Galactic Menace
Page 60
From his throne, the koj turns his one working eye over the crewmen below, twisting their dials, yanking their chains and otherwise hard at work over their instruments. “Tell ye the truth,” he comments, “I'm always forgettin' how backwards these Hesko boats can be.”
In all respects was koj Bonaventure the exact opposite of koj Vobash. Whereas the latter had been a Triomman of slim build and calm demeanor, the former is a bulbous, warty and callused Grimalti, prone to tangential rants and excitable outbursts.
koj Vobash once wore a simple bandana over his brow. koj Bonaventure compliments his own bandana with a tattered, ostentatious and feather-studded hat. koj Vobash once stroked Cluu, the semi-tame brushvezzer, while contemplating in his chair. koj Bonaventure chuffs on his pipe, nurses a tankard of unknowable slime and fans smoke from his face with that accursed hat, all the while screaming his orders down at the embattled crew.
“Full steam ahead, ye sorry slugabeds, or yer guts'll be polish on me new ship!”
With no idea what he actually commanded, vo Veaff expresses pure confusion to Sarge with a rapid sequence of gestures. The obliging humanoid, from her own customary position before the comm bank, barks out the orders to the rest of the crew – increase speed.
Thankfully, the koj appears as baffled by vo Veaff's own method of communication, evidently believing his orders are successfully passed down the chain of command.
He leers as The Loose Cannon surges forward, her pistons pumping all the more strenuously and her engines burning all the more vigorously. Through the Destroyer's bifurcated viewport, the bulk of the battle tilts and starts to slide aside as the bridge adjusts the craft's bearing towards her true intended target.
The sight of even the humblest space skirmish enraptures vo Veaff. Given how breathtakingly beautiful is the Radiant Armada, the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija's answer to the Freebooter Fleet, vo Veaff briefly wonders, despite all her misgivings, if the late koj Vobash was perhaps mistaken in wishing to avoid this spectacle.
Their dreadnoughts are formless clusters of reflective panels, catching and feeding off the rays of their red sun. As each sheet shifts aside, it reveals banks upon banks of alien weaponry. When powered by solar energy, these rain bursts of dreadful destruction upon any unlucky Freebooter in range.
Comprising the main body of the Radiant Armada, their junks rotate their own solar plating at a much more rapid pace. They launch salvo after baffling salvo from tips of their perpetually re-arranging wings. At once, they can pound an enemy's shields and hull from every conceivable angle and they can create a starkly impossible shape to consistently target.
Their starfighters take this tactic all the way to its logical extreme. To the naked eye, each one appears as nothing more than a whizzing blur of contorting mirrors and flashing sunlight. To vo Veaff's astonishment, she watches as a small squadron of the fighters willingly throw themselves into the crossfire of a dreadnought's cannons, seeming to absorb and receive system power where a teltriton ship would be incinerated.
For all they're outnumbered and outgunned, the Freebooter Fleet continues to acquit themselves admirably.
The inestimable Captain Greatgullet, loutish buffoon though he is, holds the center of the engagement. The Rule of Thumb suffers and doles out great losses, her broadside batteries hammering hard against the fragile shielding and frail plating of any Trijan spacecraft they can reach. Across the battlefield, vo Veaff spots those telltale streaks of smoke and sparks that pinpoint the usurper, that Gertie Gundeck, and the specialty missiles of her irreverent flagship, The Dick Magnet.
koj Vobash's greatest ally, however, was conspicuously absent.
The disappearance of Aju Vog Xah Qaj and her Eyesore were initially blamed, by koj Bonaventure and the three remaining Captains, on something innocently called “warp drift.” This excuse held for many long minutes as the fleet action lingered on, without sight or sound of the Xend and their very necessary divebombers.
Before long, it became clear to vo Veaff and every other Freebooter present that pragmatism and cowardice were truly to blame for the colonyship's failure to show, for its willingness to abandon its brethren to destruction.
At the moment, however, The Loose Cannon had professedly bigger fish to fry. As the Destroyer detours somewhat away from the primary battlefield, that proverbial fish aligns itself directly ahead through the viewport, in all its gorgeous, destructive glory.
