 
### 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 a collective, they discern the enormity of this event – by activating the holodeck, listening to the message contained within and undertaking the resulting mission, they were elevating themselves to the next echelon in the intergalactic underworld, from burgeoning brigands to pirates proper. Beyond this point, customs frigates would be the least of their concerns.

Moira, unsurprisingly, breaks the moment of reverie. "What're you looking at? Play the fucking message."

Nemo stretches an arm over the masticated leavings of their midday meal and presses the launch button at the holodeck's center. An argent twin of the steely logo stamped to the holodeck's face flutters into view above it and the monotone chiming of a droidvox greets its jointly skeptical and enthused audience.

"An extension of greeting to you, Captain Nemo," the recording opens. "The Most Heedful Huong Xo has observed your capability in clandestine endeavors, the enduring success of your previous engagements and the auspicious outlook of your mounting career with a great interest."

Nemo shoots his first mate a glance. "See, Moira? I got me an auspicious outlook." She cuffs him across the back of his head, eliciting his coltish giggle. Two-Bit shushes the both of them.

The hologram wavers slightly and continues. "In this fashion do Our Ingratiating Overlords deign to enlist your aid, the aid of your crew and your transport vessel, in a mercantile venture of a most discreet description."

Neither Nemo nor Two-Bit can smother the smiles from their faces. Odisseus scrapes up his second helping of jiihu tongue and dispatches it in a curt chomp as the droidvox begins to outline the offer.

"An independent cargo freighter operating off Alor, _The Hourly Wage_ , undertakes consistent supply runs to a Mercy Clinic on Danboowui. Its shipments typically consist of medical replenishments of a considerable financial appeal to The Most Sagacious Huong Xo."

Nemo's face alights with apish astonishment. "Can it be? Someone who actually hires _pirates_ to commit piracy?" The holodeck reaches its conclusion while Odisseus ingests his fish, gazing distracted out the window at a custodial drone suffusing a disconcerting black blemish on the plastolieum in corrosive chemicals.

"You will be compensated a sum equal to one hundred and sixty thousand credits of Imperium Commercial Currency in exchange for the timely and inconspicuous re-appropriation of a single shipment of these medicinal supplies," the hologram chimes, the bastard of bewilderment and triumph exploding on Nemo's face. Two-Bit literally applauds, drawing eyes from the Boiler's other diners, and Moira herself brooks a greedy grin.

"The Most Magnanimous Huong Xo respects and divines your acceptance. When the task is completed to their benevolent satisfaction, interface with intermediates through the use of the following comm frequency for further instructions." The hologram blips a twenty-digit number for a microsecond and blinks out, as if suctioned back into the holodeck.

They don't sit in silence for a second before Two-Bit erupts. "This ain't bloomin' bodgers no more, briggies; this is nitty fucking quitty." Moira blinks.

Nemo encapsulates it. "Okay, I didn't understand a word of that."

Moira grunts. "Probably for the best."

"We can be chuffed about this, is all."

Nemo indicates him with a forefinger. "That we can. Like I _assume_ Two-Bit just said, this is officially the big time now. We make this gig and our days of slinking under smuggling cordons are over, savvy?"

"Let's not get careless, of course," Moira redirects. "Or ahead of ourselves."

He squints at her, certainly about to misconstrue her point. She reposes forward, elbows rooting on the table. "Holodeck said this freighter, _this Hourly Wage_ , is an independent trafficker. Makes her a teamster."

Nemo wrinkles his brow. "Which a good thing. We plunder her and we don't catch a cap in some company crown."

"But you take backing out of the equation, you've got a freelance teamster, lacking the protection of a corp, regularly carting cargo big enough for even Huong Xo to notice. And nobody's tossed her? That doesn't sound suspicious to you?"

"What do you think?"

"This means mercenaries and probably a lot of them."

Nemo steeples his fingers against his mouth. "What, rangers?"

Two-Bit spits. "Motherless fucks."

Moira chews her lower lip, pawing the glass's rim with a wayward finger.

"Rangers are fucking extortive. If this _Wage's_ got the funds to bankroll spice rangers, we'd probably make more jangle fencing their cargo ourselves."

Crosshatching his fingers, Nemo adopts his distinctive deliberation. "What would we need?"

Moira exhales. "Luck. A full mag of torpedoes wouldn't hurt."

"I need a new wheel," Two-Bit suddenly appreciates.

Odisseus spies it almost before Nemo does. His zeal enkindles behind the slate storm of his eyes as he disembroils his fingers and levels one at the still envisioning Two-Bit.

"That's exactly it," he launches, building speed as he creaks over the table. He's veered to Moira when the grin first germinates. "We don't need more torpedoes. We need more guns." Her scowl still shows her suspect, but Nemo's undaunted. "If they have a lot of mercenaries, then what do you think we should have?"

"Mercenaries," Odisseus flatly affirms.

"A lot of them." The grin invades and conquers the left hand side of his face. "We need a bigger crew. A marauder crew."

"More crew means less cash per head," Moira advises.

Nevertheless, Nemo's beside himself. "We'll jump that warp when we come to it, but the point is," he pontificates and, arrested with alacrity, he slumps back to his chair, frowns satisfied and surmises it thus, "we wanna get serious about piracy, we get us some more motherfucking pirates."

Moira cracks into an odd simper. "Fair enough."

This triggers Two-Bit's bouncing nods of culmination. "I delly a bruno or two who main drongo when the shit turns to flaster."

Finally, Nemo fixes his familiar feverish scrutiny on Odisseus. "Whaddya think, Odi? Time to toss in."

Despite his instinctual mistrust of this new employer, his disquiet about siphoning their reward even further apart and his generally disregarded theory that a task was rarely better solved with an increase in firearms, Odisseus apprehends his final jiihu tongue with a swipe of his paw.

"You're my saltbrother. Of course I'm in," he concludes and casts the fish into his yawning mouth.

Chapter 3

Moira Quicksilver skims and counts the envelope's contents with a thumb – crisp Crander-minted banknotes, amounting four thousand Imperium credits. She tosses Lenduza a venomous glare. "This is supposed to be six-fifty."

The bartender returns an embarrassed shrug. "I guess the Mruka's two-fifty expired. I'm sorry." He stretches a stubby arm over the counter and stakes both shot glasses with separate fingers. "The Walkeen's four went through, though. Refill?"

Moira acquiesces, gesturing him off. Danbonte signals for a double. Lenduza carts off the jiggers and turns his back, occupying himself with the alcohol, while Moira leafs through the cash once more, withdraws it from the envelope, indulges in a thwarted sigh and caches it under her sweater.

"Who's the Walkeen?" Danbonte extends. The redskin hadn't discernibly aged in the third of a decade since their last association, barring the week's accumulated stubble browning his keen chin and the minute notch of a recent scar, in a deeper crimson, barely below his right nostril. Even as he asks the question, his wolfish countenance is habitually lacquered with the boredom possessed of men too clever by half.

"I don't know. Some thug," she replies, stroking the bridge of her nose with the edge of her palm.

"I didn't know you were still in the game."

"Most don't. I'd appreciate that to remain the case." She'd endeavored every possible caution to ensure that her approach and entry to The Pistol-Whip, an austere and ill-frequented saloon on the Second Ring, went unnoticed. She'd consummately muddied her route, accessed the tavern's postern door and purchased the continued silence of the dive's confirmedly reticent doormen – necessary actions all.

The Pistol-Whip had a well-warranted reputation as a bounty hunter's bar and was consequently eschewed by the vast majority of Takioro's outlaw constituency. Anonymity, in this case, was Moira's prerogative, lest she share a fate with Cogden Moore.

"Not a word," Danbonte consents.

Lenduza coasts their glasses back to Moira and Danbonte, both brimming with blue booze, before inquiring, "You don't want the vials back, do ya?" Moira dismisses him and hoists her drink as Danbonte lazily rotates his on the bar top.

"I was surprised to hear from you," he smirks. "Honestly figured you'd be dead by now."

"I got a job," Moira cuts to the chase, pitching the Gitterswitch back in a tart rush, exhaling and dabbing the residue from her lips with the meat of her thumb. "Merc work. On a pirate freighter I play first mate for."

"Oh yeah?"

"Captain wants to lease a dozen or less extra hands for a boarding party on a freelance teamster. Most likely an extension past that."

"Payment?"

"Three percent off the top." Moira eyes him sidelong. He faux-pouts.

"Three percent's pretty low for merc work." Moira ditches a handful of bills on the bar top and rises, regarding Danbonte.

"We ship out in fourteen hours. Docking Port #1118." She chucks him on the shoulder as she stalks toward the rear exit. "Nice to see ya."

–––

Two-Bit Switch brandishes both the B7 Dissident and his most dissenting deadpan against his likeness in the security corder. He pauses in the pose before hefting the weighty handgun back to his left hand appraisingly.

"How's the Dissident?" Salo calls from an aisle beyond. Two-Bit rumples his expression and tosses the B7 to his left and back to his right before answering.

"Something with the klamber," he estimates. "Feels a mite pecky."

"Well, she's empty."

His thumb discharges the cylinder and he gives it the customary spin, to the satisfying sound of the clattering chambers. "What's her zeen?"

"What you see there. She'll hold fourteen before a reload, but the good news is, she uses moonclips, so you can buy as many extra cylinders as you want. Hey, come look at this thing."

Two-Bit punches the monitor thrice and the display case's plexishield whizzes shut. He tenders a cheeky smile at the clerk, an uninterested Ondo flicking through holochannels at a dizzying pace, props the B7 against his shoulder and steps down the adjacent aisle to meet his Corgassi companion.

Salo Shouldermount was wearing a harness – an antiquated, crinkly nightmare of peeling threads and boiled leather, but the object the harness hoisted was clearly of a different stock. Though splattered with stains and powder burns, the minigun beneath had once been burnished blue, all sympathetically sculpted curves and artfully embossed with rippling wave decals. As Two-Bit rounds the corner, the masterpiece-cum-machine gun swivels to intercept him and locks to his position even as he moves forward, Salo's diaphanous hands nowhere near the contoured handlebars sprouting from the weapon's rear.

"Ain't she a beaut?" Salo smiles, flashing his row of vestigial teeth. Two-Bit had partnered with Salo on a handful of past jobs and deemed him a reliable gun caddy, enough to consider carving him a place in both this and future capers, but he still hadn't quite shaken his slight discomfort at watching Salo's bifurcated brain pulse through the transparent cartilage of his head while they spoke.

"That's an otto ratatat, isn't it?" He takes a few more steps but maintains his distance from the vigilant firearm. Droid gunnery was vehemently banned in nearly every civilized system of the galaxy; naturally, one could pick it cheap at any Takioro pistolpawner. "Who prods that?"

"Kiesha Laser. Don't know why somebody'd hock this shit, but she sure would be fun." He clenches his fists around the handlebars, grits his denticles and feigns firing the exquisite weapon, his dangling headfins jiggling in response.

"Probably 'cause it's fucking antwacky."

"You getting the Dissident?"

Two-Bit tests the bulky revolver in both hands, sweeping it across Nubo's Discount Pawn one last time. "Yeah, I razz I will," he concludes, bracketing one side of his face with it. "I shoulda tragged up a while back. You getting _that_?"

Salo Shouldermount chortles, a disquieting wet sound, and begins unhooking the harness' buckled straps. "Nah, I ain't got the scratch for this broad yet. Besides, a little delicate for this kinda work." He lifts the cumbersome weapon off his shoulder as he adds. "Maybe after we get paid." He shelves the automated minigun in the vacant rack where he found it, muzzle still aimed unnervingly at Two-Bit as they head towards the counter.

–––

Odisseus releases the accelerator and the driftcart wanders to a standstill in the middle of the First Ring's Docking Strip, the sealed cisterns slaved astern clinking and sloshing their fuel in response. Two-Bit Switch clambers off the tailpiece and capers to the floor, addressing his apparent acquaintance down the yawning doors of Docking Port #3381.

"Rooster!" he barks upward at a spindly shape, clinging like a beetle to the scorched and mangled hull of a mournfully pulverized starship – a Terro Fleet Systems L87 Circuit-class Bulk Hauler. Upon hearing the clarion cry, the figure skitters more plainly into view and upon spotting Two-Bit's approach, a pleated yellow crest erects from his scalp, presumably in some form of recognition.

"Two-Bit?" he replies. "Ord you were in statee – was conjectin' when I'd bump you." Two-Bit shrugs in response and gestures back at Odisseus in a manner he probably imagines to be placating. Odisseus grumbles and downshifts the driftcart into park. Filling up the _Lover_ wasn't the only duty the Ortok needed to perform in the next twelve hours and while he appreciated Two-Bit's uncanny aid in haggling the fuel's price down, there was a malfunctioning shield mainframe with Odisseus' name on it back belowdecks and he preferred not to dawdle.

From this distance, Odisseus' poor eyesight can distinguish very little about Two-Bit's associate, but it only takes him a moment to realize he's a Dho. Rooster gives Two-Bit a one-handed wave, sustains his grip on the derelict with five more limbs, continues ratcheting a blackened hull plate loose with another two and clutches two handfuls of gadgets in his last pair. Odisseus knew the natively arboreal Dho had rigidly structured skeletal systems but from where he was sitting, Rooster looked like nothing so much as a cluttered conglomeration of random limbs.

"This derro your gantine?" Two-Bit remarks, stepping forward and spreading his arms. "How in the bloomin' moons you fangle this?"

Rooster yanks free the shredded hull plate, enormous yellow letter "C" painted upon its face, flings it to the floor with a crash and shimmies along the cruiser's lip towards the next rent panel. "Garrok's, but affi. It's a knotty but gritty orrie, ball it up for me."

"Brondi decking?"

Rooster's crest narrows arrow-straight as he considers. "Nag, he cast out for a mite. Third then Second, I think, vizzing for a heatsaw," Odisseus recognizing the jabberterm for cutting beam, "then messes, I guess." Rooster tweaks out a bolt with his neticgrappler and the next cleft hull plate flops forward. Rooster swings lower, adjusting three of his five grips and sets about the task of unhinging the plate's bottom. Two-Bit examines the discarded sheeting with a discriminating boot.

"She even starsy like this?"

"Scanty. It were pretty rangu fanglin' Takioro as it is." The panel tumbles off, both Two-Bit and Rooster scarcely evading its descent, the former by gamboling back, the latter by swinging deftly to the left.

Odisseus noisily clears his throat. Two-Bit spares a glance over his shoulder and a parting backward step. "Well, I oughta blow. Buzz me and I'll rhino you a tumble. Savvy?" Rooster hoists three hands in farewell, preoccupied with the unlatching of the next hull plate. The driftcart sputters back to life, cargo clanging together as Two-Bit hustles back and boards the tailpiece.

He pretends not to notice Odisseus' withering glare for a few moments, until the cart's lack of motion forces him to acknowledge the surly Ortok. "What? He's a mate of mine," he justifies. Muttering, Odisseus throttles the driftcart and it lurches forward, Two-Bit nearly dismounted in surprise.

"Bloomin' jabberheads," Odisseus concludes.

–––

Moira's first kick is a Stinging Spith, an acute and incisive jab. When delivered to the nape of his neck, he's violently proned from his squatting position, crashing pedipalp-first to the filthy floor and diffusing green gaming marbles in every direction. Moira's second kick is a dirty brawler's clout, an underhanded heel smash. When delivered to his right kidney, he's hurtled onto his hunched back, skirring more marbles and finding himself face-to-face with malicious Moira, towering above in a punitive pose, promising pure violence.

Heeko hawks a wad of celadon slobber and garbles through bruised palps. "Mother's first fucks."

"Where's my planet, Heeko?" Moira opens with her classic question. He wheezes, spraying gouts of green spittle over his nettled gut.

"You eats red shit, Quissilver," he scrapes together. Moira blandly places her right jackboot, the bad cop of her favorite pair of "baby-stompers" as Nemo had taken to calling them, atop Heeko's blubbery, vibrissal gut.

"Where's my planet?"

"I isn't stupid, you bleeder. You wants I to does you more favors," he burbles, haltingly shaking his unshapely head. Slowly beginning to shift her weight to her right, Moira begins a gradual stoop towards the blenching Myyrigon.

"What I want, Heeko, is the legal indenture for Kuzu Minor and until I hold it my hand, you will do exactly," she illustrates by shoving her heel into Heeko's diaphragm, "what this bleeder wants. Savvy?"

Tens of thousands of fungibly worthless planets, galaxywide, were available for purchase through the acquisition of their individual deeds, the gaseous ninth planet of the Kuzu system among them. Moonless, devoid of any beneficial resources and even lacking direct warp access, Kuzu Minor was of exactly no use to Moira Quicksilver, saving as leverage against the wretched and indebted Heeko.

Moira extracts her boot from his midsection and he convulses in response, spewing another mouthful of expendable slime. She indifferently nudges a chance marble with her wingtip, herding it towards the gutter. "Thought I told you to stick clear of these places, Heeko? That you'd only get yourself in deeper shit?"

She'd engaged his unpleasant services on three previous occasions since he'd wagered a forged planetary voucher on an Iniquity table four years ago. For each episode, she'd been forced to delve deeper and deeper into the galaxy's gaming underground to exhume him for her purposes. This time, it was the mangiest marbling den in the Third Ring's malfunctioning sewage system, a distinction of certain prestige.

"You isn't no boss of I, Quissilver." His cadence adjusts, adopting a borderline rancor in place of his injured dismay. Moira sniggers derisively and idly arches her back, the grips of her paired pistols jostling in her shoulder holsters and glistening in the viridian light.

"What you never seemed to understand, Heeko, is that I _am_ the boss of you until one of two things happen – you hand me the deed to my planet or," Heeko blinks four of his six eyes and she's leveled Lefty, a vintage, six-cylinder double action extension of her right hand, between his two forward facing eyes, "I shoot you in the face out of general boredom."

Venom drips from the Myyrigon's languidly unsheathing fangs. "You gonna shoots I this time?"

Moira favors him with her flintiest smile. "Save your poison, Heeko. I got you a job."

–––

Odisseus theorizes that, in the utopian fiction in which he comes into the possession of any free time, he could amass a veritable fortune practically overnight, if only he sold his services to Velocity, repairing Takioro's shoots every fifteen minutes.

Equipped with nothing but the meager assembly of tools he'd belted before heading to his late meal, he crouches clumsily at work before the shoot's primitive control panel in the cramped former lift tube, a space that would have been crowded for a solitary Ortok, never-mind its additional three passengers. A pair of chittering Chook engage in feverish, interruptive discourse, an impatient Gordian drums three talons against the floor in increasing irritation and a vexed Ortok toils over retrograded elevator machinery with oversized engine repair equipment. All bottled in a free-floating cylinder, the motley assembly drift in the open space between the First and Second Rings until either Odisseus could rigidify the graviton lock or the tube wandered, forlorn, into the endless night beyond.

The main mechanical problem involved the replacement router coupling and its desperate need for a grading-and-guidance computer. Worse still, the definitive problem, the root of all the shoot's malfunction, was irreparable, considering Takioro's pervasive state of disrepair. Unless some truly bizarre turn of events led the Station to somehow acquire a new central spire, travel between the Rings unhindered by mishaps, such as the one Odisseus was currently facing, would remain elusive.

Years ago, when the antecedent pirate lords hoisted their colors over the three uprooted Rings of Takioro, the issue of inter-level transit was circumvented, naturally, through the use of very big guns. In place of the sophisticated lift traffic system, some industrious pirate mechanic fashioned a rather different scheme: effectively elevator cannons coupled with enormous magnets.

When any given tube departs a level of Takioro, an obsolete and disemboweled planetary bombardment cannon launches the blackened lift in the direction of the intended ring, where a converted proximity magnet snags it and reels it back to the underside airlock. Passengers taking a shoot ride between levels were subjected to a nauseating six-second jaunt of desperate speed and furious flames out the viewport before arriving at their destination.

Moreover, in the event of a misfire or similar accident, each tube was armed with an individual graviton projector, which could form enough of a magnetic lock to barnacle against either the intended ring or even the adjacent asteroid, until a fetcher could swing by and retrieve them.

Such a device Odisseus was currently struggling to repair and, seeing as these projectors were deteriorated, fifth-hand things, bought cheap off salvage from any junk peddler in Bad Space, he wasn't exactly hopeful.

Someone behind him issues an impatient sigh. Odisseus rewards the Gord for the dispensation of his opinion with a choleric snarl. The restless passenger recoils in response and immediately ceases the tapping of his talons.

If Odisseus had a real grievance against working as a mechanic, it was undoubtedly the attitude every non-mechanic seemed to regard him with. They overwhelmingly mistook starship repair as some form of augury – that with a few thrown bones or innards smeared in dirt, a jalopy could be ameliorated into a perfectly functioning vessel.

He'd been advertised as some sort of mechanical exemplar, mostly by Nemo who loved to demand comprehensive restorations in an impossible timeframe and then abandon the Ortok to the engine room with a quip about "rushing art," but Odisseus was little more than a tireless worker. What the _Lover_ truly needed was a team of mechanics, as even an additional pair of hands could accomplish her necessary maintenance in practically half the time.

Ortok, unfortunately, don't necessarily play well with others.

"You know, you _could_ re-route all that."

Odisseus freezes. "What?"

"I imagine you're probably trying to jumpstart the coupling? You _can_ re-route around it." Odisseus lowers his tools and turns a glance over his shoulder to spot, elbowing his way through the knees of the clustered Chook, a russet-furred male Mruka, garbed in a combat vest and standing a characteristic three feet off the ground. Having emerged from the curtain of legs, he folds his fleecy forearms pertly. "If it's an older model Grav2, there's no _need_ for a coupling. Not for a short jump like this."

Odisseus creases his forehead. "You're suggesting I," he handles a wire, "just re-circuit this here," he concludes, plugging an open socket with the cable's head. A few beats pass before the tube seems to hum to life with a flicker of the overhead light. The Mruka shrugs expansively. Odisseus contemplates him.

"What do you know about Briza?"

"I practically _invented_ her."

"And you speak Ortok."

"Apparently."

Odisseus rises from his crouch and overlooks the miniscule feline, who loses nothing of his cheek with his loss of height.

"Docking Port #1118. Half an hour. You bring your fusioner. I'll bring sandwiches."

–––

Two-Bit Switch narrowly avoids spilling both tankards as he shirks the inebriated punch. Liquor dribbles down his fingers as he deposits both beverages on a handy table and proceeds to smash the assailing drunkard in both ears with his gin-soaked hands, a favorite tactic to incapacitate an attacker. The lush's twin mouths both bellow as he plummets to the ground in a slippery mess. Whether an attempt to abscond with his drinks or whether he was simply too sloshed to determine passerby from foe, Two-Bit is unsure as he scoops up both tankards and watches the barfly flop on the floor.

"Moons," he mutters and stalks off to find the object of his search.

The Admiralty was too rough for Two-Bit, Nemo, Odisseus or Abraham and probably even Moira. Reports claim that, rather than being merely predisposed to abject brawling, the rowdy bar and grille hosts a perpetual one, a never-ending orgy of fisticuffs, intoxication and collateral damage. Certainly the copious amounts of alcohol purchased and spilled were to blame for the tavern's continued success, despite the devastating amount of destroyed property.

Brawlers of normally sedentary species fly. Brutes strapped in body armor serve drinks. The odd firearm, whose discharging is considered vaguely distasteful here, sounds into the ceiling. Two-Bit traipses through a tempest of tussling tosspots, wary waitstaff and flung flagons. Once the conscientious canteen of touring Imperium naval officers, these days, the Admiralty is afire with the joined tumult of swearing, spitting, bone-snapping frenzy–a mild afternoon.

Two-Bit discovers his quarry choking a drunkard with his left hand, strangling another with his trunk and using his right arm to alternatively punch the first in the face and elbow the second in the stomach. Two-Bit politely seats himself at a nearby table and sips placidly at his gin until both men slump suitably into unconsciousness and the strapping Aurik takes stock of his surroundings.

A toothy grin breaks out beneath the swaying trunk. "Switch?"

"Anchorage."

"What's a pickpockin' motherfucker like you doin' in here?" As if to articulate his point, a crazed boozehound rushes the Aurik, bottle hefted on high and screaming a string of obscenities. His trunk hooks the biped's wrist and yanks the surprised ruffian's snout plump into Anchorage's firm and flying fist, plowing him to the ground as if struck by an asteroid.

Two-Bit sidles the stein across the table. "I went and got you a gig, Anchorage."

He paws a handful of adorned and bedraggled dreadlocks from his eyes. "Didja?" He entangles his trunk across the neck of a threatening Triomman and with a vicious tug, feeds him an upraised knee, clearly enough to lay the brawler low and possibly break a few fangs on the way down. This achieved, he siphons up a trunkful of gin and brings it to his mouth. "What job might that be?"

Two-Bit swabs his lips with a sleeve before answering. "Nemo's runnin' a reave. Vizzing for some brunos." Anchorage's about to inhale his Gitterswitch when a Saurian slithers up in his shadow. Two-Bit begins a warning, but Anchorage twists and, seemingly on instinct, empties his trunk, showering the Saurian in boozy spray. It reels, sibilating and flaring its forked tongue. A fist blow to its skull and it enrolls in the celebrated ranks of drooling sentients at Anchorage's feet.

"I'm in," he endorses, meeting yet another challenger with a mated pair of savage headbutts that both flummox his dreadlocks and buckle the charging Moraj into the heap.

Two-Bit screws up his face. "Don't you wanna hear the take?"

Anchorage matches his expression, before bearing an embarrassed grin. "I suppose, yeah."

"Three percent," Two-Bit offers, raising his mug in toast.

Anchorage hoists his own mug in the prehensile tips of his trunk. "Sounds good," he replies, somewhat obliviously. At a signal, they both pitch their tankards back. Only as its lip whizzes scant inches past his face does Two-Bit realize Anchorage had upended the empty table by hurling his next opponent, a now thoroughly unconscious sporoid, into its opposite end. Two-Bit, agog, droops the empty mug. Anchorage jumbles his headlocks with an abashed mitt.

"Oops. Sorry."

–––

Moira Quicksilver submerges her nose beneath the brink of her shoulderless sweater, lest she inhale the interior air and perfectly ravage all six of her senses. Appropriately armored, she withdraws the drapery dangling from the truncated doorway and stalks inside.

The ceiling within is unusually shallow, abruptly halting four feet off the floor. Most who entered likely did so prostrate or crawling – Moira's exercised limberness grants her the freedom to steal about in a comfortable crouch. The chamber's occupants didn't seem to mind the abbreviated canopy, however, sprawled and decumbent about the place, utterly heedless to the architectural oddities of their environment. Only the haze of listless miasma inundating the room seemed to capture their rapture.

Very little could ever probe Moira Quicksilver into entering a Vapid den willingly, though Garrigan's disappearance apparently proved enough. They were stacked ten and twenty, like honeycombs, on the lower rung of Takioro's Second Ring, in what were once storage compartments intended for crates and luggage. They were roundly avoided by the majority of the station's patrons, those who didn't wish to plaster their pores with enough intoxicant to justify literal days of mindless capitulated inactivity.

Absurdly addictive, undividedly debilitating and fully potent from only a whiff, Vapid was a Mantrian herbal-fungal admixture that, when boiled in a steady broth, proved to be one of the galaxy's most drastic narcotics. While snorts of Spicion or even tranqs of pure Gitter might intoxicate a person, even a hint of Vapid would totally invalidate them. Customarily stewed in miniature vats, it could flounder bulwarks of men into quivering gunk. Abraham himself bore a special torch of hatred for the junk, as it was responsible for the ignominious deaths of several illustrious buccaneer captains of old, drowning in ponds of their own accumulated drool.

Moira, impromptu mask clutched over her nose and mouth, holds her breath all the same as she sifts through the hopheads, praying to all the moons that she'd even recognize Garrigan if she found him. They were knotted together nearest the threshold, as most of their motor functions likely fell prey to the haze before they took three steps. The true fiends and the more desperate of the repeat customers were sequestered at the back, malnourished, parched and sleepless. Grasping scalps to check enervated faces and rifling through already emptied pockets, Moira slinks out of the compartment, unearthing no evidence of Garrigan between the amateurs and the professionals.

Once outside a safe distance, Moira removes her makeshift veil and wheezes wildly, glad even of the putrid malodor of Takioro in deference to the creeping paralysis within. Given a few moments to square herself, Moira reapplies the lip of her sweater, pulls away the next den's mesh shroud and hustles inside.

Thus it went for the next thirteen dens, each lousy with Vaps, each mired in virulent fog, none containing Garrigan or his opium-addled remains. She'd gleaned from a credible contact that he was in station yet hadn't shipped out with any crew she'd questioned in over four months. Considering his appetites, this meant he was doubtless dead or near it in some Vapid haunt and Moira had precious little time to find and sober him before Nemo wanted to shove off.

She's practically left the fourteenth when she spots his corpse, face partially deluged in a percolating cauldron near the screened entry. She almost exhales in frustration and prowls alongside to check his vitals. As she retrieves his head from the froth, he barks awake, eyes dilated and oozing salts.

"Petty Officer Glive Garrigan, Unit BB87 – Triumph Compa–" he sputters, drool and Vapid broth both decanting out his mouth. As if under interrogation, he continues warbling his rank while Moira silently lifts him beneath the armpit into a medic's shoulder hoist.

This achieved, she struggles his inert form out of the den.

–––

Odisseus strips the excess flesh from his last toe. He jaunts his head back and casts the briny sinews into his mouth. He'd long ago discovered the only way his piscivorus palette could possibly stomach terrestrial meat involved steeping the flesh in such generous helpings of vinegar that his sensitive taste buds couldn't recognize them anymore and, to the Ortok's thinking, that made Pickle Planet the ideal venue for a business lunch with Garrok Brondi.

Nemo peels a layer of sodden skin off his paw. "Yeah, that's a bitch." He suctions in a wayward strand, adding, "That's why I, you know, dodge torpedoes."

Brondi, munching on his own limb, shoots looming Odisseus a cautionary appraisal before employing his apparent gambit, a sterling example of why Nemo had requested the Ortok's presence in the first place. "Look, you gonna make me beg here or what?"

Nemo leans bitingly forward. "What was that? I couldn't quite hear you," he thumbs an inattentive gesture over his shoulder. "Does Garrok Brondi wanna become a fucking _pirate_?"

To Nemo's credit, the street bustles blatantly about them. Driftcarts, laden with load, amble along the lane, gasping green exhaust in their wakes. A Braaca pet peddler paces between passerby, jangling squawking, hissing and mewing cages of Crandish rat-canaries, Yonite scorcher lizards and every breed of jborra kitten imaginable. A limping Etrook gallivants down the street, whistling tunelessly with an anti-spacecraft ballistic warhead buttressed over his shoulders.

They stood in the shade of the distinctive striped awning of a Pickle Planet kiosk, one of the three-dozen the megacorp threaded throughout Takioro's Second Ring, sharing a triple order of "Pickled Pacho Paws." The feet of these seven-foot rodents, when properly prepared and served on a stick, had skyrocketed Pickle Planet into a household name galaxywide.

Garrok Brondi, smuggler, scoundrel and celebrated egotist, wanted to discuss "business" with Nemo who, in a rare moment of clarity, realized that meeting Brondi without a bodyguard probably wasn't the wisest of moves. Odisseus didn't trust Marco, his recently conscripted adjunct, in the engine room alone, however, and consequently sent the Mruka to the Third Ring for gear, before meeting his saltbrother and his smuggling rival for a bite and a glower, respectively.

"Rooster heard through the grapevine that you're mustering guns for a big gig."

"Could be that's so."

"Well, it is," Brondi swallows a mouthful of paw before continuing. "The _Rose_ is blown half to Jotor and I need capital to fix her up."

"And that's where we come in?" Odisseus concludes. Brondi opens his mouth to speak something puzzled, but Nemo translates.

"You wanna work merc on a pirate ship? Little below your lofty standards, ain't it?"

Brondi shrugs his marinated paw. "It's a starting point."

"Three percent," Nemo forewarns. "Like every other swinging dick."

"Yeah?" Brondi slides into his comfortable expression of unruffled self-assurance. "What's the ship?"

"Teamster off Alor. _The Hourly Wage_?"

Brondi snorts. "Good ship. Captain's a douche."

"Most are," Odisseus opines. Nemo elbows him lightheartedly.

Brondi patronizes Odisseus with an affable smile before turning back to Nemo. "Six percent."

Nemo's scoff outweighs Brondi's. "You think?"

"I know the ship. I know the captain. You'd be paying for information."

"I'd be paying _double_ for information," Nemo repudiates by tearing into the meat of his pacho paw, "is what."

"Five percent, then. Take Rooster too. Boy's a bloomin' surgeon with explosives."

Nemo waves the gnashed foot at the humanoid smuggler. "You know, you gotta nasty habit of ordering me around." Odisseus publishes a throaty growl.

"Or not," Brondi relents.

"Four percent it is," Nemo pronounces. "We cast off in three hours. #1118. If you're late, you get zero percent."

Both Odisseus and Nemo pitch their bones in the trash and begin to depart when Brondi mentions, "Oh, a question?"

Nemo turns. "Yes?"

"What's with the hat?"

–––

Two-Bit Switch blinks against the smoke spray emanating from the mountainous bouncer standing literally _across_ the first-level entrance to the Astrobounce Gentlemen's Club. He frolics his fingers and a third banknote materializes in his hand.

"Well, suppose then that I'm a very, very generou–"

"No doin', I'm afraid," the bouncer interjects, inserting the protuberant cigar back into his mouth. "'Ppreciate the offer, acourse, but Mr. Gozzer was real specific that these four," he pinpoints the poster behind with a thumb, quartered by unflattering sketches of Nemo, Moira, Odisseus and, of course, Two-Bit himself, "ain't not to be admitted until further notice."

"Any flash as to when this 'further notice' might be?"

The behemothic bouncer strokes the hooked horn interrupting his chin as though a goatee. "Somethin' 'bout a percentage?"

Two-Bit vanishes the cash at a motion and passes a stymied hand through his wiry hair. Nemo's plan was to convene the crew at The Bloody Afterburn for a customary carouse before weighing anchor and with only an hour to spare, Two-Bit had yet to wench.

He'd been so damnably preoccupied with recruitment he'd plain forgotten his more carnal requirements and now, with the clock ticking, he'd apparently been denied access to the Astrobounce on account of today's scuffle with the bounty hunter and his boys. His options for an affordable lap dance swiftly slimming, he'd be forced to float an off-duty moll an extortionate fee for a piece of action, assuming he could even find one in the next sixty minutes or, more frighteningly, christen the incoming dry spell this caper would instigate with an ignominious jerk in the appalling squalor of a Takioro public restroom.

"Gaff me a minute. Is there bugger-all you can do to get me in that clip joint?"

The giant furrows his singular brow. "My shift's up in ninety minutes."

"Fuck. Well–" he halts mid-resigned salute. "How much Gozzer jank you?"

The giant furrows his singular brow further. "What?"

"For minding the door. For keeping villains like me out. This weekend, say. How much he janking you?"

Gathering his husky arms into a knot, the bouncer frowns the three feet down to the dwarfed Two-Bit. "You ain't tryin' to swindle me, is ya?"

"If I was, you'd paste me right between the floorboards, wouldn't ya?"

"Fair bet."

"Then no, I ain't." Two-Bit unfastens his fists and persists. "How much for the weekend?"

The hulk deliberates a moment before replying with an air of pride. "Nine."

"Huh," Two-Bit mocks impression.

He squints his sole eye. "Nine's good pay for doorwork. Gozzer treats me well. What're you pissing about?"

Two-Bit shrugs suggestively. "Maybe I have need of a geezer like you. Somebody what jabbs plenty just by standing, if you take my meaning."

"Not interested," the colossus rumbles.

"Four?"

"Definitely not interested."

"Well, thousand."

The bouncer feigns disinterest but Two-Bit peruses his curiosity like a well-thumbed book. "What sorta work?"

"Pillage and plunder under the black flag. You wanna jank four thousand crackin' skulls this weekend?"

He sniffs mightily and plucks out the cigar. "My shift's up in ninety minutes. Where do I go?" Two-Bit hides a complacent grin behind fabricated recollection.

"Um, Docking Port #1118, unless I'm very much mistaken. We'll unmoor soon as you show." He gives the titanic cyclops a parting assessment as he takes three backward steps. "What's your handle?"

"Ebeneezer."

"Nice, uh, handle," Two-Bit manages, finally finishes his resigned salute and hastens off in search of a willing woman.

–––

Moira has never, in her arguably short and assuredly hazardous lifetime, been as afraid of getting shot as she currently is. Moira Quicksilver, who had sneered down the barrels of loaded firearms pointed at her face, who'd stood the high street with some of the best gunfighters in the industry, who'd been shot, on numerous occasions and walked away with little but burnt biceps or scorched flesh wounds, couldn't sit quietly at their classic corner booth in The Bloody Afterburn and enjoy her quiet gin without whipping a glance over a shoulder every thirty seconds to see if someone had leveled a piece at the back of her head.

"Relax, dollface," Nemo, next to her, japes. "We're supposed to be celebrating."

"Nemo, I swear to all the moons, I will gun you down here and now and no soul could begrudge me."

Across from Nemo, Odisseus hurls an inarticulate growl her way, whose threat, unlike its wording, is undeniably clear. Moira disparages back in his direction before affirming the Afterburn's four exit points again and noting the new entrants.

The Admiralty was Takioro's rowdiest tavern, the Pistol-Whip its most exclusive, but The Bloody Afterburn, thus named for the enormous sanguine-stained turbine furnished off the barroom ceiling with collider chains, held the vile accolade of being its dirtiest, both in dealing and in hygiene. Owned and operated by a throaty Trijan appropriately named Unhappy Roger, here the grog was cheap, the company churlish and the floor a sickening shade of saffron; all of which naturally meant it was Nemo's favorite.

Moira Quicksilver had patronized The Bloody Afterburn on exactly nine separate occasions and, on exactly nine of those visits, she'd been shot. Ordinarily, they were mere stray bolts during one of the pub's not entirely sporadic knockdown, drag-out brawls, but often enough, she'd been bird-dogged specifically by vendettas of a personal or professional persuasion. She'd blame Nemo, but three of those wounds had been inflicted before they'd met and only one of the nine actually came from his gun.

Thusly, she was understandably dodgy about returning for any reason, especially something as ostensibly inane as Nemo's "bon voyage debauches," as he referred to them. She shifts her feet, pirouettes her tumbler between her left thumb and forefinger and keeps her right hand planted as casually as she can on her left shoulder, poised to draw and fire Lefty in nothing flat.

Contrarily, Nemo's awash with his restless energy, drumming his thumbs on the lip of the table in syncopation to some unheard rhythm. He's blithely heedless to even Odisseus' portentous grumblings about engine failure and unfinished maintenance, gleeful thoughts bent solely towards his prospective acts of rapine and skullduggery.

"Oughta put us at fourteen, we four bastards and Abraham included," Nemo calculates, briefly ceasing drumming to tally, only to start again fresh with this completed.

"Put us at zero when the boosters boil from the inside," Odisseus mutters into his grog.

Nemo interrupts his percussion, mutating his mirth into mischief. "There's no women," he declares.

"Yes. Besides me."

"Because of you?"

"Yes. Because of me."

Nemo anchors a miscreant's smile on Moira. "You think we need fifteen?" Moira attempts a protest, but Nemo's zottibles ahead on this new notion.

"Excuse me. Excuse me. Miss?" He careens over the table and yanks at the waitress' blouse. After a few rough tugs, she desists her gyrations and twists to Nemo, pert fuchsia locks swinging in response.

"Um, yes?"

Two-Bit appears from behind the waitress. "What gives?"

In his most original chauvinism yet, Two-Bit Switch had recognized one of the Afterburn's on-duty waitresses as an off-duty stripper at the Astrobounce and, in exchange for a genuinely deplorable volume of cash, purchased himself one last dry hump, which he deigned to classify as a "lap dance", right there across the table. Moira'd been too engrossed in ferreting out potential attackers to offer anything more than cursory remonstrance, but as Nemo plays his ploy, Moira divines it immediately.

"Excuse me, miss, I was wondering–"

"Oh, fuck off."

"Never mind my associate. What I was–"

"Fuck off an arlaxi."

"She's just a little–"

"Fuck off in space."

"What's your name, dearie?" Nemo champions her with a benevolent beam, transparent only to Moira. The wench affords Moira a disconcerted frown before answering Nemo's question.

"Zella." Nemo augments his grin with more mischief than Moira previously thought possible and she sags back in the booth, abandoning the whole sordid affair to its own devices.

"Well, Zella, my name is Nemo and I captain a pirate ship and _I_ was wondering if you've any experience in brigandage."

Zella doesn't blink. "I'm wanted on Cedano for three counts of armed robbery?"

"Good girl," Nemo tags in. "You free this weekend?"

"I work."

He spreads his hands and executes the gambit. "You wanna clear your schedule and come, uh–" he gestures beckoningly at Two-Bit.

"Pillage and plunder under the black flag?"

Nemo claps in recognition. "That was it." Moira rolls her eyes.

Zella eyeballs the beguiling Nemo, the relinquished Moira, the sullen Odisseus and finally, the shrugging Two-Bit before offering a shrug of her own. "Fuck it. Why not. Sure." Two-Bit emits a husky laugh, Odisseus grunts in recognition and Moira is forced to amend her earlier assumption even further as Nemo alights his moonlike face on her again, his expression a monument to all villainy.

"Fifteen."

Moira engages his devilry with deadpan. "Go. Fuck yourself."

"Probably later." He heaves his tankard, frothing with indigo Gitterswitch Gin, and proposes, "A toast?"

Cheerless Odisseus asks the superfluous question. "To what?"

He simpers. "To _The Unconstant Lover_." Captain Nemo offers his booze to the center of the table. Odisseus, dour with disappointment, is the first to meet it. Moira Quicksilver, smoldering in spleen, converges next. Two-Bit Switch, obviously occupied by purchased advances, is the last to arrive and the four glasses nearly don't clash.

First Interlude

Trash was the sole province of the Mannimar scrapyards. Should one find oneself in a blistering desire for a faulty, flat-lined BB882 auxiliary inertial compensator or an eviscerated anti-vehicular F-19 fragmentation grenade launcher or even the besieged carcass of an ancient capital Gond-class cruiser's exoejection boarding-action airlock, Mannimar could always provide. In the enervated business of intergalactic mechanical compost, it was an inexpensive option for the damaged, the obsolete or the ineffectual.

Originally the hopeful investment of a junk baron cabal in the Midworlds, the scrapyards were an attempt to recreate Mox for the galactic aristocracy; to monopolize used part trafficking at the Inner Sector's backdoor with a junkworld of their own. To this end, staggering amounts of funds were poured into habituating Mannimar's worldwide corrosive sea. Unfortunately, this act would eventually bankrupt the cabal, as the planet's surface proved utterly recalcitrant to the expensive effects of terraforming.

The Mannimar scrapyards were born – a square of technically habitable earth, fifty mottibles on a side and overflowing with all of the galaxy's third and fourth rate salvage. Meadows of rusted hull plating rose to mountains and foothills of burnt battery boxes, which sloped down to beaches of melted terraforming equipment, lapped at incessantly by the acidic oceans. Dwarfed in size by the steppes of distant Mox and trumped in price by the direct back lots of the bigger manufacturers, Mannimar was doomed to oddity and obscurity, patronized by the lazy and the strange.

The dealers here were beleaguered, freelance desperadoes, backs to a wall three feet this side of unemployment. They bought their bread by peddling defective parts to solar locals and those with bad, bad taste in machinery. They, a motley collection of midworlder mechanics, shipwrights and engineers, scratched out an anxious living from beneath the proverbial fingernails of the retail trash trade. To them, a functioning engine was a windfall unforeseen and, against all odds, an operative spacecraft a godsend unknown.

In this fashion was Hook the Handsome pushed past mere cynicism and into full-blown misanthropy at the realization that his newly acquired mystery markdown freighter was effectively a piece of flying bird shit.

Ostensibly the butt of some callous cosmic joke, the Ufaki salvagier had, via a suite of reliable brokers, purchased an allegedly serviceable spacecraft off chopshop auction on Talos VI at an absurd discount. Fully anticipating the vessel to be a total junker, he was dismayed upon delivery to discover _The Poetic License_ not only in ghastly disrepair but also, in point of fact, a "remix." Such was the polite term for a custom, homemade mash-up whose various parts and interfaces were plundered from any number of separate, often dissimilar ships and messily welded together. Dubious in control, vulnerable to practically all forms of attack and openly dangerous in most cases, a remix was only regarded as an actual spaceship in deference to any other viable option.

Generally speaking, the only people in the entire galaxy with any interest in remixes were bored engineering hobbyists and the marooned.

A wasted week's worth of matrix diving and Hook had finally at least identified the component parts to his revamped monster. First and foremost on his list of discouraging diagnoses, _The Poetic License_ was a scow – a heavy cargo tanker built for atmospheric cargo traffic and never intended for anything beyond limited spaceflight. Her chassis, by Hook's best guess, betrayed her as a revoked freighter by a now-defunct manufacturate. The last act of Briza Astroballistic, before going completely bankrupt, involved recalling their IZ series of orbital freighters, citing irreconcilable steering flaws. At least one Model 36, however, seemed to have escaped the chopping block.

As a result, she was bulky, cumbersome and ungainly to the point of being unsalable. The hindrances of her own docking peculiarities had even gone to the trouble of ensuring that she was asymmetrical, as if she required further disfigurement. Beyond that, her cockeyed frame meant that she would lean unflaggingly to port, in the speculative fiction that anyone ever flew her again.

Hook remained blissfully ignorant as regards large portions of the ship's personal history but he'd deduced that, at some point in her wretched upbringing, someone had obviously attempted to retrofit _The Poetic License_ from a simple moonhopper into a proper and spaceworthy cargo freighter. This was attempted mainly through the application of two different and seemingly contradictory methods.

The first involved the fortification of the outer hull, presumably in preparation for the rigors of interstellar warping. However, in the case _of The Poetic License_ , the hull was well, well past sufficiently strengthened. Contrasting the downloaded specs against the junker parked on his back lot, Hook surmised at least a 300% increase in hull strength between _The Poetic License_ and the regulation IZ36 Briza Light Freighter. It didn't end at the outer hull, however. During a brief and unnerving jaunt inside to inspect the tanker's interior, Hook uncovered, among other things, a bolstering of the interior walls by a similar margin as well. Whoever had supervised these sloppy modifications, by Hook's logic, was either exceedingly paranoid or schemed to fly the ship somewhere exceedingly suicidal – possibly both.

In truth, the adjustments to weight and maneuverability were so severe that _The Poetic License_ , in its current state, would have been practically unflyable, were it not for its second major conversion.

Against all rationality, someone had extracted the standardized orbital bar engine and, for some equally inscrutable reason, replaced it with a pair of interdicted Nautiloid JR1 Yeltain jetboosters.

Warhorses of a space age nearly two centuries antiquity by now, the JR1 had originally been intended as an auxiliary accelerator to help Shell-Class Blockade Cruisers, capital ships as archaic as they were gargantuan, achieve engagement speed. Shortly following field testing, however, the booster was slapped by IntraGalaxy Transpo's most dreaded veto: interdiction – deemed too consistently jeopardizing to sentient life to condone mass production. The file Hook uncovered was sketchy on details, yet he was able to glean that the JR1s apparent fascination with spontaneous combustion was likely at fault.

Yet, here were a relatively intact pair of the dinosaurs, protruding out the _License's_ rear end as if someone had tried to shove a man-of-war up her aft and got bored three-fourths of the way through.

Barring both the near-perpetual maintenance they would require and the random explosions, installing a pair of jetboosters as potentially powerful as the JR1s on a freighter as obese as the _License_ might be enough to make her at least spaceworthy, but she'd be untenable. The IZ36's steering column would be woefully inadequate to support the raw unbridled force of a single capital ship jetbooster, never mind two. In such a state, she'd be utterly impossible to maneuver, simply begging for a breakneck collision of titanic proportions, had it not been for the third and final harebrained scheme her mysterious benefactors employed on her behalf.

The steering platform system, effectively the practice of plugging a high-powered engine into a turntable and riveting it to the rear of one's ship, had briefly been tested on certain prototypes of low atmosphere driftcraft, deemed too unpredictable for mass consumption and given the hasty kibosh. Before the cancellation order's ink had dried, however, a few dozen freighter-sized platforms had been constructed and apparently fitted to a few dozen cargo freighters. All Hook's evidence suggested _The Poetic License_ was among the last surviving graduates.

While flying the _License_ through the use of such a device was technically possible, from a purely physical standpoint, the level of ability needed to meaningfully navigate the craft anywhere but into a bloody mess was such that Hook the Handsome, an Ufaki who'd spent the majority of his adult life dealing with expert albeit eccentric pilots, had never met its like.

In short _, The Poetic License's_ major problem was that she exceeded her maximum weight limit three times over, which was circumvented via a pair of illegal, oversized and spontaneously erupting jetboosters which, in turn, were her second major problem subsequently diverted through the use of an enormous, spinning rudder which, unsurprisingly, was her third major problem and that, by Hook's estimation, had never exactly been overcome.

On that single occasion Hook ventured into _The Poetic License_ , he prayed to all the moons he'd never have cause to ever, ever again. Once inside, the Ufaki salvagier made a paling discovery – large portions of the _License's_ interior; several corridors, the lower crew dorms and the hold, were exhaustively plastered, floor to ceiling, in at least a decade's worth of petrified lonktonk droppings. It carpeted the deck. It enameled the walls. It clung to the ceiling like stalactites. The cargo hold was a cavern of chalky, petrified poop.

A belligerent and degenerate fowl originally native to the fourth and fifth moons of distant Yon, the lonktonk was the staple of the Outer Ring poultry business and, as a result, was shipped between and off the planet's eight moons in staggering quantities. Using this information, Hook managed to deduce that, no sooner than ten years ago, his brand new IZ36 Briza Light Freighter began her life as a Yonite lunar lonktonk hauler. Somewhere between her maiden voyage and the ill-fated auction on Talos VI, however, someone had doomed her aground with a trio of nonsensical modifications and painted "The Poetic License" unevenly across her hull.

Complete with an engineering deck apparently built for a three-foot mechanic, absolutely no ray shield projector to speak off and a paint job the unbecoming color of stale piss, Hook assured himself that he would have achieved the precisely same effect if, rather than purchase _The Poetic License_ , he'd eaten all 112,071 of his credits spent. Hook could peddle scales to a Saurian and blue to a Braaca, but he could say, without a shadow of a doubt, he would never move this ship.

Time passed. Dust collected. _The Poetic License_ , parked on the back lot, withered from a financial tragedy to a mere curiosity, from a conversational oddity to a piece of ill-begotten subconscious. Hook walked beneath its landing feet each day without thought to what stood above him.

Thusly, it was a particularly surprising weekday when, nearly six years after purchasing the _License_ , Hook's first customer of the week parked a highly customized assault starfighter on the pad and strode into the main office like he owned the galaxy.

"Nice ship," Hook offhandedly greeted. The customer popped an astonished smile, thumbing over his left shoulder.

"You know what that thing is?"

Hook shrugged. "Concord Industries Personal Fighter. Z-Type? 333?"

"327. Very good. She's fully customized – enhanced turbine, control reception, double-charged weapons. Baby like that'll go for 500 thou, easy. The whole nine yards."

"The whole nine yards. Very nice, sir."

The customer slapped a key ring down on the barrelhead. "Want her?"

Hook scoffed. "Sure. For what?" The customer pointed a gloved finger beyond the Ufaki, through the open postern door and onto the back lot.

"That."

Chapter 4

Moira Quicksilver applies further pressure to her smarting shoulder. The meager washcloth she'd borrowed from Roger as provisional gauze had drank its fill of her blood and was now thoroughly drenched, but until she was back betweendecks and granted access to the medbay, it would have to do.

The wound certainly wasn't lethal, nor especially debilitating nor even overly painful yet it was humiliating in spades. An unrelated quarrel three tables over had earned her the tenth gunshot-related injury within the luxurious walls of The Bloody Afterburn, in the form of a blood-splattering ricochet across her right shoulder. Only her pride and possibly the skull of the still-snickering Nemo were liable to be seriously injured as a result, however.

She can't match his increasingly jaunty gait as Docking Port #1118's harborage gates roll back and he canters ahead, leaving the three of them behind.

Takioro's First Ring was devoted entirely to double-deckered rows of embarkation cylinders – enormous hexagonal airlocks that behave as the Station's Docking Ports. For a flat rate, these ports are rented for the manifold spacecraft of Takioro's transients, ranging in size from small capital-class frigates to individual starfighters, often stored in squadrons.

In the cylindrical light of Docking Port #1118, _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ appears almost legitimate. Her more hideous plasma scarring is obscured by the striated shadows along her haggard hull. At this angle, barely a handful of her pockmarks are visible, whose absent hull plates expose machinery and contrivance beneath. When striped by shade, she's nearly disguised as an honest ship, who might be flown by honest men, who might work for honest pay.

Nemo casts his arms out as he approaches her. "Who's a pretty lady?"

Her boarding ramp was extended and the area adjacent scattered with the assorted detritus of supplies yet to load, including crates of rations, spare parts and ammunition, as well as several barrels of spare fuel. Milling about the unstowed equipment, either engaging in quiet conversation or preparing provisions of their own, were the new recruits – a discrepant muster of unlovely hoodlums, dispassionate Danbonte, huffy Heeko and groggy Garrigan among them. Moira flattens a gainsaid glare at Garrok Brondi, leering at her over his decapodian first mate's topmost shoulder, before she levels up on Nemo's left quarter.

"Is that Brondi over there?"

Nemo follows her eyeline and snorts. "Guess he decided to show after all." He turns beneficently back to her. "How's the shoulder?"

She envenoms immediately and breaks eye contact with him. "I don't know why you like that shithole."

"Brondi? I don't."

"The Afterburn."

"Oh, I don't know. It's cozy."

"I got shot."

"I know," he answers, with a disturbing air of innocence.

Odisseus waddles past, making for the supplies and growling gruffly at one of the mercenaries, a bandoliered Corgassi stacking an alarming number of tackles atop each other, though if the transparent ichthyoid comprehends Ortoki, he gives no outward sign. Two-Bit, on the other hand, shakes a few hands, pats a few backs and otherwise mingles amongst the assembled marauders.

Nemo extends a brief point towards the Corgassi's largest parcel, an irregularly shaped instrument case, festooned with kitschy travel stickers from various systems and other assorted memorabilia. "What do you play?"

He squints his bulbous eyes before answering with a half-hearted gesture of the case. "Uh, rocket-propelled grenades?"

"Oh. Cool."

"Get yer thumbs out yer bloomholes and stow this freight, ye shit-lickin' sluggards!" heralds Abraham's disembarkation, the conscripts peering about for the source of their rebuking. At sight of the craggy old Grimalti harrumphing down the landing ramp, however, they promptly clamber about their duties, lest they face further haranguing from the belligerent buccaneer. "Handsomely now, gents, handsomely now!"

"Abraham," Nemo greets.

After cuffing listless Heeko across the back of the head, the Grimalti directs his attention to Nemo. "Cap'n." He purses his fleshy beak before acknowledging Moira. "Missy."

Adorned only in greasy workman's trousers and the ocean blue bandana swaddling his lumpy forehead, he currently brandishes his disenchanting custom of striding about the ship utterly shirtless, blubbery belly slumping plainly into view. With a magnitude of ink and scarring only to be accumulated by centuries of sailing the ungoverned black in the company of indecent men painted across his torso, Abraham's exposed chest is a map of interstellar piracy and her cruelties, charting all the prominent picaroons of yore and the steep price of insubordination aboard their galleons.

Beneath that venerable skin, however, dwelt only a washed-up swabber steeped in antediluvian vernacular, anecdotal portends and archaic notions regarding women before the mast.

"Have we a heading?"

Nemo turns to Moira and proposes. "Danboowui? Take them within sight of the client rather than the supplier?"

Moira nods. "Sounds fine."

Abraham levels Nemo with a gauging glance. "Ye get the advance?"

"There was no advance. Huong Xo," Nemo shrugs. "One sixty on delivery, though," he adds brightly. Abraham bitterly shakes his head, wattle wobbling beneath his chin.

"Tell ye, practice like that don't hold water. Bloomin' Yheum bastards."

Nemo's shrug deepens. "Well, what're you gonna do?" Abraham retorts with a discouraged sigh and begins to totter away, before turning an incredulous eye back to Moira.

"Ye carouse at the Afterburn again?"

Moira simmers with annoyance. "I'll be in the medbay."

"Race ya!" Nemo's cutting capers into the hold before Moira's taken a single step, running his fingers along the boarding ramp's support pylons as he saunters up, like a boy with a stick against a picket fence.

–––

Odisseus glowers at the rent and blackened pressure helix, as if the pure force of his undiluted ire could weld the mechanism back into place. Peering through the abruptly vacant hole in the jetbooster's engine, the equally blackened Marco crests his grimy eyebrows.

"You wanna ask him _now_?"

His reply is all baleful gall. "Yeah. I'll ask him."

Odisseus respects nothing so much as endurance; the galaxy, to his viewing, is brimming to the rim with junk. Manufacturers are interested solely in profit, chiefly achieved by unleashing shiny new products with larcenous sticker prices onto an unsuspecting market and hastily updating to a newer and shinier model before the customer realizes that the vehicle they've just flown off the lot would generously be qualified, at least in Odisseus' professional opinion, as motorized compost.

Ergo, despite their unsightliness, that disquieting rattle they seemed to perpetually exude, even when powered down, the gouts of red smoke they erratically emit, their tendency to burst into unprovoked flames and their general impracticality on a ship of this size, Odisseus' second and third favorite things in life were the _Lover's_ two Nautiloid, Shell-Class JR1 Yeltain jetboosters, lovingly nicknamed Port and Starboard. The quickest and most surefire way to find oneself sloppily mauled was to insult these two gawky babies within earshot of the Ortoki mechanic. At least three people had met their individual ends this way.

Contrary to that adoration, however, ran the occasional bout of supreme irritation Odisseus harbored at the boosters' apparently detestable timing. Were he to select an ideal time for a vital engine part to spontaneously dislodge, it would have been during their twenty-hour sojourn in port, the majority of which he spent here, in the engine room, actively repairing the jetboosters. It would not have been now.

It was likely, in fact it was certain, that Port and Starboard had genuinely caused more accidents and mechanical failures aboard the ship than they avoided, but there was literally no freighter in the galaxy of the _Lover's_ size and weight capable of the wildly improbable feats of maneuverability that she could squeeze out when need pressed her. Even these were only possible when coupled with Odisseus' constant careful paw and Nemo's malicious talent for flight.

In a perfect galaxy, Nemo would understand and appreciate the former as much as he did the latter, but after twenty-three years, Odisseus had learnt that the words "perfect galaxy" didn't belong in the same paragraph as the words "Nehel Morel."

The engine room's only means of ingress, a two-foot high orlop tunnel, required Odisseus to wriggle through on his belly and while he'd prefer not to openly demean himself in front of his precocious Mruka intern, he didn't exactly have much choice. His chagrin swells still further as he worms his way back toward the ladder, at which point Odisseus makes the executive decision to direct all his antagonism towards the self-proclaimed Captain.

He clambers up the access ladder, squeezes out of the manhole at the base of the rudder platform and scrambles out into the thankfully more spacious hold, just in time to spot his victim, stepping off abovedecks and onto the companionway.

"Nemo!" he bellows, but the cry goes unheeded among the clamor of the boarding and bantering mercenaries, stowing freight, inhabiting the passenger dorms and trading playful punches. Odisseus ambles across the _Lover's_ prodigious registration number, emblazoned in ten lusterless blue digits across the hold floor, as Nemo begins his canter down the companionway steps.

When they anchored at Takioro, she'd been stockpiled practically floor to ceiling with consignment on behalf of Velocity, but now the _Lover's_ belly, though currently choked with chartered crew, rests relatively barren, embarking as they were. Only the disused _Beggarman_ stowed in the starboard corner, the rudimentary supplies, a few surplus crates, the seven sacks of shipborne garbage, haphazardly piled beneath the lip of the companionway, that Nemo'd both promised and neglected to space and the crowd of cavorting criminals occupy the hold.

The ceiling cathedrals up towards the dorsal gun turret beyond, buttressed by a quartet of riveted teltriton rafters that girder the hold's outer walls and clasp together, like a pair of covetous hands. The boarding ramp lingers ajar and splashes the brassy light of #1118 across her floor, where it pools and mingles with the squalid overhead illumination of the hold's incomplete lighting. Today, she stinks of fresh ditrogen, stale trash and the new musks of the congregating mercenaries. Today, the hold echoes with scraping, stomping and the shot breeze.

Possibly by his own design, it takes Nemo three shouted names for him to notice the approaching Odisseus, as irritated Ortoki roars adequately serve to hush any adjacent marauders. Snapping his fingers jovially, Nemo alights on the hold floor and turns to regard the mechanic, nonchalant. "Everything trim?"

"No," is all Odisseus can grumble.

Nemo ceases snapping to splay his fingers. "...okay?"

Odisseus hefts the cleft helix. "This fell off." Nemo blinks in recoil, not exactly the reaction the Ortok had hoped for.

"Where?"

"Port."

"Huh. Things are always falling off that one, right?" Odisseus responds through the use of a judiciously timed glower, which Nemo seems miraculously immune to. He squints. "What _is_ that?"

"It's a pressure helix, Nemo."

Nemo punches the release button and the double doors behind him clatter open. "Oh," he comments and, resuming his snapping, traipses away down the betweendecks corridor.

"Nemo!" Odisseus yelps, doddering after him.

All the doorways on the lower hallway have been thrown wide as Nemo struts past, Odisseus in shuffling pursuit. The second and third hanging bulbs seem to have flickered dead again, which bathes the hallway jointly in spotlights, from the two still operative ceiling bulbs, and floodlights, from the exposed side rooms. Only the light glinting off its struts reveals the underturret's access ladder, ensconced in its clear plastolieum pillar.

Rooster scuttles out of the aftmost passenger dorm on six slippery feet, clutching boxes of tackle in two hands and offering a wave to Nemo as he weaves to his port and another to Odisseus as he passes on the starboard. Someone shaggy and reeking of powerful narcotics nosily vomits in the agape water closet, soliciting a sour cringe from Nemo as he glides genially by. Anchorage, leaning carelessly in the doorjamb of the bowmost passenger dorm and chatting amiably with Moira's redskin, extends a trunk in greeting to the converging Captain.

"Who let this drunken motherfucker on my ship?" Nemo begins, seemingly to the redskin, garnering only a polite snicker in response. Anchorage's playful pat nearly bowls Nemo over.

"How you been, you crazy stupid bastard?"

Nemo staggers under the weight of the trunk's dreadful wallop as he answers. "You know. Shivering timbers."

"Guess we're both shivering 'em this time, eh?" Nemo reciprocates the pat on Anchorage's shoulder and starts to depart, heading towards the mess as the Aurik adds, "Hey, what's with the hat?" Nemo percolates a chuckle as he strolls onward, Odisseus continuing to dog behind.

After throwing a "How's your shoulder?" down the medbay and receiving an unkind expletive in return, Captain Nemo moseys into the mess hall. Originally constructed for a crew much larger than five, most days the mess boasts little but loose crumbs, discarded food wrappers and vacancy. The crew's dining room table, a grizzled, battle-scarred veteran of scuffed, ale-stained hardwood, lends the scent of aged Ujad mahogany to the accumulated aromas of stagnating groceries, crusted condiments and the smoky stench of the treacherously backfiring chiller, wafting in from the galley.

Nemo draws a folded leaflet from within his jacket as he crosscuts the mess towards the galley, frowning at the room's empty expanse. "Guess we'll have to unlatch those spare tables, huh?" Odisseus tarries at the doorway as Nemo arrives in the homely kitchenette of a galley, abolishing his bowler on the counter and heading straight for the chiller.

"You understand we can't warp like this, right?" He tinkers with the charred helix with a foreclaw as he reminds.

"I mean–" Nemo dangles.

Odisseus cranes his neck forward. "What? You mean what?"

Nemo stoops before the closed chiller door, seizing the sides as if to steady himself in his search. "Is it possible that we only have two magnets?"

He's answered by a shout emanating from down the hall, possibly even the medbay. "He's not hanging it up, is he?"

"Oh, I'm pretty sure he is," Odisseus responds.

"By all the moons, Nemo–"

Withdrawing a second sheet to his face for further examination, Nemo renders his verdict. "These yogurt coupons are eight months expired. I'm stealing their magnet." Denouncing the defeated to the garbage and stamping the victor to the door with an air of nefarious satisfaction, Nemo rises out of the stoop and aimlessly pitches open the chiller, who wheezes exhaust in protest. "Gotta add magnets to the list," he adds, distractedly.

Odisseus shakes the riven helix in place of a clenched fist. "What about adding a _pressure helix_ to the list?"

"What the fuck...?" Nemo's aghast, but certainly not on behalf of the helix. Peering back at Odisseus from between the galley's assortment of hanging pots, he plasters on an affronted frown. "Somebody ate my leftovers."

"What?"

Insult abdicates to indignation as Nemo's shakedown of the chiller apparently goes south. "Yesterday, I had half a cup of sporefin bisque in here and _now_ ," he deduces, burying an arm to the shoulder amid the clatter of bottles, "it's gone!"

"Bloom me out. Moons forbid, the _bisque_ ," Odisseus mutters, seemingly to the scorched helix. Nemo, after banging the gasping chiller closed and remounting the bowler, blusters from the galley and breezes purposefully past his grumbling mechanic. Odisseus spins to follow, meekly uplifting the dismantled part in offering. "Nemo, the–"

"Moira!" Nemo splays himself across the medbay's entry. "Did you eat my leftovers?"

Her reply is as obvious as it is peeved. "I was with you."

He seems to envisage this a moment, before repelling off the doorjamb. "Yeah," he reckons and turns a consequent eye to Odisseus. "Abraham." He's off at once, loping back down the corridor with the obstinate abandon only he was capable of.

"So, we'll just blow up, then?" Odisseus proposes, renewing the pursuit afresh.

"I guess," he surrogates as a reply.

"Nemo, I'm taking that bounty poster down!" Moira threatens.

"I'm demoting you down to scullery maid!"

"You already demoted me!"

"I'm demoting you again!" Nemo elbows the door release and jaunts back into the overwrought light of the hold. Odisseus dashes up behind as swiftly as his stunted hind legs and his significant paunch will allow, managing to squeeze through before the double doors rattle to a close.

"You wanna explode? I can go pull some other things off the engines, if–" Odisseus chastises up the companion way.

Ascending the stairway to abovedecks, Nemo about-faces and takes three stairs backward to posit, "You don't think you're maybe overreacting?" before rotating forward again. Cursing his bulky tail as it thumps up each grated stair, Odisseus gives chase up the companionway, increasingly weary from the hunt and Nemo's flagrant disregard. He activates the release, the double doors fizzle in complaint and he hounds Nemo down the abovedecks corridor.

"Abraham!" Nemo challenges, yet is met by no reply. He forks starboard, groaning open the gundeck door and disappearing within. Odisseus splutters in exasperation and begins to tromp up the hallway, hoping to intercept him before he reaches the helm and quite possibly massacres not only the entire crew, but also, more importantly, the ship herself.

An observation ceiling, an unbroken window of contoured, reinforced plexishield, spanning the full length of the corridor, crests the main abovedecks passageway. While voyaging, especially while warping, it afforded a reverential vantage point of the careening cosmos as the _Lover_ lurched between worlds, but here, in port, it only saturated the hallway in the embarkation cylinder's ocherous light. Odisseus, undeterred, pounds down the passageway and rounds the corner, expecting to head off Nemo but encountering someone else.

Two-Bit's cornered into the corridor's crook by the newest recruit. Zella rubs noses and giggles, Two-Bit's errant hands making the indelicate acquaintances of various parts of her anatomy. Odisseus would bother averting his gaze had he necessarily been surprised. Rather, he administers Two-Bit with another patented glower. "Two-Bit."

Zella hard at work on his neck, Two-Bit recognizes Odisseus with a slight nod of his chin. "Odi."

"Abraham?" Nemo, leaning out the mouth of the interior hallway, surveys up and down the accordion fold of the corridor, cringes at sight of Two-Bit's bawdiness and informs, "I threw your coupons away."

Two-Bit scowls. "What?"

"Nemo–" Odisseus signals with the splintering helix to snag Nemo's attention, who attempts to hold him at bay with a gesture and before turning to Two-Bit.

"Where's Abraham?"

"I think he's up at the chair. What'd you do with my vouches?"

Nemo immediately bestrides the six stairs to the helm door. "I threw them out. The yogurt ones."

"What'd you do that for?"

"They were expired andIneededthemagnet!" Nemo manages to quash together before the helm door sputters and slaps closed behind him.

Zella demurs a moment. "You eat yogurt?"

Odisseus thrusts both paws in the air, bewildered. "Does _no one_ care that this just fell off the engine?"

Zella redirects her puzzlement. "Is that important?"

Two-Bit raises a timid hand. "I care."

By this point, Nemo has long departed, vanishing into the helm in quest of his culprit. Odisseus sighs out a hindered sigh as he deliberately mounts each step, taps the entry button with his middle claw and shuffles into the helm.

Dirty dishes dot the dashboards. Crumpled clothes, laundry left in the lurch, collect in corners. A bottle of blue booze bides abandoned on the counter. Dowdy and cluttered as such, the place resembles a disheveled artist's studio more than a starship bridge, though Odisseus, the _Lover's_ de facto custodian, would never hazard to tidy up the place.

Perched six feet atop abovedecks, the helm presides over _The Unconstant Lover_ like the eyes of a frog. Trapezoids of orange decant through the partitioned viewport, submerging the dials, the buttons, the inset screens and the myriad of other related reins and controls arranged across her consoles, in brazen copper light. Deactivated like this, she looks lifeless, harmless.

Only a single screen, the route regulator on the navpanel, is afire, piercing the russet illumination with palpable green. Abraham, bulbous face flushed verdant, scrunches over said read-out and peers, displeased, within. Nemo, at hand, leans against the support bar between the co-pilot's seat and the door.

"Can't say as I've any idea what yer talkin' about, Cap'n," Abraham acquiesces.

"Bisque, you fat bastard. Sporefin _bisque_."

"Don't know what that is." He scrolls a dial between his forefinger and thumb and continues to ponder the monitor. "She be havin' a hard time coagulatin' a lock on Danboowui. Lemme try and widen the sweep." Fiddling with a keypad for several seconds, he turns a squinting eye the Ortok's direction. "Odisseus."

He reciprocates a polite nod, but sharpens his efforts against the Captain. "Nemo, seriously, you can't try to warp out of here withou–"

"It's soup."

Odisseus clenches his fangs. Abraham ceases scrolling and passes a skeptical glance over his shoulder.

"What?"

"Bisque. It's soup. I had half a thing of it in the chiller. Did you eat it?" Nemo pontificates with a series of increasingly exasperated gestures.

Abraham brackets an imaginary soup tin. "Little container. This big?"

"Yes."

"I ate that." He returns aloof to the navpanel. "And it was more like a quarter of a thing."

"It was _mine_!" Nemo gripes. "You can't–"

He resumes transcribing his code into the regulator, unremitting. "Didn't have no name on it."

"But, I'm–" Nemo wrestles for a righteous response, but Abraham persists.

"No name? Fair game."

Nemo begins an objection, but a buzz from his belt interrupts. He unloops his comm and answers. "Nemo here."

"Freight's all stowed and she's trim, Captain," The warbled voice of Moira reports.

The comm hisses. "All ready to cast loose down there?" Nemo inquires.

"Aye aye."

"Tell the crew I wanna chat. In the hold in ten."

"Aye aye."

"And dig Two-Bit up. Tell him to roll out the last keg." Nemo quiets the comm and re-loops it. "You get a lock?"

"Will have. How soon afore ye put her at the gate?"

"Usually about seven minutes."

Abraham frowns approvingly. "Should do her." Odisseus advances to Abraham, hoping to appeal to his increased sense of mariner's prudence.

"Can you do me a favor and tell Nemo that he really, _really_ doesn't wanna warp without a pressure–"

"This came offa which one?"

"Port."

The Grimalti plucks at the outstretched helix with a few flabby and investigative fingers. "Probably ain't mucha cause for alarm, really." Odisseus affixes him with a perplexed look.

"What do you mean?"

"Oughta be a pretty clean jump. Just hopping gate-to-gate. Danboowui'll handle all the decel themselves."

Odisseus balks. "You wanna warp somewhere without functional brakes."

"Gate'll take care of all that, like I said. We was jumpin' dirty, I'd agree with ye straight down the hatch. But this ain't that." He rises from the stoop and offers a conciliatory shrug. "'Sides, it's quick one anyway. Should be there by tomorrow night."

"But–"

Abraham plops a palm to Odisseus' shoulder. "Trust me, lad. I've seen worse boats than this ol' girl make it farther with worse wounds." He taps twice and totters past. "Pressure helix'll keep." He tosses a glance over his shoulder, wattle swinging in response. "I'll go make contact with the gate. Seven minutes?"

"Six," Nemo replies, prying loose his second boot. The door stammers open and Abraham's gone, wobbling toward the warp room. Odisseus turns the wrenched helix over in his paws as Nemo unburdens a concealed smile of fraternal recognition. He topples into his cherished chair, the harried helmsman's seat, tapping his emancipated toes against the floor panels.

"You don't treat her well, she'll kill you," Odisseus admonishes. Nemo privates the smile to a smirk as he wheels the chair about in three twisting strokes.

As he aligns forward, the yoke reaches to Nemo and pulls him in, his fingers rooting in furrows eroded by two years of hairpin turns and accelerations violent enough to shudder the ship. They hold hands, in a manner of speaking, a manual weaving of intimacy, even to Odisseus' contextual observation. Nemo's smile blossoms.

His hands dance affectionately across the apocryphal controls like fox-trotting spiders – twisting dials, snapping switches and adjusting keys as the helm resurrects in burbles of green. "You worry too much, brother," he intones as the first of the driftjets ignite.

–––

Two-Bit Switch can't decide whether they look bloodthirsty or ridiculous. Certainly the ten sentients lined up, port to starboard, in the _Lover's_ hold were a roster of truly mean cocksuckers, armed head-to-toe with grit, gristle and gunmetal. They're scuzzy, tattooed, chain-smoking, drug-addled, alcoholic mongrels, each with records of misdeed and violence on every round planet past the Midworlds, yet the more Two-Bit considers them, the harder it becomes to shake images of a circus sideshow from his head.

Ebeneezer is an eight-foot tall, royal purple cyclops with a stunted horn sprouting out of his chin. Odisseus' vice-mechanic, apparently named Marco the Mange, is a shabby Mruka grouch, barely three feet from the floor and seemingly beset by some irritant form of skin condition. Rooster has ten limbs. Salo has transparent skin. Anchorage has a trunk. Processed out before the pacing Captain as they were, Two-Bit couldn't honestly decide if they were about to rape and ravage or all pile into a tiny driftcar.

"I ain't overly fond of rules or regulations," Nemo opens, "so, I imagine this'll be brief." He halts between Moira's redskin and Garrok Brondi, thrusting out a thumb. "First, respect my officers. In the case that you're an idiot and haven't figured out who the officers are yet, let me introduce you."

