Admiral Tynd and his crew of forty-thousand odd officers, technicians and gunnery sergeantts are, despite being privy to Nemo's rather public war council, fatally unable to avert the disaster the Captain's spelled out for them and their capital ship.
The starboard-side shield projector, snuggled beneath the Pylon's massive attitude fin, is the first destroyed, its fate delivered by a precisely dispatched Xendo divebomber.
The aft-side shield projector, a blip beneath the unapproachable host of the Preemptive Strike's bank of blazing engagement boosters, is the second to go, the victim of a cunningly-aimed cluster of Carnage homing torpedos.
The prow-side shield projector, whose counterpart upon the Counterattack Moira first mowed down beneath an expensive wave of wasted gunfire, is neatly dispatched by a volley or two of damning disabler fire.
The port-side shield projector is consumed in a sphere of sacrificial fire as a downed pirate freighter, the valiant Living Daylights, trailed a thickening smoke trail from its kaput thrusters directly into the final remaining projector.
With some spastic fluttering to signal its ultimate demise, the mottibles-long and yard-deep ray shield enshrouding the whole of the Preemptive Strike summarily shorts out and disappears.
While her quadroturret batteries still discharge nobly and her Spurs still strafe where they can, Two-Bit Switch watches the crosshairs of every pirate weapon, every disabler, every torpedo launcher and every laser turret, settle upon the forlorn Pylon. Once so impregnable, the Preemptive Strike appears now to be merely a target so large, the broad side of a barn would appear microscopic by comparison. Zipping around the starboard quarter on their first complete rotation, Two-Bit doesn't doubt Moira's about to gleefully join in the fun, Antagonist aimed at any exposed stretch of hull they pass.
The identity of the spaceship responsible for firing that first fateful shot would eventually come to be a matter of some prestige, debate and subsequent argument between the victorious survivors of the Freebooter Fleet. Even from his front seat, Two-Bit Switch couldn't tell who'd collectively cued the barrage of laserfire that fell upon the Preemptive Strike.
Following that silent cue, thousands of unanimous bolts fire from thousands of barrels. At first, they score only superficial damage against the facade of the Pylon's impressive hull. As the cannonade wears on, however, each fired canister collides with successively more and more destruction, eventually inspiring a terrific chain reaction of internal explosions within the Strike itself.
Before the eyes of the astonished Freebooter Fleet, the invincible flagship of the Imperial Interstellar Navy, the Preemptive Strike, gradually succumbs to the oppressive onslaught of their combined fire. Ravaged by extensive interior damage, the ship seizes once, twice, three times with wayward power surges that range up and down the Pylon's entire chassis.
With that, the Preemptive Strike falls utterly lifeless, hanging dead in orbit.
Odisseus would give anything for a swim. A marine mammal so long denied access to any body of water large enough to comfortably accommodate him, the Ortok theorizes that his mood, demeanor and general outlook dampens with each passing day that he does not indulge his aquatic tendencies.
The arid landscape of Talos II, however, likely doesn't contain one thimble's worth of surface moisture and therefore cannot provide him any viable venue for an evening dip. No one currently seated among the Council of Captains, Odisseus is forced to assume, have taken a page from Boss Ott's playbook and hidden a swimming pool either aboard their spaceships or deep within their pockets.
He'd likely be considered rude or at least impertinent for asking, anyway.
Pirateton post-Pylon is a severely changed place. Very nearly two-thirds of the city's forces were scuttled before the Preemptive Strike could be. While fresh meat continues to trickle in as ever, the city's outskirts have shrunk commensurably.
Those who remain, the lucky few, huddle around the sheltering shadow of the crash's main cruiser. They universally display their injuries, wounds and disfigurements, earned in battles both airborne and landside.
The Preemptive Strike itself is a scar against the skyline. Trapped powerless in Talos II's high orbit and visible only as a band of black discoloration, the Pylon is a memorial hung above Pirateton for all fallen freebooters and an ever-present reminder of the Endless Imperium's naval might.
Despite the 4th Fleet's disastrous underestimating of the Freebooter Fleet, none of Pirateton's citizens celebrate a victory, necessarily. The knowledge that another such fleet cannot be more than days or weeks behind is a sticking point in every mind.
