“Stay together to attack more fucking places, steal more fucking shit.”
“Right. I guess I thought,” Garrock supposes, suddenly on the defensive, “Valladia was the original hook, though, wasn't it? Valladia's all but sunk now.”
“Plentya pockets in the crowd,” invokes Nemo, the old cutpurse's maxim. “It ain't like there's a dearth of rich ports in the Outer Ring, or fuck, the Midworlds, to knock over.
“Midworlds?” Garrock spits. “You think this Fleet of yours would back a play against the Imperium? After all that 4th Fleet nonsense?”
The ever-predictable Nemo, of course, can't be bothered to even notice Garrock's surprise. “Depends on where,” he murmurs, before adding calculatingly first, then with a smirk. “Greatgullet would. Gertrude would.”
With Nemo lost in thought, Garrock Brondi's eyes flick unconsciously about, seeking any trace of a hidden Quicksilver and an ensuing ambush, he cannot believe his luck so much.
Where bounty hunters, broadside batteries and bad press had all failed to shatter Nemo and his Freebooter Fleet, Xo's outside chance, their last great hope, instead appealed heavily to the Galactic Menace's bravado, to his intrinsic nature as a natural born showoff.
As far as Garrock could understand Xo's conniving thought process, the original conceit was to provoke the Freebooters into attacking a target they couldn't possibly best and watch them bash themselves and their Fleet to smithereens in the process. Brondi's task, then, came down to a simple enough matter of pointing Nemo onto the correct warpath and allowing him the freedom to self-sabotage into destruction.
At its core, the plan preyed upon a pirate's profound sense of disproportion between eyes and stomach. Frankly, to Brondi's estimation, this was half-likely to occur anyway, with or without any extra prompting from Huong Xo.
It was this point, that his role as instigator and catalyst may be merely more fait accompli, that initially attracted Garrock to the position. The enormous paycheck, the opportunity to work more directly with Xo and the chance to participate, however insignificantly, in the obliteration of all things Nehel Morel certainly didn't hurt much either.
As a rule, Brondi's opportunist's eye was always on the hunt for a job practically complete which, for a nominal fee, he could nudge over that all-important edge. When push came to shove, however, Garrock simply hadn't anticipated that the whole thing would be so blooming easy.
“Big talk,” the smuggler offers, at last, “but there's no way you keep that rabble from masturbating over their money long enough to even–“
“What about Trija?” Nemo suggests all of a sudden.
“Well,” Garrock discovers himself saying, “it certainly would be unexpected.”
“Yeah. It would. Yeah.” Nemo sits and simmers in his own budding self-satisfaction. It takes all of Garrock's concentration to keep his jaw from literally dropping.
His instructions suggested that, in accordance with Nemo's previous patterns of behavior, nudging the Menace towards an industrial Imperium target, one Huong Xo could conceivably tip off, bore the greatest chance of success. They'd mentioned precisely nothing about strikes against mighty yet unrelated fourth parties, such as the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija.
Their own defensive fleet of starships was undefeated across all of galactic history. Their solar power was legendarily limitless. Their military complex was so rigidly xenophobic, it prohibited any diplomatic or mercantile relations with non-Trijans.
Garrock Brondi, open to improvisation, imagines Trija would do just fine.
“I call buhoxshit,” Garrock scoffs. “Pissant privateers are one thing. The 4th Fleet is one thing. The Radiant Armada? Something fucking else.”
“I mean,” scoffs Nemo back, “fucking how? They're one system, with one navy, with one commander. There's no blooming way systematically sacking ten predictable ports is easier than a surprise attack against one.”
Garrock allows a sliver of honest anger to shine through. “Before, you were talking about an underfunded defense budget spread comically thin across ten, largely indefensible points. Now, you're talking about an unchallenged dictatorship singlemindedly devoted to the defense of one planet.” He reclines fully backwards, beside himself with the task's supposed impossibility. “Imperium's been trying for centuries to frag Trija outta pure spite. An Imperium richer, smarter and better armed than you.”