He approximates that thumb toward Two-Bit, resting the heel of his boot against the larder's last keg of gin and leaning forward on his knee. He extends a hand, fingers flanged, in greeting. "Two-Bit Switch. Normally, he serves as the onboard cutpurse-copilot-jailbreaker-mouthpiece, but I'm making him your quartermaster. You gotta problem, bring it to Two-Bit. He's good people, hard as a coffin nail and twice as sharp, but whatever you do, no matter what he tells you, do _not_ play cards with him." Two-Bit flashes a loutish smile and cracks the fingers of his right hand against his thumb.

"My most trusted mechanic and boon companion, Odisseus, is our ship's engineer and de facto bosun." If one chose to qualify a slight shifting of haunch weight and a narrowing of his gaze as an acknowledgment, Odisseus, standing to Two-Bit's right and clasping the box of turbine caps in both paws, acknowledges the marauder crew. "Yes, he's an Ortok. Yes, he understands but doesn't speak Commercial. Yes, he's the best in the biz and yes, if you break anything motorized on the ship, even the bloomin' blender, tell him immediately or we'll all probably die or something."

Nemo enlists his middle finger. "And, of course, you're all very afraid of my first mate, Moira Quicksilver. Deadshot. Ex-bounty hunter. Femme fatale. Party-pooper. Probably always agree with her and never, ever go near her quarters or," he cranes forward, dilating his eyes and fluttering his fingers like a birthday party magician, "she'll _murder_ you." To Two-Bit's right, Moira exhibits a cold bristle, arms crooked and hip popped.

Flicking his fourth finger, Nemo concludes austere. "My sailing master requires less introduction than I've just given him." Sitting an empty crate ten feet beyond and steeping the swabbies in his askance scrutiny, the qualifications of Abraham Bonaventure, eminent picaroon of yesteryear, were evident to every dastard on Takioro and, as Nemo'd asserted, demanded no elaboration.

"And then there's me," he concludes, tossing his hands with ten fingers splayed, as if raining confetti burst from his wrists. "I'm the Captain and I'm responsible for all this mess. If any one of these four gives you an order, assume that it came from me."

"The second rule," he treads a little further down the line, between Rooster and Zella, and expounds, "is something of a catch-all, summarized thusly: Don't be a fuck." A few of the assembled snigger. "I ain't gonna break your balls about nothing specific, but basically, don't get caught stealing, don't get caught cheating and try to refrain from killing each other, at least until the job's done."

"What do we do if wanna fuck?" Zella poses, snaring Two-Bit in a leer.

"Not tell me about it," Nemo replies, without missing a beat. Two-Bit breaks eye contact by pretending to knead his temples with thumb and middle finger. "And finally, the most important rule, the only rule that's truly inviolable, should you value your stinky hides." Two-Bit spies that chronic morose fire reclaim the Captain's eyes as he predicates. "This ain't the navy and we're none of us sailors. Atop my deck, beneath my colors, you'll all say 'aye aye.' Wanna get shot? Say 'affirmative.'"

The unwise dither at this while the observant keep quiet. "Now, Abraham's got the gate dialed to take us to Danboowui before tomorrow night but, before we make way, there's one little hurdle we gotta overcome." He gestures absently behind, signaling Odisseus and Two-Bit. "Ain't nobody sleeps on my ship that hasn't shared a tap with me. Savvy?"

Two-Bit and Odisseus begin to distribute the alcohol amid a general murmur of concurrence. Only after several of the blackened turbine caps, brimming with frothy liquid, have been dispensed does the first question come.

Moira's Myyrigon sloshes its contents listlessly. "Glass is dirty."

"Yeah, what gives, Cap'n?" Anchorage vocalizes.

"It's a _turbine cap_ ," Marco identifies. "Junk part off an afterburner. Fuel scorchin' means you gotta replace 'em after each jump."

"We don't seriously gotta drink swill outta _this_ , do we?" Ebeneezer appeals. As soon as each marauder holds a sooty tumbler of Gitterswitch, Nemo hoists his own in toast.

"Only by the strength and speed of the vessel under our feet are we afforded the life we lead. By drinking her fuel, you chart a brigand's course of pillage and plunder, all at the suffrage of _The Unconstant Lover_."

They need no further instruction. Hoisting sudsy flagons of their own, just as Two-Bit and undoubtedly Odisseus, Moira and Abraham once had, they reprise in slipshod unison. " _The Unconstant Lover_!"

Chapter 5

Captain Barso ardently hopes to drown out her next question by drumming vigorously on the dashboard and cranking the astropunk riffs up to eleven so they practically rip through the ship's speakers.

Incorrigible as ever, she persists anyway. "Captain?"

Barso begrudgingly lolls his head to the side. "What?"

"Six letter word for Ujadi jungle predator." She cranes innocently up from her creased volume, making eye contact. "Fifty-four down."

Aubra Whipul, former freelance fighter jockey turned current freelance freighter jockey, possessed an abhorrent predilection toward mindless distractions. His first mate for four years and his second pilot since terminating his contract with Valladia and flying professional, she could paint portraits with exhaust and catch sunrises before their time zones could. The kicker to this, of course, was her unfathomable interest in the banalest of activities. She perpetually fiddled with something - knitting needles, puzzle cubes, word finds or marble mazes and never quite took the hint that she was, among the crew, utterly alone in her passion for tedious contrivance.

The last six runs she'd sat, legs crossed, tail tapping the teltriton, in the swoop-back pilot's seat, absolutely occupying every moment of her attention not spent actually flying the ship with a dog-eared and much-maligned book of crossword puzzles. To Whipul, every question was a profound mystery whose solution was a star-shattering epiphany. So invariably, every four or five clues, she'd stump herself and involve the Captain in the ascertainment of its answer.

With a submissive sigh, Barso extracts his crossed boots from the dashboard and leans forward in his own swoop-back towards the transceiver, usurping the grungy astropunk refrain in favor of a burble of abrasive static with a twist of his forefinger on the dial.

"Arlaxi," he relents, cranking the dial in quest of suitable music. "A-R-L-A-X-I. Fifty-four down."

She furrows her brow and glances back to her booklet. "Huh. Fits." She scrawls the inkjetter down the column. "Didn't know they were on Ujad."

"They're on a lot of places," Barso replies, attempting not to count the seconds until she posited another inquiry for collective contemplation.

Danboowui blushes bloody crimson through the windshield, eclipsing half the viewport with its orblike curvature. Outside, the petroleum drone hums in contentment that corresponds to the gradual spiking of the fuel gauge's shaky needle. The fragrances of industrial high-octane starch soap and Kukane's latest weapons-grade apple goulash waft in from down the hallway as the foul-mouthed quartermaster advances, by sud and scrub, his crusade against dirty dishes.

It would nearly be a moment of domestic serenity, one of those few so difficult to seize from the chaos and clamor of a smuggled existence, if Barso could only find a halfway decent radio station.

Only more static rewards his efforts, however, as he ranges the digital dial. Occasional snatches of music or dialogue breach the tangle of white noise, but never anything even vaguely decipherable. Barso frowns.

"Fucking boonie rocks."

"Hm?" Whipul resurfaces from her brainteaser. "You say something?"

Barso clicks the transceiver left and drops back into the chair, returning his heels to the dashboard. "Ninety zottibles into Bad Space, can't beam in a single fucking station."

"Oh. Yeah. I don't know," she hesitates a moment and Barso drops his head to his hand. "Four-letter word for Offchart frontier moon. Eleven across."

From the perch of his palm, Barso is finally fed up. "What exactly is the point of a crossword?"

"What?"

"I mean, let's say, hypothetically, that you have just completed a crossword puzzle. What's your next move? Start another one?"

"I don't follow you, Captain."

Hoisting his head up, he out-turns both wrists and makes his pitch. "Ostensibly, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but _ostensibly_ , when you've completed a crossword puzzle, you've learned something that you didn't previously know, right?"

She squints, apparently attempting to decipher his tactic. "Sure."

"I mean, you now know, for example, that Gren, G-R-E-N, is a four-letter word for an Offchart frontier moon–"

"Oh," she remarks, dropping the inkjetter back to the page.

"–but, my point is, how could you have learnt that information without someone to pester? They don't give you the tools you need to answer the questions." He pokes his armrest in casual accusation. "You couldn't do a crossword puzzle alone. You couldn't ask me."

After completing the "N" of eleven across, Aubra Whipul affects her most unrelenting deadpan as she regards her Captain. "But I'm not alone and I can ask you."

Barso blinks. "You're not listening to me. That's _exactly_ –"

Out of the corner of his eye, Barso can see, by way of the rearview imager, the petrodrone as it explodes, a turbulent fireball of escalating detonations. He's barely time to blink before the whole _Hourly Wage_ is pitched violently starboard, unseating both Barso and Whipul and casting them vehemently to the deck. Wailing sirens and screeching damage reports assail Barso as he groggily heaves himself off his stomach to discover Whipul has recovered significantly quicker; she's astride the pilot's seat, flipping dials and terminating alarms.

"Captain, we've got 33% damage on the port quarter, as well as total non-communication with the petrodrone or–," she frantically toggles a set of apparently non-responsive switches, "–or our own fuel tanks, sir."

Barso clambers into his seat, disarming klaxons and alerts as steadily as he can manage. "Convert to emergency fuel supply and take us forward half a dott."

"Affirmative, sir." She grapples the yoke in hooked fingers, repeatedly taps a trio of diminutive red buttons and rockets forward, pulling the ship away from the warp gate and the smoldering ruin of the petrodrone. "What, you think an accident?"

"Maybe. I don't know. What's the fuel reserve?"

"Oughta last twelve, maybe fifteen minutes."

"Fuck. Not enough to put us on the ground. Buzz ahead, contact Port Authority for assisted re-entry. I'll tell Kukane to–" he peels out of the swoop-back as she interjects.

"Why don't we just dock at the warp–"

"Gotta deliver the goods to fix the ship," is Barso's only justification as he jogs back down the hallway. Two seconds of dizzy scuttling brings him to the handrail and he shouts below. "Kukane!"

Down the kitchen well, prone Kukane glares indignantly up from a pile of spilled and sudsy dishes. "Fuck was that, Cap'n?"

"Tell the crew to strap in – we've got a bumpy landing coming up!"

"Captain!" comes Whipul's shout back up the bridge. Kukane scampers to his feet, offers a brief salute and dashes off, hollering obscenities with every step. Barso wheels around and darts back into the bridge, where Danboowui swells in the viewport.

"What is it?"

"We've got a ship, coming off the warp station and closing, sir. She's offering a hail."

Barso scowls. "Double fuck."

Whipul quickly pales, snapping back to the disquieted Captain. "You don't think–"

"I don't know. What's her model?"

Whipul dials the ident matrix rapidly, whizzing through a dizzying array of various starship outlines. "Uh, I'm reading her as a, uh," the computer settles on one, a burdensome asymmetrical junker. "Light Cargo Freighter. Briza – Model IZ36."

"Huh. Well, she's no reaver. Probably a scavenger, flying a heap like that. Bring her up, see if we can't negotiate something."

Whipul slaps the comm transceiver with the meat of her palm and cranes forward, submitting the greeting. "Unidentified Briza Light Freighter, this is TFS F9 Heavy Cargo Hauler, _The Hourly Wage_. We've come into a circum–" she freezes and inches back in recoil, as if being struck.

As though on cue, the comm screen shorts out and displays a static image, followed swiftly by every other screen in the cockpit – where once blazing alarms, damage assessments and vital statistics scrawled, now only a single symbol remains, grinning wickedly at them from every corner of the bridge.

Skull and crossbones: a bleached, three-eyed skull against a gray field, propped up by a pair of crossed emblematic pistols – the dreaded Jolly Roger.

No one breathes on the bridge for a beat.

"Buhoxshit," Whipul is the first to utter. "Ship like that, with no–"

"Get me visual," Barso flies into his seat, jabbing buttons and screwing dials wildly, to seemingly no avail. Buttons only click, dials only twist – nothing seems capable of dismounting the sneering skull from its roost on their monitors, surrounding them, enveloping them. "Get me visual!"

"I got nothing, Captain. They've jammed us with something – it's in the mainframe. She seems to work fine, but–" she yanks the transceiver in both directions and receives only static. "–I'm getting squat on sensors. No targeting, no imagery, nothing. We're blind up here."

Barso clenches his jaw and thrusts a determined finger towards the expanding sphere of Danboowui. "See that? The _ground_. That's your target."

"But, without any way–"

"Don't argue," Barso persists. Scooting forward in the swoop-back, he punches the comm button while Whipul tears into the emergency fuel, affixing Danboowui directly in her sights and plunging the ship forward. _The Hourly Wage_ belches towards the planet, inertial compensator struggling to keep up.

Barso taps the comm button urgently. "Port Authority, do you read me, Port Authority? This is TFS freighter _Hourly Wage_ , requesting assistance, do you copy?" No response among the snarling static, the Jolly Roger smiling derisively in retort.

Biting his tongue hard, he fiercely wheels the co-pilot's seat ninety degrees to port and, prevented against angling the ray shields by the chorus of scornful skulls, activates an evenly spread field across the entire ship. "Ray shields up at maximum," he informs coldly.

Steepling his fingers, the Captain Barso kicks meditatively back into his seat, swoop-back groaning in response. As Danboowui sharpens in gradual detail through the viewport, he steels his nerves and snaps on his wrist comm.

"Kukane."

"Yes, Cap'n?" comes the warbled reply.

"Man the turret. Send a team to the torpedo tubes."

"We got trouble, sir?"

"Of a sort," he replies coldly. "Pirates."

Barso hears the grin in the quartermaster's voice. "Fuckin' A," Kukane answers. "Picked the wrong motherbloomers to mess with, didn't they?"

"Agreed. Arm the irregulars while you're at it."

"Loud and clear, Cap'n," he confirms and the connection fizzes out.

Whipul's an accomplished enough pilot to simultaneously plummet in a controlled dive towards Danboowui and douse the Captain with an evaluating glance. "Want I should extend the turret?"

Barso loses the battle against smiling. "Do it." She wrenches the appropriate pedal with a harsh clack and somewhere on the _Wage's_ dorsal deck, a double-barreled MI Model V14 Handmaiden Laser Turret submerges from beneath a hidden panel, soon to be operated by one of the Szarzarr mercenaries; deadeye Daco in all likelihood.

"IZ36 is a tough broad," Whipul cautions. "Think Daco'll be able to dissuade her?"

"You worry about breaking atmo. I'll worry about the pirates."

"Affirmative, sir."

A few anxious moments pass as the _Wage_ careers onward, like a swimmer fleeing to the shore, filled with a certain knowledge that an unseen shark stalks not distantly behind, before a chirruping voice buzzes through Barso's wrist comm.

"All in place, Cap'n. Target acquired," Daco affirms.

Barso regards Whipul with the flinty, self-satisfied grin of a man about to throw the first punch as he answers.

"Good. On my mark, open–"

The shrill clatter of unfamiliar laser fire, an abrupt, jolting pitch to port and pure static, piping through the wrist comm all jointly interrupt Captain Barso's command.

"Daco! Daco, do you copy?" he barks in reply, but nothing returns for several agonizing seconds. Beyond them, the repeated rattle of laser fire explodes again, as the invisible enemy presumably opens their own fire. The ship shudders from the unrelenting impacts, hammering almost ceaselessly somewhere at the _Wage's_ port quarter.

"Captain, we're taking significant damage on our–" Whipul bellows above the clamor.

"The turret! They blew up the–" comes Kukane's patched revelation through the wrist comm.

"Shield won't hold out–"

"Gotta seal the–"

"Orders, Captain?"

"Captain? Captain? Fucking orders?"

In the space of Barso's next breath, the thudding fire from abaft intensifies, rumbling the freighter with fresh and fractious vigor. As Whipul screams something about fuel reserves, a concussive blast detonates on the port quarter, the centrifugal force of which effectively clubhauls _The Hourly Wage_ , careening her sharply around in a wild about-face. This rollicking turnabout succeeds at two things: jerking the ship into apparent lifelessness with every screen on the bridge shorting out to blank black and wheeling the _Wage_ into accidental eye-to-eye with her pursuer.

The Briza just ceases the offending salvo when the _Wage_ peels around. It's armored in piss-yellow plating, this shark, and armed with a pair of dorsal and ventral mounted teeth – turrets of some kind, spewing a trifurcated spray of green laser. It comes creeping forward, sliding ahead either with the discerning caution of a circling predator or the confident assurance of a confirmed kill.

Striding from the sepulchral darkness of his dead freighter's bridge, the Captain Barso finds himself stomping steadfast down the spiral staircase, on an eventual warpath with his first mate hot on his heels. Before he understands precisely what he's doing, he's marching between Kukane's abandoned dishes, scattered forlorn on the galley floor, and shoving shells into the chamber of his shotgun. Only as the cargo bay doors grind open and he spies the remote and doomful airlock, with Kukane and his dozen Szarzarr legionnaires in tow, does the gravity of coming events truly seize Barso.

Three minutes ago, he captained a fully functional vessel, a stone's throw from yet another profitable payoff. Now, he's here, kneeling behind an empty crate on the greasy floor of his hold, as he deploys mercenaries, racks his timeworn shotgun and steels himself to repel a boarding action from an unknown number of pirates of unknown capability or appetite, all of whom lie in predatory wait behind one door, that door. Barso battles to bolster his quivering trigger finger.

That's when the singing begins.

At first, he isn't certain he hears anything – blood thumping in his ears, some shipborne mechanical malfunction, a cruel jest on his nerves, but the harder he strains, the more evident it becomes. Someone, or someones, beyond the airlock door sings, though in truth it sounds more akin to chanting than music proper – staggering, boozy verses and a guttural, dissimilar refrain.

With thrice the fortification of any other door onboard _The Hourly Wage_ , now the airlock door couldn't possibly be thick enough.

Taking uneasy aim at the thus far unmarred door, Barso catches the odd word, "eviscerate," "mutilate" and "ruinate," generally hooted at the conclusion of a line and emphasized with dreadful zeal. He glances to Whipul and Kukane, looking for any manner of solidarity they can offer, but his officers appear as baffled as he. It seemed as if, against all sanity, bloodthirsty buccaneers, eyes blackened by patches and daggers clutched in wicked smiles, had clawed their way out of storybooks and sea shanties to scuttle his ship.

He contemplates addressing his own crew, bulwarking them against fear or despair, when the airlock buckles and bursts in a contained explosion. Fire belches from between its hinges before it tumbles clear, bent brutally convex as it clatters to the floor. Black smoke oozes out the smoldering portal, like the nostril of hell, the chorus only aggrandizing in volume and fervor. In the last hanging second, Barso ardently hopes anything but demons pour from his ship's bleeding wound.

That's when the shooting begins.

One of his own, a blenching Szarzarr with an automatic pistol, is the first, loosing a pair of bolts into the smoky breach. No reply comes for several excruciating seconds before the pirates truly instigate the hostilities.

A spray of red gunfire perforates the roiling smoke and Barso bemusedly recognizes the trademark clatter of an SV7 – the standardized Imperium assault rifle, the premier weapon of Inner Sector customs officers. For a brief baffling moment, the Captain almost expects to see razorback shock troopers come stomping into his hold, but the man who wades through the smog, pumping ammo into Barso's mercenaries is decidedly not Imperium.

Apart from bearing a gristly black beard and heralding the squalid new stench that wafts in through the airlock, the first marauder is unremarkable, as far as pirates go. A wild-eyed humanoid, wielding his clunky SV7 and screaming like the deranged, he powers one Szarzarr and another, the two forefronters, to the deck under the weight of his covering fire.

"Boil 'em all in shark shit!" he bellows, another gruesome lyric in the perverse limerick. He's painted in return fire from the entrenched mercenaries – one shot, two shots, three shots to the chest yet he stands, roaring and spewing ammunition across the hold. Four, five, six solid hits in the torso and he advances, chanting his macabre chant with a hideous grin on his face. The seventh shot finally brings him down, Barso claiming a spot on his thigh with a shotgun round and crumpling the knee beneath it. Even as he plunges to the deck, he whips the SV7 around, pocketing the walls and ceiling with holes.

Their vanguard finally down, the bulk of the pirates charge.

Two of Barso's mercenaries break cover and immediately flee the rush of the incensed barbarian horde who bay like hounds and discharge their mismatched weaponry with both reckless abandon and deadly effect. Ravenous and slavering, tattooed and begrimed, they were the very picture of modern murderous marauders. A menagerie of different species, yet all baleful, cutthroat perversions thereof, they fall upon Kukane's irregulars like those selfsame hounds on hapless livestock.

The mercenaries mount a paltry defense before fleeing amidships or meeting gory ends. One Aurik boarder tosses aside a perfectly serviceable shotgun in order to throttle a Szarzarr with his own weighty trunk. Another, a flabby Myyrigon, continues to fire his carbine into his opponent's ribcage while plunging elongated fangs into his exposed neck. Kukane himself, Barso's quartermaster for seven years, falls beneath the repeated hacking chops of an electrochette, at the hands of the behemothic purple reaver.

Through it all, through the utter routing of his wretched resistance, the attacker's anthem is conducted by the sound of pitched laughter which echoes down the impossibly still-smoking airlock – the unmistakable mirth of an archfiend, a butcherlord who sneers down with degenerate glee over the carnage outlaid before him.

It's this, this merciless guffawing, that spills the weapon from Captain Barso's hand and sends him skittering backward across the hold floor, spirit desperate to flee but limbs unwilling to push more than a crawl. It's Whipul, hoisting him roughly by the collar and literally dragging him along the floor in retreat, that saves his life, hauling him hastily from the ransacked hold and out of earshot of that dreadful, maddening laughter.

–––

Moira Quicksilver just wishes he'd stop laughing. At least he'd eventually wound down that maniacal windbag cackling he lovingly referred to as his "game face laugh," the one he seems to think strikes mortal terror into the hearts of their victims when shouted down the airlock during a boarding action. He'd only really downshifted into chuckling amiably to himself when they'd strode into the ruination of _The Hourly Wage's_ cargo hold, him passing out chummy shoulder pats and congratulatory high-fives among the sweating and partially wounded marauder crew.

There were few true injuries – most managed scrapes and near misses. Anchorage, owing mostly to his proclivity for forgoing his firearm entirely in favor of two hands and trunk, had received a sizable degree of punishment from a Szarzarr's semi-automatic, but it was nothing the Aurik's regenerative flesh couldn't amend. The towering bouncer with the electrified cleaver, Two-Bit's Ebeneezer, earned a fresh powder scar across his left cheek to match his Captain's, but he seemed to wear it proudly. Even fly-by-night armed robber Zella escaped the fray unscathed.

Only Garrigan, who'd drawn the short straw and was chosen to spearhead, had been seriously wounded, though his standard issue Imperium-model powered plate absorbed every shot but the leg wound. With proper care, he'd be fully functional in a week or two. After a cursory inspection, Moira'd sentenced Garrigan back to the _Lover's_ medbay for the remainder of the pillaging, under she could safely tend to him.

All the while the crew scraped themselves from the battleground and finished off the remainder of the apparently entirely Szarzarr mercenary squad, however, Nemo continued that obnoxiously smug tittering.

When Xo's prized cargo failed to materialize, however, his mirth whittled down to the odd sarcastic snort and finally died altogether when a floor panel was withdrawn and the vault, complete with encrypted keycode lock, was discovered.

"Well, fuck," he had added.

As befits a bulk freighter, _The Hourly Wage_ consists mainly of her cargo hold; at present, her hold consists mainly of billowing smoke, dead Szarzarr and scavenging pirates. Her walls yawn outward, lending her the appearance of a bloated belly, crosshatched entirely by corrugated teltriton grating. Swirling black smoke churns about their feet as they, Nemo and Moira, stand staring down at the cylindrical vault door, like disappointed homeowners at a mysterious stain discovered beneath the kitchen tile.

"Whaddya think, get Rooster?" Nemo proposes.

Moira points. "That's Niasi steel. Diamond-smelted. We couldn't blow this blighter open with a torpedo."

"So, what then?"

His genuine bewilderment only serves to expand her scowl. "Since when is _the combination_ no longer a viable option?"

Nemo tilts apprehensively left. "I don't know. I'm not so terribly in the mood."

"You're not in the mood."

He tousles his expression in response. "Don't give me that look. Your way involves fewer explosions."

"The petrodrone _and_ their airlock weren't enough for you?" She inquires, knowing the answer.

He does honestly seem to consider this a moment before he shrugs. "No."

Moira pours every last ounce of withering disdain into her glower, but his apparent immunity serves him well, blinking stupidly in retort. "Anybody still got a live one?" she calls over her shoulder to the assemblage of brigands. After a few seconds of shuffling, the voice of Garrok Brondi hails from across the hold.

"Here's one!" he informs. Moira flattens Brondi with her time-honored glare as she approaches, Nemo pacing doggedly behind.

Upon arrival, Brondi gestures towards the culprit. A proned Szarzarr, half-splattered across the floor grating from a gaping belly wound, hisses up at them between stained incisors.

As if by sudden magic, Lefty gleams in Moira's extended hand. "What's the combo?" The dying mercenary hacks a wad of ruby spittle.

"Don't know."

"Who does?" Moira presses.

"Probably the Captain."

A few paces behind her, Nemo characteristically shafts his hands into his pockets. "Yeah? Where's he?"

The Szarzarr's muzzle spoils into an earnest growl. "Chew cock, pirate."

"Lovely," Nemo comments. "Moira?"

With a flick of her forefinger, Lefty sings and ruptures open his throat, spewing its contents in a brief bubble on the hold floor. Moira instinctively sheathes the pistol, scowling at the sputtering Szarzarr. "Saltless mustelid fucks."

"Hey!" Odisseus barks from across the hold.

A little disquieted and apparently unable to turn his gaze from the dying mercenary, Brondi attempts to idly brush the blood from his boots. "What next?"

Nemo, hands still pocketed, shrugs forcibly. "Find the Captain."

Moira pinches the skin beneath her nose between thumb and trigger finger, dropping the other hand to her hip. "Sooner rather than later, preferably – Port Authority oughta be dropping by pretty quick here."

Nemo launches both eyebrows skyward. "We have a volunteer."

Moira sighs and absently adjusts the position of her shoulder holsters with a thumb. "Fine," she acquiesces, turning to Brondi. "Bridge's that way?" she indicates, thrusting a finger towards the hold's main exit. Brondi nods.

She begins her jaunt a few steps, motioning Heeko with a sharp head tilt, when Nemo clears his throat from behind. "Um, Zella, you go with her." Moira halts hard in her tracks. She shifts her stance a few cautious steps, in time to spot Zella disentangle her tongue from Two-Bit's mouth, cock the bankrobber's uzi dangling off her shoulder strap and begin cantering cluelessly towards Moira.

On the opposite side of the hold, Nemo only smiles at her.

Moira blinks. "Fine," she repeats and continues her stride, both Heeko and Zella falling into place at her flanks.

_The Hourly Wage_ is an efficient design, especially compact for a cargo freighter and it's a short silent sojourn towards the bridge, through the craft's largely vertical architecture. As the troublesome trio transverses hexagonal corridors and switchbacking companionways, Moira sweeps the deserted chambers for any evidence of outstanding crewmen, Barso in particular, as she concurrently memorizes a vague impression of the deckplan. Such information she cataloged instinctively, for use when Nemo assigned her as the _Wage's_ temporary spoil captain, as he had with the previous two vessels they'd commandeered.

In Moira's experience, such was the greatest benefit of chartered piracy. While Nemo apparently objected to Velocity's incessant rumrunning on more ideological grounds, Moira chafed beneath its belittling yoke on account of sheer economics. Perhaps arrant piracy was more dangerous, but with a truly savage crew, a cunning enough corsair on contract, could, when pooling the compiled revenue of a hustled spaceship, any sundry valuables found aboard unmentioned in the client's instructions and a flat fee, easily double or triple the income a square smuggler could hope to muster on a single run.

What's more, this _Hourly Wage_ seems a marketably choice catch. With allowances made toward her recently-inflicted wounds and the dubious dependability of Two-Bit's dealership contacts, a lightly-used and freshly-serviced F9 Heavy Cargo Hauler of this caliber could court a considerable asking price atop Talos VI's auction block or in the half-a-hundred other interchangeable showrooms spread across the Outer Ring. Seldom indeed could brigands of their arguably amateurish stature hope for a salable specimen this pristine and Moira anticipates satisfyingly swollen dividends as a result.

First things first, however, she had to locate Barso.

As Moira and her twofold lackwits circuit through vacant hallways en route to the bridge, they discover few signs of calamity or even struggle beyond the hold, barring a smattering of spilled dishware in the galley and the discouraging fact that every last of the freighter's ejection units has seemingly been fired, both lessening the _Wage's_ overall market value and greatly increasing the chance Barso had jumped ship. Moira favors some inexorable silence in deference to sharing these opinions with either Heeko or Zella, however, the former literally digesting the two thirds of a Szarzarr he'd just consumed and the latter whistling Abraham's bygone shanty hopelessly off-key in a manner a little too akin to her Captain's.

The old Grimalti had bribed all nine of the participating conscript crew at two hundred perfectly good credits a head, frittering away a compounded total of eighteen hundred square, all to preserve some archaic buccaneer ethos. The verses meant little to nothing to those reciting them, Moira didn't doubt – any ordinary outlaw would view such chanted vulgarities as little more than something spooky said to help rile the blood and quickly cow the opposition, but Abraham observed them almost ritualistically, as if holy orders, a superstition Nemo sponsored because he "liked the ambience."

Moira's recollection of _The Hourly Wage's_ layout places them at the threshold of the bridge in a matter of minutes. However, durable bulkhead doors, sealed emergency tight against ingress, obstruct their entry. Inwardly hexing Two-Bit's name and posting his girlfriend on sentry duty, Moira stoops before the control panel, attempting to recall anything specific she'd gleaned off him about the frangible science of breaking and entering.

The key, as far as she could remember, to disabling the locking mechanism on a standardized security door had something or everything to do with the servomotor and its discharging, disconnection or destruction. To this end does Moira labor, uninformed and frustrated, with Heeko hovering blankly over her shoulder and Zella three paces away, tracing the abandoned hallway with the muzzle of her automatic, as if to anticipate an ambush.

Several anxious seconds of manual jostling manages to wrest loose a bulb-shaped mechanism that Moira prays is the servo motor and, as she forcefully wrenches it free, the bulwark doors disjoin diagonally and whine wide open. The noise spins Zella skittishly about and, before Moira can issue an order, she empties her weapon's full chamber into the bridge.

Green laserfire streams from the lips of the blaring machine gun, spent ditrogen gas oozing from the chamber and choking the doorway. As curtly as it begins, it ceases suddenly, the trembling weapon clicking empty and shuddering from the exhaustion of its ammunition, accompanied by the distinct sound of horrified coughing from within.

Moira doesn't need to peer around the corner to recognize and confirm precisely the extent of Zella's panicky blunder. Utterly incapable of withstanding a ratatat barrage, the consoles, bridge controls and likely main computer were almost certainly pulverized, denigrating the entire _Hourly Wage_ from a potentially profitable prize into a virtually profitless derelict, fit only for petty scavenging. Beyond that, unless the single apparent survivor knew the vault's combination, Zella'd potentially cost them both Huong Xo's entire payoff and the blessing of the galaxy's preeminent criminal syndicate.

"Whoops," is all she admits behind her embarrassed grimace before stepping a handful of reluctant paces into the sparking havoc of the bridge, Moira padding a moment behind.

Royal purple blood, centered around the crumpled corpse of a female Iella, inundates the entire room, overtaking and homogenizing the significantly lesser spill of a wheezing humanoid male, himself perforated by a dozen punctures and scooting limply away from Zella. As she approaches him, Lefty explodes Zella's kneecap from behind with a wet pop. She topples to the ground, emits a stifled shriek and barely has time to cry wolf when Lefty's second shot ventilates her skull. Her expression snapped vacant, Zella droops placidly and sprawls clumsily on the floor.

"You didn't see anything," Moira asserts as she stalks forward, scooping up Zella's discarded machine gun and apprehending the humanoid, presumably Barso, roughly by the collar.

"Understands," Heeko confirms, receiving the scruff of the squirming captive's shirt in a clawed hand.

Moira devotes a brief moment to doctoring the scene, rotating Zella's body fully around by the ankle, in order to reposition her backside toward both demolished consoles and the pockmarked carcass of the Iella copilot. She kneels before the messy remains, punctures the skin directly behind the tufted ear with an attenuate needle, floods the attached vial with royal purple and rises from her crouch.

The return trip is even less eventful. For his part, Heeko, dragging the feebly resistant humanoid behind him, maintains Moira's single edict in glorious silence while Quicksilver herself mentally rehearses her alibi and savors the beginnings of a brood she anticipates to last the remainder of the day. Minutes later, Heeko tosses the blubbering Captain at Nemo's feet, who pins him to the hold floor with a boot to the shoulder.

In the interim, the cargo hold, whose scorch marks, blood stains and littered corpses had previously lent it the distinct appearance of a war zone, now more sharply resembles the wreckage left behind by some manner of natural disaster. The expansive chamber is lousy with uncoupled deck plates, sacked cargo crates and every other possible evidence of pillage ten eager and hurried pillagers could possibly muster in the time allowed. All this chaos, however, is centered on a single supervising figure, currently standing tall and pressing a wingtip over the fallen form of the ship's former Captain like an obvious metaphor.

"Barso, I presume?" Nemo guesses, to which Moira, standing apart with arms crossed and palms flat on the butts of her weapons, nods. Nemo jovially unsheathes the russet antique pistol from his hip holster and relocates it to Barso's temple. "What's the combo?"

The Captain quails something unintelligible, but Nemo's indelicate cocking of his firearm allows him to reconsider. "Uh, 44-12-98," he stammers.

As Brondi punches the combination in, Moira watches Nemo's thought process extrapolate from the ordnance hanging off her shoulder. "Hey," the notion dawns on him. "Where's Zella?"

"You're looking at her triggerman right there." Moira declines her forehead in gesture at the prone Barso. "Beat me to it."

"But–" Barso begins, blubbering.

The pleasing sounds of electronic access bleat confirmingly behind Nemo. "We have entry!" Brondi reports proudly.

"Excellent," Nemo responds and punches a round through his pistol, splattering the contents of Barso's weeping head against the grated deckplates.

"Moons," Brondi breathes, making no effort to conceal his disgust. Nemo retaliates with a smile that redefines heartless glee.

"You weren't hired for the rough stuff, smuggler. Think you're up to piloting the prize outta here before Port Authority rumbles this whole party?"

"No doing, I'm afraid," Moira demurs calmly. "The last earthly act of Two-Bit's ex-girlfriend involved shooting the shit not only out of this poor bastard," she indicates Barso's corpse with a shoulder, "but also all the _Wage's_ consoles and controls. This boat's deader than Danboowui itself."

Nemo furrows his brow in discontent. "That's disappointing."

Her excuse apparently landing, Moira commiserates without a flinch in her expression. "My sentiment–"

"Ooh!" Nemo hoots like a bride-to-be in a jewelry store and points an exuberant finger past Moira's shoulder. She spares a glance behind, perfectly timed to spot a glossy blank screen, a full circle of reflective holographic plexishield, stumble into the hold proper, gripped on either side by enormous purple mitts and sprouting a pair of khaki-panted legs. "Yes. Perfect," Nemo congratulates Two-Bit's purple bouncer behind the plundered screen.

Moira sighs and prowls past, making for the airlock which is still swamped in swirling black smog, seething and simmering along the hold floor. "And will someone turn off the fucking smoke machine?"

Chapter 6

Odisseus struggles against smirking. The rest of his companions hoot and howl in response to the latest explosion, catapulting the dash's rider a clean sixty feet into the air in corkscrewing circles. The assembled marauders jointly wince or applaud as the rider plummets back toward the ground at such a velocity that, when he lands directly on his dismayed head, he's messily decapitated. The camera cranes forward in a wild, unfocused zoom to catch the cavorting head, sloshing blood onto the sand. The mercenary crew, seeing this, wallop tankards together, exchange insults, chump change or playful punches and otherwise flood the mess hall with the raucous clamor of piratical triumph.

The holovision set was a nice touch. With Port Authority closing in, the _Lover's_ crew had precious little time to properly ransack _The Hourly Wage_ and was forced to rapidly prioritize their efforts. Warping out mere minutes ahead of Danboowui's scrambled response squad, they'd managed to abscond not only with Xo's medical supplies, which consisted of four enormous and unmarked cylindrical tanks, but also the ship's substantial purse, the contents of her larders and the GalaxComm 99D Acute-Def Holovision Imager, complete with 36 inch diameter photon-display screen.

So, in addition to the petty cash and weaponry looted off their rival mercenaries, the marauder crew enjoy the spoils of their recent brigandage simultaneously. They feast on saturated Peki macaw, salted duzzum rinds and vintage Borsk brandy while gambling away their ill-gotten booty on various episodes of _Quuilar Noxix Wants You Dead or Alive_ , streamed in through an outlaw feed and onto the purloined holovision imager, furnished like a trophy above the mess hall doorway.

The hill's king reclines on two legs of his Ujad mahogany throne, heels crossed on the head tabletop, pirouetting his bowler with one hand and savoring a stout stogie like a Rhakese mafioso in the other. This laudatory debauch had obviously been his brainchild, down to the programming choices, and practically the entire crew took him up on it, all tightly packaged into the mess, rollicking, slobbering and exalting. Only Moira and Garrigan, the former tending the latter's wounds, declined the Captain's invitation, along with Abraham who continues charting their idler's course until Xo made contact.

Normally, after executing any form of spaceway robbery, they'd make a dirty jump into unspecified non-linear space and recalibrate a heading but, with the pressure helix on the fritz, Odisseus had thoroughly refused such a option. Ever the improviser, Nemo had downshifted into the slightly more pedestrian tactic of plotting an idler's course – warping randomly about, via clean leaps, between nearby systems, in no particular order, to shake off pursuit from any hounding law enforcement or bounty-privateers that might have shadowed them off Danboowui.

At present, they were slated for the exhaustively uninteresting Wask system, from which they'd leapfrog somewhere else and somewhere else again until Huong Xo received word of their success and deigned to make contact with their lowly peons. Until then, Odisseus was content to monkey with the malfunctioning inertial dampener, snack on his imitation dubix and sample the ship's new supply of burglarized brandy.

"See, the thing about _that_ is," Nemo opines around the stub of his cigar, "it's not like Noxix is actually doing anything like, remarkable to take these guys out."

Two-Bit, savaging his meal across the table, ceases masticating his macaw wing to squint confoundedly back at the Captain. "The bloom you mean?"

"Well," Nemo explains, plucking out the stogie and tracing the finer points of his argument with trails of green smoke, "putting aside even the mine-cam trick, he rigged a coupla dash to explode. I'm not Quuilar Noxix. I can do that." He shrugs theatrically and reinserts the cigar. "Big whoop."

_Quuilar Noxix Wants You Dead or Alive_ is an extremely popular and highly illegal reality holovision program broadcast to every wicked corner of Bad Space. A cult classic among semi-legitimate mercenaries, provincial militia and the more masochistic of the criminal element, the show follows the galaxy's preeminent bounty hunter, Yheum titan Quuilar Noxix, about the Outer Ring as he stalks, apprehends and wholesales those few hoodlums both malicious and unfortunate enough to find themselves slaughtered on intragalactic holovision. A tattooed and ritualistic hunter, Noxix has little regard for the escort of crewmen and camera operators that seem to assiduously dog him wherever he goes and appears to continue his hunting in laconic silence, solidifying his place in the ranks of galactic badassery.

This week, Noxix had apparently dragged his sensationalist reality holovision crew out to the seventh moon of Talos, the colossal gas giant whose eight moons could collectively qualify as the single most dissolute, riotous and ungovernable entity in the entirety of Bad Space, a dishonor not to be undervalued. Having only visited VII's major port on a single, three-hour engagement, Odisseus could safely assert that, beyond any shadow of a doubt, Porttown 7 was nothing but a slumland of shanties, squalor and sorrow, notable largely by its prodigious homicide rate.

Noxix had arrived on the scent of a notorious dash bandit and his loyal pack of witless biker hooligans. In order to dispatch of his quarry's unscrupulous retinue, he'd employed a tactic Nemo seems to consider somewhat insipid – booby-trapping each thug's parked dash with a remote mine. Following an altercation at a nearby saloon, the dash gang piled onto their bikes and tore off, with Noxix and his flunkies hot in pursuit on _The Wendengo_ , Noxix's signature, mortar-mounted driftscull.

The next dash combusts in an expectant fireball, soliciting both agonized wailing from its rider and elated bellows from the wagering marauders. The real ingenuity behind these particular remote mines, however, involved the miniaturized cameras installed on their faces, designed to catch the last horrified expressions of the bikers before their dash erupt – gruesome, unethical and extremely entertaining.

Nemo leaks smoke between his teeth and braces both arms behind his head. "Toys for children," he comments distractedly.

Back on _The Wendengo_ , terse Noxix hoists his peerless weapon – a shoulder-mounted, heavily-personalized harpoon rifle, complete with automatic reel and spearhead-mounted camera – towards the expeditious retreat of the lead dash bandit, a begrimed Helker with piercings in all six of his ears. Much to the fascination of each individual spectator, save maybe Nemo, Noxix deliberates several painstaking seconds in targeting and lets loose.

For three seconds of pure exhilaration, the audience hurtles in tandem with the spearhead at impossible speed, in tireless pursuit of the harpoon's quarry before plunging viciously deep into the Helker's unprotected backside. The biker is jerked violently from his saddle, the dash careers off, collides with an adjacent accomplice, detonates in a magnificent explosion and the crowd of hired thugs bursts into acclamation.

Amid the chaos and clamor of the roaring mercenaries, Two-Bit considers his Captain down the length of his macaw drumstick. "Can you do that?"

Nemo's briefly dumbfounded. "Well, okay," he concedes, "that was pretty awesome. _My_ point is, no tricks, no games, no harpoon guns." He gathers his boots underneath him and declines forward, propping both elbows on the hardwood table. "Guy's got maneuvers, sure, but he's very much lacking in actual grit. You lock me and Quuilar Noxix in a room and you see who walks out."

"We're not locking you in any rooms with Quuilar Noxix," Odisseus clarifies.

The recognizable yet piqued buzz of a handheld comm shakes them from their revelry. Nemo snatches out his cigar and recovers his belted and blinking comm, raising it to his lips.

"Nemo here."

Abraham's leathern voice is further gnarled by the comm static. "Orders came in, Cap'n. Ye'd best come abovedecks'n see this."

Two-Bit peels away the remainder of the leg's flesh between clenched teeth. "Bloomin' hell, that was cracklin'."

"Could that possibly sound more ominous?" Odisseus observes.

Nemo stands, retrieves and replaces his bowler and offers yet another heedless entry in his cavalcade of shrugs and smiles. "What're you worried about?"

Against the protests of the jubilant pirate horde, Nemo and his entourage exit the tumultuous mess hall and leave the carousing thugs to their celebration. As he always does following any successful act of piracy, Nemo comports himself like a lion as he saunters up the companionway, belly full from his latest kill and his pride feasting happily below.

Abraham awaits them in the cramped sensor room, armed with dire countenance and tankard of grizzly moonshine. Four enormous display screens, each one streaming in a local broadcast feed in rotating intervals, bookend the sensor room's more modest consoles employed with navigation and shipborne perception. One monitor exhibits the third triad of a collegiate skooshball game, another the opening credits of another tired zugaxploitation genre flick, another the call-and-answer portion of a Oubanese cooking show and the last showing Noxix himself, scalping the screaming Helker with an blunt electroblade, before blinking out in favor of an infomercial on behalf of kitchenette gravitons.

"Abraham, what's the good word?" Nemo accosts.

"'Tain't nothing good 'bout it, Cap'n, but I suspect it'd be best to hear it for yerself," the spooked Grimalti reports and activates the ground-level hypercomm projection pad, hijacked off an Imperium surveyor craft not three weeks before. Half a moment of consternated fluttering and chirping before the lustrous personal logo of Huong Xo glimmers into focus at Odisseus' chest level, approximately eye level for most humanoids, and the droidvox begins its contented cooing.

"An extension of greeting and most sincere gratitude to you, Captain Nemo," the recording purrs. "The Most Gratified Huong Xo has received tidings of your diligence and discretion in the completion of your task. It is with boundless pride that Our Contented Overlords bid you migrate towards Baz to accept your agreed-upon recompense for these deeds. Coordinates shall follow." Abraham freezes the recording as a series of digits Odisseus recognizes as some form of planetary coordinate blips, suddenly petrified, into view.

Only Nemo seems appeased, green smoke still eddying from the butt of his cigar. "Great. So, what's the hold-up? Abraham, why are we not setting coordinates for–"

"Exceptin' maybe Jotor herself," Abraham interjects, jowly scowl half-cast by the pearly light of the recording, " Baz be the single most dangerous planet in all 'a Bad Space."

Nemo jettisons both eyebrows. "Oh yeah?"

"Oh yeah," Two-Bit confirms, entwining his arms decisively. "I ord all kinds of gashouse orries about Baz. Ball it up for me." He shakes his head twice, dismissively. "You do not wanna be wending there, mate."

Impeded, Nemo drops both hands to his hips and attends Two-Bit with a stubborn glare. "And why not?"

"Bloodsucking monsters. Random chemical explosions. Imperial quarantine." Odisseus admonishes.

The Ortok had never met anyone who'd actually touched down there, but enough spacer lore shrouded the fourth planet of the Baz system, mostly about trackless anemic jungle or droves and droves of hemotaphagus wildlife or topsoil infused with an unknown compound so volatile it was prone to tremendous mottible-wide explosions, that even a milkrun there seemed like an astonishingly bad idea.

Recognition alights and sculpts Nemo's glower into slow assessment, stogie only clinging by moisture to his lower lip. "Oh, you mean, this is the planet with–"

"Yes," Odisseus confirms grimly.

"Which means that, if Xo set the rendezvous here, we're probably doing business with–"

"Probably," Odisseus confirms still grimmer.

Abraham, hunched over the tracking monitor, weighs in across the crowded chamber. "Aye, these coordinates seem to indicate a berth a few degrees off the northern pole."

A moment of cagey silence passes between the four brethren.

"Boss Ott?" Nemo finally voices.

"Vizzes like it," Two-Bit evaluates.

Nemo catches the cigar drooping out of his mouth, eases back the brim of his billycock with a palm and scratches the crease of his forehead with a thumb. "Well, it's either that, or we don't get paid."

Another unspoken minute as all four freebooters recognize the weight and urgency of the hard place in deference to the rock.

Nemo tokes long on the stogie, exhales a gout of green smoke and shrugs defiantly. "It's unanimous then. Set course for Baz, I guess."

–––

Moira Quicksilver scaffolds the corner of unhinged flesh on his left thigh with three forceful fingers, in order to keep it from flapping open and squiggling the incision. Glive Garrigan continues his agonized wheezing, all but rending the rolled-up rag to ribbons within the unbridled force of his bite.

Armed with the mechanical haste of long practice, Moira finally retires the osteocaulking gun to collect the dermal sealer, wrapping its cord thrice around her wrist. This accomplished, she briskly applies the sealer's nozzle to Garrigan's first cut and activates the device. With a shrill hum matched only by Garrigan's squelched squealing, the dermal sealer sprays beige cement, smearing the incision in a dappled organicon sealant.

The semi-biotic compound would serve as mortar to amend Garrigan's rent flesh and while it would effectively adhere immediately, the dermal sealant would stain his thigh with balmy off-white residue for several days while the molecular cement acclimated to the specific pigment of his skin.

Moira traces a deft outline of Garrigan's self-inflicted wound with the sealer, depositing a wake of discolored discharge and fastening the flap of loose flesh in place. As she deactivates the device, Garrigan prods the residue with an inspecting finger. "Best not monkey with it," Moira rebukes.

Yanking the gnashed dishrag from his mouth, Garrigan levels a wry glare. "I thought I locked the door." She disentangles the cord from her wrist and shoots the door a subconscious glance as she answers.

"You did. You also apparently thought you didn't need my help," she sneers in retort.

"Well, so did you last time," he replies distractedly, flexing his thigh muscle and grimacing in response.

"That was a scrape and a hairline fracture," Moira blusters, rising nonchalantly off the swivel stool.

"Exactly," Garrigan deadpans.

Moira crinkles her nose and pokes him hard on the thigh, eliciting a harsh whimper, before striding apart and towards the basin.

A super-charged shotgun round had punched a brutal hole through the upper portion of Garrigan's thigh during the boarding action on _The Hourly Wage_ and while the grateful crew had presented the offending shotgun to him as an additional bonus for services rendered, the injury itself had not been quite so simple to amend.

His phebos, the upper leg bone on Criian humanoids, had four separate fracture complications following the initial injury and according to the medbay's admittedly outdated 612th Edition of Kyokik's Anatomy, an extensive adherence procedure could have rectified Garrigan to optimal motion capacity in a matter of hours.

Such a procedure could cost upwards of 90,000 credits and required immediate medical attention.

Barring that, however, every other underfunded medical facility in the galaxy, Moira's meager medbay included, seemed to favor the use of osteocaulk, a relatively inexpensive bone cement designed as a catch-all remedy to any manner of skeletal fracture imaginable. Osteocaulk was useful to an amateur medic in the same fashion that a firearm was useful to an amateur hoodlum – the chance for catastrophic operator failure was still proportionately high.

Fortunately, several paling blunders in her past as regards the application of osteocaulk to wounded bounty-heads had instructed Moira in the extreme importance of adroit precision and unadulterated caution in such matters as these. Thusly, she was more than capable of dressing Garrigan's wounds and overseeing his eventual recovery.

Following a lengthy gluing session, she'd applied the dermal sealer to reset the errant flesh of his thigh. While the impromptu operation itself had been completed smoothly, it would be weeks before Garrigan reclaimed any useful function out of his left leg and likely months before he'd be capable to another boarding action, the latter of which Moira didn't mind so terribly. She hadn't originally recruited Garrigan to reave, though looking at him now, she couldn't help but question the judgment behind excavating him from that Vapid den in the first place.

Eight months of malnutrition, addiction and rampant facial hair had mangled him nearly unrecognizable. When last they'd parted, Glive Garrigan appeared as archetypal as a dishonorably discharged Imperium naval officer could appear – jarhead haircut, swath of rugged stubble browning his jaw, insignia freshly torn from both biceps of his unbuttoned naval surcoat.

Who squats in his boxers on the edge of the exam chair now is a scabrous, threadbare mountain man – pallid, gaunt and feral. Unshorn scruff, dangling down in greasy tendrils across his eyes, nomadizes down either side of his scalp and across his chin in lush bristles. In place of his blue-and-gray regimentals, he dresses like a common tourist, with floral pattern shirt and mildewy khaki shorts, both garments so sodden with decay they practically became camouflaged with rot. Dotted across his sallow skin are the odd curdled pustules, agape sores or sloughing carbuncles, the steep penalty his skin has paid for months of ceaseless Vapid abuse.

"What's the diagnosis?" he endeavors from across the room.

Moira thoughtfully dunks both hands in the purifying basin as she considers the answer. "I'm gonna say three weeks until hindered ambulation, two months until unhindered."

A beat before the clarification comes, a little daunted. "That long?"

Moira snaps her wrist, scattering the excess water into the basin. "You're fortunate. That powered plate saved your life." She taps the appropriate button and the fluid grinds into the drain. "Two months is good."

He furrows his unibrow. "What do I do until then?"

She rotates back to him, propping her elbows against the basin's lip. "Rest, I guess." His expression doesn't betray any confidence. "Don't worry – I'll be here."

–––

Two-Bit Switch is up the proverbial creek. He smiles expectantly and drums three fingers on the sheer plastolieum of the crate's head as he reviews the five-act farce clutched before him, as if somehow a winning grin and a blasé comportment can conjure forth something worthwhile.

The Doxy of Truncheons, the Third of Stilettos, the Fifth of Nooses, the Drunkard of Stilettos and the Fence of Fisticuffs – utter inanity, not a single salable card among the whole absurd lot. Splayed brazenly on the cratehead, his previously played Picaroon of Truncheons and Highwayman of Stilettos simply beg for a Fence of Nooses or a Brute of Fisticuffs but, acknowledging the uncoordinated mess in his hand, Two-Bit could do nothing to oblige them.

If he could downgrade his Fifth for a Third of Nooses, he could combine it with Salo's two Doxies and Anchorage's Hooligan of Fisticuffs for _An Unhappy Wedding Reception_. If his Drunkard could wield Truncheons instead of Stilettos, he could at least elect Danbonte's Pickpocket of Stilettos into _A Misunderstood State of Intoxication_ , but he'd not prepared any legerdemain for this particular shuffle and his allegedly nonexistent set of false-facing cards were safely stowed in his cabin.

As it stood, there were two possibilities to wriggle out of this predicament. Folding wasn't exactly considered proper for ungentlemen on the second hand, which allocated only the second option, and consequently Two-Bit's favorite – bluffing. With fourteen hundred of Danbonte and Anchorage's coinage already in play, the best way to effectively feint in the game of Iniquity was to drastically raise the stakes.

"Well, brunos," he initiates, stooping right and fetching up his gambit from the depths of his boot holster, "time to hazard up." He slaps a small sidearm shaped like a brass knuckle, a personal yet completely replaceable favorite of his, square onto the centralized pot of anted cash, most of which had been recently looted off the _Wage's_ Szarzarr guards.

"Hell is that?" Anchorage offers, squinting across the crate.

Distended eyes still perusing his apparently fascinating hand, Salo glibly responds. "AccCo 511 Uppercut Concealable Pistol. Four-round magazine. Triggers in the finger holes respond to pressure. Little pigeonhole piece."

Rooster sounds skeptical. "Yeah? What's its estie?"

Salo shrugs once, rearranging a card in his retinue. "Market price – probably about twelve hundred."

That garners a brief whistle of impression from the gathered goons, all hovered around their impromptu table, fashioned of an empty cargo crate, one the dozens of similar such that border the edges of the _Lover's_ hold, forgotten or abandoned after freight runs gone sour or contracts messily terminated.

"What's the rumpus, Two-Bit?" Rooster theorizes. "Feeling a little rangu?"

"I imagine the pistol's hot?" Danbonte insinuates none too subtly.

"Probably," Two-Bit attests. "Though, if any one of you salty blighters gets clinked, the sheet on this wheel'll be the least of your crunches." This draws murmured agreement from his opponents and Two-Bit feigns stifling a yawn as he redirects. "So, what, are we gonna hazard here or chavel around?"

The game, like every other he'd played since departing Danboowui, began following yet more of Two-Bit's loud and public boasting in regard to his apparent ingrained skill at any form of card-based gambling, but especially Iniquity. It was a tried tactic to acquire some action – no self-respecting hood with half a tumbler's worth of wit didn't fancy himself a fast hand at Iniquity. Plump from their latest conquest, the _Lover's_ conscript crew were ideal targets for a sharp like Two-Bit – overconfident, bloated with petty cash and none too bright. Apparently, they'd figured Nemo's previous warning about Two-Bit's famed underhandedness was merely a jest.

Two-Bit had largely entertained himself with such games on the week and a half flight from Wask and, having just dropped warp in the Baz system during the last hand, Two-Bit hoped to conclude at least the current hand before touching down. Indeed, he'd played so much Iniquity that, overall, he'd actually lost more money than he'd won, such as it is with the duplicitous game.

Of the six thousand he'd earned from planning and executing the Kapla Caper, minus the twenty-five percent squared away for the expense account for another, much more ambitious caper down the line, minus the other twenty-five percent stashed for undisclosed personal reasons, Two-Bit'd only been left three-thousand some credits in pocket change to fritter away on games of chance, with barely half that remaining after fifteen days of straight playing.

He didn't mind, however – it helped dissuade him from fretting about Zella and the thorniness of her unceremonious death. Despite his best efforts, his sleep remained unruly.

He hadn't been overly attached to her, any more than any of his other stripper-turned-two-night-stands, and he certainly wasn't unaccustomed to the premature deaths of teammates and crewmembers in this line of work, but her inexperience was what truly perturbed him. Obviously Nemo had hired her on a lark, mostly to irk Moira, and she wasn't without a certain spunk, but Two-Bit had found himself unofficially appointed to the role of her minder and couldn't extricate himself from the notion that she could be here now, massaging his neck and whispering in his ear had he accompanied Moira to the _Wage's_ bridge instead of her.

To his immediate left, Salo Shouldermount, still rearranging cards with as dissatisfied an expression as a Corgassi can wear on its cartilaginous face, tosses in the small bevy of folding money he'd kept on the cratehead and unsheathes a blunt firearm from his hip.

"I'll see your twelve hundred and raise six of my own," he antes, finally tearing his eyes from his cards to extend the weapon to the pile. "Halisdro Quick-Action GB8 Staccato Semi-Automatic Pistol. Customized stock. Sixteen round magazine. Bloody near impossible to jam. Market price – fourteen hundred."

Two-Bit fights the instinct to purse his lips and taunt Salo. Rather, he remains silent, drumming his fingers with skillfully crafted counterfeit contentment, as the other players examine the supplemented weapon.

"I've been vizzing for a glossy wheel. Half-ratter, even," Rooster comments, pinching up the chunky pistol in spindly fingers, while another two hands shuffle his deck and another two redistribute the order of his hand.

"Hands off," Salo commands, reaching across for it and returning it brusquely to the pile. "All of 'em."

"Oh, a wank joke. Glossy," Rooster interprets wearily and returns his attention to his cards. Anchorage careens back in his seat, stretching his husky frame while his trunk keeps a harsh vigil over his cash and cards.

"You girls can argue over my new pistols all you want," he bestows lazily. "I don't mind." Two-Bit flatters him with a fabricated smile, brimming full of phony beneficence. Danbonte contorts his ruby expression into the scowl of a shrewd consumer.

"I assume we'd be inheriting a sheet on this one too?" he inquires.

"Well, yeah," Salo verifies. "I mean, it's not like I used it on Bubble cans in the backyard or nothing."

"Rooster?" Two-Bit addresses. "You gonna buzz something in?"

"Gimme a mite, gimme a mite..." he stalls, shambling forward a sizable roll of freshly pilfered funds before fishing into his pocket and contributing three fist-sized orbs of black ordinance, complete with top-mounted twist pins, to the ever-increasing pile. "That oughta be, uh, twenty-one to your eighteen. Twelve hundred in gritty rhino and the apple boomers'll come in around three."

Salo scrutinizes one at a distance. "ArmaTech Type B Fizz-Crack Hand Grenade. Twist pin. Rooster's right – market price's a little over three hundred cred a pop."

"Bloody hell am I gonna do with grenades?" Danbonte objects.

"I don't know, chavel 'em up your shitter?" Rooster suggests amid a chorus of chuckles. Anchorage offers a detached shrug.

"Like I said, doesn't really matter since they're my grenades anyway."

"Big talk," Salo chides calmly.

"Jabbing of which," Two-Bit concludes, "if we're all about termed–"

Anchorage casts a wary eye about the room at his five adversaries. "You chaps certain you wanna do this? Last chance to turn back."

"Let's just delly those faces, you big blatherhead," Two-Bit challenges with a concocted air of composure. His original stratagem rapidly fled, he'd underestimated one of the major tenants of the game, particularly when played against competitors as audacious and arrogant as these four cads: a presumptuous player will always bluff in favor to fold, especially during the game's opening hands. Two-Bit's main hope, at this juncture, was that all four of his opponents were possessed of as terrible hands as he was, in which he might be able to ransom himself a victory from the veritable mayhem of cards about to be played.

Taking his Doxy of Truncheons in hand, Two-Bit prepares to employ his Picaroon in order execute a _Shorthanded Press Gang_ , probably one of the lowest-tier incidences in the entire game of Iniquity. Hopefully, however, that won't matter.

On cue, all five players buffet their cards to the cratehead and several feverish seconds pass as they each attempt to register the full weight of the complete hand before, characteristic of a multi-man Iniquity round, they mushroom into impassioned argument.

Anchorage leaps to his stumpy feet, brandishing an alled sovereign combination _, The Bottom of the Bay_ , firmly over his head and rejoicing its superiority. Danbonte gives fierce battle to Salo, the two combatants veritably lunging with card collections and riposting with disaffirming hand gestures. Seven of Rooster's limbs engage themselves at various fronts on the cratehead, counting cards, gathering others and advancing allegedly killer incidences. Only Two-Bit reclines, abdicating himself from the worst of the fray and hectically scanning the breach of fluttering and emphasized cards for the exact perfect maneuver. The hold overwhelms with the commotion of jostling, aggrandizement and denial.

As the strident claxon of the _Lover's_ "all hands" alarm besieges the rowdy altercation, Two-Bit Switch has never been quite so pleased to answer Nemo's pressing summons as he is at this exact moment. The quarrel winding itself down in deference to the blaring alarm, Two-Bit submits a playful shrug as his only explanation, as well as an "all hazards are antwacky," before scampering up the companionway and towards the helm.

He encounters Moira in the abovedecks corridor, stepping from the rattling doors of the gundeck and equipping herself with a freshly dour expression upon catching sight of him. Two-Bit waxes on his most artless smile. "Afternoon, love. Whaddya suppose all the rumpus is about?"

"Offer still stands, Two-Bit," Moira intones.

"Oh yeah? Which propo was that?"

"The one where I bifurcate your manhood," she annotates with the same implacable bearing with which Two-Bit imagines she brushes her teeth.

"Ah. _That_ propo. I think I'll schew on that one," he declines as they convolute the corner and jaunt up the six steps to the bridge door.

"Shame," she croons, before punching the access button. The helm doors jounce open and she slips cleanly within. Two-Bit rolls his eyes and follows on her heels.

Whether Abraham and Odisseus arrived first or had accompanied Nemo at the helm when they'd dropped warp in the Baz system an hour ago, Two-Bit Switch hadn't known nor, at this particular moment, did he especially care. What he did care about, at this particular moment, is scarcely visible through the gaping viewport, arraying itself in an unbroken line around the tepid, achromic silhouette of the immeasurable planet, presumably Baz, like a child's toy drifttrain against a field of ghastly white.

Nemo, barefoot, sleeves rolled to the elbows and bowler hat askew, rotates his chair completely around to attend Two-Bit and Moira's entrance. He chews his lip and spikes his eyebrows to their zenith as the garbled voice, crackling through the _Lover's_ comm, continues its tirade.

"–hereby orders you to power down your engines and prepare to be boarded. I repeat, you have entered Baz system space and are therefore violating official Imperium sanctions. Admiral Dreffek of the Imperium Naval Cruiser, the _Exacting Counterattack_ hereby orders you to power down your engines and prepare to be boarded."

"The fuzz?" Two-Bit reasons apprehensively.

"Yes, Two-Bit," Nemo assures, "the fuzz."

Second Interlude

Odisseus harbored no illusions that his saltbrother was anything but an exceedingly, if not inspiringly, stupid man. The realization was not initially forthcoming, however. It had been years, nearly a decade, before the notion of Nemo's potential imperfection struck him as starkly as it did today – standing there, suddenly in the Ortok's maintenance stall, with that fulfilled expression he'd become famous for, the look of a loyal pet who's just deposited dead vermin at one's feet.

The first such instance had arisen eleven years ago, during their collective childhood on teeming Gallow – lone wolf or rotten apple of the Inner Sectors, depending on one's outlook. Pubescent Nemo, professional delinquent, had requested juvenile Odisseus, budding machinist, to remove the stabilizers from a freshly purloined drifttaxi in order to augment its maximum speed. At the time, Odisseus didn't imagine anything especially problematic with this – he assumed his saltbrother and boon companion completely comprehended the risks involved. While he certainly fretted over his safety, Odisseus obliged his request all the same.

It wasn't until Nemo'd spectacularly crashed his third destabilized drifttaxi that Odisseus began to suspect his audacity extended somewhat beyond mere imprudence.

All the same, here he was, as if he hadn't heedlessly boarded a galactic transit cruiser bound for the lawless Outer Ring, bent on the mad caprice of seeking his fortune as a mercenary fighter jockey and abandoning Odisseus to his fledgling and suddenly aimless repair business. Years later, the bereaved Ortok would undertake an unavailing manhunt across Bad Space in pursuit of him, only to beach himself on distant Vollok without the necessary funds to continue the search. He would endure bankruptcy, entry level employment at Dirty Djembe's Discount Engine Repair, discrimination and minimum wage for three years only to have Nehel Morel stroll in one afternoon with a rattletrap remix at his heels, chatting offhandedly about thrust capacity and steering columns and all manner of subjects he was cluelessly incapable of evaluating with any degree of confidence.

Odisseus required every ounce of restraint to keep from strangling him with elation.

"I think, I think the real issue is gonna be this section here." He partitioned an abbreviated section of the starboard booster's rear mainframe between two palms. "If we can prevent the afterburner complex from applying more than minimal drag–"

"Well, hold on," Odisseus exhorted benignly, inching several feet back towards the steering platform on his broad hindquarters. "Whenever you buy a used spaceship, no matter how recently the ticket says it's been serviced, you're gonna wanna replace the majority of the mainframe and probably some of the anterior wiring. Believe me." He uncoupled a hatch with the unpromising shriek of worn teltriton and clawed through several of the thicker strands of electrical tubing. "Most of the time, you'll uncover some light patching, maybe even a few chewing-paste-repairs that the dealer wasn't exactly forthright about. As–"

Altogether flabbergasted, Odisseus uncovered and withdrew a live wire, frayed into nothing but fizzing and foaming electric discharge. "Where is the rest of this?" he questioned evenly.

Nemo was entirely listless confusion. "I don't know."

"This is a main input feed. You flew here like this?"

"Well, sure. I mean, there's another one like that, right?" he supposed, craning forward on his toes to examine the booster's innards from afar.

They squatted in the absurdly truncated engine room, Odisseus nearly reduced to all fours, to examine the freighter's alleged propulsion system. They'd, so far, been at it for nearly three hours, talking shop up and down the length of Nemo's latest acquisition, as if it was merely another hijacked drifttaxi he intended to soup up for a weekend's worth of back alley racing.

Odisseus had spent his morning recalibrating the magnetic matrix on a HAZtanker's apparently acid-damaged cargo yoke, his afternoon disemboweling, hosing down and reconstructing the interior of an F19 mercenary police cruiser after a mishap with a flock of gracko geese and was only too happy staying late in order to hunker down in the uncomfortable engine room of this disavowed wreck with Nemo.

The ship itself, a contravened and monstrous abomination of a scow, seemed entirely averse to even powering up, never mind the apparently woebegone strains of lifting off, maneuvering, atmospheric entry, re-entry or interstellar warping. Even a cursory glance indicated to Odisseus that _The Poetic License_ was cripplingly asymmetrical, perhaps three times heavier than a skyworthy ship of her size, possessed far too ineffectual of a steering column, platform included, for the mated pair of backfiring malfunction factories haphazardly plugged into her stern, was never even originally intended for spaceflight in the first place and its interiors, horrifically, appeared to be savagely painted in bird droppings.

Should any of this reflect negatively on Nemo, however, he was deliberate not to show it. Indeed, Odisseus hadn't seen his saltbrother this inspired since, as young miscreants, they'd hurled a Talosian cocktail through the district alderman's bedroom window.

Something about this ship ignited Nemo.

"But the main concern," he realigned, conjuring his abbreviating gesture towards the indicated area again, scrutinizing it under an appreciative eye, "has gotta be the afterburner. The ramjet is sorta, uh, wider than I'd like it–"

"Main problem's got nothing to do with the ramjet. The ramjet is fine."

"Well, not if you–"

"Nemo," Odisseus admonished as he wrenched back the main access hatch with a clattering creak and peered inside. "The main problem is that your drive motor is shot. Open up your side." A pause, no doubt timed for Nemo to characteristically roll his eyes, before the rattling protest of the starboard booster's access hatch signified his compliance.

"Oh, shit," came his echoed comment.

"You see?" Odisseus indicated with a claw, to no one in particular, the jagged and blackened disfigurement corrugating the booster's interior. "Look at this – you've a primary and secondary coolant leak from your drive motor, you've got barium scarring up and down this thing," he reverberated from within the largely hollow booster. "She's got three, maybe four warps left in her. I–"

Something chitinous skittered in the murky recesses. Odisseus froze, hackles raised, and probed the darkness with a few deliberate flexes of his nostrils, though only the amalgamated odors of scorched fuel and congealed coolant distinguished themselves. A beat passed before Odisseus' limited eyesight detected the trace moments of something slender and sinewy adjusting itself among the darkness.

In a blur, Odisseus has extracted his head and crashed the access hatch closed with a resounding clank.

"Odi?" Nemo inquired after withdrawing his own head from the starboard booster. "You were saying?"

Odisseus unhooked, calibrated and sighted down the muzzle of his belted fusioner. "There's something in there."

Nemo scowled. "Something something? Like, _alive_ something?"

"Apparently," Odisseus asserted, resettling his goggles over the bridge of his snout. Nemo's astonishment appeared legitimate.

"That's not possible. Hook and I sprayed the whole ship down. We–"

"You didn't spray for this," Odisseus concluded abruptly, igniting the fusioner with a violent iridescent hiss, dislodging the hatch open and plunging the torch within.

The saffron radiance from the fusioner's plasma barb, though dimmed by his goggles, spilled enough garish copper light within to reveal the crustaceous form of an bulky arthropod waving fronded antennae in alarm. It flared its barbed mandibles, issuing an undulating shriek as flaccidly sheared cables drooped from its mouth, and Odisseus wasted no time in unchaining the maximum power of the fusioner directly into its face. Whatever innate resilience the creature's carapace possessed that allowed it to barnacle to spacecraft was woefully insufficient protection against the point blank application of the Ortok's fusioner. Several seconds of frenetic thrashing and wordless screeching later, Odisseus extricated the scalded remains of the sundered arachnid and hoisted it in pinched claws for Nemo's inspection.

Nemo briefly darted out his tongue in disgusted disapproval. "What the bloody fuck is that?"

"Dead," Odisseus straight-faced. Smote electrical parasite dangling between them, Odisseus regarded Nemo with all the exasperation of a vexed parent to their misbehaving child. "Nemo, what _is_ all this?"

"I'm not really sure; some sort of junkyard, uh, mollusk?"

Odisseus flung the blackened creature aside, clanging to the floor plates. "No, Nemo, this. Her," he denoted with a hollow slap on the port booster's outer shell. "I thought you were a mercenary jockey."

Nemo seemed to envisage this as he pursed his lips in stark reproach. "Nah, I'm done with that. Wasn't my thing, I don't think." His expression shifts severely, a bitter disfavor to a galvanized gratification, as he explores his gaze about the congested and overheated chamber. "That's why I got her."

Reposing forward, Odisseus propped both forearms against the octagonal incline of the booster's topmost covering. "Yeah?" he posed, "and what's she for?"

Odisseus would cite his answer and its accompanying expression, years later, when questioned about the original inception of Nemo's career. As if to mimic his saltbrother, he deposited himself forward, buttressing his elbows against the booster's greasy crown, rapping his forefinger thrice against the stained teltriton and exhibiting, for the first time, the long stare – the telescopic gaze of the drowned as they remember solid earth. "I'm not sure yet," Nemo uttered. "Gonna blow things up. Kill some people."

Odisseus tightened his eyes. "Yeah?" he suspended knowingly.

The distance of his scrutiny unchanged, Nemo gave his head the slightest noncommittal shake. "I think so," he added in a small voice.

He blinked and classic Nemo was back without warning, dash of an unresolved mouth furrowing into another insatiable smile. He clouted the booster's housing with a hollow thump and cast Odisseus an anticipative glance. "So, what's your ETA on this big bad bitch?"

"Uh," Odisseus reckoned, upending both paws as if the answer were etched on either of his pads, "without the right materials–"

"Assuming I could order you whatever you need and money was no object," Nemo swiftly discredited as he shafted both hands into the pockets of his immaculate aviator's duster.

Odisseus wanted to tell the truth, to confess to Nemo the hapless sincerity that this mystery freighter, this _Poetic License_ , was a nautical abhorrence that belonged on Mox as much as anywhere, decorating the bottom of a junk heap. Even in the event that Nemo somehow could provide a boundless budget and a subsequent army of mechanics, this wreck wasn't going anywhere.

Odisseus wished he'd had the good sense to play straight with Nemo and dissuade him off this proposed warpath, but he understood only too well the cataclysmic effect disappointment carried for his capricious saltbrother. Disown him of this harebrained venture and there'd be no knowing what other, perhaps more senseless, endeavor he'd pursue, probably without Odisseus' help. At least with this harebrained venture, he'd be needed on the ship and at Nemo's side.

"Well, uh, with money not as an object and not counting shipping times for the proper materials, we're looking at a month for the warp program, another three for these two, uh, things," he estimated with a shapeless gesture towards the boosters, still reeking of baked arthropod, "at least four months on re-stabilization and probably a spare month for any rewiring and, you know, other general maintenance."

Nemo absorbed this oddly well, quizzically calculating. "So, what, that's–"

"Nine months, Nemo," Odisseus flatly informed.

"Right," Nemo recalled casually. He stumbled a hand through his coltish black tuft and exhaled, with a certain chagrined pensiveness. "Yeah," Odisseus heard the question long before he asked it. "Really that long?"

"Yes, Nemo," Odisseus disillusioned. "Nine months. At least."

"Alright, alright," Nemo loudly capitulated with an explosive shrug. "You call the shots. As long as you keep this baby afloat, you call the shots."

" _The Poetic License_ , huh?"

Nemo curled his lips and graded his head slightly to the side. "Gonna change that, actually," he amended. He splayed his hands out as if flattening a pantomime tapestry against the air. " _The Poetic Justice_. You like?"

"I could be convinced," Odisseus allowed with a contemplative nod. "Would I have to call you Captain?"

Nemo scoffed. "Of course not." Extending his sullied hand, his saltbrother ripened a thick, proud grin. "Partner?"

Fully aware that this disconsolate jalopy would never cut canvas again, no matter the efforts he poured into her, relieved Odisseus takes exuberant Nemo's hand in his greasy paw. "Partner."

Chapter 7

Moira pivots the gyroscopic seat idly and sights Baz, an insipid white orb fringed with a flock of microscopic and disparate silhouettes, down the length of her amplified, triple-barreled anti-escort turret. She mimes squeezing the triggers, but her targeting sensor, swamping its inset screen with relative distance in negative red font, continues to silently affirm that, for several more minutes, the _Lover_ remains far out of range.

The shipborne munitions computer, akin to the sensor room's hypercomm projection pad or the medbay's surgical imager, was entirely too expensive, too fashionable and too useful to have originated aboard the _Lover_ and was, consequently, stolen off a much cleaner, more contemporary vessel – a toothless and decommissioned assault corvette ferrying rations to the refugee world of Hivu. An extravagant piece of military software, the MI 19D Callsign InterTargeting Computer System was only three years outdated by the premium TFS models exclusively employed by the Imperium. It could measure distances to targets, distances between targets, establish decisive quarry locks, extrapolate potential trajectories in various degrees of likelihood, display technical read-outs relating to opponent shield strength, engine power and weapons systems and even came equipped with a complicated and intrinsic auto-gunner function.

Moira, however, considered the munitions computer a precocious douchebag and invariably preferred entering broadside action with the exhaustive thing switched off.

She lounges placidly in the topturret's personalized bucket seat, absently fiddling a few dials, reconfirming the ammunition window and evenly nursing a frothing pilsner of Gitterswitch Gin, tightly nestled in its cup holder. Barring the more suicidal of Nemo's past maneuvers, rarely could Moira object to topturret duty. Here, at the _Lover's_ highest vertical point, she could enjoy comparative seclusion, a panoramic vantage point of the entire engagement and, most importantly, a profoundly-modified GG912 Concord Industries Antagonist Heavy Autofire Laser Cannon, the single greatest anti-fightercraft weapon in the galaxy, square between her knees.

