Galactic Menace

by Timothy J Meyer

  Celebrities of a particular note in Bad Space, the Dragons were one of the few professional skooshball teams who, rough customers each one, maintained a robust career in interstellar piracy. Whereas such behavior would be grounds for immediate dismissal in the stricter Inner Sector sports leagues, the Outer Ring Galactic League actively encouraged these buccaneer leanings. For one, it opened their sport's merchandizers up to an entirely new demographic – the pirate demographic – that they couldn't hope to rope otherwise.

  For two, they were some of the galaxy's toughest motherbloomers, to a player – what could the Galactic League do to stop them?

  When the Freebooter Fleet returned from the successful sack of Kezz and all her lumber mills, they were astounded to discover the Diehard and his team of championship skooshers come intergalactic celebrities awaiting their return to Talos II. With the Skunyen's eye towards his team joining their Fleet, doubtlessly as some manner of publicity stunt, Two-Bit'd heartily encouraged not only Nemo's acceptance but also this massive celebratory bash, the likes of which were quickly becoming routine following each profitable pillage.

  In order to afford the Dragons a little extra respect, Two-Bit and the rest of the Lover's crew wisely decided to forgo their usual seats around the Captain's Table in favor of some more discreet table far from the action. With Two-Bit's vested interest in killing two rat-canaries with one stone, they opted to conduct another covert crew meeting in the best possible hiding place they could – plain sight.

  “Will you relax?” hisses Moira, intended for Odisseus but spoken into the echoey depths of her hefted tankard.

  Odisseus ceases his sniffing scan of the massive council chamber to scowl disapprovingly toward Moira. “Relax” is the only word Two-Bit catches, but the Ortok's broadcast tone is easily read as skeptical.

  “You think Xo's gonna attempt the same tactic again?” Moira disparages out of hand, returning her tankard to the tabletop. “'cause the bounty hunter infiltration went so swimmingly last time.” She waves a dismissive gesture towards the grumpy Ortok, propping a bicep against the back of her chair. “You can relax. They'll come from a different direction next time.”

  Odisseus snorts something from which Two-Bit discerns the phrase “How relaxing.”

  A hustle of nearby movement catches the attention of everyone at the table as Lulo Lulo, star Buja center for the Dragmoor Dragons, cranes a lengthy arm across their meeting to catch, in cupped fingers, the stray skooshball. The alien gallbladder, possessed of enough instinctual intelligence to attempt an escape, squirms and squelches an arcing gout of bile across the table. The crowd thunders their approval and the crewmembers shelter their drinks from the viscous spray with hands or shoulders. Lulo Lulo spares everyone at the table an embarrassed expression before bounding back into play, the displeased skooshball gripped implacably in her massive mitts.

  Because volunteers numbered in the hundreds, because how often does one have a chance to participate in a friendly match against a professional team and because why blooming not, the center square of the crash's main chamber had been converted into a makeshift skooshball court. With hasty lines etched into the purple sand, the Dragons' suite of practice rings and throngs of jeering and cheering spectators, Talos II's home arena was a far, far cry from any professional skooshball square.

  During the entire length of the crew's conversation, the pros had flawlessly trounced not one, two but three amateur teams, assembled from eager fans amongst the Freebooter Fleet. This was met with much guffawing amusement from their crewmates and much chagrin from both skooshball and surface sand. By now, the gallbladder's excited green excretions produced a slick and slippery slurry where once was tractable terrain.

  The jester in chief with crown to boot, Nemo leads the revelers, hooting derision and gossiping with the Diehard from their lofty posts upon the Captain's dais.

  Two-Bit wipes skooshball slime from his multe bracelet onto the sleeve of his hoodie. “Should anybody be hinked about this, do you think?”

  “About skooshball?” Moira clarifies dubiously.

  “About publicity,” specifies Two-Bit. He huffs a few breaths onto the tarnished multe surface and begins polishing with his opposite sleeve. While he does so, he inclines his chin upward, toward the Captain, Greatgullet and their guest, a representative member of a major sports franchise, joking and jostling each other like drunken school chums. “Skooshball coaches is one thing. Who's next, is what I wonder.”