The Council of Captains convened purely out of habit. Each took a much-needed reprieve from the rigors of repairing their heavily-damaged flagships, ostensibly to discuss the next of the three remaining ports along the Valladian Shipping Line.
No discussion, as of yet, had actually occurred.
The ignored strategic imager brandishes a repeating loop of technical specs of Qabb 8, the target previously agreed-upon, and supplies the majority of the chamber's light. Silent as the fading sunset, the five Captains of the Freebooter Fleet, including an especially morose Nemo, stare into the middle distance and ponder their individual mortality.
Morale, needless to say, is low. Should one be provided him, the parched Ortok would solve this problem with a refreshing swim. Two-Bit Switch, the true power behind the throne, stumbled out only moments earlier, mumbling something about needing quiet to think properly, despite to the Council chamber's pin-dropping silence.
It comes as a shock, then, when, less than a minute after he's despondently departed, Two-Bit Switch should come hustling back into the council chamber, with a sudden and unheralded spring in his step. A tad breathless, he scans over the table's listless occupants with an expectant eye. He settles on Nemo and actually sprouts a mischievous smile as he recommends. “You oughta come vizz at this.”
Mistrust and malaise are the primary motivation for the other Captains' hesitancy. Nemo, to whom trusting in Two-Bit's expertise was directly responsible for his crown, knows enough to stand, beckon Odisseus with a motion of the head and follow his mastermind outside.
Stepping into the monochrome purple of a Talos II sunset, they discover only Two-Bit Switch, standing with the city's constituent spaceships silhouetted behind him and both his arms spreadeagled in a gesture of display. It takes Odisseus an agonizingly long moment to comprehend just what in all the moons the jabberhead's referring to.
“Vizz anything you fancy?”
The Ortok's piss poor eyesight his everlasting nemesis, Odisseus is forced to stagger forward through the sand toward the prow of the nearest indicated spaceship to bring anything significant into focus.
A painting is what he eventually apprehends, after much squinting and scowling in the dim light. Freshly splattered in quick-dry fractal paint across the teltriton canvas of the boat's broad brow is a familiar image rendered in a familiar style.
With its flowery fringe and liberal use of contrasting colors, the graffiti that decorates the BB627 Mermaid's nose would blend seamlessly into the panoramic mural encasing The Heaven Spot or, for that matter, any other mural painted by Ganymede Mel, mythical ship-tagger.
The image represented, however – a Powosi skull, its three eyes grimacing outward from atop its perch of crossed firearms – is unmistakably The Unconstant Lover's Jolly Roger, albeit a highly stylized interpretation thereof.
The ship in question is The Run Amok, a Starlight Inc. Mermaid captained by Captain Meric Eyer, both a solid earner under Nemo's colors and a celebrated survivor of the battle above Talos. Eyer could easily and ordinarily count this marking as an inscrutable boon, inspired by whatever arcane qualifications that inspired Ganymede Mel to deface anything, for the remainder of his career, a cut that much above the galaxy's criminal dross.
To judge by the reaction Nemo wears considering the stern of a spaceship two spaces over, however, The Run Amok may not have been chosen at random.
“All of
them?” questions Nemo over his shoulder, his tone decidedly neutral.
“All of them I vizzed,” Two-Bit confesses, not bothering to hide his excitement. “It's feez I missed a few blowbags weren't as rangu as we.”
Odisseus pricks his whiskers. “We?”
Two-Bit divines Odisseus' monosyllabic question. “Shall we find out?” he proposes, with evident intent to investigate anyway.
Nemo, portraying his role as final arbiter with stark emotionlessness, nods his consent.
In the tumultuous scramble to the moon's surface following the Pylon's defeat, the boundaries between the previously stratified neighborhoods blurred significantly. On a footpath that would once have taken him through Lover territory exclusively, Odisseus spies surviving spacecraft leal to Greatgullet, Vobash, Charybdis and even Aju Vog Xah Qaj. To a ship, each one bears a skull-and-crossbones sigil that corresponds to those of the relevant Captain and correlates with Ganymede Mel's overarching theme.