"Whaddya read for escort?" the warbled voice of Nemo inquires through the jumbled static of the comm.

"Coupla squads of fighters, looks like Spurs, and oughta be...four corvettes, those little Karracki eight-gun jobs what with the munitions computer?" Abraham responds advisedly.

"TFS 88F Chaperone-class," Two-Bit flatly notifies from the helm. A feral muttering signifies Odisseus' latest objection.

"And how was I supposed to know the planet was blooming blockaded?" Nemo immediately bickers back. "I'd never even heard of the fucking place!"

Odisseus' reply is undoubtedly irritated, but to Moira, he only seems to snarl a string of unrelated indecipherable nouns, agitation further mangling a statement already beset by the tameless feedback of the _Lover's_ undedicated interior comm channel.

Over the past ten months, she'd managed a reasonably comprehensive conception of the Ortoki language, initially out of pure paranoia towards the surly otterfolk muttering inscrutable obscenities in her general direction. Every now and again, however, Odisseus seemed to revert to some primal dialect, chock full of bestial and unfamiliar vocabulary and the unreliable communicator only muddied the matter of her understanding even further.

"Well, unless you've got a better option, unless you feel like taking a squatter over the side of the fuel reserve and shitting out a fresh new tank of free carbon petro–" Nemo retorts brusquely.

"Cap'n, we got activity," Abraham interjects urgently. "Two 'a them, er, Chaperones, changed headings and be tackin' right towards us. Forty-eight dottibles off the bow, port and starboard, respectively."

"Copy," Nemo replies matter-of-factly. "Garrigan? You in place?"

Several long seconds pass before an answer, set against an auditory backdrop of jostling and manhandling, wanders its way through the comm. "Uh, very nearly, Captain – Ebeneezer's having some trouble, um, fitting inside the turret himself."

Moira hadn't anticipated running afoul of any Imperium blockades during Garrigan's recovery period and, in any other circumstance, Odisseus or possibly Danbonte or Rooster would just man the turret in his stead, but when faced with half a dozen warships, studded aft to bow in capital-class laser batteries, Nemo wisely opted not to skimp on the ventral gunner. While an inert leg would inhibit his ability to pivot the underturret, a crack marksman of Garrigan's caliber was worth a dozen or more opposing batteries, bum thigh or otherwise. Moira, though, is currently disquieted by the knowledge that every single gunner aboard the _Exacting Counterattack_ received the exact same basic training that Garrigan had.

However, actually placing Garrigan into the underturret evidently required a two-man vaudeville act whose main event involved Ebeneezer climbing backwards down the access ladder with splint-legged Garrigan slung across his stomach on a medic's harness. Despite the dire straits of the incoming fleet action, most of the conscript crew apparently made time to watch the festivities through the transparent plastolieum pillar, from the safety of the betweendecks corridor.

"I'm good as I'm gonna get down here, Captain," Garrigan waveringly relates. "Uh, yes, thank you, Ebeneezer."

"Excellent. Everyone else in place?" Nemo prompts pressingly.

"In," Two-Bit reports from the co-pilot's seat.

"In," Abraham registers his station in the sensor room. Odisseus presumably replies accordingly from the engine room. Moira momentarily peels the pilsner away from her lips to answer.

"In," she swallows, presently returning to her drink.

"Um, in?" Garrigan attempts from his lower turret.

"In," Rooster finally proclaims, somewhat breathlessly, from the belowdecks crawlspace.

"Boom," Nemo exclaims. "Let's do this. The watchword today, folks, is _speed_. The sooner we break atmo, the fewer times they can shoot at us with their alarming numbers of guns. Odi, I tell you to juice her, you do it, consequences be bloomed." The Ortok barks indignantly, something about "lunatic," but Nemo's swift to neutralize the argument. "Engine damage ain't a problem until we touch down."

Moira squints towards the swelling shadows of the adversary, outlined against Baz's pallid luminescence. Two of said shapes, the blockish, uninspired shape of assault corvettes, gradually materialize from vague dots into the rigid outlines of battle cruisers. Nemo, apparently undaunted, continues his tirade.

"We're gunning for the weakest relevant point of the cordon, but we're still looking at one Pylon and four Chaperones as well as every starfighter these bastards can muster, between us and the payday. Keep that in mind, kids – the payday is on that planet."

"Abraham, you're on jamming. Focus your efforts on the biggest, baddest motherfucker of the moment, specifically their targeting systems, unless I indicate otherwise. Savvy?"

"Aye aye, Cap'n," Abraham avows grimly, antiquated sense of mariner's duty devoting him entirely to his task. Antediluvian prejudices aside, his vessel in peril, Abraham Bonaventure became a harder specimen than his blubbery frame could imply.

"Two-Bit, you're running shields, obviously. Rays up at maximum and while I know it's gonna be tempting to angle all forward, once we start clearing hurdles, we're gonna have more ships behind than before, so keep a weather eye to positioning." If Two-Bit acknowledges the order, he does so nonverbally and Nemo wastes no time in advancing his stratagem.

"Now, as for Moira and Garrigan, you're to be _exclusively reactionary_ – we're dialing down cannon power to boost the shields and you're not to engage unless engaged first. We don't wanna draw more aggression than we gotta." Down the gunturret, Garrigan mutters a muted understanding as the Captain addresses him. "Garrigan, I want you to target the bigger batteries, especially on the Pylon while Moira, you concentrate on any fighter activity." Moira reclines languidly back, well-oiled bucket seat silent in response.

"Sure," she coldly assents and begins the laborious procedure of cracking her various joints in expectation of their future and repeated use.

"And Rooster, you're the overture – the big gambit. Only way this is gonna work would be if we open hard and exit fast. Think you can handle that first part?"

The self-assured jabber immediately confirms. "That's an affi, Cap'n."

"We'll be in gamut of these two corvees in just a few mites," Two-Bit cautions pressingly. "Ray edgies at max bowside, Cap'n."

On cue, the glistening aura of the ray shields, a coruscation of redirected friction, actualize into view and ensconce the irregular outline of the _Lover's_ anterior half, in preparation for the potential onslaught of two unloaded capital assault cruisers.

Through the smudged glass, Moira discerns details on the first corvette, rapidly coasting towards them. Roughly double the _Lover_ in size, the relatively small capital ship is a hulking trapezoid of military beige teltriton, girded by harsh support ridges, brandishing four immense capital batteries on each broadside and propelled forward with a thick, ovular bar engine. Its identical twin lurking several dottibles in reserve, Moira nevertheless detects the faintest shimmering of displaced energy limning the corvette's hull – ray shielding of their own.

"Abraham, untangle the signal and set up a secure comm channel to the first corvette," Nemo instructs.

"It'll be more than a minute, Cap'n, but I can do her," Abraham confirms.

"In gamut," Two-Bit pointedly informs and Moira watches each of the eight enemy batteries shift and adjust slightly, twenty-four barrels pointed directly at her. She imagines teams of technicians, running amok on their gundeck with their ditrogen shells and their targeting computers. All the _Lover_ can muster in response to this hustle and bustle are a pair of anti-escort guns, manned by a crippled Vapid fiend and Moira herself. She permits a thin smile, enjoys a prelusive sip of her gin and collectedly deactivates her munitions computer.

"–repeat, ordered to cut your engines, power down your weapons and prepare to be boarded. This is your last warning. Under the authority of–" the clutched voice of an undoubtedly first-tour naval officer anxiously berates over the suddenly open comm.

"She be open as a wench's wet thighs, Cap'n, but gimme–" Abraham begins to request, but Nemo crashes in.

"This is Captain Nemo of _The Unconstant Lover_ , hereby ordering you to fasten your seat belts, stow your tray tables and prepare to be fucked sideways. That was your last warning," Nemo diatribes, unable to entirely mask his apparent mirth.

"Nemo!" Odisseus bellows, harshly peaking the comm's audioceiver.

"Cap'n, I–" Abraham attempts to interpose, but now Nemo's on the rampage.

Without another word, he pumps the throttle to the floor and hurtles the _Lover_ forward, rattling the length of the ship with the unadulterated force of raw acceleration. The gyroscopic seat jangling wildly in response, Moira watches the first corvette rapidly dilate in size directly through her viewpoint at the tremendous speed of Nemo's headlong charge. She's setting her sights on the practically invisible ray shield gap surrounding the first battery when the orders come.

"Dorsal, ventral, pick targets on the second corvette. Rooster, open it up," Nemo dictates over the unrepentant rumble of the _Lover's_ blazing boosters, Rooster jabbering an unheard response. After several moments, Moira spies, jettisoned from beneath the _Lover's_ nose point, a procession of miniscule projectiles, backlit by faint blue afterburn and streaking towards the incoming corvette. Her smile thickens.

The vanguard Chaperon actually manages to unleash a volley from its primary batteries, bruising the Briza's curtain of shielding with bloated red laser blasts, before Nemo banks the _Lover_ hard to port, Moira scrambling to zero a target among the second corvette's line of relevant batteries.

The first torpedo quakes the first corvette's ray shield, weak warding against the piercing solidity of missile weapons, while the second crumples the shield completely. The third and fourth torpedoes hammer hard against the hull, detonating ferociously into the bridge. It's the fifth and sixth torpedoes that truly doom the blitzed corvette, the former perforating the main bridge viewport before erupting, the latter bayoneting the previous wound as it burrows deep into the cruiser before discharging, literally sundering the entire craft in two shorn pieces. The seventh and eighth torpedoes promptly conclude the matter, both roaring into the exposed belly of the uncoupled corvette, a cross-section of severed decks and unfortunate crewmen suctioned into open space, before rupturing the entire mess into an enjoined and horrific explosion.

With the push of three buttons and over the span of fifteen seconds, Nemo's "overture" had simultaneously cost the ship and her collected crew over thirty thousand credits in replacement munitions and destroyed a heavily armored capital cruiser.

Over the unchained thunder of the combined blast, the blizzard of interruptive static where the corvette's comm transmission once was and the clamorous din of the zooming boosters, Moira swears she hears someone whooping in startled exuberance.

Awaiting no further invitation, Moira levels the turret's three muzzles toward the last and understandably shell-shocked corvette left floating before she opens her fire, Antagonist steadily jouncing with the punchy release of its ammunition in brilliant green bolts pyramidaly arranged. In brief successive bursts, she bull's-eyes each battery's shield gap, riddling the capital turret beneath with exacting laserfire, and in short order, she's pacified the corvette's starboard side, like sliding four weaponized fingers neatly into a glove.

"What're ya waiting for, Glive?" she gibes into the headset.

"...the Captain said–"

"Jocks!" Two-Bit cries, attempting to wrestle his dispatch above the booster's blare. "Whole squad, cracklin' in at 33 greez dorsie off starboard bow! Ray edgies janked out flush!" Moira watches as, after a moment, the scintillating membrane blanketing their ship anterior blinks itself along her full frame, albeit considerably less substantially. At Two-Bit's shouted coordinates, Moira indeed discovers a dozen swooping starfighters, Spur-Class, apparently cast off by the looming column of the Pylon and hugging to a tight check-mark formation at a breakneck engagement speed.

Boxy one-man Fjoran craft, Spurs were lightly shielded, heavily armed and highly mobile assault fighters generally deployed in droves and fond of swarm tactics. While not as utterly defenseless as their Xendo dive-bomber counterparts, they claimed an askance flight angle, a host of laser cannons cresting the end of a stunted belly wing and a single homing torpedo, mounted like a lance at the corner of the cockpit.

"Dorsal, ventral, take targets and go!" Nemo ardently tasks, though only Garrigan requires the prompt. Exploiting the advantage of superior range, Moira tears into them first, zeroing the leader at the lowest point of the check and letting loose. Her ammunition window briskly dials down as she pricks the leader with a pair of bolts, tumbling the fighter straight into its wingman. The _Lover_ , for all her reckless alacrity, putters ahead when the squadron screams past, expelling a literal rain of screeching red laser fire, which buffets and pockets itself against the ray shield.

What the starfighter wing doesn't seem to anticipate, however, is the exact toll they'll pay for entering Glive Garrigan's fire arc. Eight months of indigence, rampant addiction to virulent narcotics and an splintered leg seemingly hasn't damaged his inexhaustible aim at all, tagging three stragglers as the squadron messily attempts to reform under the _Lover_ and directly in Garrigan's sights.

"Edgies at 82%. Six dotts from Pylon's max gamut," Two-Bit chimes.

"Abraham, start in on the Pylon. Two-Bit, swap, what, 52% power off the shields and into the turrets. Twenty-five or whatever a pop," Nemo recklessly resolves.

Two-Bit hesitates a moment. "You facting?"

"I am 'facting,' as a matter of fact." Odisseus inserts a wary comment, the specifics of which Moira suffers under the peal of Garrigan's gunfire, though Nemo remains typically unfazed by it. "Dorsal, ventral, you gotta take out the trash before we get in range of this big bitch. Savvy?"

"Aye aye," Garrigan complies between the bluster of his ablaze turret.

Moira wrests the pilsner from its holster and, pausing before she drains it, comments inattentively, "You feeling generous?"

"Don't spend it all in place."

As Moira hastily shelves her glass of gin, the fighter squadron resurfaces into her fire arc and she squeezes of a volley with the one hand while the _Lover_ staggers in impact from their streaming weaponry.

"Edgies at 28%," Two-Bit gratingly apprises.

As if on cue, the turret's power barometer scrolls skyward and she responds by wheeling the gyroscopic seat about and sweeping the Antagonist with it, abruptly augmented autofire alight. Three of the fighters, clipped by Moira's cannonade, tailspin apart and succumb to private explosions, including the newly elected squad leader. The remaining four Spurs veer individually off, Moira spraying gunfire in one's wake and, as it crosses into his reach, Garrigan harassing another.

"Inside the Pylon's gamut in one dottible. Stamped to re-tragg the ray edgies?" Two-Bit requests significantly.

"Nah," Nemo derides. "Lemme try something." Odisseus balks another objection, but it's Abraham who attempts to rationalize Nemo.

"Cap'n, we still got plenty 'a power in the main systems – ain't time fer the haymaker just yet–" he urges, but Two-Bit hastens to the warning.

"Inside Pylon's gamut!" No sooner has he issued the alert before the _Exacting Counterattack_ , the vast scepter of a bulk Pylon-class capital cruiser, nearly thirty times the _Lover_ in sheer length, initiates its firing sequence. A cavalcade of quadroturret batteries calibrate and loose a volley outward, an ocean of red laserfire hurtling towards them – the unbridled power of an Endless Imperium warship's port broadside.

Bellowing partially in panic, partially in elation, Nemo pitches _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ brutally to starboard, boosters careening drunkenly and navigational instruments scrambling to ascertain their surroundings. The torrent of enemy fire whooshes narrowly past, leaving the _Lover_ skidding to compose herself, the unalloyed might of the evasion nearly capsizing the ship.

The comm backfires with screamed chastisement, mostly terror-stricken and all addressed harshly to Nemo, who seems beside himself with the rabbity euphoria of a first-time spacejumper. Before anyone can stop him, however, the _Exacting Counterattack_ adjusts its aim, Moira braces for impact and Nemo wrenches the freighter as callously to port as the much-abused yoke allows, screaming like a banshee.

_The Unconstant_ _Lover_ banking uncontrollably away, Moira's bucket seat whirligigs like a carnival ride, dragging the Antagonist with it. Snapping oppressively around, she spies the fighter squadron, ameliorated from their previous botched strafing run and closing fast in a predatory pounce. Cascades of capital class laser fire blast past, Moira anticipates the forthcoming starship slalom and, as Nemo vomits the _Lover_ tactlessly back to starboard, she surfs the centrifugal force of the swerve to perfectly position the turret in an unforeseen flank to the squadron of Spurs.

Strangling the trigger, Moira punishes the surviving starfighters for attempting to withstand against her anti-starfighter cannon by pouring gunfire into the first target she sees. Dismembering the craft with lancing precision, she's subsequently rewarded by a burble of Nemo's sheepish laughter. The wing mates reflexively divert, however, when the Pylon opens fire again, flooding the imaginary causeway between them with gunfire of its own.

This time, they heave to port in tandem, Nemo lurching the whole craft turbulently athwart to circumvent a hail of destruction, Moira coasting the rowdy momentum to catch their pursuers off guard. While the remainder of the _Lover's_ crew undoubtedly scrambles and screams about the ship in protest and revolt, Nemo and Moira operate in stark concert. As she composedly collapses a starfighter cockpit under the brunt of her barrage, she imagines Nemo on the bridge – barefoot, sleeves rolled to the elbows and absolutely frazzled in felicity. Again, the leftover fighters peel off lest they be caught in the merciless crossfire.

Inch by inch, _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ advances its evasive approach until, to avert the increasingly accurate battery fire, Nemo yanks the freighter upward, rocketing half a dottible above the _Exacting Counterattack_. The hounding remnant of the Spur squadron, caught unawares, requires little help from Moira to dispatch itself, swatted down amid the chaos of the Pylon's bombardment. Liberated from its starfighter tail, the _Lover_ enters a momentary nosedive to effectively hurtle the crest of the _Exacting Counterattack_ , clearing the blockade and jetting towards the lusterless white expanse of Baz. Nemo chokes the comm with his exonerated cackling. Moira exhales.

The Pylon's starboard batteries, however, aimed at the planet's surface and rendered useless against the _Lover's_ portside approach, open fire on the unsuspecting freighter.

A buffet of impacts racks the _Lover's_ port quarter and Moira instantly recognizes the dreaded alarm signifying utter shield failure.

"Edgies gone–" Two-Bit hollers against the wailing of the alarm and the ship's violent shake, but Nemo preempts the comm.

"Gun it, Odi," Nemo commands. Whatever discontent previously bayed from the engine room, Odisseus apparently distinguishes the immediate danger of the situation and promptly gooses both jetboosters. A moment of backlash before the _Lover_ taps undiscovered thrust, springing downward into Baz's atmosphere at full burn and belching twin wakes of exhaust. Even over the astounding outcry of the howling engine and Nemo's terrified caterwaul, Moira barely manages to discern Odisseus' final complaint as _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ empties its fuel reserve to the core in its frenetic flight.

"This Ott motherfucker better not give us any trouble."

–––

Odisseus thinks this Boss Ott character smells like all kinds of trouble. Only very occasionally had the Ortoki mechanic, girded with his superior sense of smell, encountered a specimen whose distinct musk he couldn't dissect and analyze, generally as a method towards assessing their specific ranking on the laundry list of individuals Nemo shouldn't associate with but inevitably does anyway. This Boss Ott, with his trifurcated cocktail of mystery aromas, had earned himself a place in the top tier.

He stinks of three contradictory stinks, all amalgamated into a single dubious odor. The first is a tangy and invasive fragrance, accented with a flavor akin to, yet markedly dissimilar from, iron. The second is something sulphuric and caustic, possibly some form of explosive, though decidedly organic in origin. The third, of course, is the unequivocal stench of ambition – sharply unlike Nemo's own furious, illogical yearning, but more cold-blooded, more methodical. Even from a cursory sniff, Odisseus recognizes Ott as a schemer, the sort of biped capable of capriciously sacrificing loyal underlings to the whims of his alleged great cause.

He raps his mottled blue knuckles inspectingly against the smelted steel of the first enormous, unmarked cistern, recently deposited at his musing feet by the suddenly perspiry trio of Anchorage, Ebeneezer and Heeko, and elicits a blunt, occupied thud from the receptacle in return. He frowns in supposedly profound review as he circuits about the driftcart, likewise auditing each tank aloofly, before plunking both of his lower arms pensively to his girthy waist while keeping the upper pair contemplatively crossed. He pleats his broad brow into an ascertaining scowl.

"And you appropriated these off _The Hourly Wage_ , correct?" he questions blankly, as unaccountable as if his indigo countenance had been sculpted of steel.

"...yeah, that's right," Nemo ventures distractedly, hands lodged firmly in jacket pockets and bowler hat thumbed up off his brow. Understandably a little winded following the harrowing and partially improvised events of the blockade run, Nemo attempts to collect his scattered breath, though Odisseus recognizes the defense mechanism inherent behind his saltbrother's nonchalance. Apparently even the incorrigible Captain couldn't help but be disquieted by this most surrealistic of rendezvous.

Xo's coordinates indicated a point somewhere down a meandering canyon on the northernmost of Baz's expansive polar continents and, after an hour of Nemo adroitly circumnavigating the _Lover_ between precarious chasms of icebound bluffs, the crew was alarmed to discover, cunningly concealed amidst the enclosing cliffs, a vast and intricate fortification where they had expected, at best, a circle of inclement tents.

Only visible to the naked eye from an oblique vista and inexplicably invisible to the ship's own sensors, Ott's high command was an impregnable citadel beseeming an ancient warlord, a militarized redoubt shaming the back alley alehouses and dicing dens of the galaxy's other ostensible kingpins and mafiosoi. Fortified against assault or intrusion by unyielding ramparts of ice and stone, jointly concealed from scrying eyes by sensor scramblers and the hazardous arctic ravine, astray amid thousands of mottibles of trackless, blank wasteland and crowning what is universally considered to be the second most perilous planet in Bad Space, succeeded only by Jotor itself, this headquarters proved a castle; its master proved a king.

Authorized for a landing atop the roof of the citadel's main stronghold, they were ushered to touch down through one of the larger apertures in the edifice's peculiar perforated canopy, which Odisseus belatedly recognized, upon exiting the ship and hearkening to the whirling wintry wind, as a Vollocki symphonic ceiling.

A swooping mosque of molded malachite, like the shell of a titanic stone tortoise, the aboriginal inhabitants of Vollok riddled the roofs of their cathedrals with thousands of keenly crafted cavities, ranging from microscopic to gargantuan in size, in order to flute the ceaseless gales of their steppeland homes into a choir of ethereal and discarnate voices. To this day, renowned Vollocki composer-architect Thyybuk Legaro, pioneer of modern breeze-baroque, continues to tap the inexhaustible depths of dynamic ventilated plainsong, his work enjoyed galaxywide by meditators, ambitious choral instructors and insomniacs.

Here, however, buttressed atop the Galactic Menace's private fortress, this masterpiece is starkly out of place, especially contrasted against the surrounding bleak badlands. Nevertheless, Odisseus finds it difficult not to at least appreciate the grandeur of the squally symphony belting overhead, as extrinsic as it might be.

Accompanying this philharmonic splendor, however, is no stately Inner Sector babelopera house, but rather a smirched and slushy landing bay, attended by a handful of carbon-scored starships and an appalling pile of wheezing machinery, diffusing orange smoke from corroded spouts and burst capillaries. Odisseus, after a moment, identifies this as a centralized torridity unit, which maintains the partially encased roof at a balmy temperature, in defiance of both the veritable blizzard outside and the heavy winter gear worn by the disembarking crew.

They had stood in an awkward knot at the foot of the _Lover's_ boarding ramp, mistrustful Odisseus, emotionless Moira, impressed Two-Bit and sweating Nemo, along with the adjoined company of Anchorage, Ebeneezer and Heeko, when Ott first appeared, ascending up the hexagonal shaft on an ample lift platform at the center of the breezedome, with his own retinue in tow.

Overdressed in the paradoxical heat of the landing bay and with no notion of what to specifically expect or even who among the kaleidoscopic posse of thuggish sentients to address as Ott, the pirates had interposed themselves, weapons loose in their holsters, before the commodity-laden driftcart, like a herd of vigilant herbivores. They had, to a being, been surprised to see the blue-skinned and heavyset dockhand proceed forward and ingloriously introduce himself.

Boss Ott, the Galactic Menace, outlaw king of Baz, thirteen million credit bounty-head and purportedly the owner of the Imperial Ministry of Interstellar Security's single currently-fielded death mark, is a rotund bull Doreen, spattered in wispy illegible tattoos and clad in the fashion of a common dock worker – muddy boots, neutral breeches and a olive vest over a beige laborer's shirt, both modified for a four-armed sapient, while the bundle of rubbery headtails sprouting out of his scalp is restrained with a simple hairband.

In as much as Ott's pedestrian appearance disagrees with the augustness of his militant environs, the bevy of rapscallions, standing apart with their own holster clips unbuttoned, certainly pertain to the fortress of their crooked patron.

Eight of the most worlds-weary and munition-strapped desperadoes Odisseus has ever seen, sporting dozens of disfiguring scars, the flinty expressions of the last sentients repeatedly left standing and massive chips on their shoulders, contemn the rambunctious miscreants currently under Nemo's employ.

Premiere among them are an underclothed humanoid woman with an inferno of brilliant blue hair broiling down her shoulders and blotchy green starbursts tattooed on her eyelids, an acerbated Gord heavy who's plucked out the majority of his white feathers to replace them with mismatched, bastardized and repainted battle armor and an aberrant, fleshy biped, reeking of blood, ornamented in tribal fetishes and seemingly lacking a mouth of any sort, substituted by a stubby yet cruelly incisive proboscis.

Ott, however, seems to pay this leathery lot little heed as he surveys Nemo under intrusively barren scrutiny. "Barso met his end then, I imagine?"

"I would say so," Nemo summarizes as casually as he's able while redoubling his efforts to discern Ott's ambiguous long game.

The Doreen hums a noncommittal beat before absently skimming the forefinger of his second left hand along the cistern's side. "Interesting. And all of this was on Xo's dollar?"

"Well," Nemo begins, as tactfully as he knows how, "see, that's the thing. Initially, we were under the impression _Xo_ would be footing the bill, but, uh," he spikes back his shoulders and cranes forward his neck in a gesture of bemused innocence, "if we sell the cargo directly to you, I don't really see, you know, unless I'm missing something, how Xo benefits at all."

"And that makes you nervous?"

"And that makes me nervous," Nemo quotes, flapping a hand out of his jacket in accord.

Ott absorbs this unchanged, inattentively smearing the cistern's condensation between his fingers in an unintentional display of the galactic gesture for cash. After an agonizing moment or two, Ott ambles two steps back, turns and waves halfheartedly towards his pack of laconic murderers. Odisseus' paw instinctively drops to the butt of his belted Acathi but only the diminutive centauroid Treffel, a decidedly unmilitarized addendum to Ott's irregulars, scuttles forward, clasps and activates some handheld artifice to the cistern.

As the device whirs in apparent contemplation, Odisseus tosses an evaluating glance to Two-Bit, who chews his bottom lip undecidedly and drums three fingers against the grip of his holstered Dissident. Several feet aside, Moira remains implacable, though she surreptitiously managed to position herself a few steps behind Heeko, while Anchorage and Ebeneezer flex fists and attempt to gauge individual specimens among Ott's entourage.

The Treffel's gadget clicks internally and emits a series of mild validating beeps. "The genuine article, Boss," he barks back towards Ott, mutedly conversing with the surly Gord.

Nemo shifts his weight to square himself and inclines his chin measurably when Ott's clarion voice resounds. "Let me disconfirm your fears, Captain," he states, rotating on his chunky feet and treading forward. "Xo is not defrauding you." The aide approves another cistern, circling around the driftcart towards the third as Ott heels slightly left and withdraws an obese wad of cash from a back pocket. He licks a second thumb and fingers through the tender as he continues, keeping his first pair of arms tightly crossed. "In point of fact, I _suspect_ they are attempting to defraud me."

"Oh yeah?" Nemo remarks quizzically.

"So it would seem," Ott substantiates, not nearly as distracted by the monumental amount of money he wafted through like loose change as Nemo clearly is. "Apparently, Xo would prefer to shower me in unwanted gifts and toothless favors rather than pay our agreed-upon price for services past rendered." The Treffel endorses the final cistern and Ott achieves the apparent total he was searching for, less than a third of the wad's strength. As the aide scurries back among the cluster of brutes, Ott restores the original sheaf of creased currency to his back pocket, passes the lesser stack to his topmost arms and commences a recount.

"Ah," Nemo tentatively concurs, "I can see how that'd be, uh, bad."

Ignoring him, Ott progressively elaborates with each tallied banknote. "It is my contention, however, that a few containers of blood, Triomman or otherwise, are shoddy recompense for my endorsement," he concludes with an vague nod towards the cisterns before accounting for the last bill, doubling over the wad of cash and extending it, unconcerned, to Nemo.

Nemo guardedly reaches out to palm the payment. "Blood?"

"Yes," Ott affirms. "That's one hundred and sixty Commercial in payment for the shipment and another two hundred for your fuel costs." His bottom hands find their way into his pockets and his top arms cross complacently. "Any questions?"

"Uh," Nemo stammers, thumbing through the money abstractedly, "no, that'll be good for me."

Odisseus scrunches his muzzle. Tangy, invasive, mildly ironlike – Ott smells of _blood_ , though a nearly unrecognizable variation thereof and ergo, very possibly Triomman or another species whose blood the Ortok hadn't yet had the displeasure to encounter. While a medical facility on Danboowui would have an especially high Triomman transfusion quota, whatever undoubtedly fell purposes Ott designed for it, Odisseus couldn't guess. There certainly weren't any Triommans in his patient little roster.

One of them, a Braaca with a pair of vicious electroknuckles fortifying his fuzzy blue fingers, edges Ott's shoulder with the flat of his hand and mutters a lengthy something in his ear.

Two-Bit sniffs loudly once, waits three seconds and sniffs again, louder – an old jailbreaker's signal for an imminent gunfight the crew'd picked up. Nemo, on cue, ceases counting and presses the payment into his pocket. "Yeah, I–" he attempts, shuffling back a step and thumbing a gesture over his shoulder.

Still heeding to the whisperings of his flunky, Ott freezes Nemo with an outstretched hand in a gesture for momentary patience.

Stymied Nemo slaps his hands against his thighs and dawdles at the foot of the boarding ramp a few seconds until Ott finishes his aside while the Treffel produces, from somewhere in the cluster, effectively a steel milk crate, racked with four dingy looking plastocartons, each filled to the brim with an opaque, apricot slush and redolent with the unidentified sulphuric scent. Ott, taking it in his meaty second hands, lumbers forward.

"Reports indicate a broadside of an unusual size during your blockade run and, coincidentally, we've just lost visual on the _Indurna_ , one of the Karracki Chaperone-class corvettes assigned to the _Exacting Counterattack_ , suggesting you destroyed it," Ott asserts coldly. Two-Bit explodes out a masterful false cough and, as Nemo stares the Galactic Menace down, Moira crosses her arms, Odisseus drops both paws to his belt, Ebeneezer fingers the hilt of his electrochette and Anchorage clenches the end of his trunk into a tight fist. Only Nemo, under scrutiny, and Heeko, totally oblivious, remain relaxed, though the former feigns and the latter simply doesn't comprehend.

Cornered, Nemo confesses. "Yup. We blew it up," he nods bluntly.

"I know." Ott extends the crate. "Here."

Uncertainly, Nemo complies, grasping the crate with both hands and regarding the sloshing cartons under an unfiltered apprehension. "Well, I always did want some orange shit."

Ott mimics Nemo's former posture, sinking both lower hands into his pockets, though in addition, he drapes his upper wrists over his braced under arms, as if propping his elbows against a bar top. "My technicians have a different name for it, but the smugglers here call it 'repellent.' Chemical under the topsoil that spontaneously combusts."

Nemo blinks. "Oh yeah?" he repeats, shifting his regard from that of an unhappy gift recipient to the loser of a game of hot grenade.

Ott shrugs his upper shoulders dispassionately. "I offer a standing bounty to anyone who causes significant damage to the blockade, which would include, you understand, destroying one of their capital ships." His first right hand points a fleeting finger towards the crate. "Market price for a gallon is, what," he glances over his shoulder to his cutthroats but doesn't wait for an answer before turning back, "eleven right now?"

"Hundred?"

"Thousand. Takioro is your current port of berth, correct?" Ott inquires unflaggingly. "You're familiar with a gentleman named Eidesmoe?"

Nemo opens his mouth to answer before turning sharply around to confer vacantly with his own associates. Odisseus shakes his head. Moira just raises her eyebrows. Two-Bit, though, nods increasingly.

"I ord of the bloke," he chimes in.

"Approach him. He's as fair a fence as you're liable to find in-station," Ott advises. "You're encouraged to refuel and make any minor repairs before embarking. You've until half after to vacate the bay." He flays open both of his drooping hands beseechingly. "Still no questions?" Nemo shrugs callously and the cartons clink precariously together. At that, Ott concludes with nothing but a stiff nod to his troops and files back toward the lift, four of them falling in roomy rank behind him, the other four remaining to secure the cisterns.

Nemo hasn't tarried a single beat before he's spun, thrust the crate into the spindly hands of listless Heeko and began his indignant stomp up the ramp. As he passes Odisseus, they fall abreast of each other, the Ortok keeping a prudent eye on their departing host.

"Did you understand any of that Xo, recompense, endorsement stuff?" Odisseus murmurs to Nemo, hopefully out of earshot.

His gait accelerated, his stare nondivergent and his answer epitomizing, Nemo brushes past Odisseus as he replies.

"No. Let's get the fuck out of here."

Chapter 8

Two-Bit Switch practically throws the crate at Eidesmoe. He shuffles it roughly across the impromptu counter and out of his reach, the orange repellent lapping against the lids of their cartons. Eidesmoe fingers the gaps in the crate's grating and inches it closer under impressed scrutiny. "Bloom me out, Switch. I thought we were talking about, like, a Bubble can. Who'd you have to blow for all this?"

"Hush," Two-Bit pleads, bracing his elbows against his knees and dropping his face into his hands. "Do us a kindie and just hush."

On the return trip to Takioro, Two-Bit had been appointed by the Captain to serve as the repellent's temporary guardian. Saddled with the unpleasant task several minutes before departing Baz, Two-Bit, wary of spontaneous combustion, was a little baffled at how, precisely, he was expected to baby-sit a time bomb.

This anxiety was compounded, of course, by Nemo's attempt to circumvent another blockade run by exiting Baz' atmosphere through its polar window – the practice of threading a gap through rotational momentum sufficient to shear the ship with enough deviation. Two-Bit had never met a pilot Nemo's equal and even he couldn't manage the feat entirely unscathed; the previously malfunctioning inertial dampener shorted out mid-flight and bestowed unnerving weightlessness not just upon the entire ship, but also on the four cartons of repellent under Two-Bit's charge. Several frantic seconds were spent scrambling about not only to right himself but to prevent the free-floating cartons from jostling or spilling or anything else that might provoke them into unwarranted detonation, at least until Odisseus could rewire the dampener.

The repellent passed the remainder of the trip locked firmly in the topmost compartment of the galley's chiller, predicated on Two-Bit's blind gamble that a colder temperature might help avert combustion, but the notion of an unjustifiable explosion merely one deck down haunted the quartermaster's sleep the entire two-week return voyage, a sleep already hounded by unheralded thoughts of Zella. Here, in Eidesmoe's private bathroom-come-office on Takioro's Third Ring, Two-Bit had been only too grateful to pass the restless burden of flammable liquid containment on to a professional.

Eidesmoe whistles idly to himself as he scurries away to the bathroom basin, doubling as his chemical laboratory. As he exhales, the thousands of translucent black quills dotting his hide protrude outward, retreating wetly within as he ceases his whistling to filter repellent into a thermosteel canteen.

They squatted on toilet seats in the decommissioned bathroom Eidesmoe, a Glothi fence of Two-Bit's and apparently Boss Ott's acquaintance, laired his operation out of. Though he'd never formally inquired as to the specific story behind the somewhat unsavory locale, it wasn't difficult to guess that an independent, bottom-rung middleman like Eidesmoe had some trouble securing respectable office space on the Third Ring, the majority of which was snatched up by the larger corporations. Unoccupied storefront space, public bathroom not withstanding, was a rare find and certainly worth any renovation, though Two-Bit didn't envy Eidesmoe the original task.

All the mirrors, save one, had been smashed or stolen. Each basin, save one, had been broken by bludgeons, though severed pipes and tubing still hang flaccidly from the bare sockets, reluctantly dripping stagnant water. The five toilets, save one, were relatively untouched, as their removal would necessitate an entire septvac crew to avoid copious spillage, as evidenced by the wide array of sickening stains around the uncoupled and collapsed one.

Eidesmoe had complimented an intact toilet, basin and a viciously cracked mirror with several card tables, a miniature computer bank, his prized collection of hot scramble codifiers and a chemistry set in order to erect his little office. Even though he'd also installed a series of encryption locks and replaced the door sign, the joint was still a bathroom. Decades worth of rampant graffiti adorns every wall, promising that "Tejeno the Shank likes it in the butt" and ensuring that "for a good time, dial freq 29:361.7V". Most of all, however, Eidesmoe's office continues to reek of urine, semen and feces, despite the best efforts of the canopy of air fresheners he'd festooned all along the ceiling, a suspended jungle of purple, orange and yellow tree icons from a hundred worlds, undulating by an imperceptible draft.

"Tell you what, I been up to my balls in repellent lately," Eidesmoe opines as he cracks open the ninth thermosteel canteen to accept the last of the third carton's contents.

"You facting?" Two-Bit bites, attempting to sound as uninterested as possible. Increasingly prone to openly discuss business with other clients, small talk with fences, even those as harmless as Eidesmoe, had cost Two-Bit more than a few teeth over the years and he considered it a point of professionalism to avoid it. Besides, Eidesmoe was something of a boor, even by Two-Bit's abysmal standards.

"On all the moons," the Glothi affirms nonetheless. "Every coupla weeks, Ott sends a smuggler up here with tubs and tubs of the stuff – makes hisself a tidy profit, he does."

"I hazard he does," Two-Bit consents. Eidesmoe continues to pour with the smugly amiable satisfaction of a successful businessman while Two-Bit, against his better judgment, inquires after several long moments. "What's the junk used for, anyhoo? Boomers?"

"Ya don't know? Bloody hell, Switch, I'da thought you, in your line a work, woulda at least heard of a Wolfsbane before."

"Can you just fess the fucking ringer?" The Glothi throws up the splayed fingers of acquiescing innocence and makes for the fourth and final carton as he complies.

"'s a torpedo. Homebrew. You see," he explains, setting aside his current task to pantomime a diagram, "you take a regular torpedo, right?" He frames his prickly hands in a roughly ovular shape, approximately the size of a standard starfighter class torpedo. "And you plug it into a bigger casing, say something like this," he swells the imaginary object in his hands nearly twice the size, like an exaggerating fisherman. "Then, you flood all the negative space with the repellent," he traces his spined finger about to simulate the liquid. "Direct hit with one of those babies oughta be enough to blow that junker 'a yours straight to Jotor," Eidesmoe completes as he turns his attention back to his work.

"You facting?" Two-Bit listlessly repeats.

"Only a matter of time afore one of the major corps'll scoop 'em up," the Glothi shrugs. "They're a hot commodity right now, swear by the quills on my daddy's cock."

Two-Bit muffles a sigh and tilts his head aside, in order to massage the space between his eyes with his middle finger. "You about termed?"

"I can square ya now, if you got other affairs to see to," he offers indifferently. On cue from Two-Bit's weary nod, he scampers back toward the toilet, the provisional throne ensconced by muted monitors, and, after retracting the lid, fetches forth a lockbox of girded steel, buckled by some deluxe retina scanner Eidesmoe undoubtedly conned out of an unsuspecting tourist. After raising the box to his eye, the device chirps pleasantly at him and he peels back the cover to reveal a substantial pot of funds.

The sort of hood who considered himself canny for employing such a costly piece of security, the notion never seemed to occur to Eidesmoe that right now, should Two-Bit or any other customer pull a pistol, none of that would matter. Two-Bit made a mental note to, at some future point, introduce the fence to this concept – an armed robbery, maybe rounded off with a nice safe pistol-whip to the nose, should do the trick and shouldn't hurt him or his operation too badly as a result.

Eidesmoe leafs out a hefty sum of funds on an uncluttered space of table and slaps the lockbox closed harshly, the retina scanner re-arming. "Total should come to 64, for four gallons."

Two-Bit crinkles his brow and scoops up the money. Unbothered, Eidesmoe returns to his basin and drains the fourth carton into the last canteen. Two-Bit thumbs through the stack of crumpled bills, mostly originating from deep Ring worlds like Ostara and Bozee, before tapping the butt of the stack against an open palm to level it out. "I was vizzing to jack a lot less," he comments, contentedly surprised.

"Told ya," Eidesmoe adds. "Hot commodity right now."

–––

Moira Quicksilver shouldn't smoke. Taxing on the budget of a common hood, hazardous to her health without heinously expensive genetic treatments and capable of recalling potent memories of her father's jackets, Moira typically disdained smoking as a waste of time, money and energy, only occasionally engaging in the behavior to alleviate serious duress.

She drains the next cigarette to cinders in under a minute, billowing the subsequent gouts of smoke out her nostrils like a Tyorth dragon and banishing the scorched stub to the gap between floor tiles, the same shallow grave where she'd sentenced the first three butts.

She loiters on a Second Ring Takioro side-street, a constant amid a sloshing sea of both vaporous and humanoid effluvia. As the expected crowd of miscreants and vagabonds filter past, the air is ablaze with the mingling aromas of the dozen nearby restaurants, taverns, saloons and luncheonettes. Brined rodent mutton from the local Pickle Planet kiosk, freshly brewed Nokko chococino off the Nomad Café as it bustles by, the acrid and pervasive stench of overcooked jellyfish, all amalgam together to mellow the reasonably pungent smell of her Yellowtooth cigarettes into the stinking soup of the sweating space station street.

Holster clips unbuttoned, fingers of her right hand limbered and prepared to draw a preemptive pistol at the first sign of trouble and resisting the urge to siphon off another cigarette from her dwindling emergency packet, Moira focuses her conscious attention on the passerby, scanning for any familiar face, all the while locking her peripheral on The Pistol-Whip's side door, desperate for the first sign of Danbonte's exit.

This had been a stupid idea, a principle Moira was constitutionally averse to complying with. The Pistol-Whip presented itself as the double-edged sword of rendezvous points; its unpopularity was both her best defense and her worst alibi. It was extremely unlikely that Nemo or any of his crew would happen up this particular alley and spot her, lurking around the side entrance to Takioro's only bounty hunter bar, but should they, she could employ no reasonable excuse they'd believe, considering her history. Her best option, if presented with one of the _Lover's_ conscript crew, was to simply kill them, as she had Zella. People were ignominiously murdered on Takioro every hour. Doubtless she could at least capitalize on their bounty, if nothing else.

Though, in truth, should Nemo himself come strutting down the street towards her, the best strategy she had was probably the same one.

Despite this, she'd chosen a decent moment to make this most delicate of errands. Nemo currently hosted the third of his celebratory debauches at the Afterburn and the majority of the crew elected to attend. Those few who declined, Odisseus among them, were unaccounted for and could very possibly round the corner at any moment. Moira thumbs another cigarette from its packet.

They'd been three days in Takioro, with plans to remain another four, before shipping off to whatever catchpenny chore Velocity had chambered for them on Rith. The crew, distended with the spoils of their piracy, had streamed off-ship to fritter away their winnings, ingest outrageous quantities of alcohol and catch new diseases from discount meals and even more discounted whores. The only dive and dicing den left untouched by the crew, on Nemo's official mandate, was the Astrobounce, as the Captain, swollen with bravado, suddenly felt no need to float Gozzer his promised eight percent, a total beyond nine thousand credits, for nightclub repairs easily accomplished with six.

She's guzzled down half of the fifth cigarette and nearly gunned down a sulking Quarg brute she briefly mistook for a prowling Odisseus before Danbonte strolls out the side door, skimming a bundle of ill-gotten cash as if he'd just delivered a Nanosecond Pizza pie rather than a handful of blood samples. Moira curses the insolence of amateur bounty hunters and stalks forward to meet her redskinned co-conspirator.

As soon as he's within reach, Moira snatches outward, succinctly palming the money to stash it from prying eyes. If Danbonte is alarmed by this action, it doesn't break his stride as the two fall in together, stalking back up the alley, Danbonte half-jogging to keep up with Moira's brisk jaunt.

"Looking at about a thousand," Danbonte summarizes as he finally submits to a cursory glance about the street. "Lenduza sends his regards."

"Does he?" Moira inquires flatly, mapping methods through the madness of milling foot traffic. They were a sizable distance from the nearest shoot back to the First Ring, but they couldn't chance riding it together. More likely she'd have to send Danbonte up there and she'd find another route back to the _Lover_ , or better yet, to the Third Ring and lose a hypothetical tail entirely.

"I guess the Iella was the big money," Danbonte idly comments. "Seven hundred. Most of the Szarzarr were only packing short sheets in the Ring ConFed. Assault, battery, that type of thing."

"Can you do me a favor and shut the fuck up?" Moira hisses curtly, before spacing them apart between a crowd of quacking Kieshans, each one sprouting metallic oddments from their brows and beaks, as they strike out onto the main avenue of the Second Ring. Danbonte only replies with a huffy sniff and a steeling of his crimson facial features.

They transverse the main thoroughfare for many long moments in silence, amid the desperate bleating of merchants, the hazy din of holovision advertisements clattering above them and the pooled hustle and bustle of a hundred passing sentients before finally clearing the last block. All the raucous tumult and atonal turmoil of a Takioro minute is oblivious to the circumventing stealth of two bounty hunters, one more discreet than the other, absconding among the ebb and flow of the pedestrians.

A pair of tagalongs, both passengerless and therefore evidently in some manner of high-density drag race, zig past, perilously close to Moira's right flank, and zag onward, cutting uncomfortably tight corkscrews into the crowd. Promising station waifs, plucked from indigent lives in Takioro's drainpipes and sewage arteries by Velocity's opportunistic embrace, piloting decommissioned dash scooters, tagalongs, as they were colloquially known, were the only form of public transit the Defederate Station could offer. For a handful of change, anyone both wishing a whisky ride to the opposite side of the appropriate Ring and willing to chance bodily harm at comparatively high speeds could requisition the services of a tagalong and commute, by dangling off the trolley pole jutting from the scooter's tailpiece, to the destination of their choice.

The shoot ingress swells ahead and Moira hastily calculates the most efficient trajectory to both escort Danbonte to the lift and achieve adequate concealment among the churning pandemonium of the embarkation platform. A driftconvoy, captained by a three-eyed Powosi taskmaster, promenades through the bystanders at the shoot landing, in seeming preparation to depart to the Third Ring, and Moira seizes her opportune moment.

With a palm to the flat of his back, Moira pitches her compatriot towards the shoot before flicking the halved cigarette away. With a last surreptitious glance about the swirling hubbub of faces, she slinks off, hopefully unnoticed, into the crowd.

–––

Two-Bit cringes. The larger mantis, a bellicose brute of an Aloroid purple and apparently the house favorite, succeeds in achieving a headlock on its wirier opponent, the bleached and virulent Pixocotto white. Even at this distance, through the tobacco's smoggy haze, Two-Bit can watch the serrated barbs of the prevailing grappler's forearms rend and rake the chitinous neck of its smaller adversary. The match's final seconds include the frenetic floundering of the white's ineffectual stinger and the nauseatingly progressive decapitation of the doomed mantis. Before long, the dangling head tumbles to the tile, the previously enraptured audience disavows their gristly reverence and explodes into a chorus of expletives, Velocity calmly applauds against the base of her wrist and Two-Bit subsequently loses a small fortune.

The Depot-Commissioner thumbs another briku beech nut into her mouth and begins her pitch as the victorious Aloroid mantis, seemingly ignorant of the droves of attentive onlookers, begins to mate vigorously with the unsuspecting corpse of the headless white, eliciting disgusted protest and congratulatory whoops from the massed gamblers. As a result, Two-Bit has little difficulty paying Velocity with his unadulterated attention.

"As I'm sure you're aware," she stipulates around the shape of her acorn, "my brother Baigo heads a small time cargo redistrib on Rith." She casts the masticated shell into the dried sludge of the impromptu arena, along with the rest of the accumulated trash – Bubble cans, loose change and cigarette butts – that litters the saturated fighting ring. "And he's recently come into the possession of some cargo he's gotta move offworld to adequately vend. Discreetly, if it all possible," she appends, shifting weight off her left elbow to daintily select another specimen from her greasy paper pouch of broiled nuts.

"Hate to break it to ya, dollface, but we don't really do discreet anymore," Nemo disillusions jovially. Declining forward with both elbows propped on the grubby railing, he serves both as a counterpoint to the reverse reclining Velocity and the only sentient peering into the arena with absolutely no interest in any of the proceedings below, Two-Bit included.

They stand amid the rowdy assembly enveloping the cordoned lip of one of the tavern's lesser fighting pits which, in reality, are little more than cropped sewage pipes, jutting out of the unkempt floor and retrofitted to host miniaturized gladiatorial combat for the amusement of Dirty Fighting's patrons.

A sixteen table joint at the crux of three major gutters on the Sewer Level, Dirty Fighting panders to two of the largest constituencies on Takioro Defederate Station – the violent and the dirty. In addition to the sludge cocktails, the saloon offers its patrons the unique service of inhumane and consequently popular wagered combat between freshly imported forty-pound mantis, attack jborra and shovel-snout frackers. Every hour on the hour via the use of their dozen makeshift fighting pits, the tavern exhibits all manner of specialty events and grudge matches.

The only major downside to doing business at Dirty Fighting is the pervasive sewage stink, supplemented suddenly by the noxious addition of mantis ejaculate. Deepening his cringe from his vantage three paces to Nemo's left, Two-Bit resolves to stop hanging around places that smell like shit.

Posted in reserve at a nearby cocktail table with the serenely sickened Moira, Odisseus seems assured by the publicity of their latest parley with Velocity, though Two-Bit reckons it prudent to withhold the notion that, should Takioro's Depot-Commissioner wish to murder someone in station, she could accomplish it anywhere she damn well pleased without too much, if any, hue or cry. Traasha, ignoring her own drink at the end of the bar, guarantees that.

"You'll do discreet if I ask you to," Velocity resolves and, as if to emphasize her point, vises the briku beneath broad herbivore's teeth until it bursts.

Nemo's habitually unimpressed. "Your brother."

"My brother," she mutters confirmedly as she mashes the nut to pulp. She glances over her shoulder at some commotion below.

A triumphant mantis handler shepherds his engorged champion into a steel enclosure with a sparking neticgrappler while a dejected one ladles up the remains of the less fortune contender. Turning the nugatory marker over in his hands, Two-Bit empathizes, having only originally wagered on the Pixocotto white centered upon the memory of a dire sting one of the venomous fiends bestowed upon Two-Bit in his youth. What was once capable to the task of fully debilitating a six-year-old station waif for nearly a week now appeared paltry poison against all thirty-seven pounds of the incensed Aloroid purple, however.

"So, Baigo's got his hands on a valuable cargo at a bargain rate, an eager buyer waiting on Gant, everything seems sublime. But there's one little snag." Velocity's appeasing shrug does little to pull the punch. "Following some unrelated terrorist activity on the larger port towns, the Ring ConFed has spiked Rith's system space security up a notch or two over the past few weeks and the contraband trade's colder than a Bozeen tit down there," she concludes with a deepening of her shrug.

Two-Bit buzzes his lips with impatience. "So, what your frat and, by noil, you, hank yourselfs," he expresses, intertwining his arms, "is a booter."

Nemo scoffs and twists a disapproving glimpse back towards Odisseus and Moira, obscuring his eyes from Two-Bit beneath the shadow of his billycock's rim. "I keep tellin' ya, Vel, hoping one time maybe it'll stick," he reiterates, "I'm no smuggler."

"You gotta ship with decent ident jammers, compartments in all the right places and you can make her move like she's your own two feet. What's the difference?" Velocity theorizes brusquely, fingering through the package of nuts. "You got no idea how many cocks I hadta suck to move your flagged Kapla cargo. You owe me."

"Okay, okay," Nemo amends amiably, gyrating a finger above his head in signal to Odisseus. If the Ortok comprehends its meaning, a vague approximation of the galactic 'get me a drink' gesture, he doesn't appear to act on it more than squinting obliquely in response.

"What's the goodies?" Two-Bit presses, adjusting his comportment to directly face Velocity, who returns his consideration with little but withering contempt. Rather than hocking more witless abuse, however, the Vollocki delays her answer by glancing away herself, towards the direction of her own garrisoned bodyguard, before wandering her apparently reluctant gaze back to her order of saturated bar nuts and relinquishing bluntly, "Puppies."

Nemo suddenly freezes, ceasing his listless gesture to evaluate Velocity with a matching mask of incredulity. "Puppies?"

"Domesticated tje cubs," she's quick to clarify. "Little blowbags go for a hefty price in the right market. Apparently bloodthirsty household carnivores are all the rage in the Inner," she shrugs uncomprehendingly. "I don't know."

"Wait, you're serious?" Nemo slowly apprehends. "Actual fucking, like, puppies? _Baby dogs_ are the cargo?" he continues to disbelieve, glancing hesitantly to Two-Bit for confirmation.

"I ord of this," Two-Bit attests grimly. "Bloke of mine, crimin' the Inner, had a gashouse run booting the bity bastards. You ever bump Flask?"

"He's my damn cousin."

"He is?"

"Yeah. You didn't know that?"

"No, I didn't."

"On my mother's side. Good kid. His dad's a little–"

Velocity clears her throat loudly. "Point being," she redirects, "alls you gotta do is pick up the cargo, make it past Port Authority and rendezvous with Baigo's people on Okberrin. It's that simple. One little choke point."

"I thought we was all marked men in the ConFed," Two-Bit invalidates with a spiking of his eyebrows and the slightest cock of his head. "What about the 78 worth of posting? Plus, we take on organi goodies, it falls on us to mess 'em and slosh 'em. It ain't near as habby a hustle as you think it is."

Spewing a wad of crumpled shells into the vacating ring, Velocity finally unchains some ire. "Rith's a province of the ConFed, numbnuts. You earn a flag in any other major system, any _certified_ system in there, it's gonna take the RPA at least three months to file all the digitwork. Nobody on Rith's gonna give two jizz squirts about your little bounty."

"And the food?" Nemo persists.

"All that falls under Baigo. He wants to keep his cargo alive, he's gonna supply you with everything you need to do that. Long as you don't cook 'em or step on 'em or something, it ain't an issue." Velocity scoots along the grimy handrail several inches towards Nemo, as if to cloister him against Two-Bit's ill council. "Listen, you don't gotta tell me twice that this is a scrub job, alright? I know that – my brother's just in a bad way right now and could use a little income. I'm his sister, what'm I gonna do?" she intones privately.

Cornered, Nemo jabs a discouraged forefinger against the railing twice, lingers his hand in midair for a moment and ultimately pokes towards the reposed Velocity. "Alright. You win. You buzz the coordinates to the _Lover_ , tell your brother we're coming and we'll take care of it. Savvy?"

Velocity creases into a relieved smile. "Savvy."

"This squares us, though, Vel. No more 'you owe me' jobs. I mean it," he admonishes tartly, eyes flashing impassioned for a beat as he repels himself off the railing.

Her expression reforms hard. "I put you where you are, Nemo."

Flagging Two-Bit with two fingers, Nemo stalks away towards his re-enforcements, commenting conclusively, "And now you can't put me back."

–––

Odisseus hooks all eight primary claws, wicked fish-gutters, between the cracked lips of both plates and wrenches outward with every last inch of his backbone, only succeeding in uncoupling the panel after several arduous seconds of embittered struggle. Seemingly without warning, the panel ruptures forth and clatters itself to the Docking Port floor, plumb at Marco's feet. A charred and twisted chunk of plummeting metal, however, isn't enough to even hiccup Marco's unremitting babble.

"I mean, at _that_ point, you might as well just rip the whole fucking system out, right, and fly around naked. It'd be exactly as useful to you as an old B24 relay strip. _Seriously_ ," he emphatically squeaks, jangling his belay cords with the force of his pontificating. Odisseus chokes on a snarl and manages to spit out a question as he paws pointlessly towards the ship's hull with his truncated rear paws.

"You coming up?"

The Mruka appears to rediscover the harness and its subsidiary cables buckled about his scruffy waist. After a moment of hesitation, he screws the appropriate dial and is summarily yanked upwards, with a hiss of complaint from the rusty winch, to an approximate level three feet to Odisseus' right.

The automated ascender had been a staggeringly useful device forty years ago and had essentially revolutionized the practice of external starship maintenance. When parked in drydock, though alternate deep space repair models existed, one installed an overhanging winch, fed with several dozen feet of industrial strength belay cable, over the side of their conventionally designed ship. Through the use of a remote-control harness, one could hoist themselves at any point between the floor and the winch, allowing for both access at difficult to reach external systems and hours of embarrassing fun dangling off a spaceship like a marionette.

Despite its initial popularity, it soon went the way of the steering platform and the Nautiloid jetboosters, in favor of driftstages and eventually graviton boots, granting their owners simpler and more stylish methods of reattaching and repainting hull plates. Because nothing on the _Lover_ could be possibly be effectual, because none of the copious winnings they'd earned at the hands of their latest caper could possibly be spent at the _Lover's_ multifarious non-vital expenses, because Nemo only really seemed to value the _Lover's_ ability to pirate capably, their corroded old set of automated ascenders weren't liable to be replaced anytime soon.

"Bloom me out," is all Marco can whistle in response to the exposed machinery they swing before. "I guess I'm not really even sure what I'm supposed to be _looking_ at."

Odisseus could have throttled the precocious life out of the Mruka had he not more or less shared this sentiment. The internal plumbing matrix, the epicenter of all the ship's onboard hydro pumps and drainage valves, is a blast-shorn disaster.

With the ray shields disabled, the unfortunate plumbing matrix had been among the numerous victims of the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's eponymous retaliation and Odisseus and Marco had only just reached it on their elongating list of system repairs and malfunctions yet to amend. Judging from the extent of its blackened disfigurement, however, prioritization would probably claim a working toilet, shower and basin.

The suspended Ortoki mechanic reaches out gingerly and pinches the main artery, dislodged and distended from laser damage, of the belowdecks water supply, in broad claws. Marco emits a hissing caution instinctively, as he tends to whenever the Mruka disagrees with Odisseus' latest mechanical maneuver, but he's ignored this time as Odisseus establishes a firm hold behind the pipe and attempts to smoothly recalibrate the partially shredded conduit into position, at least as a starting point.

His efforts are rewarded perhaps too generously when the pipe uproots completely, coming off in his paw and both severed stubs spraying stale, unctuous water in his face. Marco rappels away with a fierce kick, successfully avoiding the thorough drenching unsuspecting Odisseus is doused with, the Ortok spitting fetid water furiously out of his mouth. He sways lightly from the force of his recoil, dripping dispassionately and flailing his fur frantically at the end of his line like a hooked fish.

Marco upturns his eighteen whiskers in disgust, flashing a mouthful of delicate, miniaturized incisors. "I _warned_ you," he deigns distastefully. Even hunkered as far up the hull as she is, Odisseus can still hear the sound of Moira sniggering.

"One of these days, I'm gonna take a shit in the booster intake valve and kill you all," Odisseus mutters, wiping the remnants of the squalid backwash from his facial fur.

In all her arrogant adroitness, Moira Quicksilver doesn't need graviton boots or even automated ascenders to make the only external repairs she cared about. Hours and hours of cloistered kickboxing practice granted her the liberty to clamber limberly about the _Lover's_ hull and focus her attention on the topturret and the overly meticulous custody she expended upon the weapon. Odisseus admits the irony presented by an obsessively attended laser cannon atop a pirate ship dolefully fraught with propulsion, defensive, electrical, mechanical and logistical malfunction would at least be fitting, if also disastrous.

Somewhere behind the pendent mechanics, Odisseus hears the telltale grind of Docking Port #8887's harborage doors as they wheel away, though the angle of _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ abaft bulge screens the entrants from his view.

The tangible whiff of alcohol wafting into the port settles the matter more promptly than Nemo's immediate clarion call does. "Guess who just called?"

"You get your tooth fixed?" Odisseus barks over the sound of the doors meandering closed.

"Yeah. I–"

"How'd it go?"

"Fine. Feels weird. That place still smells like tuna," he reports distractedly.

"Yum."

"So, there we are, at the After–" Nemo endeavors, but this time, Moira stops him short.

"You pick up my glareguard?" she demands from her lofty perch.

"Yes."

"Toss it to me?"

"Two-Bit, throw her the thing," Nemo sighs and, after a moment, Odisseus briefly spies a murky bottle of turbid liquid whiz over a corner of the _Lover's_ anterior.

" _Thank_ you," is Moira's only voiced gratitude before Nemo endeavors a third time.

"Can I tell my fucking story now?" he requests, anxiously aggravated. The lack of immediate reply is less than he requires for a prompt. "So, we're in the Afterburn, right, with a couple of the crew, and I'm trying to, uh, disentangle myself from more of Gertie's advances, right, so–"

"Gertie? _Good Luck_ Gertie?" Marco bluntly recognizes. "Since when is–"

"I'll seriously shoot the next person who interrupts me," Nemo deadpans more bluntly. Marco purses his feline lips in an annoyance marginal to Nemo's apparently murderous irritation. "So, _anyway_ , I'm literally running away from her and Abraham buzzes me in a transmission, which I assume to be a good thing, right, an excuse to duck Gertie."

"Who was it?" Moira questions from somewhere above them all.

"Xo."

"Fuck," she retorts instantly.

"No, no, see, that was my initial reaction too, but it's not what you'd think," Nemo pacifies. "They have another job."

"They what?" Odisseus questions.

"They have another job _offer_ ," the Captain elucidates. "They buzzed me straight-away, I guess, because they, like, desperately require our services. Or something."

"So soon?" Marco opines.

"Apparently," Nemo replies, accompanied by the characteristic slapping of his thighs. "And get this – the job _is_ open contract, but–" Moira begins to scoff dismissively, but Nemo plows through her remonstrance, "but, they made a specific point to contact me first. They gave us the priority over the all the rest of their standing operators." A beat before, "Which is, you know, something."

"And ball it up for me, Xo's got theyselves plentya brunos tragger than us," Two-Bit assesses pointedly.

"What's the job?" Odisseus readdresses.

"Guess some other freebooters just pinched a squadron of real jig prototype starfighters from some auxiliary company of Xo's, some Kiesha Laser something? I ain't heard of them, but Xo's putting out a cattle call to anybody willing to tangle with these pirates and squash these prototypes before they sell 'em to a competitor."

"Huh," Moira remarks significantly.

"I guess speed would be the determining factor there. You know, wanna beat all the other pirates to the prize," Nemo observes decidedly. "Which is, might I add, considerable."

"No cargo?"

"No cargo."

A pregnant pause plays out before Moira breaks their conspirator's reverie.

"Yeah, I didn't really wanna do that puppy thing," she confesses.

"Yeah, me neither."

"Hey–" Odisseus begins to chastise, but is summarily trampled by the gusto of Nemo's extemporaneous inspiration. Even without line of sight, Odisseus envisions his saltbrother snapping out commands, jabbing vigorous two-fingered gestures and casting off accomplices with guiding shoulder shoves. This, Odisseus divines, will certainly not end well for anyone involved.

Accompanied by the enjoined noises of the harborage doors retreating open and lithe footfalls against the _Lover's_ upper hull, the former signifying Two-Bit's immediate departure and the latter Moira's nimble approach, Odisseus tweaks his harness' dial harshly left and sinks quickly to the floor, Marco only several beats behind. After successfully unraveling the belay line from the harness' face, Odisseus stalks between the _Lover's_ landing feet towards Nemo's position, spotting, as he predicted, the Captain yammering orders into his belted communicator, likely recalling crewmembers from carouses across the station. Moira, meanwhile, grimy with bought burnish, roosts languorously on the helm's roof.

"Who're the pirates?"

"Uh," Nemo abstractedly stammers as he dials between frequencies on his hissing comm, "haven't heard of them. Must be hard-hitters, though, stealing straight outta Xo's drydock."

"That would be my concern," Moira adds.

Odisseus raises a paw in query. "Um, are we seriously gonna stiff–"

"Do we know where to find them?" Moira continues, seemingly ignorant of Odisseus' entire presence in the conversation.

"Abraham," Nemo mutters into the comm before pulling it away in disgust. "Abraham, you there?" Only static replies, however, and Nemo, squinting, glances obliquely up at perched Moira. "Um, I've got a name? Captain, fuck, Taro? Something like that. Guess people call him 'Snakeeyes,'" he illustrates with a sardonic gesture and a bogeyman grimace, Moira jokingly mirroring him. This answered, the Captain refocuses his efforts at his uncooperative communicator. "Anyway, Abraham will've heard of him."

Three paces behind, Marco corrects, "Her."

"Hm?"

"Abraham will have heard of _her_. Captain Dijiqi Taré is a woman," he blandly annotates.

This draws Nemo's impregnable notice. He scowls at the diminutive know-it-all as Abraham's husky voice pipes into the handheld comm.

"Cap'n? Cap'n, ye–" he begins, but Nemo, searching the Mruka, switches the device swiftly off.

"You know this Snakeeyes?"

"I have that _misfortune_ , yes," he affirms, barely requiring the slightest prompting from Nemo to elaborate. "Used to be an amateur salvagier on her boat, what would that be, _five_ years ago now? Scabby bitch booted me after a few months, said I had 'the space-mange,'" he grumbles disdainfully, folding his scruffy forearms. "Whatever the fuck _that_ is."

As Odisseus, his fears confirmed, inches away from his surly understudy, Nemo steps a pace closer, indicating Marco with the deactivated comm and sneer growing progressively more wicked. "You know her port of call."

Marco shrugs. "Sure." He grates stubby scavengers claws through his auburn goatee-tufts. "Lzura _Minor_ , unless I'm very much mistaken. Makes her berth at orbital anchor in the planet's rings. Two of my littermates still sail under Taré's colors, actually."

"Well, we're gonna go blow up their ship and likely kill them in the process," Nemo ensures, splaying out the three fingers not grasping the comm. "You square with that?"

"Eh. Bloom those assholes," the Mruka offhandedly condemns.

Nemo's sneer converts into proper nefariousness. "Boom. Promoted." Odisseus is about to balk, but Nemo quickly assesses. "What were you before?"

"Petty mechanic," Marco responds flatly.

"Now, you're a, um, slightly less petty mechanic. Congratulations," Nemo confers curtly before reactivating his comm and striding away, each step armed with that implacable assurance of his, towards the boarding ramp.

"4 percent?" Marco requests after him.

"3.1!"

"Nemo," Odisseus persists, shuffling behind. "Are we not worried about–"

From on high, unseen Moira attempts to strategize. "What're you thinking? 'Ball-and-biscuit?'" In order to answer, Nemo sidesteps right thrice, peering searchingly towards the roof of his vessel.

"Sure, normally, but we're here to destroy fighters, which means we're looking at docking procedures." He flares out his forearms to suggest. "What's the best way to avoid blowing up your starfighter? Fly away."

Moira's apparently puzzled, which unflaggingly irks her. "So, what, then?"

"You wanna pull a hell-and-handbasket?" After a brief silence, she must offer a nonverbal reply of some kind, which Nemo greets with a leer as he directs, "Good. Then, ammo them both up and pick a replacement." He wanders several steps away, dialing the comm, before he adds. "And get the hell down from there!"

"I'm serious, Nemo," Odisseus hounds, finally overtaking him at the foot of the ramp and seizing his upper arm in a meaty paw to whip Nemo around.

"What?" he obtusely responds.

"Think, Nemo. We can't take this job now – we've got Vel's Rith job. You remember Vel, don't you? Big antlers, stick up her ass?" Odisseus panders, ardently wishing there was some other method of getting through that skull.

"Look, it's not like we're actually stiffing her, brother. We're just going next door first, alright? To Lzura Minor to, you know, take out the trash. That's all."

"I don't think Velocity would agree with you on that."

"Well, she doesn't have to know," he resolves candidly, stomping up the boarding ramp with his absorption firmly relegated to the sibilating comm in his hand. "We ship out in one hour." Odisseus doesn't bother to pursue, stymied by his saltbrother's obstinacy.

"She's not even trim yet, Nemo!" he gestures indistinctly towards his previous workstation. "The plumbing matrix is shot – you can't flush the toilet!"

"Better hold it in!"

Chapter 9

Moira Quicksilver, sweaty, unlaundered and delicately crossing her thighs in some last ditch attempt to prevent the hoarded pressure of her bloated bladder from finally bursting and soiling her spacesuit, had every intention of storming aboard _The Damn Shame_ , guns ablaze and commandeering the nearest available bathroom, Huong Xo's direct orders be bloomed.

After brushing away the collected film of cosmic dust from the face of her visor, Moira spots another hunk of space ice plunging bowside towards the extended boarding ramp, one of the billions suspended in circumference of the radiant blue gas giant. While the _Lover_ does her level best to repel it, the angle of her bombard shield only succeeds in ricocheting this particular meteoroid into a different approach vector. The amassed marauders raise their weapons to shatter it, but Moira's preempted them, Righty and Lefty splintering the rebounding meteoroid into pebbles.

_The Unconstant_ _Lover_ , ident tag currently reading " _The Finder's Keeper_ ," hurtles among the colliding ice ring of Lzura Minor on an intercept course with Dijiqi Taré's flagship, _The Damn Shame_ , under the entirely fictional auspices of a "swap-meet." The only thing they intended to swap, however, was their eponymous "handbasket": Moira and her six-man squad of thirsty, tarnished cutthroats, all consequently crossing their own thighs and fermenting a week's worth of clammy filth inside spacesuits of their own.

Nine days of indirect warp between Takioro Defederate Station and Lzura Minor without a functioning basin, shower or toilet had left the majority of the crew in a similar state, both physically and mentally, to Moira's own. As they clung desperately to the boarding ramp's struts, the imminent spacejump and resultant boarding action nearing by the second, each and every one of their murderous minds is filled solely with the thought of clear, fresh, running water.

Only a small percentage of the conscripts had noticed the shower's malfunction, notably Brondi, Danbonte and the gradually ameliorating Garrigan, and most had at least offered complaint against the meager slate of dry-good-based meals Odisseus and Abraham had been able to scrape together without running water, but every last marauder, even down to witlessly laconic Heeko, had bemoaned the utter lack of a flushing toilet. Were it not for the four hour layover at Ganad Major, as well as the auxiliary relief tanks in the half-a-dozen other spacesuits, the crew, Moira included, would have been culpable to mutiny against Nemo for the atrocious crime of warping out without functional plumbing.

Moira thumbs her jetpack's straps, hiking the discounted device off the small of her back, as the _Lover_ banks to starboard and aligns the figure of the impressively armed _Shame_ into view. Moored between two orbital tethers, _The Damn Shame_ rests at idyllic anchor, docile laser turrets accentuated by the light of Lzura's azure framing. Just short of thrice the _Lover_ in length, the _Shame_ was a prime specimen of a DD874 Starlight Inc. Bulk Cargo Barque, a vaguely pendulum-shaped capital ship popular among the navies of independent planetary governments, complete with enormous circular deployment bay and elongated neck sporting ample gun emplacements.

A capital ship of the _Shame's_ size would operate with, at minimum, a score of crewmen, without including the dozen auxiliary technicians, half again as many gunners and the literal horde of pirates she would require for her own boarding actions. In total, Moira and her six confederates were looking at opposition numbering anywhere between ninety to one hundred enemy pirates, depending both on relative response time and exactly how many currently occupied the cargo bay.

Normally, Moira would never have volunteered to lead a boarding party against such insurmountable odds but, in a "hell-and-handbasket" of this variety, under these very unique circumstances, she acknowledges that numbers are significantly less important than haste and armament. What Moira's handpicked shock troops lack in quantity, they amend tenfold with weaponry.

Anchorage, Danbonte, Salo Shouldermount, Garrok Brondi, Ebeneezer, Heeko and ringleader Moira Quicksilver bristle with shoulder-slung machine guns, pocketed pistols, bandoliers of subsequent ammunition and entire bushels of grenades. As _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ skirts obliquely between the ice floes and implicitly towards their target – the cargo bay's deployment doors – they count down seconds, fiddle with ripcords and imagine what three hundred thousand in hard Commercial currency looks like.

"Stand by," Moira commands over the comm, _The Damn Shame_ 's haft sliding swiftly pass their view. "Whatever else you do in there, clump together and cover the Corgassi. Understood?" The congregated raiders respond with grim nods and gun barrels tapped in salute against helmets. Moira flexes her fingers around the customized stocks of Righty and Lefty as she includes, "An extra two hundred cred to anyone who doesn't sing."

The chorus of patched sniggering nearly conceals Nemo's preparatory instruction. "Strike team, stand by," the Captain repeats over the comm, Moira silencing her squad with a pistol signal. "On my mark," he teases as the _Lover_ inches further starboard to accommodate the bulge of the _Shame's_ cargo bay. Moira spies, several seconds ahead, the gleaming purple of the embarkation shields. Coiling her leg muscles beneath her for the impending pounce, Moira silences the blenching terror that invariably grips her before each spacejump, before deliberately heaving herself into the untenable powerlessness of the void, when Nemo's summons come. "Go!"

Moira pounces, jettisoning herself off the lip of the boarding ramp and into open space, her stomach clambering up into her throat. She counts off four terrifying seconds of enervated floundering as she coasts towards the embarkation shields, her squad in approximate formation behind her, before yanking her jetpack's ripcord with a frantic jerk. The piece of markdown junk sputters once and goes ballistic, rocketing Moira raucously forward and through the shivering discomfort of the embarkation shield.

A brilliant purple semi-permeable membrane of emitted deflection, an embarkation shield, typically installed over a cruiser's hangar door, allowed objects to pass through from one direction, while restricting ingress from the other. Nemo had gambled that Dijiqi would dial her embarkation shields to resist high-heat expenditures like laser bolts and most types of torpedoes, but would recognize slower-moving, more static objects like stolen prototype starfighters and, in this case, small handfuls of pirates with used jetpacks.

Moira Quicksilver doesn't cast lots to determine who spearheads her boarding parties. The shield transgressed, Moira elbows the jetpack's disarm, tautens herself into an aerial modification of the Wheeling Tvorka double somersault, alights to the scummy hold floor in a half-tented crouch and mercilessly murders the first two crewman in sight, an appropriately astounded Akishi and a bodily baffled Buja, with a mated pair of glaring yellow headshots from Righty and Lefty.

While the rest of her squad had been instructed to pack as much firepower as they physically could, Moira herself only carries her fraternal twin revolvers, vintage double-action, top-break AccCo 665 Lawman triple-cartridge six guns. Standing from her squat, she polarizes both in a gunfighter's spreadeagle, clouting another two more reactionary crewman straight to the floor under the combined brunt of a pair of bolts apiece.

Having briefly pacified the point of her landing, Moira wrests the face mask onto her forehead and sweeps the vast docking bay for as impregnable a corner as she could reach, while maintaining line of sight to as many of the glossy, anomalous starfighters as she could.

The cargo hold of _The Damn Shame_ is, first of all, colossal. Three stories high at its epicenter and not quite one hundred and fifty feet in diameter from embarkation shield to embarkation shield, the disc-shaped bay is speckled, stacked and surrounded by droves of waist-high industrial cargo crates. Despite this, the bay still retains ample space to store the full squadron of sleek, modernized prototype starfighters that haphazardly dot the enormous place.

Her confederates deactivating jetpacks and setting down all about her, Moira gestures briskly towards a cluster of clumped crates and engages her wristcomm's timer, fully aware she's less than four full minutes to wholly destroy fourteen brand new starfighters before the literal army of baneful, besieged pirates thunder into the docking bay and kill her where she stands.

–––

Two-Bit Switch tools the jouncing gyroscopic chair about to face Nemo as his sensor monitor ignites with the indicative red triangles. The Captain, deftly correcting the yoke in response to the tempest of ice particles in swirl about the ship, whistles gainfully, as if placidly trimming the verge on a weekday afternoon rather than engaging an illegally weaponized capital ship in a high-density planetary ring.

