vo Veaff's throatsac hums contentedly, relieved she and her colleagues weren't attempting to bushwhack Valladia's surface refineries on Ohostoi right now.
Moira switches her munition computer on.
Under normal circumstances, such an act would be utterly inconceivable to Moira Quicksilver, celebrated sharpshooter and snubber of any targeting technology more advanced than a crosshairs. In this circumstance, however, she's forced to consider both her Antagonist's newfound concussive power and the explosive ramifications of any misaimed shots. Not only were the flammable commodities they hoped to preserve pretty clearly in her line-of-fire but, at the present moment, each of those flammable commodities were surrounded by hordes of otherwise “innocent” marauders.
Therefore, Moira reasons that, in this specific instance, a little computerized assistance could potentially spell the difference between a jubilant victory and a despondent defeat.
She thumbs the activation switch. The algid blue of the munitions computer's too-ritzy-for-the-Lover software washes over all three of her inset screens. The program purrs "assisted targeting enabled" suggestively at her.
Moira immediately reintroduces her thumb to the activation switch of that insufferably smug, self-satisfied ponce.
A few oil drums may explode. A few boarders may be incinerated. In lieu of enduring the entire pillage at the suffrage of that computerized twat, these are risks Moira's willing to take.
Below her and the banking Briza she rides atop is nothing but abject pandemonium. The entire installation is crosshatched with a panoply of polychromatic ditrogen, originating from hundreds of firearms and terminating in hundreds of skulls, shoulders and shins.
Anti-aircraft emplacements are installed conveniently on icy ridges, bluffs and precipices surrounding the facility and are therefore uncommandeerable by ground forces. These extend the pyrotechnics into the air and mostly in the direction of The Unconstant Lover, to the consternation of everyone aboard.
Seventy-foot gouts of flame jet unprovoked and skyward from the facility at chaotic intervals, either a direct byproduct of the incipient attack or simply some bizarre feature of oil refineries.
While far from an oil tycoon, Moira's still passably impressed with the sheer scope of the operation Valladia's banking down here on Ohostoi's brumal surface. The epicenter of a continent-spanning constellation of drilling rigs and oil platforms, the GalaxGas Refinery Complex rivals most planetary cities in both size and population. The sprawling speck of civilization, nestled into a remote valley amid miles of snowy wastes, was so similar to Boss Ott's polar stronghold that Moira practically went into flashbacks the moment they dropped atmo.
Smokestacks smoke, pipelines intersect and every thirteen feet is an enormous storage tanker filled to the brim with a cocktail of chemicals so volatile its likely to explode at the mere mention of the phrase "supercharged ditrogen."
To this end, reams of reavers, representing the conjoined armed forces of the veteran Rule of Thumb and the amateur Low-Hanging Fruit, storm across the breadth of the facility, bandying laser bolts back and forth without precision or discretion.
"Did you just," comes the discomforting voice of Nemo across the ship's internal comm channel, "switch the munitions computer on?"
Moira suffocates a curse toward all Odisseus' dedicated inter-wiring. "It was a moment of weakness."
"I was gonna say," mutters Nemo, his voice laden with faux-concern. "Who are you and what have you done with–"
As though colliding with some manner of midair speed bump, The Unconstant Lover hiccups jarringly. This exact sensation Moira's finely-tuned equilibrium has come to perfectly equate with the ray shields receiving a pounding from some high-powered surface-to-air laserfire. It's no great leap to point the finger at any one of those pesky anti-aircraft turrets scattered strategically atop the cliff-face.
In keeping with the task assigned her during their briefing on Talos, the Lover flies a series of wide circuits around the installation's perimeter. The piratical powers-that-be wisely chose to rely on the ship's most enduring strength, the crackshot riding topturret, to troubleshoot tangled areas on the ground and generally provide air support for both Greatgullet's irregulars and the Fruit's hodgepodge of volunteers.
This, of course, necessitated the freighter flying high enough to maintain their bird's-eye view over the entire surface engagement. Doing so, however, inevitably painted a metaphorical and enormous bull's-eye across her hull for the amusement of those accursed anti-aircraft batteries.