During Garrock's entire monologue, a grin, the lascivious smile of a career iconoclast presented with something sacred to smash, grows across the Galactic Menace's face. As the smuggler nears the end of his speech, it becomes increasingly clear that Nemo's got his response all picked out.
“You saying I can't do it?”
Garrock chooses the specific words of his riposte very carefully. “I'm betting you can't.”
“How much?
“How much?” Garrock's heart skips a beat. “An actual bet? You're blasted.”
“I'm the Galactic Menace and I get what I blooming want.” Now it's Nemo who reclines comfortably back, drunk on his alleged ability in all things impossible. “How much will you bet me the Freebooter Fleet can't put even Trija to the torch?”
“What're we, moons-damned teenagers again?”
Nemo's smile becomes that much more condescending and abrasive. “If we were teenagers again, you'd remember betting anything against me's a pretty bad idea.”
“A million,” Garrock spits.
“A million?” Nemo chuckles with earnest surprise and adjusts his posture again. “Bloom me out, but you've got stones these days, Brondi. Have you the money, though, is the question.”
He didn't and wouldn't until Xo signed on the dotted. This arrogant cocksucker wasn't going to survive long enough to find that out, though, so bloom him. “Have you not?”
The Menace extends a suitably menacing hand. “A million on me sacking Trija.”
Garrock strains halfway across the table to take his hand in the shake. “A million on you not.”
With that, the compact is made and Garrock's work here is done. That hell-bent gleam to Nemo's eye promises that he'll, in some short order, hurl himself and all his freebooting resources against the Supreme Sovereignty until either their homeworld is sacked or he's reduced to ash.
Whether the Fleet meets with success or defeat, however, makes zero difference to Garrock, particularly since he had no intention of honoring his word to Nemo, noted ignoble and all-around asshole.
Reclaiming Garrock's untouched Backwash, Nemo rises to crick out his back. “Soon as the thing's done,” he predicates, “meet me on Thuwo Minor. And bring my money.”
“See you when I see you,” Garrock salutes grimly with the head of his cane.
Nemo chews the cryptic sendoff a few seconds. One hand occupied with a full tankard of booze, he draws his firearm.
The shot he scores is a minor injury, barely a flesh wound. The sheer shock and pain of a canister so startlingly delivered causes Garrock to convulse from impact and flop backward against the booth like a flummoxed fish.
His shoulder smokes. The concert squeals to a halt at the sound. His pride suffers a wound ten times more grievous than his shoulder does. The crowd screams approval of their Galactic Menace and his murderous actions as he retires back to the bar.
The second canister Nehel Morel ever surprised Garrock Brondi with he vows to make his last.
Moira Quicksilver's off drunk some fucking place, who knows.
The sensations she was actively aware of were numbered fewer than the fingers on her left hand and they amounted, quite simply, to these.
She was drunk, possibly drunker than she'd ever been in her entire life.
Skirts made the simple act of sitting down an art form far too extrinsic and zen for someone as intoxicated as Moira was to master.
No one – man, monster or machine – could force her to enter The Bloody Afterburn if she damn well didn't want to.
The drunkenness had come somewhat swiftly following the drinking of a bottl
e and a half of Gitterswitch Gin. When precisely she'd consumed this much alcohol, she wasn't sure. It was certainly at some point, however nebulous, between their well-publicized lunch at Shellshucker and her sudden appearance in this roach-populated alleyway.
Seemingly in imitation of its owner, her memory remained a mutinous little bitch. The rest of her brain seemed only capable of leap-frogging from individual second to individual second.
Tonight, she could surmise, alcohol came in no short supply. It was pushed into her palms with great regularity, doubtlessly the origin of this partially-full bottle and its empty cousin somewhere round about her booted feet.
The skirt she'd actually purchased while sober – a black denim affair that'd caught her eye during a particularly whimsical mood one afternoon in Pirateton. Frankly, she'd assumed wearing something this unabashedly feminine would inspire more uproar or confusion in her companions. Somewhat to her chagrin, they seemed hardly to notice.
