“Where is my bouncy ball?” wonders the Captain absently.
Rounding the corner of Qabb 2 or 11 or whichever, the full extent of the ship-to-ship shootout sprawls out, vista-like, before Moira and her Antagonist's eager iron sights. Asteroids, formerly interlocking hunks of Qabb's consummate crust, flood the majority of the view, gamboling and bouncing about. Every few seconds, a pair of them will appear, for all the galaxy, like they're about to titanically crash but they always, always are conspicuously careful never to so much as chafe against each other.
Perhaps twelve of the twenty such passing planetoids contain the landing lights and teltriton tumors that indicate internal mining operations. The most massive depot and the Freebooter Fleet's main focus appears to be Qabb 8. The monstrous chunk of moonlet stays some distance from the circumnavigating Lover and is only distinguishable to Moira by the massive label stenciled onto its currently besieged cargo doors.
Here, at this typically bustling port of mercantile splendor, is where all Nemo's less distractable pirate allies have concentrated the bulk of their assault. The Low-Hanging Fruit and a smattering of other craft claiming more boarders than piloting skills are the primary storm front. An evidently heartbroken Rule of Thumb heads them, consoling herself after The Grasshopper so spurned her advances by stomping aboard Qabb 8 via any accessible airlock and no doubt sparking enough mayhem to compel its staff and defenders to evacuate.
What they don't realize, however, is that evacuation will inevitably land them directly within Vobash's own crosshairs.
The Loose Cannon's coppery hull is complimented beautifully by Ganymede Mel's rendering of Vobash's own colors. The Triomman tools his Hesko Planetary Destroyer in lopsided circles about Qabb 8, likely cackling with unconstrained supervillain glee. His disabler cannons zap and short out any ejector or evacuation vessel the station shoots out before they've cleared half a dottible.
The Dishonorable Discharge, meanwhile, is stuck playing watchdog. Her squadron of suppliant Trijan runaways linger a short distance from the parked cruisers of the otherwise occupied boarding parties. Charybdis and her ilk form the only line of defense between the defenseless craft of her allies and any opportunistic privateers that escape the clutches of the Freebooter Fleet's dozens of irregulars.
This relegated turret duty to Aju Vog Xah Qaj, owner of the most expendable mooks to be literally tossed at the problem, and Nemo himself, owner of the most maneuverable spaceship. The difficulty that Moira'd encountered with assigning duties to Nemo based on his extremely maneuverable spaceship, however, was that maneuverability always came packaged with sidetrackability. Before long, they were zipping around unrelated asteroids, attracting the odd unwanted privateer and arguing about the precise location of mislaid hand tools.
“Who didn't fucking space this trash?” is Odisseus' next accusation.
Nemo is all blissful innocence. “Hm? Which trash?”
From his previous outburst, the Ortok's tone corrects into a scarcely-maintained calm. “I'm standing in the hold and I'm staring at this fucking pile of fucking trash that it's somebody's responsibility to space.”
Nemo's protestation is purely instinctual. “I–”
“I wasn't talking to you,” Odisseus exhorts flatly. The guilty silence he hoped to inspire, the remaining three crewmembers each unwilling to volunteer their voice, arrives. “Did we not have a specific meeting about how he can't be trusted to complete even childishly simple tasks? Did I not specifically say any clambake that doesn't get eaten needs to be spaced immediately?”
“Wait, you guys have meetings?”
“Or it's gonna stink to all the moons?” Odisseus continues, ignoring him. “Well, guess what? Guess where it stinks to?”
A pirate, The Dead Heat, and a privateer, The Horsepower, participate in a perfect tableau of spaceship combat, exchanging cannon fire with picturesque plumes of dramatic ditrogen. Attracting the attention of an idle turret, the Lover's shield dampens in response to the incoming fire before a swooping Xendo starfighter slams into the gun emplacement with a fiery bang. Brash enough to attempt a solo boarding against Qabb 2, the mostly empty hulk of The Sucker Punch is reduced to scorched smithereens by an avenging torpedo.
“So?” Odisseus dangles, true irritation bubbling beneath the surface. “Is anybody gonna cop to this or am I gonna have to hang a blooming chore chart on the chiller from now on?”