"Edgies at 68%," the voice of Two-Bit Switch reports before, with another electrical scream and unexpected bump, the Lover and her poor, maligned ray shields suffer another impact. "58%," re-reports Two-Bit, with increasing grimness.
"Is, uh," stammers Nemo, "this something anybody should be worrying about?"
"Surprisingly, no," an unfazed Odisseus pipes in from his usual post in the engine room. "Do you not remember?" the Ortok sighs into the pervasive silence that follows. "That new shielding mainframe I installed? The prototype we looted off the Shipyards?"
"Ah, uh, yes," Nemo grunts unconvincingly. "Of, um, course."
"Edgies at 63%," Two-Bit finds himself reporting. "70%." Another beat passes before he mutters, apparently mystified, "Cap'n, somebody's feeding power back into the ray edgies and I don't–"
"They regenerate,” Odisseus informs. "Over time, the ray shields will gradually recharge themselves. I'm telling you, Kiesha Laser Corp's changing the game before the rest of the manufactures even understand that they're playing. Sooner, rather than later, all technology's gonna–"
Another ship-shuddering jostle botches her aim a millisecond before the trigger's squeezed and Moira accidentally sends three canisters of vehicle-class ditrogen into a parked driftcart. "Could we maybe bottom-line any of this?"
"Current settings are such that, as long as you aren't deliberately hurling the ship into crossfire, her shields should regen fast enough to absorb any damage they might receive." Odisseus pauses an appropriate length of time. “Now that I've said as much,” he stipulates thoughtfully, “I've little doubt you'll find someway to countermand that."
"You're sweet," Nemo blushes. "Topturret, can we, just for shit's sake, maybe also try shooting those turrets back?"
Moira sets her jaw firm. "This angle, I've no line of sight, helm," she snarls sardonically. "You're barking up the wrong turret."
Nemo's next request is full of reluctance. "Would...underturret care to take a crack?"
The response that crackles up from the underturret is, as expected, a rampageous ramble of what Moira must assume to be Iella profanity. This is Jargon, the Lover's temporary undergunner, espousing her own opinion on the matter and seemingly expressing some manner of consent or another. Several seconds later, the underside Antagonist opens up and, according to Moira's inset sensors, peppers the surrounding cliffside with a fortune in wasted ammunition.
Among the four hundred plus yardbirds liberated from Hazro, Moira canvassed for a halfway talented marksman to ride underturret aboard The Unconstant Lover during her next daring, high-profile air raid through the ditrogen-streaked skies above Ohostoi. Of course she anticipated rather a large number of unqualified wannabes, attempting to bolster their claim on the strength of their braggartism and bravado.
Nearly a dozen different sources, however, many of them boozy, most of them unreliable but all of them consistent, had professed the sharpshooting skills of a non-Commercial-speaking Iella with the inexplicable nickname Jargon. Hearing this, Moira conscripted the daft lemurfolk and had done.
Now, however, confronted with the absolute buhoxshit of Jargon's aim, Moira wonders if perhaps she'd been incorrect to trust the judgment of even a dozen psychotic murderers.
"I don't know if you're seeing this but," Moira addresses towards Nemo, "unless you're actively trying to waste ammo, how about we just flip the ship?"
Without another word of warning, The Unconstant Lover tips totally on its axi
s, tilting Jargon and her Antagonist cleanly away from the offending turrets and positioning Moira perfectly to pulverize them with her own.
"Happy?"
"Very."
Her internal chambers start their gradual spinning with that anticipatory whine. Moira's GG912 ConcInd Antagonist Heavy Autofire Laser Cannon ignites, pouring a stream of continuous green down onto her nearest target. The receiving turret, whipping about as though to answer, combusts long before the Lover even enters into its crosshairs.
The freighter screams past nothing but a column of smoke and a diaspora of gunners and technicians fleeing the blaze their weapon emplacement once was.
The same pattern – realign her aim, rattle off a rain of ammo to wreck and ruin each successive turret built along the western promontory, realign her aim again – continues virtually unchanged for the next six to seven targets.