"Cap'n?" Two-Bit competes with the unintelligible astrogrunge clamor growling out of the helm's overtaxed speakers. "You dellied me to delly you if they cast any jocks off?"

Nemo darts an absent eyebrow up. "Yes'm?"

"They cast jocks off."

Tipping the _Lover_ harshly to starboard, in order to circumvent a misshapen meteorite, grants Nemo an excuse to make eye contact. "How many?" he evenly inquires.

"Three," Two-Bit affirms, glancing back towards the read-out, only to miscalculate. "Er, four."

"Mmkay," Nemo gauges in stride as he returns the ship to her previously even keel. "Abraham, how long you figure until those cannons find themselves gunners?" he conjectures while Two-Bit watches the four pyramidal icons, like red arrowheads against the green of his screen, fall fleetly into a loose formation, the fourth faltering a few dottibles behind as it clears the embarkation shield.

"I'd say we be lookin' at half a minute, likely less?" the gristly voice of the Grimalti sailing master reckons through the comm.

"Mmkay," Nemo repeats and, as Two-Bit haltingly notes, crawls his hand towards the clutchlever. "Dorsal, ventral, you got visual on these buggers?" Garrigan, at his customary seat in the underturret, and Rooster, substituting Moira in the topturret, both weigh in with affirmations as Nemo continues. "Good. Take targets and prepare to open up on my signal. Abraham, keep sensor jamming firm on the _Shame_ , lest those batteries come online and smear us. Two-Bit, dial down bombard and angle ray shields sternside at 70%."

Two-Bit exchanges these orders with a measuring glance. "You sure you want bombard zilched?"

"Sure," Nemo agrees appraisingly. "I got it." He gestures half-heartedly towards the billions of gamboling ice chunks, jostling and colliding through the viewport. Unwilling to pursue argument, Two-Bit re-dials the specifications into the deflection grid and, on cue, the enfolding bombard shields wane to allow the rearguard ray shields to wax.

Eight months of riding shotgun to Nemo's low impulse control served as sufficient education towards the Captain's eccentricities, specifically in regards to sensible nautical maneuvers and the impolite ignoring thereof. In truth, though, three capers into their acquaintance, Two-Bit had essentially distinguished Nemo's proclivity for peril, his egregiously good fortune and his impunity against prudent broadside tactics. To Two-Bit's honest thinking, however, as long as they warped free with the goods in tow, it didn't make much difference whether or not the Captain was a little deranged. A moderate amount of maniacal laughter befit a hoodlum, especially a pirate captain, and Nemo's penchant for piloting, however pernicious, was worth a certain degree of lunacy.

Knowing all this and not flinching when the Captain barrel-rolls directly into a barrage of homing torpedoes were two entirely different matters, however.

"Cap'n?" Abraham interjects. "Buzzer be goin' wild down here – the barque's still tryin' to comm ye."

Nemo distractedly sibilates his lips. "Patch it through."

"– _no_ idea who you think you _are_ , but I assure you, I work for some powerf–" an incensed female voice, seemingly Taré herself, seethes from the _Shame_ , but Nemo wastes little time in disrupting her chain of antagonism with his own.

"Listen, bitch, you could work for a bucket of hot drongo poop for all I care. I'm just here to destroy your starfighters and make a ton of money doin' so."

A pointed pause before, "Kiesha send you?"

" _I_ sent me," is Nemo's flaccid attempt at negotiation, before he appears to weary himself and terminates the frequency with the flat of his palm. "Nobody seems to understand," he comments, largely to himself as he re-calibrates the scramble codifier back to the _Lover's_ proper moniker, "that sometimes, I just wanna _blow shit up_."

_The Finder's Keeper_ was a V&R FF2 Hulk Transport by make, a bush-league tramp salvagier and occasional middleman to Taré's pirate gang by trade.

Employing Marco's superlative information, Two-Bit had managed to, during their layover in Ganad Major, barter the ship's penultimate bottle of Borsk brandy with a passing scrap dumper for a particular scramble codifier, a scramble codifier that would falsify _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ ident tags in order to, with a little tinkering, read her as a rather particular V&R FF2 Hulk Transport.

According to every sensory input aboard _The Damn Shame_ , the craft that had just deposited a team of mercenaries in her hold and was now currently whizzing about the meteoroid cloud had been, until several moments ago, their trusted accomplice, _The Finder's Keeper_. By virtue of the dedicated scramble code, coupled with both a convincing alibi and Nemo's elliptical approach vector, specifically designed to elude any of the _Shame's_ major viewports, the _Lover_ was free to execute her opening maneuver before Taré could muster an adequate welcoming party for Moira and her cadre of spacejumping commandos.

The ruse revealed, however, the _Shame_ remains a fully equipped capital ship, manned by vengeful pirates and armed with a compliment of recently stolen, highly expensive prototype starfighters.

The proximity monitor brays in Two-Bit's earpiece. "First three jocks are cracklin' in at -72 greez ventrie, off starboard stern," he reports in reminder.

"Right, right," Nemo collectedly recalls and fiddles with his headset as he issues a new batch of instructions. "Abraham, do me a favor – flash the _Shame_ our colors. Dorsal, ventral, take your targets and go. Oh, and Odi? You on comm?" Several moments pass, ruptured by the sound of the turrets' rattling gunfire, before Odisseus grants a begrudgingly growled reply. "I'mana clutch her in a second here – you wanna gimme a little more starch?" Another snarled expletive through their headsets before Nemo crinkles into a complacent grin, strumming fingers against the brittle grating of the abused clutchlever, the yoke's distant cousin. "Much appreciated, brother."

Without apparent consideration to potential rending oblivion at every inch, Nemo suffocates the clutch and _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ bulldozes headlong into the broil. Infinitesimal particles impact harmlessly against the viewport as Nemo threads the fortuitous freighter through the frigid thicket of collisions with trifling twitches of the yoke. The _Lover_ opens her trajectory astray of the _Shame_ , flashing her skirts to coax the fighters to chase and, as Two-Bit spies on sensors, they're hooked, peeling off to pursue in an amateurish diamond formation.

Nemo, rapt with the paradisiacal panic of spacer's adrenaline, suggests above the enjoined thunder of the roaring turrets and the screaming boosters. "So, who'dya figure'll get their's first? Moira or us?"

–––

Moira jackknifes Righty and Lefty mostly for show and pounds rounds out of their chambers and into the skulls of both dreggy Mruka driftcart drivers, slumping them simultaneously in their seats as their craft simmers to a stop. She scours a panoramic view for more nearby hostiles, revealed or hidden, and, only discovering opposition too distant or fortified to dispatch from her current position, crouches to cover to signal her marauder squad as laser fire splits the air about her.

Across the scummy expanse from their previous embankment of crates, Danbonte receives her signal. With a fierce nod, he initiates the charge towards Moira's next improvised bunker, each of the six brigands, save Salo, blanketing the opposing pirate's main bulwark with bouts of covering fire as they scramble over the trail of corpses left in Moira's wake. Bastioned gunners from various posts throughout the hold potshot at the transversing squad. Moira swivels her pistols about, Lefty and Righty remonstrating the only way they know how, until Danbonte and his followers slide to the relative safety of their substitute stronghold.

"Whadda we got?" Danbonte barks over the riotous din of the gunfight as the arriving squad arranges themselves into their rehearsed formation.

_The Damn Shame_ 's cargo hold is infested with laserfire – a coruscation of polychrome bolts bandying about the bay as both parties engage in fearsome trench warfare. The home team, a formidable coalition of wrathful buccaneers proper, crewman who happened to occupy the hold at the moment of Moira's boarding and several press-ganged technicians, assault Moira's improvised redoubt from a myriad of fronts in nearly every direction. The greatest concentration of the _Shame's_ repellers, though, had infixed themselves atop a crate mountain at the bowside end of the bay and shower a steady stream of gunfire from those relatively impregnable heights.

For all their inferior numbers, however, Moira's marauder squad manages to match ammunition at a prodigious rate with the cruiser's defenders, blazing machine guns begrudging the enemy every bolt and every inch. By Moira's design, the bulk of her brigade, Anchorage, Ebeneezer, Heeko, Danbonte and Brondi, function as the frontline, spraying the hold in abrasive gouts of cover fire and lobbing the occasional grenade to scatter problematic clumps. Moira, meanwhile, troubleshoots, zeroing and eliminating potential hazards before they develop and threaten the effectiveness of the "handbasket's" haymaker – their rocket-powered artillery.

"We've got an Etrook crackerman at fourteen degrees," Moira briefs to her contingent, popping her pistols forward and shimmying out the spent casings. "Least a coupla shooters behind with Concord Ind pieces, but I ain't gotta visual. Green muzzle flash," she answers before anyone asks. "Two Helker with ratatats are gonna be your big concern from starboard, back behind that wreck and I think we're looking at a Dho, or at least a Zibbian, up this stack here. Too much fire and not enough voices," she concludes, shoving fresh moonclips into Righty and Lefty's wheels before folding them back whole. "I trust you boys can handle the messy details?" she adds amid a chorus of cheeky confirmations.

As Moira assays the defensibility of their bearings and the relative threat of nearby resistance, she spies, over her shoulder, the Corgassi planting another swollen shell into the spigot of his signature shaped-charge launcher. "We gotta flyboy back here," he informs in a half-shout before supporting the stock against his eponymous shoulder and training the weapon towards the aft.

Salo Shouldermount squats like a statuesque soldier, sighting a bulbous eye down the shapely length of his MI 53B Culminator Unguided Anti-Vehicular Rocket Propelled Grenade Launcher. The warhead's spear-tip aims directly at the sputtering engines of a mid-ignition sequence starfighter, its pilot desperately attempting to escape the deliverance of Salo's detonating justice, as four previous fighters had been destructively unable to avert.

Moira allows herself the mundane joy of watching a starfighter sloppily explode inside its own hangar bay as Salo's missile streaks unerringly towards its target, tracing its wake in dusty exhaust and shattering the prototype into a horrific, blistering mess. Her squad exalts a ribald cheer, addled with expletives.

One minute into her boarding action with five fighters already relegated to smoldering hulks, Moira trusts Nemo to handle the four prototypes whose pilots had been near enough at hand to scramble before her strike team could mount an effective offensive against them.

Browsing the brouhaha for the next sentient unfortunate enough to earn her crosshairs, Moira spots her. Apparently vanguarding the resistance from aloft the bowside citadel of crates, this one, a sinewy dame, complete with dusky desert duster, sculpted spacer's helmet and antiquated hunting rifle, purports herself like a Whuudi war chief. Squatting on supple shanks atop her stacked fastness, this one deploys her troops with succinct military hand signals. This one, Moira deduces, must be the Captain, Dijiqi "Snakeeyes" Taré.

Busying herself with the informal dismissal of an emerging Saurian grenadier, Moira locks a weather eye on the supposed Taré, as she extinguishes the reptiloid before he's the chance to hurl the explosive, which discharges in his dead claw and demolishes both his cover and his cowering confederates with a refrain of stupefied screams. An opportunistic salvo from Heeko's machine gun disposes of the scrambling survivors when Moira's wristcomm chirps.

"Your jetpack didn't blow up, did it?" Nemo's warbled voice solicits unenthusiastically, assaulted by the characteristic hum of the _Lover_ and beset by another, less familiar ambiance.

"Not yet. Have you crashed into anything?"

"Nothing like, big," he denotes. "Not yet, anyway."

Before Moira can respond, the whine of extremely proximate laserfire ushers another, less familiar sound – a burble of moist deflation, somewhere over her left shoulder, causing her to twist and pale.

Salo Shouldermount slouches inertly forward, perforated cavity in his lolling head bleeding translucent ichor in fizzy gouts. His suddenly orphaned rocket launcher, slumped against his sinking shoulder, spews its inserted missile straight into the chamber's ceiling and showers the squad in sparks and buckled deckplates.

"How's the boarding action going?" Nemo cheerily checks in.

"Well, Salo just took one in the head. You be the judge," Moira grimly reports. Nemo responds with one of his bared-teeth winces.

"Yeowch. Who got him?"

Moira traces the trajectory of the killshot and pinpoints the sniper's position, only to discover none other than Captain Taré herself at the delivery end, cocking the literal smoking gun. "Snakeeyes."

"What a cunt."

"Agreed."

After Moira issues a string of urgent instructions, Anchorage and Ebeneezer, hollering obscenities, jointly paint the Captain's perch in covering fire and Taré's retinue retreats behind their makeshift shelter. Danbonte doesn't hesitate to shuffle Salo's corpse aside and snatch up the Culminator, his machine gun drooping like a forgotten handbag as he struggles to load another warhead. Moira and Heeko scoot toward the derelict driftcart, ducking errant gunfire and forcibly yanking both limp Mruka from their seats.

"Not really sure how to drives one of these, Quissilver," Heeko stipulates as he climbs behind the steering levers.

"Unless you've got my planetary deed on hand, I suggest you learn fast," Moira ultimates before clambering into a Poised Hukia stance atop the drift cart's tailpiece. After a few lurching moments of Heeko dimly investigating the drift cart's elementary guidance system, he manages to motor the hovering vehicle onto the elliptical path Moira had outlined, with Quicksilver herself riding shotgun atop the cart's rear quarter.

As they falteringly trundle across the embattled hold, a hidden, multidextrous pirate, who reveals himself to be a bandoliered Zibbian, breaks cover from atop his mound of crates to unload three pistols at the passing driftcart. Heeko careers the craft aside on instinct and Moira persuades the assailant back into hiding with a little unloading of her own, the second shot pummeling the MI 14B Curveball cleanly out of his tentacle.

"Oh, uh, Marco wants to know if you see his littermates?" Nemo refers.

The Zibbian, astonished at his improbable disarming, receives an iridescent yellow bolt squarely in the forehead. "Yeah, I think I stole their driftcart," Moira attests, with a brief appraising glance down toward it.

"Did you? What kind?"

"TransHaul, I think. That's the one with the magnetic clamps, right?"

"Ooh, those are nice."

A cerulean flash streaks scant inches from Moira's head and instead bursts into a patch of exposed machinery at the cart's stern, which proceeds to frizzle fumes and flames forebodingly. "Moons," Moira breathes and scrambles several feet to the cart's port before the driftcart's stern quarter explodes.

With one rear motivator afire, the conflagrating driftcart tips hard to starboard and the recoil bucks Moira fiercely from her post, though she muddles together a half-staff somersault and escapes with minimal bruising. Heeko, however, is not quite so fortunate.

Scraping its inert half sparklingly along the hold floor, the crippled driftcart whips into an oblong turnabout, pitching the Myyrigon out of his seat and spilling him harshly to the floor, before, deprived a driver, it sinks into a harmless amble and budges listlessly into a cluster of crates. Pistols in hand, Moira dashes to Heeko's prone from, scattering covering fire to hinder the pack of opportunists, emerging from cover to encroach on the decumbent Myyrigon's position from three directions.

As Heeko blearily recollects his inconsiderable wits, Nemo bemusedly interjects. "What was that?"

"It crashed," Moira clarifies, deflating the distended chest of an Ufaki gunslinger with a single streaming shot to his sternum.

"Oh," he reflects. A beat before he inescapably asks, "Were you driving?"

"No," she flatly denies. Matched shoulder wounds flounder the oncoming Etrook rifleman to the floor.

"Well, that's good, at least."

Heeko staggers to his clawed feet and scatters the remainder of the entrenched thuggery with a spray of his machine gun. Over the peal of the discharging gunfire, he bluntly comments. "I tells you, Quissilver."

"You did. Get back to the others. I'll manage from here," she commands directly and, without another urging, Heeko shambles backward, in the general direction of their temporary base camp, flailing the firearm about to obscure his exit.

Scurrying towards the comparative safety of an interposing crate with close calls whizzing harrowingly near, Moira steels herself for her culminating assault on Taré's looming pyramid, as Nemo, his comm apparently still transceiving, converses with someone on his end.

"Hey, turn it up," he eagerly appeals and, on cue, the background of indecipherable music increases in volume.

"What're you listening to?" Moira inquires insistently.

"That Cosmic Vomit album I got."

"Oh, by all the moons–"

"What?" Nemo challenges.

"I don't know how you can listen to that shit."

Nemo's reply is brusque generalization. "Yeah, but you don't like anything."

"I like Cannonball Dogs," she opines defensively before retrieving both of her belted coups de grâce, one of which she adroitly palms, the other she brutally unpins between her teeth and, prepping Lefty, hurls in a sidelong arc towards the crate mountain.

The grenade tumbles languidly through the air, Lefty's snout tracing the course of its trajectory until, at the opportune moment, Moira clenches the customized trigger and pops the explosive like a combustive metal bubble.

"Okay, so, you don't like anything _good_ ," Nemo amends compromisingly. Her vantage to Taré shrouded by the grenade's smoky discharge, Moira tears her jetpack's ripcord and pounces forward, the miniaturized thruster enkindling behind her and granting her considerable, albeit wavering, lift.

"Well, what was that one thing you played on the way to Iogo last month?"

"The Spacers? They're okay, I guess."

"I liked them."

"Everybody likes them."

From beyond the haze of evanescing exhaust comes Moira Quicksilver, gifted fragile flight by a secondhand jetpack, with twofold pistols ablaze, splattering the brunt of Taré's garrisoned bodyguards under the cruelty of her citrine crossfire. Veering her torso sharply left with her jetpack scuttling to keep pace, she floods ammunition on the remainder of the ruffians, claiming necks, knees, hearts and foreheads.

"What's that sound?" Nemo questions obliviously.

"I'm using the jetpack," Moira tersely returns, escalating to the level of Taré's perch and squeezing a few introductory shots at her, the last of which spears her stomach, clattering both the woman and her weapon to the cratehead with a shrill shriek. The cold corsair Captain doesn't cry or quail like Barso, however. She, agonized, rather sneers as Moira awkwardly alights before her, elbowing the jetpack dead.

Wasting absolutely no time, Moira gyrates Lefty on her trigger finger until she grasps its barrel and activates her second coup de grâce; Cogden Moore's pilfered bombard knuckle, nestled tightly against her right palm. Glistening membrane blinking into being beyond the butt of the handgun, Moira delivers the most brutish pistol-whip of her career, crunching both Taré's jaw and the shielding array in the process. The woman crumples to the cratehead and Righty pities her with a swift bolt in the brain.

"Oh, okay," Nemo interjects calmly from the wristcomm. "Let me know if it blows up."

"Will do."

As Moira kneels to collect a blood sample from reputed outlaw Captain Dijiqi "Snakeeyes" Taré, the rampageous mayhem of gunfights, grenades and exploding starfighters behind her, something curious catches her analytical eye.

The round that perforated Taré's temple had dislocated her hat, uncoupling the clip of her spacer's cap with the brute force of the bolt and revealing a smattering of bloodstained blue beneath. Prying the cloven helmet off the corpse, Moira looses a brilliant confusion of incandescent blue hair, smeared with gore.

Seizing her lifeless and mangled jaw with an urgent hand, Moira dials both of Taré's eyelids closed to unearth the most damning evidence – mottled tattoos, in the pattern of faded green sunbursts, etched incriminatingly on both of her eyelids.

–––

Two-Bit, desperately clasping his armrests to prevent himself from toppling out of his seat, discerns the exact moment when the aftside ray shields, assaulted under the buffeting chorus of pursuant laserfire, falter and short out. "Well, there goes the edgies. Goodbye, edgies," he laments as he, fully aware that a seatbelt is a pitiful defense against imminent explosion, buckles his nonetheless.

The innermost fringes of Lzura Minor's primary ring tumble clumsily past the averting _Lover_ , which narrowly absconds between the thinning field of jostling spacebergs and the thickening cloud of harrying laserfire. The portending planet itself engulfs the viewport entirely with its cobalt effulgence, only blotted by the silhouettes of the meteoroid ring's outermost members.

Nemo grunts, accosted now not only by track four of the new Cosmic Vomit album, but also by blaring klaxons and blinking alerts that caution with ominous messages such as 'vital system failure' and 'defensive grid offline'. "Huh." He catches Two-Bit with an askance glance. "Well, that's no fucking good, is it?"

"No, Cap'n, I hazard it ain't," Two-Bit vigorously agrees.

"Hm. Okay. New idea."

Driven by some mad whimsy, Nemo belts the _Lover_ starkly to starboard, scarcely skirting certain collision against a craggy meteoroid by a margin too mean for Two-Bit to comfortably calculate. Mere moments pass before the freighter clears the gap and tears into the vacant patch of space between Lzura's many rings, the hounding fighters accelerating into proper engagement speed, finally free of the churning icy chunks.

Four of Xo's commandeered prototypes had given merry chase across the clattering expanse of Lzura's primary ring, as Nemo'd baited them to. Two of said starfighters had met unpleasant ends attempting to match the impetuous speed of _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ feigned retreat and subsequently dashed themselves to tiny pieces in the endeavor. The remaining pair, however, were canny enough to follow more discreetly, only hastening when given an unobstructed route to their clunky target.

For all Nemo's maneuverability, though, Taré's pilots had been far from silent. A consistent torrent of brilliant blue laserfire had hassled and harassed the _Lover_ the entire loop. While Garrigan and Rooster poured copious amounts of ammunition in discouragement, the icy impediments proved a more effective shield against the smaller starfighters than the bulky Briza.

Now, with less than a minute remaining until Moira's designated withdrawal point, the prototype starfighters, like hounds rushing from dense thicket into open meadow after an abruptly exposed hind, gain and gain on the fleeing, defenseless _Lover_ as she plunges toward the gaseous beryl ball of Lzura.

Blithely undeterred, Nemo snaps several switches and slightly tilts the ship starboard on her axis. "Abraham, concentrate a target jam on the forward fighter for me. Dorsal, ventral, try to establish as hard a lock as you can on that same ship. Two-Bit, you oughta swap full power to bombard shields. Should probably angle 'em double forward too and Odi? How's about prepping a starboard clubhaul on my signal, huh? Think you can do that for me?"

Amid a bout of comm chatter, Two-Bit bounces the gyroscopic rig forward, screwing dials and tuning frequencies while the shield reconfigures as a practically opaque coif of shimmering double-folded deflection. "You, uh, vizzin' to wend back into the brim? Coop Moira maybe?"

"At some point, yeah," Nemo pleasantly concedes. Several investigative blue bolts whizzing past the viewport from somewhere far abaft seems to motivate Nemo into hustling Odisseus. "How's that booster coming, buddy?" A gnarled reply, the disagreeable bastard of ambivalence and affirmation, returns the question, though Nemo appears contented by it. "Motherbloomers try and catch me now," he mutters viciously to the bleating instrument panel before signaling. "Flip her over, Odi!"

On cue, the muffled bellow of the boosters is halved as Starboard promptly extinguishes and _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ limpingly pirouettes, coming confusedly about on two proverbial wheels – a classic gimmick among stick-shift fighter jockeys. The moment the ensuing starfighters appear in the viewport, however, Starboard kickstarts, sluicing the _Lover_ brutally forward under the concerted thrust of the re-established booster and Nemo's unrepentant pumping of the clutch.

Finally achieving a decent visual on these fighters as they sprint towards them, Two-Bit readily admits they're sweet little models, with contoured chassis, effective frontal fire arcs and ample ascension power in their trim turbines. They decelerate their approach in response to both the _Lover's_ turrets, and seemingly Nemo's cackle, opening their fire.

A bifurcated bombardment from the two barking turrets batters the anterior starfighter's sophisticated shielding. While its wingman hangs in reserve, the craft retorts against the barreling freighter by dashing forward to meet it, lancing out with its own sapphire salvo to participate in this shipborne joust. Blue bolts, utterly undeterred by the forward-facing bombard shield, nick, pocket and scrape the _Lover's_ nose, but Nemo doesn't lessen their heedless momentum in the face of oncoming enemy fire, chortling cordially the whole way.

The two starships, one unwieldily cumbersome but torqued beyond reason, the other glossily aerodynamic but smaller in size, meteorically plummet towards each other like a contrived math problem, disgorging gouts of green and blue laserfire across the dwindling expanse. Within seconds, both ships had clenched the gap to engagement distance but neither the starfighter, its advanced ray shield wobbling under the pressure of both Antagonist cannonades, nor the _Lover_ , her bare hull bruised and abused from its consistent bashing, falter or deviate from their collision course.

"Cap'n, fun being fun, mayhaps I could advise ye to pull just a wee bit up?" Abraham, undoubtedly watching the sensor with as much incredulity as Two-Bit, attempts to lovingly cajole. Ahead, the starfighter, perhaps a dottible out, seems to reassess his verdict regarding this claptrap pirate clunker and its apparently kamikaze Captain by slackening his initial thrust and emptying his ammunition at the _Lover_ from crying cannons. This shift of tactics, however, has little effect on Nemo's own singular strategy.

"Cap'n, you ain't gonna horn them," Two-Bit blankly hypothesizes, no manner of question in his probing voice. Half a dottible beyond the viewport, the starfighter pilot, in some drastic escape maneuver, attempts to wrench his craft away from the impending crash, exposing his sleek underbelly at a perpendicular angle to the _Lover's_ diving nose. With the prototype swelling rapidly before them, Nemo's reply is purported soberly, even reasonably, which only succeeds in disconcerting Two-Bit's better judgment all the more. "He's a starfighter. He can suck my spaceship's dick."

In the exaggerated second before collision, Two-Bit recalls the yelping embitterment of Odisseus peaking the comm channel, the honking "IMPACT IMMINENT" alarms flooding every helm screen and the petrified visage of the screaming Suraaqi starfighter pilot, visible even at an oblique angle between both besmeared viewports and the hyaline sheen of the _Lover's_ bombard shield.

_The Unconstant_ _Lover_ bumps into the inverted belly of the hapless prototype like a battering ram against wet wood, buckling the Briza's beak into a brutal concave and shearing the starfighter into scrambling scraps, scattering against the bowside bombard shields. The whole freighter jerks instantaneously forward and strangulates her crew with inertial kickback, Two-Bit's stomach backflipping into his mouth and his heart skipping a handful of beats. Abruptly jolted into concussion, _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ idles limply, all systems dead, both boosters drained and its whole crew numbly recoiling as shiny shorn starfighter wreckage dances lightly about her broken nose.

Shellshocked and cursing the fearsome spaceship whiplash his recently applied seatbelt had gifted him, Two-Bit watches as the second starfighter, vulturelike in its prudence, stalks forward, seemingly to inspect the carrion. Splashed comically against the dashboard, Nemo appears in little condition to repel boarders. "Er, Cap'n?" Two-Bit manages, wheeling the rig about to rap the back of Nemo's head with his knuckles. "You likely wanna vizz at this."

Coughing hoarsely, Nemo peels himself off the control panel and gazes blearily about at the deactivated screens and lifeless instruments, as if awakening in an unfamiliar location after a drunken bender. "Well, how about that?" he comments vaguely, snagging his uncrowned bowler, replacing it on his head and peering down the crooked nose of his beloved freighter. "Probably not my best idea ever."

"I groof the sentiment, Cap'n, but, uh–" Two-Bit acknowledges with a nudge of the head towards the approaching starfighter.

"Right. Space," Nemo corrects himself, creaking his back and aligning his elbows with simultaneous cracks, seemingly in preparation for some miraculous amelioration of their drifting vessel.

The Captain wallops the comatose dashboard jarringly and the inert instruments hiccup half-alive a moment, flutter and fall dormant again. A second smack garners less response but on the third attempt, the ignition computer gooses, the boosters spurt and _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ gloomily grinds herself back into operation.

Welcome screens click into place on the helm's manifold monitors as the _Lover's_ various cannibalized computer systems reboot – propulsion, sensory and communications. As the internal comm channels recycle, roaring Ortoki, presumably threats and vexations, pipes into their headsets mid-stream and Nemo wastes little time dialing the engine room's individualized volume to a more manageable level.

"Nemo? Nemo, do you copy? Oh, for bloom's sake, don't fucking tell me," the scraping voice of Moira, patched through the reformatting transmission matrix, distinguishes itself in pitch, but not in tone, from Odisseus' remonstrance.

"We're here, Moira, sorry," Nemo responds indistinctly.

"What the fuck happened? I've been trying to buzz for minutes."

Nemo and Two-Bit both glance to the _Lover's_ furrowed forepart before exchanging furtive looks of their own. "Er, we had a little, erm–" Two-Bit begins.

"Collision," Nemo concludes honestly.

"You're blasted."

"'fraid not," Nemo readily disillusions.

"Dented is more what we is."

A resigned sigh accompanies her response. "Can she still fly?"

"We're coming, we're coming," Nemo abates, as he takes hold of the yoke and begins to navigate the coasting _Lover_ through the curtain of masticated debris.

"You chavel 'em all to hell down there?" Two-Bit questions.

"You could say that," Moira contentedly returns. "Ten fighters destroyed. Now we're just twiddling our fucking thumbs down here while they shoot at us."

"We'll be down in a few; just stand by," Nemo confirms, easing the ship out of the drifting wreckage.

An abrupt tonal shift claims Moira's voice. "Actually," she dallies, "could you possibly give us a minute?"

"Well, it'll take us a few minutes to wend back there, won't it? Say, five minutes tops?" Two-Bit supposes.

"That's perfect. See you then." The comm channel clicks dead.

The Captain and co-pilot exchange a second pair of glances. "What's she about down there?"

Nemo shrugs, making a grunting approximation of "I don't know."

Through the viewport, the converging starfighter, apparently unwilling to tussle with a freighter capable of merely shaking off a head-on collision at headlong engagement speed, tucks tail, pulls off and flees into Lzura's primary ring, bustling back toward _The Damn Shame_ with all haste.

Observing this, Nemo responds in kind – throttling the _Lover's_ clutchlever long before she's game for pursuing velocity. The much-abused freighter convulses ahead in apparent shock and, after a few seconds of reconfiguration, gallops ungainingly after the final fleeing starfighter.

–––

Moira probably doesn't have time for a shower. With ditrogen bolts poking and pocking the walls and crates all about her encircled boarding party, Moira devotes the majority of her mental energy towards nullifying the airborne efforts of a Kezzerak crackshot and his pet grenade launcher. Lefty snipes each grenade seconds after they're fired, exploding them harmlessly high overhead while Righty joins the efforts of her strike team's machine guns, to beat back the vengeful pirates hordes pressing hard against their entrenched position before the nearest bathroom.

Moira bangs Lefty's butt roughly against the bathroom door during a spare second while the Kezzerak reloads his artillery. "Your sixty seconds are up!" she decries back to Brondi, hopefully only washing his hands and not wasting his time sprucing himself in the mirror. "Anchorage, you're next!" she directs with a scream and pistol-wave toward the Aurik, who nods sagely.

Heeko, to her right, plows a Trijan to the teltriton under his covering fire. "Captain says he was coming, right, Quissilver?"

She nods. "Well, that's what he said." Whipping about to spy the Kezzerak's next projectile already whizzing through the air, she brings Lefty to bear as quickly as she can, snagging the spinning grenade at the last possible second. Ducking slightly to avoid the fringes of the resulting explosion, she mutters, mostly to herself, "Let's only hope he doesn't get here before my turn."

Chapter 10

Odisseus isn't interested in Happy Yum-Yum Bars or CryoChew Extinct Jerky or _Frisky Phnuki Fuckbuddies_. He's only interested in preserving Nemo's mercurial attention for at least thirty seconds.

"Main _electrical_ conduit got crumpled," the Ortok elaborates, now counting on his fourth claw. "That'll require effectively a full re-haul of the anterior wiring before I can get anything but auxiliary systems up, but we don't gotta ground her. Eight thousand and five days, a week on its own," he pointedly adds.

"Uh huh," Nemo ignores between bites of his candy. He pinches the masticated stub of the peeled Yum-Yum Bar against his ring and pinky fingers as he leafs confoundedly through the sordid publication with nougat-stained fingers. The languid unfurling of a centerfold elicits a visible recoil, accompanied by an expression somewhere amidst revulsion and intrigue. "Okay, what is _that_?"

Nemo and Odisseus wait in queue at a Warp Gate Junction, identical to the thousands that dot the galaxy at nearly every certified jump point. They're one place behind a laboriously chatty Ondo freight tramper who inundates the incurious Chook clerk with tedious palaver and one place before a trio of bickering Xend delinquents with antennae piercings and the telltale aromas of recently consumed Yellowtooth cigarettes.

Awaiting contact from Velocity's brother in orbit above Rith, the stopover had allowed for some badly needed recuperation, both for the browbeaten starship and the surviving members of Moira's boarding party. Beyond nursing their minor injuries and allowing bolt-addled Anchorage's regenerative flesh to amend itself, Salo's demise had cast something of a pallor over the allegedly victorious pirates. Zella's death may have been untimely, but few among the crew, save Two-Bit, actually knew her, while Salo had been considered a comrade for long enough to turn even professional cutthroats a little introspective, reminding everyone aboard, Odisseus included, that, in this business, a stray bolt or a crack shot was all it required.

If such speculations penetrate Nemo's breezy aplomb, however, he's unwilling to show it. Three paces ahead of Odisseus in line, he leans flippantly against the rack of outdated, non-holographic periodicals. As he browses the bawdy material, he devours, amidst his horde of selected confections, an unpurchased Yum-Yum Bar; a pet peeve of Odisseus' about which he elected to keep quiet, figuring it somewhat petty to chide a wanted criminal for consuming goods before he paid for them.

"I mean, seriously, where would that even _go_?" Nemo ponders astoundedly.

"And then, of course, there's the shielding mainframe," Odisseus ignores right back, dialing his tally down to his broad thumb claw. "That I'm gonna need parts for and no small number of them. A week on its own, easily, and probably longer. I'll be lucky to get her under ten thousand."

This catches Nemo's eye as he slaps _Fuckbuddies_ to the counter and draws up another, a slimmer volume entitled _Dirty Bipeds_ , from the top shelf and absently pages into it. "So, what's your total?"

"Forty-nine," Odisseus reports firmly. "A minimum of ten days at dock."

"Forty-nine," Nemo repeats, starkly unable to mask his intimidation. He flips a few dispirited pages, Odisseus counting the seconds before he, rigidly in character, glances back to his saltbrother and reaffirms, "You're sure?"

"Yes, Nemo. Do you see what happens when you crash your spaceship?"

"Yes, yes, okay, I get it. Forty-nine thousand. Fine." Seemingly hectored by responsibility, Nemo relents, throwing up a palm in submission. As Odisseus turns aside to retrieve his intended purchases from atop the cigarette stand where he'd placed them to more effectively budget to Nemo, the Captain halts him hard with a breathless exclamation. "Holy shit."

Whizzing suddenly about, Odisseus expects Quuilar Noxix or worse, but only discovers Nemo, new centerfold flapping open from the inverted copy of _Dirty Bipeds_ , with eyes agog at the drooping insert's undoubtedly illicit contents. "By all the moons of Jotor," the Ortok bemoans, " _what_?"

Face flush with ebullient astonishment, he brandishes the nudie magazine towards Odisseus with flabbergasted pride and the Ortok reluctantly considers the objectifying spectacle Nemo suspends before him.

A humanoid woman of ludicrously voluptuous proportions, complete with tattered bandana, cartoonishly enormous bare breasts and a gauzy gee-string emblazoned with a tiny skull-and-crossbones, tarnishes the entire poster with both her slovenly posture and her very existence. Its caption, "The Dread Pirate Blackbush," wholly deserves Odisseus' disgusted grimace.

"It's horrifying."

"It's also perfect. Look," Nemo denotes from behind the dangling obscenity, "they even have the same boots. Or, well, boot."

Even more reluctantly, having already witnessed the thing, Odisseus turns his unwilling gaze back toward the area of Nemo's indication to discover that, indeed, one of her mismatched combat boots was passingly familiar.

Nemo hastily folds the demeaning pin-up back into its sheaf. "Moira's gonna _love_ this."

"Oh, Nemo, I don't think that's–"

The fizzing warble of a communicator interrupts his cautioning. Nemo, unthwarted, plops the crude periodical onto his mounting pile of junk food and unclips the buzzing device from his belt. "Nemo here."

"Erm, Cap'n? Ye be aboard?" Abraham addresses with an odd air of apprehension.

"Odi and I made a run to the Junction."

The old Grimalti buccaneer seems to deliberate a beat before inquiring, "Ye ain't got Xo's old holodeck on ye by chance, would ye?" Consideration crosses Nemo's expression as he fishes a hand into the pockets of his duster.

"Uh, yeah, I think so. Why, what's the rumpus?"

"I'mana buzz ye over the transmission I just received and ye'd best give it a look-see as soon as ye can," he returns cryptically. "Seems we might be in a spot 'o trouble."

Nemo and Odisseus exchange wary glances, wave the impatient Xend past and huddle a little closer to watch this supposedly troubling message. Nemo jams the sheer metallic holodeck into the insertion drive of the scuffed copper communicator and, after a moment of stammering static, a projected head-and-shoulders wavers into view.

"Captain," Boss Ott's holographic likeness begins, "I sincerely deplore having to contact you like this, but I'm afraid you've scarcely left me another option. It seems we have an urgent matter that requires immediate discussion. I await your arrival on Baz and I would advise strongly against refusal or tardiness." As curtly as the message began, it concludes, the oscillating image of the Galactic Menace guttering back into the holodeck.

"Shove all the moons of Jotor up my ass," Nemo breathes frightfully.

"What was _that_?"

"Ye boys didn't, say, shoot his puppy or somethin' last time we was there, didje?" Abraham theorizes through the freshly opened comm channel.

"Not that I remember."

"What does he want?" Odisseus reiterates.

"'Discussion', he said?" Nemo recalls, "about an 'urgent matter?' Whatever the fuck that means, I guess."

"'course, it's possible this be nothing but a bushwhack. Xo coulda set us up. Ye think the blood was bad, maybe?"

"I mean, the Treffel's blood detector thingy seemed to like it fine," Nemo extrapolates as he extracts the bowler from his brow to wander a consternated hand through his hair. "Fuck, I don't know."

"So, what do we do about this?" Odisseus doggedly assesses.

"Bloom him. Creepy-ass motherfucker can suck exhaust." Nemo dismisses with an encompassing shrug, but Abraham quickly disillusions him.

"I ain't sure runnin' be the wisest course 'o action, Cap'n."

"What? Why?"

"Last thing ye wanna do is pour salt in whatever wound he's got on you, 'cause trust me boyo, there ain't a round planet spinnin' where we'd be safe – not Medroteria, not Spithax, not no place."

"Oh, come on," Nemo derides, "we go deep Offchart. Bril or Gren or–"

"Nemo, only person what draws more water in this galaxy, 'sides Boss Ott, is the Emperor. Maybe. Ott's bigger than Vel, he's bigger than the Scar, he's bigger than Xo. Ye think we've got bounty hunter troubles now?" Abraham challenges, before giving a brief snort, "Blow, ye'd be better off buying a hole out at Skelta and chuckin' yerself in fer all eternity."

Nemo spits. "You're serious?"

"If we run, Ott'll most likely buzz every angler and headhunter owes him a favor and believe ye me, that'll be too much heat, too fast," Abraham estimates.

"I mean, he is the Galactic Menace, Nemo," Odisseus supposes calmly.

"Okay," Nemo, flustered, submits, "so, what then?"

"I guess we show," Abraham warily proposes.

"What, and get fucked in the ear for our trouble?"

"I mean, we go, right," Odisseus postulates, "we go, we have an escape plan, we hope for the best."

"We go _armed to the dick_ , you mean," Nemo asserts.

"Well, sure."

"I think the Ortok's right there – we show up, make it clear we'll fight iffen we have to and hope he's got something reasonable to ask ye."

Nemo pleats his temple with a grimy palm. "There's that word 'hope' again." He roots the bowler back atop his head, plants a hand to his hip and shudders out a sigh. "For once, I think this is a phenomenally bad idea."

"Says the man with the starfighter-shaped dent in the front of his spaceship," Odisseus mutters, to which he receives Nemo's elbow in his side.

"Whaddya wanna do, Cap'n?"

With a helpless shrug, Nemo relents. "Make contact, explain that we've got a few repairs to make before we're ready to warp and we'll make our way as soon as we're trim. Savvy?"

"Aye aye, Cap'n." Nemo snaps the channel closed and clips the comm back to his belt, offering a stymied glance to Odisseus.

"All the moons. You ever think we'd end up like this?"

"Decidedly no."

Their business concluded, the two saltbrothers, as one, collect their discarded merchandise and, turning to approach the check-out counter, discover all three Xend customers and the Chook clerk, apparently having overheard their entire comm conversation with Abraham, staring at Nemo and Odisseus, wide-eyed and slack-jawed.

–––

Ott doesn't need to wait in order to glean a reaction. His guest, gauging the saffron-spotted composition before him with a callous disinterest, is about as scrutable a person as the Galactic Menace ever had cause to encounter and his opinion, as uneducated as his own, starkly plasters his face.

"I don't know," Nemo tangles his arms together and deposits a violent shrug. "It sorta looks like puke," he bluntly spits.

Somewhere behind, Bald Tizor fails to muffle a scoff, but Ott inclines his head to the left in accord with Nemo's observation, knot of barely-contained headtails sloping in unison. "Well, it is puke, actually."

In response, Nemo squints and cants his own torso left, as if to examine the canvas from a fresh vantage. "Oh, huh." At his new askance angle, he jabs a finger towards the painting. "That, uh, would explain it."

Ott allows himself a smirk. Nemo's entire demeanor capably betrayed his bafflement at being led into an apparent portrait gallery rather than being immediately murdered upon his landing. Both the Captain and his obstinate Ortoki orderly kept their weapons looser in their respective holsters than they had during their first meeting with Ott. The Doreen could easily ascertain the characteristic combat tension that clenched both their chests, the pair of them simultaneously anxious for the second proverbial footfall and for this to become an ambush after all.

The four of them occupy, to varying degrees, the third floor map room in the South Spire, with Ott and Nemo contemplating the Luq 3211 in the far corner as their respective minders, Bald Tizor and this undiscourageable Ortok, glower mistrustfully at each other on opposite sides of the exit.

Nemo's candid conjecture had indeed been correct – apparently this Ubiq Luq, a Moshi solvachromist a millennia classical by now, was reputed for ingesting various hues of fractal paint, swilling them amalgamated for several hours in his fluidsac and regurgitating the motley mess onto the canvas. Whatever dried an hour later he proceeded to term as "art." Few people, it seemed, contested the ancient painter on this point and this particular piece, a spattered festival of noxious yellows, oranges and greens retrieved by Tizor on his latest run, was ostensibly worth three quarters of a million credits – arguably the most expensive piece of dried vomit in the galaxy.

"Tell you the truth," Nemo, two steps to Ott's left, prefaces, "I never woulda pegged the Galactic Menace as an art buff." He sweeps an absent gesture at the menagerie of other odd paintings that adorn the unfeeling thermosteel walls, Ott following his motion and burying his lower hands into his pockets.

"Actually never thought of it like that," he appreciates. "What would you have pegged me as?"

Nemo considers the admittedly leading question less than he probably ought to have. "A war criminal. A vengeful gangster." He blinks. "The Galactic Menace."

"I see. And this is how the greater galaxy views me?"

"Pretty much, yeah," he answers, liberating a cloistered exhale and peering down the curvature of the chamber towards an ancient Mantrian marble of some local war deity or another, virtually identical to the pantheon of similar statues dotting various rooms throughout the fortress.

"You understand what all this is," Ott states flatly.

"Esoteric?"

"Plunder," Ott corrects with a term that ensnares Nemo's truant attention. "At a certain point," he elucidates with a conversational shrug, "it no longer makes sense to spend all your capital on drink and whores. Canisters I still buy, but after a few years of working this game, before everything here really came to a head, I bought, I don't know, art."

The Captain contemplates this with a hint of that grave esteem which characteristically claims the faces of all aspiring hoodlums when they consider the foregone conclusion of their future riches. By this tell, does Ott recognize Nemo as a kindred class of criminal.

For, in truth, the only thing Ott possessed fewer of than dependable soldiers or reliable intelligence was artistic sensibility. Priceless paintings such as this Luq, avant-garde sculptures like the enormous dingus that dominated the lobby and idiosyncratic architecture from dozens of worlds and cultures like the Vollocki symphonic ceiling, all became Ott's chief imported commodity only shortly after he'd purchased lifetime supplies of several differing brands of alcohol, only after he'd sampled the majority of the galaxy's sentient bipedal prostitution and only after he'd, quite literally, drunk and fucked himself into boredom.

Contracted smugglers and payroll pirates often padded gift packages with pilfered pieces, while fellow gangsters and kingpins would attempt to flatter with flawless replications or, in many cases, previously-vanished originals. As a result, the polar redoubt was choked with antiquated artwork, each apparently exhibiting a litany of individual merits, according to Ott's much more erudite and interested personnel.

At the end of the day, Ott merely smiles and nods, personally preferring the candor of Nemo's objective assessment.

The Galactic Menace was, in all honesty, surprised himself when Nemo's remix rattletrap first appeared on their outer scopes. Just as the Captain had pegged him for a frothing gangster, Ott was certain that a freebooter with as flighty a reputation as Nemo's would balk at a direct summons and slum his chances with the anglers somewhere in the Offchart Territories. Yet, against all logic, here he stands in his shabby flight jacket and appalling bowler hat, squinting at a wall-hanging of dried vomit and waiting to be murdered.

"You're aware Taré worked for me, right?"

Nemo's squint deepens. "Until this exact moment, no." Ott watches the degradation of his thought process. "Fuck," he sputters. "Which means–" he breathes before another, "Fuck," more resolved, more condemned.

"My chief financial officer estimates that Kiesha's prototypes are valued at 200 thousand. Apiece."

"Uh," Nemo manages, suddenly very intent on the splotchy mess hanging before him.

"I'll save you the calculation," Ott summarizes. "That puts you into me for 2.8 million credits, not to mention a top-tier operative, her own craft and some forty of her underlings." Nemo unscrambles his forearms, parts both wings of his threadbare duster and inters his hands deep in breech pockets – the very image of a flabbergasted debtor. "I assume you're unable to settle the outstanding balance?"

"Sure," Nemo brusquely confesses.

Ott meanders backward a step before mentioning, "It's a popular opinion, especially among Taré's comrades like Tizor back there," he indicates with an upper left thumb, "that I should kill you. As messily as possible."

A husky noise from the apart Ortok slightly shifts Nemo's stance, hands sliding subtly from his pockets to hook thumbs beneath the broad black gunbelt and dangle idle fingers over the holstered butt of his obsolete pistol. His whole form seems to bristle as he, with a severe flick of his head, banishes a few errant wisps of black lock from his seething gray eyes, annealing steely in preparation for violence.

Ott marvels a moment. Nemo looks nothing of the cornered animal, or the blubbering captive, with no desperate self-preservation in his deportment but rather all the threat a remorseless, professional murderer ought to carry. Ott marvels at the unadulterated, twenty-four-carat stupidity of this Captain Nemo.

Disengaging from the Luq 3211 and mounting the half-staircase, Ott enfeebles the Captain's mordacity with a casual command and a halfhearted gesture. "Come here."

The map room focalizes around its expensive namesake, a rotary projection pad, which crests a small dais at the epicenter of the chamber's encircling and priceless decorations. Ott, laboring through that implacable polar weight with each stair, hoofs himself up the seven stairs to the dais' conical top, Nemo presumably lingering somewhere behind.

Years ago, before the complications here arose in earnest and he was forced to relocate his operation to this most isolated of headquarters, Ott had considered himself a hale individual of sound constitution and capable frame but some vestigial failsafe in the subtropical Doreen's homeostasis facilitated an involuntary blubber build-up relative to global positioning. The farther north or south he deviated from his current planet's equatorial regions, the more fat his body would produce, in order to compensate against the assumed climate change.

Inside his thermosteel and torridity-controlled fortress however, Ott remains nothing but haplessly fat and perpetually hot.

Achieving the pad a little more winded than he'd prefer to admit and with Nemo dawdling a step or two below, the Galactic Menace triggers one projection port to spray an enlarged freeze-framed legal document, shimmering, orange and holographic, into suspension above the display pad. Ott waits a moment for the desired effect to wash over his guest.

"Planetary deed, isn't it?" Nemo realizes, pique of interest betrayed not only by his tone, but also by the three more steps he ascends to peruse the projection clearer.

"Have you ever seen one of these before?" Ott probes harmlessly, but Nemo, leveling up on his left, scrutinizes the hologram with squinting disbelief instead.

"Bloom me out, is that–"

"Emperor's signature. Yes. Never seen that before either?"

Nemo exhales the first note of his impression the entire evening, the hanging portent of his potential murder utterly dissolved. "No." He declines comfortably forward, propping both arms against the lip of the pad before pointing an absent finger towards the deed's subject line and inquiring, "B33 is Baz, I take it?"

"Correct. Here." Ott pounds a handful of familiar coordinates on equally worn keys to sequentially activate the seven other projection ports encompassing the pad and recall the weary holographic globe of Baz, translucently orange in this rendering, complete with highlighted continental shores and a lonely illuminated moon at a modest apogee.

"Under section 44BQD of Imperium Planetary Property Law, I own this entire planet and her one moon, Nebho." Weaving his upper arms together while his undermost left holds the 'function' key to the pad and the undermost right clicks a corresponding key, Ott summons a purple perimeter of orbitals near Baz's proverbial equator. "Here's the blockade." He taps another two keys before patches of muted magenta bruise the untouched orange of three of the four continents. "Here're their harvesting farms." Jabbing the center of the keypad lacquers the hologram of Nebho lavender as he continues, "Here's their lunar depot and," he adds as he rattles a final set of coordinates into the console until, after a moment of computerized concentration, somber swaths of violet blot the majority of the digitized globe, "here's a bead on the projected range of every known Imperium infantry group stationed on planet."

Hunkered before the pad, Nemo's face is painted more purple in the light than orange. "They're in violation of their own ordinance? What in all the moons for?"

"Doxychoraphum."

An anticipated graveness tempers Nemo's expression as he turns it towards Ott, Baz's implicit planetshine waning to a half-moon on his face. "Repellent."

Ott blusters a pre-expositional sigh, withdrawing both underarms from the keypad and returning them to his trouser pockets. "Like teltriton or ditrogen before it, doxychoraphum is the Imperium's current commodity of choice. Whatever warfare they face in the Haliquant Quadrant, they seem to believe a few billion Wolfsbane torpedoes is the appropriate solution."

Mindlessly redrawing his only visible scar with a forefinger against his left cheek, Nemo furrows his brow. "So they've invaded you?"

"Effectively. They've cited some loophole, some 'manifest destiny' something that legalizes their actions here, but it's an invasion." He paws absently forward, dipping his fingers beneath Baz's holographic surface, and spins the planet on its axis, the dichotomous orange and purple coalescing together on Nemo's face as it twirls.

"Troop-wise," Ott continues, "they can't commit to an entire campaign's worth, nor can they risk any planetary bombardment, as it would certainly ignite the repellent. For the time being, they've deployed a single company, which protects their provisional harvesting farms and engages the natives in jungle warfare," he mentions, hopefully planting the seed.

Ott reaches both arms forward and snatches the globe out of its rotation. Grasping it like a skooshball, he thumbs the hologram around to face its northern zenith. "My polar fastness is adequately defended for now, but it's only a matter of time before they tire of these guerrilla tactics and execute an actual invasion," he concludes with a calculating sigh as he releases Baz. The hologram, freed from bondage, rolls peacefully back to its original position. "Which would mean landing craft, gunships, surgical strikes and ten million strong, in all likelihood. At which point," he resolves, crossing his upper arms again and inching away from the pad, "my polar fastness is no longer adequately defended."

Hook in mouth, Nemo mutters a gauged question. "Natives?"

Ott ensnares as casually as he can. "The indigenous Baziron," he denotes, uprooting his underarms from his pockets and shuffling forward to enter a new code on the keypad. "They're mounting a resistance in these regions," he indicates as the purple highlights short out and, informed by the new coordinates, a few dozen emerald dots speckle and contrast against the orange orb, "and we're supplying them with as much aid as they'll allow, but they're woefully outgunned and overmatched against Insurgent Company's trained commandos."

"Insurgent Company," Nemo obliquely states.

"Indeed. It seems they appreciate an ironic garnish to their genocide." This the Captain seems to chew sourly as Ott, with a few weighty taps of the keypad, deactivates the projection pad entirely. "I landed here ten years ago – another ambitious gangster with planetary deed in hand and an eye to make a quick buck."

Without making eye contact, Nemo presses the inevitable, "And now?"

"Now I'm not sure," Ott acknowledges, after a measured response time. "According to the Imperium, I'm the Galactic Menace." He initiates an unconcerned shrug of his upper shoulders before adding, "And I could kill you."

"But that ain't likely to settle the debt."

Where a conventional hoodlum might plead, cajole or balk, Nemo utters a challenge, riposting Ott's pressuring with his own easygoing shrug and all the implied proposition that comes with it. The Captain finally diverts his unflinching forward glare to catch Ott in an assessing smirk. "You need soldiers."

"I need pirates," Ott specifies starkly. "I need things that aren't for sale."

Nemo's offhand smirk denatures into the first real smile of their association, an honest, no-holds-barred grin, something of felonious majesty. "You know, I'm good at that."

"Are you? How fortunate."

"Boss, you can't be serious," comes the cry of the unobserved third party. Bald Tizor, his cockatiel crest bobbing with agitation, takes a cautious step forward from his post opposite the Ortok, extending a halting gesture.

Ott's wearily unfaltered. "Why not? The good Captain's unlikely to obtain the 2.8 million on his own terms and killing him now would only achieve a waste in salable repellent."

Nemo arrests himself an apprehending moment. "Repellent? You were gonna–"

"Yes. Assuming, of course."

"Boss–" Tizor attempts to interject, but Nemo's shock flattens his objection.

"That's fucking evil."

"Not really," Ott counters calmly. "Dunk them in enough, their nerves burn too quickly to register a painful reaction. According to my technicians, anyway," he qualifies.

"Who do you do this to?"

"Boss–" Tizor endeavors again, more emphatically.

"Imperium captives."

"Oooh."

Stepping up to the lowest stair of the centralized dais to reinforce his grievance, Bald Tizor, after repeated effort, clumsily inserts himself into the conversation. "Boss, may I have a word?"

"Apparently."

"In private?" the Gord insists. The Galactic Menace unenthusiastically contemplates the request and subsequently its spokesman, standing perturbed at the foot of the staircase.

"Nemo, would you and your companion mind giving us a few–" Ott begins, coloring his request with an aggravated sigh and a taxed massaging of his temples.

"Uh," Nemo stammers a moment, shooting a glance towards his own, apparently respectful bodyguard, "sure." As Nemo innocently descends the staircase and the Ortok grumbles something unheard to him, Tizor shuffles up to Ott's left, entirely overlooking the Captain's presence in the room as he commences his complaint.

"I say he dies."

"Do you?"

"Sight unseen."

The latest to occupy the frequently vacated position of Ott's right-hand, Bald Tizor had hammered himself hard an unyielding distinction as a hardboiled mercenary, though a reputation wasn't the only thing earned during his thirteen years as a hired gun. His piecemeal appearance paid homage to this truculent history – he sports a sculpted Imperium powered plate, a disparate set of Kelkian vambraces and a matched pair of flared Whuudi pauldrons; all of it repainted, all of it scuffed, scraped and stolen as spoils from the Laerto Revolt, the Ten Systems War, the Doxia Incident and the countless other campaigns across the Midworlds under which he'd seen action, all save the personalized helmet, tailor-made to accommodate the unique shape of his Gordian skull.

His fame and notoriety brought him under Ott's influence nearly seven months previously, to replace a previous bodyguard who'd met a foul end at the hands of a disgruntled Baziron headman. Tizor had thus proved a competent, if uninspired, second-in-command. While a formidable opponent on the field whose pillager crew went unchallenged in both ferocity and accomplishment, he lacked a particular initiative whose absence normally spelt death for any commander, no matter the rank. Tizor, though, had managed to avert the fate of his predecessors thus far, so perhaps Ott presupposed too much.

"Elaborate."

Requiring less than the slightest provocation, Tizor launches in at full depreciation. "Destroyed your prototypes. Murdered Dijiqi. Banged up the _Shame_ and decimated her crew. That cocksucker and his shitty old freighter have, single–"

"Hey," Nemo's voice barges in from the distant doorway, "whaddya got, one of those powered breastplates?"

Tizor, obviously confounded by the interruption, deadpans a "Yes."

"Damn things make you near invincible from the front, right?"

"Yes."

"Huh. Cool."

The shriek of laser fire smashes the chamber's conversational quiet. Tizor's Gordian features bubble in revulsion and he falters, pitching forward to slouch awkwardly on the dais stairs, muttering incoherencies on quivering lips and absently groping for the bloody back wound as it dyes his plumage a sickly pink.

His own bodyguard apparently around the corner, only Nemo and his copper firearm stand immediately behind, the former squinting down his weapon's barrel, the latter disgorging accusatory smoke.

Ott regards the trembling corpse at his feet with muffled alarm. "Oh my."

Nemo lowers the weapon and considers his handiwork gruffly. "Douchebag had it coming. Besides," he rationalizes with a weak shrug, "you don't need asswipes like that anymore. You got asswipes like me."

"Huh," Ott concludes. "Bold move."

"I guess," Nemo returns, evidently not entirely convinced of his own daring.

Ott honestly evaluates his would-be vassal, blocking the room's only exit route with a still-smoldering firearm in hand and pondering over the high-ranking lieutenant he just unfairly butchered. "You know, I'm not entirely unconvinced you're not a dangerous lunatic with a hair-trigger."

"And I'm not entirely unconvinced you're not a blood-sucking megalomaniac with a god complex."

The Galactic Menace frowns approvingly. "Fair enough. You wanna go burn some Imperium captives alive?

Nemo's shrug is all sprightly self-evidence. "Do I?"

Ott tiresomely disembarks three steps before halting a moment to propose, "One thing." Nemo vaults an eyebrow, to which Ott suggests, "Lose the hat?"

"Lost," Nemo instantly complies, peeling the bowler hat clean off his matted black mane.

Chapter 11

Odisseus bangs his head. In an effort to prevent the whipping centrifugal force of the frenziedly careening _Lover_ from pitching him headlong into Starboard's open access hatch, the Ortoki mechanic had managed to adequately brace himself against jamming the booster with half his thrashing torso and undoubtedly further complicating the calamitous engine failure his beloved and abused freighter labored under at present. What he hadn't braced himself against, when _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ wheeled about a fourth time, was banging his head.

Suffused in surplus exhaust and gloaming bright blue from the residual heat necessary to propel half a spaceship across a quarter of the Outer Ring, Starboard's interior is a white-hot ruin, even through the insulating filter of emergency goggles and welder's gauntlets.

Seeing all this, Odisseus forces a frustrated exhale between clenched incisors when his belted comm, whose warbled pandemonium somehow manages to overshadow even Port's unrepentant roar, burbles to life and accosts him with stupid, clarifying questions.

"What do you think? The drive motor?" Nemo posits, barely contained panic present in the shout of his voice.

"The drive motor?" Odisseus screams his rejoinder. "The _drive motor_? You're blooming kidding me, the drive motor..."

"Well, what then?"

"What have I been telling you to fix _this entire time_?" He inches as much of his upper torso as he dares into the service gap, cautious against making even the slightest unprotected contact with the blistering surface of the inner booster, lest he wish to catch his fur afire.

"Uh," Nemo procrastinates a moment, as a cavalcade of dashboard alarms resound about him. "The igniters?"

"I'll give you a hint," Odisseus offers as he hunts for the motor control box, "it starts with 'p' and rhymes with _'bressure helix_!'"

"Ah. Yes. Of course."

"Yes the fuck of course!"

A routine warp disengage, on a routine return trip to Takioro, had rocketed a thousand zottibles south of wrong when, for what Nemo persistently terms as "no good reason," the starboard booster engine sputtered once, coughed a burst of spent fume like an effervescent swan song, and promptly died. This succinct, almost ephemeral malfunction immediately spawned a harrowing list of lesser, procreated system failures, a list that Odisseus had, doing time at Dirty Djembe's, repeatedly read on ever so many collision reports.

The propulsion computer assuredly attempted to compensate Starboard's unscheduled demise by cosigning the bygone booster's fuel intake directly to Port, precisely the sort of logistical error a seventy-five-year-old propulsion computer was inclined to make when pressed. This, in turn, overburdened the drive motor into issuing a series of commands, certainly in haste, one of which was to polarize the heretofore unreliable inertial dampener into wild exaggeration of the Briza's every move, subsequently tossing crewmen about like rag dolls and spilling Odisseus' precariously placed lunch of Bubble Blue Diet and imitation dubix all over the deactivation controls. Another of these commands was to flange Port's turbine cap open, creating an afterburner flare that could only adequately be described as "volcanic." In summary, having very little voice in the matter, _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ chose to respond to this chain of events by plummeting to her own destruction.

Only by the sheer idiot chance that bought his breath did Nemo manage to wrench the ship away from direct demolishment with the Defederate Station and now, by the grace of whatever queer fortune had blessed Odisseus' saltbrother, they spiral barely-contained circuits around Takioro, rocketing full throttle in a hairpin tail-spin. Were Nemo not cranking the yoke as far to port as possible, the amputated Briza would certainly crash headlong with the space station's mooring asteroid, though explosive possibilities remained abundant among Takioro's perimeter of embarking and disembarking ship traffic.

"So, do we have any kind of plan here, or...?" Nemo tentatively probes, level of hysteria gradually mounting. Such was classic Captain behavior – blithely disposed to hurtling an ill-repaired starship into the breach, yet dismember said craft via direct consequence of his venturesomeness and he dissolves into a trepidatious child.

"I'm cutting the main drive feed," Odisseus ultimates, regardless of whatever objection Nemo might advance to muddy the situation. In these moments, these unhinged instances of utter nautical catastrophe, a stark, subconscious role reversal always manifested itself, in accordance with an Ortok's biological warding instincts. In that moment, Odisseus was no longer the Captain's underling; he became Nemo's surrogate father.

"But you just said that–"

"The pressure helix," Odisseus begins as calmly as he could muster, spying the object of his search and extending both gauntleted paws toward it, "is the problem, not the solution." Grasping the smoldering motor control box between safeguarding gloves, the Ortok mentally laments the practical loss of his claws as he attempts to pry back the device's dented lid on rusty hinges, adding, "If you can keep her afloat another fifteen seconds or so, we should be fine."

"We'll be–"

"Dead in the water, yes, but we'll be stopped and we can buzz in for help."

Nemo's pause betrays his reluctance before his words can. "So much for a discreet docking."

"This is what happens when you clubhaul, Nemo," Odisseus admonishes. He hoists the unlatched motor control box to his snout and inspects the coils of overheated cables within with a hasty, inquisitive nose, his vision towards wires and other finer objects effectively neutralized by the thickness of his goggles. Selecting the appropriate specimen, the Ortok nuzzles his muzzle into the grody contrivance, pinches the aforementioned wire between fangs and yanks the cord loose.

"I guess," Nemo lamentedly concedes as, with a dreadful shudder, the adjacent booster engine finally relinquishes its infuriated shrieking and dwindles into muttering gripes. "Hey–" Nemo observes, woebegone demeanor immediately forgotten in the face of imminent salvation. As Odisseus spits the riven wires of the main drive feed from his mouth and wriggles free from Starboard's access hatch, he can already feel the acceleration slacken and hear the oxygen brakes vent; two telltale signs of the _Lover's_ plodding, ponderous process of mid-flight retardation.

Odisseus, likewise enervated and panting, declines back to his haunches before catching sight of, out of the corner of his eye, the sparking deactivation control panel, sodden with squandered fish and splattered soda. It remains, a fact the weary Ortok is painfully conscious of, only the first on a suddenly elongated list of repairs that had just landed squarely in his exhausted lap.

His stomach grumbles in protest.

–––

Moira Quicksilver practically has to chase him down the boarding ramp, Two-Bit Switch cantering to keep flush with his opposite flank and Abraham Bonaventure waddling into rearguard twenty steps behind. An airlock breeze whisking his duster open, Captain Nemo disembarks _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ onto Docking Port #7294's grimy grating at a hustle, as if impelled forward by a swell of his own irresponsibility.

"So, fuel, ammo, Xo's payment, magnets," he rapidly tabulates on his left hand, "uh, mustard?"

"Odi's list," Moira prompts for the third time.

"Right, right," Nemo suddenly appreciates. "I have that," he vouches irresolutely, padding down his pockets, "...somewhere."

"Left breast pocket."

"Boom."

"Socks?" Two-Bit pipes in.

"Again?" Moira demurs. "You get more socks every damn time we come into port."

Two-Bit blinks obtusely. "They get holes in 'em."

"Because you wear them until they liquefy."

Without warning, an aurulent laser bolt, fired from cover, sizzles the galvanized ground several inches from Nemo's feet, abruptly halting the haste of his advance. By the time Nemo's raised his palms in a pacifying gesture and Two-Bit's dropped a hand to his holster, Righty and Lefty, hammers thumbed back and canisters chambered, already scour the dimness of the Docking Port in search of the hidden assailant.

"See anything?" Nemo, in sotto voice, offers over his left shoulder.

"Yellow muzzle flash. From the gas release and the size of the impact, we're looking at an AccCo ditrogen-powered sidearm, probably on the heavier side. Best guess says a sawed-off 387 Absconder carbine. Which would mean either Boy Blaster or, more likely–"

"Traasha," Nemo finishes as, training an AccCo 387 Absconder laser carbine, complete with signature sawed-off barrel, on him with her bulky claws, Traasha emerges from behind a support pylon, snarl carefully composed on her cracked lips. "Gee, Vel," Nemo calls toward the shadowed outline of the harborage doors, "what tipped you off?"

"You gotta minute, Captain?" comes the husky Vollocki reply, mere moments before she struts into the brassy light. Velocity shudders the folds of her common tramper's poncho as she entwines her arms together.

Nemo blossoms into his most charmingly apologetic smile. "'fraid not, kiddo. You didn't think I was gonna run, didja?" Velocity parries his ingrained insolence with a disinterested smirk of her own as she plants each hoof into a gunfighter's stance, though whether her belt serves another purpose than holding her trousers up, Moira can't determine through the jaunty cut of her poncho.

"You won't be runnin' anyplace if Traasha here does what she's keen on doin' and I've half-a-mind to stand aside and let it happen."

"Traasha's outgunned," Moira categorically counters.

"We've got a whole deckload full of brunos who might delly a peccadillo with that flash of yours," Two-Bit points out with a sharp nod of his forehead toward the boarding ramp.

Velocity, engaging Nemo in a fierce bout of ocular fencing, ignores the both of them in all but word. "Captain'd still be dead."

A handful of seconds, stretched taut by the unflinching mien of both markswomen, gracelessly passes before Nemo relents. "Fair enough," he moderates with the compromising shrug of a man held at gunpoint. "What can I do you for, Vel?"

"Ain't heard a buzz from Baigo. All's quiet on Rith, it seems."

"That's odd. What with the terrorists and stuff."

Velocity, the very image of unamused, purses her lips with impatience. "It's been over a month, Nemo, with no word and you come rocketin' back here, nearly bang up my station and now you're expecting what, fuel, quarter? A nice blowjob, maybe?"

"If it ain't too much trouble," Nemo grants with a daringly compliant frown.

"By all the moons," Velocity breathes, seemingly flustered by the very manner of disregard and obliviousness that Moira swallows on a daily basis. She bats a choleric gesture at Traasha. "You know, I could just have you shot and put an agreeable end to all this."

"Listen," Nemo placates with extended assuaging palms, "we were en route to Rith and a certain misunderstanding arose regarding our previous job with Xo that couldn't be ignored, savvy?" He shrugs helplessly. "Just stowing loose freight."

This Velocity appears to consider, dissecting his account somewhere behind the naked indignation of those cobalt eyes. "That's all, huh?"

"That's all," Nemo inoffensively repeats.

"Then you wouldn't know anything about Lzura," Velocity confirms with nothing but the slightest twinge of grim gratification curling her lips. Moira constricts her trigger fingers.

"Who?" Nemo blithely retorts, air of mock quizzicality replete across his entire comportment.

"Heh. Of course." Velocity glowers her discrimination at Nemo in full, as if attempting to survey his entire person. "Somethin' different about you, squirt." She snaps several times. "Can't get a finger on it." Traasha, standing apart, growls something that evidently jogs Vel's memory. "Hat," the Vollocki realizes tauntingly, with a final extenuated snap. "Where's the eyesore, Nemo?"

The Captain gnaws his bottom lip and flashes the dangerous grays. Moira herself had noted and deigned to comment on the bowler hat's unforetold vanishment, as had the _Lover's_ other three lieutenants, each with varying degrees of caution or skepticism. Odisseus, the only crew member present when it initially disappeared, had thus far offered precious little comment regarding the obnoxious hat's current whereabouts, the motives surrounding the event and whether or not it was likely to make a resurgence any time soon.

Nemo nonetheless is cryptically curt. "I ate it."

"Cute."

"'Speak for yerself, missy. What's with the get-up?"

Lumbering down the boarding ramp with all the authority uncounted years amidships lends a mariner of his stature, Abraham Bonaventure deflates the room's apprehension under the weight of his mere presence. He lingers atop the ramp, a quarter of the way to the Docking Port floor, and arrests the Depot-Commissioner with the very strabismic regard he attributes to deckhands and dockworkers.

At the advent of this fresh and formidable opposition, Velocity visibly bristles, adjusting her bearing to receive the grizzled challenger. "Abe," she salutes stiffly.

"Vel," the Grimalti sailing master responds, remotely picking at the puckered hide along his abdominal scar with a split fingernail. "Mind mayhaps pointin' yer piece somewheres else?" he forthrightly addresses to Traasha who, in turn, glances back undecidedly to Velocity. The Vollocki reluctantly acquiesces with a curt nod to her armed escort and, on cue, Traasha lowers the Absconder. Moira reciprocates with a prudent withdrawal of Righty and Lefty to their respective holsters, though she remains confident that should Traasha again find cause to brandish her clunky carbine, both pistols would have ample time to preempt any other attack.

"Don't rightly think this concerns you, old-timer," Velocity opines judiciously, attempting to bolster her claim with the full weight of her office.

Abraham, however, remains unflappable in his disinterest, running a thumb along the rim of his immense brown bandolier. "Yer talkin' 'bout pluggin' me boy here. I think it concerns me well enough."

"Your boy's picked himself up some bad habits."

"Well, ye know how it is. Takes a whole crew, as they say," he invalidates casually, before canting his gaze upward in feigned retrospection. "Come to think on it, I seem to recall a certain young brigand who, in her time, got herself into quite a spot with White Dwarf over some disappearing cargo."

"When was _this_?" Nemo questions with thinly veiled mirth, like a teenager learning of his grandparents' youthful mishaps.

"Oh, long afore yer time. And, unless I'm very much mistaken, that be a problem she solved by simply shootin' him in the skull." The purport of his implication hangs palpably enough for Nemo to glance sidelong at Moira with a silent whistle of impression. Moira knuckles him castigatedly on the upper arm.

"Captain?" Vel, duly chastised, shifts her attention from the imposing to the infantile. Erecting three gloved fingers, the Depot-Commissioner fuels her ultimatum with stymied frustration. "Three days, you understand? By week's end, I want you off my station and hauling your goldbrickin' bloomhole to Rith. Savvy?"

"That'll do, Vel," Abraham interjects, ambling past Moira and toward the harborage doors. "That'll do."

With that, the effectively vanquished Velocity retreats a step back, as if in deference to Abraham's unconcerned approach, the _Lover's_ other present officers falling into step behind him, though none with quite the degree of superciliousness Nemo musters to his swagger.

As soon as the harborage doors hiss closed behind them, the Captain wastes little time in matching the Grimalti's stride to inquire, with his patented brand of irreverence, "Abe?"

"That's four ye owe me now, boyo, and don't ye forget it."

–––

Two-Bit Switch prefers to approach his trade with the strictest professionalism, as much as is humanly possible in his admittedly peculiar line of work. That being said, he was very much going to enjoy bamboozling the ever-loving shit out of Nabdres No-Cock. The dickless old Diraaqi had displayed enough clemency not to insert a canister into Two-Bit's face upon the dissolution of their partnership and, given this opportunity, he'd repay Nabdres with a canister of his own, as black-collar business ethics duly demanded of him.

Nemo, boots bespattered by sleet stains and ballasted against the table's lip, rears his chair back on its hind legs, tottering precariously on the very cusp of ruin, as was his wont. Abraham, meanwhile, decants his capacious form forward to the illustrated tabletop, pondering the deep indigo depths of his ale-jack. Armed with fresh socks, an Attaché equipped with an itemized dossier for the upcoming caper and a scotch glass awash with ochre Tivossian ginger-olives, one of which he wanders against the array of his upper teeth, Two-Bit Switch occupies the chair across from his recently arrived confederates with the frothy energy only a full cup of doused chococino and two lines of snorted Spicion can truly lend a hoodlum.

"How long ago was this?" the Captain questions distractedly, attempting to wave down a profoundly disinterested Obax waitress who'd, for some reason or another, fascinated herself with tracing her padded pointer finger along the rim of a partially-full pilsner.

"Maybe a month before we mated up?" Two-Bit estimates with a good-natured scowl. "Ain't been out to that sector since."

"Ye don't imagine he's liable to expect this?" Abraham suggests.

"Don't vizz as how," Two-Bit concludes, eviscerating the olive to its viridian pit before continuing. "He's just as feez to vizz me comin' now as he is five months from now, ain't he? Way I schemed it out, we scanty gotta blag much anyway," he plops both palms haphazardly to the tabletop. "No digits, no fuzz, just a coupla wheels and a bit of old-fashioned handbaggin'."

Nemo, however, is officially preoccupied with the magnitude of the waitress' truancy. He emits a brief, shrill whistle to shake her from her slack-jawed revelry but whatever incomprehensible mystery the humming pilsner contains, it retains its inexplicable beguilement over her, much to the chagrin of her sole client.

The Heaven Spot, along with the less esoterically titled Barfly, jointly represent a queer sidestep around the issue of Takioro's meager storefront space. While the latter employs a quartet of slaved driftstages to hover above the squalid churn of the station street, the former, a three table canteen blanketed stem to stern with labyrinthine graffiti, is suspended from four heavy turbine chains from the Second Ring's ceiling. Despite the volant venue's ingenuity, the Heaven Spot is only accessible via a pair of individually sized lift platforms, hosts an unimpressive square footage as dictated by the Depot-Commissioner and is plagued by occasional bouts of pendant swaying akin to those of a sailing ship. Therefore, the Spot is unsurprisingly frequented by only a limited patronage, mainly those seeking privacy in which to conduct affairs too illicit to openly discuss on Takioro or those wishing to simply admire the artwork.

The fashion, exhibition and patterning of the fractal paint that illustrates every square inch of the Heaven Spot, bleeding off the ceiling, dripping down the walls and pooling on the floor, even clawing its way up the pub's furniture, belies it as the especially extravagant handiwork of a mythical shiptagger enigmatically known as "Ganymede Mel."

Her identity, species, location and motives all remained the subject of galaxy-wide speculation, but inexplicable and maddeningly embellished graffiti artwork, from miniscule stamps on Service Junction bathroom stalls to sprawling murals that encompass entire buildings such as the Heaven Spot's signature coating, have unaccountably appeared across the galaxy, each vandalism actualizing without any eyewitness, each tableau tagged with the unforthcoming handle "Ganymede Mel." Though copycats abounded, the phantomlike spray artist's workmanship was unmistakably perplexing and, before long, she'd become a folk legend among the Outer Ring's insurgent population, earmarking warp gates, drinkeries and even one Imperium barracks on Prash, a feat that earned the very possibly fictional "Ganymede Mel" a thirty-thousand credit bounty courtesy of the IMIS. Her true apparent passion, however, seemed to be marking starships and those captains lucky enough to earn her inky endorsement on fuselages and torpedo tubes wore them as badges of outlawry honor.

