“When?” comes the reply, tinged with desperation.
“Movement, here, is key,” Moira chastises. At that moment, she gains visual on a fresh batch of Trijan regimentals – more numerous, better armed and more orderly than the humble palace guard – emerging at full march from a gatehouse on the edge of the courtyard.
Odisseus now bares his teeth over his shoulder, towards Moira. “We're aware!”
“But still not moving,” Moira grouses quietly.
It's Nemo who, paradoxically, solves the problem. By means of some twisting, weaselly maneuver no doubt employed by Gallweigan street urchins to escape those whose pockets they've picked, he frees himself from Odisseus' implacable claws. “You move or I shoot,” Nemo proposes, planting the snub of his pistol uncomfortably, Moira imagines, on the Trijan's testicles.
Progress across the courtyard suddenly moves much swifter.
The three surviving members of the landing party and their hostage clear the fountain, heading towards nowhere in particular, except away from the battalion of Trijan re-enforcements. Spotlights pursue them just as doggedly as guards do, Moira's distressed to discover. The tangle of solxite panels hovering above the fountain refuses to let them from its sights.
Had they any chance of accomplishing what they'd originally infiltrated both planet and palace to accompany, it would land solidly in the realm of stealth, not shooting.
To this end, Moira ushers Odisseus, Nemo and their hobbling captive past, before she spins completely about. Pistols upraised, she proceeds to pepper yellow hell onto the accursed solxite spotlight-maker.
Her aim is less than stellar, blinking against the blinding glare. It's several squandered shots before she hears the first sound of glass splintering. She persists, though, until her wrists ache from the pistol's repeated recoil. With each successful hit, she sees better and better, the device stuttering and its glare lessening.
Before she's finished, she's expended practically a full clip of ammunition on either Lawman and she's allowed the nearest of the charging palace guards to comfortably reach disintegrator territory. Her final shot makes the whirling mass of broken mirrors lose whatever aerial integrity was keeping it afloat. It plummets to the fountain below, impales several of its panels on the centerpiece and otherwise shatters into thousands of jagged pieces.
As a towering pillar of steam rises from the cooling shards of solxite, Moira is sentenced to approximately one billion years of bad luck.
She's purchased a valuable few seconds of head start as her pursuers attempt to navigate the smoking, scalding minefield of broken solxite plopped down before them. To discourage the faster runners amongst the palace guard, Moira empties both magazines and bolts off to reunite with her companions.
She discovers them a meager ten feet ahead, squatting amid a stand of the garden's topiary and gazing about them like turned-around tourists.
Diving down beside them, Moira makes good both on her head start and their idiocy by swiftly emptying and reloading the chambers of both pistols. “What the fuck're we–”
“Which one's the queen in?” Nemo asks dumbly.
Moira opens her mouth to remonstrate him, only to gaze about at the encircling domes, minarets and spires on every adjacent building within the immediate palace complex. She makes an educated guess, spies another building, amends her guess, spies a third building and is suddenly reminded how little she knew about Trijan culture, architecture or internal logic.
He would know, though – this quailing cripple at their feet.
“The palace,” she demands, pressing the hobnails of her right baby-stomper onto the captive's fractured knee. This generates both a wheeze of pain and a confused stream of musical gibberish, doubtlessly High Trijan, that're both equally useless to Moira. “Balls,” she exhales, easing off the guard's wound.
“The Attaché,” breathes Odisseus in realization.
As one, each of the three heads spin back towards the smoldering fountain, where Two-Bit certainly dropped his Attaché in the moments before his death. Like its owner, that Attaché had been the cornerstone to their success today – it contained a complete holographic map of the entire Palace Immortal's grounds.
It was also currently buried beneath a prodigious amount of sharp, superheated solxite.
Gripping his prisoner by the scruff of his uniform like he's a disobedient hound, Nemo poses the necessary question. “Well, anyone?”
A wavering beam of disintegrator distortion comes entirely too close to all three of them and they all instinctively separate. Odisseus, Nemo and their unwilling captive duck deeper into cover. Meanwhile, Moira, like a moron, goes galloping back across the lawn in the direction she lately came from, muttering “Balls, balls, balls,” harshly under her breath.
