Hull Damage

HULL DAMAGE

Timothy J. Meyer

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Timothy J. Meyer

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BAD SPACE TRILOGY

HULL DAMAGE

GALACTIC MENACE

UNCONSTANT LOVE

www.hulldamage2012.com

To Daniella,

the original First Mate,

I am not what you'd call a civilised man! I have done with society entirely, for reasons I alone have the right of appreciating. I do not, therefore, obey its laws and I desire you never to allude to them before me again!

– Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea

Table of Contents

PART I: Crew

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

First Interlude

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Second Interlude

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

PART II: Captain

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Third Interlude

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Fourth Interlude

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

PART III: Crew

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Fifth Interlude

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Final Interlude

Chapter 27

Acknowledgments

About the Author

GALACTIC MENACE Preview

Chapter 1

Moira takes the next punch directly in the face. She unexpectedly buckles, as if all the moons had suddenly lent the greenskin’s sloppy closed-fisted cross the velocity of a comet, and she lurches backward, only the bar top’s slippery lip saving her from forfeiting her balance completely. She heaves a breath, eyesight sputtering in and out and her teeth expressing a hitherto unheard desire to pop out of her gums and escape. Her clock is nearly cleaned with all the veracity of a spaceship crashing on her head.

Between hazy blinks, she spies her opponent, a spunky humanoid with patchy malachite flesh and flared incisors. He bobs like a prepubescent imitation of a pugilist, utterly incapable of concealing that frivolous snigger.

Moira Quicksilver devotes at least three hours a day to rigorously rehearsing her Tebi-Gali stances, strikes, counterstrikes and combination incapacitations and she’d just been knocked practically to her flat ass by a hundred pound weakling with arms like wet Jowna noodles and a sneer like her Captain’s.

A pump of her elbows returns her to the balls of her feet as she attempts to dissect his stance, acrid pain of his paradoxical punch radiating in her skull. Under the biostrobe lights, he carries himself like a hologram signal, complete with deep blue aura. His swaggering stance is mockable at best: wavering spasmodically, fists tightly clenched and face fully exposed. She’d fenced fists with a dozen similar back-room brawlers, thugs educated in form and footwork by public access telewave simulations and delusions of grandeur.

Moira deftly ducks the original punch’s ugly stepsisters – another pair of stumbling, embarrassing crosses, the greenskin apparently enough emboldened by his single score on Moira’s cheek to waltz right into her counterstrike. His right cross blazing overhead, she weaves beneath and raises a crooked elbow, ramming it into his own exposed elbow joint with a tearing crack. The greenskin sprawls back, yowling, to the greasy floor, his arm suddenly an obtuse angle and his framing shifting from optimistic blue to cautionary green. A hasty heel stomp to his temple, a comical rebound off the plastolieum and he’s out cold or dead, Moira doesn’t care which.

Her jaw pulsing in electrified pain, she inspects her face with three prudent fingers, offering a silent prayer to all the moons that her brittle and much-abused jawbone wasn’t broken. Anglians, famed for prissiness, needlepoint and hollow bones, weren't terribly suited to the delicate art of being punched in the face, a fact always brought poignantly back to Moira whenever separated from her precious revolvers by a hundred feet of nightclub and a gun detector.

She prods the punch's impact zone with a thumb and bites back a curse.

Moira Quicksilver had been beaten, bruised and blackened by a menagerie of goons, even thrashed by a horny bull arlaxi on one instance and she had never known a punch to exude agony like this. Something, she reasons, is afoot.

Ninety seconds had upheaved the second floor of the Astrobounce Gentlemen’s Club into a riotous mess. The whole joint is on its feet, half embroiled in the brawl, half seeking cover or escape. The talent, meanwhile – two-dozen striprobats who represent half the bipeds of the Midworlds – weightlessly clamber in orbit about their poles behind the safety of the observation bubble as the fight rampages on around them.

Fitful bursts of the biostrobe lights alternate between plunging the club into pitch darkness or limning the healthy in indigo, the wounded in emerald and the unconscious in crimson. The house music, a listless disaster of seismic beats, is tempered with shattering bottles, the most ribald of the Captain’s cursing and the frantic dithering of the automated bartender. A ragtag cadre of aromas – cheap booze, fight sweat, imported tobacco, spilled blood and forty-five years of the galaxy’s dried semen – vanguard an assault on Moira Quicksilver’s nose as she re-calibrates her wits against the bar top.

She hadn’t had anything to eat, drink or snort since they’d strode into the ‘bounce like the corsair kings of old. She certainly didn’t feel drugged, though the atmospheric cocktail of odorous effluvia could possibly be masking an airborne agent of some kind, maybe even a paralytic. It was just as possible that the underlying rhythm of the house music, piped loud enough through the club’s subwoofers for Moira to feel the vibrations on the back of her neck, contained a subliminal frequency, specifically designed to wreak havoc on her senses. Both options seem highly unlikely and nearly impossible to prevent even if true.

All physical evidence suggests that she ought to be performing at peak efficiency, yet here she stands, clutching her bruised jaw and watching the crew brawl these mystery goons like a shell-shocked spectator. Three Mruka ruffians have stalked Odisseus back against the glass wall of the bubble, but they’re still clearly outmatched. Two-Bit’s on his knees across the room, throttling the life out of his proned Saurian, who returns the favor with snapping jaws and black spittle. Barely a grenade’s toss away, however, the Captain cheats by whatever means possible to ward off his three grotesque assailants – a Prul in a bowler hat, a Walkeen plastered in jailhouse ink and a Kezzerak sporting a nicotine halo.

This was what he paid her for, after all.

Four steps took her straight to the Kezzerak’s exposed back and she takes them as running strides, two on the grimy floor, one up a chair and the fourth a springing bound off a wobbly tabletop. One great leather boot stomps onto the goon’s chitinous left shoulder, the other hooking around its segmented neck. The mantis-man flounders in response to Moira suddenly riding shotgun on its plated back, spitting a shower of buzzing curses through its mandibles. Four spined forearms flail about in a frenzied attempt to dislodge Moira, who grabs her hoisted boot by the ankle and yanks hard upward, cracking the chitin. Temporarily blinded by the displaced nicotine halo spewing excess fumes in every which direction, she jerks her bootstrap once, twice, three times before the exoskeleton splits and the whole head cleaves off in a burble of blue goo.

