The throne's part is portrayed by a certain Ujad mahogany chair, positioned away from its table to face the open doorway and the string of supplicants who've neatly lined up to supplicate themselves. The chair in question, in fact, was the one favored by a certain black-haired, long-coated asshole whose irresponsibility in the action over the GalaxGas Refinery Complex was responsible for Odisseus' morning and a half of mending hull plates.
The throne's occupant, the ostensible king of this crappy kingdom, slouches dispassionately, affecting the air of a crowned barbarian, outwardly bored by matters of state and inwardly seeking any excuse for conquest. At ten thousand paces and through a thinly-veiled disguise, though, Odisseus can always recognize his saltbrother's self-satisfaction.
The holovision set hanging above the doorway – "MARAUDERS OVER MOQU" blasts the holographic headline – plus the empty turbine cap that he grips in his right hand both serve to distract His Majesty from those so desperately seeking an audience with him. In this case, it's a swashbuckling Suraaqi, flanked by burly Simvesti bodyguards, that quite literally kneels before Nemo's seat.
The role of court vizier appears to have fallen upon a gleeful Abraham, seated to Nemo's immediate right. The Grimalti balances a bottle of Gitterswitch atop one knee, the sacred box of turbine caps atop the other. The court jester, on the other hand, is fulfilled by Two-Bit Switch, seated to Nemo's immediate left and thumbing through his Attaché.
As the Ortok eyes his saltbrother on his trajectory to reach the chiller and the galley basin, he cannot help but be reminded, by the whole regal spectacle, of Boss Ott.
"–Captain of The Deaf Ears," recites the Suraaqi in gormless monotone, "swear to follow your orders, fly your colors and portion you the agreed-upon percentage of any plunder I take from a Valladian port, at least as long as..." she halts herself, scowls her thorny brow and glances a wary eye up to Abraham. "As long as?"
"As long as the winds," Abraham relates patiently, "remain favorable."
"As long as the winds remain favorable," the Suraaqi repeats by rote, the old-timey phrase devoid of meaning or comprehension through her scabby lips.
"Rise," commands the Captain dramatically, obeyed somewhat clumsily by his Suraaqi counterpart. Once she's regained her proper footing, she's cued, once again, to reach out and receive the brimming turbine cap Abraham hands her.
As both Captains toast to The Unconstant Lover, Odisseus washes his paws clean from the prodigious purple grime one accrues while performing exterior repairs on a windy Talosian morning. As Captain Whasername strides from the room, a newly loyal peon to Nemo's ignoble cause, Odisseus fills his canteen, swigs the entire container dry and refills it in preparation for his eventual reunion with the blistering sun and the blasted hull plates.
"And fourteen percent," Two-Bit mutters towards his Attaché, as Odisseus scans the thoroughly uninteresting contents of the chiller as a thin pretext to bask in its cooling breath, "from Captain, er, Lhogo of The Deaf Ears." The information recorded, his tone abruptly changes and he's suddenly giving Abraham's crooked vizier act a run for its money. "So, this gantine, yeah, the one I were jabbin' about, she's called Sunrise Over Criia. Antwacky handle, I know, but vizz at this," he remarks before flipping the Attaché's screen to allow Nemo to view what's displayed there, "she's a cusher, you follow?"
"A pleasure liner?" Nemo comments skeptically.
"Bang on. Shiniest of the shiny, what I ord." He leans still closer to his Captain, exuding so conspiratorial aura, they might as well have been conducting the conversation beneath the rim of Two-Bit's shadowy cape. "Here comes the jazzy bit. I specc it's on some special kinda mission from the Valladia brass to show this boatload of Imperium toffs around the Shipping Line, you know, like a vote of confidence in their investment or what have you. She's jockin' untragged, carryin' fuck-all for an escort and, as we jabb, diddles in orbit above Crander."
"An unarmed pleasure liner, full of Imperium hostages, on a walkabout only three systems from Moqu?" Nemo's skepticism holds fast. "So, a trap?"
"Sure vizzes that way, Cap'n. Awful tomato-looking prize, for a trap, though."
Slamming the chiller closed with a grateful growl of its machinery, a refreshed Odisseus weaves around the countertop and levels up on Abraham's right side. "As long as the winds remain favorable?"