The copious steam the fountain still oozes upward provides a smokescreen both useful and dangerous to Moira. It irritates her eyes, it stings her skin and reduces obstacles and enemies to only the vaguest of outlines and silhouettes. Several of the thinner, more ambulatory shapes she guns down for Trijans. One blockish shape, seemingly centered and immobile, she assumes to be the centerpiece and her destination.
Stepping between solxite as gingerly as she can, she thanks Jotor and all its million moons for her jackboots now, her feet immune to the carpet of caltrops that would rip and rend the souls of a lesser shoe.
Skating down one massive solxite sheet like a driftboarder and sheathing Righty, Moira dunks one hand to the shoulder within the lukewarm water to retrieve the dropped Attaché. Discovering the device inches from his dropped Tigress, Moira retrieves her prize and rises once again to discover company – a Trijan and his trusty disintegrator, sneaking through the wreckage.
With one wide swing of her boot, she ensures her escape by kicking both water and shattered solxite, in a spinning spray, directly into his face.
As she decamps back across fountain and lawn, Moira spends a moment attempting to thumb the Attaché on. Soon as she manages this, a few measly feet from Nemo and Odisseus' unchanged hiding spot behind the hedgerow, a fresh obstacle pops into view above the screen.
“PASSCODE REQUIRED,” demurs the device and dangles five empty rectangles, each ready to receive one digit from Two-Bit's five digit passcode. Moira strangles a curse and slides into cover like a champion fistball player.
“Passcode required,” she relays, brandishing the obstinate Attaché in their direction. “Anybody happen to peek over his shoulder sometime?”
From his seat literally on the chest of his proned captive, Nemo gestures insistently towards the device. “Gimme.” One hand he devotes to the noble cause of firing blindly over the hedge at the enemy and the other to tapping viciously on the touchscreen. “T-W-O-B-I–” He stops tapping abruptly. “Oh, fuck, that's five letters.”
“Pretty sure,” growls Odisseus between Wreckingball blasts, “I had some evocative things to say about this time not being the time.”
As though to prove his point, their leafy cover is demolished straight through the middle, courtesy of the disintegrator wielded by the nearest Trijan crackshot. Odisseus thunders off an answering shot from his Wreckingball, bowling the assailant over with a shout, before clambering to his feet. “Whaddya think about the biggest one? Wanna do the biggest one?”
The Ortok indicates, with the smoking snout of his weapon, the building that had been the strongest contender in Moira's playbook for “most likely to contain a virgin queen.”
A swooping mosque, surrounded by twelve twisted marble minarets, each of the building's six separate side wings are easily large enough to park the entire Freebooter Fleet within. Were Moira, at gunpoint, forced to make a rash decision about which direction to head, that building's ornately-carved double doors would she be kicking down.
Mother Moira paints a spray of covering fire in their wake while Father Odisseus shepherds both their children to safety. Nemo, their eldest, debates as he moves how best to simultaneously wield a firearm, an Attaché and the Trij
an's sagging form, before arriving at the obvious solution. With another threat to the genitals, he compels Two-Bit's murderer to carry his late victim's Attaché.
This decided, the happy little family falls back, making for the massive portico outlaid before what everyone's reasonably certain is the Palace Immortal.
They've, none of them, time or patience to stop and appreciate the exquisite splendor of the cultivated courtyard they flee through. It's a sight fewer than ten non-Trijans would ever lay eyes on in all of galactic civilization's hundred thousand year history and it's also a site currently being ditrogened and disintegrated beyond all recognition.
The indistinct sense of pretty trees, pretty shrubs and pretty paths is all Moira would later describe, when asked to share her experiences within the sacred Palace Immortal. Frankly, she won't consider the location much more remarkable than the hanging gardens or conservatories of her native Anglia, much to anthropologist's distress and alarm galaxywide.
She will recall laboring up the massive marble steps of the Palace Immortal while, behind her, disintegrator rays eradicated steps she'd stood on mere moments before.