Insectoid legs crumbling and twitching all around her, Moira Quicksilver falls to the puddle of innards in a tight crouch, just in time to miss the wooden chair swung wildly over her lowered head. The Walkeen, a hulking tripod of a thug, follows through with his two-handed swing, clobbering the nearby table and all its souls in a shower of wood, glass and alcohol.

Not quite seven feet of bruised magenta muscle, hoisted on three swollen calves and splattered with wisps of its history of incarceration, the Walkeen spits a guttural challenge between its tusks. In the strobe’s flicker, it’s a phantom silhouette, a child-gobbling nightmare made flesh and flash. The goon adjusts the hefted chair in its enormous mitts, preparing to continue the arc back as Moira kips up, extrapolates the distance between each leg and braces for impact. The chair returns and Moira, nearly bowled over in the process, snatches it stopped with a leg in each palm, titanic recoil absorbed by her half-tented Hukia stance.

She muscles back, wrenching the chair from his alarmed grasp and heaving it back over her shoulder with a clatter on the plastolieum.

He answers with a meteoric left, rifting the boozy air inches from Moira’s shoulder, who sidles left herself and delivers a double-barreled kick to the Walkeen’s forward kneecap. She’s rewarded with exactly no purchase from the monstrous knee, as if she had instead kicked a hull support beam. Pivoting two steps backward and out of range, Moira attempts to recalculate when the spitting, hacking cacophony of the upturned nightclub is interrupted by a squealing alarm.

–damage to observation bubble outer shell. Inertial dampening unit activated at 15%. Warning– chimes the passive-aggressive droidvox over the ‘bounce’s house comm while Moira instinctively feels the changes in both her own weight and the room’s pressure. She whips a glance to her right, towards the enormous observation bubble dominating the floor’s center to spot the comically spread-eagled form of a Mruka, impacted vehemently enough into the glass wall to crack and spiderweb it.

Broken bottles, torn napkins and loose teeth reluctantly wander off the floors and counters. The steady spill of mingled blood and booze tires of dripping off tables and meanders into open air. The patrons, Moira included, suddenly feel an indefinable weight lifted off their persons. The Walkeen lumbers forward, shambling stomps suddenly springing steps, as he curls a fist for reprisal.

Apparently, Moira observes, the Astrobounce is equipped with a gravitational counterbalance system as regards its central observation bubble. Following damage to the glass shell, the entire club would even out the levels of weightlessness, saving the strippers a nasty forty-foot free fall when the interior of the bubble depressurized, at the cost of lowering the gravity to the main bar floors.

She could exploit this; what a normal brawler would either attempt to ignore or possibly even be hindered by, Moira could manipulate. She didn’t have enough raw strength to even blemish the blubbery flesh of her attacker, but with a decrease in the club’s friction, it would be a simple matter of finding a way to launch herself with enough velocity in order to break his knee.

Reverse somersaults were tricky enough on a clear field, but on a floor besieged with glass, cadavers and injured furniture, they were practically impossible, even to one as practiced as Moira Quicksilver.

Inertia, on the other hand, could care less.

Double barrel-rolling backward, a scant inch above the cluttered ground, Moira exits the roll and lands in a vertical crouch against the bar. She braces her legs beneath her, preparing for a pounce at her approaching adversary, who currently clambers over a pulverized table in an effort to charge her.

The Walkeen clears the furniture, Moira catapults off the counter and the shrieking alarm changes pitch. Mid-flight, Moira twists her body and pulls her knees to her chin, flexing for a donkey kick straight to the thug’s own exposed knee. The Walkeen is caught nearly by surprise, with only a second to brace for impact and curl a fist, both combatants dimly aware of the automated message beaming over the club.

–dampening unit increased to 35%. Warning: Conditions un–

Moira unexpectedly accelerates in the increasingly lower gravity, rocketing through a cloud of corpses and chair legs, towards her gigantic foe. She’s attempting to recalculate the instant of her attack when the Walkeen, with the full force of an unleashed ballistic torpedo, uppercuts her in the stomach.

Instantly changing directions, she hurtles upward like a cartoon character until she makes vicious and unrepentant contact with the ceiling. Her stomach detonates in black, vomiting agony for a split second before the leftover momentum from the Walkeen’s blow bounces her straight back to the ground. Moira lands prone, stomach and spine screaming and her limbs practically jolted into paralysis, as she languidly drifts off the club floor and into the steamy air. She flounders feebly, attempting to quell the bloody rebellion of her panicked nervous system, as the Walkeen’s gargantuan shadow grows over her.

A few cursory gasps of nervous breath indicate that her fragile ribs remain dubiously unbroken. Her previously cobalt outline, courtesy of the biostrobe, turns coat and adopts a sickly olive hue. As her eyes wheel to focus the blurry hulk, outlined in strobe and preparing a finisher, Moira, with a titanic effort, reclaims the use of her unwilling appendages and manages to gain some distance on her pursuer with a few frenetic flailings of her legs.

Desperately attempting to recalculate, Moira backstrokes through the ocean of drifting alcohol droplets and fine grains of shattered glass, the Walkeen lumbering after her. As much as she can, she attempts to interpose floating pieces of furniture, corpses or whatever other aerial flotsam and jetsam she can between herself and the grimacing brute, only to have them swatted out of the way by great swings of his fists.

Scrambling through the confused tangle of hovering detritus only buys her time and sooner, rather than later, she’s cornered. Back to the liquor cabinet’s fourth shelf, jointly assailed by both the wailing of the automated bartender and the looming threat of her pursuer, Moira Quicksilver wraps her fingers around the neck of a racked bottle of gin, chambers her best poker face and extrapolates the heft needed to crack open the Walkeen’s skull with a single throw.

What she doesn’t extrapolate, however, is the effect of a breakneck collision between the Walkeen’s unprotected backside and a flying, flailing humanoid, seemingly launched from across the ‘bounce at an improbable speed. With a chain of flabbergasted cursing, the humanoid topples backward into the unsuspecting bruiser, scattering both of them to the floor. Midway through the forward fall, the Walkeen just manages to catch his bloated chin against the bar top and with a vile crack, his snarl wilts and his massive form sprawls on the ground. Moira blinks and lowers the bottle.

