and also, Odisseus notes with mild interest, points on the Valladian Shipping Line.
The Ortok's heart plays hooky on a handful of beats – Valladia.
The Valladian Shipping Line, a string of corporately affiliated ports, anchorages and space stations, ranging from the depths of the Outer Ring all the way into the heart of the Inner Sectors, was the galaxy's single most profitable merchant enterprise. Every day, billions upon billions of credits worth of cargo pass along the Line from Imperium member worlds to Bad Space rogue planets and back again. The Imperium sanction, the official stamp-of-approval to represent Imperial trading concerns in the abdicated regions of the Outer Ring, would only quadruple, perhaps quintuple, the amount of capital, in raw goods and raw cash, flowing up and down the
Line in days to come.
An attack, an attempt to plunder some wealthy target somewhere along the Line, was the most obvious and, in his estimation, most likely conclusion Odisseus could draw between the dots. Qabb, Yime and Ikoril, then, were logically Nemo shopping for marks. The Captain lingered the bull's-eye over each one long enough only for Odisseus to render his assessment and was evidently counting on the Ortok's inability to piece together the puzzle.
The airlocks themselves seemed a somewhat overblown tactic, but nearly everything else – Velocity's connection to Ikoril, Greatgullet as a potential collaborator or distraction, the Noxix footage to ingratiate Greatgullet – clicks together progressively like the teeth of a turning gearbox.
The connection to Valladia made, Nemo's motive crystalizes clearly. The pizza parlor above Qel Qatar, the holovised press conference and that sour sound bite “piracy is pointless” are suddenly salient in Odisseus' memory.
“Well,” Hook concludes, with a bizarre three-handed clap, “if we've officially decided against these–”
“Oh, no, no,” Nemo corrects, thumbing the Attaché off and realigning his attention on the conversation around him, “we'll take them. All twenty.”
With Odisseus too absorbed in his own mental epiphanies to pay much attention, Hook is forced to flabbergast for two. “Uh,” he stammers, stalling for some manner of objection, but only comes up with a clarifying question. “All twenty?”
Nodding Nemo is reaching into the trusty inside pocket of his duster, undoubtedly to withdraw another significant sheath of cash when he freezes. “And you offer delivery?”
“Depends,” Hook's wise to stipulate. “Delivery to where?”
It's Odisseus, much to the surprise of Hook and especially Nemo, who supplies the Ufaki's answer, unable to keep a certain self-satisfied smirk off his whiskered muzzle. “Talos.”
Galactic Menace Page 20