Soon as they reach the top of the final flight, Moira spins to avalanche a fresh supply of canisters down on their climbing pursuers. She savors the sight of the gunshot Trijans tumbling and spilling down the austere steps of their precious palace.
Once a somewhat more comfortable berth between them is bought, Moira jogs backward to her crewmates. While one torments his new pet Trijan, the other unsuccessfully attempts to bash down the Palace Immortal's immovable doors.
“No luck?” she wheezes to Odisseus, popping free the chambers on both Righty and Lefty to discover she's all but burnt through even her second pair of moonclips.
Slamming all his considerable weight against these doors that dwarf even the Ortok gains nothing but more grunting and panting. “You tell me,” he bemoans breathlessly. “I mean, it's possible there's an automated lockdown but, looking around, I'm inclined to think just a big iron bar's responsible here.”
Odisseus absorbs another shoulder check that would throw Moira four full feet, but this stubborn door still refuses to budge an inch for all his gentle Ortoki reasoning. Alarms, in the form of bells and bull horns, resound within the compound's walls. The song of battle across the courtyard is taken up by more and more voices with every passing second. Moira pops both her cylinders back into her pistols, shuffles back several steps and takes aim.
“Fuck this.”
With her last pair of canisters, Moira shatters a doubtlessly priceless stained glass window. From a casual glance through the massive hole she made, it fortunately appears to open into the palace's main atrium. Ushering Odisseus, Nemo and their tagalog with a sharp motion of the head, Moira sneers “Stupid medieval assholes” towards the unbreachable double doors.
An understandably annoyed Odisseus hoists the Trijan's practically limp form and hurls him, with complete disregard for his safety, through the window's jagged opening. “What is your,” he challenges to Nemo, huffing with exertion, “end game with this cocksucker?”
“Soon as I get a minute,” Nemo retorts, that lunatic edge obvious in his voice.
“When do you really think that's gonna happen?” Odisseus retorts back, anger and anxiety both bubbling over. “In the throne room? You're just gonna haul off and torture a guy?”
“He. Disintegrated. Two-Bit.”
These three words no one can counter. The shortened little company of Odisseus, Nemo and Moira, then, vault themselves over the toothy lip of the destroyed window without further discussion of the matter.
After so much trial, tribulation and ultimately tragedy, they set foot onto the hallowed floors of the revered Palace Immortal, dwelling place of the undiminished Trijan Royal Family, they assume.
Solxite fixtures on every other pillar bathe the atrium in very dim light. Even in the semi-darkness, however, the entryway appears both grand and unoccupied.
In sheer size, the chamber would dwarf an entire cathedral. The dozens of doorways that jut off to other parts of the Palace are made from wood polished so black they appear as empty arches until actually approached.
More important to Moira, seeking to stretch the distance between themselves and the small army of pursuers, are staircases. She finds four of them without looking – grandiose jobs, branching upward in elegant spirals and leading in four entirely different directions.
While she pops Lefty open for the reload, Moira swings Righty about in a casual point. “Up seems good, right? I were the ten-year-old queen of a timeless galactic power, I'd want my throne room high as my immortal palace would possibly allow, wouldn't I?”
“Joy,” remarks Odisseus upon spying the stairs. He takes a moment to indulge his shaggy hide in a full body convulsion, to shake loose as much of the fountain's excess water as he can and spatter it indiscriminately upon the palace's flawlessly mosaic floor. “Would milord prefer his baggage to be carried?”
“You know, milord would,” Nemo agrees, brightening a beat and savagely kicking the moaning Trijan an inch towards the Ortok.
Halfway across the atrium already, Moira spins to upbraid the three stragglers. “They're not not coming, you know.” Spinning back forward, she slams today's fourth moonclip into Righty and mutters, “If anything, they're coming faster.”
Duly instructed, the three-and-a-half companions rush, as much as they can, across the strangely and suspiciously silent atrium. Her paranoia finally justified, Moira's bounty hunter instincts flick her eyes between shuttered doorways, awaiting the inevitable ambush.