Bloom a fucking blighter on a whore’s ass cheek, comes the last of the profanity in husky coughs as the humanoid assembles himself from the wreckage of the downed Walkeen. Moira rolls her eyes.

His favorite jacket, a mud-brown maltreated aviator’s duster of scuffed, stained and carbon-scorched leather, sports a fresh slash at the shoulder seam, uncovering a shirt twice as threadbare below. One of his hands, whose knuckles are gashed martyrs to his slipshod and unprincipled brawling philosophy, clasps his stomach as he wheezes, while the other impulsively shuffles through his waifish black mane. Despite the visible bruises, cuts and scrapes, despite his ninety-foot flight and its curt conclusion, despite the cascade of blood coursing from his smashed nose and dying his teeth scarlet, the Captain's smile wrecks his face.

What? No, replies Moira disgustedly.

Nemo gestures towards the clasped bottle. Pass me that, willya?

She gives it a toss, he snatches its neck with his left and has it uncorked at his lips in the space of a blink. Moira floats from the cabinet shelf to the bar top and crouches down, surveying the panoramic ruination of the Astrobounce Gentlemen’s Club.

Two-Bit’s stranglehold on his attacker appears to have reached a hitch with the club’s partial weightlessness, suddenly allowing the Saurian the use of his previously pinned and considerably hefty tail. Tufts of multicolored fur wafting about their heads, the final Mruka squares off against the glowering, bloodstained Odisseus.

Who hit you? she intones.

Nemo resurfaces to answer. The Prul.

Halfway across the room?

Son of a bleeder knows how to close a fist, he shrugs, hoisting the bottle. I guess.

Fucking anti-gravity.

Fucking gun detectors.

Moira probes about her abdomen with her fingertips, uncovering a remarkable extent of cruel and future bruising. She chokes on a curse.

Any sign of Xo’s man? she offers.

Alcohol upraised, Nemo returns a noncommittal shake of the head. She sighs and rubs the bridge of her nose with a frustrated forefinger.

Promise me we’ll never do business here again.

With his teeth a nauseating violet from the red of his blood and the blue of his booze, the Captain Nemo waxes a sporty, sidelong grin and sloshes the gin’s remnants.

Onwards and upwards.

As if on cue, Moira spies a muzzle flash across the joint. With a piercing shriek, an orange blaster bolt streaks narrowly between them and instead shatters Nemo's lifted bottle, dispelling a cloud of glass shards and indolently drifting liquor into the air.

Moira instantly tenses and scoots back behind the bar top. Your Prul? she suggests from cover.

Nemo regards the bottle’s splintered neck as a slain comrade. Oh, by all the moons of Jotor, he breathes. What’re the odds, even–

He could have hit you.

Nemo shrugs. Would have been preferable.

Another pair of iridescent orange bolts, both claiming victims among the racked brethren of Nemo's destroyed bottle pierce the fine mist of spilled indigo alcohol.

Orange muzzle flash. Makes it a Halisdro. Most likely a holdout. Probably bonded fibers, Moira postulates.

Probably, he replies offhandedly, tossing the severed head of the bottle aside. He twists, affixing her with a quarter-moon smirk. Race ya?

She scans the expanse of weightless carnage. Following a loose trajectory to her right, Moira could, with a lessened line of sight to her attacker, blaze a trail to the hunkered Prul’s position – a makeshift barricade constructed of an upturned table, complete with telltale bowler hat peeking just into view. The majority of the floating debris on all other routes towards the Prul’s improvised fortification was either too sparse or simply too small to serve as an adequate screen from laser fire. Only by hugging to the rightmost path, along the observation bubble, could she avoid being a vulnerable and obvious target to the full clip of ammunition the Prul would be able to unload before she reached him.

She regards Nemo with an indirect glance.

Left or right?

Nemo squints the thirty yards to the garrisoned gunman, who squeezes off another embarrassment, flying fifteen feet wide. He shrugs.

Left.

Deal. Ready?

Just about. Nemo snakes an arm behind the bar and fingers an idle decanter of frothy blue Gitterswitch, yanking it up to his grasp. He tosses back a gulp, cants his gaze to Moira and splinters into his most malignant grin.

Go.

Moira watches him scurry off, immediately drawing fire from the Prul and current route equipped with little or no sufficient cover. To his credit, he’d at least learnt to crouch a little when facing uninterrupted enemy fire. When she was certain the Prul had focused his attention entirely on stopping the charge of the one-man idiot brigade, Moira slinks off, unnoticed, to the right.

Two strides and she’s airborne, sliding off the ground and sailing along the rim of the observation bubble. She scuttles the length of its glass face like a beetle, perpetually gyrating striprobats on her right, string of floating, dismembered corpses and furniture on her left. Between gaps in the debris, she catches brief glimpses of the jowly, behatted Prul, body pivoted away from her rush, shooting madly in the other direction and utterly unaware of her imminent threat.

The bolts only berate the oncoming Nemo, however. Liquor hiked to his lips, he scampers across the club floor, determinedly draining the bottle as laserfire darts miraculously by. Moira decides not to bother calculating the statistical improbability of Nemo’s accidental evasiveness as she approaches her destination.

She skates the remainder of the distance along the bubble’s convex, aligns and musters her legs beneath her as Nemo closes the gap from the left. The Prul, unnatural terror clouding his double-chinned face, rises and squeezes off the last two shots his sidearm will allow before the chamber clicks empty.

On cue, Moira pounces, pulling herself into a Snarling Jborra stance and swooping silently towards her oblivious foe. Nemo, bottle empty, hurls it oblique, catching the Prul on the right hand and clattering the empty pistol to the ground. In response, the Prul steps forward and clocks Nemo absolutely in the face with a closed fist, plowing him to the ground and haphazardly skipping him across the floor.

Moira descends, instantly flattening the Prul beneath her knee, landing in a hard squat atop him and finally dethroning that moronic hat. They briefly wrestle, the frantic Prul attempting to thrash her off while Moira grapples to grasp a hold on his chin. She yanks him wickedly, his neck shatters and his fluorescent emerald border flickers into a deep crimson. She exhales.