"An old saw," Abraham explains, a certain shade of reminiscence in his craggy voice. "We be talkin' to pirates here, ain't we? There ain't that much loyalty there worth demandin' in the first place."
"With The Deaf Ears," Odisseus tabulates, "and the three more waiting outside, what's that put our total at?"
Abraham doesn't need a moment to calculate. "Nine."
The Ortok makes an impressed huff. Nine was nearly half.
Over the course of the past week, twenty-one pirate ships trickled their way towards Talos II, with the expressed intention of swearing fealty to the Freebooter Fleet and parceling out a piece of the prize for themselves. Which Freebooter the newcomers approached seemed to be matter of preference and reputation. For arguably the least prominent of the five original members, forty-two percent of those recruits were evidently prepared to queue up on behalf of The Unconstant Lover.
They were, of course, none of them especially potent or established pirates. Odisseus couldn't recognize a single one from the admittedly little he knew about the galactic underworld's cast of notables. Certainly Two-Bit or Abraham or even Moira might recognize some of them.
By and large, they were nobodies, bottom-feeding hooligans in hijacked moonhoppers, the type of sycophants that'd normally be bedeviling the Veraspo Belt with their numbers and their inexperience. How they deduced Talos II as the Freebooter Fleet's staging point seemed somewhat irrelevant now for surely, any information stream these ruffians could feed from, the Imperial Ministry of Interstellar Security already was.
With their numbers swollen from five ships to twenty-seven ships and their combined crews totaling a number rapidly approaching a thousand, however, any Imperium task force they dispatched would certainly have their work cut out for them.
Initial reaction to the recruits was seemingly mixed, to judge by the differing opinions voiced by the assembled Captains. Those who most recently chose to assail Ohostoi and therefore the majority were passionately in favor of more pirates, despite the severe decline in booty each buccaneer was likely to receive. Odisseus assumed this had something to do with the clusterfuck the refinery sack had blossomed into.
The minority, in this case represented by Vobash and Aju Vog Xah Qaj, were opposed or indifferent to the batch of eager newbies, citing security risks or payment decrease at intervals.
Personally, Odisseus was innately suspicious of bloating Nemo with any more power or influence than was absolutely necessary. Considering the less-than-charming manner to which he treats his current underlings, Odisseus felt nothing but pity and a vague sense of camaraderie with those poor souls determined to place their lives in his chronically irresponsible hands.
On the other paw, with the capital from all the pilfered spacecraft, cagonuts and carbon petro cascading into his and everyone else's pockets, Odisseus couldn't realistically bemoan any cash surrendered by the presence of more bodies. On an even more practical level, each Jolly-Roger-waving idiot that joined their forces would represent one more target for Valladia's turrets and privateers and subsequently less hull damage to Odisseus to repair.
"You're loving this, aren't you?" probes Odisseus, not without a certain tactlessness.
"Reminds me of old times," Abraham beams, oblivious to any sinister undertones or grumbly portends in the Ortok's words.
"Captain Xesk," announces the Prul underling standing in the doorway, making a sweeping gesture towards the supposed Captain Xesk like some carnival barker shilling for sideshow attractions, “of The Welcome–"
She, along with her captain and fellow Cyngok crewman, are shoved roughly aside.
The party that blusters into the room, the queue shucking them forward
vomitously, are approximately seven members in strength. They represent a wild array of mismatched races but share both a common gender and a common comportment. All are male and all are motherfuckers; criminals several notches more scarred, tattooed and gun-toting than the smattering of lowlifes assembled for Nemo's knighting ceremony.
The vanguard of this wedge of thuggish muscle, the principal pusher and shover, defies each of these descriptors, however – unscarred, holstering only a single firearm and, most demonstrably, female.
"What's all this, then?" demands Captain Gertie Gundeck.
Nemo nearly crawls over the back of his less-than-regal throne in recoil. "Swap my dick for a Patesshi prickly pear." He cranes his neck to shout over everyone's heads. "Moira!"
"Don't fucking start," comes a faint and familiar voice down the betweendecks corridor.
"You had one job!"
"What was I supposed to do, shoot her?"
"Yes!"
“I ain't ruled out shootin' you myself,” states Gertie Gundeck significantly, monkey in the middle of this shouting match.