Even the Lover's particular Jolly Rogers that he spots, plastered onto the mismatched hulls of Nemo's sworn spacers, are all subtly divergent from each other in design, outline and especially color. Each and every pirate prow that Odisseus, his Captain and his crewmate pass bears some exquisite piece of nose art, a tribal thumbprint unique both to each allegiance and each individual, applied by the galaxy's most legendary and most mysterious artisan.
Pirateton's shortened streets, now girded by host of grinning skulls and heraldic weaponry, deliver them to the extended boarding ramp of The Unconstant Lover much sooner than they might have even days before. After some loping about between her landing feet, the newly-christened helm is located and admired in stunned silence by the three pirates.
Whether the other four flagships received such ritzy treatment, Two-Bit seems uncertain, but the mural adorning the Lover's famously dented nose puts all Ganymede Mel's lesser graffiti slumming across all the adjacent ships to shame.
Embellished to the extreme, the Jolly Roger and its artsy tendrils encompass the Briza's entire bow. The Powosi's three eyeholes are perfectly proportioned to accommodate the viewport and the torpedo launcher is fitted perfectly into the negative space between the hammers of both pistols. Requiring twenty paces backward to thoroughly appreciate, the ship-spanning spectacle, at turns, incorporates and rejects the Lover's previous excuse for a paint coat, that stale urine hue it's held since long before Odisseus' tenure aboard.
This is, paws down, the single most welcome addition to the dumpy little freighter the Ortok's ever approved of, hypercomm projection pad, strategic imager and regenerative shield mainframe be bloomed.
With Odisseus struck speechless and Two-Bit approaching tears, it's Nemo who reserves the right to next speak. “Nobody saw anything, I assume.”
Two-Bit clears his throat. “I didn't vizz nothing. Whole burg were shushed up. Somebody else maybe vizzed something,” he adds with a sudden sniff and a glance around. “I don't know.” His gaze falls once again on his Captain's back. “What do you hink it's s'pposed to mean?”
Rather than brooding upon an answer for a dramatically appropriate amount of time, Nemo's reply comes almost instantaneously with Two-Bit's question. “It's a stamp of approval.” His weight shifts and he's suddenly facing them both again, his partially-dissolved duster snapping in the wind and his mouth as unflinching as the horizon beyond. “It's a vote of confidence.” Something resembling a smile, a crooked curve to the further most corner of the Captain's mouth, appears unbidden on Nemo's face.
“It's a challenge.”
Chapter 20
Moira Quicksilver admires the artistry of Ganymede Mel all the more in the semi-direct sunlight of the Qabb Cluster. She's reminded of the shiptagger's genius whenever another member of the Freebooter Fleet, rather than an asteroid or a privateer, chances to flit past the topturret. From her perch atop The Unconstant Lover, Moira gazes with the aforementioned admiration at each figurehead, depicting Vobash's or Aju Vog Xah Qaj's or Greatgullet's Jolly Roger, blossoming upon the buccaneer's brow.
The outer fringes of the Lover's own masterpiece Moira can only see whenever her target, be they turret or privateer, is obliging enough to point her Antagonist forward.
Once upon a time, the densely-packed cloud of spinning space rocks that constitute the Qabb Cluster was known simply as Qabb and known to be a single, remarkably solid planet. Today, scores of face-painted spaceships lay waste to everything in sight, an alliance of kindergarteners attempting to ransack the county fair's cotton candy booth.
Following Ganymede Mel's mysteriously and exhaustively accomplished vandalism, the Qabb Cluster became the next target for Nemo's undeserved scorn.
Qabb 8 is allegedly the primary target for the Freebooter Fleet's seventh such assault. In preparation for the Fleet's arrival, however, Valladian Shipping had thoughtfully installed a myriad of anti-aircraft turrets on each and every specimen among the twenty some spinning planetoids that jockey about Qabb's airspace. Equally thoughtfully, they'd pumped the system so full of their remaining privateer reserves, one couldn't fly a fifth of a dottible before rubbing shoulders with The Snakebite, The Nevermore, The Tenterhooks or half a hundred other preposterous privateer names.
“Well,” comes Nemo's moderating voice over the comm, “do you remember the last place you left it?”