The Council of Captains and their strategists referred to it as an orbital reflector. To vo Veaff, the object toward which the Cannon chugs with all speed resembles nothing but a massive mirror. Ovular in shape, many dottibles across and fringed with knobby pieces of Trijan technology, this mirror was capable of catching much of the outspread carnage within its mighty reflection.
With minute adjustments toward the system's distant sun, the reflector manages to snag a sunbeam. Once caught, the sunbeam is bounced toward the battle by more subtle repositionings of the reflector's angle.
Whetted into a brutal blade of sunlight, the beam slices ignorantly through the shields and hull of The Low-Hanging Fruit, the nearest Freebooter vessel, for a scarce two seconds. vo Veaff watches, with horror and amazement, as teltriton walls bubble and roil, the viewport caves and the Fruit's crewmembers are thrown from the terror of open space to the instant incineration of the sweeping beam.
“Port! Starboard!” bellows koj Bonaventure. He cranes his prodigious belly forward so fast, the Captain's seat nearly has a screaming fit of its own. “Quit her grab-assin' down there onna gundeck and give 'em a volley!”
Once this order reaches the appropriate ears, The Loose Cannon's customized pair of DF498 ConcInd Cascade Heavy Rapidfire turrets unleash white rain, her disablers activated at full capacity. With help from the Tegoonish helmsman, the swatch the disablers cut across the reflector ranges from the mirror's lower base straight up against its center.
Much to the koj's chagrin, this appears to have little practical effect, though it's a marked success in one particular respect.
The orbital reflector reasons the oncoming Cannon and all her disablers are enough of a threat to adjust the mirror's angle and aim their next ray of annihilation straight at them.
“Evasive action, ye shitnosed louts, evasive action!”
At the last possible second, the koj's order clicks through and The Loose Cannon careers away starboard to avoid the swinging about of the reflector's high density beam. She doesn't escape entirely unscathed, however. At the sound of the competing alarms and alerts from the bridge's consoles, vo Veaff rushes forward to the command railing, inquiring after Sarge, with her thrumming throatsac, about the damage sustained.
The ex-commando pushes away from her suddenly sparking panel and stares back at the Baziron, but addresses her report to the koj. “Comms're fried, Captain. They must've nicked our sensor array!”
All the excitement's enough to propel the koj onto his own stubby feet. “Now ain't the time, missy!” he decries, pointing next towards the Tegoon. “Helmsman, ye keep this bird evasive, else these scabrous dogs'll make tinders of the lot of us!”
On these orders, The Loose Cannon continues to tumble sideways to starboard. She plunges forward at such an obtuse angle, vo Veaff wonders if the mad Grimalti, now pacing back and forth along the command railing, will roll the whole craft over. His strategy does appear to be passingly successful, the reflector not quite fast enough to match its quarry's speed. Before long, through the pilot's superior maneuvering, they finally achieve their favorable position – directly behind the reflector.
Like a pageant made sham by peeking past that all-important curtain, the reflector's backside is substantially less impressive that its smooth, streamlined public face. It bristles with machinery, the reflector's working guts hopefully more vulnerable than its sheer and impregnable mirror. Toward this aim does the koj point a bloated finger, guffawing out more commands. “There's yer blooming target, Port and Starboard! Open fire, ye witless jackanapes!”
No brilliant barrage of disabler fire accompanies the koj's stirring order. “Comm's down, Captain!” Sarge screams in reminder. “Gundeck ain't responding.”
“Mate!” koj Bonaventure snaps immediately. With two long strides, vo Veaff's at his starboard side, straightening at attention. “Hustle yer own bloomhole down to the gundeck, then, and tell 'em it's now or never, ye understand?” The Baziron nods as grimly as her deflated throatsac allows. As fast as her lanky legs can carry her, she's off toward the bridge door. “I said hustle, ye bloodsucking bleeder, or we're all flotsam!”
It's at this moment that vo Veaff seizes her opportunity.