Gertie Guspatch was the snot-nosed doxy flaunting both her trick-shooting prowess and her upper thighs around Takioro Defederate Station with equal panache. She was a far cry from the corsair queen now standing before them, whose current hands-on-hips posture and expression of parental disapproval could've been a direct transplant from Odisseus' own litterbearer.
The unheralded appearance of one of the Gitter Consortium's most wanted provokes a variety of reactions from all assembled. It provokes an undulation of whispers and mutterings amongst the lesser rabble. It provokes abject terror in Odisseus' saltbrother and it provokes the manner of frosty stiffening from Abraham that only appears in the presence of betrayers and mutineers. Both categories, for all her bellicosity, Gertie Gundeck fulfills in spades.
Her finger, aimed dead center at Nemo's chest, earns more reaction than her shotgun might. "You call this shindig together, bringin' in all the Ring's best buccaneering talent, fixin' to put to the torch Valladia and all she holds dear." She pauses precisely long enough for Nemo's mouth to shape a reply before continuing her tirade. "You invited Greatgullet. You invited Vobash. You invited the Xendo queen, for whatever fucking reason. You fucking converted Charybdis and then, to top it all off, you invited Captain Fuckface,” she points vaguely back at Nemo's huddled followers, “of The Good Ship Fuckface." She drops her fists plaintively back to her hips, mocking the same exact breed of disappointment a mother divests upon her untruthful child. "And you didn't fucking invite me."
Cornered, both by this accusation and by Gertie Gundeck's brigade of bloodthirsty toughs, Nemo makes a pleading glance towards Abraham. The Grimalti's advise consists of a humorless shake of the head. When similarly consulted, Two-Bit instead screws up his lower lip and hoists the Attaché, as though in suggestion.
Struck with a sudden bolt of inspiration at the silent offering, Nemo plasters on his most placating expression, scoots forward some in his chair and addresses his accuser.
"Say, Gertrude, how do you feel about jewelry?"
Gertie Gundeck was a shoddy engineer, a passable pilot and a glorious gunner.
To accommodate this, the first major modification The Chick Magnet underwent upon its rechristening and re-captaining was to swap out her husband's previous chair of command. The gaudy, imperialistic nightmare, within which he highhandedly spouted his commands like the narcissistic prick he was, ended its life atop a Lrissi junk pile.
New Husband, its replacement and an enormous highly-customized Munitions Intergalactic Model C76 Carnage Homing Torpedo Cluster-Launcher was substantially more fun to play with.
As a forward-facing turret, New Husband served double duty as The Magnet's primary teeth and Gertie's seat of power aboard. From this seat, she could easily bark orders to the horde of horny devotees she called her crew. She could, just as easily and from the same seat, explode the shield projector, main turbine drive and all four defensive turrets off a fleeing spice freighter with a little precision targeting and a simple squeeze of her trigger finger.
Today, however, the proverbial wheels of this previously flawless strategy were gradually coming unhitched as New Husband met his match, in the form of not one, but two separate graviton projector pads.
"Rigidity's dropping!" screams one mouth of Typhoon Qalhoon over his shoulder from his temporary posting at the graviton control panel. "From 21% to 18%!" screams the other.
"On which ship, Tiff," Gertie spits acrimoniously. "On which ship?"
"The Days, Captain, sorry," one mouth apologizes, before the second supplies. "18% rigidity on the Days. The Uncle's holding at 30%."
"Well, swap more power, damn you," Gertie snaps. "Even them out best you can but, the second either of 'em goes, dump everything you've got onto the other. Copy?"
"Copy," Qalhoon repeats with the eerie unison of both mouths speaking at once.
"More fighters inbound, Captain! Sixty degrees off starboard bow!" declares Yeoman, the greenhorn substituting Qalhoon's formerly held position at the sensor bank.
Gertie sighs, frankly relieved to be delivered something worth shooting at. "Much obliged, sweetheart," she passes along, sweeping her viewfinder across the loose knot of half-a-dozen starfighters and allowing New Husband to acquire quarry locks on each one.
This done, she blows off some steam by unleashing a single bloated torpedo. A tenth of a zottible past the end of the barrel, the bloated missile fragments into a hell storm of component rockets, each corkscrewing apart and swerving towards whichever starfighter Gertie thoughtfully targeted for them.