“If I remembered the last place I left it,” returns Odisseus' pained growl over the comm, “it would blooming be in my blooming paws by now, would it not?”
“Then,” Two-Bit's voice offers, “where's the last place you ain't blanked on havin' it?”
“Gee, where was the last place I remember using my neticgrappler?” Odisseus ponders, his voice redolent with bitter sarcasm. “Could it be...the engine room?”
As a matter of course, Nemo's immune. “Maybe you should check the engine–”
“The engine room was first fucking place I checked!”
“He said,” Nemo begins the by rote translation for Two-Bit's benefit, “the engine room was–”
“Pretty sure I understood that,” Two-Bit voices meekly.
The Captain steers his newly painted paramour around the most adjacent asteroid, Qabb 19 or 5 or 15, Moira really can't keep track. As he does, stray laserfire, the handiwork of some passing turret or some dogged privateer, pricks and pokes against The Unconstant Lover's famously fluctuating ray shield. On habit, Moira pivots the topturret's gyroscopic rig about to best compliment the attacker's trajectory and achieves visual contact with the guilty party.
Some TFS corvette, the privateer displays the dubious title of The Grasshopper. It also displays the dubious honor of limping away from The Rule of Thumb's attempted boarding action, her port side practically ripped unevenly off but evidently unbothered by the large portions of their spacecraft simply missing. Whenever the interruptive hunks of asteroid grant her a chance, The Grasshopper lobs a few bolts toward the Lover, the broadside equivalent of tapping the Briza obnoxiously on the shoulder.
“You know what I think?” Nemo confides to Two-Bit, perfectly audible on the comm. “I think it's the tool belt.” There's a pause, long enough to indicate that Two-Bit doesn't follow the Captain's meaning. “The tool belt that he wears every-damn-where? Ten to one, he didn't wear that thing about, he wouldn't be losing his tools left and blooming right.”
“'acourse,” points out a pondering Abraham, “then he'd be naked.”
“Wasn't he already?” Nemo's quick to counter. “There's also always my sweaters.”
“As though you're any different,” Moira opines bitterly, her teeth rattling from the exertion of the Antagonist unleashing hell at the occasional snatches of visible Grasshopper.
“I am wearing all my own clothing, thank you,” Nemo states defiantly. “Today.”
“You're the one,” Moira reiterates, “with the nasty habit of picking up and fiddling with whatever you find lying around.” She ceases her shooting and her conversation a second, while the corvette disappears from view, only to in
itiative hostilities and haranguing again a second later when her target rematerializes. “You'll carry the thing through three or four separate rooms–”
“I don't know what–”
“–eventually abandoning it at some completely illogical new location when you discover something more interesting–”
“Based on what–”
“–and then spend hours whinging and moaning because you've somehow lost the first thing.”
His two previous attempts to interject dismal failures, Nemo awaits a period of time after Moira's made her point to disavow her opinion. “All of that's hearsay.”
“Where's your bouncy ball?”
The next pause is of an impressive length.
To judge from the Lover's suddenly unsure handling, the Captain no doubt attempts to juggle the yoke and a confused jacket pat-down. Somehow, his quarter-of-a-credit bouncy ball eludes him, the one purchased from the gumball machine placed outside the Talos Warp Gate Junction to ensnare children and pirate captains with more change than brains.
“You know,” Odisseus pipes in, moments later, “that I'm still on comm, right?”
In addition to piloting the spaceship and searching for his missing bouncy ball, Nemo attempts to multitask still further with translation too. “He said 'you know that–'”
“I actually understood that one, too,” Two-Bit opines quietly.
“Oh, yeah? Good on you,” Nemo congratulates, earnestly surprised
Moira's attempts to rub supercharged salt in The Grasshopper's wounds is subsequently successful. The corvette's port side bulkheads buckle and blacken in response to her contained fire bursts. With a string of interior explosions, the frantically sealed doorways serving as The Grasshopper's makeshift airlocks give way and proceed to spew scrap metal and crewmen wildly into open space and onto the jagged surface of the nearby asteroid.
Fatally unbalanced, the corvette lists drunkenly aside and, like The Arrowhead before her, mets her fiery end by colliding with an unrelentingly amount of ice and rock.
Galactic Menace Page 41