What most amuses Moira, however, is that each impending turret appears wholly able to anticipate the disastrous approach of The Unconstant Lover and the nasty anti-escort cannon riding bareback atop her. Short of magically sprouting legs and heading for the hills, though, they're each woefully unable to do anything but fire back, a strategy rendered pointless by the unexpected windfall of Odisseus' wonder shield.
It is with grim satisfaction that she glances over her shoulder to see all the western batteries have been reduced to identical smoke signals. Amid all the posturing, preening and pirate politics, Moira Quicksilver remembers precisely how she likes blowing things up.
The pandemonium that continues below Moira is afforded a spectacular view of as the Lover careens across the northern end of the valley. To judge by Nemo's subtle steerings, he's preparing to sweep her along a second strafing run, presumably based on the success of the first, against the eastern anti-aircraft emplacements.
Down below, the combined forces of Rule and Fruit seem to be, ever so slowly, encroaching further and further into the facility, the defenders' holdings more and more resembling cornered prey than stalwart defenders.
Otherwise, comm chatter about ray shield percentages continues unimpeded and Jargon even makes a few laughable attempts to contribute to the unfolding action below. Moira, deep in the tranquility of the topturret, ignores both.
The gap closed between them, Moira's about to introduce this upcoming turret and all its brethren to a steady diet of her Antagonist's brand of ditrogen. An unexpected salvo, fired from somewhere high above, connects with the Lover's ray shield a mere five yards from Moira's position within the topturret.
Even with the ray shield's buffer, the ship still dips some from recoil. The nearest anti-aircraft turret opens its own fire and The Unconstant Lover veritably buckles under both barrages. Recovering what she can of her aim, Moira practically avalanches the entire hillside in her eventually successful attempt to destroy the turret in question. All the while, she devotes the majority of her mental energy to both searching out this sudden new attacker and ignoring Jargon's derisive sniggering.
"Edgies're at, er, 12%!" barks Two-Bit. "Who, in all the–"
"This," Nemo declares simultaneously with a wild outward swing of both yoke and Lover, "I'm choosing to be worried about. Can anyone confirm visual? Topturret?"
"The sun's in my fucking eye," Moira announces truthfully, the approach of any aerial intruder obscured by the friendly rays of Ohostoi's benevolent sun. "How about, I don't know, asking the asshole in the sensor room?"
"Craft comin' in, Cap'n, 155 degrees," Abraham relays exactly on the heels of Moira's chastisement. "Specs're live. ConcInd Convoy Escort. L-Type. 864. Called The Arrowhead?" Five brains, plus whatever Jargon keeps in her skull, scramble through known bounty hunters for ten seconds before Abraham connects the dots. "Bloom in me bloomers, Cap'n. It's one of them privateers."
"Figures," Nemo carps. "Tall order for one Trijan."
Three of the Council's Captains – Nemo, Greatgullet and Charybdis – elected to tackle the petroleum capital of the Outer Ring between them. Greatgullet spearheaded ground operations and Nemo provided air support. It was the sing-a-long psycho herself who, owing to both insider experience and some perverse dark humor, volunteered to entertain in low orbit whatever privateer forces Valladia had amassed for the welcoming party. Vobash's prediction about all the opposition Valladia would array before them had, of course, been one-hundred percent accurate.
Their new friend, The Arrowhead, was still the first member of the asswipe armada to evade Charybdis' seemingly ironshod defenses. Considering the number of enemy ships clogging Ohostoi's atmosphere and stacked against the Trijan's three-ship flotilla, even Nemo, habitual under-appreciator, couldn't muster a real complaint.
With that, the growing sunspot resolves itself into the convoy escort unimaginatively named The Arrowhead. She arcs her incoming trajectory just diagonally enough to intercept them, assuming, of course, that the person gripping the Lover's yoke was educated at some posh Imperium naval academy someplace and not Nehel Morel. In short, the incoming privateer succeeds only in revealing themselves to the full sunlight.
A triangular-shaped slab of teltriton, the entire Arrowhead is speckled with a graffitied admixture of buccaneer tags and Valladia's corporate logo. She's powered by triple-stacked, triple-housed booster engines that protrude from its aft like the fins on a zegofish. The only feature of The Arrowhead, paltry pirate turned petty privateer and precisely the breed of brigand Greatgullet would love to meet up a dark alley some midnight, that Moira Quicksilver's even remotely interested in are the front-mounted cannons.