  In his grand calculation of Nemo's planned sightseeing tour of the Shipping Line, Two-Bit Switch had honestly become blindly embroiled in the pure logistics, in arranging this here and negotiating that there. The very concept of Bad Space's reaction, Bad Space's opinion of the Freebooter Fleet, had completely eluded him.

  Certainly the Endless Imperium weren't particularly popular among the Outer Ring's citizenry. Valladian Shipping, on the other hand, even in spite of their exorbitant taxes and tariffs, was a main conduit of trade, responsible for carting the lion's share of Inner Sector valuables to regions of space unlikely to receive those commodities any other way. The general opinion of them was therefore correspondingly murkier.

  This far from civilization, public outlook on even something as ostensibly negative as pirates could vary nearly as much. On some planets, they were courageous corsairs, using whatever means necessary to battle a corrupt and inflated Imperium that was content to ransack resources from worlds they long since forswore protection from. Others planets took the more traditional view and saw them as simply robbers, marauders and raiders.

  If pressed, Two-Bit would probably place his chips in the later camp, as regards Bad Space's perspective on the Freebooter Fleet. To see Coach Dvalex here, however, in such open endorsement of not only Two-Bit's own handiwork, but more abstractedly the actions of the Fleet as a whole, may be enough to sway that prediction from one direction to another.

  “Let the boy have his fun.” It's unsurprisingly Abraham, living to spoil the Captain as of late, who first brushes the concern aside.

  Watching Nemo up there, a giggly child in a dopey hat at the center of an enormous party thrown by thousands of people in honor of his sixth birthday, Two-Bit Switch can't disagree.

  He extends pinky, ring and middle finger. “Three to go.”

  Chapter 18

  Moira attempts to weigh color against design, size against craftsmanship, price against aesthetic, for a truly distressing amount of time. The perfection of one pair, which is precisely the right size, is undercut by its color – an obnoxious shade of neon pink that reminds Moira, somehow, of Gertie Gundeck. Another pair is colored a traditional white but are so comically enormous, Moira couldn't even cup one in her hand.

  Some of them jangle tinny little tunes whenever something or other tripped their triggers. Others of them project outward a halo of holographic numbers, symbols or logos. A few are even corporate shills, with looping advertisements and coupons for the bored commuter.

  When she sees the Jolly Roger one, a dozen white skulls and their crossbones stitched onto black felt, Moira calls off the dogs.

  Moira points out her desired pair from where it softly swings, among the racks and racks of its peers, and pays the Tifranese knickknack-monger. In any other market, on any other moon, she forks over enough cash to purchase not only the item, but probably the lifelong service of the little Zugax child-laborer who stitched the damn thing together.

  Here, however, to the overflowing pockets of the Freebooter Fleet, a mere hundred credits was a small price to pay for a pair of fuzzy dice.

  Plus, she was purchasing the item on Nemo's dollar and, as such, Moira was careful to tip over-generously.

  With fuzzy dice dangling from her fist, Moira departs the Tifranese's humble kiosk and starts her sojourn back across the purple sands of Pirateton. Her first destination, a certain clothier situated on one of the township's temporary corners, would bring Moira across turf staked out by both Vobash and Greatgullet. From there, she'd n
eed to traverse the Trijan and Xendo ghettos before arriving back at her home and spaceship, parked at the nexus of Lover territory.

  All in all, the overland trek would swallow the better part of an hour, looping around the neutral ground of the central crash site and through all five of Pirateton's wards. These were each rough neighborhoods for those without the prestige Moira Quicksilver wielded amongst the Freebooters. Here, when she chose to walk openly, the press of pirates parted a respectful berth for her passage.

  Six months ago, Talos II was a desolate wasteland, boasting a single despondent landmark across its entire sand-swirled surface. With only three ports on the Valladian Shipping Line left to sack and all of Bad Space's fascinated eyes turned to their little moon, Talos II can now finally claim its own Porttown.

  Pirateton was born, a pseudo-community germinated up from a windblown ruin. With a population climbing into the thousands, Talos II's one settlement consisted primarily of parked spaceships, architecture re-appropriated from the abundant wreckage and an extremely opportunistic merchant class.