Sure, the skirt was worn over black leggings. Sure, they were precisely no less revealing than the sheer black slacks she normally wore. Nevertheless, a more sober Moira would be lying had she claimed she hadn't worn the skirt mostly to provoke a reaction of some kind from her mates or the masses, neither of whom seemed to give much of a shit.
Her drinking venue she considers the evening's greatest masterstroke. The slime-stained back alley only adjoins The Bloody Afterburn by its perpetually ajar back door. Its abundance of piss-smelling garbage cans, spilled bottles of steak sauce and nations of virulent Akuddi roaches, appear as pleasant décor in Moira's current mood.
The mental philosophy behind the decision to relocate back here remained unflappable, even amid her drunken stupor. Without fail, whenever the tip of Moira's jackboot inched over the threshold of The Bloody Afterburn, she caught a nonlethal canister at some point in the immediate future. Best way to ensure she avoids this karmic comeuppance, therefore, was simply to refuse to enter the accursed Afterburn, even should the majority of the festivities be hosted there.
Certainly, the seating arrangements back here were universally and unaccountably wet. The company, occasional vagrants and frequent vomiters, was less than the desirable. The not-getting-shot factor, though, was, thus far, incredible.
Apart from Gitterswitch dregs and scuttling roaches, the only company she currently keeps consists of a chatty orangeskin. Perhaps rightly, he deigns conversation with Moira to instead converse mutteringly with a slice of pizza clinging to the Afterburn's back wall by the combined force of inertia and cheese. Also in attendance, though somewhat less attentive, is the Ikaardi carcass. The most recent arrival, Moira watched the corpse, freshly-minted within the Afterburn's walls, hurled into the shallow non-grave of the alley.
Combined with applause, firearms and Cosmic Vomit, the irrepressible din and disorder one comes to expect from a typical Takioro carousal is multiplied by a magnitude of ten. The only other activities within the The Bloody Afterburn she was even dimly aware of were from what few glimpses she caught through the open doorway.
Frequently, a silhouette or a stage light would darken or illuminate said doorway, both blinding Moira for a split second to what's transpiring within. The one sight she does catch regular sight of, the one that raises her inebriated ire the most, is undoubtably that of Gertie Guspatch and her blatant lack of pants.
The unscrupulous captain of The Dick Magnet evidently borrowed someone's overlarge shirt which she, in her inimitable way, wore exclusively, like an exceedingly short dress. How, precisely, among so many horny drunkards, she managed to dissuade all the boozy or violent advances thrown her way, Moira didn't know.
What she did know was, were Nemo to stumble shirtless up The Unconstant Lover's ramp tomorrow morning, Moira may be required to choke a bitch.
As Moira begins to entertain this notion, Nemo actually appears quite unexpectedly, his shirt disheveled, but in place. Limned by the kaleidoscope of Cosmic Vomit's colored lights, he blunders through the Afterburn's side entrance and into the alley with no more grace than she would expect from her own severely sauced self.
“I brought you a drink,” he declares, eyes unfocused, speech slurred to an extent she's never seen in even him, celebrated inebriate.
His clothing cling to his body via sweat and sheer stubbornness, all the traditional methods unfastened, as though someone attempted to undress him vehemently and at speed. Even standing still, he wavers this way and that, the effects of Gitterswitch playing very similar tricks on both of their equilibriums.
As advertised, he clutches one tankard precariously in each hand. The left tankard is definitively empty while the right tankard, seemingly Moira's, is definitively overflowing. The organgish swill within betrays the concoction as none other than the station-famous Bile Backwash of song and story.
She adjusts her posture to address him. “You bought me a drink?” she stammers, surprised at her own slurring and the sudden uncorking of the world around her.
“Two-Bit bought you a drink,” he struggles to string together. “I brought you a drink.” His scowl conveys mighty and profound concentration. “That is the distinction.”
“Need a place to sit?” proposes Moira, with as steady and consistent a gesture as she can manage toward an adjacent trashcan lid. The brown stain across the lid's surface Moira, an eyewitness to the act, remembers too late is the now-congealed beer shit of an unspeaking Lriss who joined her atop the garbage pails only long enough to void his bowels.