After confirming the kill, Moira shifts her weight to her other knee and reaches for the castoff piece. She'd been right – a Halisdro sidearm. A miniaturized bootleg of an MI model, it was small enough to conceal in a shin or wrist holster, carried a magazine of sixteen off brand vapor cartridges and appeared to be woven and cemented from reinforced, low-tensile shobo silk. Organic weaponry was the number one answer to metallic-based firearm sensors, such as those the ‘bounce employed. Even a holdout this small would have been useful, if Nemo’s bottle hadn’t cleaved the whole thing in two, leaving the barrel dangling from the chamber by a handful of wiring. She flings it dismissively and it breaks on impact.

Bloom. Me. The Fuck. Out. Moira looks up and left to find, slumped like a child’s abandoned toy, her Captain, scraping himself off the club floor. Thrown clear by the Prul’s blasphemous blow and sporting a fashionable green tint from the biostrobe, he arduously labors to his feet, wheezing and spitting out blood. His face is bitter mush – bruised, bloodied, by all rights, broken. Even looking at him, Moira could feel her own battered head throb. I think I lost a tooth back there.

That’ll be expensive, Moira deadpans.

Nemo throws on another of his quick shrugs. Depends. I know a guy. He uses both thumbs to ladle some of the blood from his eye sockets. Antigravity can suck its mother’s cock.

Moira scowls. She rises off the corpse and flips it with the edge of her boot. He's repulsive, even by Prulish standards. His gristly jowls are slack, spilling across his face and pooling on the plastolieum. His scalp only boasts a smattering of bristle, the same vibrissa that coats his bulky biceps and corrugated knuckles. His cloth is characterless – a sleeveless vest, an appropriately sized wrist holster and the same unexceptional shirt and breeches found on every transient spacer in Takioro Defederate Station. Her boot’s edge serves the same purpose in rolling him back, face plant to the floor.

Recognize him? Nemo asks, having achieved relatively stable footing. Moira deepens her scowl and shakes her head. Nemo makes the voyage back to the body of his assailant, wincing with every other step, and stoops before him, grasping a few fingerfuls of barbed hairs and examining the face.

Any idea for a motive? Moira inquires.

The usual ‘no good reason?’

Sublime.

Nemo unhands the Prul’s head and grimaces, glancing about the carcass of the nightclub. Looks like the festivities are breaking up.

Moira fires a peek over her shoulder. Order, however relative, did seem to be returning to the second floor of the Astrobounce Gentlemen’s Club. The pumping music had wound itself down, secondary and tertiary inertial compensators began to re-route and the majority of the brawl’s combatants were either fleeing the ensured justice of the house brutes, bleeding out or, in the case of the truly idiotic, panting and wiping their brows amid the floating jungle of collateral damage. Such was the case with both Odisseus and Two-Bit Switch, the former picking amber Mruka fur out from the cracks between his fangs, the latter hunched, checking the vitals of the asphyxiated Saurian.

I imagine Gozzer’ll be none too happy about this, Moira muses.

His exhale explodes out of his lips as Nemo answers. No, I imagine not. He regards her incredulously, thumbing over his shoulder. Did you decapitate that Kezzerak?

She sniffs. He was asking for it.

He furrows his brow. How do you figure?

Damn mantis-men don’t wanna get dismembered in fistfights, they should grow some blooming bones.

Nemo’s eyebrows polarize. Fair enough.

I assume we’ve no idea what happened to Xo’s representative?

Nemo purses his lips. Correct.

Fuck.

Seconded.

With a string of electrified cracks, the biostrobe is usurped by successive blasts of garish industrial lighting, flooding the club floor in uncompromising illumination and heralding the approach of the incensed management. In a few seconds, the joint would be lousy with Gozzer and his hired heavies – a dissimilar handful of saw-toothed Triomman thugs with profoundly trigger-happy dispositions. As the last of the weightless furniture awkwardly alights on the ground, Moira wonders how Nemo planned on cajoling their way out of this one.

Sometimes, I wish we could just play nice with all the other criminals.

Nemo musses up his face. Whaddya mean? I'm nice.

By all the moons, Nemo, if I find out you’re in back of this! comes the heavily accented clarion call from across the nightclub. Nemo’s eyebrows bounce back into place.

That’ll be Gozzer. Wish me luck. He stands, scoops up the stray bowler hat and spins it onto his head in a single motion, stalking off towards the sound of Gozzer’s voice.

Moira sighs. You’re kidding me.

He twists his torso to answer, continuing his stride uninterrupted. What? he teases. Moira rolls her eyes and shifts her attention elsewhere as he saunters off, Two-Bit and Odisseus falling in behind him at a motion.

Moira releases a yawn, which is accompanied by a blistering pain, characteristic of a cracked bone, on the left side of her jaw, precisely where the greenskin scored his lucky hit. She gives the point of contact a judicious massage with a thumb and reminds herself to obtain a few bottles of osteocaulk before they shoved off.

Out of the corner of her eye, Moira spots something – a meek point of red flash, emanating from beneath the pudgy hand of the dead Prul. She edges his wrist with her boot and reveals a handful of crumpled machinery, complete with tiny, cracked transponder, likely broken in his fall. She reaches to his other hand and inverts it, uncovering a similar transponder nestled in the palm, though it displays a steady green light, rather than a flashing red one.

Moira plucks up the device for closer inspection and watches the air four inches beyond it quaver and distort. She wheels it about for a moment, smirking in recognition.

It seems this Prul, along with the greenskin and probably the Walkeen she’d previously faced, had been equipped with manual shielding arrays, better known in these circles as bombard knuckles. When planted in a palm and properly activated, the transponder projected a fist-sized swath of buffer comparable to a shipborne bombard shield. Being struck in the face by an assailant wielding such a device was akin to being rammed by a starship, albeit considerably smaller and slower. The mystery of the greenskin’s disproportionately powerful punch suitably solved, Moira continues her search.