Much to her continued chagrin, however, three of the brainless things crossed into the same inescapable graviton fields that currently ensnare the Magnet's fellow wing-mates, The Dog Days and The Cry Uncle. These unlucky missiles clink harmlessly against the face of whichever projector pad happened to magnetically snag them.
Thusly, only three of the enemy starfighters Gertie'd slated for destruction actually meet their makers. The remaining three strafe the Magnet unharmed, lancing laserfire into her dwindling ray shields until Gertie's other, less talented turret gunners could dispatch them.
Nemo willingly sent her into a deathtrap. Of this, she'd become pervasively certain. The only foreseeable strategy going forward, as far as Gertie could divine, was to survive said deathtrap and rub his pretty face in it and possibly the Magnet's afterburner.
The planet Crander is an innocent bystander, gaping agog at the bizarre "space battle" that was unfolding in its unwitting atmosphere. She would apply the term “battle” loosely here since what she was really looking at was some strange festival of kicking, screaming and fingernails-peeling-woodgrain.
The local space station, Crandish Commercial Exports, whose main commercial exports could be rat-canaries, blow jobs and lollipops for all Gertie cares, seems likewise bemused by the whole fiasco and hangs there, proverbial jaw agape.
To either side of the looming Warp Gate linger both jaws of the aforementioned trap. The pair of graviton projectors are comparable to capital ships in size and are capable, when cranked to their maximum setting, of literally pushing small planetary bodies, namely moons, around in their orbits.
Needless to say, the trap was sprung the moment The Dick Magnet, plus the two cannon fodder cruisers that Nemo'd been graciously enough lend her for the purposes of this apology sack, dropped warp. The graviton projector pads kicked on, seized both spacecraft within their respective fields of gravitational inescapability and proceeded to reel them in, her ironically-named ship unmagnetized by virtue of arriving last.
Acting on instinct, Gertie ordered Qalhoon to man their own meager graviton projectors and target her allies, instigating this hilariously one-sided tug-of-war. There was only one conceivable reason the Magnet's graviton locks could even compete with these two behemoths the Imperial bushwhackers had dragged out of storage. Their intention wasn't to powderize upon contact any pirates this maneuver leashed
them. It was rather to inter and interrogate those caught.
In the face of superior numbers, superior weaponry and superior underlings, this was the only advantage Gertie Gundeck could see to exploit.
A scarce ten dottibles through the viewport and surrounded by a thin curtain of its privateer escorts dawdles the bait, the Sunrise Over Criia. With its lavish paint job, its luxuriantly improbable design and its baroque fixtures, it appears from moment to moment to either be begging to be boarded or presiding over the entire ambush from a comfortable distance.
Scuttling the Sunrise was a task easily accomplished by even the Magnet alone. Puncturing her web of escorts without the clunky hulls of Uncle or Days to absorb the brunt of the blows would be a much taller order.
The ambient hum, the faint rattle that's afflicted her ship ever since dropping warp within sight of those pads, suddenly changes pitch. Gertie can hear her Magnet straining from the renewed pressure.
"That's them cranking up the juice, Captain!" Typhoon Qalhoon needlessly frets. "We're losing rigidity on both and rapidly!" His instruments bleat insistently, as though to corroborate his story. "16% and 24%! 12% and 21%!"
"We keep this up," mutters Evileye from his disconcerting post over Gertie's right shoulder, "Magnet's to be ripped stem from stern."
Gertie cannot pry her eyes from the prey, so agonizingly close and yet separated by the Breach itself for all the good it does them.
Could she somehow find a way to teleport past both projector pads, she could easily free her captured brethren with a few cluster-torpedos up the respective asses of both gravitons. From there, the three of them could joyfully smash the piddly privateer resistance and spend the rest of the afternoon rolling around in the piles of gold bullion that were undoubtedly flooding the entirety of the Sunrise's decks. Simple enough, Gertie supposes bitterly; all she's gotta do is buzz those lazy bastards in the Magnet's magical teleportation room belowdecks and tell them to flip the switch from "off" to "on".
Alternatively, there might be something else she could try.
Galactic Menace Page 29