Whether the obese Obax that owned and operated the Heaven Spot was somehow in cahoots with Mel or whether he'd simply shown up to work one morning to discover an ornate ornamental sheen to his establishment, Two-Bit couldn't swear for certain, but the panoramic masterpiece, complete with massive underfoot depiction of Takioro Defederate Station itself, had certainly boosted the daily foot traffic the modest cantina could claim from virtually none to practically none.

"Don't ye leave us in suspense, boyo," Abraham beckons with a two-fingered gesture.

Recalling an image from the Attaché with three taps on its touch screen, Two-Bit swings the device around and edges it across the table toward the Grimalti between two fingers of his own. "You know this gantine?"

Abraham massages his wattle scrutinizingly before answering. "She's a schooner, ain't she? Vbeck & Rhissol, what, a GL-3?"

"Spot on."

"Nabdres?"

"Double spot on," Two-Bit sprightly confirms as Abraham scrolls through various of the Attaché's displays. "Calls her _The Dead Messenger_ and she's all ten flavors of combat zone booter. Half the size of the _Lover_ , this one, but ball it up for me, she's tragged out beyond belief."

Another whistle from Nemo, no acknowledgment from the enthralled waitress. "Would you look at this?" the Captain, amazed in his vexation, breathes to no one in particular.

"Ye ain't japin'," Abraham concurs gravelly. "Four bow chasers, two stern chasers, top-mounted swivel gun..." the sailing master numerates murmuringly with his archaic mariner's parlance, "not to mention her anti-pursuant bar engine."

Leaning halfway across the table, Two-Bit drums an illuminating rhythm against the touch screen to conjure more of the Dead _Messenger's_ schematics for Abraham's perusal. "Don't blank on the deflective hull plates or the extended zeen of forward-firing zoomers," he chimes cheerfully.

"What's he smuggle?"

"Wheels. Outta Haess."

Abraham, lopsided gaze still planted on the Attaché's rotating read-outs, declines backward, wooden chair voicing its dissent with an oaken groan. "What's this V&B gunrunner to do with us?"

Two-Bit ventures a prankish smirk. "We're gonna pinch her."

An oceanic world in the Ring Confed's Sesmon Sector fabled for its blustery gales, behemothic jiihu fish and bribable politicians, Haess, ten months and a thousand years ago, served as the de facto base of operations for Two-Bit Switch and Nabdres No-Cock to peddle cut-rate firearms to underfunded mercenary firms and desperate revolutionaries. Bountifully possessed of a ditrogen copycat chemical, Haess shepherds itself a brisk munitions business, both over the counter and under the table; playing host for the industrial interests of major arms corporations like Halisdro or AccCo to legitimately manufacture substandard products while, in the same breath, supplying the booming criminal element with enough merchandise to fetch ample profits on the local black market. Into this sweetest spot of commercial climates did Switch and No-Cock ideally situate their exploitation of both gunrunning and graft.

In hindsight, Two-Bit wouldn't have described it as an entirely unhappy union; the profits were tidy, the overhead was low and the only comeuppances delivered from on high resulted in a shared twelve-hour incarceration and, of course, Nabdres' eponymous gelding at the hands of a particularly displeased and particularly rancorous customer. Thusly, the unanticipated divorce of their business enterprise came as something of a shock when, after discovering Two-Bit's traditional seven-percent skim off the winnings' top, Nabdres lacked the felonious decency to properly execute him and rather opted to sloppily empty half a clip in the general direction of Two-Bit's crotch, in an attempt to "even up the score." Luckily for Two-Bit's dangly bits, No-Cock was never renowned for marksmanship.

Two-Bit managed to escape with manhood intact, though the four gunshot wounds he took to the legs during said escape ensured that, ten months later, when Nemo came to Two-Bit requesting a caper that would necessitate hustling a Haessian gunrunner, Nabdres comprised the beginning, middle and end of the potential target list.

With a clamor sufficient to rattle both glasses and frighten the Attaché into "collision mode," Nemo spanks the tabletop with a palm, in a last-ditch attempt to snag the waitress' bubbleheaded attention. Oddly enough, this most brutish of tactics is evidently successful; jarring the Obax from her slack-jawed preoccupation and into startled discernment of her single patron. "All the moons," Nemo bemoans, jangling a pantomimed shot glass over his head to signify his earnest desire for alcohol, to which the apparently bleary barmaid sets about accommodating.

"And how, precisely, do ye suppose we does that? Ye said yerself, this bitch's got more teeth than a Nartachi's bleeder," Abraham challenges before licking dripping residue from off the worn sides of his homemade tankard.

"Listen, I know Nabdres like I know my own lollies, don't I?" Two-Bit elucidates in a slightly hushed tone as he slants forward, counting each mannerism of his former accomplice on his fingers. "He never claws his bloomhole without snuffin' it afterward, he never inks his handle on his mess in the chiller–"

"And that be a bad habit, no mistake," Abraham pipes in, with a glance to the still thoroughly inattentive Captain.

"–and, of greater jazz to us, whenever he and his outfit fangle themselves a beasty little heist, they have their pre-game beanos out at the very same pub. Every bloomin' time," Two-Bit emphasizes by splaying out both hands and reposing back into his chair.

A gleam, the waxing of piratical guile, enkindles Abraham's murky, asymmetrical orbs as the true disingenuity of Two-Bit's scheme dawns on him. "So, alls we have to do is–"

Abruptly interrupting his revelation, the Obaxi waitress promptly appears bearing both the beseeched tumbler, brimming with the briny lather of Gitterswitch Gin, and an expression of vacant lassitude. "Was that so fucking hard?" Nemo casts both arms aimlessly upward in a brief, futile shrug. "Bloom me out," he adds as he bewilderedly brings the drink to his lips.

"–diddle around this boozer a bit, wait for No-Cock and his brunos to show, push their motherbloomin' buttons, lift the _Messenger's_ jingles off one of the stiffs and, as habby as that, we'll be having the bees." Two-Bit laces his fingers together behind his gratified head and reprises his earlier smirk with another, even more prankish version. "Easy as foogin'."

Sporting a sudsy new mustache, Nemo blinks into the conversation for the first time. "What're we talking about?"

"Well, you've put your dick in it now." Moira Quicksilver, all dourness and disgust, somehow materializes, standing two feet off Two-Bit's right shoulder.

"Moons, woman," Two-Bit flinches, sense of alarm summarily spiked by the double dose of Third-Ring-quality Spicion. "I didn't even ord the lift platform go." Ignoring him as per usual, Moira thrusts a clammy sheet of letterhead across the flowery tabletop, pinned under tented fingers. Depositing the document before Nemo without further comment, she sheathes both hands to the stocks of her holstered firepower and awaits the Captain's assessment.

For his part, Nemo scans the leaflet a moment, before billowing out a buffaloed breath and befuddedly pitching the paper toward Two-Bit. "Congratu-blooming-lations, numbnuts," Moira lauds bitterly as Two-Bit gathers up the jettisoned flier to inspect its contents for himself.

Two-Bit Switch had, in his decade and a half of breaking the law for money, encountered quite the lion's share of bounty postings, many promising pronounced profit, most detailing fellow ne'er-do-wells and a vanishingly small number of them emblazoned with his own lovable mug. While this most recent addition couldn't boast anything in the way of that last qualification, its achievements in the first two categories were impressive enough to be considered vaguely legendary.

"250 thou? Quicksilver's affied there, you're crimin' for keeps now."

Abraham yanks the notice from Two-Bit's grasp to begin his inherently suspicious questioning of the new arrival. "How fresh is this?"

"Very. Barely a week old," Moira relates as she chews her bottom lip. "Took them some time to correlate their differing reports with the ConFed, but, as of last week, the Endless Imperium officially regards you as a hostile power. Which would make sense after you–"

"Destroyed their warship. Sure," Nemo concurs, craning to confirm details on the posting. "Still no picture, though," he comments, crestfallen. "This artist's rendering maybe leaves a little something to be desired."

"Oh, this is gonna unlag a shiny new gauge of angler," Two-Bit recognizes.

"How'd ye know?" Abraham squints his oblique squint at Moira, who parries with an unflappable stare of her own.

"Amateur hour at The Barrel's Bottom. Half-wit teenager with a dimestore piece tried to bushwhack me on my way out. Left her in a pile of her own broken teeth, though I did find this on her." She waves an approximate gesture toward the certificate. "Indeed, you'll notice a supplementary reward there for an unidentified Anglian female."

"Ooof, you see this?" Nemo indicates with an eager pointer finger over Abraham's wrist. "That Chaperone, what you call it, the _Indurna_? It's entire crew; lost." This confirmed with a nod from the Grimalti, Nemo sprawls back into his chair with a deeply contended comportment. "No survivors."

"Shit, 250 puts you on an even keel with Vel's own sweets, don't it?" Two-Bit posits with a propositional shrug and accompanying scowl.

Nemo, reclining complacently, mushrooms into a deeply satisfied grin. "Does it now?"

"Well, this certainly wasn't the reaction I'd anticipated," Moira appraises resolvedly.

"You get anything at the Bottom? No? Come on, pull up a chair, have a drink," the Captain gesticulates from the elbow and inches an unoccupied chair away from the table with a gunky wingtip. "Hey, can we get another–" Nemo begins until, shooting a glance to his left, he notices the truant waitress, returned to her previous half-full mesmerism. "Oh, sublime," he utters and clouts the tabletop again, rougher this time, unsettling an olive from Two-Bit's tumbler, sloshing Abraham's booze onto the bounty poster and jolting the baffled Attaché back out of collision mode once more.

Moira, with a cursory glimpse at the reactivated device, spies the various displays and readouts with her archetypal foul humor. "What's this, Ott's audition? That gunrunning thing?"

"Right first try. We got schemes on deerin' a combat booter off Haess."

"You ever hear of Nabdres No-Cock?" Nemo inquires.

Tracing a finger along the touch screen, Moira frowns. "This is the one without the penis?"

"Quite the little detective, aren't ye, missy?" Abraham calmly dismisses.

Moira compounds her frown. "Yeah, well, I _came_ to inform you that Xo's payment has finally come in, but I certainly didn't mean to interrupt the circlejerk." Adjusting the weight of her gunfighter's rig with a thumb, Moira pads two steps away from the trio of conspiring hoodlums. "As you were."

As soon as the dispiriting first mate is thusly departed from safe earshot, Two-Bit Switch returns his gaze from the direction of her departure and musses up his face. "Jabb about your bleeders with teeth, eh?"

–––

Moira burns her tongue. It made exactly no difference how assiduously Moira followed the unimpugnable recipe, nor would her level of mental preparation, predicated on years and years of adverse trial-and-error, ever truly change this particular outcome because every single time Moira Quicksilver took her first sip of a new blend of spacer's tea, she burnt her tongue.

She cordons off the scalded area by sticking out said tongue, banishes the gouts of steam issuing from her calescent beverage with a puff of breath and, balancing adroitly on one foot to increase her reach with the other, simultaneously clicks off the oven's port most burner between middle and pointer finger and heels open the chiller door. Ice was the simplest, if least elegant, solution to this time-honored problem, though, in all fairness, elegance was not a primary virtue of spacer's tea.

Concocted either by bored fighter-jockeys on extended warp jumps or strapped freight trampers lacking the necessary funds for luxuries like alcohol, spacer's tea was ostensibly a revolting and poisonous category of hodgepodge grog, comprised mainly of boiled water and miniscule doses of the various lethal liquids one might find aboard a spaceship. Engine coolant, wiper solvent, other sundry chemicals like glareguard or turret oil, even trace amounts of carbon fuel were all popular ingredients for differing flavors and brands of the homemade tea. Moira herself prefers a straight helping of deceleration fluid, a fact she'd thus far managed to conceal from the cantankerous Odisseus, perpetually baffled at how frequently the booster's reserves needed replacement.

Of course, the only way to consume spacer's tea and not suffer a horrific, retching death was to boil it beyond reason, to the point where any of the component toxins were summarily neutralized and their previous presence was demonstrable only by a sharply astringent aftertaste. In truth, most humanoid stomachs could barely handle the tea's pungency, which was certainly the drink's main attraction, beyond its reasonably affordable cost. Moira had, during her itinerant years as a wayfaring bounty hunter, cultivated an appetite for the appalling swill, though she required an empty galley to comfortably brew herself a batch.

Plunking several iceballs into her steaming beverage while the open chiller pants huskily, Moira ponders the singularity of her solitude. Save Garrigan, sweating out another bout of retributive Vapid withdrawal, and Odisseus, sequestered deep within the belowdecks engine room, the majority of the conscript crew were squandering the remaining ten hours of their leave among the manifold venalities and vices Takioro Defederate Station could offer. With Nemo, Two-Bit and all the rest of the miscreants evacuated, Moira found herself with an unheard-of privacy in _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ now vacant chambers and corridors, to engage in unobserved activities like blending a mug of spacer's tea or drilling a Tebi-Gali regiment in the open hold or wearing sweatpants.

Momentarily affluent from her commission of Xo's payment, plus the augmented bonus that Salo, Taré and the smattering of other bounty-heads she'd been lucky enough to collect aboard the _Shame_ , Moira could even treat herself to a posh Gitter vintage, securely stowed in the topturret compartment for future use, and a double carton of deluxe chiller cream on which she currently, along with her recently-finished helping of spacer's tea, held designs.

Her comparably congenial mood is hastily curtailed, however, upon smacking the chiller closed with a clatter and glimpsing, for the first time, the appliance's only decoration. As opposed to Nemo's latter-day and grossly inflated bounty posting, which Moira begrudgingly anticipated, a freshly-purchased Bubble brand magnet pinions the dog-eared corner of an abhorrent illustration to the chiller's front door, a depiction so saturated with lechery, it's virtually transparent.

The "Dread Pirate Blackbush," with her eerily familiar footwear, sneers crustily out at Moira Quicksilver. A brief visual stalemate unfolds, one corner manifesting the austere comportment of the career gunfighter and the other all the buxom bravado that befits a pin-up prostitute, until the entire matter is brusquely concluded when the fuming Moira proceeds to tear the exploitative thing straight off the chiller and pitch it directly into the garbage.

Chapter 12

Two-Bit Switch appreciates nearly every aspect of his B7 Dissident – her relative range, her impressive stopping power, her agreeable weight distribution, even the contoured snugness of her grip. Coupled with the handy moonclips and her subsequent rapid reloading feature, the Dissident could have been, to Two-Bit's thinking, the ideal handgun, had not the recently departed Salo Shouldermount neglected to warn him of one little imperfection; her tendency to jam.

The bane of all vintage revolvers, the B7's rotating cylinder was ill suited to the trigger-happy gusto Two-Bit and today's mercenary marksmen favor. When pressured by rapid firing, the weapon's expelling mechanism tends to constrict whichever canister it's about to shoot and consequently obstructs the barrel. With his secondary firearm forfeited to a high-stakes Iniquity hand a week previously and monochrome laserfire erupting about his hunkered head, Two-Bit Switch, short of flinging his inoperable Dissident at Nabdres' assorted thuggery, is running low on options.

To his immediate left, Ebeneezer, doing his level best to squat his mountainous purple frame wholly behind the overturned barroom table, palms massive shells into the magazine well of his Acathi Backlash 7-LV Bolt-Action Rifle and attends Two-Bit with a crumpled brow. "You tried smackin' it?"

"'Course I have," Two-Bit remonstrates sorely, "and it ain't done me no kindies thus far." Despite the rebuke, he endeavors another attempt, walloping the stymied sidearm with the flat of his own palm, to absolutely no effect. "No squeak you got a spare on you?" Ebeneezer halts his reloading, withdraws the folded form of his electrochette from its scabbard and offers it offhandedly to Two-Bit.

"Er, thanks, but no thanks, mate."

The cyclops shrugs his doublewide shoulders once, sheathes the collapsible weapon, sidles the shortened barrel of his rifle over the table's upturned lip and proceeds to thunder off a spray of buckshot in the general direction of the opposition. "Gotta get me wanks on another wheel," Two-Bit resolves mutteringly.

If memory served, Loose Lips was a placid, if unscrupulous, taproom of shabby titanium tabletops, gin of unremarkable distinction and quiet, corrupt company; the quintessential drinkery for underhanded, unmolested dealings. At present, however, its spacious common room plays unwitting host to a time-honored knock-down-drag-out brouhaha, almost worthy of the Admiralty's illustrious altercations. As if by some act of augury, a tempest, the brawl's superior in size yet possibly its equal in sheer vehemence, ravages the oceanic surface of Haess just outside, pelting torrential rain and sizable tidal waves against the ample windows of the anchored edificial bubble that houses the tavern.

Nemo's handpicked buccaneer crew, brandishing a discrepant assortment of weaponry, spew insults and canisters at Nabdres' bloated band of Triomman and Diraaqi bruisers, who tenfold reciprocate the hostilities in orange return fire from their host of identical Halisdro assault rifles. While they certainly couldn't compete with the fervor and creativity of the blasphemies being shouted across the divide at them, _The Dead Messenger's_ crew more than requite the imbalance with actual gunfire, a point Two-Bit likely should have anticipated when preparing to bushwhack a troop of prosperous arms merchants.

"Any idea which of these blowbags we're _actually_ trying to kill?" Nemo, huddled behind the next table down and barking out blind shots from his obsolete yet somehow fully functional firearm, bellows above the bedlam. Two-Bit attempts a cautious glimpse beyond the rim of the table's protective cover, but a skirting orange ricochet, scant inches from his nose, thoroughly discourages the notion.

A moonclip and a half into the skirmish and Two-Bit's already lost visual on Nabdres, the centerpiece to this entire maneuver. In his own defense, though, with only furtive glances into the line of sight, distinguishing one cockless Diraaqi among half a dozen similarly dressed, identically armed candidates was no small feat.

"You know, I ain't rightly sure. Maybe a Diraaqi bloke missing his plonker?"

Squatting his own considerable form to Nemo's immediate right, Odisseus racks his own Acathi once and grumbles an extended reply in his guttural mother tongue, to which Nemo rejoins, "Be my guest. Blech."

"Say, Cap'n," Two-Bit apprehensively begins, "neither you nor the Ortok would happen to have an extra wheel on wank, would you?"

Nemo abates his return fire a moment to scowl at Two-Bit. "What's wrong with yours?"

"She's gone and got herself all lagged up."

"Sorry, pal," Nemo demurs, punctuated by another round from his pistol. "Afraid I didn't think to bring an extra."

Odisseus barks something over the sound of the venting Acathi. "Oh, good idea," Nemo concurs. "Odi says you should try smacking it."

"What, did I miss a meeting here? 'course I tried biffin' it!" Thusly discouraged, Two-Bit starts to shift his weight to pursue other solutions before Nemo stops him.

"Hey, have you seen Moira?"

"Erm," Two-Bit stalls as he conducts a perfunctory census of the _Lover's_ entrenched crew. With Ebeneezer to his left and Nemo and Odisseus occupying the next table over, Danbonte and Garrigan fortify the table directly behind Two-Bit, the former squeezing ammunition from his automatic pistol and the latter wielding Barso's totemic shotgun. Having successfully heaved the ungainly thing on its side, Anchorage, Brondi and Rooster seek shelter in the shadow of the joint's now-pockmarked marbles table, giving as good as they got with a steady stream of laserfire toward the hostiles fortuitously installed behind the counter. Finally, Heeko'd managed to wheedle some lukewarm cover out of the shufflefeed by dislodging the hefty console away from the back wall and stooping behind it, peppering the bar top with potshots from his bolt-action carbine.

Indeed, though, Nemo's observation seemed to be correct; with Nabdres' assorted goons covering the entrance and bar area, Moira is nowhere to be found.

"Don't tell me she's still in the loo."

Realization emerges on Nemo's face. "Oh, bloom me out," he bedamns as he wrenches the comm off his belt. "Moira? Moira?" he menaces onto the channel before regarding Two-Bit with an appraising look. "What do you think, she spends the whole gunfight in the bathroom, I dock her pay?"

"Sounds feez to me," Two-Bit admits, inching himself fully around, with his back to the table, to address another prospect. "Danbonte?"

The redskin pauses his barrage. "You wanna be shooting _that_ way, Switch," he indicates forward with the snub of his firearm.

"You know that, what was it, that little Uppercut wheel you smackered off me last week?" Two-Bit inquires with hands steepled before his mouth. "Have you got it on you?"

"Sure. Why?"

Advancing his clasped hands, Two-Bit makes his pitch. "Could you possibly bum it back to me? Just for a spell. Just 'till the flaster is over. Me own's just gone all chaveled on me."

Danbonte flinches left as an orange bolt streaks narrowly past his ear. He punishes its contributor with a trio of canisters of his own before consenting. "Okay. She's only got the four shots, remember."

"Oh, sublime. That'll be jig," Two-Bit claps once. "Buzz her over to me, willya?"

A devilish grin meanders onto his red lips. "Fifty cred."

Two-Bit blinks. "You're taking the fooge."

"What, you think I'm running a charity back here? Fifty cred to lease a piece's a solid deal."

Garrigan unleashes another supercharged round from the late Captain Barso's reappropriated shotgun. "Get bent, Danbonte."

"Fifty cred for four canisters?" Two-Bit gainsays.

"Fair. Forty cred for four canisters."

Two-Bit flattens a palm against his forehead. "Thirty-five."

"Deal," Danbonte compromises, sliding the clip out of his custom-modified handgun. "Fork it over."

Misplaced gunfire rattles the table he leans against as Two-Bit fingers out a paltry handful of banknotes from the depths of his trouser pocket. Counting out thirty-five square, he passes it forward to Danbonte, who merrily collects his prize before tossing the brass-knuckle-shaped sidearm playfully to Two-Bit. "You're a schiesty little bleeder, you know that, Danbonte?"

The redskinned mercenary pockets the impromptu fee, thrusts an unspent clip into the butt of his pistol, takes precise aim and shrugs with an "I've heard worse," before opening fire again.

Wrapping his fingers through the familiar grips of his recently bygone handgun, Two-Bit Switch, finally armed if only for four shots, regains his bearings and browses the brawl for his emasculated rival. Like shovel-snout frackers popping out of their burrows, a veritable array of Nabdres' ilk belabors the _Lover's_ crew with seemingly endless barrages, situated from a number of secure points along the bar and against the door. By Two-Bit's squinty calculation, of the dozen or so assembled muscle, two Diraaqi cadavers stain the barroom floor green while another two remain in the ranks of the five Triommans and one Prul in Nabdres' collective employ.

As neither of the downed Diraaqi particularly resemble No-Cock anymore than either of the remaining two, Two-Bit aligns the Uppercut's stubby snout toward the nearby cigarette dispenser and times out his return fire. Sure enough, after several seconds, a prickly Diraaqi countenance surfaces around the vending machine's lip and Two-Bit lets fly, clenching his fists to engage the pistol's odd triggers. His first two shots whiz wide, sizzling sizable scorches into the wall, his third shot smashes the machines' display screen, half-frightening the Diraaqi gunman back into cover, before Two-Bit's fourth shot opens his temple, clobbers his head against the dispenser's buffer and spills his quivering form to the tile.

Before he can register precisely what's struck him, something clouts him furiously on the shoulder, nearly plowing him straight into the table. For the briefest of moments, he fears he's somehow been shot from behind, but Ebeneezer's throaty laughter mollifies that notion almost immediately. Resting his prodigious purple hand on one of Two-Bit's proportionately diminutive shoulders, Ebeneezer favors him with a toothy beam.

"Four shots well spent, eh, little man?"

"Scanty so. Weren't for that last one, the whole thing woulda gone lollies-up," he concludes, tossing the useless weapon disdainfully to the floor. "And now I'm still one wheel short."

Over this point Ebeneezer seems to brood a moment, before peering left and suggesting, as matter-of-factly as Two-Bit Switch had ever seen the rather rational bruiser suggest anything, "Take his."

Slouched cartoonishly against the corner of the sparking cigarette machine, the dead Diraaqi had relinquished his hold on his own weapon and the abdicated assault rifle, spattered with emerald blood, lies, barely visible beneath his crumbled corpse, a scant fifteen feet past Ebeneezer's left. However, transgressing that modest expanse would parade the transgressor in question across fifteen feet of uninterrupted exposure from two Triommans and a Prul's worth of Nabdres' triggermen. It would also require no short supply of cover fire and even more frenzied dashing, something typically best left for the Captain's doing.

"That's a bit of a hazard, that is," Two-Bit summarizes, scrutinizing the fire arcs of the potential assailants to which he'd, however fleetingly, present himself. Ebeneezer, after plugging another set of buckshot shells into the chamber of his Backlash, latches the rifle back into one piece and shrugs another of his titanic shrugs.

"What, you think I won't cover ya?"

Several jostling seconds pass before Two-Bit and Ebeneezer have arranged themselves appropriately for the upcoming gambit, during which a mistimed Halisdro projectile pulverizes the shufflefeed into a smoldering hulk and unwittingly grinds it into enervated operation, though, instead of the jouncy Nosebleeds tune it was perhaps slotted to play, it belches out a glitched, bloodless version thereof. Two-Bit has, in response to the klutzy clamor, enough time to comment "Peachy" before Ebeneezer's hollered "Go!" commands him into action.

Propelling himself forward at the exact moment his cyclopean safeguard jettisons out a fine mist of hypercharged ditrogen as covering fire, Two-Bit Switch skedaddles across the fifteen-foot stretch on all fours, like a peevish child pussyfooting punishment. By the time Ebeneezer's second canister impacts the bar, hacking and chiseling away the shoddy titanium, Two-Bit's slid well into safety, the combined thickness of the defunct cigarette machine and the westernmost corner of the bar itself between his foes and his person, with only a handful of glancing blast marks marring his passage.

Wasting precisely no time acquainting himself with his new surroundings, Two-Bit promptly dislodges the corpse to retrieve the castoff assault rifle. Just before he pumps the shiny new bolt on his shiny new weapon and scoots the Diraaqi's body into the well of the tavern proper with the heel of his boot, something odd catches Two-Bit's eye: a second assault rifle, slung across the Diraaqi's second shoulder. Currently hefting one of the unwieldy babies in his own two hands, Two-Bit acknowledges the bulkiness of this particular model of Halisdro; dual-wielding such a ponderous weapon would require someone with at an expert level of marksmanship or rather, as it dawns on Two-Bit, someone with a desperate need to overcompensate.

Yanking the deceased Diraaqi back into concealment by the lapel of a suddenly familiar combat vest, Two-Bit's closer inspection indeed reveals a slack-jawed Nabdres No-Cock, nearly a year older than his previous incarnation and presently varnishing the tiled floor of Loose Lips under a steady stream of his gummy green brains. Mindful not to accidentally confirm No-Cock's namesake as he does so, Two-Bit hurriedly frisks the leaking remains of his former comrade and, after a swift search, he uncovers, in addition to a crumpled public transit stub and some loose change, a humble handful of linked property keys, roughly analogous to those Two-Bit had last observed, dangling idly from _The Dead Messenger's_ ignition port, ten months ago.

Two-Bit Switch whirligigs the looted starship keys around his pointer finger once before hoisting them over his head. "Cap'n," he addresses, jangling the pendent prize for added effect, "I got the–"

A small circle of scalding metal, like a burning brand, delicately introduces itself to the nape of Two-Bit's neck. He doesn't need to glance back to recognize the shape of a firearm's muzzle, in all likelihood a Halisdro-make assault rifle, judging from the configuration of the selfsame weapon lying fruitlessly at his knees, though the reflection granted by the shattered glass of the cigarette machine substantiates the Prul, a female in fact, leaning heavily over the bar top, who currently holds Two-Bit Switch at a significant disadvantage. "On your feet," she urges in a croaky Prulish accent, emphasizing the order with the tip of her loaded rifle.

Complete with begrudging sigh, Two-Bit complies, blossoming both hands to reveal empty palms, save for the key ring still quietly clinking at his knuckle. The Prul, who'd somehow managed to shield herself from potential reprisals behind the sputtering jalopy of a cigarette machine, prattles something in glottal Triomman to her confederates before barking "Put up your pistols or I'll empty the whole chamber into his brain" in Commercial.

Bolt by bolt, the crossfire begins to gradually diminish and finally abates altogether, as the crew of _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ individually lower their weapons and each instead brandish the universal "held-at-gunpoint" gesture of empty, raised hands. All the multi-toned shrieking, chopping and twanging of the firefight is unanticipatedly replaced by the shufflefeed's seesawing pseudo-song and the remotest peal of distant sirens. As unprecedented as its pithy beginning, Two-Bit Switch's most recent caper ends with a cantina full of disarmed pirates and the Captain's flippant disparagement.

"Sublime, Two-Bit," he commends, gazing about the room with his vintage pistol drooping flaccidly off his trigger finger. "Sublime."

–––

Moira Quicksilver has literally just begun urinating when she hears the first shot. A bawling blast, unlike the discharge of any modern pistol, a sound Moira has come to recognize as Nemo's signature Carbon Industrial piece, harbingers the downpour and, within moments, the alehouse immediately beyond the bathroom door disorders into the makings of a truly rowdy gunfight. Unchaining enough squalid profanity to curdle milk, Moira does what precious little she can do to expedite things below and, short of discontinuing entirely and taking her chances with wetting herself, she isn't exactly flush with options.

In Two-Bit Switch's infinite wisdom, they'd apparently preempted Nabdres' arrival by some significant margin and, after two straight hours of sipping substandard gin and watching the windows' incessant buffeting at the hands of boundless leagues of tidal waves and limitless cascades of driving rain, Moira hazarded the briefest of bathroom breaks, reckoning that her chances of missing the action during the ninety seconds she'd spend relieving herself were slim to none.

Yet here she squatted, helplessly micturating in the safety of the southernmost stall, while stray bolts splinter booze bottles, titanium-topped tables are capsized for temporary cover and all the ribald ruffianism of a barroom brawl roils on without her.

She's rapidly unraveling reams of toilet tissue when the fizzling murmur of her pocketed comm, signifying an incoming transmission, echoes its droning cry across the empty bathroom. She's plunging both hands in the tepid water of the basin, though she'd fleetingly considered foregoing that particular nicety before better judgment seized her, when some form of tuneless electronic melody lends its voice to the uproarious chaos without. She's just finally banishing the excess moisture from her hands that the basin's inefficient dryer couldn't oust with a few brisk snaps of her wrists when the gunfire sequentially dies out.

Easing matching pistols from matching holsters, Moira flattens an ear against the bathroom door and attempts to administer an aural survey of the room beyond, despite the atonal fanfare and the relative thickness of the door. Several potential outcomes could result in an abrupt ceasefire and normally, prudence was most advisable when interjecting oneself into any preexisting hostilities. Yet, even through the ambient noise, she's able to discern the prevalence of an unknown voice evidently issuing orders, a general gabble of nondescript Triomman muttering and the unmistakable sound of the Captain's cloying submission, as obvious an indication that a little two-fisted deliverance would perhaps be in order as she required.

An oddity for any modern colonial establishment, the door to Loose Lips' women's bathroom is an outmoded hinge job and consequently, Moira Quicksilver fancies herself an old-fashioned desperado when she unceremoniously kicks her way into the saloon proper, parallel pistols fully extended and expulsed door freewheeling apart. A female Prul, holding Two-Bit at barrel's end while issuing instructions to an adjacent underling with a harsh point outward, receives a complimentary perforation clean through her elbow joint, courtesy of Lefty's opening pleasantries, before her Triomman lackey enjoys Righty's corollary statement directly between the eyes.

Triumphantly pillaging the persons of their kneeling captives and the majority of their weapons discarded or disarmed by treacherous victory, the surviving six of the _Messenger's_ crewmen are plumb oblivious to Moira's grand entrance until she's loosed her first four shots, a window of time she exploits for its undiluted worth. As the proned Prul, howling undoubted expletives in hooting Prulish, flounders on the floor and claws at her soon-to-be-severed forearm, Righty and Lefty zero and eliminate the next nearest Triommans, flopping the first forward to crack his forehead against the barhop with a bolt to his bulbous gut and toppling the second backward into the racked alcohol with an explosive neck shot.

Finally, with four of their number instantaneously incapacitated, Nabdres' remaining rowdies respond to Moira's unforeseen barrage, two snatching up idle assault rifles and the third scurrying toward the shelter of an inverted barroom table. Moira smears the tile sooty, mere inches ahead of his scrambling gait, with an ill-timed trigger but Righty recovers, burying its bolt in the Triomman's unprotected armpit and flummoxing his breakneck retreat into a literally breakneck stumble.

A Halisdro snaps twice, corresponding orange streaks caterwauling past to poke pocks in the thermosteel composite. Moira lambastes the offending Diraaqi beneath both pistols' bombardment, utterly overwhelming him with brilliant yellow laserfire. From the opposite vector, something equally brilliant but incandescent orange chars a clear strip up Moira's ebony sweater sleeve, narrowly singeing not just the cloth, but a swath of arm hair as well.

The crackshot in question, the final capable crewman of _The Dead Messenger_ is, of course, a jeering Triomman, bunkered behind the obliterated bar and jerking the chamber closed on his recovered firearm. Nowadays, with the remains of his posse dead or mangled at his feet, any last man favored yielding or at least withdrawal in preference to actually standing, but it seems this orphaned Triomman heavy, cocking his weapon and muttering a mulish challenge, hankered for an exit worthy of the erstwhile art of showing down. This is a yearning Moira Quicksilver, seasoned duelist, is only too charmed to oblige.

For this task, she elects only Lefty. Leveling the single six-gun toward her single enduring opponent, Moira thumbs the hammer back and aligns the necessary adjustments to submerge a canister into his skull during the moment the Triomman spends upraising the clunky weapon to his beady eye. With the merest of sighs, Moira Quicksilver clicks the round out of the chamber, down the elongated barrel, across the breadth of the bar, meteorically through the Triomman's cranium and, accompanied by a squirt of escaping blood, into a half-full bottle of blue whisky.

The final Triomman sags to a floor saturated in his spilled brains and the _Lover's_ emerging crew collect themselves from the makeshift refuges they'd lunged to during the gunfight's brief epilogue. For a few passing seconds, Loose Lips is approximately peaceful, save the husky whining of the dismembered Prul and the discordant drawl, which resolves itself as the joint's injured shufflefeed, a monstrosity Moira hastily euthanizes with a second shot from Righty.

With otherworldly sirens yowling several districts away, the conquering pirates begin to reclaim plundered weapons and despoil the cadaverous gunrunners' own personal goods when Moira makes brief eye contact with the Captain, disentangling himself from Odisseus and clambering awkwardly out of cover. On his hands and knees, he glances up to catch sight of his first mate, treating him to a flinty smile and one vainglorious pistol-twirl, before sheathing her signature sidearms.

For once, Nemo rolls his eyes.

–––

Odisseus watches the man burn. It's a remarkably short spectacle – a plume of white-hot holocaust which washes the chamber's corrugated walls unholy orange for an exceedingly brief moment. During today's first immolation, Odisseus had literally blinked at the exact wrong second and where once a prostrated prisoner knelt, a meager whiff of soot spontaneously flourished instead. As Ott's attending technician effusively opines, the incineration was rapid enough to outdistance not only any screaming but also apparently the actual pain, though Odisseus doubted the pandering little Treffel spoke from personal experience on the matter.

"Whoosh!" Nemo exclaims for the fifth time, arrested with childlike wonderment at the whole production, a display the more discerning Ortok found gruesomely distasteful. Though, as Nemo's sworn saltbrother, Odisseus reluctantly concedes a small measure of gruff satisfaction at the repellent's results.

To Nemo's eventual left, Boss Ott, sitting the chiseled stone steps that promenade down from his vacant high seat, firmly weaves his upper arms together, drops his lower elbows to his kneecaps and gestures towards vo Qwer with a stiff inclination of the jaw. The definitively laconic Baziron obliges, depositing the next sopping captive, who tumbles awkwardly into the depression, with an unforgiving shove to the shoulder. "Which somewhat exacerbates my situation with Xo, as I'm sure you'd understand," Ott continues.

"How many are left?" Nemo interjects, jabbing an absent finger toward the heaving prisoner.

Ott's lower right arm languidly scratches his chest. "Two, I believe?"

"Indeed," Rymple confirms, nodding his petite head. "One final Corporal and then the Captain." The Treffel cohort, temporarily filling Ott's recently vacated "aide-de-camp" position, lingers the closest to the Imperium commando as any of them, vo Qwer lurking a taciturn vigil somewhere beyond the entrance, Odisseus posted at the foot of the relevant staircase that Nemo lounges on, with the Galactic Menace reposed on the next flight over. All five of them, however, focus their attention firmly upon the cavity's sole occupant.

This one, a particularly scruffy specimen among the entire unkempt roster, spews a mouthful of repellent and fumes up at Ott, between saturated strands of matted black hair, with that hackneyed expression of hate, that stale silent vengeance pointlessly pledged by every sentient Odisseus had seen put to death this morning. This one, the First Corporal and subsequently the second-highest ranked among this most recently acquired crop of detainees, was gifted with the distinct displeasure of watching each and every one of his company, with the notable exception of his Captain, violently cremated before his very eyes. The deliberate practice of this, according to Rymple, ought to compel confessions out of those with ostensibly the most information but, as far as Odisseus could discern, seemed to breed bitter recalcitrance instead.

Half the morning they'd devoted to exterminating another score or so of the Insurgent Company commando captives Ott had accrued while the _Lover's_ crew went about the Galactic Menace's illicit business on Haess. While he'd purchased the entirety of the _Messenger's_ hold, a voluminous supply of Halisdro-make assault rifles, for the munificent price of four hundred thousand in hard currency, as well as arranged profuse accommodations for the conscript crew within his palatial fastness on Baz's northern pole, Odisseus couldn't seem to shake himself of the growing suspicion that they were, the Captain especially, being coiled ever so gradually around a great blue finger.

"Who is your commanding officer?" Rymple intones with as much thunder as the elfin little Treffel can muster. In keeping with tradition, the prisoner is reticent; only pants with persecution, ineffectually twists his magnetic bonds and mutters his disobliging shibboleth.

"First Corporal Farriq, Group GH44, Insurgent Company," he hisses emphatically with a voice drenched more in rancor than he himself was in repellent. Ott reaches for his Bubble.

"I'm sorry – you were saying?" Nemo proffers conversationally.

"Xo doesn't make a move unless they can wear gloves while doing it," Ott reiterates, raising the soda can to his lips, before adding, "and that's where the trouble began."

Nemo pauses a breath. "What do you mean?"

"Where were you stationed?" Rymple persists, undiscouraged, though again, the decumbent captive remains uncommunicative, brushing unctuous locks from his eyes to afford himself a better view of his persecutors, in order to continue adhering Ott with more murderous scorn.

"First Corporal Farriq, Group GH44, Insurgent Company."

Ott dabs the carbonated residue from his lips with the meat of his lower right wrist before elucidating. "Perhaps, what, six or seven months ago, I received what was then a scintillating offer from 'Our Ingratiating Overlords of the Cleft-Assholes.' Seems they'd chanced upon a score, or rather an opportunity for a score, which they figured was a little over their heads and wanted to pool resources."

"Sure," Nemo guardedly allows.

The Doreen kingpin waves a condoning gesture with the aluminum can. "I'm cautiously optimistic, you know, make the necessary noises and they inform me that, basically, they're looking to move several capital haulers worth of contraband. Through the Haliquant Sector."

"That's a war-zone," Nemo bemusedly recognizes. "That sector's sanctioned worse than this one."

"Exactly."

Finally, Rymple concludes with his last unanswered question, igniting a sparker as he speaks. "What were your orders?" The Corporal, instinctively glimpsing the frizzling sparker for a moment, hastily reinstates his glower towards Ott who, in turn, retorts with another quaff of his soda pop.

"First Corporal Farriq, Group GH44, Insurgent Company."

With that, no information gained, no troop movements learned, Rymple casts the enkindled sparker into the depression with a stilted sigh and, on cue, a titanic gout of iridescent hellfire voraciously devours the Imperium commando corporal with such ferocity as to literally leave only ashes.

"Whoosh!" Nemo blurts out as Ott buckles and crunches the empty Bubble can in a fist.

Momentarily abating his anecdote, Ott beckons down the slender hallway with a scooping motion and vo Qwer emerges to physically drag the final hostage, smearing a wake of repellent behind him like some enormous wet gastropod, across the thermosteel floor and tumble him into the crevice.

"So, wait, what was the cargo?" Nemo strives to clarify, but Odisseus catches sight of Ott's subsequent countenance presumably before the Captain does.

Boss Ott's expression is stony remonstrance. "By all the moons, boy. Any more invasive questions?"

"I wasn't–" Nemo blusters a beat before the Treffel aide-de-camp interrupts.

"Should I proceed, Boss?" Competing levels of both humility and inconvenience temper Rymple's request. Ott nods his consent and reinforces his reclining head with buttressed upper arms before continuing his tale, apparently unperturbed by Nemo's faux pas.

"Like I said, flagrant acts of treason tend to run directly contrary to Xo's particular brand of business ethics, which one might politely describe as, say, 'serpentine.' Conversely, however, they weren't exactly about to let as profitable a prospect as this one pass them by or worse, land in some competitor's lap. Chiefly, mine."

"The best way to remove you from the equation is to cut you in," Nemo appraises.

"Smart kid." Without line of sight, Odisseus confirms the particular brand of self-satisfied grin Nemo's face crescendoes into.

Rymple clears his miniscule throat. "Who is your commanding officer?" This latest detainee, weapons-grade accelerant glistening off the seemingly polished pate of his bald head, appears entirely less composed than the remainder of his incinerated platoon, blackening the worn knees of his combat trousers. Toiling unsuccessfully against tears, he sputters out his name and rank with considerably more difficulty than his vanquished underlings.

"Field Captain...Haldaz, Group...GH44, Insurgent, Insurgent, uh, Company..."

"They habitually downplay my importance in the maneuver, of course," Ott proceeds, completely heedless to the interrogation exhibited before his distracted feet. "In exchange for official courtesy and an unspecified token, Huong Xo requires the use of craft, ostensibly, but what they're actually after–"

"–is a stooge," Nemo completes. "A patsy. You move the contraband, you take the heat and Xo takes the goodies?"

"At this point, heat's no deterrent for me. What, am I going to become more galactically menacing?" He shrugs his underpropping shoulders. "13 million's as effective as 15, 20 or even 30 million."

"Sure, but why wouldn't they just sub-contract out to a smaller-time middleman? Why run the risk tangling with someone who's obviously got the stones to contest them?"

"I believe," Ott construes casually, "Xo's supposition was that my mere presence discourages IMIS' direct involvement. Any other middleman, any black collar supplier Xo might approach for the task, would raise suspicion and prompt an investigation – exactly what they're looking to avoid. If Boss Ott's behind it, it's marked down to general outlawry on account of a rampant malefactor and annexes itself to my growing list of capital crimes."

"So, what, you went for it?"

Boss Ott bubbles a sigh between browbeaten lips. "Unfortunately. That seems to be my biggest mistake of this whole affair. At the time, Xo's favor or courtesy or what have you, sounded at least useful and besides, you know how they operate, with the holodecks and such – finer negotiations are virtually impossible. The effectively irrelevant risk seemed worth a superficial reward, especially considering my circumstances here." The Doreen adjusts his posture, planting both sets of elbows on separate stairs as he summarizes. "I enlisted three capital-class cargo ships, each with outstanding Imperium warrants and each specifically associated with my operation and, for the most part, the actual transaction was a notable success."

"Where were you stationed?" Rymple blathers forward and despite the Treffel's utter lack of presence, the waterlogged commando captain is fully cowed, practically unresponsive to any of the questions offered. Only after Rymple restates the question, with a barely perceptible spike in portent, does this Captain Haldaz blearily attempt to chime his ingrained byword, only to renege halfway through and devolve into dismayed mutterings.

"Was it worth it, though?" Nemo presses.

"Oddly enough, no. Or it hasn't been yet, I should say. Rather, it's actually resulted in a pronounced detriment not only to my activities abroad, but even here on the home front."

"Yeah?"

"Apparently IMIS interpreted my involvement in the proceedings as some misguided endeavor on my part to interfere with the Haliquant campaign and, according to my Imperium sources, the powers-that-be now consider me a threat of entirely different color. Which, if increased landing craft are any indication, has manifested itself in a relative swell of troop activity these past few months."

Nemo hesitates before seeking a resolution. "And Xo?"

"Gifts, mostly, in addition to a nominal fee, scarcely enough to cover the initial fuel costs. Those vats of Triomman blood," he seems to suddenly recall, "which the Baziron headsmen I'm attempting to ply with appreciate on spec, but fail to regard as anything but a blank bestowal. This inquisition well," he illustrates with a vague gesture about the room, "and the suite of architects and masons necessary to construct the thing."

Odisseus glances about the "inquisition well," a great tapering shaft of a chamber, clearly contrived to dwarf any hapless being thrown both into the shallow bowl at the room's conical bottom and before the anonymous mercy of the ten lofted arbiters, atop their encircling heights. With the severity of the partitions, the lighting's theatricality and the general specification toward occupants of roughly Quuilar Noxix's spindly proportions, it wasn't difficult to imagine the ten Yheum cabalists who comprised the galaxy's predominant criminal syndicate utilizing a chamber as austere and terrible as this.

"This is precisely why I've attempted to even the score a little."

"By interfering with their–"

"By stealing those prototypes," Ott punctuates, before centering his attention back toward the dripping prisoner and his imminent doom. "By inducting you into my service."

Odisseus furrows his brow, half-tempted to interject, when Rymple prepares to conclude the morning's inquiries. Energizing his twenty-third sparker, the Treffel extends his last question and consequently, the commando's final moments.

"What were your orders?"

Shuddering at the sight of the sizzling sparker clutched in Rymple's upraised paw, Haldaz wriggles wetly in his magnetic restraints and incoherently fumbles over the recitation.

"Oooh, hey, wait," halts Rymple from hoisting back the activated torch. The Treffel glances back to spot, scrambling down the precipitous steps ascending over Odisseus' left shoulder, Nemo, rapidly en route down the sheer stairs and onto the floor proper, with palm outstretched. "Lemme do it."

After an endorsing wave from the roosted Ott, Rymple hesitantly hands the smoking sparker to the sneering Captain, made zestfully pernicious when armed with a tool of such sudden, assured destruction. Haldaz, bearing witness both to this unforeseen exchange and the murderous visage of his latest executioner, blanches a fresh shade of pale.

"Be fucked and die, you–" is all Nemo has time to utter before he's interrupted himself by the hurriedly truckling hostage, stammering out a half-shouted plea.

"Field General Pluvosh, Central Ground Command, Insurgent Company!"

Nemo stays his hand a moment, briefly perplexed. "...is?"

"Is his _commanding officer_ ," Ott starkly apprehends, rising off his perch, "Nemo, hold off a minute!" Looking supremely disappointed, Nemo deactivates the sparker and shuffles several paces back as Ott begins to disembark the arduous staircase. "I thought Pluvosh commanded operations on the southwestern continent."

"Grant me clemency," Haldaz pleadingly beseeches.

"Clemency granted. I thought Pluvosh commanded operations on the southwestern continent."

"He, um, he was promoted," the basted captive hems and haws as he reveals, "to the head of a task force, here, on the northern continent. Groups GH, TS and CC, I believe, were all, uh, what do you call it, redistributed?"

Ott alights ungainfully to the inquisition well's main floor, standing slightly winded to Nemo's immediate right. "To what end?"

Haldaz who'd, up until this moment, fixed his jittery gaze directly into the puddles of excess repellent pooling at his knees, braves an irresolute glance up at the now-looming figure of the Galactic Menace. "Yours," he shrinkingly confesses.

Boss Ott absorbs the room's additional three scrutinies well, Odisseus' included, the Doreen sniffing dispassionately and demanding, with a certain degree of boredom lacing his voice, "What were your orders?"

"Uh, engage the abbers on the northern continent as much as possible–"

"Abbers?" Nemo requests quickly.

Ott supplies him a withering look. "Imperium military parlance for aboriginals. Continue."

Haldaz struggles to gesture a progression through his restraints. "Uh, engage the abbers, provoke a response and, uh, well, CGC has, um, currently very little information on your whereabouts, so I believe the goal was to, uh," he noisily swallows, as if to force the answer back down his throat, "take a hostage."

Nemo snorts. "Good job."

Rymple, however, does little to hide his incredulity. "We've heard absolutely nothing about this from the Dancing-Horizon," he conjectures. "Is this information even reliable?"

Ott meanders a scratching finger along the rim of his broad chin as he considers. "It certainly sounds in-character for koj Hhenel to withhold that sort of thing from a report." He exhales wearily and crosses both sets of forearms. "Well, we'll have to find out, won't we? Anything else, Captain?"

The prisoner flops prostrate against the sloping surface of the crater with a sodden squish. "I swear, that's all I know. I was just a Field Captain. I follow orders. I swear."

"Hm," Ott grunts, unsatisfied. "Too bad. Nemo?"

Like a child on his birthday, Odisseus' saltbrother ruptures into an exultant and profoundly nefarious grin before he triggers the sparker afire once again. Haldaz has barely a second to glimpse his incoming fiery destruction as Nemo consummates his fathomless hatred for the Endless Imperium with a simple "Drink deep, cocksucker," and tosses the conflagrant sparker into the bowl.

Chapter 13

Moira Quicksilver executes a passable Headlong Buhox, ramming her forehead directly into her opponent's chalky countenance. She follows this with a shoddy Clapping Ksaosiok, viciously snapping both wrists to the crux of its imagined neck. She finishes with a flawless Oabbra's Visegrip, simultaneously kicking high left with her right knee and chopping low right with her right fist in order to instantaneously hook and topple her bulky, leathern adversary.

The punching bag recoils, jouncing wildly about with the links of its ceiling-pinioned lead rattling. Garrigan, seconds before the haymaker, releases his steadying hold and inches half a step away, to avoid being incapacitated himself. Moira, exhaling a fierce athlete's breath, matches the bag's drunken dizziness with her own boxer's bounce and dashes some of the sweat from her eyes. "I'm gonna try the clap again – I didn't get enough torque that second time."

Garrigan spews a wad of masticated fungus from his mouth. "Sure," he vacantly concedes between upraised hands.

This particular move set continued to vex Moira, mostly because the specific combination was itself a little nebulous, only hinging on the effectiveness of the conclusive Visegrip, and thusly, its exact preluding ploy was pretty much dependent on the individual Gali's fancy. Moira typically settled upon the aggregate cranial discombobulation afforded her by the jolt of a Buhox's fierce headbutt mated to the momentary paralysis a Ksasosiok's polarized clap induced. However, this combo tactic was measurably slower than the one-hit-wonders most brawnier practitioners could usually rely on and Quicksilver, of significantly slighter build than the average specimen of the martial art's founding species, scrambled to compensate.

Moira undertakes the routine a third time, with an exact eye toward achieving the necessary leverage to maximize the clap's efficiency. She decreases the headbutt's initial drawback, amending the Buhox from a brutal nose-breaker into a mere bell-ringer. This allows her the necessary nanoseconds to properly focus the kinetic energy of the clap and deliver a vectored strike potent enough to fully disconnect the punching bag from its crook. The attendant Visegrip arrives just in time to callously clobber the bag with a leathery slap to the thermosteel floor.

Panting perspiry over the fallen form of her fat inanimate foe, Moira Quicksilver sweeps the sparse occupants of Ott's subterranean gymnasium, as if in challenge or defiance, like a spent predator standing vigil over the carcass of sought-after prey. The smattering of off-duty muscle and tight bevy of vo Qwer's Baziron faithfuls seem bored or unimpressed. Garrigan golf-claps.

"That'll do, I guess," Moira breathlessly intones.

"Question," Garrigan poses as he kneels to collect the crumpled remains of the lambasted bag. "I can't imagine too many of your theoretical opponents would have, what's the word, the _courtesy_ to just swing there, waiting to have the ever-blooming shit slapped out of them, would they?"

Moira bops back a little, throwing a few playfully pantomimed punches. "Probably not," she concedes.

Steadying himself against the weight of the pendant chain, Garrigan rises, bag cockled over his shoulder, and begins fussing with the hooking mechanism. "Then, what's the point?"

"Of a martial art?" she clarifies, mopping her brow with a forearm.

"Yeah."

"Ostensibly, discipline," is her short answer to a question Nemo'd pestered her about ever since he stumbled onto her rehearsal in the abandoned hold during an extremely lengthy layover on Cothmozar. "Focuses your mind, maximizes your output." She sidesteps left to snatch her draped towel off the adjacent chair before adding. "I don't know – seemed like a good idea for a bounty hunter."

"And you keep up with it?"

"Apparently."

Snapping the clasp connected and shuffling the sack off his shoulder, Garrigan allows sufficient berth for the punching bag to dangle, relocating himself to the seat left vacant by Moira's towel. "So, this is just in case you miss them with _both_ of your pistols?"

Her face freshly swabbed, Moira peevishly pitches the damp towel from whence it came and subsequently into Garrigan's unsuspecting face. He fumbles with the castoff cloth a moment, before draping it over the aloft railing and stooping to the ground to retrieve his own discarded items. As Moira deposits herself into a Counterbalanced Gracko stance, Garrigan gathers up the unhinged exertion sleeve and withdraws another sinewy, shaved stem from his tepid glass of jehorak mushrooms. He slides the former clumsily around his left calf and pops the latter into his waiting mouth.

It had been no simple task requisitioning jehorak mushroom this far from Nos Mantri, even for Ott's exquisitely stocked larder. Yet, after several abortive efforts to combat his voracious Vapid withdrawals, regularly chewing on cured stems of its component fungi had yielded the most measurable remedy of the narcotic's exorbitant aftereffects on the _Lover's_ undergunner. After only five days of nibbling mushroom stems, the changes to his demeanor, activeness and appetite had been gradual but profound, ameliorating even his appearance into something resembling a humanoid being from the malodorous skeleton he'd seemed less than a week previously.

Regardless, Ott's Nyvo kitchen master persisted in looking down his forked snout at her whenever Moira arrived in his expansive galley to replenish Garrigan's depleted stock of jehorak stems, a repeated reminder of the tenuousness of their position within Ott's criminal household.

Such implicit admonitions were never more present than in the company of vo Qwer and his outfit of allegiant Baziron. Moira instigates her first bout of left knee strikes and Garrigan switches the exertion sleeve on with a clack and accompanying hum as the seven such Baziron patriots bore of free weights. Clustered together like a departing flock of scavengers, the Baziron take their collective leave of the gymnasium via the distant lift tube, all prattling amongst themselves with their thrumming throat sacs, all spoiling at Moira with those distrustful scowls their mouthless faces seem to perpetually leer outward.

"Abbers," Garrigan breathes when the sibilating troop is safely out of earshot. Watching them retire over her shoulder, Moira pounds the bag with a knee.

They were an odd and disquieting breed, these queer sanguivores of Baz's bloodless bush. In the fourteen days the crew had frittered away, savoring the manifold comforts and profuse succors of the Galactic Menace's polar fortress, Moira had casually observed the movements and behavior of the taciturn vo Qwer; Ott's mute shadow and the ringleader of this group of native militants.

From what little information she'd managed to glean, vo Qwer began his service to the Galactic Menace as a gift, an emissary of sorts from the "Dancing-Horizon kojaj" as Ott referred to it, presumably one of the several Baziron tribes dwelling on the planet's northern continent. While he appeared a stout and unflappable guerrilla, vanguard and pathfinder, the dietary and cultural barriers kept him at arm's length from Nemo's commissioned cutthroats and even Ott's own brigand band. If the sedate Baziron ranger or any of his roughly two-dozen hangers-on took offense at the considerable berth afforded them, however, they gave no outward sign.

While the enlisted natives, vo Qwer included, seemed to, however reluctantly, tolerate the cooperation of Ott's established pillagers, their exact opinion of Nemo, Moira and the rest of their irregulars was relatively indiscernible across the mammoth ethnic gap.

Moira eyes Garrigan. "Not a fan?"

"I don't know – I feel sorry for the silly blowbags."

She halts a beat, hesitating on one foot, before delivering another punt. "Why?"

Garrigan withdraws the jehorak stem between pointer and middle finger as he considers. "Well, that's the whole notion, isn't it? The plucky, fractious natives fending off the militaristic invaders for home and hearth, right?" He places the stem's butt between the right side of his bite, almost imperceptibly shaking his head. "At least the Mantrians had the foresight to assimilate."

"You see combat out there?"

Garrigan snorts. "Through the window of our embarking cruiser, maybe." The exertion sleeve packaging his lower leg ceases humming and he reaches down to unfasten it. "Moons, this woulda been, what, twelve, thirteen years ago and, as I remember it, by the time the 16th Fleet arrived, most of the truly deplorable shit was pretty much over. Besides which," he adds, peeling the limp device off his clammy calf, "tail gunners typically don't see a lot of ground action."

Moira switches feet. "Fair."

"I did, however," he comments, gingerly cinching the sleeve around the meat of his left thigh, "spent some quality leave time there, you know, absorbing a little _local color_ ," he bares his teeth to highlight the fungal barb drooping like a stogie out of his mouth, "and we all know how well that went." He dials a few settings into the sleeve's menu before muttering "And not just for me."

Moira wallops too hard, sending the kick-addled sack lurching away, and she spares Garrigan a brief glance before it returns to range. "For the Mantrians too?"

"The dumb ones, anyway." The exertion sleeve quivers into operation, blanketing and buffeting the enclosed thigh with repulsion and retraction waves to flex and exercise the muscles beneath, Garrigan wincing as his still-sore gunshot wound is gently kneaded. "See, that's the thing with abbers, the thing that pisses me all the way off. They regard themselves as these defiants, you know, fighting to the last man, fighting only for survival–"

"–and then the Imperium, of course, are just greedy cocksuckers, come to rape and despoil their planet for fun. Sure."

"They have no context, these indigenous." Garrigan adjusts his posture as he begins to relate. "You gotta think of the Imperium as a big hungry animal and, if seven centuries of galactic conquest have taught us anything, we oughta know that an animal doesn't like to get cornered. When that happens, it'll eat anything its gotta to survive. Governments, people, planets – all more grist for the mill."

Moira desists her kicking as Garrigan chomps the jehorak stem messily in twain and wrenches the protuberant end free, gesticulating with one severed stump while he summarizes around chewing the other. "The Imperium gets stuck on something, be it drugs or repellent or whatever, _they'll_ fight to the last man to take it – they've just got more ships and more guns and more men. Sooner, rather than later, they're gonna put a definitive end here – to Ott, the Baziron, all of it."

Moira lingers on one foot, watching Garrigan chew. "And the dumb Mantrians?"

He shrugs resolvedly. "They got smart or they got dead."

–––

Odisseus is thoroughly drenched. Chlorinated water continues to slough off his bristly fur, even after forty minutes surfaced, pooling in great puddles on the deckplates between his hind paws and potentially lessening _The Dead Messenger's_ overall market value. Nemo, though, snapping dials and twisting switches with complete disregard, has little ground to object, likewise sodden and dripping from their mid-afternoon swim.

He occupies the pilot's seat of this pilfered V&B GR-1 Interloper with all the authoritative impudence of her Captain, but with none of the infatuated homage he pays the _Lover_ whenever he graces her helmsman's chair. Juxtapositionally attired in only his scrappy pilot's duster and his sopping swim trunks, Nemo rebounds the swoop-back seat off the precarious limit of its reclination and shovels fork loads of Jowna directly from his battle-scarred pot and into his eager mouth. Swimming had always given the both of them monstrous appetites but even granted access to the vast multitudes of Ott's unreasonably well-provisioned larders, his saltbrother still unflaggingly favors dimestore instant noodles.

Odisseus, his big wet girth overwhelming a co-pilot's seat clearly built to accommodate a co-pilot of more Prulish proportions, flatters the red light of the navpanel with a disinterested glance. "Tell me when you see it."

Propping one foot against the counter, Nemo gradually hoofs the pilot's seat around to face the exposed wiring where the regulation grid had once been bolted. After a few prolonged seconds of slurping limp noodles into his mouth, Nemo frowns into the jumbled mess of crusty regulatory cables. "I see nothing."

"Nothing?" Odisseus squints in Nemo's general direction but, as always, his narrow eyesight fails him. "You should see prescribed activity on port and starboard alignment thrusters."

Nemo nudges his head a scant inch in each of said directions while harvesting another bundle of Jowna with successive gyrations of his fork. "What does it mean if I don't?"

"That I did something wrong," Odisseus quietly muses, regarding the navpanel with a consternated scowl.

Fresh off the factory floor, a GR-1 Interloper of the _Messenger's_ clean caliber could conservatively be audited at well over four times the _Lover's_ own totaled monetary value and, coupled with the various individual modifications, many costly and many more illegal, _The Dead Messenger_ was potentially the most profitable prize they'd ever managed to seize, especially considering that she was relatively undamaged, unlike the vast majority of the _Lover's_ previous catches.

However, with the promise of profuse proceeds came the need for assiduous maintenance and, as Moira and her four-man prize crew could attest to, Odisseus' shrewdness had indeed been well-founded. While _The Dead Messenger_ certainly compensated with premium equipment and embellished gadgetry, negligence had apparently been the order of the day under Nabdres', and quite possibly Two-Bit's, regime. Compounded laxity, mostly as regards to the auxiliary systems, had quietly accrued beneath undisturbed plates and panels, improprieties only brought to light under the Ortok's seasoned diligence.

Nemo considered rectifying wave after wave of minute mechanical indiscretions a tedious way to pass an afternoon, particularly in deference to swimming, but Odisseus found a certain degree of inexhaustible refreshment in starship repair aimed to his direct profit and unrelated to his direct destruction. Each fault he remedies denied the discerning buyer a chance to micro-disparage the _Messenger_ to a lower price and in the event he catastrophically botches a particular repair, he was unlikely to face any explosive consequences.

A constant in their provisional daily schedule, three hours of ten afternoons, directly following an invigorating hour in Ott's underground pool and unerringly preceding a dinner of authentic preserved dubix trout, were spent inspecting and examining the _Messenger_ for the open market. Swimming with his saltbrother, consistent meals of extinct fish and a state-of-the-art spaceship to tinker with – sixteen days of leave on Baz had been kind to Odisseus.

Now if he could only stabilize those navigational thrusters.

A modernized ringtone severs Odisseus' concentration as the dashboard comm unit emblazons an incoming transmission across its touch screen. Nemo and Odisseus reciprocate each other's wary glances and crane forward in concert to check their mysterious caller's scrolling identification number. "Unknown Herald," it claims, the sobriquet most communication computers assign to unregistered channels and subsequently, the telephonic alias of ninety percent of Bad Space, though the determining digits themselves are apparently appreciable to Nemo.

"Brondi."

"Sublime," Odisseus murmurs as Nemo taps the touch screen in question with a pinky, balancing an unstable noodle knot atop his upright fork.

"Nemo here."

"Permission to come aboard, Captain?" Brondi's oily arrogance, present even in such a seemingly complacent request, oozes from encircling dashboard speakers. Nemo appeals Odisseus with an irritated glance, to which the Ortok rolls his eyes and returns to the navpanel.

"Permission granted." With another tap and a combination of rapidly rapped keys, Nemo concurrently silences the transmission and initiates the lowering-ramp sequence before flopping back in his chair and thrusting the saturated wad of Jowna into his mouth. "What do you suppose he's after?" he manages from somewhere behind the noodles.

"Money," Odisseus flatly returns, toggling a string of switches to evidently little effect. "I'm thinking," he gladly changes the subject, "we've got a thruster fluctuation problem."

"Yeah?" Nemo grunts.

"Yeah." Odisseus reels his seat starboard to correlate his hypothesis against the computerized fuel register. "I'm getting no triangulation between navcontrol and the turbine motor. If this computer is to be believed, the flanges are properly adjusted, but if you're not reading activity, then they certainly aren't."

Nemo swallows the mouthful. "What do you think, then?"

"Missed synapse somewhere. Situation like this not commonly caused by software failure." He finishes fiddling and adjusts his posture to properly address Nemo, brushing matted wet fur from his eyes. "Probably hardware."

Nemo slings the presumably empty pot aside, clanking against the instrument panel and assuredly complimenting its already sizable array of scratches, scuffs and dings with a shiny new dent. "Expensive?"

"No reason to think so. Not yet, anyway. In theory, we could just be talking about a loose cable here. I won't know until I check."

"When you wanna do that?"

"Tomorrow, most likely. Should fuse down that compression pad first."

Nemo knits his fingers together and retires the chair to its previously reclined position, with an appreciable lack of the maudlin creak the _Lover's_ helm lends its furniture. "Wonder why it didn't give Moira any trouble."

"Yeah, I don't know," Odisseus surmises before the _Messenger's_ bridge door purrs wide to reveal Garrok Brondi, lightly stubbled, buttoned into a pressed waistcoat and smelling vaguely of perfume, as he retracts a gloved hand from the release button and somehow manages to swagger his single step into the room.

"I trust I'm not interrupting something?"

The Captain, still sprawled out at maximum accumbency, prods himself a quarter of the way around to catch Brondi at an incredulous slant. "Nice to see you all dolled-up, sweetheart."

"What, come a-courting?" Odisseus opines gruffly before refocusing his attention toward the navpanel.

"I'd hardly constitute socks and a shirt as 'dolled-up,' Captain." Brondi's return withers beneath characteristic disdain. "And how're those trunks working out for you?"

"Don't tell me you're putting on airs for whatsername, that second squad lancer everybody's getting their dicks wet about," Nemo struggles to recall with a succession of finger snaps before Odisseus contributes.

"Jakosha Joojberry?"

"Her. You got designs on Kivad's underlieutenant, Garrok?" Nemo spares a peek towards the clock before qualifying, "'cause if you do, I'd suggest you hurry or else Two-Bit's gonna beat you to the punch."

Brondi attempts to hide his bristle, straightening his waistcoat with a meager tug and answering oddly, "I've got designs."

"And which of these designs impels you to interrupt us today?"

"Uh," Brondi stammers in response to Odisseus' snarled rebuke.

"Whaddya want, Brondi?" Nemo translates bluntly.

The smuggler ganders two steps into _The Dead Messenger's_ solemnly beeping bridge with the companionable commentary of a passing pedestrian, as if noticing renovations to his neighbor's home for the first time. "How're the repairs going?"

"Slowly," Nemo relates as Odisseus continues to fiddle with the navpanel's keypad. "Today, it's..." he dangles beseechingly toward the co-pilot's seat.

"Turbine signal reception. As it specifically relates to navigation."

"That," Nemo confirms with a halfhearted point towards his saltbrother. "I don't know, _I_ think it's a little excessive, but Fishballs over there is convinced it'll fetch a higher price at market this way and I, being the fan of money that I am, see no reason to argue."

Brondi, left blinking behind the language barrier, nods dumbly and ambles a step starboard, to trace a finger along the lineament of the mainframe shielding fixture, a model probably a decade and more newer than the _Lover's_ and assuredly less grimy. "She's sure a jig little vessel, though."

"Sure is," comes the first hint of Nemo's suspicion, an ingrained incertitude Odisseus immediately attaches to any dealings with Garrok Brondi.

"How much?" Odisseus questions flatly. Brondi imparts Nemo with a quizzical look, but the Captain's adjusted his focus to his saltbrother.

"You really think so?"

"I really do."

"Care to share, Nemo, or...?" Brondi interjects with a vaguely unnerved glance to the Ortok.

"Odisseus smells an ulterior motive behind your unprecedented loitering." Nemo lolls his head off his propped wrist to realign a buoyant gaze toward their visitor. "How much you willing to shell out for her?"

Brondi barricades both biceps across his chest. "Three hundred. Even."

Odisseus makes little effort to swallow his scoff. Nemo patronizes Brondi beneath a deflated, bemused smirk. "Where'd you get that kinda scratch, smuggler?"

Struggling manfully to ignore Odisseus' flagrant depreciation, Brondi splays his right fingers off the muscle of his bicep. "Will have. Figure I chop up the _Rose_ , pool the cost of her organs with Rooster and I's winnings off this Haess thing – all that piled up oughta come out as three," he elucidates, feigning a faint unconcern. "Give or take."

Unlacing his fingers to ramble a right hand through the clumpy jungle of his still-drying hair, the Captain slings it straight. "There's half-a-dozen scrubbers right here in this sector'd pay more than six, I give 'em ship this fine. Why should I throw you a bone?"

It was an exaggeration perhaps, but at the very least a calculated one which, when measured against the steep standard of Nemo's recurrent "big fish" braggartism, found itself very solidly in the minority. In truth, only two feasible fencing options presented themselves within the Orbika Sector. A former associate of Two-Bit's, evidently an associate with less leftover chagrin than the late Nabdres No-Cock had borne for the slippery little jabberhead, oversaw a scrapbarn on Qel Qatar while Abraham, at some undisclosed point in a past decade, worked some thirty odd shifts driving an orbital sideloader for one of Foundry's two score shipyards and somehow managed to retain some handy business contacts. None of this, however, Brondi needs to know.

Odisseus didn't altogether hate Garrok Brondi. Indeed, having proved himself capable in scrap, more capable with a neticgrappler and possessing an allegedly well-earned reputation as a top-flight smuggler, Odisseus could perchance respect a man like Garrok Brondi, were it not for the profound mistrust of his every action. This was a man, barring his general and unprecedented avarice and that particular duplicity that clung about him like so many expensive perfumes, who, by all appearances, didn't bat a nostalgic eyelid at the thought of indiscriminately scrapping a starship he'd flown nearly twice as long as Nemo'd captained the _Lover_. No matter how much the _damage The Compass Rose_ had sustained, to Odisseus' mind, it was difficult to fathom anything quite as callow.

Brondi's habitual hauteur instinctively spikes an eyebrow. "Six? Hope you don't con anyone I know into it."

"Yes, you do," Nemo counters calmly. The Captain momentarily distracts himself as he tweedles some unseen atomy from between his right fingers before meeting Brondi's pretentions with insolence of his own. "You'll have to do better than three, old sport."

"I can go to four," Brondi grants with artificial reluctance, "and I give you twelve percent off whatever first run Rooster and I take."

"Cute," Odisseus jeers huskily, systematically powering down the navpanel in preparation for the engine maintenance he'd need to square away tomorrow.

While he doesn't necessarily deduce his exact phrasing, Brondi certainly comprehends Odisseus' ambivalence. "Fifteen. Maximum."

Thirty seconds behind, Nemo echoes Brondi's former posture by threading his forearms together, coupled with a contentedly contemptuous shrug. "Contract's out. Cash is in."

"Six is insanity, Nemo. I don't care who you think you can manhandle – literally no one is gonna front six in hard cash."

"Gotta feed my crew. Gotta fuel my ship." The Captain reprises his previously issued shrugging dismissal. "Match six and I'll gladly put her in your hands. If not, do me a favor and fuck off."

"Four upfront, could easily clear five with the incoming percentage, is plenty," Brondi cajoles. He, stonewalled, flaps his arms off his belt in a gesture of aggravated fruitlessness. "Why does every blooming thing need to be a forty-yard pissing contest with you?"

Nemo's smile, a wan, listless thing, scarcely masks the departure of his patience. "Because I'm really good at pissing."

"All the moons of Jotor," Brondi hisses, frustration vicing his jaw together.

Odisseus climbs off the taxed co-pilot's seat to his full height, ostensibly to collect his tools and patch down that troublesome compression pad before heading to supper, though should Brondi suddenly appreciate the imminent bulk of impatient Ortok impending overhead and thereby lose whatever remained of his nerve, so much the better, but Brondi remains resolved in his denouncement.

"You understand nobody's fucking amused, right? That this is bad business and nothing else?"

"Six or leave," Odisseus ultimates with a hiss of his own, only employing his lips to enunciate before bared fangs.

At seemingly long last, Brondi, instinctual self-preservation trumping righteous self-entitlement, receives the hint from Odisseus' less-than-subtle warning, sidles back a step with stymied enmity painfully evident on his face, mutters something about "big wet blowbags" and stomps moodily from _The Dead Messenger's_ helm, tail firmly established between his legs.

Odisseus watches him go, the aromatic wake of perfume dissipating into the bridge's redolence of spiced Jowna, residual chlorine and burnished shipmetal. Nemo saunters the pilot's chair fully around to face the panels of waiting equipment, expression crumpled in confusion.

"Who's up his ass?"

–––

Moira couldn't decide precisely which was worse; that she might be forced to agree with Abraham or, conversely, that she might forced to agree with Two-Bit. Certainly one of the presented options could safely be defined as the lesser evil but, try as she might, Moira simply couldn't determine which choice was the least desirable.

"But, I'm jabbing, that's all flash and feelings, that's all that is," Two-Bit, dangling his feet childishly off the engine coil repository's rim, disparages absently as he cuts and shuffles one half of an Iniquity deck. "You take one second and vizz at it, you know, objective-like and it don't take some kinda brainer to suss out how many bees we got."

Abraham, however, appears unconcerned by aspersions cast against his spacer's intuition. Leaning both his considerable girth and ineradicable authority against a fuel contractor, as if he had always leaned there, the Grimalti offers a negligible shrug and counters calmly, "Those 'flashes and feelings' o' mine kept me afloat long afore they e'er even strung up that station you was whelped on, boyo."

This seems to pluck a chord somewhere in Two-Bit, who starkly surceases his shuffling to nibble loose a strip of flesh from his lower lip. Odisseus, facial fur sooty from engine exhaust, briefly pops his head into view from somewhere beneath the lumbering mechanism to rejoin, "Can't argue with that," before vanishing into the contrivance again.

Ever since the Bozee Bushwhack, they, Nemo's four lieutenants, had held three such impromptu conferences over the course of their fourteen months aboard _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ , each one staged at some discreet location unlikely to attract attention, each one deliberately exempting the presence of their apparently clueless Captain. The subject matter of these meetings was, in truth, fairly benign, nothing terribly mutinous or even dishonest, as evidenced by Odisseus' presence. Rather, whenever Nemo contemplated a major policy shift or a uniquely suicidal caper, his first mate, his bodyguard, his mentor and his accomplice all congregated to discuss the particular wisdom, or in most cases, the stupidity underlying said decision and whether the lengthy process of dissuasion was worth the collective headache.

They'd first convened in the frozen food section of a neighborhood Galaxmart on Ortolé directly following the thoroughly unexpected results of the Bozee Bushwhack. They'd secondly held extemporized council in the Xwollese jungled outskirts of Chaconta City and now, with Nemo solidly clasped within Ott's thrall, they all assemble within _The Dead Messenger's_ engine room, to discuss this latest development in the mercurial moods of their capricious Captain.

"Well, I mean, alright, minus your misgivin's, if you vizz at the mathematicals of it, you ain't really got much to queeg about, does you?" Two-Bit commences an insanely fast and extraordinarily precise overhand shuffle, slapping fractions of the deck against the meat of his palm and withdrawing equally sized chunks with an alarming rapidity. "We jank forty on the nail for the little Haess maneuver, with another sixty on the way for this gantine – we're vizzing at a jig million, which oughta sum out to one hundred and thirty thou a maggie for the four of us and the Cap'n." He desists the blurring shuffle a moment and gestures dismissively with a transitory stack, the Third of Truncheons vanguarding the clasped cards. "That's, what, three times over and again what Xo scored us for that previous business. Now _that_ is something you can't row about."