A hard heel kick to the corpse’s abdomen and it flops to its back again. She bends over the body and pads down its pockets. He was unarmed, save for the sundered silk sidearm, though the shoulder holster suggested he’d logged a pistol at the door – a medium chamber, short muzzle weapon, possibly an O9 or a V2. His clip was unimpressive, hosting a small hodgepodge of bills, which Moira discreetly palms, along with the one working bombard knuckle. His forward trouser pockets contained, along with a surprising number of empty chewing paste cartridges, a clearance card for Docking Port #2187 and an expired ident tag.

Cogden Moore, the tag named him and granted him second-tier bounty hunting status under the Ring Penal Authority. Rifling through the vest, she found something folded and stashed in the rightmost breast pocket that Nemo would likely be very interested to see.

Look what I found, Nemo calls from behind. Moira half-turns as he swaggers towards her, elbows cocked up and forefingers pinching a sliver-thin piece of tech.

You square everything with Gozzer?

More or less. Two-Bit’s closing negotiations. Looks like he might be entitled to eight percent off our next job.

Moira extends a hand. You gotta stop offering percents – bigger jobs we take, more money we lose. He passes her the card, emblazoned with the familiar Hong Xo insignia. Business card?

Holodeck. Looks like they left the offer after all, he tilts his head and smirk sideways. See? I done good.

Moira glowers and tosses him the folded leaflet. Right breast pocket. Cogden Moore. On contract from the RPA. Carrying a license and everything. My bet is, she spares a consideration for the full splay of fallen thugs all about her, he bought himself some untalented muscle for the takedown. Check their pockets, oughta find cash minted from Psabo and Yime, just like his.

Nemo's smirk disappears as he busies himself with the unfolding and scrutiny of the flyer, only to evolve tenfold into a jubilant grin upon realization.

You’re serious?

I’m serious.

The odd elated snicker besieges his recitation. Eighteen counts of murder in the first degree, three counts of piracy, one count of brigandage and one count of enthusiastic corruption of the galactic good. 78,000 Commercial. Dead or alive. He tears his eyes off the posted notice, childlike wonder in his face. So, he’s a–

Yes.

And we just–

Yes. Mind you, this Moore is no Quuilar Noxix, but that’s a notice you can be proud of. Trust me.

He motions emphatically at her with the half-crumpled handout. You do understand, of course, this belongs on the chiller. It’s a necessity.

That seems a little–

He’s thrust the notice into the air, in a gesture of mastership and dominion over the inebriated wrecks, irritated administration and inner sanctum of his crew, exclaiming across the second floor of the Astrobounce Gentlemen’s Club, in the voice of a conquering warlord. Attend me, galaxy. I, the nefarious Captain Nemo, have successfully vanquished the first bounty hunter you fucks could throw at me. Eat shit, long arm of the law!

Chapter 2

Two-Bit Switch had conducted business as a freelance cutpurse, a hired gun and, most recently, a professional jailbreaker for the past thirteen years, operating entirely out of Takioro Defederate Station. On only two separate and unrelated occasions had he been summoned before the old lady herself, Takioro’s Depot-Commissioner: the first relating to an in-station counterfeiting ring that he, to this very day, denies any involvement in and the second, this exact moment.

Dujic’s Holo-Ink Parlor wasn’t owned or operated by any Dujic, nor had it been the entire time Two-Bit had plied his trade on the Station’s circular streets and blackened barrooms. Whatever Dujic’s origins, his namesake was a dank, unkempt outlet on the First Ring, possessed of fourth-hand tattooing equipment, a musky, disagreeable clientele and the particular distinction of serving as the Depot-Commissioner’s base of operations.

A lack of available office space between the station's querulous merchant bigwigs had damned old Vel to the lodgings she’d held before ascending to the undesired position of Depot-Commissioner. Something in her demeanor, however suggested she preferred it that way. The Parlor’s unimpressive square footage relegated the dozens of daily malcontents to briefer and smaller audiences, lest they wished to endure the cramped, reeking confines of her lair for more than a few minutes at a time. All cloistered within as they were at present, Two-Bit could sympathize.

The four of them, crammed into corners and crouching on counters, plus Vel and her current customer, made even the larger of the two studios stuffy. Despite their proximity, Vel was forced to shout over the sound of the whirring holopen; though in all fairness, she’d probably be shouting anyway.

Gozzer’s been chompin’ my ear off all morning, she protests, attention planted firmly on her patron’s left bare breast. Today’s specimen, a balding Buja beauty with a thousand-dottible stare, was emphasizing the shape of her nipples by having holographic adrogi goldfish inked in, swimming lackadaisical circles about them. Two-Bit battles the impulse to stare, but Vel seems unmoved. Says you’re fixin’ to welch on his damages.

The Captain, still sporting his purloined bowler hat and spinning halfheartedly in the room's only other chair, opens on the defensive, giving his hands a partial spread. Welch nothing. I promised him eight percent.

Off what? Vel answers, not missing a beat.

Nemo scans the room for the crew’s confirmation. Two-Bit, cross-armed and propped against an expansive wall-poster, shrugs one shoulder. Moira, squatting near the sink, gives a curt, closed-eye nod. Blocking the doorway with his broad tail leaking into the next studio, uncomfortable Odisseus doesn’t even respond.

Off the next job.

You got another job? Vel hesitates to retouch a shimmering scale on an errant fish’s streaming dorsal fin. Some other misguided blowbag hired you after that last debacle?

Consternation crosses Nemo’s features. The Kapla Caper? Two-Bit stifles a smile at the term he, the crew's designated heist namer, originally coined.

If you wanna call that mess a caper, Vel responds.

Consternation gives way to frustration. We delivered the freight, didn’t we?

After you got boarded by a customs frigate.

Doesn’t tie back to you. Moira monotones.

Vel adjusts her lopsided imaging goggles. As soon as some bounty hunter pinches your freebootin’ ass, you bet it does.

Odisseus snarls an abrasive reply, but Vel doesn’t flinch or even spare him a glance as she answers.

"I think if I’d just hired me a smuggler instead of a trigger-happy pack of–" Vel begins, but annoyance overtakes Two-Bit and he interjects, before his better angels can dissuade him otherwise.

Look, it’s a hustle-and-cuss operation, isn’t it? Anybody with a spaceship and two lollies is gonna have a gashouse time fangling that clean, customs frigger or no.

The holopen deactivates. The Buja coughs. Two-Bit untangles his arms and dangles them about his hips. Vel regards Nemo civilly, even courteously. Tell your boy not to interrupt me.