Outside, she can hear the muted and continued sounds of pursuit. Moira holds out some small hope that the unspeakable blasphemy of offworlders even entering the Palace Immortal might give their pursuers pause. Their pace was just as likely to quicken, rather than slacken, however, upon the crew's committing this most heinous of transgressions.
Moons forfend anything should happen to their prepubescent queen, after all.
“No one's had an epiphany on this passcode, right,” wonders Nemo aloud, jabbing idly at the appliance, “and just hasn't mentioned it?”
“He strikes me,” Moira theorizes, entirely unprepared for past tense, “as smart enough to choose some random sequence of numbers, right, rather then some significant word or phrase.”
“Sure,” Nemo noncommittally grunts. “Oh, wait.” A flurry of blunt finger-tapping follows his new idea and an electronic note of denial follows that. “Nope,” he comments, crestfallen again. “Wasn't N-E-M-O-1.”
“Company's here,” Odisseus informs. With a snapping bite, he chomps down on the collar of their weeping Trijan captive, to free his paws for the use of his shotgun.
Moira confirms Odisseus' warning without turning her head. The sound of reverent chanting, in a three-part round no less, emanates from somewhere behind her. Moira speeds up, her accomplices on either side doing likewise, until they're partway up the first flight of their selected staircase.
Seven steps higher, the flight switches back on itself, climbs another thirteen steps and then opens onto an expansive balcony story, which gazes down onto the lobby's main floor. Moira has brief but vivid fantasies of sniping the entire Trijan battalion from such a secure position. Before they can reach these lofty heights, however, the disintegrators open fire and Moira's forced to retaliate from her current, unsecured position.
Righty and Lefty compliment and contradict the Trijan's chorus with their own song, streaking down the stairs to impress its lethal melody onto the hearts and minds of the people below. Odisseus' Wreckingball works overtime and he makes some motion with the ineffectually flailing palace guard dangling from his teeth.
Between the coughing fits of his pistol, Nemo stares at him confusedly. “What?”
Moira scoots several stairs higher, at the sight of precisely how many Trijans are pouring through the fractured window and, soon, the palace's front door. “How's about,” she recommends, “we fall back s
ome?”
“I cannot understand you,” Nemo over-enunciates to Odisseus, gesturing rather than shooting with his pistol. “Take the–” he suggests, drawing blue circles in expelled ditrogen around the chest of the man drooping from the Ortok's teeth.
A small sound behind her raises Moira's hackles all at once; the three-note hymn that activates a Trijan disintegrator.
Instinct is all that saves her from Two-Bit's fate. She lurches, in an extremely undignified manner, as far left as she can. In her mad scramble aside, Moira catches sight of and is narrowly missed by four Trijans and their disintegrators. Arranged in a shooting square on the landing atop the staircase's first flight, this new quartet of enemies absolutely were not arranged there thirty some seconds earlier.
With an eerie synchronicity, they each ready their weapons for another volley.
“There's, there's more,” is as clear and concise a warning as Moira can furnish to Nemo and Odisseus. Her attention, at present, is instead focused on breaking apart the vital bones and organs of her newfound attackers with pistol-whips and Tebi-Gali.
As her allies scuttle up the stairs to her rescue, Moira tears into her unprepared ambushers. She put Lefty's butt to one kneecap, an elbow to a temple, a kneecap to a groin and Righty's snub beneath a chin. Squeezing the trigger concludes the fourth and final guard. The entire squad, in two steps and several scrambled seconds, are down, though not all dead.
The Trijan host below, however, is increasingly hot on their heels.
Nemo throws himself onto the landing beside Moira with a woof of sheer exhaustion. Tired of carrying the extra baggage, Odisseus spews his own Trijan dead weight onto the marble floor with obvious disgust.
Little more than a useless corpse the entire chase, the palace guard, momentarily liberated, seizes what frail opportunity he can grasp. He scurries down the staircase, scarcely above hands-and-knees, toward the advancing front of his allies. Sprawled on his back and propped up on his elbows, a breathless Nemo voices some wordless protest and fires again.
Galactic Menace Page 62