Abraham massages the dappled flesh of his wattle as though a beard. "Xo's a machine – it don't warrant no more debate than does this rudder here," he mentions with a distracted wave toward the housing mainframe of the _Messenger's_ bar engine. "We got us a debt ain't been paid. Whatever the boy thinks of her, he owes Velocity a job."

"That's her affair, isn't it?" Moira formulates bemusedly. "I mean, if she wants him on a shorter leash, then that should fall within her responsibilities to rein him in." She drops into something of a conversational squat, hunkering down to rest haunches weary from Tebi-Gali before clarifying with a meager shrug. "As far as I see it."

"I agree," Two-Bit mainstays emphatically.

"Which deeply horrifies me."

"And let's not blank on, let us not blank on these beasty bloomin' mummies Ott's bunked us up with." He polarizes both halves of the bifurcated deck in opposite hands and alternately shuffles each portion with every selling point. "Maxed access to a top-gauge galley, half a wank's worth of truly tomato lizzies," he sneers a filth-laded sneer, referencing the in-house harem of professionals floozies Ott kept at hand to amuse his victorious raiders, "feez past two thou holovision channels and best of all, if there's a better spot in the galaxy to be down low in the lavender, I can't imagine where that'd be." He slaps both halves together again, mingling the cards into a whole deck with an arresting display of legerdemain. "Ain't no anglers gonna bump us up here."

"Case ye hadn't forgotten, this Boss Ott be, ye know, the bloody Galactic Menace," Abraham disillusions immediately. "Literally an entire armada and its accompanyin' army has got this bloke at the top o' their lists and 'twon't be long afore the Imperium drops the right bomb, hires the right gun or commandeers the right ship." The bristly Grimalti shrugs unconvinced shoulders. "'specially if he keeps making the noises he's been makin' of late, his days be numbered, exactly like the previous Menace and the one afore that and the one afore that one."

"It is a brief office," Moira concurs gravely.

Two-Bit frowns in the face of Abraham's obstinance. "We're in no immediate shit and I, for one, don't vizz no razz why we can't be squeezing as much rhino as we can outta this outfit until the real flaster hits."

Odisseus, autocincher gripped in a paw, emerges from the gap between collider columns to voice a question. "Do we know when that'll be? I saw Tizor, a high-ranking lieutenant, gunned down at Ott's own feet with practically no repercussion."

"Well, by Nemo," Moira qualifies.

"What's he jabbing?" Two-Bit cluelessly solicits to the room.

"Tizor."

"Ah."

"Exactly my point," Odisseus spitballs off Moira's correction. "What's to prevent that from happening again? Say somebody gets ambitious and decides to off Nemo. Some underling, moons, even Ott himself." He allows himself a minimal shake of his besmirched head. "Much as I appreciate all the trappings, seems we'd be safer taking our lumps with Velocity than waiting around for the Menace to get tired of us."

"Aye," Abraham endorses with a nod to the reasoning Ortok.

Several lines of thought behind, a frustrated Two-Bit surrenders fiddling with his Iniquity deck and begins denigrating at full throttle. "You facting? You'd rather we towel up this whole business sos we can tilt our rubbishy bloomholes all the way back to Takioro and tongue up whatever antwacky fuckin' codswallop capers Velocity decides to fooge down on us? You wanna jank twenty times less what you're janking now?"

The appeal certainly doesn't fall on deaf ears, not among buccaneers with pockets and wallets recently buffered by sizable percentages of hefty prizes, each understandably hesitant to suddenly surrender the possibility of further such opportunities. The prospect of Jowna meals, scavenge missions and even cheaper gin weighs visibly upon the four assembled lieutenants, particularly Moira, to whom a decrease in piracy income would necessitate an increase in bounty hunting income, a risk she certainly couldn't comfortably afford.

It's Odisseus who, after several baited moments of individual rumination, breaks the reverie with the obvious counterpoint. "Of course, there's the other matter to consider."

Two-Bit squints. "What?"

"The hat," Abraham deciphers cryptically.

A second silence, considerably grimmer than the previous, befalls the collected criminals at the reminder of this most significant of frivolities. As unexpectedly as he'd latched onto the peculiar headgear, Nemo had, directly following the fateful meeting with Ott, altogether divorced himself of the bowler hat he'd looted off Cogden Moore three months previously and indeed, no one among the crew, conscripts included, has seen the stupid thing since.

Odisseus had unfortunately been out of the room when the exact exchange occurred and was thusly unclear on too many specifics but little doubt was left in the minds of the _Lover's_ officers that something Ott had said, expressed within mere moments, somehow managed to convince the definitively egomaniacal Captain to forfeit his cherished bowler, without any apparent fuss. As superficial as such an event might seem to the hired help, everyone present at the secret meeting understood the magnitude, if not the explicit ramifications, of someone capable of commanding, especially in trivial matters, the obedience of one as ungovernable as Nemo.

It doesn't escape Moira's astute attention, however, that both Abraham and Odisseus exchange a pair of decidedly more insightful glances than they'd certainly like to portray; an unspoken something, perhaps a shared knowledge, is recognized between two of Nemo's oldest crew members, a distinction Moira notes with intrusive interest.

As her three compatriots, with varying degrees of information, undoubtedly speculate silently over the very same dilemma, Moira Quicksilver finds herself unable to clearly predict whether Nemo's unnervingly newfound vassalage at the hands of Boss Ott, Galactic Menace, will result in zooming profit or plummeting disaster.

Third Interlude

Abraham Bonaventure slapped the Fifth of Fisticuffs to the toilethead, the impact of its landing nearly scattering the mated members of its posse, the Cardsharp of Stilettos and the Pugilist of Nooses, off their improvised card table. As the big Grimalti properly aligned the three participants of his latest play beneath three bloated gray fingers, his opponent, having just laid down the Doxy of Truncheons, scowled obliquely at all six cards arrayed against one another, in groups of three. He jabbed a baffled finger toward Abraham's displayed hand.

"So, that..." he dangled measuringly.

"Fucks yer shite up. Aye."

As his opponent reached apart to retrieve the ream of toilet tissue, he regarded Abraham with skeptical disfavor. "And you could just be making all this up?"

"Precisely."

"Explain it to me, then," he demanded, fingering out four squares of winnings.

Abraham blustered a balked sigh and inched his cumbersome form forward to interpret the complexities of the triumphant combo, _A Suspicious Shore Leave_ , to his moronic cellmate, as he had with _The Mysteriously Ransacked Caravan_ , _The Duke's Diamond-Studded Purse_ and _A Colorful Assortment of Bruises_.

In all fairness, Abraham had only, in fact, made three of those four up.

It had been two weeks and eight days, wasting away what remained of his blubber beneath the sweltering yoke of a Vhaseen summer, locked in a twenty-foot by twenty-foot sandsod prison cell with this idiot. Frontier planets like Vhase could rarely be bothered to hold anything resembling a proper trial, much less expend resources to build an actual jail, so when the Coggi County Police Department, consisting of seven Triommans with tiny tin shields and big wooden clubs rumbled his friendly neighborhood moonshining operation, Abraham found himself unceremoniously pitched into the county's only prison cell – a sinkhole half a mottible outside of town, complete with titanium bars barricading the ceiling and a desperately thirsty cellmate.

Abraham wasn't certain precisely how long this bedraggled scarecrow of a humanoid had been imprisoned down here, nor when he was likely to be released. This close to the Gitter Consortium, moonshining held a stern punishment, but the old Grimalti felt confident he'd only summer in this sinkhole and, given a few months, he'd walk free a thinner, but unlikely a wiser being. He couldn't necessarily say the same for his press-ganged partner, however.

At first, they'd said little to nothing, each entertaining their own private corners, each heeding the other with the wary mistrust of two caged but dissimilar predators, as the typical Bad Space prison custom demanded. Before long, however, suspicion invariably gave way to boredom, which, in turn, gave way to conversation and one botched escape attempt. As soon as Abraham succeeded in his attempts to cajole a deck of cards from their attendant minder when he delivered the daily rations, things quickly dissolved into gambling and thusly, via the ancient Trijan art of Iniquity, did Abraham come to learn some important distinctions about his temporary holemate.

By his talk, he was some form of pilot, professional, contract or otherwise, though Abraham had little trouble imagining this emaciated captive as one of the thousands of all-balls, no-backbone fighter jocks that troubled the Outer Ring's space lanes like droves of so many unemployed flies. Whether he was actually a pirate or an honest hired gun, Abraham couldn't immediately ascertain, but the boy was certainly fond of taking risks, both in his cards and in his captivity. His bets were large and summarily foolhardy, especially for a game he wasn't terribly familiar with. His shouted insolence toward the posted sentry had earned him the odd ill-aimed potshot or three during Abraham's stay within the sinkhole and, to judge from the carbon scoring on the cell floor, at least seven more before the Grimalti's arrival.

The most salient description of this strange little man, however, was that he definitively _loathed_ imprisonment. He spent much of his mornings, afternoons and evenings concocting elaborate and impossible escape maneuvers and, when not scheming said schemes, he sulked in his prescribed corner until the water was delivered and he greedily guzzled down his share, oftentimes even more than that. The single escape he attempted came to a crashing halt when, while laboriously attempting to tunnel to freedom with the help of a pocketed plastolieum cup, he uncovered something he apparently feared worse than incarceration; a nest of burrowing agwaifapedes. A furious stomping session later, the threat was neutralized with Abraham's help and, for fear of unearthing more poisonous insects beneath the Vhaseen desert, all further tunneling ventures were promptly abandoned.

The Game of Iniquity, then, served as his most recent distraction and Abraham, for his part, saw precious little reason to dissuade him of the vice.

Fortunately for Abraham, his opponent was only passingly familiar with the game, though he offhandedly claimed to have encountered it in his youth, back where he, as he put it, "first got into trouble." Abraham imagined this to be Gallow, judging by the merest whiff of a Worldshine dialect in his speech, indicating that they may have, though decades apart, shared a common stomping ground. Even more fortunately for Abraham, however, Iniquity was a game uniquely suited to cheat the living daylights out of amateur players and, in this case, it was difficult to qualify "amateur" any lower than his befuddled opponent.

Originally conceived by Trijan cardsharps untold centuries ago, Iniquity was somehow resurrected to popularity among the Outer Ring's more unsavory denizens at some point in the past five decades and, before long, asserted itself as the premier amusement in all the best and worst casinos, dicing dens and chance houses throughout Bad Space's dankest nooks and dingiest crannies. Though manifold versions and variants abounded wherever the game was played, a traditional game of Iniquity harbored six or fewer players, hands rarely ranging larger than ten cards a pop and an expansive eighty-four-piece deck. Lewd and vulgar characters, like Doxies, Hooligans and Picaroons rounded out four separate suits, each representing tools of the archaic hoodlum; Fisticuffs, Nooses, Stilettos and Truncheons.

Victory was achieved through the employment of various conjucted cards to create "incidents," as they were colloquially referred to, of varying superiority. Abraham, who'd been introduced to the game within months of its resurgence, had yet to see a comprehensive list of the individual incidents and their relative rankings. This lack of clarity tended to foster rather more debate and its ensuing cousin, violence, per table than most of the galaxy's other chance games. While a base two hundred or so combinations were well-established and agreed-upon among the vast majority of Iniquity players, along with a general sense of each card's singular position in the hierarchy, nearly every round included some unknown incident, at whose appearance, the game either dissolved into clamorous altercation or, conversely, veiled acceptance, depending entirely on with whom the mysterious hand had originated. By that token, one could infer that, at any given table, the most successful Iniquity player was likely to be synonymous with the hardest cocksucker in the room.

Such was a lesson this young punk desperately needed to learn about two hours ago, had he wished to wipe his ass with something other than his hand for the remainder of his stay in their less-than-tastefully appointed hole.

He plucked the meager remains of toilet tissue from his emptying spool, with that satisfying tearing sound which came to signal triumph for Abraham, before pitching his final four squares across the makeshift card table in rebuff. Pawing up the waxen spoils and adding them to his accumulated pile of winnings, Abraham creased his beak into a faux-magnanimous grin. "I trust I sucked ye dry there, eh, boyo?"

"Um." The boyo in question glanced about momentarily, as though he had some great store of provisions lying about him over there on the left side of the toilet, rather than a empty paper tube and a good deal of loose sand. Certainly out of habit, he even padded himself down, dusty shirt to abused leather boot, before surprising himself with an unforeseen discovery.

He, as puzzled as Abraham, hastily unfolded a square of grimy paper, folded and cockled several times over into its current shape, for closer inspection. The afternoon suns, a trio of screaming Vhaseen scorchers, permeated the segmented document as it expanded and exposed a formatting familiar to Abraham; a standardized starship work-order, such as any number of chopshops might issue, including the uncounted dozens Abraham had found employment within over the years.

"Got this?" his cellmate mused.

"Give it here," Abraham beckoned and, without apparent hesitation, the boy passed it across the extended toilethead and his latest defeat.

A work-order it was; a faded, barely legible print-off from a digital manifest which, to judge from its dilapidated state, had been riding around inside a sweaty boot for several months. Abraham had never heard of "Dirty Djembe," but evidently, this dehydrated jockey was currently paying top dollar to renovate a freighter remix equal parts IZ36 Briza and Shell-Class Nautiloid Blockade Cruiser, a craft most flatteringly described as "suicidally unconventional."

"Yer bettin' yer ship?"

The boy scoffed. "Moons no. Get bent. I'm betting the work-order."

"What, like the piece of paper?"

"Sure. What, have you got _too much_ toilet paper now? When did this happen?"

Abraham considered his impressive stack of earnings, amounting roughly two full spools of toilet tissue, freshly swindled off his neighbor's supply, and shrugged consentingly. "Fair enough."

As his young opponent gathered up the spent cards from the previous hand, Abraham palmed what remained of his borrowed deck after exhaustive hours of play and flicked out a pair of starting hands, a single card apiece, for the both of them. The boy snatched his up covetously and brooded over it for several moments, Abraham only sparing a brief glimpse at his Third of Nooses.

"Yer ship got herself a name?" he inquired pleasantly.

"She does." He flavored his reply as a riposte, leering dubiously from behind the sheltering screen of his single card. "Card," he commanded after an additional handful of stewing seconds.

Abraham tossed the topmost card his direction as requested. "Card," the Grimalti repeated before selecting his own, the Brute of Nooses, allocating a number of potential options, one of which was _The Gallows Tree_ and a recognized, mid-level incident, while the others were decidedly not. "Care to ante up, lad?"

He distractedly cast his final remaining valuable, a creased and tattered work-order, into the center of the substitute table and pinpointed his attention back to scrying some value from his clasped cards. " _The Poetic Justice_ ," he muttered abstractedly.

"Heh." Abraham, for humors sake, supplemented the central pot with his own wager, a solitary square of his tissue paper hoard. "So, what, she's got the basic chassis of the Briza, with the bar swapped out and the boosters just plugged in aft?"

He gave an inattentive nod before waving vaguely in the direction of the deck. "Tarry," he beseeched bloodlessly before requisitioning a third card. Abraham indulged himself off the top of the deck to stay competitive and, complimenting his duo with a Highwayman, resolved himself behind a _Gallows Tree_ as he attempted to visualize this abomination of a spaceship. He did his level best to call to mind the boxy B-shaped frame of the IZ36, its precipitous bridge, the sloped slant of its teltriton rafters, all while envisioning a forked pair of protuberant super-charged capital class jetboosters where a modest orbital-cruising bar engine once dwelt.

"How's her handlin'?" he probed at his preoccupied partner.

"Great and terrible," he summarized brusquely, shifting a card in his line-up. Abraham digested this an allowable moment, before testing the waters with a final question.

"How's she painted?"

For the first time since being dealt his original card of this latest hand, Abraham's opponent made cagey eye contact with the old Grimalti. "She hasn't been yet. Why?"

To this, Abraham merely shrugged. "No reason. Dealer reveals," he instigated as he arranged his hand to the toilethead with Highwayman of Truncheons front and center, flanked on either side by The Brute and his Nooses, _"The Gallows Tree_. Let's see 'em, boy."

With an augmented braggartism unearned by the afternoon's complete routing, Abraham's opponent flattened three cards in opposition to the Grimalti's own and burgeoned into a most mischievous sneer, a smile to give even Abraham, a scallywag among scallywags, who'd cut canvas with ruffians and rapscallions of the very worst dispositions, pause.

The Picaroon of Stilettos, The Cutthroat of Fisticuffs and The Cutthroat of Stilettos formed no incident that Abraham had ever encountered. " _The Pirate King and All His Crooked Court_ ," he announced grandiosely.

Abraham blinked. "Ye made that up?"

"Oh, very much so."

The Grimalti broke into a husky chuckle. "As ye wish, boyo. Take yer prize."

Immensely pleased with himself, the boy clutched together the work-order and his newly won sheet of toilet tissue as Abraham raked aside the disbursed cards and clustered them together into the discard pile. " _The Poetic Justice_ , eh?"

"That's the notion. What," he instantly impugned, "you got a problem?"

"Only with the name."

Affront immediately melted into piqued curiosity. "Yeah? You think it's too obvious?"

"Well, I don't know from obvious, but I've got a couple of names a-squared away that I've been savin' for the right ships and this here Briza," he motioned toward the work-order clenched in the boy's hand, "sounds like one 'a them right ships. 'magine this, painted 'crost her fuselage, if ye fancy."

He popped open his scarred hands to bracket the imaginary title in mid-air above the pillaged remains of their card game, attempting to convey the sense of mysticism the old Grimalti thought the disembodied moniker evoked. " _The Unconstant_ _Lover_."

Instant recognition of the name's worthiness didn't flood into the youth's eyes and he scowls deep, a concentration riddling his features that Abraham hadn't since seen and would scarcely again, before breaking his reverie abruptly to scrunch up his face. "Nah. I like mine better."

"Suit yerself," Abraham allows privately, honestly somewhat disappointed.

"Yeah. Yeah," he repeats, as if to assure himself. "Yours was weird and confusing."

"Wait 'till ye see her built. Ye might change yer mind."

"Eh. I don't know. What was the other one?"

"Ain't found the right ship for that one yet," is all Abraham chose to reply.

"Huh, well," his cellmate concluded, browsing the specifics of his recently reclaimed work-order with seemingly new eyes, "when I become a famous pirate lord, maybe I'll make you my official ship-namer."

"I'd be delighted," the old Grimalti chortled. "Oh, one stipulation, however."

The boy eyed him again. "Yeah?"

"What's yer policy on singin'?"

"My policy on _what_?"

Chapter 14

Two-Bit intercepts the ball. It falls into his outstretched hands with a satisfyingly eponymous skoosh and subsequently douses him fully in the face with a fresh stream of its defense liquid: a sterile, slimy substance the organ come sporting good naturally exudes, with a similar, if wetter, reprise of its namesake. Its increased viscosity is quickly allied to its attempts to escape his grasp, but Two-Bit, already plastered from the waist upwards in partially dried solution, has no intention of granting its most ardent pleas for freedom for another four or five steps at least. Clamping the skooshball hard, Two-Bit bounds across the slippery floor three, four, five steps before closing to acceptable throwing distance from Marco the Mange, himself spattered in the grayish-greenish ooze and waving for the pass Two-Bit was already so inclined to make. Finally, just before it wrestles itself free, Two-Bit emancipates the skooshball in the form of a one-handed, shot-put style heave, practically clobbering the petite Mruka to the floor beneath the concerted force of his throw and the ball's own willing flight.

Another gout of pasty goop greets Marco the Mange as he catches of the pliant green orb between a clap of his tiny paws and, for a moment, Two-Bit doubts the wisdom of his toss, until the Mruka's claws sink into the skoosh's sides and lock it firmly in place; technically legal, but typically considered unsportsmanlike. The Chains hoot and heckle with derision as they scramble to intercept but, before even the nearest of them can close the gap, Marco zeroes a target, cranks both forearms back over his head and lets the skoosh loose. It tumbles true, effortlessly across the expanse until it connects sharply with Ebeneezer's shaven pate. The ball rebounds deeply and, for the briefest of heartbeats, the lanky purple giant is wearing an elastic emerald hat, before the skoosh snaps abruptly away and, guided by the slight tossing of his head, Ebeneezer casts the ball cleanly through the largest of the five hoops.

The scoreboard, sensing the ball's passage through the main hoop, reflects this with a droning tone and the _Lover_ s inch one point closer to the Chains' daunting lead. This point is met with exultant applause from the _Lover_ s and playful jeering from the Chains. The skoosh, fresh from Ebeneezer's headbutt, dawdles in the court's far corner and a handful of players from both teams scamper to reclaim it from various different approach vectors.

Among the seemingly endless list of amenities, comforts and luxuries Boss Ott had afforded the crew of _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ during their three-week layover on Baz, the regulation skooshball court was, by far, the most singular. Sequestered deep underground, at the base of the West Spire, it had taken nearly two weeks for any among the _Lover's_ crew to even discover the chamber, much less organize a game but, armed with the powers of quartermaster vested in him by the Captain Nemo, Two-Bit had managed to marshal the conscripted thuggery into a formidable team of six skooshers; Danbonte, Marco, Anchorage, Ebeneezer, Heeko and himself.

Two-Bit had attempted to rope, cajole or guilt more of Nemo's lieutenants into the pitched match – Odisseus or Moira would have made inspired teammates, but the Captain continued to tirelessly attend Ott, Odisseus continued to even more tirelessly attend the Captain, Moira flatly refused and Abraham was doubtlessly knee-deep in negotiations on Foundry, with Garrigan and Rooster as prize crew, hopefully cheating a truly enormous pile of money out of some poor sucker in exchange for the _Messenger_.

Thusly, rather than a hulking Ortoki point guard, the _Lover_ s had a claw-happy Mruka mechanic and in place of a lithe Tebi-Gali devotee, they'd been forced to make due with a witless Myyrigon lout but, nevertheless, seventeen afternoons into their extended shore-leave, Two-Bit Switch and his ragtag squad of rookie athletes met six members of _The Yanked Chain_ 's crew on the hallowed field of skoosh. A commandeered and subsequently modified TFS 889 Chaperone-Class Karracki clipper ship captained by an unmannerly brawler of a Braaca simply called Kivad, _The Yanked Chain_ and her crew of thirty-odd reavers were, by a fearsomely cultivated reputation, numbered high among Ott's best pillagers, though certainly not among its brightest and therein lies the _Lover_ s' greatest advantage.

Across the court, the skoosh is hastily recovered by the Chains' main charger, the opposition's answer for Heeko; a latitudinous wrecking ball of a Gung'nooj, probably twenty stone or more but lacking two wits to rub together. He, or possibly she, unearths the ball with a massive tridactyl paw from the gunky corner where the headbutt had wedged it and, literally batting the interposing Danbonte across the court with a swipe from the other knuckle-dragging slugger, chucks the skoosh skyward, toward the waiting embrace of the stacked hoops.

It's certainly a powerful effort and Two-Bit, a full court length away, is effectively powerless to intercede but, even if properly aimed, the skoosh still needs to transverse a sizable distance and inevitably, a _Lover_ crosses to intercept. Anchorage, barreling across the ball's course, manages to snag the orb at trunk's absolute end and, contorting his cumbersome form halfway around to better aim and dodge the squirt of its intestine juices, pitches the skoosh forcibly against the western wall. "Switch!" he bellows over the Chains' vociferous protestation.

At a vicious velocity, the skooshball ricochets messily off the transparent plexishield, sufficiently reinforced to withstand the full brunt of a laser cannonade, and careens crosswise wildly. Two-Bit, heeding Anchorage's plea, vaults himself forward, hoping to shortstop the hurtling skoosh and smack, spike or otherwise propel it into the two-point-hoop but, watching its trajectory, Two-Bit spies another, more choice, opportunity.

Falling ten steps behind, Two-Bit Switch reels his forearm back and bides three seconds worth of time as the skooshball whizzes wildly past him. Unmolested, the ball unwittingly enters the unseen perimeter encircling Heeko, standing listlessly in the middle of the court with apparently little apprehension of how to participate. Its primordial instincts of flight engaged, the skooshball boomerangs instantly back from whence it came and straight toward Two-Bit, repositioned before the coveted five-point-hoop. Two-Bit employs his blind gambit; the minute the skooshball reaches him, he unchains the cocked elbow and, with a wet warble, the ball motors perfectly through the contracted aperture of the five-point-hoop.

"Disqual!" roars Kivad against the harsh bleat of the scoreboard and the scurrilous hurrahs of the encroaching _Lover_ s. "I ain't tellin' you twice, Two-Bit, that Aurik's trunk disquals him!"

"Alright," Two-Bit complies, stifling a burgeoning complaint from Anchorage with an upraised hand, "then I'm disqualing that geezer of yours what with the grabby feet!" Two-Bit aligns an accusatory finger toward the Chains' favorite forward, a spindly and copper-furred Zourim greaseman, complete with recaptured skooshball gripped in a perfectly prehensile foot. Kivad follows his indication and grumbles something incoherent beneath the noise of the jostling players and before any actual disqualification can occur, the Zourim passes the ball with a vicious snap of his ankle and the game soldiers on.

Skooshball is somehow a popular sport played with the pseudo-intelligent gallbladder of a giant endrozzi slime slug in place of an actual ball. As with all other members of the slug's extrinsic and bizarre anatomy, the skoosh possesses the faintest of instinctual defense mechanisms – minor levitation, a bottomless supply of slippery bile and enough sensory understanding to flee the nearest life form that breaks its three-foot perimeter by the swiftest and most direct means possible. This obviously made for a court almost immediately slick with expelled bile and, should one add a dozen bulky players, in this case all violent criminals, to the mix, one would have the perfect recipe for the slipping, skating, sloppy mess unfolding in Ott's skooshball court. The game's rules ostensibly involved a series of variantly shaped hoops dangling from the court's ceiling and members of each team attempting to muscle, punt or hurl the skooshball through any or all of these hoops to rack up some esoteric amount of points but no professional or collegiate skooshball match in Two-Bit's memory had ever reached the first triad without at least one penalty-laded, tooth-shattering, slime-slinging bare-knuckle brawl and, six minutes to the first bell, there'd already been three.

Still less destructive than the brutal fistball but bereft of all bankshot ball's etiquette and tedium, skooshball presented a third option for the discerning holosports fan, which combined the speed and ferocity of the former with the equipment-based exclusivity of the latter, to create a highly holovised and highly impractical sport that demanded an enormous watertight chamber and a specially-bred organ from an incredibly endangered gastropod to properly play. As such, Two-Bit and the rest of the _Lover_ team were woefully amateurish as regards practical floor experience, especially when compared to the Chains' adept athleticism, but as veteran fist fighters all with roughly two decades of holovision exposure under their belts, the _Lover_ s were quickly picking up the nuances of the game, much to their opponent's collective dismay.

As with most regulation skooshball courts, the bulwarked outer walls of Ott's personal chamber are diaphanous plexishield, allowing spectators in any of the three viewing galleries, including the topmost café, to safely view the bout without fear of collateral reprisals from a rapidly rebounding skoosh or its sticky residue. As Danbonte and the Chains' Phnuki lancer shoulder and elbow for possession of the ball, Two-Bit spots, sharing both a decanter of gin and a ringside table, his Captain and their gracious host, apparently chatting amiably, with Odisseus looming just within his field of vision. Abraham's admonitions from two days previously struggle against resurfacing as the streaking skoosh deflects off a corner and rockets past, inches shy of Two-Bit's inconscient face.

"Two-Bit!" Danbonte bemoans from thirty feet across. "That was _right_ to you!"

Wresting himself from his reverie, Two-Bit Switch tracks progress of the rabbiting ball, dribbling itself against the opposite corner, with Heeko, finally engaging to some degree, clambering to redeem it, though Kivad and his Gung'nooj dash forward, threatening to outpace him. From his remnant position before the five-point hoop, Two-Bit hastily calculates the rates of motion, angles of attack and approach vectors of each individual interested party, rationalizes another stupid gamble in the spirit of Captain Nemo and charges headlong across the court to head off both opponents.

However, one of the several arithmetical factors currently in play is bodily ignored by Two-Bit's heedless sprint and that factor manifests itself in the form of slippery skoosh secretion, coating the distance between Two-Bit and the ball thicker than osteocaulk. Losing his balance in this instance, however, does more than plop him clumsily to his ass – the slick transforms his trip into a sliding tackle. Two-Bit smashes directly into the loping Gungi'nooj with excessive forward momentum, summarily bowling the both of them over into a great heap of thrashing limbs and jabber-expletives.

Literally one step behind, with mere moments to react, Kivad is collisionally unable to swerve in time and all two hundred and twenty-five pounds of fuzzy blue Braaca tumble headlong into the cavorting confusion. Amid a rending knot of knobbed knees, flailing fists, edged elbows and flapping feet, Two-Bit's initial escape attempts quickly become accidental clouts which naturally result in retaliatory strikes until, before long, this purposeless pile-up deteriorates into the match's fourth consecutive brouhaha.

Aiming as precisely as his shellacking surroundings will allow, careful not to impale a sneaker on one of his four hooked facial horns, recumbent Two-Bit feeds Kivad a hard heel, walloping the Braaca's woolly rump straight to the thermosteel and purchasing Two-Bit a split second or three to squirm inches away on his elbows. With Kivad left contemplating the lamentable contemplations of the truly trounced in an awkward heap on the floor, Two-Bit need only stave off the thrashing aggressions of the bewildered and incensed Gung'nooj for a dozen seconds or less until the converging Heeko could close the distance and reinforce his position. Before he can even begin to conjure any earthly method to achieve this, Two-Bit Switch, like Danbonte before him, finds himself the beneficiary of a teeth-shattering overhand clobber from a wrathful Gung'noojian meathook and, upon receiving the necessary inspiration, promptly learns to fly.

Finally landing in an unwieldy clump of his own with a sickening splash of goop, Two-Bit predicts a ravishing new bruise staining the point of contact as he props his punch-drunk person up onto his palms just in time to distinguish, through both wavering eyelids and the scummy partition of plexishield separating him from the scene, the Captain and the Galactic Menace clasp hands in agreement. As the brawl several yards over his left shoulder intensifies with the timely arrival of both Heeko and Anchorage, Two-Bit sinkingly suspects that their overlong vacation is likely coming to a close.

–––

Odisseus positively hates visiting new planets. Baz's coral tundra, a comparatively tepid climate when held against the unmatched virulence of the equatorial jungle regions, is still awash with multifarious new stinks, stenches and other unclassified pungencies, all too foreign and exotic for the sniffling Ortok to properly process. The territorial markings of a score new predators, all sanguivores by the flinty twinge of iron in their urine, the bitter calcium carbonate secretions of a hundred new species of land polyp, each at various stages of hardness, the accumulated reek of a million anonymous danders, pollens and spores from an unknown number of unseen life forms, be they plant, animal or fungus, all battle for supremacy inside Odisseus' nostrils, all virtually blinding him beneath the combined weight of an unfamiliar ecosystem.

He snorts, sniffs and coughs every few seconds, tossing his head and pawing at his nose in an effort to dislodge the warring battalions of odorants and regain some limited level of nasal composure, his effective perception relegated to his unimpressive eyesight and a drastically curtailed sphere of olfactory awareness.

"Oh, bloom me out," the blurred amalgam of spiced gin, abused leather and overconfidence to his left curses, accompanied by the sound of wallowing mud. Standing amid a patch of porous star coral laced with scraps of a phosphorescent fungi, sufficiently apart from the main exhibitions and the tightest knot of the redolently potent Baziron, Odisseus clings desperately to the now-pleasantly intimate odors he'd so long taken for granted, each standing thankfully adjacent; both Nemo's contradictory cocktail and that unsweetened medley of gun oil, sweat and disdain that could only signify the presence of one Moira Quicksilver.

"Well, this solves the case of Kivad's mysteriously orange shoes," Nemo carps quietly, exhuming his own left boot with a squelching complaint, to reveal a freshly tangerine tint. Moira, her mighty hobnailed jackboots manfully resilient to the tundra's orange advances, smirks mercilessly to his right. Barefooted Odisseus squints down toward his hind paws, praying to all the moons they don't spontaneously combust.

Even this far north, seemingly every square inch of Baz's surface was so thoroughly suffused with doxychoraphum that one could barely expect to stride two steps in any direction without physically feeling the combustible liquid sloshing about beneath two feet of permafrost, spongy topsoil and a layer of various arctic fungi. Vacuous sinkholes in the boggy ground, often deep enough to ensnare a knee and apparently playing host to something vo Qwer described as a "boreal muck leech," were unnervingly frequent as, in addition to whatever ambush predators may lurk below, the omnipresent danger of accidentally igniting the dormant repellent with a misplaced footfall was only too recurrent.

Beyond this, the doxychoraphum lent the planet's surface the unyieldingly sulfuric tang of unprocessed ordinance, which, paradoxically, played grandfather to a household smell in Odisseus' fragrance vernacular; the signature whiff of a ballistic torpedo. This arresting aroma, however, radiating upward from under the very earth, was unreasonable; practically limitless reservoirs of untapped conflagrant chemical, nearly overwhelming the compounded mélange of residual pheromones, upturned soil, stale manure, fresh carrion, burnt ditrogen and every other nightly scent and stench the northern continent can offer.

"What do you think," Moira postulates faintly, as if the participants in the distant scene had ears to burn in the first place, "how long until one of these blowbags misfires a chamber into the mud and blows this whole little resistance all the way to Jotor?"

Instantly huffy at the slightest depreciation of his scheme, Nemo creases leather as he entwines his arms together. "I don't know – Two-Bit seems to have it in hand."

"That was sorta my point."

At the heart of the village proper, some number of yards ahead of the three onlookers, Two-Bit Switch, posed halfway up a mounting pyramid of Nabdres' gun crates and bulwarked by the joint intimidation of Ebeneezer and Anchorage, extols the apparently manifold virtues of the Halisdro Intermediate Cartridge DU5 Belligerent Semi-Automatic Assault Rifle to a swelling audience of Baziron and their hound-like slodzen below, his every word clumsily translated into their thrumming mother tongue by the attendant vo Qwer.

"Now, when you get zilched," Two-Bit announces, snapping the dry trigger several times, "you wanna toggle this hicky _here_ and that," he declares, yanking the weapon's ammunition clip free, "oughta pop the nanner right the fuck outta there, alright?"

Seemingly undeterred by Two-Bit's flagrant inability to speak actual Commercial, vo Qwer appears to focus the emanations of his sibilating throatsac directly at the obese koj Hhenel and his plumed entourage while, simultaneously, he address the remainder of the assembled Dancing-Horizon clan with a maddeningly abstruse string of infinitesimal hand-signals.

"Did we ever figure out what all the hand gestures were?" Moira poses.

"Oh, um," Nemo begins, tapping a palm against the bicep sleeve of his jacket, as if to remind himself, "it's a, uh... well, Ott explained it–"

"It's a secondary language," Odisseus provides. "The primary language, obviously, is the throatsac stuff, but it's apparently pretty formal and difficult to communicate finer points, so it's mainly ceremonial. Addressing the koj, that sort of thing." He shifts his weight, a disconcerting gurgle under his feet. "So, the hand-signals are more expressive, are for actual conversation between peers."

"And they're all fluent in both?"

"I don't know," Odisseus shrugs. "He is, apparently."

vo Qwer's and, by proxy, the rest of the pirates' arrival in the Dancing-Horizon's capital village, whose name the Baziron emissary had mentioned in passing and Odisseus was woefully ill-equipped to pronounce, let alone remember, was greeted with some confused hybrid of awe and suspicion from its approximately four thousand inhabitants, the former for the return of their prodigal son and the latter for his apparent poor choice of playmates.

Teams of Ott's truculent raiders were frequent enough in this region, retrieving loads of doxychoraphum for sale on the black market, scouting the expanses for signs of Imperium presence and attending the odd war council as honored guests of Hhenel. To judge from the frosty reception the common Baziron paid Nemo and his squad of hangers-on upon their own landing, however, after four years of depleted hunting grounds, anti-infantry emplacements bristling off dropcraft and midnight guerilla raids on their relatively defenseless dwellings from teams of highly-trained jungle commandos armed with laser weapons, the local populace harbored an understandably dim view of offworlders in spaceships, no matter their stated intentions.

Solar wind particles, conflicting with some ionized chemical element low in the atmosphere, bespeckle the gloaming sky with effulgent emerald, scintillating sapphire and radiant ruby, wheeling whimsical capers and aimless gambols, like kaleidoscopic grotesques enacting a shadow play against a curtain of sunset. According to vo Qwer, only along a narrow meridian across Baz's northern continent could such a polar spectacle nightly be viewed and by this sign would intruders realize that they'd trespassed onto the territory of the Dancing-Horizon kojaj.

The terrain they appropriated for themselves was bleak, as remorseless as the grim folk who mustered together their rough-spun existence from its immensities of quaggy, sodden tundra, its full roster of various hemotaphagus predators and its mazelike swatches of terrestrial coral. Entirely too ambitious for a multicellular organism, Odisseus instinctively distrusted land polyps, as, during his youth, a swarm of the aberrant little critters had threatened to overtake and annex the lodge of his birth for their own unfathomable purposes, but these Baziron provincials evidently found a method of domesticating the insatiable creatures.

Through some indiscernible thaumaturgy, the farmers come carpenters of the Dancing-Horizon kojaj could sculpt, or perhaps encourage, the plantlike land polyps into forming tailored shapes of their own specifications which, when the subsequent calcium carbonate hardened, would coagulate into rigid coral hedges. Thusly, nearly every building within their capital was engineered from living coral, in dozens of differing configurations and, though undoubtedly blanched by wintry steppeland winds, thousands of contrasting colors. From where he stood, Odisseus could see puffy fuchsia brains as domed domiciles, tiered turquoise pillars jutting from the slush like the bone-spurs of some slumbering subterranean beast and voluminous saffron tables to shelter those beneath from both oppressive tundra gales and the prying eyes of passing Imperium aircraft.

Despite this, blast points, blackened streaks and scars which Moira definitively denotes as the unpleasant handiwork of the SV7 classic, still manifest persistently throughout the village, tarnishing the seamless coral shells as unflagging reminders of the Imperium's impending presence. Without the enfolding canopy of the planet's anemic jungles to impair navigational equipment and offer camouflaged asylum from their enemies, vo Qwer's home village and its four thousand inhabitants were vastly more susceptible to Insurgent Company's raiding parties, surgical strikes and flyby sorties than their southern brethren and subsequently suffered the most under the Imperium's pitiless campaign of decimation.

The seemingly blameless faces of the Baziron children, fleetingly visible between the thickets of their bow-legged parents, conspire to cloud Odisseus' judgment, to attribute storied stereotypes where they don't belong and to conflate these events with those of decades past.

"Plus, in a crunch," Two-Bit twirls the rifle about to catch the butt in an open palm and hastily mimes a brutal stock strike, "you can just biff 'em with the bloomhole." Some hiccupping noise, whether signifying condemnation or approval Odisseus has no way of determining, reverberates from the throatsacs of the congregation as Two-Bit canters down a crate. "You've got two-hundred forty crackers here, with five nanners a piece. That's sixty carts a cracker, but you gotta buzz Ott back before you get zilched sos we can coop back out here, float you some more, yeah?" Alighting to the swampy ground with a moist squish and a muttered expletive, Two-Bit flings the DU5 into the waiting grip of the koj's nearest minder, flags Anchorage and Ebeneezer with a gloved hand and begins slogging his way through the slush to rejoin with the Captain and his expectant companions.

"Well, that was relatively painless," Nemo appraises briskly.

Two-Bit Switch, marching nosily through the morass with a contracted thug at either flank, opens his mouth to voice a rebuttal, only to be interceded by the grating metallic interruption of vo Qwer's droidvox, calling haltingly after his departure. "THE GLUTTED ONE HHENEL," the blinking droidvox-implant, barnacled to the side of vo Qwer's head, drones with poorly rendered timbre and nonexistent cadence, "DESIRES YOU TO TARRY A MOMENT."

"Sublime," Two-Bit breathes.

Odisseus snorts to banish a particular putrescence, likely the pervasive musk of slodzen droppings, and squints across the breadth, in an effort to bring the corpulent koj Hhenel, struggling ungainfully to his feet with the aide of four strapping attendants, into better focus.

The koj, or the "Glutted One" as vo Qwer terms both him and Ott, much to the latter's continual distress, belongs in a weight category shared by prize-winning livestock and only via his stubby, bloated proboscis, more of a squat curiosity than the slender, trenchant barbs sported by most Baziron, can he even be identified as the same species as the beings encircling him. He, like his squad of retainers, is ritualistically attired in fancily impractical garb, composed principally of prodigious feathers, the plumage dyed a dizzying array of clashing colors. While this grants the movements of his ancillary warriors a perplexing mirage-like aspect, this effect is somewhat lost on the enormity of the koj, who resembles nothing so much as a monstrous half-plucked rainbow lonktonk.

Verticality ultimately achieved, the koj Hhenel, undisputed ruler of the Dancing-Horizon kojaj, with half a dozen dauntless Baziron honor guard cincturing his position, waddles a step and a half forward and bombinates a splattering wet pronouncement from his spacious throatsac.

"THE GLUTTED ONE HHENEL DESIRES," vo Qwer hastily translates, his own throatsac rumbling quietly to activate the droidvox's metaphrase protocol, "TO CONVERSE OPENLY WITH HIS COUNTERPART AMONG THE OUTLANDERS, BE IT THIS PROFANE ONE OR ANOTHER AMONG THOSE WITHOUT."

"That's your cue, gov," Two-Bit beams back to the Captain.

"'Wait, I'm his counterpart? Do you _see_ him?"

"Nemo–," Odisseus growls.

"I mean, he's _fatter_ than Abraham, for bloom's sake!"

"Nemo!"

"Right, right, interspecies diplomacy, I'm going, I'm going," he complies repeatedly, swaggering three steps forward and launching a lax gesture and a laxer greeting to the koj. "Hey, I come in peace, what do you need?"

"THE GLUTTED ONE HHENEL RECOGNIZES YOU, PEER, AND EXTENDS HUMBLEST GRATITUDE FOR THIS BOON OF WEAPONRY," vo Qwer, reiterating split seconds behind the koj's muculent rumblings, sidles aside to allow an uninterrupted sightline between Nemo and his headman and adopts a more obsequious posture.

"Yeah, you bet, anytime. Listen, I'm just the dumper here, you wanna send your thanks or whatever up north to–" Nemo blusters, wandering a step backward and absently thumbing over his shoulder, in fact, to the south, but the koj continues to blaze diatribe forward.

"HOWEVER, THE GLUTTED ONE DISMAYS TO INFORM YOU THAT THE ENEMY HAS ALTERED THEIR OBJECTIVE AND NOW ENDEAVORS–"

"See, you're gonna wanna get that information where it belongs, so I tell you what," Nemo forestalls with an extended hand, snapping the copper comm unit off its pendant perch on his belt, "you tell vo Qwer here and I'll buzz Mutha or Kivad and they can–"

"THE IMPERIUM HUNTS YOU."

This statement, deprived of any conceivable gravity or portent by the droidvox's monotonous discord, somehow manages to throttle the breezy nonchalance from Nemo at a stroke and instead inaugurate that dark diligence of his that had, thus far, claimed the lives of innumerable Imperium soldiers. "Me?"

koj Hhenel clicks, evidently in clarification, and continues. "YOU AND THOSE OF YOUR CLOTH. THE GLUTTED ONE'S CITY OR PEOPLE CAN OFFER YOU LITTLE HARBORAGE NOW THAT THEY SEEK YOU."

"How do you know?" Moira declares suddenly from Odisseus' right. Made momentarily hesitant by the bluntness of the conversation's latest entrant, vo Qwer proceeds to translate Moira's inquiry only after a condoning wave from Nemo.

"THE WILDS ARE SILENT," koj Hhenel, via vo Qwer, stipulates. "THE GLUTTED ONE HHENEL HAS RECEIVED WORD FROM HIS SISTER-CITIES ALONG THE HORIZON. NOWHERE CAN AGENTS OF THE IMPERIUM BE FOUND."

"Ain't that a good thing?" Ebeneezer, apparently emboldened by Moira's contribution, mutters to no one in particular, only to be promptly shushed by Two-Bit.

"THEY AWAIT SOMETHING, SOMETHING KILLING THE GLUTTED ONE'S PEOPLE MUST NOT PROVIDE THEM."

"Me," Nemo intones bitterly. "Where are they?" he pursues, without missing a beat.

"SOUTH," the koj categorically replies. "WHITHER IS THE GLUTTED ONE'S PEER BOUND?"

"South," Nemo disconsolately echoes, the faintest glimmer of a sneer gradually materializing into view.

"Nemo," Odisseus interjects, advancing forward a step, "this needs to be reported. Ott should–"

"I've forty more crates of munitions to deliver," Nemo confesses, replete with mock responsibility, "to koj Pasqkla of the Scream-Weed kojaj, a thousand mottibles south of here–"

koj Hhenel's veiny throatsac flares abruptly and, for a heartbeat Odisseus' wonders if it'll burst, but it rather deflates into clammy throbbing. "THE GLUTTED ONE HHENEL DENOUNCES THOSE OF THE SCREAM-WEED," vo Qwer translates after a moment, "AS HONORLESS SCUM, AND GLUTTED ONE PASQKLA DEVOID OF DIGNITY."

"Sounds like my kinda guy. Don't translate that."

In accordance with Ott's wishes, one third of Nabdres' pilfered weaponry was to be delivered to the koj Hhenel and the remainder of the Dancing-Horizon, while the majority of the DU5s had been allocated to the largest Baziron tribe on the northern continent, the embattled Scream-Weed kojaj, evidently so named for a particularly vocal piece of native flora, located deep in the southern jungles.

From what little Odisseus could glean from official briefings and small talk among Ott's other pillagers, the Scream-Weeds were both a militant and prolific kojaj, over twice the size of the Dancing-Horizon and covering nearly four times the territory. Unscrupulous, quarrelsome and displaying a peerless penchant for slaughtering Imperium soldiers, this kojaj and its leader, the reputedly unstable koj Pasqkla, sounded exactly like Nemo's kind of people.

While skirmishes with several distinct infantry battalions abounded in these northern regions, regular reports of extremely heavy fighting, with a staggering daily body count, continued to flood Ott's polar command from the south and, with the Field Captain's confession indicating a new directive from this General Pluvosh, it'd become increasingly clear that Imperium Campaign Ground Control was doggedly attempting to provoke an exploitable response from the Galactic Menace by hammering the Baziron hard.

However, the main problem with this objective, what the military brass hadn't foreseen, was that the vehemently individualistic Scream-Weed kojaj had, in fact, repeatedly rebuffed Ott's extension of alliance and really only entertained diplomacy on account of the exorbitant tribute Ott regularly paid them. Much to the Imperium's eventual chagrin, giving battle to the Baziron of the Scream-Weed kojaj would purchase precious few results, at the cost of egregious casualties, in their burgeoning hunt of the Galactic Menace.

Thusly, it was Ott's apparent supposition that, even without the direct aid of his reavers, if the Scream-Weeds could be suitably armed to stand against their better equipped adversaries, their superior numbers would eventually bleed the ground campaign so severely, the Endless Imperium might be forced to re-evaluate the net profitability of their stake in Baz's doxychoraphum trade. Such was his supposition, at any rate.

"Tell the koj," Nemo summarizes to vo Qwer, "that although I appreciate his cautions, I've been tasked with this errand and duty compels me to complete it." The Baziron ambassador, as if incredulous himself, wavers a moment before conveying the message.

"Duty compels me..." Odisseus scoffs, glancing aside to commiserate with Moira who, steely as ever, spits.

"THE GLUTTED ONE HHENEL LAMENTS THIS CHOICE, BUT DEFERS, IN THIS MATTER, TO HIS PEER'S WISDOM," the Baziron chieftain wheezes within the confines of his throatsac, "BUT," vo Qwer appends as koj Hhenel adjusts his dubious posture and continues, "HE WARNS YOU NOT TO UNDERTAKE SUCH AN ENDEAVOR HEEDLESSLY. BE FOREARMED AND EXPECTANT OF STRIFE." the koj Hhenel bats some unrecognizable gesture with a blubbery hand, banded by rolls of excess fat. "ONLY RAMPANT DESTRUCTION, THE GLUTTED ONE OBSERVES, IS TO BE FOUND IN THE SOUTH."

"Well, that's the plan," Nemo slaps this thighs. "Respect, koj," he salutes with some sort of laudatory gesture Odisseus is pretty certain he just made up, before revolving stiffly on his heel and traipsing the short distance back to his confederates, with the sporty comportment of impending violence. "We ready to boost?"

"You're serious." Moira flatlines.

"I am. Very much so, in fact. If there's–"

An aberrant sound, somewhere between the extremes of an animal's agonized howl and the choppy reverberation of a jet turbine, resounds wanly in the distance. All the village's commotion drops harshly away as the unearthly cry, be it from beast, machine or man Odisseus can't conclusively say, winds up a second time.

"Fuck me upside down, what _is_ that?" Two-Bit wonders aloud.

"From the southeast," Moira indicates mutteringly.

As if on cue, the Baziron explode into motion, dissipating rapidly in every direction, disassembling and stowing the crate mountain, scrambling for cover within buildings, beneath drooping overhangs of concealing coral, wherever shelter may be found. Within mere moments, the main thoroughfare of the Dancing-Horizon village is practically deserted. With surprising fluidity, the koj's suite of escorts hurriedly retires the immense being to the relative sanctuary offered by a dense bouquet of interlacing antler coral. One among them pauses long enough to inhale a titanic breath of air and, upraising the flanged barb of his proboscis, unleash a warbling vociferation of his own, the skin of his throatsac literally rippling from the exertion of streaming the outlandish noise through the perforations in its mouthparts.

"Okay, what's happening?" Nemo bemusedly implores of vo Qwer as the Baziron lopes toward them.

"AN AIRCRAFT APPROACHES. IMPERIUM. FROM THE SOUTHEAST."

Within fifteen seconds of this revelation, Odisseus has Nemo safely sequestered from view beneath the inflexible eaves of the nearby star coral, almost more to prevent his saltbrother from firing his pistol wildly in the general direction of the advancing enemy than anything else. Moira, Two-Bit, Anchorage, Ebeneezer and vo Qwer huddle nearby in the muck, all of them like eight bipedal roaches, having scampered under the chiller.

"Nemo to _Lover_ , do you copy? Abraham, do you copy? This is Nemo, Abraham, are you there?" the Captain croaks into his comm, "You gotta power down, you hear me? Shut down all systems, take her completely black. If they get a bead, they'll–"

"Nemo!" Moira hisses, craning a covetous arm across both Two-Bit and vo Qwer to snatch the comm from his grip. "All the moons," she marvels inwardly, snapping the device completely off.

Before Nemo can offer protest, however, a glaring orb of brassy dawn, the strident shine of a floodlight, pierces the dusky twilight beyond and stalks a studious path between the mounds and growths of ostensibly barren coral, most acting sanctuaries for handfuls of hidden Baziron, lying in anxious wait. Indistinctly, as if from some prodigious range, Odisseus can hear the muffled churn of a vehicle-class driftmotor and indeed, after several strenuous seconds of searching from the lofty spotlight, a compact low-atmosphere craft, painted jungle olive and boasting both beacon-mounts and anti-infantry emplacements from the tips of its support ridges, meanders into view between studded coral boughs.

While certainly manufactured by Terro Fleet Systems, as indicated by the unmelodious motif of its architecture and the apparent efficiency of its propulsion system, Odisseus can't quite determine, from his skewed vantage point, whether the aircraft lingering overhead was either an M2 Vagrant-Class Short-Range Scout or possibly an M9 Onslaught-Class Low-Atmo Gunboat. In either case, it was staunchly armored, packing enough firepower to effectively engage a small army and maneuverability-capable to navigate thorny jungle terrain at speeds approaching seventy mottibles an hour, over twice that through unobstructed airspace.

The aircraft, whatever it was precisely, dawdles awkwardly two hundred feet above the disguised Baziron settlement, like a curious bloodhound probing its prey's burrow with a high-octane searchlight in place of an inquisitive nose. Odisseus hears, though partially smothered by the chopping throb of the driftmotor, at least three separate voices, conversing indistinguishably in Commercial, and imagines a trio of bored Endless Imperium occupation commandos, likely strangling jborra kittens or pissing on orphans or whatever it was that aiders and abettors of genocide do to pass time on patrol.

Spare seconds after too long, spare seconds after Moira's noiselessly eased open the clips of her shoulder holsters, spare seconds after vo Qwer's gesticulated something unknowable across the deserted plaza to a cluster of the koj's huddled honor guard, the floodlight peels off, presumably in search of other quarry, taking the boxy vessel it's mounted onto along with it. With an asymmetrical carriage and a presently visible attitude thruster spewing a wake of heinous petro exhaust behind it, the M2 or M9 putters ponderously off eastward, thankfully away from the _Lover's_ poorly-camouflaged landing site and deeper into the trackless frozen quagmire of Baz's northern tundra.

"Bloom me out," Two-Bit whistles, minutes after the vacating transport is barely a dot on the coruscating horizon.

"That was fucking nuts, for a second there," Nemo exhales, face somehow plastered with that ineludible grin. "I was about ready to just murder the fuckers and take my lumps."

Odisseus groans as he pulls himself to his haunches. "Of course you were."

"Think they zeroed the ship?" Anchorage proposes.

"Woulda headed the other direction, were that the case," Nemo attempts to clarify, but Two-Bit's rebuttal rings truer to Odisseus, whatever it actually means.

"Unless they was wending back to flag the real fuzz," he manages to state with a certain degree of poignancy.

"If they're sniffing out spacers among aboriginals," Moira reasons as she struggles to right herself under the oppressively low coral shroud, "and have one functioning brain between the entire lot of them–"

"Which I wouldn't count on," Nemo quips briefly.

"–they're gonna be tracking comm signals," she finishes, clearly peeved at the relatively corny interruption.

"Explains why they didn't jam communications," Odisseus quietly deduces.

"And since the Cap'n was buzzing somebody when the fuzz faced..." Two-Bit extrapolates, with a pair of progressive hand gestures as he arrives at the conclusion

"Ten-to-one, they know we're here," Moira deduces gravely, climbing fully out from beneath their impromptu hideaway with mammoth boots scrunching through the soil and her thoroughly exasperated disposition.

"So, can I have my comm back, or...?"

Chapter 15

Two-Bit Switch positively hates planets. From lifelessly arid terrestrial rocks, like Saxon or Ostara, to the colossal and troublesome gas giants, like Lzura or Talos, from the poisonous methane fields of Ebroc or Omiph to the teeming, organism-infested jungles of Xwollow or, more immediately, Baz, Two-Bit Switch has exactly no patience for planetary bodies of any kind, shape or creed with one notable exception and perhaps a handful of inoffensive moons. For context, this was a man whose entire childhood was set against reliably stable corridors of solid teltriton, artificial gravity dialed to a manageable level, consistently re-purified oxygen and with a hot meal, a stiff drink or a holovision set never more than three storefronts away. Therefore, it was unsurprisingly difficult for the former station waif to imagine anywhere more perpendicular to his carefully cultivated tastes than the exploding albino blood-forests of defiantly uncivilized Baz.

At least, to Two-Bit's thinking, on Takioro, the very ground and everyone on it wasn't necessarily working actively towards his death, which is more than this forty-five minute overland trek toward the temporary base camp of the Scream-Weed kojaj could claim.

Dawn escapes only momentarily between rare breaches in the three interlacing layers of canopy, freckling the forest floor in shreds of orange and red. Excepting these semioccasional slivers of sunlight, however, the Scream-Weed's ancestral province is little but noxious, musty and oddly sepulchral, an apparently endless jungle of hemotaphagus fauna and whitewashed flora. All of the vegetation here, from the unusually patterned leaves, to the desaturated wood of a thousand entwining trunks, to the frondy undergrowth of ferns and scrubs, is a sinister shade of pale, as if a forgetful painter-by-numbers had neglected to color the entire forest in.

Beyond the chronic sinkholes, which returned deeper, darker and more abundant, and the mounting suspicion of unprecedented and fiery fulmination from below, no less than twice did vo Qwer and the seven members of their "welcoming party" from the nearby kojaj need to stave off, by waggling both their throatsacs and their peculiar hollow polearms in its general direction, the predatory advances of some prickled monstrosity that appeared uncomfortably predisposed to draining the pirates of their various bodily fluids. Like any progressive hoodlum would when confronted by a charging, ravenous sanguivores, the ten non-Baziron present drew down and prepared to pepper the thing with supercharged ditrogen and only the stern admonitions of vo Qwer who stated that energy weapons would only "FURTHER ENFLAME THE NHYBARK," and "ALERT THE IMPERIUM TO OUR POSITION," could dissuade them.

Most salient among vo Qwer's various stern admonitions, however, were his unceremonious cautions against the multiform wildlife of Baz's unnavigable tropics that professedly thirsted for Two-Bit's blood. As he trudges through the cadaverous white undergrowth, Two-Bit occasionally passes the odd fern or shrub, blushing delicately pink as though embarrassed, and he's immediately more mindful of his footing lest he, through clumsiness or simple misfortune, run afoul of some lurking danger and provide the parasitic vegetation with a second meal this morning.

He's more mindful to fully circumvent the patches of hanging growth that droop down across his path, in case any of the pendulous vines happen to belong to an arboreal creeper and its nettles imperceptibly puncture his skin and summon worse fiends down upon them. He's more mindful to avoid stepping upon, over or too near any deadfall, sunken logs or rotted timber, lying overgrown among the leafy chaparral, on the off chance that they currently house the ambushing, adhesive tongue of a giant crerpo toad. A creature so exceedingly grotesque that the Baziron regard it with all the deferential deification that befits an ancestor, the crerpo toad allegedly reels any ensnared prey in at an unavoidable speed and, according to a reverential vo Qwer, pulpifies them against the serrated walls of its own throatsac.

While perhaps not as directly hazardous to his health, several other unpleasant features of these southern jungles, in Two-Bit's admittedly biased opinion, could have warranted mention in vo Qwer's too-eponymous briefing; the stifling humidity, for one, that eerily persistent wailing of the scream weed for another, but the most intolerable of vo Qwer's oversights, were the droves of damned ktotari birds.

Millions of infinitesimal birds that Two-Bit, judging by their size and numbers, would have mistaken for midges had vo Qwer not passingly corrected his zoology, cloud the muggy air in pestilential swarms, buzzing about with their microscopic wings flapping once every millisecond, like the insects Two-Bit'd confused them for. Ostensibly lacking the necessary mouthparts to draw blood from their own victims, ktotari birds simply hounded likely-looking prey long enough until another, larger predator could be bothered to spill the hapless creature's blood for them to scavenge the leavings. Two-Bit considered this, predicated on the innumerable multitudes hovering about the twin driftcarts and their squadron of accompanists, a heartening sign.

After quite nearly submerging his entire left leg into another invisible sinkhole, Two-Bit Switch sours enthroned Odisseus with his nastiest glower. The Ortok, struggling obstinately to steer the enslaved driftcarts through the entangling brush without toppling either of their insecurely stacked loads, pays no heed. The grumbly Odisseus had flat-out refused to bear any additional passengers as burden beyond the forty crates of DU5 assault rifles to be delivered to koj Pasqkla's proverbial doorstep, arguing that the driftcart's undercarriage was entirely liable to bend and buckle under the weapons' tremendous combined weight and, unless the pirates felt inclined to march through the undergrowth hefting four gun crates a head, they'd best not tax the driftcarts anymore than they absolutely needed to. Though Two-Bit couldn't exactly take exception with this hypothesis, it didn't make the aforementioned march through said treacherous undergrowth, especially for those without a cushy driftcart to ride, any smoother sailing.

Moira, nursing a Yellowtooth and a deeply scurrilous attitude ten feet to Two-Bit's left, certainly didn't think so either.

The newest in an extended history of her foul temperaments, Moira's current umbrage, of course directed at Nemo, first germinated late the previous evening, following the hovercraft incident at the Dancing-Horizon's main settlement. When her earnest entreatments to reconsider his strategy fell on habitually deaf ears, the seething contempt endured through the night, to manifest this morning with disregardful cigarettes and barely an audible word to spare anyone.

The Captain, however, is as customarily clueless to Moira's moods as he is to nutritional facts, local weather patterns or common sense and is, by some strange means Two-Bit couldn't comprehend, able to contently, even cheerfully, tromp through the underbrush. Which, Two-Bit suddenly grasps, meant he was almost certainly thinking about killing someone, a sentiment Moira undoubtedly shared.

As for the rest of the thuggery, Two-Bit observes that, to a sentient, from Danbonte to Ebeneezer, Brondi to Rooster, Anchorage to Heeko, they all flinch from snapped twigs in the brush, restlessly scan both the shadowed fathoms of the jungle and the unreadable expressions of their Baziron hosts for signs of hostility and, as casually as they can, rest uneasy hands on the stocks of so many holstered weapons. With only Abraham, Marco and Garrigan left behind to guard the _Lover_ in whatever unspoken and vainglorious subterfuge Nemo assuredly attempted to bait Insurgent Company with, the remaining six hired guns evidently share Two-Bit's constitutional fear of this place, in all likelihood many reared in circumstances resembling his own on Takioro. This uneasiness, coupled with last night's sleep deprivation and shaking loose the residual malaise instilled in a spacer after practically a month of shore leave, jointly works wonders on the crew's morale.

From what little Two-Bit could piece together about Baziron disposition, even vo Qwer seems wary, though apparently more by the immediate presence of over half a dozen Scream-Weeds than by any authentic fear of the jungle or its dangers. For their part, the seven fetchers from the approaching kojaj commit their level best to ignoring their charges, vo Qwer and pirate alike.

Such is how the expedition progresses for three quarters of an hour: forty crates of stolen firearms, seven inconversable Baziron guides, six gravely disquieted mercenaries, two cumbersome driftcarts, the consternated Ortok piloting them, one skeptical emissary, one resentful first mate, one good-natured Captain and Two-Bit himself, stomping begrudgingly through the most vigorously hazardous wilderness environment in the galaxy until, at length, they arrive.

A pair of whitewood totemic posts, ritualistically carven with glyphs and wardings of a fashion passingly similar to those adorning the equipment and vestments of the Dancing-Horizon, are Two-Bit's first clue toward the nearness of their destination. As gratefully painless an action as it is to officially gain entrance to the base camp of the Scream-Weed kojaj, he can't shake the grim conceit that, had they not been escorted, the crew of _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ , even with vo Qwer's aid, would never have broached this far.

Two-Bit's second indication of their infringement comes significantly later, at his first spotting of a Baziron citizen, crouching among the bracken to feed a handful of swatted ktotari birds to a yipping slodzen. These southern specimen, when contrasted against vo Qwer, differ slightly on an anatomical level: svelter, more wiry and of substantially paler complexion with nostril slits that taper upward, practically to the cranium's crown and an elongated proboscis, capped with a thistled tip. As the driftcarts and their entourage lumber ungainfully through their settlement, the Baziron inhabitants, of assorted ages, genders and social standings, gradually begin to materialize, momentarily disregarding their morning routines to rubberneck this queer caravan. Only as several of what Two-Bit recognizes as Baziron children come scurrying out of their abode to view the parade of interlopers does Two-Bit realize that he's unknowingly passed over a score of their dwellings.

Marked every few yards by the latitudinous and half-buried mossy stone slabs their ashen roots entwine and sprout from, the hollowed-out bowls of a chalky softwood tree serve as masterfully-disguised domiciles, expertly woven thongs and camouflaged nets mingling with the tree's own ghostly foliage to perfectly blur the buildings into mere underbrush. Two-Bit even imagines that, were the Baziron to remove their engraved whitewood posts and retreat into the confines of their virtually undetectable lodgings, a complete Insurgent Company battalion could transverse the entire breadth of their village and not suspect a thing. On the other hand, the labor-intensive act of excavating a new tree and carefully re-applying the facade every time they moved camp sounded perhaps over-elaborate for the purportedly nomadic Scream-Weeds to continually undertake.

This question resolves itself further down the trail. One of the dwellings' stone foundations, apparently uncomfortable in its current position, shifts, briefly disinters its westernmost face to reveal two segmented legs which, free of their earthen tomb, inch the entire production, tree, dwelling and Baziron included, several degrees to the south, before retracting both surprise appendages and nuzzling back into the sodden soil. The Baziron female above, complacently boiling clothing in a clay basin in the doorway, barely notices this adjustment, only idly hoisting the washbowl off the "stone's" surface in order to prevent its spilling and, her home's facing summarily changed, returns, unbothered, to her laundry.

Two-Bit hastily yanks on vo Qwer's slender arm, a gesture the jumpy Baziron seems to almost interpret as some manner of attack and nearly gores Two-Bit with his proboscis but, following the sightline of his pointed finger and the bewilderment in his voice, the emissary at last comprehends his intent. "vo Qwer, what, in all the moons of Jotor, is _that_?"

"AN EJVORA CRAB, QUARTERMASTER BITSWITCH," vo Qwer's droidvox categorically replies. "THE SAVAGES CONSIDER THEMSELVES AT WAR AND, THUSLY, HAVE ABANDONED THEIR SACRED FOOTHILLS TO FOLLOW THE HERD."

"The herd?" Two-Bit restates, shooting a panoramic glance at the encompassing number of Baziron homesteads, each planted firmly atop a monumental hunk of brown bedrock. "You're tryin' to delly me..."

"THE EJVORA CRAB FEEDS ON DEPOSITS OF DOXYCHORAPHUM IT FINDS IN THE SOIL. WHEN IT LOCATES A SUFFICIENT AMOUNT, IT BURROWS INTO THE EARTH, SPENDS SEVERAL DAYS DRAINING THE SUBSTANCE FROM THE IMMEDIATE AREA AND RELOCATES ITSELF TO ANOTHER CHEMICALLY RICH AREA." vo Qwer motions vaguely about the campsite, apparently in reference to its milling denizens. "COME THE ADVENT OF WAR, THE SAVAGES OF THE SCREAM-WEED INITIATE A PARASITIC RELATIONSHIP TO THE EJVORA, PROVIDING THEIR COMMUNITY WITH MOBILITY, HAVEN FROM THE DOXYCHORAPHUM'S FURY AND A STEADY SUPPLY OF BODY ARMOR, HARVESTED FROM THE CRAB'S DURABLE OUTER SHELL."

"Tragg enough to edge off a bit of repellent, sure," Two-Bit muses appreciatively, before issuing a half-cough and the slightest shake of his head. "This place is bloomin' antwacky, isn't it?"

"CONFIRMED."

The final leg of the overland journey to koj Pasqkla Two-Bit occupies by skimming the Baziron camp for any sign of the next batch of weirdness to drop from the sky or spring from the earth but, luckily for him, it happens to be the koj herself.

She is female, Two-Bit assess as about the only feature he can declare decidedly, although how, precisely, he's able to declare this detail remains a mystery. She sports neither breasts nor any visible genitalia and overall, biologically resembles koj Hhenel as much as two members of the same race ought to, but something about either her attire or her comportment seems to suggest the utmost maternity. Like koj Hhenel, she's prodigiously plump, conceivably even plumper, if such a thing was indeed possible but, unlike koj Hhenel with the copper coloring representative of his tribe, koj Pasqkla contradicts this complexion, as she's swollen with pink pigment. Watching her bulbous form shudder and shake atop the unearthed ejvora crab she rides towards them, Two-Bit, briefly reminded of the plots of rosy vegetation they'd crossed in the jungle, shivers.

Chaperoning her atop her mammoth chitinous mount, in addition to the capacious cushion she reclines upon, are a full retinue of ten burly attendants, lending the slowly scuttling arthropod beneath them the combined weight of fifteen regularly sized Baziron. The ejvora crab, unperturbed by the excessive burden continues forward all the same. Presumably all guards, the koj's half-a-score of minders are draped and festooned in a flurry of downy regalia, similar to those of the Dancing-Horizon warriors but far more extravagant and puzzling, a wild conglomeration of kaleidoscopic feathers. Chief among these protectors is a swarthy oddball of a brute, a full foot and a half taller than the rest of the already beanstalk Baziron, this attribute the only reason he's even remotely visible to the party of pirates, standing, as he is, directly behind koj Pasqkla.

The two bizarre hosts, the former a pair of mated, mud-splattered driftcarts surrounded by spooked pirates and stacked with illegal hardware, the latter an overtaxed crustacean of burden conveying Baz's fattest bloodsucker and her entire honor guard, finally converge upon a conveniently sparse patch among the undergrowth. Odisseus meanders the driftcaravan to an intermittent stop and their seven Baziron conveyors continue roughly ten yards forward, halting immediately before the lumbering crab and, as one, they about-face, forming a defensive half-perimeter around the koj's settling platform and leveling their seven polearms straight the way they'd come. Freshly reminded of their unfriendly odds should this koj Pasqkla be less receptive to Nemo's unique charms than koj Hhenel had been, Two-Bit fleetingly wonders if they'll need to crack into those DU5s to ensure an uncontested retreat.

Several strained seconds elapse, neither faction willing nor necessarily certain how to extend the proper opening pleasantries, before vo Qwer discharges some mucous greeting and ventures forward, throatsac pulsating and fingers flourishing. Several of the Scream-Weeds, the koj Pasqkla among them, reciprocate the popped salutation and, as vo Qwer strides past, Two-Bit suddenly catches an unexpected whiff of nicotine and tobacco, a putrescence oddly domestic to his Takioro-bred sensibilities. Glancing over his shoulder, he spots discontented Moira, christening a crisp cigarette and about to stash the diminished remains of the pack.

"You got another bifter in there?" Two-Bit inquires with a halfhearted point toward the crumpled Yellowtooth carton. Moira, unlit smoke drooping from her mouth, blinks. "Mind bumming me one?" After a long scrutiny, she tosses him the almost exhausted package.

Withdrawing the penultimate cigarette from its tissuey casing, Two-Bit loiters three steps backward as Moira fishes out her book of matches and vo Qwer presumably devises as grand an introduction as Nemo could possibly deserve.

koj Pasqkla, her throatsac engorged like an overripe melon, chortles some strangling interruption to vo Qwer's protracted preamble. After a moment, the cowed emissary relates, possibly masking frustration beneath his implant's unfeeling voice. "THE GLUTTED ONE PASKQLA DEMANDS TO KNOW WHICH OUTLANDER DOG GLUTTED ONE OTT SENDS TO TREAT WITH HER NOW."

"The dog in question would be me," the Captain volunteers, traipsing himself and his sunny inclination forward a few steps. vo Qwer initially attempts a translation, but koj Pasqkla supersedes him again, undulating her distended throatsac and eliciting streams of hiccup-laughter from her encirclers.

As though embarrassed to report her jeer, vo Qwer stutteringly imparts, "THE GLUTTED ONE PASKQLA DOES NOT RECOGNIZE YOUR SCENT AND PROCEEDS TO MOCK THE DUBUIOUS SUCCULENCE OF YOUR BLOOD."

"Mock?" Nemo, half-alarmed, struggles to comprehend. "Wait, like, that's a joke? That I'm not, what, 'succulent?'"

Two-Bit closes his eyes to imbibe a first great swallow of the newly ignited Yellowtooth, hoping to so sweepingly swamp his senses that he might, if only for an instant, totally expunge any evidence of Baz's abhorrent jungle and replace it with the faintest trace of Takioro's signature smog.

He nearly vomits from the shock, doubling over to hawk and wheeze into the mud whatever residual wreckage of his pulverized lungs remained after that virulent pseudo-tobacco wearied of roughing up the place. He commits several moments, hunched and hacking, to re-establishing as regular a respiratory rate as he dares and insuring that his ambushed esophagus had not, in fact, shriveled into a blackened, mummified husk.

Two-Bit peers up, after the brief respite to discover not just Moira's withering two, but all sixty of the transaction's eyes, the pirates, the Baziron, the Captain, the koj, all fixated on him and his unheralded spasm of dry heaving. "Sorry, mates," he croaks apologetically before barking out a final wad of ebonized phlegm and silencing the offending cigarette in a gloved fist.

"Seriously, I'm supposed to be offended that she _doesn't_ wanna drink my blood?"

Two-Bit blearily rights himself, glimpsing the abused package's "Yellowtooth Blacks: Unfiltered Cancer Sticks" label, unholy little icon sniggering malignantly back at him. "All the moons, Quicksilver," he exhales to Moira under his beleaguered breath, "these blowbags are naffy enough to unclink outta their boxes and gank you in your sleep!"

Moira retrieves the concave carton between two left fingers and, maintaining her embittered silence, only flares her cigarette's end with an inhale.

"Tell the koj," Nemo describes, rooting his hands deep into the pockets of his ceaselessly unbuttoned jacket, "that Ott seeks council, which he's willing to purchase with a gift of, how many, five hundred some high-quality assault rifles, for the Scream-Weed's use against the invading enemy." vo Qwer complies, quickly converting Nemo's request, but the Captain adds, mutteringly, "See if that don't brighten her day."

As vo Qwer, throatsac quivering, sets dutifully about his task, Two-Bit, although standing somewhat apart from the actual negotiations, notices that koj Pasqkla's attention, diverted wholly away from vo Qwer's translation, appears to be focused, more or less, in his general direction. Two-Bit glances behind, fails to spot anything alarming or untoward and faces forward again to see koj Pasqkla conferring concisely with the nearest associate, before exploding into her own diatribe.

"THE GLUTTED ONE PASQKLA," vo Qwer begrudgingly downshifts, ceasing Nemo's statement prematurely, "REMINDS THE MALODOROUS OUTLANDER THAT SHE REQUIRES NOT COUNCIL NOR WEAPONRY FROM GLUTTED ONE OTT TO DO BATTLE WITH THE IMPERIUM AND ONLY ACCEPTS HIS GIFTS AS TRIBUTE FOR HIS OWN OCCUPATION OF HER PLANET."

Nemo smirks the same stymied smirk he indulges Velocity with, his good humor bleeding away, and considers his boots in the apricot mud. "Which is plucky and endearing of her, but now, we need information on troop movements. So, vo Qwer, how about you tell her to take the weapons, tell us where the forward command station is and then we'll get out of her hair. Or fat, or whatever."

Again, vo Qwer rattles into another long-winded translation and again, Two-Bit observes koj Pasqkla's focus waver and, after a moment, realign her gaze seemingly right at him. Two-Bit instinctively runs his tongue between his teeth and slithers a hand through hair two weeks unwashed but again, before vo Qwer can fully recount Nemo's message, the koj spouts more avarice from her voluminous throatsac.

"THE GLUTTED ONE PASKQLA DOES NOT REQUIRE AID FROM OUTLANDERS TO FIGHT OUTLANDERS. HER SOLDIERS ARE SUFFICIENT, THEIR WEAPONS ARE SUFFICIENT AND SHE STERNLY RECOMMENDS YOU EXTRICATE YOURSELF AND YOUR COMPANIONS FROM HER SCENT."

"See, I don't really think I'm being that unreasonable, am I?" Nemo appeals to Brondi and Rooster, who have the distinct pleasure of standing just past his left shoulder. "I am not leaving here," he directs back at the koj, "until I know the specific location of Insurgent Company's forward campaign base. Now, you can either take these weapons and answer the fucking question–"

Two-Bit hurriedly sniffs twice and the mercenaries bristle, loosening firearms in holsters for the impending moment of diplomacy's irrelevancy, but koj Pasqkla, as is her nature, preempts everyone with a clicking exclamation of her throatsac and an effortful point of her inflated finger.

"YOU," vo Qwer begins to decipher koj Pasqkla's continued accusation and Two-Bit fidgets apprehensively, wondering what in all Jotor's million moons a Baziron chieftain could possibly want with him, "THE STENCH OF YOUR TOBACCO OFFENDS THE OLFACTORY FUNCTIONS OF THE GLUTTED ONE, WHO COMMANDS YOU TO EXTINGUISH YOUR RECEPTICLE."