I think what he was getting at–

I don’t care what he was gettin’ at. He’ll speak when spoken at or you can chain him up outside.

Nemo catches Two-Bit’s eye as he replies. Fair enough. Two-Bit sniffs and coils his forearms back together. If Velocity wanted to play queenpin in her parlor, let her. To the greater galaxy, she was nothing by a racketeer with delusions of standing, but here on Takioro, on her station, at the unruly, dissolute heart of Bad Space, she was cream on the upper crust.

She was an alumna of an industry four decades older, when the Endless Imperium still managed a flaccid grip over a fragment of the warp routes and shipping lanes of the Outer Ring, when Smerdyakov Svetlova was an entry-level thug on the boulevards and dry-docks of Shavshoka, when Takioro Federate Station was a brilliant new beacon of commerce and enterprise beyond the Inner Sectors. Abraham had called those the days of yore.

Then came the mercenary transport corporations; Valladian Shipping, the Ring Confederacy, the impregnable Gitter Consortium and their fleets of both affiliated and freelance teamsters, whose tenuous security attracted hordes of pirates too incompetent to clash with the Imperium in the Midworlds. In turn, the victimized cargo companies were compelled to conscript the least scrupulous of these pirates as bounty-privateers to safeguard their new business interests, which succeeded in finally fracturing the Outer Ring into the shambolic, lawless territories known colloquially as Bad Space, utterly bereft of government, legality and restraint.

Takioro Federate Station was ideally situated to monopolize commerce in the Outer Ring, at a junction between the most efficient routes to the standardized Imperium resource worlds, such as Pequod or Baz, and the key shipping lanes of several of the independent cargo firms. Unfortunately, it was exactly this prosperity that drew the eye and the successive pillaging of opportunistic pirates. Half a decade of repeated reaving and Takioro’s grand goals of intergalactic entrepreneurship went the way of its smashed and dysfunctional central spire.

Nowadays, the Station’s three rings were tethered to a local asteroid, the nearest possible object capable of anchoring them. Nowadays, Takioro Defederate Station was a nest of malfeasance, bloodshed and debauchery and its Depot-Commissioner was a vintage picaroon impersonating a gangland queen.

My point here, Nemo, is that now I got the Ring Penal Authority and all her bounty hunters to deal with, Velocity continues, reactivating the holopen and returning her implacable concentration to the goldfish at hand.

Nemo’s face bursts into his first smile of the meeting. Bloom me out, Vel, we’ll take care of the bounty hunters.

It’s not a problem, Moira utters.

That’s where my problem starts. You get scooped up by a bounty hunter, it’s over for you. You’re lookin’ at life in a cold box – you think you wouldn’t sell my skin for yours?

The bounty’s only 78 thou – he hasn’t drawn any real heat yet, Moira denotes.

Hey, now– Nemo begins but Vel diverts her attention for half a moment to regard steely Moira.

And when he does?

Nemo kneads the brow beneath his bowler. It ain’t gonna happen, Vel–

Lemme explain something to you, Nemo, alright? Her right hand absently sweeps a few bluing hairs behind her horn as she explicates. "You are a pirate, not a fucking revolutionary. You don’t got to, in fact, you’d best not take such romantic fucking glee out of shooting down the bloody cops. You take a job from me, I want it done quietly."

Two-Bit throws his hands wide. We were fucking kuckled!

The holopen snaps silent. Her voice, one Two-Bit doesn’t doubt could scatter spacers when shouted above decks, suddenly expands to fill the chamber, meeting and overtaking his own. You’ll keep that jabberhead in polite fucking comportment or by all the moons, I’ll stitch bitch across his forehead and you’ll pay for the ink.

Nemo peels the hat off and drops his elbows to his knees, apparently prepared to pacify. What would you have preferred?

I would have preferred a little fucking discretion. Smuggler has the misfortune to get boarded, I appreciate a tactful resolution – a few bills in the right hand, a little strong-arming, if absolutely necessary. What I don’t appreciate are motherfucking executions.

I–

Weld it up now, boy, I’m talkin’ here. The Buja’s breast is forgotten as Velocity aligns the full force of her ire at the quickly cooling Captain. You might be able to butcher up a batch of customs officers without thinkin’ twice about it, but all you’re doin’ is passin’ the hurt along to me. Likely never occurred to you as to where I’m supposed to unload this cargo now. She rotates the chair back in rank with her patron, squeezing the holopen into operation. Leave it to Cap’n Nemo to chase all my legit contacts in the Ring ConFed back down their holes with his hot flagged freight.

Nemo’s become brusque by now, ashen anger flooding his cheeks. Your point?

Menace abruptly evaporated and supplanted by her characteristic composure, Vel busies herself in the hoary eye of the undermost fish. My point being, you wanna keep earnin’ enough scratch to keep that rattletrap afloat, you’d best change your fucking colors.

The crew’s six eyes swerve to the Captain, drumming four fingers along the rim of his grasped billycock. Two-Bit had personally seen Nemo inexorably gun down a dozen souls for slander against the ship, but he only splits open a tight smile and continues drumming.

You ain’t thinking of stiffing us, are you?

Vel scoffs. Ain’t worth the trouble. She aims the butt of the holopen over her shoulder, beyond Odisseus and into the smaller studio. Traasha’ll take care of you on the way out.

The Captain climbs out of the chair and holsters his hat. Will that be all?

A trio of truncated holopen stabs and Velocity leans back, chair creaking in protest. Very nearly. She taps the Buja briskly on the shoulder, utters an offhand remark in what Two-Bit assumes to be Bujese and the customer lopes out of the parlor, holographic fish looping their very first circuits. Velocity tilts a glance at the standing Nemo. Who’s the new client?

His paltry smile corrupts into a proper sneer. Huong Xo.

She spends a long moment negotiating the imaging goggles past the stubs of her once immense horns and onto her cleft brow, unearthing eyes as azure as an afterburner.

Odisseus had passingly referred to her as a native of Vollok, a boondock world known for its endless steppeland, tricky jump point, subsequent fields of wreckage and natives whose fantastically impractical antlers had to be basically sheared off if they ever hoped to even board a starship. Looking at her though, even Two-Bit, whose personal preferences favored a slimmer and stupider model, had to admit that for an aging, battle-scarred cervine, she wasn’t without her charms.