In the business of stomping on the dreams of upstarts, Moira lobs a volley at The Arrowhead for good measure, an act Jargon, coattail charioteer, mimics a moment later. Moira's unpleasantly surprised, though, to discover both their ray shields engaged and their pilot not a brain-dead incompetent.
Their own gunners face no such difficulties and somehow manage to whittle away what remains of the Lover's ray shields under the percussive patter of laserfire. Approximately seven billion wailing klaxons proclaim this event across every inch of the ship with extreme prejudice.
A noncommittal Ortoki noise, expressing some manner of bewilderment, vibrates through the comm. "Am I hearing," Odisseus restates more coherently a second later, "what I think I'm–"
A strident squeal, loud enough to trump even the conjoined clamor of all the ship's internal alarms, shakes through the Briza's very bones, as that same anti-aircraft turret spatters the exposed Lover with ammunition. The chaser to this abhorrent sound of rending teltriton is, of course, the impact that tosses about everybody aboard.
Two-Bit's presumably the first to recover his seat. "Damage to outer hull!" he expounds, a certain degree of hysteria abundant in his voice. "Impact's on the–"
"I spent days installing," Odisseus reminds with his trademark tone of increasing impatience, "the most sophisticated piece of shielding technology the galaxy's ever seen and now, three seconds later, I'm listening to this fucking alarm and Two-Bit talk about hull damage?"
"What've you been doing down there, whittling some fucking scrimshaw?” wonders a baffled Nemo. Somehow, he retains the peace of mind to wobble the Lover away from the turret's unfriendly fire and weave a perplexing course through the refinery's thicket of smokestacks. "Fix it!" he commands, part skittishness, part urgency.
Odisseus' reply could only contain more vitriol if he was literally strangling his saltbrother while he spoke it. "Yes. Captain."
The Arrowhead is obviously unable to keep up with the freighter as it flies across the facility and instead, it maintains its superior altitude to lob down potshots. Thankfully incapable of actually connecting with the spasmodically zigzagging Lover, they connect instead with the especially sensitive sections of the petroleum processing plant below her.
Scorching green skyfall results in subsequently smoky explosions on the surface sixteen feet below The Unconstant Lover. When combined with Nemo's circuitous steering, this conspires to further confuse Moira's aim. For all her
impotent efforts, Moira tosses a bucketload of ammunition towards their skyward tormentor, now cleanly outlined against the afternoon sun, to no visible effect.
"Boss!" barks a shiny new voice on the comm frequency, inbound from an external channel marred by static and the unmistakable sound of nearby small arms fire. "Maybe you've noticed all that oil that's mysteriously blowing the fuck up?" Despite his clearly besieged state of affairs, Greatgullet still possesses the good grace to allow for an ironic pause. "We fucking need that. Any time you feel like lending us some air support, you go right the fuck ahead and help yourself."
"Be right with you," chimes Nemo, frustration barely contained beneath a cracking veneer of pleasant good cheer. "How're those ray shield com–"
Interrupting their cue, the pearlescent shimmer of repulsed energy that blessedly are the ray shields winks into view several inches above The Unconstant Lover's hull. Imminent and momentary relief is felt from every corner of the ship.
"Edgies're 61% and climbin'," Two-Bit indicates, full of purpose.
"Oh, what's that?" The Ortoki that warbles through the comm is so laden with sarcasm Moira, a secondary speaker, almost can't comprehend it. "Did Odi fix the problem again? Did Odi fix the problem with almost superhuman speed? I stand here," he continues with feigned grandiloquence, "with bated breath before the mainframe access panel, awaiting the moment when you bloom everything to Jotor again."
At verbal and visual confirmation of the ray shields begrudging return, Nemo jerks the Lover upward out of the refinery's thermosteel tangle. He pinpoints her prow directly towards the hovering Arrowhead. "Double forward. Let's strafe this bitch."
"And nobody thanks me."
"Thank you, Odisseus," prattles three of the Ortok's five fellow crewmates, one of the abstainers an ignoramus of an Iella and the other just a clueless prick.
Galactic Menace Page 27