Moira, smoke snaking from the crack of her lips, plucks the Yellowtooth out only to intone, "Tell that sack of shit I'd be happy to extinguish it on her fucking face, if that's her royal fucking wish," before calmly restoring the cigarette to its former seat.

Response, initially, is mixed. Several of the pirates, Two-Bit included, scoff, snigger or whistle at the statement's sheer absurdity. Odisseus breathes some word of caution. Nemo, after a beat, guffaws loudly, while vo Qwer, evidently liking their odds against the squadron of Scream-Weed faithfuls, proceeds to translate the remark.

Upon receiving the gist of Moira's threat from vo Qwer's paraphrasing, the seventeen stoic Baziron scouts and bodyguards burst into alacrity, brandishing their polearms and expanding then deflating their throatsacs in a chorus of honking, a sound Two-Bit can only assume is some manner of war cry. Almost instantaneously, of course, has the crew of _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ dislodged weapons of their own, Two-Bit Switch yanking the Dissident loose and bringing it to bear on their less-than-gracious hosts. The situation, he appreciates, has become significantly snarlier.

The koj, however, only laughs her hiccupping laugh, sustains her pinpointed deadlock on Moira and emits a warbling response, concluding with another onerous gesture, this time aimed at Nemo. "THE GLUTTED ONE PASQLKA ADMIRES YOUR METTLE, OUTLANDER. YOU, SHE SURMISES, ARE THE TRUE PEER, RATHER THAN THIS WITLESS BOOB?"

Despite the brunt of gunfight tension, a smattering of the conscripts, Brondi most prevalently, manage a chuckle even at this. Nemo, glancing back at her, shrugs endorsingly, which Moira apparently interprets as her cue.

"What if I am?" she spits, framed between extended pistols of her own.

"THE GLUTTED ONE PASQKLA OFFERS, IN PLACE OF THIS LOOMING BLOODSHED, THE RITE OF MORWAQ."

"Which is...?" Moira dangles.

"A DUEL TO THE DEATH," vo Qwer hastily simplifies, "FOR CONTROL OF THE KOJAJ."

Odisseus mutters some disparagement, but Nemo's instantly taken with the idea. "Shit, you serious?" he substantiates to vo Qwer, before turning back to Moira and, in a stage whisper, as though any of the Baziron could understand him, "Say yes, Moira. I got an idea."

She percolates a moment, as if debating a refusal until, with one flowing movement, she retracts both Righty and Lefty and the twin pistols plop contentedly into their respective holsters. "I accept. What the fuck."

–––

Odisseus drums the points of his hind claw and wonders whether or not the creature he's standing on, with its fortified outer shell many times more resilient than most starship hulls, even registers the clicking sound of his impatience, much less the nine other pirates and one Baziron standing atop it as it trundles down the incline. The experience of riding an ejvora crab had somehow proven more unpleasant than Odisseus had predicted – their progress is ponderously slow, its gait lurching and the chosen terrain, this blast-strewn, ebonized crater, less than ideal for the creature's six stubby, segmented legs. Upon reaching the deepest point of the bowl and the ejvora crab readjusting itself to mount the toilsome climb up the corresponding slope, Odisseus finds himself ironically missing the bumbling unhandy steering levers of a driftcart.

"See, this is actually a brilliant idea and I'll tell you why," Nemo stands apart from the rest of his clustered comrades, like their skooshball coach, atop the teetering crustacean. "All Moira has to do is win the duel–"

"Versus the koj?" Rooster poses, racketing his crest to an incredulous horizontal.

Nemo scowls. "Yeah, I don't really know how that's gonna work but," his face instantly rectifying as he elucidates his asinine plan, "but assuming she wins, she takes Pasqkla's place as the leader of the kojaj–"

"KOJ PASQKLA."

"That's what I said. So, if Moira wins the duel, she becomes the new koj and boom, Ott's got himself an army of like, a hundred million Baziron guys, right?"

"Pretty sure it'd be my army," Moira constitutes, tightening the straps on her left duelist's glove.

"Yeah, but you work for me."

"I don't know if the Baziron would even follow a humanoid koj," Danbonte demurs.

"What if she loses?" Odisseus finally contends.

"I won't."

"You might."

"What's the matter, Odi? Don't you trust me?"

"Anybody care to make it, er, jazzy?" Two-Bit tenders for approval among the conscripts, eliciting more hoots and snickers.

"Switch, you cheap bastard," Anchorage playfully derides, "the lady's life is on the line."

"Don't call me that."

Ebeneezer, however, remains unconvinced. "Ain't bettin' less I know whose fightin'."

Odisseus adjusts his posture to gaze back over the blackened basin and spies, across the rubble-scattered bury zone, the koj's own platform-crab squirming into its proper position, three quarters of the way up the opposite bank of the hallowed concavity. Reputedly the bygone site of a titanic explosion of the area's residual repellent, the Scream-Weed kojaj favored such locales as makeshift coliseums for the combat trial of "morwaq" because, according to vo Qwer, "ONLY THE GODS, NOT EVEN THE DOXYCHORAPHUM, CAN INTERRUPT THE PROCEEDINGS."

By now, Baz's summer sun had wheeled its way to midmorning, slathering not just the jungle below beneath continued waves of this oppressive heat, but also the nearest face of the blue ball of Nebho, scarcely visible above the white-capped horizon of the western treeline. Both Baziron commoners and ktotari birds, the former ringing the crevasse's brink, the latter hovering several yards above it, slowly begin to congregate in greater and greater numbers, as though anticipating the morwaq's eventual bloodletting.

The opposite ejvora is swollen with mingling Baziron warriors, including the koj Pasqkla herself, greedily draining a globular red fruit of its intrinsic juices, all doubtlessly fifteen hundred pounds of her profuse form preposterously unsuited to any manner of physical activity beyond perhaps further ingurgitation.

"Something's definitely wrong here," Odisseus evaluates skeptically. "Short of rolling her down the hill, I don't see how it's possible for the koj to compete in any meaningful way."

"Unless she's some sort of obese savant," Nemo theorizes, with a disturbing sincerity.

Odisseus slaps his paws fruitlessly against his thighs. "I don't even know what that would be."

" _Terrifying_ is what," Nemo imagines absently.

Moira buttons closed her right glove and flexes her fingers beneath the leather. "You're thinking a champion?"

"Sounds feasible to me."

"I wouldn't be buggered, were that the case." Two-Bit nods.

Nemo shrugs dismissively. "Then Moira kills the champion. No biggie."

"Who's the champion?" Odisseus presses.

As though on cue, the accumulating crowd of Baziron onlookers, amassing in loose clumps along the caldera's lip, intermittently begin to part ways to permit the entrance of an individual who, upon first sight, unequivocally answers Odisseus' question.

"Oh, fuck," Two-Bit mutters.

At first look, especially at this distance, Odisseus isn't certain exactly _what_ species the creature belongs to: a head and shoulders taller than most of his fellow Baziron, sporting a swarthier complexion and, most conspicuously, bedecked in the most outlandish body armor Odisseus had laid eyes on. His forearms, shins, torso and crown safeguarded by dimpled plates of chitinous bronze armor of a fashion akin to the ejvora crab's carapace, only his proboscis and its accompanying throatsac betray him as the statuesque Baziron heavy previously posted at the unenviable position of the koj's rearguard. Alighting to the pit's bouldered floor, he raps the haft of his hollow polearm against his breastplate and trills out some manner of introduction, which vo Qwer promptly translates.

"VO OBXO PRESENTS HIMSELF AS VINDICATOR TO THE GLUTTED ONE PASQKLA. COME FORTH, ONE WHO WOULD IMPUGN HER SOVREIGNTY THAT HE MIGHT EXSANGUINATE THEM."

"Exsanguination?" Brondi echoes over the eerie, fluted ovation of the entirely Baziron audience. "That's what happens if she loses?"

"Best not lose then, I guess." Nemo edges a few steps closer to Moira, as if in private conference. "Well, whaddya think?"

"Weak points are gonna be the elbows, knees, anything on his backside," Moira appraises mutteringly, more to herself than anyone else present as she strides down off the ejvora and onto the begrimed ground. "vo Qwer, translate for me."

She advances three steps, nuzzling her hands onto the butts of her holstered pistols and spouting her own presentation in an uncharacteristically emphatic voice. "Moira Quicksilver of the _Unconstant_ - _Lover_ kojaj hereby denounces koj Pasqkla's sovereignty and declares herself as successor!" A ragtag cheer, of course riddled with obscenities, erupts from the pirate's impromptu balcony, as the _Lover's_ crew catcall, hurrah and rattle their own weapons in the air, matching the Baziron's unanimous applause in fervor, if perhaps not in sheer volume. Odisseus, despite himself, strangles a smile.

koj Pasqkla, however, does not appear terribly amused. Another blaring of her spacious throatsac and vo Qwer has more ill news to report. "THE GLUTTED ONE PASQKLA FINDS HERSELF UNSURPRISED BY YOUR IGNORANCE," the droidvox accounts. "A MORWAQ MAY ONLY COMMENCE BETWEEN TWO GLUTTED ONES AND THEY DO NOT DEIGN THEMSELVES TO MELEE COMBAT. HAVE YOU NO SUPPLICANTS THAT MAY VINDICATE YOUR LAUGHABLE CAUSE?"

Moira falters a moment, peeking quizzically back over her shoulder. "Um," she stammers, "well, what do I do now?"

Nemo eyeballs the handful of potential candidates with an expression of remiss recommendation. "Anybody feeling unusually charitable?"

Only silence volunteers. All of the _Lover's_ gathered crewman, Odisseus among them, glance to each other or to their boots. For a long moment, no one is either able to face the giant vo Obxo in single combat or willing to tender their life on behalf of Moira Quicksilver. For an instant, Odisseus steals a brief glimpse of her and nearly spots something, be it animosity, affront or bald-faced fear he isn't certain, in her dull viridian eyes before a slurring, heavily accented voice shatters the awkward reticence.

"Clears my debt, Quissilver, and I'll kills him."

Heeko, dusty carbine dangling off a shoulder strap, shambles a step forward, wetly blinking three of his six eyes. His volunteering purchases him the aggregate disbeliefs and irresolutions of his nine encompassing companions. Only Moira, the holder of his proverbial chain, speaks up.

"Are you sure, Heeko?" she ascertains, her own hesitancy painfully evident in her voice.

"Long as you clears my debt."

"Very well. Done," Moira certifies after a moment's deliberation, extending a hand in agreement. "You drive a hard bargain, Heeko." If the Myyrigon appreciates Moira's unprecedented display of compromise, he makes no outward display of it, simply shuffling his pear-shaped form off the ejvora crab and trundling down the depression to confer with Moira. Odisseus and Nemo trade significant glances, one traditionally graver than the other, as Moira speedily coaches her new champion.

"Just shoot him, alright? He's got that armor, but you've got more canisters. Just shoot him until he falls over and dies."

"I wills, Quissilver," he complies vacantly, continuing his maladroit waddle down the declivity.

Moira's given ample berth as she reclaims her post at Nemo's left hand, sourness unjoyfully returned. "Thanks, boys," she finally snarls, absolutely daring any among them to comment.

Instead, vo Qwer launches a fresh suite of introductions, Heeko hobbles to the crater's floor, checking the chamber of his carbine and, without warning, Nemo's comm belches into operation, spewing the harsh discordance of a familiar ringtone.

"The fuck...?" Nemo murmurs, wrenching the droning device from his belt to examine in the incoming frequency. "Abraham. I'mana take it."

"No, you're gonna turn it the fuck off, idiot," Moira rebuffs coldly. "You wanna bring the Imperium down on us? Right now?"

"Oh, shit, right." He snaps the dial entirely off, succinctly silencing the blaring jingle. "There. All the way off."

With Heeko summarily introduced, koj Pasqkla conjures no further objections, ritualistic or otherwise. The two combatants square themselves, vo Obxo amending the hang of his breastplate and tapping the flanged tip of his unusual spear against his crab-shell helm, all the while purring, Odisseus assumes some manner of prayer, within his throatsac. Heeko, on the other hand, merely widens his stance, cocks the outdated Carbon Industrial carbine and raises the weapon level to his largest left eye. Odisseus holds his breath as the clarion call, a squawking sound from one of koj Pasqkla's sycophants, springs vo Obxo in a furious charge forward, honking a war cry and whirling his weapon. The morwaq roars into operation with the alien howl of the Baziron crowd.

The carbine cracks, burrowing a blazing blue bolt straight through vo Obxo's right shoulder before he's landed his third step, but the bounding Baziron seems undaunted by the virginal wound and persists his charge all the same. Heeko lobs a handful of successive shots, but even those that avoid falling short or flying wide are laughed away by the burnished hunk of carapace bulwarking vo Obxo's chest. Before long, the koj's vindicator has sought refuge from Heeko's barrage between a string of interposing boulders and is closing rapidly.

Shifting his own ground to correctly correspond with the uneven elliptical of his approaching adversary, Heeko struggles with the carbine's chamber as he scampers aside. Whether via some inherent mechanical failure in the decrepit old rifle or simple ineptitude on the Myyrigon's part, he appears to congest and subsequently jam the firearm's loading cylinder. All nine pirates suck in an anxious breath as vo Obxo clears an uncluttered batch of rubble and surges himself toward Heeko in a staggering leap, cranking his armored arm back for a full-body harpoon jab. The mob urgently silences into an expectant hush before Heeko, visibly surprised himself, swings the defunct carbine like a battleaxe and clobbers the hurdling Baziron plump in the expanded throatsac with a potent uppercut from the weapon's triangular butt.

The Scream-Weeds approximate jeering, the _Lover's_ crew holler and cackle and vo Obxo's Baziron bell is temporarily rung, staggering away and convulsing his bruised throatsac, Heeko is granted the moment he needs to re-sling the inoperable carbine and clamber, with briskness belied by his dumpy physique, onto the nearest available boulder.

"Smart move," Nemo comments passively. "He's never gonna be able to stand to that–" he starts, only to abruptly break off and blink obliquely into the distance.

Odisseus furrows his brow. "Nemo? What is it?"

Tracing his saltbrother's westerly point, Odisseus spots, though veiled by considerable distance, the eddying cloud of ktotari birds and currents of midmorning mist, the explicitly familiar frame of a blockish Briza, trailing a pair of telltale jetboosters, disentangling herself from the jumble of ivory canopy, completing the final stages of preflight ignition and, this accomplished, skimming the treeline as it motors out of sight – in the opposite direction.

"That is my ship," Nemo states blankly.

"Correct," Odisseus confirms.

"And it's going _that_ way."

"Also apparently correct."

"Why is that?"

"Stupid, Heeko," Moira unconsciously whispers. "Stupid, stupid." Odisseus wrenches his attention from their inexplicably errant spaceship briefly back on the subject at hand as Heeko, viperous fangs unsheathed, scoots his pudgy form full around the rock's southern face and proceeds to pounce down upon the ameliorating vo Obxo. The onlookers quell their clamor, the Baziron brave nearly buckles beneath the full brunt of the Myyrigon's girth. Heeko, however, miscalculates, thumping solidly onto his opponent's back, but fangs overshooting the relenting flesh of the neck and instead only scraping the breastplate's front piece with a sickening squeal. It's a simple matter for vo Obxo to reach behind, tear the Myyrigon clean off his back, slam him recumbent to the stony earth and cinch the morwaq.

The Scream-Weeds jubilate stridently. The victorious vo Obxo panders to his admirers, twirling his spear once, twice, the third time stabbing down in a savage skewer, deep into Heeko's stomach. The pinioned Myyrigon whines ruefully, the strange polearm's true function starkly relevant even to him as, much to the masses' trumpeting delight, vo Obxo inserts his proboscis into the weapon's hollow stub and drinks deeply of the shuddering Heeko's blood.

"Well," Nemo coughs, adjusting the hang of his gunbelt, "I expect we won't be able to sweet talk our way outta this one. Everybody best be on their worst behavior."

When he's supposedly drunk his fill, vo Obxo violently dislodges his provisional straw, blanched Heeko gurgling in response, and thrusts the weapon skyward, both its spearhead and his own bristled proboscis dripping rivulets of jade blood. The Baziron gallery winds up some gladiatorial chant, the ktotari flock churns with bloodlust and Odisseus spots koj Pasqkla, a lounging constant among an ejvora crab full of exultant Baziron, hiccupping zestfully and mimicking Heeko's sanguine fate with her enervated fruit, until something punctures her throatsac.

Odisseus squints, scarcely trusting his undependable eyesight, but indeed, when he's focused his vision, an utterly surprised koj Pasqkla whimpers mortally through a clean hole in her throatsac. It isn't until the second shot that her lackeys actually take notice of the koj's predicament; a muffled red streak penetrates the side of her confounded head, originating from some eastern point above Odisseus' current position. A third and a fourth shot, definitely the doing of a sniper, likely lurking among the trees at the easternmost edge of the morwaq cavity, both officially terminate koj Pasqkla with a horrid shiver and propel the remainder of the Scream-Weed kojaj into a lather.

"I'm hinking that our crunches just got a lot worse," Two-Bit soberly predicts.

Even over the mingled bedlam of the headless kojaj, Odisseus still hears the wail of the approaching driftmotors before he sees them; three M2 Vagrant-Class Short-Range Scouts hurtle past overhead, dissolve what was once a tight formation and begin unloading their anti-infantry cannons into the scattering Baziron populace. As the pirates curse, draw weapons and scramble for cover among the declivity's stones and boulders, Odisseus hears, within the adjoining stretch of jungle, a flurry of rustling brush, humanoid voices exchanging code phrases in gruff Commercial and, before long, the unmistakable clatter of so many SV7s, opening fire.

Chapter 16

Moira Quicksilver elects never to be shot in the neck ever again. First of all, neck wounds too often proved nearly impossible to properly bandage mid-gunfight, judging largely from their apparent tendency to unrepentantly spew copious quantities of blood, regardless of how much manual pressure one exerted on them. Secondly, the entire esophageal region was perhaps a little too close to her vital carotid artery for Moira to comfortably receive gunfire. Lastly, an injured throat rendered her virtually mute and therefore, incapable of issuing commands to their outnumbered, outgunned and effectively surrounded handful of pirates.

A serendipitous shot during the opening salvos of the ambush had claimed a skirting, finger-deep puncture on the margin of her neck – a harrowing, if otherwise benign, wound. Moira could certainly treat such an injury, should she ever find herself safely returned to the _Lover's_ medbay. Danbonte'd struggled to dress the wound as best he could, but the more pressing concern remained that Moira required one hand planted firmly on the left side of her neck to continue staunching the blood flow, leaving her only the one hand to return fire and forsaking Righty to swing fruitlessly in its holster.

Unjustly separated from its mate, Lefty seeks sweet vengeance against the next Insurgent Company bastard to wade through the exploding underbrush, surrendering one shot to the belly of his powered plate and inserting another into the right goggle of his chemguard mask, succinctly concluding his military career with an awkward tumble into the bushes. His running mate, another identical humanoid commando with snowy-camouflaged body armor, a portable respiratory pack and an unslung standard-issue assault rifle, emerges seconds later and a yard west. Lefty rewards him for his hair's-breadth tardiness with a pair of complimentary bolts, the first in a kneecap and the second in the elbow of his trigger arm. His yelp is muffled beneath the triple-prongs of the chemguard mask and he slumps atop his comrade, a pair of hand-wrapped gifts for ktotari birds or worse. The coast fleetingly clear, Moira darts from cover to adjust her position, ten degrees southwest.

Rampant chaos usurps the Scream-Weed camp. Alternating waves of blaring gunfire and armored shock troops deluge the suddenly besieged settlement from a veritable blockade of entrenched positions. Ejvora crabs, awoken from their slumber by the bedlam unfurling about them, uproot themselves and stagger confusedly about the encampment, impervious both to errant laserfire and the occasional burning tree swaying off their backs. The trio of Imperium driftcraft circumnavigate the clearing, peppering pockets of troublesome resistance with their vehicle-class artillery. Slodzen, in mongrel packs of five and ten, tug free ankles and throats of those few commandos luckless enough to ill-aim their weapon's final shots. A resultant smokescreen of consumed ditrogen castoff, the gushing contents of a dozen uncorked gas grenades and legitimate smoke contribute bloodshot eyes and general obfuscation to the developing mayhem. What little Baziron remain unswatted by the compounded swatches of aircraft and infantry crossfire stage an urgent resistance, but sharpened sticks and sporadic suits of crustaceous armor are little more than breakable toys against Insurgent Company's methodical aggression.

Within minutes of koj Pasqkla's assassination, the entire camp will be exhaustively pacified, thanks to two full battalions worth of jungle extermination tactics, complete with overwhelming force, aerial bombardment and extreme prejudice. This is heartless work for hard soldiers and even Moira, a matured murderer in her own right, battles against the rising contents of her stomach as she scurries across a spread of Baziron children's' corpses to reach the agreed-upon rendezvous.

The pair of concavely arrayed driftcarts, towered with baggage, create uniquely ideal shelter against three-fourths of the encroaching Imperials and thusly, serve as the first hurdle in the pirates' strategic retreat from the killing fields without. Only Two-Bit, Anchorage and Ebeneezer await Moira's arrival, with Danbonte dogging her heels, and all three of the crouching hoodlums cringe and wince at the sight of her red-stained neck.

"Not as bad as it looks," Moira wheezes feebly as she slides to cover and wastes little time popping Lefty open to replenish its ammunition.

"Would have to be, else you'd be dead," Anchorage confirms, chucking Danbonte a fresh DU5 from a nearby unclasped case. The redskin accepts the relative upgrade in firepower with a terse nod and replaces his semiautomatic pistol to its holster.

"Well, this went south fast, eh?" Two-Bit comments.

Moira thumbs a clean moonclip into Lefty's empty cylinder with a satisfying click. "Got what we paid for."

"Big buyer's remorse, maybe?" Danbonte proposes.

"Maybe," Anchorage concurs, parceling out five banana clips for Danbonte's use.

Moira scoots herself several feet along the side of the parked embankment to cautiously peer into the blast-addled gap of the cockled driftcarts and divine the progress both of the Scream-Weeds' continued decimation and her hopefully still-absconding crewmates.

She spots one of the M2 hovercraft, some distance away, teeter on its axis and instigate a swooping pass toward the barricaded Baziron, its portside gunner unleashing a red torrent below, only to sideswipe another airborne object which, to Moira's eyes, appears to be an hefty clay jug, hurled skyward from within the churning chaos beneath. Upon collision, however, the jug reveals its intestine surprise – a full load of repellent. With an aggravated explosion of unholy orange fire, the driftcraft precipitously ruptures into two twisting hulks of metal, which whirligig smoking circles to the dirt.

Narrowly avoiding the raining wreckage, certainly from no adroitness or eludity of his own, comes Nemo, only his heinous profanity louder and more colorful than his barking blue pistol. He powers three shots into the exposed back of a prostrate commando partially crunched beneath the smoldering hovercraft, he discharges a distressing multitude of ammunition wildly upward at a second passing M2 and he futilely empties his own magazine into the absorbent powered plate of another advancing infantryman, sporting an oddly-shaped yet faintly-recognizable weapon Moira only identifies split seconds before it's fired.

Most commonly marketed as a utility weapon to big game hunters and with little practical application to a conventional military, an adhesive webgun performed admirably at the single task it was suitably equipped to perform; quickly and efficiently capturing a target. Activating with a sputtering hiss of conjured gunk, the commando's cumbersome weapon unchains an amorphous mesh of paralytic goo, whizzing toward the Captain. Nemo has nearly enough time to stumble aside before the viscous net snags him by the sleeve and yanks him imploringly to the ground. He flails and flops beneath his partial imprisonment, assailing, with only artful vulgarities and the clicking of his pistol's hollow chamber, the squad of Insurgent Company's finest descending upon him. Moira's just selected a target among Nemo's potential captors, the fastest commando to fetch out the magnetic bonds.

Then Odisseus hits him from behind.

Scattering the other commandos like a handful of aflutter lonktonks, Odisseus, as if from thin air, bulldozes the hapless humanoid beneath a flying tackle, crumpling his spine with a skin-crawling snap via the undiluted dynamism of three hundred pounds of ballistic Ortok. Planting both feet firmly on the quivering corpse of his first fallen foe and rearing to his full height, Odisseus, mouthful of fangs bared and radiating the blackest rumble of a threatening growl, interposes himself between the pinned form of his Captain and four of the Imperium's most elite storm troopers and their four assault rifles, his own Acathi lying forgotten on the ground and murderous defiance blazing in his eyes. Moira withdraws Lefty, either unwilling to risk striking the Ortok in the portending melee or simply out of a desire to watch him take out the trash.

They immediately open fire, three blistering bolts boring holes through the blubber of his midsection only the catalyst to their own maimings. Advancing with a bestial snarl on his lips, Odisseus literally slaps the face, chemguard mask and all, messily off the face of the nearest soldier. He clamps his locking jaw entirely around the skull of the next razorback, tousling the humanoid menacingly with a complimentary incisor through each temple. Spewing the brain-damaged commando to the ground, Odisseus scoops up the penultimate of Nemo's tormentors with claws to his throat, hoists the flapping trooper over his head and, thundering a wordless animalistic roar, heaves the helpless humanoid directly at his single remaining comrade.

The last two Insurgent Company bozos crashing into the brush amid snapping necks and breaking bones, Odisseus appears to slowly compose himself and shuffles to the aid of Nemo, still floundering under the webgun's snare.

A spur of proximate movement to her right snatches Moira's attention. Brondi, with Rooster shadowing several yards behind, dashes and darts between available trees, rocks, ejvora crabs, whatever cover presents itself on the fastest route through the carnage toward the folded driftcarts, just as Danbonte and Moira herself had done several moments previously.

"They coming, Quicksilver?" Anchorage hollers.

Moira, in deference to speaking and potentially exacerbating her neck wound, reverts to hand signals, indicating to Anchorage the hastening approach of Nemo and Odisseus at one hundred and forty degrees, before glancing back to confirm Brondi and Rooster's heading and strangling a curse.

Neither the smuggler nor his Dho co-pilot detect the Insurgent Company commando, ghosting their progress deeper in the brush, toting another webgun in place of the standard SV7, likely with a pile of buddies lurking unseen in reserve, hoping to secure a medal or a promotion by bagging one of Ott's pet pirates. Instinctively, she shouts a warning to Brondi or Rooster or both but only a desiccated murmur escapes her lips. She endeavors a second time with worse results, reapplies manual pressure to the right side of her neck and continues to inwardly curse, with indecency enough to rival even Nemo. With Brondi utterly oblivious to his companion's plight, the concealed commando triggers his webgun. This time, though, the aim rings truer.

Rooster is caught entirely both by surprise and by the web, its sticky tendrils snapping back together to fully engulf his relatively diminutive frame. Thrashing out with all ten limbs and his tongue in frantic protest, the Dho demolitions expert and his newfound entanglement greet the encroaching crowd of revealed commandos with a flurrying cloud of arms, legs, hands, feet and profanity. Moira scoots forward into the breach as much as she dares and extends Lefty at arm's reach, showering the predatory pack with streaking yellow discouragement. She discourages only one to death with a fortunate earshot, but the rest of her barrage blends toothlessly into the wall of hustling body armor. Moira watches helplessly as half a squad bear down to detain their freshest catch. Rooster, his previously polarized yellow crest drooping and his omnidexterous struggling quickly draining momentum, finally collapses comatose, the webgun's torpid effects evidently a rousing success.

Brondi, meanwhile, slides to safety just as Insurgent Company is bundling up their netted quarry, the smuggler huffing relievedly and reaching for his ammunition to restock his spent pistol. "We're here," he begins, before spotting her neck and exhaling a gout of sympathetic air.

Moira urgently shakes her head, chokes down the responsive pain from her throat and jabs a clamant pistol in the direction of his pilfered co-pilot. Crawling along the driftcart's rim, Brondi peeks through the impromptu arrow slit and pales.

"Rooster," he breathes, shooting a glance behind, as if searching for the Dho's clone or his evil twin. "Well, what're we doing? We have to rescue–"

"Can't," Moira disavows quietly. "Unconscious."

"But–"

"There's no way," she painstakingly articulates. "I'm sorry, Garrok."

As though summoned at that exact moment, Odisseus and Nemo, though the latter is missing a significant swatch of leather from his sleeve, round the opposite corner and flatten themselves against the driftcart's sheltering embrace, unintentionally impersonating Brondi's winded panting.

"Gentlemen. I almost got shot," Nemo appreciates.

"I did get shot," Odisseus surmounts. "Three times."

" _You_ got shot," Nemo realizes, glimpsing Moira last among the assembly. "Like, in the mouth."

"Neck," she croaks.

"All the moons, what does it take to kill you?"

"They took Rooster," Brondi informs, biting back acrimony as he speaks, "In a net. Like an animal. Moira says we can't rescue him."

"Webgun?" Odisseus inquires, to which Moira nods the grimmest nod her makeshift bandage will allow. "Then you're probably right. We don't have the time or the manpower to extricate anybody."

Nemo scowls, craning to get a look past Moira and into the crevice. "There's no way to grab him back?"

"Not unless you feel like stomping out after him, guns blazing." Odisseus pauses. "Which–"

"Well–"

"Yeah, stupid question."

"Plus, if Moira's right and he is proper drooly," Two-Bit rationalizes, "we're gonna have ourselves a gashouse enough old time, aren't we, hoofing it back to the gantine with camos snupping at our bloomholes the whole way, with or without dragging his sleepy stiff along for the ride?"

Nemo chews his lip, fingers his scar and continues craning. "I mean–"

"No, Nemo," Odisseus ultimates. "I forbid it."

"You forbid it?" Nemo bristles, suddenly challenged. "Since when–"

"Since I just finished yanking you outta that massacre – I'm not about to let you waltz back in there. We don't fall back, we're all gonna end up like Heeko or Rooster or worse."

"I agree," Moira intones, amid a chorus of grunts, nods and affirmations from the cloistered crew.

"But what about–" Nemo attempts to take exception, but Odisseus is swift to suppress his excuse.

"Don't be a jackass. This isn't about that." They exchange something unspoken, Odisseus' unflinching scowl portending an anonymous implication to the Captain that Moira can't decipher. "I took three rounds for you. Non-negotiable." Nemo blusters for a counter but, after a moment, seems to begrudgingly arrive at the conclusion that the Ortok's logic is sound.

"Fine. But, if we see any of those cunts on the way, all bets are off."

"Fair enough."

"So, what?" Brondi fumes, exasperation coloring the fringes of his voice. "What about Rooster? He's just expendable?"

"He's gone," Moira consummates sternly. Careful to maintain a firm hold on the side of her neck, she pulls herself into a squat and gestures with her drawn pistol. "You're welcome to go after him, Garrok, but we're leaving."

As the mercenaries collect themselves, ready additional ammunition and begin charting an exiting course, Moira watches Brondi grind his teeth, glance back into the broiling havoc for any sign and ultimately, with the rest of his companions preparing their expeditious getaway and neither Rooster nor his captors anywhere in sight, swear flagrantly, moodily retrieve an assault rifle from Anchorage and follow the rest of the party out.

Their numbers dwindled from eleven to eight, the remains of _Lover's_ fielded crew sprint, as one, across the expanse of exposure between the haven of their driftcarts and the density of the western jungle treeline, hopefully blitzing whatever perimeter patrol Insurgent Company had installed beneath the mingled hail of their concerted gunfire. As they, a band of cold-blooded killers, fervently flee the scene of their own utter routing, abandoning two driftcarts, forty crates of illegal weaponry and vo Qwer, who apparently vanished during the opening seconds of the fray, Moira can't help but spare a passing thought for Boss Ott and what precisely he'd think of this fantastically disastrous caper.

They crash into the initial thickets like a surf of screaming marauders, a smattering of targets emerging from hiding to brandish their line of impeding Sv7s. After a breathless beat, the firefight begins in earnest.

Ebeneezer's Backlash belches buckshot, spattering the arranged opposition with a fierce shower of fragmented ditrogen particles and allowing his allies to execute their haymakers. A super-charged canister from Anchorage's five-round shotgun clangs against and consequently catapults a commando clean off the ground, slamming her to the earth with a caved-in breastplate. Nemo's tactic is more manic – he simply pours the full contents of his newly-acquired DU5 assault rifle's first clip into his trooper's powered armor, the constant pummeling not only bewildering its wearer against return fire, but also staggering and eventually shorting out the plate's power supply, leaving the unfortified commando behind perfectly vulnerable to the last four of the Captain's shells.

Lefty, on the other hand, is somewhat more selective of its targets. Moira bobs and weaves in response to incoming fire, adopting the abounding underbrush as concealment against the SV7's red-hot reproach, clipping and pruning the feathered fronds but missing elusive Moira. Before long, however, she's within optimal distance and, taking exacting aim, she pops a single shot into the unprotected groin of the commando in question. He wavers, agonized outcry smothered beneath his mask, and, having received sufficient excuse to do so, takes his leave to collapse into a writhing heap on the dirt. As she passes his squirming form, Lefty, almost as an afterthought, delivers a second bolt to his brain.

With that, the _Lover's_ crew punctures the perimeter, each of the seven pirates dispatching one or more counterparts out of hand and soon, they're relatively free and relatively clear, galloping away westward through the steaming jungle, towards the last known location of their famously-departed spaceship.

"Abraham!" Nemo blathers into the comm when they're an agreeable distance away. "Abraham! Where's my ship?"

"Cap'n? Cap'n, you readin'?" Static feedback beleaguers the Grimalti's reply, but it's discernible, enough for Nemo to snap back.

"Abraham, I swear on my mother's revolver, if you've stolen my ship, I will broil your fat ass in your own blubber."

"Me blubber be the very least of yer concerns o' the moment, Cap'n. We got razorbacks, whole troop of 'em, inbound–"

"We actually noticed. Where's my blooming spaceship?"

"She hadta be relocated, Cap'n. Couldn't have Insurgent Company makin' her–"

"No, Abraham, you're not listening to me. You need to tell me where the ship is right fucking now, because right fucking now is when we are in desperate need of evac!"

"Oh, moons' tits, Cap'n! Why'd ye not say nothin'? Gimme a minute – I'll triangulate." Moira's left knee wobbles beneath her next step. "I did try buzzing ye, let the record show."

"The comm is for emergencies only."

" _This_ don't qualify as a bloody emergency?"

Moira stumbles. She's reflexive enough to catch herself on the nearest bough of appropriate height, though with her left hand, alleviating pressure from her neck wound and ushering a fresh onset of trickling blood. The pirates, the jungle, the very planet all unscrew themselves from their sedentary positions and seem to careen about in Moira's quavering vision. Her building bewilderment is dramatically highlighted as the perfunctory cloud of ktotari birds, thousands of tiny appetites suddenly whetted by Moira's leaking blunder, cease swamping the general air to redouble their thirsty teeming about her head. Danbonte, the closest, first catches sight of her dizzy dilemma.

"Whoa, hold up," he relays to the rest of the heedless hoodlums before swatting open a pathway to Moira through the pendant parasites with his wounded hand. "You hangin' in there, Quicksilver?"

Having little conception precisely how feeble she currently appeared or exactly how rapidly she was losing face to the burgeoning circle of crewmen, Moira instead commits the bulk of her energy to smothering nausea and blood loss enough into submission to at least utter a response to Danbonte, but the severity of her injury conspires against her even in this.

Some distance away, Abraham's craggy voice, further beset by more whirring feedback, declares at last. "There – got ye charted, Cap'n. Won't be but a few minutes. Ye stay put and I'll bring the _Lover_ there. Keep yer comm live."

"Finally," Nemo concludes brusquely, scarcely recognizable to Moira's slowly amending senses as an arrogant blur at the edge of sight. "Hey," the blur grunts in her vague direction, "what's wrong with you?" Despite her queasy condition, Moira musters the moxie to roll her eyes and gesture emphatically with the point of her pistol at the gaping hole in her throat. "Oh, sure," comes Nemo's recognition a moment later.

Moira's engineered a gradual straightening of her posture, a replacement of her five-fingered substitute bandage and is making appreciable progress toward the reassembly of her motor functions when Two-Bit screams.

It's an incoherent curse, inspired by horror or alarm or both and immediately following a moist suction and an unfurling of wet tendrils. Anchorage and Odisseus, those two most adjacent, instinctively recoil and scramble aside, conceding Two-Bit the privacy of a wide berth to contend jerkingly with whatever underfoot fiend he'd unwittingly disturbed with a careless footfall into one of vo Qwer's reputed sinkholes.

Coils, rubbery yellow and dripping with some unknowable ichor, snake a dozen routes up Two-Bit's aghast thigh, investigating all the creases and pleats of his trousers, as though fingering out any means of ingress. Two-Bit, understandably anxious about this particular line of inquiry, wrenches and wriggles to extract his snatched appendage, but all his panicked exertions only seem to engulf him further and further.

"Okay, ew," Nemo grimaces.

Ebeneezer crouches from his tremendous height to better inspect what's undulating up Two-Bit's calf. "What in the butt-fuck tarnation is that?"

"Muck leech," Odisseus breathes.

"Do us a kindie," Two-Bit requests curtly, "and get it fuckin' _off_ me!"

With the enlisted help of Anchorage, Ebeneezer, Danbonte and Odisseus, minus the sulking Brondi and the effective hindrance of Nemo's shouted supervision, an array of uprooting methods are attempted, involving pushing, pulling, twisting and firearms, while Moira blearily multitasks; indulging herself in a sequence of progressively deeper breaths, in an attempt to screw her upended equilibrium to the sticking-place, and appointing herself chief sentry to the five-man pratfall comedy unfolding behind her.

Sentinelship, especially with her flagging eyesight and more especially in Baz's vibrantly eerie jungle, is no mean task. The surrounding forest is afire with motion and noise – swaying flora, the rustle of nearby fauna, the frothing haze of waiting ktotari birds. Enough visual and auditory interference that Moira keens her scrutiny down to either an SV7's signature racket or the squarish blur of an Imperium driftcraft, but something else, something less fitting of their environs, presents itself first.

Escalating silence, where once clamor flourished, and compounding stillness, where once movement thrived, join unnerving forces to raise each and every one of Moira's bounty hunter hackles. A new sound, the sound of crashing foliage, then manifests at the very edge of Moira's hearing, almost inaudible over the hullabaloo past her shoulder, though its volume seems to swell with each passing second.

"Something's coming," Moira first ventures, forgetting for all the galaxy that someone had poked open a hole in her neck and, in consequence, only mustering a wet whisper. "Hey, fuckwits," she exhorts hoarsely as she turns around to address the fuckwits in question, with still-ensnarled Two-Bit boosted high onto Odisseus' shoulder and Ebeneezer chopping gainlessly at taut tentacles, "something's coming!" Frustration looses two shots from Lefty into a rare spot of dry dirt some inches ahead of the crew's stumbling spectacle, which both commands their instant attention and, after a long moment, appears to dissatisfy the muck leech of Two-Bit. Its pulpous yellow feelers unbind themselves from their advance up his breeches and, with a disquieting slurp, retreat back into the safety of their muddy hole.

"Good work, Quicksilver," Anchorage bemusedly congratulates. "You scared it off."

Only by the jungle's unorthodox quiet can they discern Moira's stifled reply. "No, I didn't."

Three strides worth of guttural panting and a throaty squeal, its first vociferation, resound behind her. Moira spins to catch the materialization of this approaching phantom and finds, much to her chagrin, the unanticipated shape of a creature that had already twice attempted to waylay her this morning.

Paradoxically, what Moira first sees when this gargantuan animal comes smashing through the underbrush is seemingly a Baziron specter – ghostly pale, even for a Scream-Weed, suspended several feet off the ground and thoroughly dead, deeply impaled on the jagged barb anchoring its chest. What resolves itself through the vegetation seconds later, however, is a confused knot of bifurcated antlers, serrated spines and sloping horns, all mounted unevenly atop the loping form of a monstrous quadruped, bearing aloft the desiccated corpse of previous prey like a waving standard or a gruesome trophy. vo Qwer had christened this particular beast a "nhybark" and, barring flaunting one's polearm and swilling one's throatsac mucus, offered precious little example on how to halt its blood-crazed bull rush.

No conversation, no debate and no exchange occurs between the eight of the nhybark's various quarries. With no vo Qwer to admonish them otherwise, the thrice-ambushed pirates each unsheathe their individual weaponry and, lacking either polearms or throatsac mucus, unanimously respond with the one action vo Qwer had rebuked them from doing: shooting.

For its own part, the nhybark seems to accept this prismatic protestation in relative stride, barreling forward with unchecked velocity and practically shrugging off the onslaught of laserfire its potential prey volleys toward it. It peals another bloodthirsty bleat from its fanged maw, ensconced by notched prongs, and Moira, as she pelts its relentless headway with Lefty's fiercest disincentives, perceives nothing short of feral frenzy baking deep in the creature's beady eyes.

The nhybark, Moira cynically denotes as the _Lover's_ crew hastily disperses with an outbreak of cursing from the raging beast's warpath, is substantially larger in person, standing at least Ebeneezer's already considerable height at the bone-spurred shoulder and possibly twice that in total length from snout to rump. It sunders through the last patch of opposing brush, smashes into full view and entirely clogs the pirate's impromptu pathway with its disorderly turmoil of forward-facing spikes.

A blizzard of ditrogen reprisals from the strewn pirates buffet the galumphing monstrosity, Moira contributing, however sporadically, by blasting away at the creature's rear haunches, in a markedly pointless attempt to cripple the creature's mobility. Ebeneezer, fool enough to close to melee range with the nhybark, clashes and clangs his sparking electrochette against its cartilaginous hide to even less purchase. The incensed nhybark, evidently alarmed by the electrochette's sudden voltage, veers its ponderous bulk about in search of this newest assailant on his hindquarters and subsequently gores an unsuspecting Anchorage from behind with a hateful hook.

Bodily skewered by one of the nhybark's uppermost antlers, wriggling Anchorage, leaking sapphire blood from three separate punctures, rides jerky co-pilot to the ghastly Baziron as the nhybark wheels about to pursue Ebeneezer. Upraised Anchorage's leaking blood streams down twisting corrugations in the nhybark's horns until it seeps wholly into its agape mouth. After a second's deliberation, Lefty plugs a single brilliant bolt into the crown of thorns encircling the nhybark's brow, scant inches from one of the beast's only two defenseless points – its minute eyes.

The nhybark, jolted and furious, tosses its head with a snort and aligns its seething gaze toward Moira, disentangling antlers from its pursuit of Ebeneezer to confront this most recent of threats. Moira matches the nhybark's wrathful scowl measure for measure with a frigid glower of her own, edging several tantalizing steps backward, toward the brushline, and sighting a second shot down the length of Lefty's barrel. The nhybark swallows the bait, heaving heavy breaths and draining more blood from still-dangling Anchorage. As Lefty lets fly, it surges forward in a mad dash, baying uproariously and chasing Moira headlong into the jungle.

Moira tears through the undergrowth at maximum speed, whacking aside shrubbery with the butt of her pistol and feeling her knees weaken with every footfall. Mere moments behind, the infuriated nhybark tramples the vegetation out of hand; uprooting trees, pulverizing any unlucky plant-life and rampaging after Moira, brandishing the limp Baziron and twisting Anchorage on high, like ever-present reminders of Moira's gory fate. Both of the nhybark's squinty eyes, however, are zeroed directly at her, presenting Moira with two cleanly arrayed targets like an old-fashioned shooting gallery might. Granted said shooting gallery was blanketed in wicked spikes and hell-bent on running her down and drinking her blood.

Desperately clutching the sodden remnants of her scrappy bandage to her neck and continually wrestling her wits from the grip of unconsciousness, Moira is made keenly aware of the mounting presence of her pursuer, looming nearer and nearer behind her, indicated not only by the raucous tumult of destroyed flora but also by that intangible tingle that haunted the back of her brain right before she was sucker punched. Moira ratchets Lefty's hammer back, spares a glimpse behind to hopefully claim a killing stroke on either of the exposed eyes and discovers, in addition to the rest of its loathsome countenance, the nhybark's lowermost tusks skimming the ground meager feet from her heels. She fires to little avail, her first two attempts flying pathetically wide and the final chipping the forked tip harmlessly off an unrelated antler, and, this aborted, she quickens her pace.

Her strategy's practical shelf life steadily declining, Moira vaults the mossy mass of a toppled tree trunk and nearly trips herself, scampering artlessly on three limbs with her already-flimsy balance barely maintained. The nhybark, on the other hand, apparently just obliterates the immense hunk of pesky deadfall into sawdust with a single torqued swing of its host of horns, soliciting both a tortured groan from Anchorage and an abrupt recalculation from Moira.

Vigilantly keeping the faint clamor of the crew within earshot, she veers a skidding, unceremonious left, feasibly flustering the nhybark's mindless charge with a moment of reorientation and earning her invaluable instants to hotfoot back to the rest of her companions. Sure enough, the nhybark hoots in surprise, screeches its hooves to a stop and squanders several seconds to adjust its standing. Moira, meanwhile, is plainly gone, sprinting with all speed for the relative safety the remainder of the _Lover's_ crew could provide, whether as security or scapegoats.

Moira breaks cover onto the pathway of their previous passage, the nhybark righting itself an entire minute behind, to a disappeared crew and an M2 Vagrant-Class Short-Range Scout, hovering ten feet above the leafy ground, in their place. She forgoes a thwarted sigh, which would certainly complicate her injured throat, and instead prays to all the moons for Salo's erstwhile rocket launcher.

Barring a sudden downpour of heaven-sent ordinance, however, Moira instinctively sidesteps to the closest available cover, a fanned batch of ferns, to formulate some manner of new retreat. Despite its blotchy camouflage paint job, the M2 is a sterile teltriton eyesore among the sylvan savagery of Baz's jungle, its driftmotor mutely repulsing all adjacent vegetation and thereby sculpting a windblown halo of waving white flora wherever it lingers. Three Insurgent Company cadets man the thickset dropship – all three humanoid, all three appareled identically to their infantry brethren; one to pilot the craft atop a pivoting helm, a second to operate the starboard-side floodlight and a third to dangle on the port-side bucket seat, with a mounted MI Model I34 Dragoon Anti-Infantry Cannon to keep her company.

"Hey, Moira," an unexpectedly immediate voice whispers, "over here!" Moira whizzes as Danbonte, fur-lined collar of his bomber jacket hiked up, seemingly to hide as much of his scarlet complexion from prying eyes as he can, emerges from the foliage farther to her left. He signals hurriedly and Moira complies without complaint, as the M2's spotlight begins bathing the forest's shadows in probing illumination. A dozen feet deeper in the brush, Danbonte, with close-by Ebeneezer striving his damndest to conceal his massive build behind a squat sapling, addresses Moira in a harsh murmur. "You handle that monster?"

"For a minute," Moira manages gratingly.

"And Anchorage?" Ebeneezer crinkles his unibrow.

Ignoring him, Moira presses Danbonte. "Where's the crew?"

Danbonte shrugs with honest ignorance. "When that bastard showed," he indicates the driftcraft with an indefinite gesture of his pistol, "we split. I imagine the Captain and the rest are in a similar predicament, somewheres over there." He points his weapon's nozzle straight north, toward the opposite side of the path and Moira, waiting until the seeking searchlight rolls by, dares a glance in the direction of Danbonte's pointing. After several seconds of scanning the recesses of the trees, Moira indeed perceives the signature shape of Odisseus, skulking unnoticed by the floodlight's scrutiny. "Orders, Quicksilver?" Danbonte defers.

Before Moira's even half a breath to contemplate their next move, a trumpeting howl signals the nhybark's destructive entrance. Seconds later, the creature itself, all hatred and horns, rumbles into view a score of yards to Moira's right, still ferrying a trembling Anchorage as lofty burden and colored an entirely new color of rabid. The M2, at the unprecedented advent of this berserk beast, recoils slightly to allow the nhybark sufficient space, with the cannon emplacement swiveling about at the hectic behest of its gunner. The nhybark squeezes off a single habitual roar of challenge before the gunner can activate her minigun's firing mechanism and let a volley loose.

What was once durable armor against the best efforts of handguns and assault rifles is proven bloodily useless by the vented thunder of the I34 Dragoon. A merciless storm of red laserfire buckles and bursts open the nhybark's spike-shod neck. With a final discombobulated bray, the nhybark lurches drunkenly and quakes the earth with a titanic collapse as its suddenly unstable legs cave beneath it, the impaled Baziron rent to ribbons amid the hail of broken antler. Miraculously, however, Anchorage, with a severed hunk of horn still protruding outward from his torso, clambers coughing from the wreckage, struggles to his blocky feet and hobbles, with an understandable degree of affliction, limpingly toward the opposite treeline and unabashedly toward Nemo, Odisseus and the rest of his comrades in hiding.

"Shit," Moira spits. The M2's gunner, outfitted with more common sense than Moira'd expect in the average genocide commando, traces Anchorage's passing with intent rather than actual gunfire, delaying long enough for the perforated Aurik to clear the bleached brush and for the floodlight operator to swing the high beam fully around to catch Nemo in plain sight, standing there with his thumb practically up his ass, before engaging another salvo.

Canisters cascade to the dirt, spent and slivered, from the Dragoon's flashing shell chamber. The fiery bombardment, matched in volume by the machine gun's thudding rapport, tears entire trees to smithereens and effectively disintegrates any foliage unfortunate enough to be caught in the crossfire. All five of the assailed crewmen, Odisseus, Two-Bit Switch, Garrok Brondi, Anchorage with his innards in his arms, and the Captain himself, rally a ragged retreat, disbanding and scampering deeper into the jungle before the fearsome display of the Dragoon's pure horsepower. A rushed conference between the three commandos ensues before the driftcraft actually gives chase, tilting inelegantly on its axis to better navigate the treacherous trees. As it trundles off into pursuit, the next round of hounding fire from the Dragoon lights up the musty depths of the jungle with vivid flashes of crimson.

"Fall back," Moira orders grimly, stalking past both Danbonte and Ebeneezer in a hunkered crouch. "Try to raise Abraham on the comm, see if we can get ourselves evac. Nemo or Odi or whomever will figure something."

With that, the majority of their crew harried and harassed into the rainforest by an M2 Vagrant-Class Short-Range Scout, Moira Quicksilver, Ebeneezer and Danbonte abscond silently southward, the latter attempting to excavate a workable comm frequency on his handheld unit and the former gradually succumbing to the charms of a nice peaceful nap, courtesy of extreme blood loss.

Under Moira's implacable lead, they drive deeper and deeper into the trackless bush, the strident ruckus of combat ebbing away somewhere behind. All around her, the manifold shapes of ferns, fronds and all the flapping, momentary foliage of a dead run through the jungle blur and coalesce together under Moira's faltering vision. Her mind and senses benumb themselves but her body, press-ganged into ability by rigorous physical conditioning, soldiers forward regardless. One moment, she's hastening deftly in the direction of nowhere in particular and the next, she's on hands and knees in the tameless undergrowth, saturated bandage forlorn in the mud and exactly no recollection of any events between.

Enormous Ebeneezer stoops comically over her, expression of uncertain concern troubling his purple features. "Ya alright, Quicksilver?"

A reddish discoloration in a bomber's jacket, tromps about at the edge of Moira's perception. "I think," it mutters in Danbonte's voice, "I think we got something–"

"...position..." a crusty Grimalti stammers somewhere, the greater part of his sentence squashed beneath unchecked static, "...dial yer...touchdown...."

The three confounded pirates need little time to suss a meaning out of this, however, as the telltale grumble of _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ bellyaching boosters, followed by the initial whining of its shrill landing sequence, reverberates deafening through the forest from every direction, as if an unknown number of IZ36 Briza Light Freighters were anchoring unseen all about them.

A toothy smile, indicative of the absolute sincerest relief, dominates Ebeneezer's face. "Thank the moons."

"We lucked out," Danbonte comments with a nearly nervous smirk and a cautious crane onto his tiptoes. "Sounds like he brought her in actually close." He shoots a glance around. "Not precisely sure where, of course."

Moira grits her teeth, scoops up her bandage from the muck and shakily struggles to her feet. Much as she likely could have benefited from his help, she opts to cling to whatever shreds of her dignity remain and waves off Ebeneezer's assistance, instead steeling her nerves and enacting a Tebi-Gali breathing exercise against a nearby stump.

In an effort to pinpoint their unrevealed evac, Ebeneezer scales the slanted trunk of the only dead tree courteous enough to lend Moira a seat and, thus elevated, employs the full effect of his stature to better overlook their surroundings. "I think I–" he begins to report before something unpredicted, something alive, stirs within the presumably hollow confines of the capsized tree trunk. Moira's instincts tumble her instantaneously from the stump at the first hint of ambush, but her punctured throat continues to forbid her from warning her fellow crewmember of forthcoming danger.

The rotten wood yields like a coward beneath Ebeneezer's weight, unmasking the fleshy form of a strange broad serpent slithering beneath – eyeless, viscous and royal blue. The cyclops, jammed halfway into the shaft of splintered, decomposing wood, yowls in shock as the muculent creature, whatever it was, doesn't dawdle a second before cincturing his burly torso in a single swift stroke and constricting his entire body beneath its muscular coil.

It isn't until entrapped Ebeneezer is yanked, by some unknown power, a full fifteen feet farther into the jungle, with another sustained yowl and a total hewing of the rotted timber into deadfall confetti, that Moira recognizes the peerless abomination that truly awaits Ebeneezer at grappler's end. Predicated both on vo Qwer's all-too-brief briefings and what little research she'd muddled together from the _Lover's_ laughably outdated encyclopedia the previous night, the "serpent" in question, the end of which now disappeared unresolvedly into the jungle, was mostly likely, in fact, a tongue, a tongue that, given the context, would almost assuredly belong to the dreaded crerpo toad. In her limited knowledge, Moira could safely ascertain that, should such a toad succeed in withdrawing this newest catch, a most macabre exsanguination, thanks to a saw-toothed throatsac, was Ebeneezer's only possible outcome.

The crerpo toad's designs, however, have thus far been thwarted by designs of Ebeneezer's own. He's snagged himself on the sturdy reliance of another tree, healthy and hale this time, and strains with all his strength against the potent pull of the portentous predator, still shrouded by vegetation an untold distance away. "Somebody–" Ebeneezer wheezes, all the wind exhaustively knocked from him. Moira wallows in the mud, thirsty mind reeling, enervated limbs unresponsive and perfectly functional eyes nothing but powerless witnesses to the grisly unfolding. Danbonte, however, bolts to the rescue of his desperate companion, though, upon arriving, appears entirely unclear on how, exactly, to be of service.

After watching him uselessly loose a couple of hesitant shots from his semiautomatic both farther down the tongue's lead and in the vague direction of where the crerpo toad might actually be, Ebeneezer groans out some advice to Danbonte. "The belt," he mutters, with a stiff inclination of his horn. "Electrochette."

Moira, still floundered several feet away, bends all her willpower to browbeating her rebellious right arm into operation as Danbonte, careful to avoid catching himself on the tongue's adherent surface, tugs the folded weapon from its sheath, snaps it flush and powers it up. A hyper-charged current of electricity tracing the blunted blade, Danbonte hammers out methodical work on the toad's bulbous tongue. The creature's flesh, however, is pliant enough to absorb each blow's weight and only chop after repeated chop starts to peel and flake the clammy skin in response to Danbonte's frenetic battery.

The toad's retaliation, however, is far more potent. Following a pained bellow somewhere out of sight, the tongue tightens its strangulating grasp, taxing a terrible toll on the tautened cyclops. Already Moira can behold its effects as black blood trespasses down Ebeneezer's chin and dribbles to the dirt. He opens his mouth to voice some final protest, but only more blood, black as pitch, gushingly words his cry. Moira summons barely enough strength to drag her pistol off the ground and tender three laughably-aimed shots toward the rescue attempt before some vital bone, likely a vertebrate, severs somewhere in Ebeneezer's body, his fingers fail and, bearing a stupefied contortion on his face, the kickback nosily whips him from view in the space of a blink.

Half a second of turbulent jungle dragging, half a second of a mortifying sluicing sound, half a second of the toad's gratified rumble and Ebeneezer's gone.

A pang of unsettled silence passes, even the enveloping wilderness adopting a bizarre solemnity, as if humbled by the crerpo toad's monstrous might. Danbonte looks for a moment as if he might possibly follow the absurdly obvious trail of Ebeneezer's ultimate passing, but at another of the crerpo toad's nearly infrasonic growls, he immediately thinks better of it and instead drops down to his haunches. Moira does what little she can to ameliorate her posture.

"You tried."

Danbonte sniffs coldly. "I did." His glare doesn't budge from the ground until, after a quick second, he palms an empty vial from his breast pocket and syringes up a tiny fraction of Ebeneezer's coughed blood, pooling in the scoop of a broad-faced leaf. "Worth a shot," he rationalizes with a curt, wolfen sneer after filling a quarter of a container, just barely enough to claim a bounty, even by Lenduza's shifty standards.

His daily quota of spinelessness accomplished, Danbonte helps the flummoxed Moira to her feet who, in light of her current condition, concludes against commenting on his latest indecency. She focuses rather on renewing her neglected breathing pattern and hardening the wispy remnants of her runaway consciousness into something resembling optimal operation.

"How's the neck?" Danbonte appeals, despite not meaning it. She regroups a workable posture, confirms her memorized ammunition window inside Lefty's chamber and conducts a comprehensive audit of the ambience, until she detects the pained spluttering of the _Lover's_ twin turbines, grinding themselves to a standstill some uncounted number of feet to the east. "Fine," she answers to Danbonte before stomping as best she can into the waist-high brush.

It's, as Danbonte predicted, a short trip. _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ , three stories of piss-yellow hull plating among the alabaster-white forest, awaits them a quarter of a mottible away, unevenly parked atop a reasonably clear tract of ground. Her engines rasp, her floodlights flicker and her boarding ramp yawns open with an unspeakably welcome creak. The silhouette of Abraham is, by activated instruments, blotted neon green through the viewport. Further more, the half-limping form of Garrigan, by his powered plate and his SV7 nearly a clone of the Insurgent Company commandos were it not for his scruff and his khaki shorts, jaunts down the _Lover's_ ramp with weapon ready, but Moira spots no trace of Nemo, Odisseus or the rest of the trounced crew. She frowns as much as her wound allows.

"Where's everybody else," Garrigan interrogates as the unimpressive pair of them slog gratefully toward the ramp, "and what in all the shitting moons happened to your face?"

Danbonte smears more black blood across his red forehead as he massages it with three fingers. "Ebeneezer's dead. Heeko's dead. Rooster's captured," he indelicately relates. "The rest are, well, busy at the moment, I'd imagine."

"Or dead," Moira hisses. Garrigan opens his mouth to react, but Moira stretches her neck and shifts the bandage. "An M2 Vagrant. Chased them north."

Garrigan's naturally aghast. "Well, with Nemo MIA, that'd make you the Captain." He practically winces as he speaks. "Orders?"

Under both Danbonte and Garrigan's irresolute expressions, Moira clamps her jaw tight and half-reluctantly commands, "Glive, fetch me a proper bandage. Danbonte, tell Abraham to trace my comm signal."

Both of her enlisted men nod in synchronization and jog three steps up the ramp before they, almost simultaneously, apprehend the full breadth Moira's extremely bad idea.

"You're blasted," Danbonte utters.

"Moira, you've got a hole in your neck. You're not seriously going back out there."

"There's no chance in Jotor those dipshits are just gonna find us here. Especially with an M2 to worry about." She adjusts the blood-soaked dressing's placement anxiously. "But I can find them."

Cold-blooded Danbonte needs no more assurance and trots upward, soon disappearing into the flickering light of the hold and about his duty. Only Garrigan, concern creasing his brow, lingers halfway up the ramp. "You're in no condition."

"I outrank you, I'm afraid. Get me that bandage, at least," she tasks with a feeble gesture, "and Salo's rocket launcher too, actually."

A guileful smirk softens his "aye aye" and Garrigan's also gone, shambling up and into the ship, off to the medbay by way of the weapons locker. Moira relies on this transitory break to slump against the ramp's nearest retractable pylon, to regulate her irregular breathing and to scrape the bottom of her nerve's proverbial barrel for the final push. In this respite, the jungle around her seems almost tranquil, serene, but Moira is fixedly aware that somewhere, far to the northeast, the combat labors on.

Garrigan's reappeared before she truly registers his return and he applies the sturdier, more prescriptive dressing from his field kit to her neck wound wordlessly, neither party necessarily willing to concede any dialogue to what may be their final conversation. Finally, when he'd administered as much first aid as Moira's time constraint made feasible, he looses the slung Culminator from his back, extends the bulky weapon, armed with three auxiliary grenades, and chucks her chummily on the shoulder. "You should come back," he requests oddly.

"If you insist," is all she can think of to offer.

Salo's unofficially bequeathed rocket launcher slaps against her back as she strides stupidly back into the oppressive confusion of Baz's intertangled jungle, forsaking asylum behind triple-thick teltriton walls and further medical attention at Garrigan's hands to woundedly scour across more untrodden territory in fruitless search of her wayward and likely dead companions and very possibly contend head-to-head with mounted artillery.

She ought to abandon them. She ought to convince herself that five disorderly outlaws could hardly hope to survive a blind rout through Baz's unforgiving wilderness, particularly not with a fully-armed M2 in pursuit and, in truth, she ought to realize she was more likely chasing a crowd of corpses, but a suitable trail, consisting mainly of ditrogen scorch marks and the odd Ortoki footprint, was quickly located. Before her better angels could object, the distinguished drumfire of a Dragoon echoes somewhere nearby, suggesting to Moira that, at the very least, enough of her crew mates were left alive to shoot at.

A corridor of blanched trunks interrupts the complexity of the underbrush like a wide thoroughfare bisecting a metropolis of white woodland. Possibly a game trail, etched from the implacable wild by the passing of ejvora crab or nhybark or crerpo toad, Moira couldn't fathom but, as the obscure droning of the M2's driftmotor only increases in pitch and volume, she prepares herself. Slouching her exhausted form within a convenient cranny of the nearest tree bowl, she hefts the unwieldy 53B Culminator and fumbles loading its first shell into the cartridge. Half a mottible to the north, verging along the western edge of the strangely sculpted aisle, comes the first sign of her mislaid compatriots.

The semi-distant figure of Brondi bounds and springs at full tilt along the cusp of the passageway, heading exactly in Moira's direction and obviously in flight from something. A beat later, two more, easily identified as scrawny Two-Bit Switch and speared Anchorage, surface some feet behind Brondi, each shouldering for position, but both with the same obvious intent as the fleeing smuggler. Finally, just as Moira manages to socket the grenade shell properly into place, the M2 rounds a surrogate corner of clustered trees and into plain view, drawing a lancing red line of laserfire and igniting any sheltering vegetation. For a second, Moira assumes both Odisseus and Nemo to have met fates similar to Ebeneezer's or worse, Rooster's, but, backlit by the annihilating brush, they materialize as Ortoki and humanoid silhouettes, Odisseus in the lead and Nemo, straggler of stragglers, lagging somewhat behind.

Her target within optimal firing range at last, Moira, the surplus of her strength sapped by trailblazing, grapples to effectively hoist the Culminator even in the same direction as the floating M2 hovercraft when Nemo, somehow unsurprisingly, stops himself short, whips about-face and stomps defiantly into plain view. Even over the rattling sound of the Dragoon's expectant gunner cramming another chain of ammunition into her weapon's chamber, Moira can just barely make out the sound of Odisseus' horrified protestation to his Captain's latest bad idea. Nemo stands comically meager before the suspended shape of the weapons platform, aviator's jacket snapping and crackling clumsily about him by the displaced force of the driftmotor, pistol extended upward with sloppy, one-eye-closed aim.

His first shot rings pointlessly true, impacting the M2's expansive plexishield windscreen with a precarious crack and beneath, the unaffected spotlight operator whirls the high-beam about to fully immerse Nemo, as though he required any further exposing. His second shot, the one he fires just as the pendulous gunner aligns her own contrivance dead bang at the Captain, succeeds slightly more, shattering the plexishield in a drizzle of fractured shards. Moira, as paralyzed as with Ebeneezer, bends all her might to flex her trigger finger and fire the accursed Culminator, Odisseus lunges from cover in some mistimed attempt to tackle Nemo out of harm's way, the Dragoon's gunner racks her prodigious anti-infantry firearm with an apparently satisfying hiss and Nemo takes his third and final shot. In the space between squeezing the trigger and the discharged ditrogen streak actually connecting with its intended target, Moira observes a righteously bizarre phenomenon – the ground, evidently of its own volition, seething and bubbling square beneath the trapezoidal shadow of the unsuspecting M2.

Moira, punch-drunk from blood loss, drops both the unspent rocket launcher from her hands and her own insipid form from her propping against the tree, as the M2's entire midsection is cleft suddenly in twain by a pillar of baneful wildfire. Murderous orange and belched upward as if from the vengeful planet herself, a fiery hellfist punches a crisp, smoldering hole straight through the Vagrant-Class driftcraft and slathers everything approximate with a precipitous roar of detonation and a hysterical heat.

Unsurprised that the capricious repellent gods would find common cause with Nemo's mad providence and so spectacularly turn the tables at the very last moment, Moira face-plants in the mud, the shock of her impact stripping free Garrigan's cleaner bandage and bashing away the remnants of her sense.

Three nebulous sensations flitter about her consciousness, the last three she acknowledges; the unimagined heat and orangeness of the forty-foot column of ignited doxychoraphum against her drooping face, the miniscule black outline of Nemo, coat flapping and madcap laughter roiling almost louder than the explosion itself and the ephemeral notion of whether or not Danbonte would salvage her blood for a bounty, and precisely how much she'd be worth anyway.

Fourth Interlude

Moira Quicksilver would have, were it not for the very specific instructions to the contrary, loved nothing more than to shoot this prick's fucking face off. Had the bounty posting not expressed a particularly earnest desire for him to be apprehended otherwise, Righty and Lefty would gladly have rectified the dental arrangement of that shit-eating grin he was doubtlessly wearing. She appraised the drastic dichotomy between his "alive price" and his "dead price" and concluded that, given the current state of her finances, maybe she'd just clock him on the jaw with a nice respectable pistol-whip instead.

She knew he couldn't take one, either. She'd read his particulars on the seven-hour-warp over from Bennevikos, beamed into the single idle matrix aboard her Bloodhound. Unimpressive build, little recorded history of physical assault or battery, even when incarcerated, he wasn't even branded with an "armed and dangerous" notice – practically unheard of this far into Bad Space. She'd caught half a hundred deep space bozos exactly like this; rinky-dink smugglers with infantile codes of ethics, guileless grifters with nothing but mustaches and hard-ons and, worst of all, wannabe buccaneers with delusions zottibles beyond grandeur.

If she could only line up a single shot at a non-vital part of his anatomy, she could take her lumps with his Carbon Industrial piece and accompanying poor aim, pistol-whip him across the chin for kicks, drag his senseless body back to Podhi for the piddly bounty and have done, off to some slightly less pitiful rock, in pursuit of slightly less pitiful prey.

"So," his infuriatingly unbothered voice began again, hollering over the sound of the pelting mud-rain, "I hope you don't think I'm trying to snow you or anything, but when all this is said and done, whaddya say to maybe, I don't know, grabbing a bite to eat? Buzzing in a Nanosecond Pizza or something?" She disparages this plan with a pair of sequential shots from Righty and Lefty, chipping and chopping chunks of the ravine away and hopefully showering him with dirt. "No, seriously," he consents after spitting dirt from his mouth, "my treat."

They were alone among the No'tiukki night and the mud-rains, Moira seeking shelter beneath his abdicated jalopy of a starship and he beneath the rocky lip of the adjoining drainage ditch that, by some devilish misfortune, he scrambled headfirst into before Moira could succinctly conclude the affair. Only the residual worldshine of immense No'banis Minor and the periodic flashing of the landing gear's warning lights illuminated the midnight confrontation, the former tracing all the nearby terrain in a dull glimmer and the latter rhythmically casting her quarry's hunkered shadow upon the far side of the gully, offering Moira the closest thing to precise targeting she could acquire, with her foe so literally entrenched.

They squatted only twenty feet apart. Under normal conditions, it would be an exceedingly simple matter for Moira to just dart across the gap to point-blank range and joyfully deliver his much-anticipated pistol-whipping, were it not for No'tiukki's one little climatic oddity: mud-rain.

She didn't pretend to at all comprehend the explicit geometerology or the explicit meterogeology or the explicit whatever behind this remote moon's torrential phenomenon. In essence, as least as far as Moira understood it, something in No'tiukki's unusually dense atmosphere interfered, on some fundamental level, with the basic underlying principles of the hydrologic cycle. Any water evaporated from the moon's surface carried encapsulated dirt molecules as unwitting passengers on their recurrent trips to the troposphere, perpetually plagued by murky storm clouds. When these clouds burst, however, the ensuing precipitation resulted in downpours the effective marriage of rainwater and landslides. Even such miniscule amounts of earth, when plummeting from such intense heights, proved extremely lethal to anyone standing beneath and while these sorts of turbulent soilstorms tended toward brevity as much as violence, venturing into No'tiukki's mud-rains needlessly was the very definition of a fool's errand.

"You know," he wound up again, continuing to strain his voice over the wet din of sand-grains painstakingly chipping away his spaceship's paint job, "I sorta hate to break this to you, but considering my location and considering your location, there's really no way you can line up a decent killshot. You're only gonna–"

The docking lights flared once, Moira caught half-a-second's glimpse of the idiot's approximate position, leaning heavily to his right to deliver an oncoming wisecrack. She flirted with the idea of killing him anyway, Lefty peeling a dirt clod from the ledge scant inches from the last known location of his head. Technically, she inwardly admitted, his assertion was correct; from her current vantage point, the only real haymaker either of her twin pistols could execute would certainly be unclean and ineffectual. On the other hand, with his back against a solid wall and a pair of freshly-polished 665 Lawman Clicktriggers gleaming in her gloves, who was he to get technical?

"Well, okay then," he appreciated, "I stand corrected. Or, squat corrected, I guess." An exhaustive pause labored past, at the torpid speed of the moron's process of elimination. "So, if you could have shot me in the head and didn't, then you're obviously not really trying to ice me, by which I can probably assume that you're not on any sort of hatchet contract. Which is good, you know, a relief, but still sorta begs the question..." She hears the sound of skin on leather, as if he was drumming his thighs in pleasant conversation before he implored. "Hey, weird question – you're not some sorta ancient-history ex-girlfriend, are you? Because I have dealt with that situation before, actually and I–"

"Captain Creezok wants you alive."

A beat passed before his recognition. "Creezok Skullchewer? Already?" He wheezed out a breath of apparent surprise. "My, you are unusually prompt. I thought I woulda had a week, at least, on any thumbbreaker he could scrape together." His thoroughly unimpressive powers of deduction awhirl, he, at long last, surmised. "So, what, you're a bounty hunter, then? A sub-contract?"

Lefty barked twice, but this he only seemed to interpret as some manner of affirmation or encouragement, the exact opposite outcome from Moira's desired effect, and continued. "Yeah, you're a bounty hunter. I always liked bounty hunters. Well, mostly to kick in the teeth, to be fair, but they're typically more fun than privateers or cops. Do you watch Quuilar Noxix? Who am I kidding, of course you do, everybody does. The thing that gets me about Quuilar Noxix is that you never see him take anybody alive, you know? Actually hogtie the fuckers and bring 'em to justice? Nope, not once."

The landing strut's guidance lights flickered again, revealing his exaggerated shadow as he shifted his crouching weight to further explicate his asinine opinions. "I think you bastards get into this business thinking you're all gonna be like, professional blooming war machines, you know, real bad motherfuckers or something. You buy flamethrowers and missile launchers and poison darts, but what you don't realize is that, half the time, it's gonna be about live capture and manacles and paperwork and all the really fucking boring parts of bounty hunting." She could just envision him down there, gesticulating with some imagined, self-conjured ease, as though conducting this conversation in a public bathroom or a lift tube instead of in their odd little Talosian standoff. Moira squeezed off another two shots and, with no one to observe her, gave her eyes a perfunctory roll, which would be the first of many such eye-rolls.

This fact she was, of course, thankfully unaware of at the time.

"They don't put those parts in the show," he resolved. "Quuilar Noxix doesn't want me alive – he only wants me dead."

Moira bit. "As opposed to what? Petty crime?"

"Um, have you even read my shit? When was the last time you boosted seventy crates of ammunition and two gun emplacements off a Saurian pirate barge while it was still in drydock?" Arrogance of an outrageous new caliber cocked his voice. "Listen, sweetheart–" he demeaned casually, the mere mention earning himself another two unclipped canisters from Lefty, "you're just pissy because we both shoot people for a living and I have more fun, I make more money and my hours are better."

She countered his blithe insolence with more gunfire, her efforts only pockmarking the ditch's meddlesome stones. Nearly obscured by the clunky prattle of mud-rain against hull plates, Moira overheard his practically inaudible muttering, as though making notations or whispering into a handheld comm.

"Bloom me out," he declared, louder, more present than his private utterance, "I'm so fucking hungry. Maybe I'll buzz Odi. Tell him to grab me something at the Junction." A moment's deliberation caused him to mention, certainly for her benefit, "You know, I have an associate inbound."

"Do you?"

"I do. Swinging in from Vollok to pick up the recently pilfered contents of my hold. Figured, at the time anyway, that No'tiukki'd be a pretty safe bet for a drop-off." Moira pinpointed the irony with another exactingly adjacent shot from Lefty. "Apparently not. But, yeah. He oughta be here any old minute now. Probably with his Bellringer combat shotgun in tow."

"I'll manage," Moira denigrated coldly. "The B11's three years outdated anyhow."

"Suit yourself. I will warn you – things like this tend to make him, I guess you'd call it 'irritable'."

"What sort of thing is this?"

"Well, shooting at me things. That and Yeltain jetboosters. Apparently, he hates those now. I guess I can't really blame him." A change in his voice, an abrupt amelioration of tone, banished any residual anxiety or lingering melancholy the gunfight might have imposed upon him. "Did I tell you I have a ship?" Moira instinctively discouraged this sudden brightening by issuing double rebukes from her pistol, but he babbled on, steadfast in his imbecility. "I have a ship."

"I noticed."

"Oh, moons no, not that thing," he scoffed, his shadow tossing a disavowing gesture over its head toward the source of Moira's quarterage against the now-dwindling mud-rains. The dull, characterless bulk of a light cargo buss towered over Moira: Starlight Inc. made and therefore obsolete, complete with single rotation turbine, peeling paint and the unbecoming name, _The Easy Target_. "That's a...transition ship, let's call it. No, I picked one up cheap from the Mannimar scrapyards, what would that be, eight months ago now? Oughta be nearly finished by this point and believe you me, she is a beaut."

"Is she?"

"Well, not necessarily in like, the physical sense so much."

"Of course."

"See, that's very much my associate's problem too. He's got this constitutional aversion to seeing the big picture. Sure, she's, you know, missing a few teeth. Got some battle scars. Tends to explode. But what that adds up to is character."

"Does that matter?"

"Um, that's everything? Look, you gotta understand – the _Lover's_ an old Briza, Model IZ36, except imagine the standard bar engine removed and a pair of customized, stripped, pivoting Yeltain jetboosters in its place."

"This thing is spaceworthy?"

"As an asteroid. Most maneuverable thing in the air. Or will be. Or, I guess, woulda been. You know, were it not for the whole 'bounty-on-my-head' thing."

"I remember. The _Lover_?"