The indicator light which specifies Two-Bit's comm channel wavers scarlet a millisecond before Moira's forced to speak, least the squidgy little jabberhead tattle. “I was supposed to,” she admits huskily.
“Uh huh,” the Ortok grunts. “And why didn't you?”
“I forgot.”
“Uh huh,” the Ortok grunts a second time. “If I was mean,” he stipulates, with an Ortoki “oomph” of exertion, “I would make you come climb down here and space this for me yourself.” The sound of clinking bottles and sloshing trash can be heard faintly over the comm. “Luckily for you, I'm not mean.”
“What exactly,” ponders Nemo to everyone or no one, “do these meetings entail?”
Perhaps because of its alternately gorgeous or vexatious habit of catching the sunlight across its sheer surface of reflective solxite, Moira finds her eye more and more drawn towards the blasting blockade of Trijan warships. Processed out unevenly before Qabb 8, Charybdis and her comrades return each ounce of punishment they're delivered with equal fervor.
With The Dubious Honor and The Olive Branch as her two wingmen, each one a junk of smaller and less impressive proportions, The Dishonorable Discharge is the belle of the bottleneck. She dispels the eager advances of anything enemy that dares approach and brandishes her own figurehead proudly across her solxite plating despite the suboptimal effects it may wreak on her system power. A perverse caricature of the Radiant Armada's official colors, Captain Charybdis' Jolly Roger is perhaps the least jolly and most frightening of them all, unshackled from any dependence on skulls or crossbones.
By her own merits, the Discharge is a fascinating piece of nautical engineering, disregarding the piratical additions and disfigurements their deserter of a captain may have supplemented or inflicted upon her.
The Dishonorable Discharge doesn't exactly have a consistent or coherent shape. Instead, she appears as some manner of spaceworthy funhouse mirror trick. Her triangular panes of shimmering solxite each bristle an alternatech weapon from every wingtip. Like omnidirectional sunflowers, each panel is capable of pivoting in whatever direction the sun might be shinning from. The constant pivoting and rearranging to best catch the solar rays is uncomfortably hypnotic to watch, a side effect Moira wonders if the Radiant Armada ever exploits to crash their enemies' spacecraft on account of their squinting pilots.
Together the three ships dance their synchronized dance, thrusters adjusting, wings angling, painting the nearby asteroids with trapezoids of redirected light.
“There,” Odisseus announces, the airlock's drone audible through his speaker. “It's spaced.”
“Sorry, Odi,” mumbles Moira, hoping to mask her apology beneath the all the airlock's clamant commotion.
“Don't be sorry,” he spouts dismissively. “Don't let it happen again.”
“He's talking about the–” Nemo helpfully provides for Two-Bit.
“The rubbish. Yeah, I ord him.”
Unexpected movement, new blackness against the bottomless blackness around them, on the absolute edge of her peripheral vision draws the focus of both Moira and her loyal Antagonist. She whips the weapon ardently around at the potential of a new foe to plaster.
Instead, Moira watches the lumpy, churning and oddly delicate ballet an overfull garbage sack, jettisoned into the weightless expanse of interstellar space. The laughably graceful dance is performed to an ignoring audience of spaceships too concerned with their own death or destruction to pay much attention.
This obliviousness is key to the downfall of The Underdog, a privateer gunboat content to simply bustle by an
d receive a viewport's worth of splattered garbage for their hubris. With black plastosealant and spoiled clambake obscuring their view, the swerving gunboat seems to lack sufficient time to consult their instruments. Instead, The Underdog recruits promising pirates, privateers and even one available asteroid into a snowballing, no-holds-barred explosion extravaganza on the opposite side of the fleet action.
“Two-Bit?” poses Odisseus, the corresponding light from the engine room igniting on Moira's comm panel.
“Yes?”
“Am I blasted or can you, more or less, understand what I'm saying?”
Nemo's thickheadedness knows no limit. “He wants to know if you can–”
More's to Two-Bit's credit that he simply ignores the prick. “More or less, I hink,” he agrees tentatively. “Half of the shit you jabb,” he's quick to disillusion, “I still can't specc, but it's enough, at this point, that even I can pick up the bloody pieces.”