Rather than heading towards the Cannon's gundeck as ordered, vo Veaff veers wildly off course, scuttling through the ship's super-structure. Several moments later, she's arrived at her private quarters on the dwelling deck and is retrieving one item from its cherished rack above her bunk. From there, she follows her orders as commanded, hustling with all speed back toward the gundeck and relaying the koj's instructions to the baffled gunnery crews.
Mere moments later, she's clambering, step-by-step, onto The Loose Cannon's bridge once again.
Through the viewport, she catches a glimpse of the koj's ordered barrage, wreaking havoc against the backside of the reflector. Amid the applause and acclimation of the bridge crew, the koj is crucially distracted for a moment, cheering along with his new crewmen.
With two strides, she's within reach of him. She replaces her third stride with a wild banzai leap, hosting high the item she'd retrieved from her quarters – her ceremonial zylkco stick – with the murderous intent to drive its hollowed-out tip directly through the imposter's fat neck.
She doesn't anticipate how fast her replacement koj can spin the chair's servomotor, bringing himself and his ponderous bulk one hundred and eighty degrees around a heartbeat after vo Veaff takes to the air.
She's enough time to register both the blunderbuss he grips and the shit-eating grin he wears before her zylkco stick connects wetly with his opposite shoulder. vo Veaff savors the sound of the Grimalti's delicious and agonized scream.
She plants one bare foot against his chest for shaky balance and another on the lip of his chair for superior balance. With the eyes of the entire bridge crew riveted on her, vo Veaff comprehends she has spare seconds to drain koj Bonaventure's entire of body of blood before something – blunderbuss or crewmember – can intervene.
To her credit, she manages to swallow two deep throatsacs full before the Grimalti summons the wherewithal to click the trigger and blow her away.
They're thrown completely clear of each other, vo Veaff missing a substantial section of her side and crumbled into a quivering heap on the teltriton a distance away. Having underestimated the kicking power of that decrepit blunderbuss of his, vo Veaff watches helplessly as the suddenly pallid koj Bonaventure staggers to his feet.
He lurches ungainly towards the doorway, smoking weapon at his side. As he passes vo Veaff, he mouths a single word that, even across the language barrier, the Baziron understands perfectly.
“Mutineer.”
Gertie Gundeck is, contrary to popular belief, not made of cluster-torpedos. Each one of the expensive little darlings costs her a small fortune and an immense hassle to acquire.
Each one she fires crashes helplessly against the unpierceable bombard shield that enshrouds her assigned orbital reflector.
Shouting out fresh orders to her largely greenhorn crew, she attempts to reposition the Magnet in search of the reflector's theoretically vulnerable backside for anything resembling a shield gap. Much as she enjoyed commanding the Freebooter Fleet from a Council seat, the fun-and-games above Trija had more than run its course.
While she definitely wasn't made of cluster-torpedos, Gertie Gundeck was even less made of willing Freebooter vessels, if such a thing was possible.
“Moons damn you to hang by your balls from hooks,” she snarls, “if that thought ever enters your vacant skull again. Much less,” she adds for good measure, “comes creeping outta those gross ass lips of yours within my earshot, you hear?”
The clarity of Greatgullet's reply is diminished so greatly by the sheer number of competing comm frequencies clashing for airwave space as to be practically inaudible. “I ain't accustomed to language that threatening pointed in my direction, swabbie.”
“Fly your cowardly ass over here, then, and accustom yourself with a torpedo or two, you don't like hearing my threatening language so damn much,” Gertie berates, attempting to juggle attention between haranguing Greatgullet and averting total disaster.
“You come out here in the open, maybe, draw a bead from a few of these dreadnoughts and maybe I'll permit you to threaten me in that fashion,” the Obax retorts, the Rule's systems failure evident even through their comm transmission. “There ain't a chance in Jotor we're surviving another two minutes, we don't make tracks and now. Catches in the throat to say so, it does, but maybe that Xendo bitch were right in the first place.”
“The mighty Greatgullet? Pussing out?”
“The mighty Greatgullet keepin' his heart beatin',” is his irrefutable argument. “There ain't nothing to board here, nowhere to put my sword but my own stomach. You won't warp out with me, your choice, but thought I'd do you the courtesy of keeping you abreast.”