  In Pirateton, the pedestrians are universally pirates, gun-strapped sentients comparing tattoos, haggling over implements of maximum possible destruction and polluting the atmosphere with the mingled clouds of tobacco, smoke and exhaust. In Pirateton, the buildings are insanely ramshackle, where a crinkled tarp, loose sand and a crumbling sheet of unstable wreckage constitutes a luxurious storefront. In Pirateton, streets are sterling examples of chaos theory, rewriting themselves with irritating frequency by the palimpsest of departing and arriving spaceships.

  Calling a district a “district” in Pirateton is an act of saintly generosity. More vain pretense than effective urban planning, these artificial borders were a natural outcropping of the allegiance system that'd sprung up among the amateur corsairs, each one pledging support and plunder to a particular Council-seated Captain. A constellation of spacecraft develops in every direction around their favored flagship, creating an unnatural neighborhood between landing feet, beneath ship shadows and among rusted debris.

  Some subtly, some less-than-subtly, each district wears the psychology of its selected Captain and the psychologies of those who would willingly ally themselves to that Captain. Moira bears witness to a core sample of each district as she strides between Pirateton's personalities.

  Greatgullet's turf is a rowdy barrio of frequent fistfights, public intoxication and a near-perpetual chorus of boozy, repetitive buccaneer chants. Here, Moira watches a jubilant Etrook, with a shouldered anti-spacecraft ballistic warhead launcher, demolish an empty turret atop the main body of the crashed cruiser to precisely no consequences beyond rubble.

  Within Vobash's borders, all the Captain's subservient ships are circled protectively around his like a buhox herd before the approach of a predator. Here, Moira keenly observes a doubtlessly Vobash-appointed militia, disguised as shore-leave spacers shooting the proverbial shit. They loiter with feigned nonchalance at each point of ingress into the Triomman's territory and turn away undesirables with antagonist stares and spread shoulders.

  Crossing into Charybdis' sphere of influence reveals a whole shipyard of her sovereign spacecraft, parked in regimentally neat rows. Here, Moira keeps a weather eye for signs of any single unpolished hull. To her amusement, she locates none, the meaning behind this particular scruple seemingly lost on the majority of the Captain's non-Trijan flock as their ships are made predominantly of teltriton rather than solxite.

  To pass Aju Vog Xah Qaj's domain, one must weave through a winding series of streets, all swirling around the mountainous heap of compiled junk from which The Eyesore's crew withdraws its component metal. Here, Moira makes note of only three types of transients. She spies the queen's true born offspring, she spies a motley assemblage of Xendo former strays Aju Vog Xah Qaj's willingly or unwillingly adopted and she spies the very occasional enterprising vendor, attempting to peddle carapace wax and raw meat.

  A handful of traits, however, are universal across all of Pirateton's citizenry, a few fragile links that tie the entire tent city together.

  Some ambitious jackass with a scummy forefinger has traced “WASH ME” on the viewports, fuselages and exhaust thrusters of every dusty craft they could spot. Wherever Moira goes across Pirateton, she can still hear the mistimed strums and off-key wailing of a dolefully subpar Cannonball Dogs cover band that, when located, she plans to punish with verbal or physical violence.

  Every street, every boulevard, every alleyway is carpeted with peddlers, their blankets outlaid and their plunder proudly displayed. Each of these trinkets – rings, watches, pearls, comms, sunglasses, inkjetters – Moira doesn't doubt were looted from the pockets of corpses on Valladia, on Ohostoi, on Kezz. Their customers, every one, were the plunder's original pillagers, haggling down the prices of items they could've pocketed for free weeks ago. The Fleet's puzzling pillage-based economy, Moira reflects, is practically a closed loop.

  Every hundred steps or so, Moira sees another strange anomaly among all of Pirateton's sprawl. Poking into view between jagged metal spurs and dorsal-mounted turrets are the glitzy, glowing corporate logos of Pickle Planet, Nanosecond Pizza and Yellowtooth Cigarettes. When held against Pirateton's junkyard aesthetic, their cheap, sputtering holoneon signs becomes beacons of rarefied society.

  These intergalactic conglomerates seem to have performed whatever legal acrobatics necessary to, at once, publicly condemn the Freebooter Fleet's actions and privately profit from their well-known appetite for fast food and tobacco. Their furnishings, however, are no more grandiose or expensive than their unincorporated neighbors.