Without any suitable objection, Nemo crosses the distance between doorway and dustbin and squishes into the Lriss's vacated seat to Moira's immediate right. Once there, he settles wetly into the sodden throne appointed him and hands off the still-steaming mug to Moira. “Enjoy.”
An intoxication this thorough is all that's required to drive Moira to actually drink a Bile Backwash. She accepts the gift greedily and gulps away with gusto.
Her face promptly goes numb. For a moment, she's blissfully and bewilderingly underwater, the outlines of the trash, the alleyway and her drinking buddy swirling together like chocochino froth.
When clarity comes back to her in a sudden stab, Moira, a momentary clairvoyant, notices something about her Captain that three years serving aboard his spaceship somehow hid from her.
“That a tattoo?”
His posture, doubled-over and considering the dry depths of his own tankard, is all that makes the marking visible. Two inky black strands snake their way down the Captain's neck and disappear past the rim of his duster jacket. Not a trick of the light, the marks are certainly dyed on the skin and also certainly rendered invisible ninety percent of the time by their location at the well-shrouded intersection of Nemo's raised collar and shaggy black hair.
“There. That,” Moira extends a shaky point. “On your neck. That really a tattoo?”
In reaction, Nemo barely glances aside, neither of his ashen eyes visible beneath strands of his sweaty hair, and declines to comment further.
“Since when've,” Moira continues, undiscouraged, “you had a tattoo? Looks fucking fresh.”
In contrast to the wispy, teenaged indulgences that adorn all the muscle, thuggery and goonage of Bad Space, the indecipherable markings that're only scarcely visible on Nemo's neck are vibrantly black. Not only do they lack all the age and fade that inevitably afflict any tattoo with enough time, Moira also notices a strange lack of the reddened, inflamed flesh that frames all tattoos recently inked.
Nemo's reply comes couched in a burp. “Since I was born.”
“Don't buhoxshit me,” giggles Moira, a sound that surprises even Moira as it escapes her lips. Before blushing, she covers as much of her face as the upturned tankard will allow. In the process, she ends up quaffing long and deep from her Backwash.
As the same cycle of sensations washes over her, Nemo offers no more explanation. Instead, he lolls his head back and forth as though some mechanism in his neck suddenly malfunctioned.
With each motion of his head, ho
wever, Moira's afforded more and more glimpses of this mysterious emblem that inexplicably marked the Captain since he “was born.” With each successive glimpse, she's more and more convinced of the greater design the tattoo bears, extending an unknown distance down his back and torso.
She has not, the blushing Moira appreciates, ever seen him shirtless.
She discovers her proposal seconds after speaking it. “Well? Let's see the thing, for Jotor's sake.”
Nemo's brusque answer is chopped into sections by the wagging of his head. “Maybe when I'm older.”
Once again, Moira's giggling, through the magic of alcohol. To better cover her tomato red face, she's forced into the third swig of her Backwash. Soon as she emerges, all the woozier, her hands become the next subject of her fascination.
“I gotta fucking tattoo, man.” As she confesses this in mutterings, she fiddles with the straps of the gunfighter's gloves she habitually wore. “Shit, I got two.” Before any better angels can descend and warn her off, both her gloves are unstrapped and the flesh beneath is exposed. “Wanna see?”
With a titanic effort, Nemo holds his pendulous neck steady. Moira peels both her sweaty hands from their black leather confines and displays to him the symbols etched onto their backs almost exactly a decade earlier. Each hand bears a rectangle of lusterless green – an ace of spades, an icon meaningless to anyone past the Midworlds.
“I suppose you never played royals. May not have trickled down to Underglow.” An expression of deep incomprehension continues to color Nemo's face. “The thing's a card game rich Inner Sector cunts play. A game played exclusively on white linen tables with white linen gloves.”
She rotates her wrists, to better appreciate the contrast between the tattooed skin and the blank skin of her palm. “Fuck me,” she grunts a second later, observing both her youthful indiscretions within the brazen light of a Takioro back alley for the first time ever. “I was maybe fifteen and I was certainly stupid as shit. To me, then, this was the best idea I had on how to get my mother's goat.”
Galactic Menace Page 53