“You won't warp out without coordinates,” she taunts, with sudden, childish desperation.
There's a certain resignation, detectable even through the static and feedback, replete in Greatgullet's voice. “Techs've been running those coordinates since we hit the system. Like I said, only buzzing you now outta courtesy.” There's a passing beat which, with Gertie too fuming to furnish a reply, Greatgullet fills. “You see the boss again, pass on my apologies.”
“Clear us of this shit,” she hisses at her scurrying crewmen. “Put the Thumb in my crosshairs.”
In response, Ugly Ubol, the pilot to replace Igg at the helm, cranks The Dick Magnet cruelly to port and her boosters realign. She's propelled all the faster around the near side of the orbital deflector. Within seconds, a panorama of their incipient and crushing defeat over Trija opens up across the Magnet's narrow viewport.
The glass palaces of the Trijan dreadnoughts – many cracked, blackened and smote – plow forward all the same. Their batteries continue to find consistent purchase against the ray shields of whichever Freebooter makes themselves most handy in the melee. Against the more numerous, less defensible junks do the pirates gain the most traction. Their missiles, turrets and kamikaze crashes shatter solxite panels with suicidal abandon. The starfighters, however, those dastardly Trijan snubs, prove the true nuisance to anyone unequipped with a homing torpedo cluster-launcher, capable and practically encouraged to swoop between crossfires to supercharge their own weapons and shields.
Devoid of that traitorous Xend's own starfighter backup, the day was rapidly being won on the basis of whose craft were the more maneuverable.
With another kick of her engines, The Dick Magnet quickly comes within sight of The Rule of Thumb. In a wild flight of fancy, Gertie imagines rushing to the Greatgullet's rescue, only to remember herself and her purpose here.
Outflanked by a pair of limping but functional dreadnoughts and consistently raked by their complimentary banks of batteries, The Rule of Thumb holds remarkably to its own. As evinced by the smoldering sores all along its hull, however, the Onslaught-Class cruiser would be fortunate to escape even should the ship activate its warp protocols the moment Gertie laid eyes upon it.
Unfortunately for Gertie and her perhaps overdeveloped sense of retribution, that's precisely what the Rule does. Her main engines unexpectedly flash that telltale flash and the ship temporarily defies all laws of gravitational pull to be yanked somewhere far across the galaxy, as though a cartoon hound dragged by its inescapable cartoon leash.
One moment, the Rule shores up the Freebooter's final hopes of victory. The next, the tide turns drastically in the other direction.
Gertie watches The Humble Pie lose frontal integrity and stall completely out, twisting lifeless in the astral wind. Gertie watches two additional Freebooters make an explosive grave from the derelict Pie, freewheeling too fast to halt their imminent crash. Gertie watches The Blown Fuse follow Greatgullet's less-than-sterling example and simply turn the other cheek to warp unapologetically away when confronted by a starfighter squadron, a performance that threatens to become a trendsetter.
Gertie's reverie is shattered when that second orbital reflector, the one so damnably resistant to all her attempts to smash it, tilts its dreadful gaze directly toward the aft end of The Dick Magnet.
Babs, the shield operator and the token askew female Gertie kept around to confuse her all-male crew, breaks the news. “Captain!” comes the blueskin's shaky scream, “the hull's heating up! Shield's holding at 41%, but–”
“Look out the window, love,” coos a suddenly fatalistic Gertie.
Angelic light paints the dashboards, consoles and controls all about the Magnet's helm in soft springtime yellow. Not to be fooled, Gertie hisses a course correction to Ubol and the Magnet subsequently rollicks away from that blistering ray. At her Captain's command, The Dick Magnet spins into a skidding about-face.
With no idea more solid than to simply fly towards the thing, launching torpedo after torpedo until the magazine's run dry, Captain Gertie Gundeck resolves to either outdo that slimy Grimalti sexist, responsible for deactivating that first reflector, or die trying.
Thankfully, the orbital deflector's far too cumbersome to counter a ship of the Magnet's size and maneuverability. With all Ubol's talent dedicated toward shirking that concentrated spear of sunlight, it's a surprisingly simple task to avoid the ever-shifting sheet of solxite.