“Bloom me out,” Odisseus appreciates, “and color me impressed.”
“How'd you manage that?” wonders a mystified Nemo.
“Keeping me ears open, wasn't I?” Two-Bit, somewhat annoyed, supplies. “Weren't habby, jabb you what, being the only bloomhole on this boat what hanked everything to be translated for him.”
“And?” Moira adds suggestively.
“And that reader Moira cadged me,” Two-Bit amends, moments later. “That helped some.”
The primary reason the score of asteroid fragments collectively known as Qabb refrain from either drifting aimlessly away or, conversely, from knocking and rocking against each other passes some small distance beneath The Unconstant Lover – Qabb 1.
Qabb 1 is the most centrally-located planetoid, sprouting a thicket of gunmetal gray outcroppings, oddments and impedimenta in every which direction. According to Two-Bit, the installation houses some fancy piece of technical wonder called a gravitational field generator. The mottible wide contraption was several million credits too expensive for the average planetary government to even consider purchasing and precisely the tool necessary to grasp the shattered remains of a planet together with redoubtable pull. Transponders, presumably installed deep within the core of the nineteen other asteroids, allow Qabb 1 to conduct and coordinate the traffic of each mining depot with maximum possible efficiency.
This, of course, was all assuming any troublemakers, armed with supercharged Antagonists, magazines of plumb torpedos and an empty afternoon, were nowhere to be found.
“Guess that completes the transformation into one big happy family,” Nemo comments, devoid of any trace of actual sentimentality. “Remind me,” he beseeches suddenly, “Moira, when'd you learn?”
Moira prefers not to boast. “Pretty much immediately. Purchased that book my second week aboard.”
“I don't remember,” ponders the Captain absently, “how long I took.”
“I remember,” Odisseus weighs in, “you were total crap until age eight.”
“Shit's hard, though,” Nemo carps. “Right?”
“Ain't eight years hard,” opines Two-Bit quietly.
Abraham shares none of Moira's modesty. “Why, I'd the whole thing near mastered in close on two months.”
“You came aboard fluent, though,” Moira points out, “didn't you?”
“Near enough,” Abraham confirms. “Knew a fine Ortoki deckhand on Cterka, way back in the day. Picked up the tongue from her, mostly. Necessity of the work environment.”
“Cterka?” Nemo repeats. “Do you know anybody on–”
“Because we all know each other,” Odisseus responds with genuine spite, “we all share the same sewing–” His voice suddenly breaks off, radio silence and static filling the gap left by his unfinished sentence. “Found it.”
“Your neticgrappler?” Nemo returns. “Where?”
It's the Ortok's turn to mumble an embarrassed truth. “In the engine room.”
Moira lacks any intimate knowledge of the field generator's inner workings or vulnerabilities, especially considering the dressing-down Vobash preemptively gave Nemo about not meddling with the device, at the cost of the prize ships in system.
Trial-and-error, then, becomes her best bet on how best, precisely, to puncture the field generator's ray shielding. She only bobs and bruises the projection with concentrated bursts from her Antagonist.
Nemo, meanwhile, encounters no such difficulties. He presses unrelenting on the torpedo button and his sporadic projectiles pass by unscathed, with a mere shiver of the shield by way of reaction, towards various sections of the asteroid-come-gravitational anchor.
They fly a perfect pair of perimeter-length flights around Qabb 1, lobbing off torpedo after torpedo at what Nemo must deem to be either structurally relevant targets or appropriately dramatic moments. This treatment appears to be precisely the correct medicine to reduce the satellite to splinters. A shower of flame, shrapnel and smoke bursts outward from each detonating point of contact the torpedos enforce.
A nebula of dust, debris and rubble is all that remains where once floated the beating heart that kept all of Qabb's disparate elements from crashing into each other. The Unconstant Lover, the shamelessly guilty party, jets back into the thick of the fray, its captain and crew keeping eyes peeled for any more mischief they can conceivably spark.
Two-Bit Switch considers himself something of a pioneer in the field of pizza toppings. While quite content with the traditional schools of thought – pepperoni, olives, sausage and every other stable of the genre – Two-Bit holds a special chamber of his heart for the more outlandish and unthinkable examples, the outliers and novelties at even the most obscure pizza parlors.