Of course, it certainly wasn’t worth any effort. Barring the particular batch of abhorrence she held for Two-Bit, she’d, in Abraham’s days of yore, sculpted such a reputation as the sort of scurvy, cutlass-swinging buccaneer to freeze his hard-on before it started. One could fill junkyards full of wreckage from the tankers she’d tossed. Her birth name no one on Takioro had ever heard, but her given name referred to an especially famed game of chicken her now-defunct freighter, The Gypsy Laddie, had once played, dropping full throttle into Borkun VIII’s atmosphere, against an anti-aircraft installation.

Today, though, her moniker was just a nickname, her namesake just a legend, her cruiser chopped up for parts and her history of violence and crime nothing but an uninherited legacy. Today, she ran a tattoo parlor on Takioro’s lowest ring, held an ostensible title and spent her days humoring crooked merchants as they elbowed each other for real estate space.

Her cerulean eyes narrow. You’re fucking me.

Nemo vents his palms. You’re not paying me enough for that. Two-Bit quells a snigger as the Captain suffers under her burning blue scrutiny.

Xo hired you? Her words ooze incredulity. To do what?

Pirate. Presumably.

They leer at each other, the entire studio suddenly sodden with gunfight tension. Something, the instigation of an emotion, crosses behind Vel’s eyes for the briefest of beats, but its fluttered away before Two-Bit can decide whether it was murder or appeal. Nemo, however, is all arrogance, thumbs cocked in his broad black belt and face plastered with that excessive expression that suggests he’s about to start whistling.

Gaze still firmly fixated on Nemo, Velocity reaches her left hand to her surgical tray, pinches a greasy gray rag and wipes the gristle from the tip of her holopen. You go play with the big boys, then. See how it’s done.

Nemo’s beam is both derision and delight. Will do.

Odisseus is the first to leave, with a single huffy snort before waddling out of the studio. Nemo follows after him, strutting like a gunfighter with Moira sliding off the counter and into step behind him. Two-Bit furrows his brow as he notices, apparently for the first time, that at some point during the meeting, the straps that secured Moira’s twin pistols in their shoulder holsters had mysteriously unclipped themselves. Two-Bit shoves himself off the wall to fall in after Moira, when Vel calls over her shoulder.

Heard back from my brother, by the way. Says he’s still got that job waitin’ for you on Rith. You wanna take care of that when you get back?

Sure, Nemo exclaims from the other room.

Two-Bit lingers a second in the nearly empty parlor, offers Velocity an open palm, a cheery smile and a skulk out.

–––

Odisseus was continually dismayed by the level of complacency he’d cultivated as regards synthetic fish, more specifically in their consumption. Certainly, in his years hobnobbing between the sort of scanty dives and greasy spoons Nemo seemed to prefer, he’d ripened a ravenous gluttony for authentic seafood, of any size, recipe or color, but only when faced with a truly doleful replication did he come to understand exactly how deep he’d sunk his standards.

The dappled orange fillets laid out before him, so distended with boiling yellow oils that the flesh crackles and oozes like magma, had been billed as poached jiihu tongues and came garnished with fungal shavings and simmering in a heavy heated broth of associated distillations. As far removed from fresh seafood as Odisseus had become, the beleaguered Ortok desperately wanted to believe his dish’s authenticity, but there was no fooling a sense of smell as fastidious as his own.

I tried to hum it to her, you know, that just ‘cause I can delly a skin is flimmy don’t mean I prod it, or even delly who did, but she wouldn’t ball it up. To Odisseus’ right, Two-Bit Switch, through a mouthful of fronded fixings, regales to no one in particular, possibly his hoisted pinks-and-greens sandwich. His succession of incessant complaints concerning Velocity and her cantankerous business practices had dominated the crew’s conversation on the twenty minute walk, shoot ride included, between Dujic’s Holo-Ink Parlor and The Boiler, though if any of his three companions were paying any heed at all, they gave no outward sign.

What certainly didn't help the matter, of course, was Two-Bit's ingrained predilection towards Jabber, that peculiar dialect of rhyming slang, technical shorthand and confusing idioms. A spacer's cant developed by lonely starship crewmen months and months out of port, Jabber was the lingua franca between fighter jockeys, space station waifs and those with teltriton beneath their feet more often than terra firma. Working an Outer Ring chopshop for three years had taught Odisseus enough Jabber to scrape by with his comrade's queer vernacular, though Two-Bit himself could hardly claim the same, with barely six months of Ortoki exposure under his belt.

Odisseus gazes inattentively out the window, at the combined hurly-burly of Takioro’s Second Ring, as a six-pack of a Saurian hatchling street gang saunters past, spitting hisses at passerby. Likely as ignored as Two-Bit’s continued remarks, Odisseus nudges his exceedingly frothed fish with a claw and observes quietly, They left the mushrooms in.

Send it back, Moira asserts, seated slantwise across the table.

She’s just got in it her maggie that’s she’s an agger proper, you know, so she’s gotta be all fuckin’ hinky now. That’s the lot of it, Two-Bit clarifies as he gulps down a mouthful of his reuben.

Odisseus gestures a half-hearted paw in the direction of the besieged Zibbian waiter, six out of eight tentacles hurriedly taking orders from impatient diners. I don’t want to bother him.

Halting her milk’s advance to her mouth, Moira answers, unrelenting. It’s his job.

Ain’t no allbee for that kind of wankery, though, Two-Bit obliviously mutters through a mouthful.

I don’t know – he seems busy, Odisseus replies, apprehensively licking the brimming broth from the dipped tip of his foreclaw. Unlike the enormous and rowdy Astrobounce, with its literal army of waitstaff, The Boiler was a five-table, two-Zibbian noodle counter, one of the anonymous dozens of similar joints underlining the lower level of the Second Ring. Boasting little more than a varied menu, its eponymous penchant for poaching and the indigent charm of a struggling greasy spoon, it was undermanned, ill-stocked and overmatched by the encroaching intergalactic megaconglomerates like Pickle Planet, portending an assured defeat beneath the wheels of its mighty culinary conquest.