  Replenishing her own supply of Cancer Sticks at the handiest Yellowtooth stand, Moira imagines the megacorps enjoy Pirateton's steep inflation as much as the local fishmongers do.

  It's nauseating to think that everything her eyes behold was born out of the imagined bruising of Nemo's ego by some sidelong comment from a Valladian spokesperson.

  This inadvertent act of creation, the birth of a boomtown by accident, is something Moira allows herself to marvel at. The newborn pirate port is an occurrence wholly unique across all galactic history.

  Nowhere but Pirateton caters so exclusively to the buccaneering way of life. Pirateton is devoid of law and all its agents – be they bounty hunters, customs officers or spice rangers – and of order – save a solitary pecking one – in a way no other anchorage across the galaxy can match. While superficially similar to both Takioro Defederate Station, Two-Bit's alma mater, and Gallow, where the Captain first cut his teeth, Pirateton lacks the former's neutrality and the latter's corruption.

  In Takioro's case, Velocity tries her damnedest, in her tenure as Depot-Commissioner, to maintain her station's reputation as a place where any scoundrel can not only find a safe port, but also conduct their illicit affairs – all at her direct profit. No matter how much Nemo might balk at the notion, the Freebooter Fleet drives home a point far more political than mere petty crime.

  Anyone who represents a significant threat to the Fleet, such as Dranab and his Dusty Dimick, will swiftly be eliminated by the pistol-wielding management. On Takioro, bounty hunters are frowned upon, but tolerated, since their money flows just as easily into Velocity's pockets as anyone else's. Ostensibly, Pirateton and its proprietors could care less what one's business here is – just so long as it doesn't conflict with the Fleet's business with Valladia.

  In Gallow's case, Underglow remains a relatively risky place to lead a criminal's life. Despite its deeply-ingrained corruption, the local government continues to endanger the activities of the average hoodlum on a daily basis, with speed limits, prowl cars and sting operations.

  In Pirateton, however, one cannot become a citizen without committing or becoming an accessory to the act of piracy. The Freebooter Fleet's reigning kleptocracy is founded on Bad Space's fundamental principle: take what's not yours. No internal corruption among the Council of Captains could ever be more egregious than the crimes those mas
ses gleefully commit to earn a living.

  Here, amid the dregs and dross of somebody's colossal blunder, arose arguably Nemo's greatest success, a haven where, at once, a pirate can comfortably kill, commerce and cavort, all the while harming the hated enemy – Valladian Shipping – in the process.

  In the same breath that she wonders at the accidental industry of the place, Moira's trusty cynicism reminds her that, no matter how remarkable their purple sand castles may have become, the tide will always change. Whether the direct retribution of their target or simple ennui between successful pirates is to blame, Pirateton may be, in the galactic sense, little more than a desert mirage.

  She finds the correct clothier straddling the boundary between Xendo territory and Lover territory. Moira's exceedingly careful to patronize the ship with only the utmost caution. When push came to shove, she was far more willing to be caught at the Pistol-Whip, Takioro's only bounty hunter bar, that to be caught shopping within these gently drifting tarp walls.

  Moira browses as fast as she dares, forks over the outrageous fee the Xykerin shop keep demands, stuffs her purchase into an available sack and slinks, as surreptitiously as possible, from the clothing kiosk.

  Her errands complete, Moira embarks on the final leg of her crosstown journey toward her ultimate destination – her more comfortable quarters aboard The Unconstant Lover.

  The region reserved for the Lover and all her supplicants is easily the largest, the grand total of Nemo's forces equal in numbers to those of Greatgullet and Charybdis combined. Very much observed as the public face of the Fleet, Nemo's service was therefore substantially more popular than any of the other Captains serving supposedly as his peers and counterparts on the Council.

  His famously lax policy regarding new recruits and their experience, aptitude or criminal record was undeniably the factor to blame, however, for his own armada so outnumbering that of any other flagship. Aju Vog Xah Qaj accepted no underlings, save the odd Xend who wanders too close to her chemical signature. Greatgullet would just as soon smash the pissant wretches Nemo ends up recruiting as enlist them. Vobash only extended his blessing towards established associates and Charybdis' strict military ethos found a potential peon wanting more often than it found them suitable.