He's sampled fried egg atop pizza, he's sampled peanut butter atop pizza, he's even sampled banana slices atop pizza. His objection to more anchovies, therefore, doesn't come on culinary grounds. His objections are aimed more towards the sheer monotony of ordering the very same toppings atop each pizza the crew splits, as dictated by an addicted Ortok.
“Say something in Ortoki, then,” commands a chewing Nemo, either to his partial slice of anchovy-speckled pizza or to the table in general.
Odisseus' reply, “I say everything in Ortoki,” is issued between chomping bites, his fangs flush with cheese, sauce and shredded fish.
“No,” Nemo swallows. “You.” He inches his chin towards Two-Bit in a gesture of indication. “You say something in Ortoki.”
“Me?” Two-Bit scoffs and motions bewilderingly with his pinched napkin. “Bloom me out. I can't jabb any. Moons,” he remarks, “me gargler weren't exactly constructed for that, were it?”
“That's the trick, isn't it?” Nemo nods appraisingly. “Bloom knows I tried, you know, when we were tots. Could never quite get the hang.”
Odisseus nearly expectorates a mouthful of masticated dough and dairy across all the rest of their own meals, his snort is so intense. Composing himself, he manages to chortle out “couldn't get the hang of it” and a blunt “sure” before returning to the pressing task of his next slice.
They encircle a formidable stack of telltale red-and-white boxes from Nanosecond Pizza – some open, some still shut, all visibly stained from grease, crinkled by captured steam and reeking of baked anchovies. The mess hall of The Unconstant Lover is, for a few hours, mercifully devoid of corsair conscripts, queuing up to pledge allegiance to Nemo's flag.
Tonight, the ship is populated by only her original crew, each occupying their traditional seats around the scraped, scuffed and scarred veteran that's served as their primary dining table all these meals.
Odisseus, as ever, reigns supreme over the rations outlaid before him, consuming more than twice any other two crewmembers combined, not even counting Moira's proffered anchovies. Abraham abstains, eyeing the greasy smorgasbord his companions enjoy with evident suspicion and clutching his tankard close to his sternum like some manner of alcoholic security blanket. Her anchovies sacrificed to appease the bestial hunger of Odisseus, Moira is the most distracted by the hol
ovision, her bounty hunting instincts flicking to life with each new movement originating in the general direction of the chamber's only exit. Nemo, as per his prerogative, controls the remote control, dual-wielding this awesome responsibility with a slice of pizza in his opposite hand whose cheese is seconds away from slumping to the floor.
Two-Bit, as is his own prerogative, guards the single order of breadsticks with fierce determination. In order to deny any of his supposed allies access to the armada of dipping sauces he's accrued, he mixes them all together into a sludge-colored mess which only he could possibly stomach.
At present, the holovision advertises a new line of allegedly unisex facial razors, seemingly marketed towards sentients covered head-to-toe with “shaggy, difficult to maintain pelts” and whose spokesperson is a comically masculine female Braaca. Two-Bit's not only unfamiliar with the product or its brand, but is zottibles outside its intended demographic. The intended demographic, rending fast food between his powerful jaws, isn't actually facing the proper direction to even be advertised at.
“There was one word,” Nemo reminisces with sudden wistfulness, “that I could get the hang of.” Clearing his throat to banish any pizza residue in preparation for the coming proclamation, Nemo proceeds to “pronounce” this Ortoki chestnut, a monosyllabic glottal sound that Two-Bit nearly mistook for more throat clearing.
Endeavoring his best to recreate the uttered sound within his own ill-equipped windpipe, Two-Bit slaps a question mark and an uplifted tone to the word's end and presents it, questioningly, to the table. “What's it mean?”
Unthinking Odisseus, too absorbed by the very vital devouring of his pizza, “translates,” seemingly unaware that all he's done is repeat the word for now a third time.
“Helpful,” Two-Bit appreciates with a nod and an end torn from his breadstick.
“Lemonade,” provide both Moira and Abraham unanimously a second later, the former's attention still pointed towards the Braaca and her cleanly-trimmed fuzz, the latter combining the explanation with a thankful gasp after a drag of moonshine.
Galactic Menace Page 42