This, of course, is precisely why Nemo ate there.

Do you think they’d mind if I send them a picture? he declares directly across from Odisseus, mere moments after messily slurping a jungle of Jowna noodles into his mouth. He wafts the creased bounty posting as he speaks, relegating the pasta to the left side of his mouth, so as not to stem his flow. I mean, I’d be helping them, if nothing else, and I really think it’d look better with a picture.

Moira winces as she swallows and kneads the left side of her jaw. That’s what he’s paid for. It’s his job.

Odisseus pricks up his whiskers. I heard you. He gingerly brushes some mushroom slivers from the body of the dish and into the stewing broth as Nemo continues.

I also noticed, he observes, that none of you seemed to have made the cut. He jumbles the Jowna with his fork a few flicks before amassing another bundle. There’s no ‘known associates’ listed. Not even you, kid.

Moira’s expression crinkles as she lances a peach cube. You understand you’re basically a bathroom break, right?

Hm?

78 thousand is a chump change bounty. Odds are, you’re gonna have to murder a lot more customs officers than that before you’re generally considered worth the trouble.

That right?

’Fraid so. That Prul was probably even hunting beneath him. She pops the indigo cube, like a chaser, into her mouth.

Nemo cants his head right, considering. You'd be the expert, I suppose. Chewing, she perks up an eyebrow, more than enough prompting for Nemo. 'Course, if I'm a bathroom break and you work for me, that'd make you, what, ass grease? Shitty toilet tissue? He jabs his own pasta wad into his mouth, which he thereupon smears with a convivial and sauce-stained grin. Two-Bit winds up his husky laugh and even Odisseus upturns his muzzle.

Go shit a grenade, is her only rejoinder, between bites of blue peach.

Two-Bit points decisively at Nemo with two-thirds of his dripping, saturated sandwich. I’ll tell you what that would make the dregg of us – a bloom of a lot beedier if we narmed you in for the sweets.

Odisseus glowers, issuing a deep growl from behind closed fangs. Moira ceases chewing. Don’t get smart, Two-Bit. Ladling out a portion of jiihu with three curved claws, Odisseus snatches the morsel in his jaws and rends it with his harsh rear molars. As he wipes the syrup from his muzzle with a tufted forearm, Moira scowls across the table. You’re not sending it back.

He swallows the poached tongue and gives his low shoulders a sheepish shrug. I’ll be okay.

Moira rolls her eyes and returns to her fruit. Nemo looks up from the bounty, eyeing Odisseus’ piping lunch. What, did they forget to take out the mushrooms?

Rapidly ruminating the sandwich in his mouth in an effort to speak, Two-Bit proposes, Say, jabbing as we were about jangle, what’re the tosses we’d be able to get our jank of the rhino right now?

Reaching for his porringer to combat the calescence of his broth, Odisseus regards Nemo, cockling his coveted notice and securing it within his inside duster pocket. Normally, Nemo waited to disperse a particular job's winnings until the entire crew, Abraham included, was present, but Odisseus was always glad of an early paycheck. He’d neglected to restock on canisters for his Acathi before the Kapla Caper, reasoning three full clips would be more than ample ammunition for a relatively painless smuggling run and not anticipating the surprise inspection, subsequent boarding action and resulting firefight. His unexpectedly depleted store consisted of only two canisters, leaving Odisseus understandably anxious to reload his supply before his quarrelsome Captain over-engaged them for the second time this week.

Nemo traces a middle finger along the white fleck of the gunshot scar staining his cheek, a forming habit. Bloom it. I don’t see why in the moons not.

Odisseus' toothy grin leaks oil. Two-Bit gives one hard clap in elation. Even Moira, draining her milk, nods appreciatively. Nemo withdraws the sheaf of cash from within his inside coat pocket in two pinched fingers and begins thumbing through broad bills. All attention is pinpointed on the fluttering currency as he parcels out four equal stacks of tender before his bowl of slimy saffron pasta.

He doles out the three’s payment, half a dozen thousand-credit marks a piece, sets aside six of his own and re-creases the remainder of the cash, stashing it within the folds of his jacket: six thousand for Abraham and one-third of the total take, fifteen thousand in this case, for the Lover's repairs, refueling and general maintenance.

Two-Bit lunges over half the table to snatch his share. Moira palms her portion, discreetly checking Nemo’s math before securing it somewhere beneath her signature shoulderless black sweater. Odisseus scoops up his slice with one paw, raising it to his nose for closer inspection.

Six tattered Imperium banknotes, four of which emblazoned with the emerald image of Prash and her three moons, the other two sporting Greva’s bleak sigil, would purchase several new clips for the Acathi, a week’s supply of frozen imitation dubix trout and possibly even a replacement neticgrappler.

Not a word to Abraham now, savvy? Nemo emphasizes, returning to his steaming pasta with a few insistent stabs of his fork. Odisseus nods and safely stows his earnings in a belt pouch.

Tell you the gritty, I was hinked and a half that we was gonna get dritched by that loopsy Vollocki back there. Two-Bit tips right, stuffing his cash into his pocket as he confesses.

Nemo scoffs. Vel talks tough shit.

She wouldn't dare shortchange us. Excepting Traasha, she’s barely got enough muscle to keep that house in order, Moira reasons.

She and Abraham, you know, they're just old school, Nemo concludes, thrusting a fork, draped with unctuous noodles, into his mouth.

Odisseus knots his forearms together. Still. Maybe she had a point back there, with that revolutionary stuff.

Sure doesn't, if she's saying we're better off smuggling. Nemo manages through a bite of Jowna, a few rogue specimens dangling slack out of his mouth, "My point being, we’re moving on to bigger and better things." From the seemingly all-purpose jacket pocket, he withdraws a slim silver card – a holodeck. His right hand shoveling the stray pasta back in, his left slaps the card in the middle of the table, trademark Huong Xo crest leering up at the assembled.

You give it a jack yet? Two-Bit baits, reclining postprandially in his chair, reuben little but a creamy residue on his plate and fingers. Nemo’s smile swells from a smirk.

Nope. Thought we should all get a chance to hear it first. The four newly minted outlaws exchange looks: Nemo impish, Two-Bit villainous, Moira humored and Odisseus circumspect. As