" _Unconstant_." As the impromptu conversation drew to a lull, this latest bout of mud-rain, seemingly taking the cue, abated its fierce pelting to drizzle spasmodically and eventually fall entirely silent. "I gotta 'gram here, if you wanna see. Uh," he stammered a moment, over the sound of shuffling clothing, "here. Catch."

The landing lights shimmered off an attenuate airborne object and Moira reflexively snapped both pistols high, lobbing a single ill-aimed bolt from each before her target harmlessly slapped the mud several feet from her position. "Relax, willya? It's just a holodeck." With Lefty unnervingly trained on his location, Moira scooted briskly from cover to confirm this assertion and indeed, the inert object was nothing but the slender shape of a dirt-spattered holodeck. Moira, uncertain herself as to why she was indulging this cretin his inane ramblings, pawed up the offered device and inched back beneath the _Target's_ lip. "Now, as I said, she certainly ain't the belle of any ball, but I tell ya, watch those bounty postings in the near future 'cause that ship'll make history."

With a thumb across its activator, the discount holodeck spewed up its wavering contents; a poorly scanned holographic rendering of an improbably designed spaceship, pirouetting a series of non-concentric circles above the deck's display. Even with her admittedly limited knowledge of starship design, Moira could instantly appreciate this _Unconstant_ _Lover_ for exactly what it was.

"I even got a crew all lined up," he beamed. "Well, mostly lined up."

For some unfathomable reason, Moira fatefully inquired. "Mostly?"

"Haven't actually locked down a halfway decent first mate yet. Got a mechanic, a navigator and hell, I'll fly the bitch myself, but I'm still in the market for someone to keep the irregulars in line. And to ride topturret in her spanking new Antagonist."

Moira peered up from the holodeck, as if startled. "Antagonist?"

"Sure. The proceeds from the infamous Skullchewer caper. Only thing that 'gram there doesn't show are the pair of GG912 Conc. Ind. An–"

"–tagonist Heavy Autofire Laser Cannon, yeah," Moira glanced back to the revolving hologram, attempting to mentally install a pair of three-pronged hypothetical Antagonist laser turrets somewhere on the Briza's misshapen frame. "Jotor's moons, there ain't a weapon system in the galaxy as can match an Antagonist against starfighters."

"Now, how'd a nice girl like you learn a thing like that?"

The next two shots, both from Lefty, she fired inattentively, on impulse, her attention still planted on the clasped holodeck. Rocks tumbled down the ditch in response, but the unheralded sound of an ancient firearm wheezing and expectorating out a canister whipped her fully around.

The jackass, Carbon Industrial pistol smoldering in his hand, was struggling to scramble up the ravine at maximum speed, evidently on some indiscernible catalyst. "That's eighteen shots, kid!" he bombastically bellowed, hoisting his antique pistol toward unaware Moira. "And it looks like you're out of–"

His second shot, an indigo streak indicative of its bankrupt manufacturate, whizzed absurdly wide, striking the opposite leg of landing gear with a spray of scintillant sparks. Moira raised Lefty impassively and promptly plugged off a reprisal, striking him directly in the head. "Counting ammo, huh?"

She stalked to his writhing form, dallying a moment to clatter his pistol some distance apart with the tip of her boot, and loomed over him, the twin snubs of both her Lawmen afixed on his prone form. "See, that's why I carry two."

His gambit run aground, lying in the rain-slick mud at Moira's feet and dabbing the blood away from the smarting gash her glancing bolt traced across his cheek, he shrugged. "Which seems fair." He swallowed a resolved breath. "Off to Skullchewer, then?"

"Could be. You said this ship's on Vollok?"

"Maybe I did."

"You got coordinates?"

"Maybe I do."

"Well, I wanna see her then. So, get the fuck up."

Life, mischievous and cocksure, rebounded his face. "You interested in the position?"

"Depends on the ship," Moira disillusioned flatly. "If you're lying and there's no ship or she's a junker, I'm taking you in."

"And if I'm not and she ain't?"

"Then we'll see. Now, get up. 'till then, you're still my bounty."

"Yes, ma'am," he acceded mockingly, climbing to his feet. "Nehel Morel."

"I know. Moira Quicksilver."

A smug smirk, creasing his crisp new cut, corrupted his expression. "That's the fakest name I've ever heard."

Moira, before he could react, wheeled Lefty about on her trigger finger, grasped a firm, yet flexible grip on the six-gun's chamber and barrel, yanked him by the upturned collar of his duster and pistol-whipped him hard in the stomach, reasoning that he probably still deserved it.

"Oof," he agreed.

Chapter 17

Odisseus grimaces knowingly, straggling a loathsome curse against Baz, the Imperium, Nemo's continued stupidity, Boss Ott, Insurgent Company and especially the trio of SV7s responsible for punching three holes clean through his midsection. He aches with each shift of his weight, with each flex of his abdominal muscles and with each left step he takes through Ott's expansive headquarters, shadowing his saltbrother on another of the Galactic Menace's walk-and-talk briefings. This afflictive circumstance granted the Ortok two conflicting opinions; a keenly recurrent reminder of the damage the Imperium was capable of dealing and an utter inability to sympathize with Ott's seemingly esoteric woes.

"I'm asking," Ott clarifies calmly, "not to chastise nor reprimand your actions, just to fully understand what actually transpired down there." He, traipsing onward several feet ahead of both Nemo and Odisseus, placates generally with broad, appeasing gestures of his upper arms. "You failed to notify me of a shift in the enemy's tactics, you deliberately baited them into this apparent 'trap' you were grievously undermanned to execute, you insulted koj Pasqkla, engaged her in morwaq and fled the scene–"

"At that point, she was dead," Nemo delineated meekly.

"You abandoned not only the auxiliary driftcart I lent you, but also the forty crates of stolen weaponry I'd tasked you to deliver, which are now certainly in the Imperium's possession, you, however unwittingly, supplied Insurgent Company with a hostage with concrete knowledge of my whereabouts, enabled the slaughter of a major Scream-Weed encampment and lastly, you managed to somehow _lose_ one of my chief operatives."

Odisseus exchanges an apprehensive glance with Nemo. The situation with vo Qwer had been unfortunate but untenable. As soon as Insurgent Company had made their presence at the encampment known, the _Lover's_ crew, like any sensible crooks would when the constabulary arrives to crack skulls, scattered before their assured death or their potential incarceration. Whether vo Qwer simply failed to hear or comprehend the shouted orders to regroup within the shade of the driftcarts or whether Ott's emissary had suddenly been overtaken with some latent Baziron patriotism or whether there was some less explicable reason, none of the pirates could attest to, but whatever had actually occurred, vo Qwer was nowhere to be found. The crew had speculated some; he could have fled, he could have been captured or, more likely, he was numbered among the thousands of Baziron casualties at Insurgent Company's hands, a dark smudge against killing fields of paler corpses.

Neither of these options, however, would seemingly mollify Ott.

Nemo nibbles his bottom lip, an unusually appropriate anxiety evident in his comportment. "Yeah, that's, uh, one way of putting it."

"Losing my temper," Ott rationalizes faintly, "would accomplish nothing. Until I've a clearer idea of how the Imperium will exploit this information, I'm going to reserve judgment for the time being, except to say this." He nudges his chin to his left, curtain of headtails drifting aside to reveal a chillingly lax expression. "Your cost continues to outweigh your worth to me, Captain."

"You know, we lost people too." Nemo's defiance, if it could be properly described as such, is undercut by another challenge, barely coherent and shouted down the hallway.

" _Coward_!"

The word, as shrill and inappropriate as a child's tantrum, freezes them in place.

"Speak of the moons," Odisseus mutters, struggling mightily to ignore the twisting agony in his abdomen as he pivots his posture to glance behind and glimpse their confronter, Nemo and Ott both mirroring his adjustment.

They linger in the ribbed, thermosteel corridor that, via a trio of identical doorways, opened into Ott's spacious mess hall and, poured messily against the farthest such aperture, is Garrok Brondi. His legs waver beneath him, his verticality is only granted by a left shoulder wedged into the doorjamb and, even at this distance, Odisseus smells the signature spice of Gitterswitch, thickly suffusing his entire aspect. "You _fucking_ coward," he sputters unevenly with a pure, unfermented sample of his inebriation's source, a half-eaten Gitterpeach, clasped in trembling fingers.

The three of them, a drunkard, his saltbrother and the Galactic Menace, had individually cultivated effective immunities against the most drastic of alcohol's consequences on underlings, crewmen and strangers alike and neither Nemo, Odisseus or Ott are even remotely rattled by Brondi's evidently advanced intoxication. Odisseus, nevertheless, is unable to restrain a sour frown.

Having left intensely severe instructions with Two-Bit that none of the conscript crew were permitted to leave the relative safety of the ship until Ott's temperament and receptivity could be ascertained, the Ortoki mechanic is jointly displeased and unsurprised to discover Brondi not only here, in direct violation of his specific orders, but also in such a state, given his circumstances. Circumstances, Odisseus is poignantly reminded, that he personally forbid the trigger-happy Nemo from attempting to rectify in the first place.

Displeased, however, is as profound an understatement as one could feasibly attribute to Nemo's current mood. While Odisseus only scowls and Ott retains his customary unimpressed impassivity, a subtle stiffening of Nemo's jaw harbingers something within his saltbrother's face the Ortok only had the misfortune to witness on three previous occasions; a well of unfathomable blackness, a teetering on a precipice of illimitable depth.

Nemo, his motions fluid but his expression petrified into a rigid blankness, thumbs open the fold of his leather duster, retrieves his timeworn pistol from its hip holster and shoots Garrok Brondi. Odisseus instinctively winces as the gunshot, accompanied with cruel crack and cloud of bright blue ditrogen castoff, echoes both directions down the corridor.

Brondi, alcohol apparently mangling his judgment beyond recognizing this a zottible off, staggers, drops his Gitterpeach and slumps to the thermosteel, marveling at the fist-sized wound growing redder and redder on the meat of his thigh. He stammers something disjointed as Nemo, inching a step forward first as if in mental debate, strides down the corridor. Odisseus considers halting him with a paw to his shoulder but he's a quick instant too late. As Nemo approaches, duster fondled and brushed aside by the idle breeze meandering up the tunnel, Brondi, with bloodied fingers inspecting his injury, looks numbly to his attacker. "You shot me."

"Yup."

With an unforeseen fleetness, Nemo shoves the snub of his smoking Carbon Industrial firearm into Brondi's agape mouth. Understandably surprised, he mumbles some unknowable vowels until Nemo levers the pistol's cold steel against his teeth to promptly silence him. Horrified tears welling in his widened eyes, the wounded smuggler finds zero quarter with Nemo's implacable malice.

"Nemo," Boss Ott's voice interrupts. "Come on." After a moment of potent silence, the Galactic Menace continues forward up the corridor, away from the would-be execution.

Without hesitation, Nemo yanks the ancient pistol from between Brondi's quivering lips, suffers him beneath another second of his rancorous scrutiny and stalks obstinately back toward tense Odisseus and departing Ott, breeze wrapping the tips of his duster around his thighs. Behind him, bleeding Brondi stains the thermosteel red, huffing terrified and almost disbelieving the suddenness of his fluctuating fortune. Odisseus watches him a brief moment, trembling and coughing up blue ditrogen smoke beside his forgotten fruit, only turning away as Nemo strides past.

–––

Two-Bit Switch prays to all the moons these purple spots go away.

"This shit's getting antwacky..." he murmurs to no one, prodding with his pinky the nearest example, the smallest and least concerning of the five, where it rests below his kneecap. Fifteen minutes he'd wasted, sequestered in the back corner of the bustling medbay with his feet dangling off the lip of the wall-mounted stretcher, stupidly poking the inscrutable purple marks that encircle his leg and muttering vague premonitions to himself. Having been deemed a non-priority by the beleaguered Grimalti and his amateur Mruka assistant, Two-Bit had little other choice but to sit patiently and await medical attention, but there was just no ignoring these spots.

They'd swollen somewhat in the last hour and now resemble less cartoonish purple polka dots and more warty contusions, bubbling up from the flesh of his right leg, a distinction Two-Bit had noted with a powerless dismay. The five spots follow a predictable path, spiraling up the length of his calf and thigh, each an indication of where the muck leech's suctioned feelers managed to pierce the threadbare denim of Two-Bit's trouser and find purchase on his susceptible skin. What significance these markings held remains a mystery to Two-Bit; be they bruises, bites or something more sinister, all he knows is that they're swelling.

Two-Bit shifts his weight and attempts to banish unwanted thoughts of egg sacs by glancing about the medbay and the drastically worse condition of his crewmates.

He actually doubts he's ever seen the medbay this crowded. To the majority of the crew, save Moira, Abraham and occasionally Odisseus, the medbay theoretically consisted of whatever lurked behind the closed doors just before the mess hall. Only two separate emergencies could compel Nemo, Two-Bit or the conscript crew into the abandoned medbay; a potentially mortal wounding or their monthly dousing in the decontamination shower, the former unsurprisingly more frequent than the latter.

Anchorage floods the central chair with his bleeding bulk, the tissue replicator's hexagonal grid dividing and subdividing the gory hole of his torso beneath swatches of fine green laser. The wall-mounted stretcher to Two-Bit's diagonal left strains and moans under the fitful writhing of a partially conscious Odisseus, whatever dimestore anesthetic Abraham could scrounge together from the _Lover's_ laughable stores dolefully unable to knock a fully grown Ortok senseless. Opposite him, to Two-Bit's diagonal right, Danbonte sits cross-legged on the third stretcher, re-swaddling his burnt and perforated hand in stained cotton gauze.

Meanwhile, Abraham, sporting a blood-spattered surgeon's apron across his expansive girth, lumbers between patient and patient, recalibrating or confirming the replicator's conclusive scans and tending Odisseus' still alarmingly active heart and respiratory rates. A frantic Marco the Mange orbits the hulking Grimalti like an exasperated moon, caterwauling and complaining with every instruction and rebuke from the irascible Abraham.

Only Nemo, miraculously unharmed as usual, Brondi, disappeared since the morning's incident outside Ott's dining hall and his subsequent wounds seemingly patched by the Menace's own physicians, and Garrigan, who'd personally elected to handle the Moira situation, were elsewhere, one unburdened with injuries, one unburdened with proper medical training and one too fearful to set foot aboard the Captain's ship, it seemed.

Those seven who had survived, in various and differing states of physical health, were fortunate, to Two-Bit's finding, to even have wounds that require patching. Danbonte, with an unusual sullenness, had reported that Moira, in an equally unusual display of clemency, had granted the agonized Heeko a compassionate bolt to the brain, before she'd received her own gunshot wound. Rooster's capture and Ebeneezer's unwitnessed death particularly catch in Two-Bit's proverbial throat, with both the Dho and the cyclops having been recruited to the _Lover's_ crew at Two-Bit's behest. With the late Salo Shouldermount three months dead and far from forgotten in the back of his neglected conscience, only Anchorage remains of Two-Bit's individually enlisted thugs and only by the slenderest of threads is even he held aloft.

Little had been expended in the way of mournful words or sad sentiments as regards fallen crewmen, the majority of everyone's energy invested in licking wounds and pacifying Ott, but exactly nothing, save sparse logistics, was afforded to the topic of Moira. Sheer idiot chance had conceded their discovery of her in the first place, crumpled forlorn in the underbrush, Salo's namesake Culminator discarded at her side and swarms of opportunistic ktotari birds, bobbing and weaving about her collapsed body. Upon returning to the _Lover_ , Garrigan had cited some unspoken "former-associate" prerogative and no one objected, leaving their first mate within his seemingly appropriate custody.

Nemo, in particular, had been atypically close-mouthed about the entire affair concerning Moira and was last seen, according to a then-conscious Odisseus, cloistered in the helm, losing at "Asteroid Math" against the ship's computer for the twenty-thousandth time.

"How's yer spots, boyo?" Abraham plods through Two-Bit's daydream and straight into view, brushing organicon film off callused hands and onto the rim of his apron.

"Purple. Swellin'."

"Still?" Abraham bares his lower left teeth in a leery grimace. "Well, that ain't a good sign."

"Yeah, I hinked as much. Any flashes?"

"Mayhaps we can lance one, see what happens?"

Two-Bit musses up his face. "That as squidgy as it sounds?"

"More so," he answers cryptically.

"Oh, peachy."

"Say, Switch," Abraham digresses, from craggy and overtaxed to complaisant and complimentary, "might be a need to replenish our supplies pretty quick here. Any chance ye're up fer another little favor?"

Two-Bit blinks wearily and opens his mouth to sigh. "Depends on the kindie, doesn't it? Whaddya need?"

The combination of habitually underfunded equipment and an unexpected surplus of wounded pirates conspired to run the _Lover's_ medical supplies utterly ragged, an eventuality Abraham had actually preempted via employing Two-Bit's professedly expert skills as a housebreaker and sneak thief. Boss Ott's infirmaries, in fact, were outfitted with the widest array of pharmaceutical contraptions and contrivances credits could buy and security to match. Even for Two-Bit, it had been a less-than-simple matter of walking out the front door with several choice pieces of gear tucked under his metaphorical hat.

"Might be the replicator's run low on organicon compound."

Two-Bit creases his mouth trapezoidal. "Didn't I already pinch like, three tubes of that rubbish yesterday?"

Abraham spares Anchorage a glance over an aproned shoulder. "Awful lotta meat to replace on that one."

The pride and joy of a handful of Inner Sector cosmetic parlors, a tissue replicator could, if properly utilized, regenerate lost limbs, erase or create burns, scars, disfigurements or disguises and, in a few unsavory cases, actually manufacture organs. The complex artifice of plexishield awnings, confused cables and spastic read-outs that ensconces the lower half of the Aurik's torso is likely the single most expensive piece of hardware Two-Bit had ever "borrowed." With perhaps only seventy-five such devices in existence, most space stations, Takioro included, and private planets were more affordable.

Despite all Two-Bit's larcenous artistry, the intrinsic value of the replicator insured that Ott would neither overlook nor permit its vanishment for any length of time and it was exceedingly unlikely, in Two-Bit's expert opinion, the Galactic Menace would tolerate another such act of involuntary charity.

"Think the fat man'll let it slide again?" Two-Bit poses, itching an imagined itch under his chin to sell the impression that he was contemplating.

Abraham, with the faintest hint of a shrug, nods. "Worth a shot, methinks. Otherways, what would that be," he calculates grimly, under his breath, "five? With him and, ye know...?"

Two-Bit darts his gaze to his grimy feet, swinging placidly, oddly naked of socks or sneakers and defiantly brandishing the accursed purple spots. He harvests a sizable dollop of saliva with several puckerings of his closed lips, palms himself roughly off the stretcher with a leathern groan and hauks a mustered loogie to the deckplates with finality.

"Alright," he agrees, gesticulating with a hard finger in the Grimalti's face, "but when I coop back here, you're popping my spots. Savvy?"

–––

Odisseus swipes the Spyglass from Rymple's six-fingered grip with a vengeful paw. Yanking the delicate mechanism out of the pint-sized Treffel's reach, he presses the viewing receptacle to his right eye, dials the minute focusing lens with the rubbery pad of his middle digit and, spying the object of his exasperation, thrusts the opposite paw upward, indicating, somewhat pointlessly, with a claw.

"There," he snarls. "That's an extended V94 steering fin in plain blooming sight. The 549 doesn't have _modular_ fin emplacements, does it?" Maintaining his forceful point, he peels the Spyglass from his eye and thrusts it back to the unconvinced Treffel. "The 545 does."

"The 545 is six years off the market and wouldn't use a stabilizing vein," he disparages, kettling his frustration beneath some pretentious false composure.

"No, look again," Odisseus grumbles. "That's not a stabilizing vein. That's a ventral docking ridge. Sure, she might extend stabilizers in a low orbit, but that ain't her primary purpose and you know it."

Rymple shuffles his two forward paws in the sleet as he squints into the Spyglass, removes it a long moment to glower distrustfully skyward with a naked eye, before replacing the device and muttering huffily. "Well, perhaps not a stabilizing vein _necessarily_..."

"That's what you said. That's _exactly_ what you said."

The Galactic Menace, standing impatiently to Rymple's immediate left, crosses both pairs of burly forearms. "If you two girls are about finished?"

They, Odisseus, Rymple, Ott, Nemo and Kivad, cluster together beneath the most gaping puncture in the Vollocki symphonic ceiling that brackets the roof come landing strip of Ott's palatial headquarters. Slush continues its grungy accumulation around the stained landing feet of the dozen and more starships squatting in the speckled shade. The torridity unit, quaking and snorting fire like some childhood nightmare kitchen appliance, is thankfully welded in place far across the platform, though all its rattling exertions suggest it has other plans.

The focal point of their collective attention, however, dwelt not on Ott's landing circle, but seventy or eighty mottibles upward, dangling enormously some distance above Baz's exosphere, like a teltriton storm cloud or a bad portent. Though only a handful of its lower spars and a portion of its underbelly are visible through the threading cloud cover that perennially blanketed the planet's polar region, Odisseus had nonetheless identified its various overt components as what they'd dreaded most, Rymple's amateur opinion notwithstanding.

"Yeah," Odisseus summarizes literally over Rymple's head to Nemo, past Ott's left shoulder, "it's a TFS 545 Pylon-class capital cruiser and, unless I'm very much mistaken, the _Exacting Counterattack_."

Nemo begrudgingly translates, scuffing a boot tip against the besmirched thermosteel, before adding, "That name continues its eerie relevance."

Ott lolls his head aside, headtails drooping with it. "See what you've done?"

"Think Rooster broke?"

"Unprovoked redeployment of the blockade's flagship? Yeah, sounds like a safe bet."

"No chance of like, 'Musical Warships' or something?"

Ott's countenance is the very essence of unamused. "Now, I think, would be a perfectly acceptable time to _lose my temper_."

"Have we any notion," Rymple interrupts, "of why it's failed to appear on any outboard sensors?"

It had been Kivad, preparing to pressgang his rowdy crew into their weekly servicing of the nearby _Chain_ , who'd first noticed the Pylon's looming specter, hapless chance rather the sophisticated system of planetary sensor packages the fortress employed responsible for its initial discovery. Ott's technicians, Rymple chief among them, cultivated assiduous tabs on the movements and whereabouts of every Imperium craft in the blockade and had, in fact, noted with interest the _Counterattack_ 's abrupt withdrawal from their sensor bubble the previous hour. Rymple himself had been bodily astounded at the Pylon's unexpected reveal over the polar window and thusly obstructed the planet's only unblockaded exit point. Ever since, the Treffel'd stood dissembling any theory that called for his incompetence.

"What's fuckin' me is why they ain't opened fire on us by now." Kivad, standing precisely where he had been when he'd buzzed the spectacle in, puzzles aloud.

Odisseus knits his brow and extends an open paw and no comment to Rymple. After a hesitant moment, the Treffel drops the Spyglass into his awaiting grasp. Replacing the viewfinder to his right eye, Odisseus sharpens the resolution as much as the discount Spyglass will allow, pinpointing the absolute nearest of the extended sensor arrays and attempting to trace its movements.

"Nemo, you remember what we did off Moqu?

Without looking, he confirms Nemo's rumpled expression. "You think they're blindfolding?"

Kivad scoffs. "A capital? Is that even blooming possible?"

"I wouldn't imagine so," Ott comments unassumingly.

"I'm afraid not," Rymple demurs coldly. "Such a method of sensor displacement becomes exponentially more difficult with each size category of craft attempted. A capital ship, much less a Pylon, couldn't–"

"Fits with the patterns the arrays are using," Odisseus verifies. "Concentric circles, as opposed to cross-hatched grids." He lowers the Spyglass and confidently deactivates it. "They're not searching – they're screening."

"Well, that certainly would explain why we can't see 'em," Kivad considers. "Or why they ain't nuked us."

"Or started landing troops," Ott dispassionately mentions.

"Their programmer would have to be a mathematical prodigy," Rymple carps quietly.

He shrugs his upper shoulders. "Crew of what, forty thousand some? Maybe he is." Ott passes his disapproving deliberation back toward Nemo where, at least to Odisseus' thinking, it belonged. "Do you understand all the ramifications of this?"

"I'm betting not."

"Up until this point, their entire blockade, however inconvenient, was more or less fruitless because they didn't know where on this moons-forsaken planet I even _was_ , but, of course, you had to go and ruin that for everybody. I can't fly ships out of here. I can't fly ships in here." He begins counting on a thick blue finger. "You have, in seemingly one fell swoop, barricaded any means of ingress for traffic, weapons, re-enforcements, amenities or even the most rudimentary of supplies, alerted the enemy to basically my exact coordinates, forced my hand directly into open conflict and so thoroughly vanquished any further attempts at resistance that you'd probably earned some sort of honorary medal in the Imperium Navy. We are now, in fact, besieged, Captain. This is why we can't have nice things."

Odisseus endeavors his level best to avoid stealing a glance at his saltbrother, a humanoid who, not two days past, gunned down an enlisted crewman for implying less than a tenth of what the Galactic Menace baldly accuses him of now.

Starkly out of character, Nemo is quiescent. "What'll it be, Boss?"

"Go lift the siege."

"That'd just be a waste of a ship." The reasoning, surprisingly, comes from Kivad. The bright blue buccaneer, apparently unaware of whose neck he's spared from Ott's chopping block, sustains his heavenward gaze, appraising features braced by a male Braaca's four facial horns. "His little Briza'd be easy pickings against a Pylon."

"For once," Nemo, instantly divorced of austere duty, affirms, "I completely agree."

"You volunteering?"

"I mean," Kivad begins to qualify, throwing an absent gesture back toward his dormant 889 Chaperone, "the _Chain's_ only capital we got. Couple her with the _End_ and the _Winds_ , though, you've almost got a fair fight," he forecasts with a lighthearted shrug, referencing _The Yanked Chain_ 's two sister ships, partners in piracy that fly Kivad's colors and prowl in flanking formation, a practice common among those lucky captains with too many marauders for a single craft.

Ott grinds his teeth in evident conflict. "Think that'll really give you a chance?"

"A fighting one, maybe," Kivad relents, "but better chance than he's got."

"Again, agreed."

Boss Ott, all four sets of eyes upon him, weighs invisible pros against invisible cons before, with the slightest shake of the head, he capitulates. "Bloom me out. Call me a sentimental fool, Kivad, but you've been in my employ longer than anyone, longer than even Dijiqi had been. If anyone's to have a fighting chance against an Imperium capital ship, I'd be a fool to think it anyone but you."

"Heh. Sure," Kivad allows, grinning. "Rymple, get me any relevant information you can drag outta the feeds about this _Counterattack_. Armaments, captain, military history, all that. Anything you think I could use, as soon as possible." Rymple nods and immediately scurries from view, eager to be set upon a fresh, less embarrassing task. Kivad, favoring the remote Pylon with a fortuitous glance, claps his fuzzy mitts together and tromps off after him. "Best go tell the irregulars."

After Ott, nearly leveling Nemo with more unspoken scorn, takes his own leave toward the lift platform, Odisseus' saltbrother sidles into clearer view of the warship's shadowed shape and to the Ortok's direct right, remarking in a hushed tone. "Pretty much dodged the fucking canister on _that_ one, did we not?"

"I guess."

"You're not convinced?"

"How about we don't count our lonktonks just yet, alright?"

Nemo unbuttons both a carefree smile and a favorite maxim. "You worry too much, brother."

–––

Two-Bit bites his knuckle hard as _The Yanked Chain_ explodes. His rapid focusing of the Spyglass' lens had cost him the sight of the ray shield's final faltering. Clarity, however, overwhelms the rendering screen pressed to his eye just as the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's second battery bores brightly into the commandeered corvette's broadside and grants Two-Bit a front row seat, however surrogate, to its splashy destruction. In a sight six months familiar to Two-Bit, Kivad's 889 Chaperone-Class _Chain_ splinters beneath the warship's barrage and into three sundered chunks, twirling harmlessly away from the distant engagement.

A chorus of silence resounds from the assembled onlookers, each aiming their own Spyglass high into the atmosphere, each observing the grisly events through the largest pinhole in the whistling, malachite dome, professedly the very pinhole Kivad had initially spotted the _Counterattack_ through in the first place.

The knot of bystanders had evidently ballooned some, his presence included. Ott and Odisseus, it seemed, had similar impulses this afternoon – Mutha Be Mean and two heavies whose acquaintances Two-Bit hadn't the displeasure of making; the brawn, an able-bodied Akishi drooping two identical cigars from his lower jaw and the brains, a scrawny Ufaki bristling a disquieting number of electroknives, had jointly accompanied the Galactic Menace to the rooftop vantage, should today's events go sharply south. Meanwhile, Odisseus had bolstered Nemo's ranks with Two-Bit himself and an Anchorage fresh from the replicator's forty-eight hour embrace and boasting a brand new abdomen.

These eight, plus the gutless little technician Rymple, all huddle together and peer upward with Spyglasses planted on their eyes, watching with varying degrees of stunned, shocked and stony expressions.

An hour before dawn, Kivad and three ample crews, notably minus any trace of boarding party, manned their scrappy flotilla and disembarked Ott's landing circle, ostensibly to the end of the _Exacting Counterattack_. The Karracki clipper _Chain_ and her two wing mates; _The Four Winds_ – a souped-up Concord Industries Interceptor frigate, a capital ship by technicality and built for relative speed and _The Business End_ – a tooled-up TFS IntraSystem Tugger, not remotely a capital ship but packing prodigious firepower all the same, skulked away southward under cover of darkness.

Unlike yesterday's broody conditions, high polar winds granted the afternoon in question spotless skies. Bereft of cloud cover, their adversary was plainly visible, in all its outstretched glory. Military beige against Nebho's dull aquamarine, the Pylon's underbelly points her procession of spires and steeples toward the pole below, like an inverted city skyline on the moon's underside. Though the off-brand Spyglass couldn't actually discern them, Two-Bit knew all too well that each of those outcroppings brandished dozens of broadside batteries, a mere fraction of the _Counterattack_ 's complete armaments.

The battle was bitterly brief. Kivad, approaching from an obscure southerly vector so as not to reveal the exact location of Ott's fortress, blitzed, all three craft opening mad fire and loosing torpedoes with abandon as soon as they came within range, hoping to inflict as much damage as physically possible on the blind Pylon.

Their introductory salvo found marketable purchase. Their concerted laserfire tarnished the _Counterattack_ 's naval-quality ray shields and the swarm of loosed missiles slid effortlessly past them to pocket and deface the Pylon's outer hulls, the dire explosions seeming almost miniature and precious through Two-Bit's Spyglass. Beyond this initial gambit, however, the element of surprise availed the pirates little and less. Once within range of the batteries' individual targeting sensors, the preemptive strike's hope was subsequently dashed beneath a hail of capital-class fire.

Even at their obtuse angle of approach, even with only a minute portion of the Pylon's full broadside arrayed against them, a single volley proved potent enough to entirely flatten the double-angled ray shields of each pirate ship but the _Chain_ , who stubbornly clung to those last wisps of her projected protection for several more minutes. The hard lesson learnt, Kivad's toy fleet had scattered before the _Counterattack_ 's fearful cannonade, affording them greater evasiveness in the face of concentrated battery fire, but rendering them virtually helpless against the oncoming starfighters.

Scrambled comparatively slow on account of the Pylon's obliviousness, a handful of emergency-deploy squadrons, minute men pilots seconds away from their ships at all times, oozed from yawning docking ports along the Pylon's fighter gantries, like Spith stingers defending a burning hive, and made even shorter work of Kivad's joke of an armada.

_The Business End_ had, of course, been the first, the cumbersome tug utterly overwhelmed beneath the furious teeming of the Fjoran fighter craft and chewed into burning, teltriton rags. _The Four Winds_ ' greater speed and agility had spared it thus far, but with _The Yanked Chain_ 's ray shield finally forfeit thanks to oppressive waves of fighter fire and its ultimate destruction assured by another unfortunate broadside from the _Counterattack_ , those starfighters who'd plagued both her sister ships were hastily abandoning the wrecks of their former targets and giving chase to the fleeing frigate.

Two-Bit attempts to catch the _Winds'_ progress through his Spyglass as her captain, the famed Jakosha Joojberry, plummets her frigate into the atmosphere, seemingly innumerable Spurs hounding her every dottible, but the pursuit's jerky movements prove too difficult to predict. Dialing his lens out into a general wide angle of the quickly-unraveling action, Two-Bit fears, for half a heartbeat, that Joojberry is driving hard for Ott's fortress, with scores of Spurs and the eyes of the Pylon on her, until laserfire shorts the frigate's main propulsion drive to a sputtering mess. Almost peacefully, _The Four Winds_ idles and tumbles into a lazy nosedive.

Above it all, the Pylon, bearing a few blackened scars along her underside but virtually unharmed, watches with expressionless indifference.

"Well, _that_ didn't work," Mutha Be Mean blurts to little reaction.

"Remind me, Captain," Ott, sheathing his Spyglass Deluxe, addresses to Nemo, after a prolonged enough pause for the Spurs to flutter back to the Pylon and the scorched and flaming thirds of _The Yanked Chain_ to crash distantly to the ice with a muffled hiss. "How many of my lieutenants have you killed? I'm afraid I've lost count."

Nemo wallows in further silence.

Ott ceases craning his neck toward the victorious _Counterattack_ to numerate on great blue fingers. "First there was Dijiqi, then Tizor, then vo Qwer and now, Kivad. Did I miss one?"

"Far as I ord it, Kivad anted up himself," Two-Bit interjects mutteringly.

"Boss ain't talking to you," Mutha lashes out with all the sham authority of her recently minted office. A reaver on Ott's bottom-rung hastily promoted to the Galactic Menace's official shadow, Mutha Be Mean had a fortunate few months, having inherited Bald Tizor's ship and entire crew, the remainder of vo Qwer's pathfinders and likely now Kivad's boarding parties, and her jumped-up station certainly amplified her already abrasive nature.

"I'm reading minimal debasement to her lower deck's outer hull, which practically guarantees no major system damage and effectively zero percent reduction of combat capabilities," Rymple assesses through his Spyglass. "She could be repaired in a fortnight, assuming they even make such a priority."

Odisseus grumbles something, assuredly some technical correction, but Ott pays him no heed. "Any chance they discovered us?"

"Not with our scrambler feed and their undedicated sensors. Given Kivad's southern angle of approach, it's unlikely they detect us."

Ott nods succinctly before aligning his condemning blank scowl upon Nemo. "I trust you understand what this means for you."

Nemo, a statue carven of flapping leather and unwashed black locks, squints upward at the imminent outline of the _Exacting Counterattack_ , down and across to the black smoke pall emanating off the far-flung ruin of the _Chain_ , smoldering in the snow somewhere out of sight and finally, with the merest narrowing of his eyes, whips fully around to march hard for the _Lover's_ lopsided shadow, parked far across the pad.

Odisseus tags immediately behind, glowering his ingrained glower. Two-Bit and Anchorage are only moments later, Two-Bit disregardfully tossing Mutha the borrowed Spyglass before stomping off after his Captain.

Chapter 18

Odisseus can't remember the precise recipe for Artelian slapdash gumbo. A smattering of various species of arctic shellfish, unwittingly provided by Ott's voluminous pantries, a bushel of unsliced yellow rhama onions and a half-vine of detoxified talorja tomatoes, all patiently await the stymied Odisseus to make his move. He's neatly arrayed these along the galley counter beside the full battalion of various flavorings, spices and seasonings the Ortok and the currently absent Grimalti had accumulated across their fifteen-month interstellar sojourn aboard _The Unconstant_ _Lover_. A tenth a shaker of sea salt and three unopened cases of expired Trijan cilantro make up the unimpressive display, the latter of which is the only ingredient present that he's reasonably certain doesn't feature in the ill-remembered gumbo recipe.

To this end, Odisseus is seeking Abraham Bonaventure, his mislaid cooking partner, hoping the soggy fat bastard's often-spotty memory serves and Two-Bit Switch hadn't been sent for another daring midnight raid of Ott's kitchens in vain. The navigator's typical roosts, his personal quarters, the sensor room and the engineering shed, all vacant, Odisseus, resembling his litterbearer more than a little with wooden ladle in paw and swaddled in that stained novelty "Shoot the Cook" apron Nemo'd surprised him with last year, trudges through the _Lover_ , in search of the crotchety old Grimalti.

After a fruitless survey of the abovedecks and betweendecks corridors, Odisseus finally happens upon him on his second pass through the hold, the familiar clink and clatter of hand tools echoing forlornly off the encapsulating teltriton walls of the queerly deserted hold and cueing Odisseus to Abraham's presence, hunkered before _The Little Beggarman_ where it collects dust in the _Lover's_ far starboard corner.

Abraham, his warty back turned completely away from the approaching Odisseus, remains somehow unsurprised by his unheralded question. "Slapdash uses what for thickener?"

"Flavored Xiab powder," he answers matter-of-factly, without missing a beat.

Odisseus pauses. "Uh _huh_. And what do you use?"

"Oh, lard and gravy," he answers exactly as matter-of-factly, twisting his blubbery torso about to snag the Ortok in one of his trademark squinty considerations.

One of the _Beggarman's_ aftside hull plates is wrenched loose. Engine grease and spilt coolant color Abraham's bulky arms to the elbows and dab the very tip of his fleshy beak a patchy brown. He grasps a whirring torquer between soiled fingers and Odisseus reminds himself that, in fact, Abraham was, unlike the majority of the _Lover's_ crew, conscripted or otherwise, a competent mechanic in his own right. "Ye'll be wantin' to spice that with a shot or two o' the Wage's Borsk, be there any left to speak of."

"You'll be wanting to neticgrapple these six bow rivets tight," Odisseus counters with a lazily extended claw, "or she'll peel up in atmo."

Abraham further crumples his leery countenance and stretches a glance toward the _Beggarman's_ indicated bow and their loose rivets. "Oh," he relents, after a moment. "Suppose ye're right."

Barring his superlative experience as a dirty navigator, the odd barrel of booster-brewed moonshine and more crusty nautical wisdom than one could shake a spaceship at, _The Little Beggarman_ had been Abraham's primary offering to Nemo when the antiquated Grimalti, for whatever enigmatic reasons he possessed, sought to join the fledgling crew. Tightly qualified as a two-man jockey box, the _Beggarman_ was nearly as old as the _Lover_ \- an HH331 Starlight Incorporated Beacon-class Heavy Escort Starfighter, modified nearly beyond recognition, practically devoid of whatever green and yellow paint job it had so brightly adorned unknowable decades ago and perennially parked over the _Lover's_ starboard freight elevator.

Despite the potential usefulness the bizarrely-named HH331 presented the crew, she was rarely employed, as the instance almost never arouse in which Nemo deferred to the _Beggarman_ in place of the better armed, far better armored and ultimately more agile _Lover_. Otherwise, Odisseus couldn't imagine squeezing his paunchy self into that cramped bucket seat, Abraham didn't trust Two-Bit with his prized relic any farther than he could throw it and all souls be in peril the dark day Moira should feel the need to fly anything, from tiny compliment fighter to cardboard box.

"You tuning her up for fun, or...?" Odisseus dangles, his curiosity at Abraham's sudden interest duly piqued.

"Cap'n's orders. Says she's to be all trim come next week's end or it's me head," he relays, inching his squatted bulk a few degrees to better face the standing Ortok. "Meant it too."

"What's happening come week's end?"

"Not sure," he confesses with a shrug of his bare shoulders. "Says that's when he ought to have his brilliant idea by."

Odisseus shifts his weight, each rifle wound announcing their continued presence with a stinging regard. "You talked to him?" he muscles though the ache.

He breaks eye contact a moment. "But briefly."

Following the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's emergence, Kivad's subsequent destruction and Ott's grim charge, the Captain Nemo had promptly quarantined himself within his quarters, professedly toward puzzling out some manner of solution for the Galactic Menace's "capital-warship-at-my-doorstep" dilemma, though if amount of alcohol consumed and number of _Quuilar Noxix_ reruns re-watched were any indication, some truly villainous works were undoubtedly fermenting in his saltbrother's truant mind. Whether instantaneous bouts of madness, like the Bozee Bushwhack, or convoluted concoctions slowly simmered, like the stash-and-blast on Nos Mantri, all of Nemo's bad ideas were born of urgency.

Three days now he'd been isolated by the strictest possible instructions and with the "Brondi incident," as it had been dubbed, not even a week cold, none of the crew had yet conjured a reason to dare and defy the Captain's most dangerous of temperaments. Two-Bit had started to take exception only this morning, but personally, Odisseus wasn't overly concerned – a mood such as this had once claimed Nemo for six years, hijacking his saltbrother away on the unwise caprice of mercenary jockeydom and three days of same wasn't enough for the Ortok mechanic to fret over.

What Odisseus had begun to fret over was this latest unwise caprice, Boss Ott's newest and most suicidal of errands.

"You think she's up to the task?" Odisseus poses implicitly, with a nearly imperceptible nod of the nose toward the disassembled _Beggarman_.

"Well." Abraham returns Odisseus' significant gaze and significant question with a ponderous aspect of his own, his eyes flicking toward the abovedecks corridor and his Captain's quarters for half a second. "Been too long since she's been serviced, maybe, but I imagine she's got it in her." He follows the statement up with a mutter. "Somewhere."

"She's never seen action like this before."

"She's ready. Wouldn'ta carried me this far iffen she didn't have salt enough for a Pylon."

Odisseus inwardly debates voicing his next statement. "I would know better than you."

Abraham absorbs it graciously, however. "That ye would, but I've a sense 'bout these things. Ships, their names and their captains. Trust me on that, boyo."

A moment passes in silence between Nemo's saltbrother and Nemo's mentor, the same unspoken knowledge inspiring both Odisseus' pragmatism and Abraham's idealism, a tacit history that freezes the both of them into an insinuated stalemate.

"I guess I have to. You hear where we're heading next week?"

Abraham crinkles his leathern brow. "No?"

"Takioro."

Releasing his scowl from relieved wrinkle lines, the Grimalti snorts and shuffles his stooped form back around to the exposed mechanics of his _Beggarman_ as Odisseus meanders a handful of steps backward. "Heh. Vel'll have kittens."

"So will Moira," Odisseus adds, spinning completely around and nearly tangling himself in the drooping apron.

"Add that Borsk," Abraham calls out, over the sound of the clanking torquer.

"Fasten those rivets," Odisseus offers as a reply, over the sound of the betweendecks doors sputtering open.

–––

Moira Quicksilver is keenly aware that consuming an entire carton of Deluxe Mint Chococino chiller cream would be both fantastically unhealthy and veritably disastrous to a physique already eight days bedridden and deprived of any meaningful manner of exercise. At the same time, someone shot her in the neck with an assault rifle last week and came remarkably close to actually killing her, so she's going to eat all the damn chiller cream she feels like and her waistline will just have to suffer the consequences.

She'd, at long last, reunited herself with her beloved topturret, devoting the entire evening to nostalgic familiarizations with a secreted bottle of premium Gitterswitch, the triple-barreled, super-charged machine gun whose upkeep she'd tragically neglected and the unbridled calorie dump her melty carton of chiller cream represented. Much of the crew hadn't yet been informed of the extent of her recuperation and she was intent on seizing a little much-deserved R&R, before facing either a direct crewmen or whatever new calamity Nemo had roped her into next.

From her secluded roost high atop _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ , Moira watches the midnight, awash with the muted blue of Nebho, leak through the punctured canopy of the Vollocki symphonic ceiling, trickle off the ghostly shapes of Ott's idle armada and pool in dim spotlights, great and small, upon the greasy rooftop. Not a soul stirs anywhere in Moira's all-encompassing line of sight – stillness across the sleet-stained landing pad, stillness across the polar horizon, the only movement the occasional blink of operation lights off the atmospheric Pylon. With the gunner's hatch tightly sealed beneath her feet, Moira is finally alone, with only chiller cream, gin and peace to accompany her.

In truth, activity aboard the _Lover_ had been blessedly circumspect these past three days. Whereas normally after a successful raid, the conscript crew would be engaged in recurrent carousal and pervasive debauchery about the various public areas of the ship, the previous week's failures cast something of a melancholy over the remaining marauders. On express instructions from Odisseus not to leave the ship for any reason, they'd all kept mostly to themselves, a brigand's abrupt mortality so starkly illustrated by the recent events in the jungle. Moira, who'd passed eight days on her deathbed with former Petty Officer Glive Garrigan hovering over her, could sympathize.

The wound on her neck, still bearing the ugly square of gauzy bandage, is considerably uglier beneath, still a reddish, blotchy, semi-yielding mess despite the dermal sealer's best efforts. She had Garrigan's profuse assurances that, given a few more days to settle, the organicon compound would graft more permanently onto the side of her neck but, for the time being, perhaps a nice solid bandage would be preferable to leaking replacement tissue everywhere she went with her newfound freedom. Moira had been compelled to agree.

The same, however, could not be said for the two liters of freshly transfused Triomman blood currently swimming its grimy little way through her veins.

She's scavenging together the dredgy remnants at carton's bottom with the flat of her spoon when her precious solitude is quite suddenly shattered by the spontaneous explosion of some ungodly scrabbling and screeching racket, dully audible even through the prodigious thickness of the gunner's hatch. Convinced that someone must be simultaneously torturing innocent animals and juggling grenades very poorly to produce commotion of that unprecedented caliber, she slivers the hatch open scarcely an inch, only to be assaulted by a clamorous cacophony of atonal riffs and thudding breakbeats. Nearly deafened in the process, she ascertains the epicenter to be somewhere directly below her, in the bowels of the ship. With a wearisome smirk, she slams the hatch closed, lest her ambushed eardrums start bleeding.

Especially with the hatch latched beneath her, she could conceivably ignore it. Safely insulated within her hallowed topturret, the tumultuous roar from below was relegated into little more than a muffled throb, resonating through the _Lover's_ teltriton. Obnoxious as it may be, it was nothing that Moira Quicksilver, firm devotee in "mind-over-matter" couldn't simply phase out of her bubble of consciousness. She would simply sample her Gitterswitch, shut her ears to the screaming upheaval beneath her and assume that someone more discerning, maybe Odisseus or Two-Bit, would handle this situation in due time.

The siege wears tirelessly on, however, surprisingly audible fingers of distant dissonance grasping around her private fortress and gnawing at the outermost fringes of her attention. Three sips into her bottle, her own better angels are peeved past the point of any esoteric justifications and she's forced to intervene.

She plucks the dangling headset free in two fingers, hastily secures it against her temples and, adjusting the receiver to allow her unfettered access to her booze, dials down a hailing frequency to the underturret. Her first attempt finds no purchase, the ringtone and evidently the flashing indicator light drowned out beneath the caterwauling chaos. Her second effort, coupled with ramming the heel of her jackboot against the gunner's hatch, actually achieves a response.

A connection is established and, before the ensuing uproar can violate her ears, Moira's cranked the channel's interior volume drastically down, the pounding and keening at as reasonable a decibel as Moira can imagine. After a jostling of the opposite end of the receiver, he shouts something completely unintelligible.

"I assume you can't be convinced to turn that garbage off, or at least down?" Moira requests as politely as she ever bothers to be.

Finally, blissfully, the astrogrunge bedlam below is drained to a manageable volume. "This is their second album," Nemo, his voice alarmingly distinct, categorizes on the other end of the line. "Their third album is the garbage."

"Cosmic Vomit again?"

"Yup."

"And there's no chance it's all garbage?"

"Nope." At a stroke, he deactivates the maelstrom, leaving only the soft buzz of electrical feedback to blur the channel. "You're awake."

"I am awake."

"And in the turret?"

"And in the turret."

"You know," he poses, as casually as one might broach the topic of last night's skooshball match, "we all thought you were gonna die back there."

"Yeah," she's forced to admit, "that was sorta my assumption for a while there too."

She'd, in fact, only regained consciousness the previous night, with a handful of wispy memories of doxychoraphum and rocket launchers, sullen voices and grave faces, mainly Garrigan's scruffy features and scruffier speech, and most of all, the unmistakable sound of the spewing dermal sealer and the unforgettable sight of the riveted teltriton ceiling to her quarters. The notion of her own death, even now, seems more an estranged concept than a possible reality.

"Suppose it just wasn't in the cards."

"Not yet, anyway," Nemo cheerily qualifies.

"So," Moira begins, eager to switch subjects, "do I wanna ask what you're doing down there?"

"Well, okay, there I was, watching _Quuilar Noxix_ and–"

"Which season?"

"Eleven. That one with those lame HAZtank dumpers on Glory?"

"That one _is_ dumb."

"Right?" Moira can clearly envision him down there, irresponsibly spinning the turret seat around and inadvertently tangling himself in the comm cord. "So I figure, indecent quantities of Gitterswitch Gin is really the only way to get through this episode–"

"Naturally."

"But, as luck would have apparently have it, I've just run dry. And," he forswears, "as soon as I get my hands on the thieving little blowbag-muncher who cleaned out all my emergency stashes, I'manna keelhaul me a motherfucker."

Hoisting her own emergency stash to her lips, Moira inquires before sipping again. "Any leads?"

"The investigation is ongoing."

Moira wipes the residual gin away from her lips with the meat of her thumb. "What exactly is a blowbag-muncher?"

"I don't know. Something bad. Somebody who steals my alcohol and like," he sniffs, "munches blowbags."

"That seems logical."

"So, yeah," he upshifts, with a little cursory drumming on the armrests, "I've got, what, sixteen some minutes until this episode is over."

"Could you just skip the episode?"

"Lost the remote."

"Fair."

"But, wait a minute," he sharply ceases drumming. "What're you doing up there?"

"Um."

Moira bites the bottle between unresolved teeth. She certainly wasn't about to admit, especially to Nemo, that she'd been secretly hiding from Garrigan of all people, that her apparent eight days worth of enfeebled helplessness deeply disquieted her, that, from all reports, Glive's bedside manner remained utterly unflagging, that she was finding his unprecedented compassion strangely difficult to swallow and instead sought refuge in her confidential little clubhouse, the only place aboard where she could comfortably let her guard down.

"Um?" Nemo repeats blandly.

"...Garrigan said I should exercise. Odisseus said I couldn't leave the ship."

"Oh. Sure," Nemo appreciates and immediately begins drumming again. Relieved at his obliviousness, Moira rewards herself with a mouthful of Gitter. "Hey," Nemo blathers on, "you wanna come watch _Noxix_ with me in...fifteen minutes?"

This she honestly considers first. "I'll probably pass. The next one is the casino break-in."

"Yeah? Fuck."

"The eleventh season," Moira concurs resignedly.

"It's rough."

Motion on the shadowed landing pad catches Moira's eye as the hexagonal lift platform clicks silently into place and the handful of figures occupying its center shuffle off toward separate ships. "Anything happen that I should know about?"

"Nah. Not really."

"I heard you shot Brondi."

"Oh, yeah. That happened."

"And stuck a gun in his mouth?"

"That too. Where'd you hear it?"

"Garrigan mentioned it. What did he say?"

"Well, nothing." Nemo halts drumming a second. "He had a gun in his mouth."

Moira frowns. "No, I mean, _why_ did you stick the gun in his mouth? What did he say before that?"

"I don't know. Some stupid shit."

Detecting that conversational malaise that would occasionally seize the Captain in his queerer moods, Moira briefly wonders if she'd accidentally strayed too close to that unuttured territory that no one presumed to encroach upon. She half-expects Nemo to deactivate the comm channel and wander off to blare more Cosmic Vomit or watch more _Quuilar Noxix_ or masturbate for what would likely be the ninth time today.

"So, were you like, _dead_ dead?" he questions instead. "Did he like, revivify you?"

"Garrigan says no," she reports. "He says that when you found me, I was just passed out. You know, from blood loss." She shifts anxiously in her seat.

"Sure."

"But I didn't see any like, lights or anything," she's quick to disillusion. "No visions or whatever. I was just basically asleep for most of it."

"Sure."

"Why?"

"Oh, I don't know," he confesses, with a concerted slapping of his thighs. "Nobody's ever shot me in the neck."

"Yeah? I don't recommend it."

"I've actually never been seriously wounded," he relates with an unnervingly degree of disappointment.

Moira scowls. "What about that time I shot you in the head?"

"Well, like mortally wounded."

Moira scowls deeper. "Okay, how about that time Flask ran you over with his drifttaxi and broke like, twelve of your ribs?"

"Like _really_ mortally wounded. That didn't kill me, did it?"

"Unfortunately not," Moira relents.

"Hardy bloomin' har."

"You sound jealous."

"Curiosity, I guess," Nemo surmises, somewhat wistfully. "I don't know what that's like, is all."

"Which is really sorta the worst injustice."

He pauses. "What do _you_ mean?"

"Only that you repeatedly put everyone around you in these dire circumstances where, chances are, they'll all die horrible deaths and you have literally no fucking conception of what that'll mean." Silence answers her unceremonious personality assessment. "That came out harsher than I intended it to," she assuages at length.

"No, no," he mutters distractedly. "You're not wrong."

"It's possible that I'm a little drunk," a fact she corroborates with a harsh swig of her prized liquor.

"Did you steal my emergency stash?"

"To be fair, if I had, I wouldn't exactly be inclined to tell you, lest I get myself keelhauled." She securely fastens the bottle cap, pops open the compartment with the heel of her boot and stows the bottle away. "Besides, that's Garrigan's turret. I never go down there."

"Likely story. Aren't you two like, a thing?"

The question arrives without warning, minus any of the playful augmentation of his tone that _always_ preambles his moronic jesting, minus any possible indication to Moira that he's anything but genuine in his asking and that, rather then merely teasing her, he seems to consider this a definite possibility, even a likelihood, enough to pose such a scenario.

"Excuse me?" she attempts to clarify.

"You and Garrigan. A thing. Aren't you?"

"No. Not even a little," she instantly disavows, blatantly realizing how one-dimensional it must seem to Nemo, Two-Bit and the rest of the crew. "No."

"Okay. Moons."

"Maybe a good way to put it is," she hastily offers, by way of explanation, "he's a comrade. We've, you know, worked together in the past, we have a rapport. I don't know. I actually trust him. It's complicated."

"It's fine," he mitigates, the very picture of mock-innocence. "I was just asking."

"What, are you and Odi a thing?" she advances as whatever means necessary to shift the focus and perhaps driven by a certain curiosity of her own.

"Well, he's my saltbrother," Nemo retorts bluntly, a reference to a title Moira'd encountered in his daily speech with Odisseus, but whose meaning she continued to be ignorant of. Spiritual bonds between males weren't necessarily uncommon between the galaxy's multifarious sentient species, but nearly all those in Moira's experience contained some sexual component, an element virtually and thankfully absent from Nemo's relationship with Odisseus and thusly painting another layer of conundrum onto this kernel of enigma that was certain areas of her Captain's assuredly-sordid past.

"And an Ortok. And a dude," Nemo concludes.

"So?"

"So 'no' would be the answer to that."

"You're sure?"

"Yes."

"He's just the mechanic, then?" Moira presses.

"Stop asking."

"And the cook, I suppose," she allows.

Nemo adjusts both his posture and his tone, true discontent blemishing his voice. "He didn't make you eat any of that gumbo of his, did he? What was it, Artelian like, slapdash something?"

Moira sighs. "Gumbo. It's slapdash gumbo."

"Right. That's what I said."

"What about it?"

"Oh, I forgot," he discerns panderingly. "You like his cooking."

"I forgot you don't. I suppose with all the junk food you and Two-Bit shovel down, it's no blooming wonder."

"I don't wanna be ungrateful, it's just always seafood, you know?"

"I was under the impression you liked seafood."

"I did. I do," Nemo pacifies, certainly with splayed fingers and broad sweeping gestures. "Look, trust me, I like fish as much as the next idiot. More even, but for every moons-damned meal is maybe a little, what's the word, excessive?"

"Maybe you should learn to cook, then." Moira, as it happened, cultivated a modest respect for Odisseus and his culinary endeavors, a skill she'd never managed to grasp with any success.

"Too late now," Nemo concedes wearily. "Now there's leftovers."

"I suppose."

"Like, days and days and days of leftovers."

Moira musses up her face. "Did he really make that much?"

"Forgot he only had ten mouths to feed, I expect."

"That I hadn't even considered," she discloses after a long beat. Her memory jogged, Moira allows another sizable pause before, "That was why Brondi–"

"In retrospect, I'm thinking."

"Danbonte. Marco. Anchorage. Brondi. Garrigan."

"And the five of us," Nemo numerates with a certain level of finality. "Are we over our heads?" he suggests suddenly.

"I'm somewhat sketchy on details, but very definitely yes."

This is something he seems to mull for several long moments until his unexpected backpedaling. "Do you know what I think it is?"

"What?" Moira bites.

"I don't understand the risk in it."

"The risk in what?"

"Danger. Derring-do. Whatever you wanna call it." Moira furrows her brow in confusion and he, as if on cue, reprises her earlier point. "Why I'm not afraid of getting shot or blowing up."

"How're you not afraid of that?"

"Because what would I care?" Garrigan's chair groans in exertion as he flops backward with philosophical abandon. "If I get shot in the head, I'm dead. If I blow up the ship, we're all dead. Everything else, everything leading up to that, is just hull damage." She imagines him shrugging unconcernedly. "It's reparable, you know?"

"I'm reparable?"

"Apparently. Otherwise, you'd be dead right now."

Moira can't help but smirk. "But that's legitimately your rationale? 'Who cares 'cause I'd be dead?'"

In the space between her question and his reply, Moira observes several of her dashboard lights adjust. The channel had previously been undedicated, allowing anyone aboard to participate or overhear their conversation, should they pipe into an interior comm access port. Before continuing, Nemo'd taken the precaution to dedicate the channel, leaving Moira to wonder why as the neutral yellow indicator light next to Port 11 (Underturret) blushes a faltering red.

"I don't know what you mean by rationale," he proclaims, his tone gone signature steely above the severely diminished feedback of the dedicated connection. "It's not a conscious choice. It's a reaction. You know," he recalls, in what Moira would later regard as her first tangible clue, "when I went back there this last time, right before I bought the _Lover_ , I didn't even land. I think I just circled a few times and warped out again. I didn't really have the heart to touch down." He scoffs almost inwardly. "Maybe I should have. Maybe that could have given me a better rationale. Oh, hey," he brightens without hesitation. "Sixteen minutes."

As simple as that, it was gone, whatever it had been. Amid clinking bottles, squeaking chairs and the other sounds of his evident departure, Moira raps her fingers against her armrest and fails to shake the sinking suspicion that she'd borne witness to something consequential but lacked the proper context to appreciate it.

"Back to _Noxix_?"

"The casino break-in, but still. Better than nothing. You sure you don't want in?"

"Thanks but no thanks," Moira decides. "Have fun."

"You too, I guess. Doing, I don't know, whatever it is you're doing up there."

"Hey, Nemo?"

"Yes'm?"

"What's our next move?" She waves halfheartedly about at the assorted pirate's ships on the pad, made chimerical in the midnight moonlight. "We can't keep squatting here forever, can we?"

"You wanna know the truth?"

"Yes."

"You're exactly correct. We can't keep squatting here forever," he confides restlessly. "We got errands to run."

"What sort of errands?"

"Oh, you know. The Takioro sort."

Moira massages the middle of her forehead with both forefingers. "You understand that she'll be waiting for you."

"Yep."

"You understand that, going back there after stringing her along for, what, six months, something like that, your life is blooming forfeit."

"Yep."

"You understand that she is perfectly within her rights to gun you down on sight – no smiles, no excuses, no weaseling, if you so much as set foot on her station?"

"Very much yep."

"Well," Moira concludes dumbly, "as long as you're aware. I assume these errands are worth a fight or two?"

"One would hope. I mean, it's all still a blind gamble, of course, but Takioro is probably the best shot we've got at this point."

"And it has to be Takioro?"

"It has to be Takioro. Two-Bit even says so."

"Sublime," Moira peels her head from her hands and plummets backward into her bouncing turret chair. "You're absolutely out of your mind, you know that?"

"I suspected as much," Nemo professes. "But I also suspected," he adds, "that's the reason you're still here, isn't it?" This last rejoinder he delivers with another time-honored sneer from his repertoire, one Moira can distinguish even across the entire length of the ship. "Shit, I'm missing the episode."

The squeal of the gyroscopic chair, some manhandling of the headset and the connection, dedication and all, is promptly terminated. With that, he was doubtlessly clambering up the access ladder, off to his quarters and the nest of distractions he employed to whet his mind toward crafting wild and still wilder schemes, leaving Moira alone with only her peace, the chiller cream vanquished and the alcohol securely cached.

An hour past midnight and tranquility continues to rule the world outside. Dissimilar ships slumber in silence. No more spacers trek back and forth from the immense lift platform to loading ramps that spill different colors of light upon the slushy thermosteel. Only Nebho, shining its tenebrous indigo, and the Exactly _Counterattack_ , blinking a work light sporadically, offer Moira any further illumination to the twilit scene, the former a comforting constant, the later an unwelcome intruder and the one major obstacle between them and Takioro.

–––

Odisseus, as per Nemo's request, uncouples both acceleration regulators, punches up the maximum fuel intake limit on both Port and Starboard, consigns system power from the aftside afterburn shielding directly into the propulsion computer, latches the emergency dynamo cables from the auxiliary generator into each booster's supplementary intake jacks and systemically disables each and every safety precaution he'd laboriously installed to prevent anyone from ramming this much raw firepower into his cherished boosters in the first place. This achieved, he slumps into his technician's seat, straps tight every seatbelt within reach and growls into the comm. "There. You happy now?"

"Let's find out."

To his immediate starboard, the wall-mounted 'engine exertion' light engages bitterly, as though it anticipates the suicidal strain its about to be subjected to. Odisseus clenches his jaw tight but doesn't dare close his eyes as, in the helm, Nemo chokes the throttle. The Ortok mechanic watches in horror as Port and Starboard, each booster presumably gushing freakish gouts of exhaust, rattle and quaver in their restraints from the undiluted effort. His equilibrium, long ago hardened into space legs of steel, barely registers the steering column's blunt bank to port, likely to swerve _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ around some looming obstacle, likely even the Pylon itself. The Briza's barely time to correct after the lurching adjustment before Odisseus' comm burbles to life again.

"Hey, Odi, could you possibly do me a little favor?" Nemo's voice is pleasant and neighborly, though patched, seemingly about to request a corkscrew and a cup of sugar.

"You're blooming joking."

"We're actually gonna need a little more juice. If that's not too much trouble."

"Trust me, Nemo," Odisseus growls, his scowl firmly planted on his gasping, exhausted boosters. "You really don't want that."

"No, I really, really do."

Odisseus releases a weary sigh. "...how many fighters are behind us?"

"Oh, I don't know," Nemo relents. "Two-Bit, how many fighters do you suppose there are behind us?"

"Like, a hundred-bloomin'-million!"

"Two-Bit says a hundred blooming million. Is that enough, you think?" he retorts, the sardonicism evident even through the comm's warble. "How many more would you like?"

Snarling profanities against Pylons, polar windows and power failures that consisted mainly of wordless vitriol rather than actual language, Odisseus unbuckles his chassis of seat belts, staggers to his feet and sets about the unpleasant task of somehow browbeating more system power into his already-overtaxed jetboosters lest either the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's broadside batteries or the apparently "hundred blooming million" Spur-Class interceptors currently hounding their tail blow them into literal smithereens.

"'You call the shots, Odi'" Odisseus mutters, yanking the fuel compression pad entirely away with his bare paws. "'Long as you keep her afloat, Odi, you call the shots.' All the moons of cocksucking Jotor..."

Chapter 19

Two-Bit Switch, honestly a little disgusted, brushes yellow blood off the butt of his B7 Dissident and onto the thigh of his trousers. "You fuckers got cotty blood? Shit vizzes like fooge," he opines with a grimace, quick to level the pistol's snub back where it belongs once the weapon's been sufficiently cleaned.

Eidesmoe wheezes on the floor, quills rapidly sheathing and unsheathing, aforementioned yellow blood oozing from his recently-pistol-whipped-puss. He adheres rigidly to cliché, dabbing at the wound with spined fingers and staring shocked daggers up at his incipient armed robber. Two-Bit rifles his left hand through the Glothi fence's open cashbox, the retinal scanner now rendered a blinking vanity. "You fucking scumbag," Eidesmoe manages through broken teeth.

"Oh, don't moralize me, you dritchin' little shit," Two-Bit sneers, deft fingers leafing through sheaves of stored cash. "This is bloomin' Takioro, isn't it? You with your little peep scanner - you practically had a blinker up, invitin' me to biff your beak and avail meself of your rhino every time I came here." Gathering up his hefty stack of ill-gotten gains, what his professional burglar's extemporaneous appraisal estimates at around seven thousand ICC or so, Two-Bit creases the bundle and stuffs it into his pocket. After shuffling back a step, he vaults the nearest card table, making his way through Eidesmoe's improvised den toward the object he'd crossed three sectors to swipe.

Wish fulfillment had been the order of the day when Nemo'd first proposed this particular maneuver to him back on Baz, back before the polar window run and their close call with the Pylon and its innumerable allegiant starfighters, back before they'd stole away to Takioro Defederate Station under the cover of the Yarba New Year's four-day hullabaloo. Initially, Two-Bit would have gleefully volunteered to break boorish Eidesmoe's nose any day of the week Nemo cared to pick. Yet, he found himself oddly sullen as he slunk through the engorged crowds of celebrants that choked the Third Ring toward Eidesmoe's bathroom-turned-base of operations, the cowl of his hoodie upturned to shield his face both from unfriendly eyes and from the downpour of confetti that seemed to perpetually percolate from somewhere above. Perhaps it was paranoia about discovery, perhaps it was residual jitters from their white-knuckler with the _Counterattack_ but, whatever the reason, Two-Bit took strangely little joy in ruining Eidesmoe's day like this.

He had, as expressed, no intention to kill or even seriously harm his Glothi associate any more than was strictly speaking necessary to execute this stage of Nemo's evolving strategy against the Pylon. Even the robbery itself was something of a pretext for the sake of appearances. An additional seven thousand credits weren't about to make or break this venture; it was a very specific piece of Eidesmoe's hardware Two-Bit'd been tasked to boost and the contents of the cashbox, a relative pittance of the Glothi's total earnings, Two-Bit pocketed as a gratuity.

It takes him a full minute and more to find the scramble codifier in question, especially with one hand occupied in covering the sputtering wreck of prone Eidesmoe. As Two-Bit runs the proverbial gauntlet of markdown mechanical merchandise in search of an ident flasher that reads "TFS K4 Individual Interceptor Unit, Spur-Class," the Glothi fence on the floor passes the time spewing up hunks of yellow-stained teeth and muttering spuriously in his mother tongue. Two-Bit isn't concerned about reprisal, particularly with the Dissident trained on his every move – if there's one thing Eidesmoe could be relied upon to do unhesitatingly, it's kowtow.

After a few uneasy seconds of wondering whether he'd been mistaken, Two-Bit locates the specific scramble codifier, snatches the console from among the stack of dusty claptrap, tucks it under his arm and, keeping his revolver solidly trained on the crumpled form of Eidesmoe, sidesteps his way back around the cluttered card tables. From here, it would be a simple matter to dart for the exit and lose himself amongst the throngs of other looters and ruffians teeming along the Ring before Eidesmoe can call for any sort of aid.

"Now, it'd be pretty feezy to pop a canister in your stupid little maggie and have done, wouldn't it?" he announces to the cowering Glothi on the floor. "But you know I ain't gonna do that 'cause, were that the case, I woulda done it already. So, instead, ord to fuckin' this." He gestures emphatically with the pistol. "You were blooming bummin' for this, weren't you, Eidesmoe, mate? You don't seem to follow that this _is_ fucking Takioro and the blokes here got fucking wheelies, don't they? So, get your own fucking wheel outta your fucking wozzer drawer, hire yourself a nice big bruno with a mean fucking kisser and this kinda shit won't happen no more. Nod your silly maggie if you're still followin'." Eidesmoe complies with an apprehensive nod. "There's a good bloke. No crunchy feelings now, alright?"

Two-Bit's a foot from the door release when Eidesmoe spits, "You're in for a surprise, Switch."

"What's that? You'd rather the canister?"

He attempts to chuckle, which only causes more blood to seep from his smashed face. "They're waiting for you and yours, Switch."

Two-Bit advances an inch. "You been jabbing to Velocity?"

Gripping the nearby toilet to hoist himself onto his elbows, Eidesmoe grins through cracked lips. "Maybe you should check your postings."

Opting not to waste any further time with this lowlife, Two-Bit nudges the door release, merges into the teeming press beyond and abandons Eidesmoe to his broken teeth and dangling colony of multicolored air fresheners.

–––

Gertie Guspatch is attempting to foster herself a better nickname. She'd recently deemed her current sobriquet a little too ironic and far too detrimental to her career, considering the unfortunate string of bad breaks and worse ends that had befallen each of the four captains she'd served under these past nine months. Captain Akari's _Strange Bedfellow_ had been promptly boarded by a Ring ConFed customs cruiser and himself promptly incarcerated therewith. Captain Chiriq had contracted the Dressdaalian retchings a week out of port, followed shortly by half _The Far Cry's_ non-humanoid crew. Captain Bors Fingerbreaker had been shanked in the eye over a thirty-credit bar bet during a game of bankshot ball. By the time that Captain Mantares had been fed to The Scar's mated pair of pet jborra panthers, Gertie was zero for four and the prefix "Good Luck" had emerged in and among the cups and whispers of Takioro's superstitious citizenry at an alarming frequency, along with a sharp decline in the rate of her employment.

So Good Luck Gertie was in the proverbial market for a relabeling and potentially a nine-to-five behind a laser turret, could such a thing be managed. She'd heard Fingerbreaker's boatswain, an enormous Walkeen eyesore known simply as Bosun, offhandedly refer to her as Gertie Gundeck, a handle that had enchanted her and then never been repeated. She'd also heard that Captain Herne Halfsmile had lost a few hands during a recent boost-and-juice off Vanholt and was perhaps shopping in station to scrape a few unsavories off Takioro's tile to replace them. Hiking up her skirt, unfastening her third button and strapping on her gun belt, she's swaggered down to the Bloody Afterburn to offer up her credentials, as she'd done with every corsair of sufficient clout who'd swept into port of late.

Herne Halfsmile, an ugly Phnuki scuzzball with a decent rap sheet in the Midworlds and twelve teeth missing from the left side of his grin, brushes some imaginary dust off his lapel and signals Unhappy Roger for another two of whatever Gitterswitch concoction sat drained before him. "You're big trouble, what I hear, ain't you, Guspatch?"

"Maybe I'm the good kinda trouble," she purrs, shrugging deeply over the bar.

"Yeah? And how do I tell?"

"Look closer."

Sexy banter, in Gertie's experience, rarely made much sense, as the conversation's verbal content was typically of less importance than the actual manner of its delivery. As long as it was snappy and breathless and she pursed her lips just so, most of the drooly apes she danced this dance with could care less whether they discussed crew openings or the consistency of quorki manure.

Unhappy Roger deposits both tumblers before Herne with a morose sigh. Eyeing the nearest of the frothy blue drinks, Gertie scoots her wobbly stool an inch and an inch closer to Herne, all the better with which to murmur her desirous aspirations under the conglomerate commotion of the celebratory Afterburn.

On Day Three of the Yarba New Year, The Bloody Afterburn seethes and churns like an overflowing tide pool. Sentients of every shade and stripe rub raucous elbows about the begrimed barroom. A bewildering confusion of chat, be it Commercial, Jabber or the dozens of more outlandish tongues bounced about the joint by its myriad patrons, wrestles the piped-in tavern music for the supremacy of sound. Tankards are hoisted, clinked and drained of the Consortium's cheapest swill in exaltation of the obscure holiday whose planet practically none of the celebrants had ever even heard of. Subsequently, Unhappy Roger's dolor was black as ever and the saloon was suffocated with unwashed buccaneers and unsavory intentions.

Gertie toys with her tumbler on the bar top. "Well, you know what they say about Phnukies, don'tcha?"

As he shoots back his Gitter, Herne cocks his head askance, to prevent the booze from dribbling out the side of his toothless gap. "What do they say?"

"They say," she intones, her conniving eyes catching movement somewhere past the Halfsmile's shoulder, "that their cocks are as big as their...Nemo," she breathes.

"My cock is as big as my Nemo?"

By now, Gertie Guspatch was paying precisely no attention. Minus that winsome bowler hat of his, minus the meretricious grandstanding he flattered the Afterburn and exasperated Roger with upon every visit, minus that deadpan harpy, Quicksilver something, that usually dogged his every step, but nevertheless, there, all the way across the Afterburn, is unquestionably him – edging his way past the even more persistent Ortok and two-hundred-and-eighty pounds of dreadlocked Aurik muscle to slip unsteadily out the side entrance.

Gertie slams her Gittershot, jettisons herself off the teetering stool and saunters through the cavorting crowd toward the exit to the alley, Herne Halfsmile a faint memory behind her. She indulges both the Ortok and the Aurik with the most virginal smile in her arsenal as she breezes past the pair of them and sidles herself through the agape doorway.

The alley adjoining The Bloody Afterburn and its next door neighbor, a humble five table bistro called The Peach Fuzz, is an anticipatedly squalid affair, decorated largely in wet sacks of cast-off trash from both establishments, dissolute shells of sentients slumped against the scuzzy teltriton walls and a dappled mosaic of stains, splattered, spilt and dried across Gertie's path in a dozen not-so-mysterious colors. To her left, Nemo just circles the far corner and disappears, with a half-stumble and an unintentional twirl of his coat, around the Afterburn's backside. To her right, the alleyway deltas into the Second Ring's main thoroughfare and all the hooting, honking, riotous ribaldry of the Yarba New Year invades the sidestreet's relative hush.

An alpacafolk from an ill-visited world in the Offchart Territories, the beginning of the Yarba's calendar year coincided with the ninth month of the Standard Imperial Calendar, an otherwise banal enough occurrence that Takioro's criminal culture deemed as worthy as any to ceremonialize with a four-day, no-holds-barred, station-wide debauch. Outlaws from all walks of crime, from petty pickpocket to kingpin pirate, flock to the Defederate Station each year, all the restaurateurs and flipskirts and pistolpawners clean up on holiday discounts and clearances, the Depot-Commissioner enjoys a juicy percentage of each transaction and Gertie is reasonably certain that, even with Takioro's vagrant population swollen fivefold, she's never, in two decades, seen a single Yarba in station during their alleged New Year celebration.

She discovers him pissing shamelessly into the emergency exhaust vent jutting from the floor behind the Afterburn, the rippling wake of hazardous miasma shimmering the air before him into a effervescent pillar and splaying the tails of his coat wide open. She sashays across broken bottles and discarded syringes to slink up along his oblivious side.

"'round back here ain't exactly my ideal choice of venue, but skip, you know I'm always willing to improvise if you are," she admits with an accommodating shrug and a glancing appraisal of their scuzzy surroundings. "Moons know I've done worse."

He scowls left, opens his mouth to speak in alarm, bites his lip and remarks rather, "You continually astound me," he slurs, "with your unsung talent for creeping around."

"I got lotsa unsung talents. You game for a tussle?"

"'fraid not. You know, I got that..." he punishes his lip with further gnawing, "dick mold."

She regards his sputtering yet evidently unmarred manhood with a hoisted eyebrow. "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah," he nods, with exaggerated graveness. "It's in the sorta 'spore' phase right now."

"This is different from those, what, gonad barnacles you had last time?"

"Yes. Very different. This is mold," he points. "On my dick."

"Guess I don't want no dick mold."

"You really don't. Anything else I can help you with, Gertrude?"

Ever since the dissolution of her first marriage, Gertie'd considered the practice of twirling doltish men around her little finger a point of professional pride and thus far, barring this most recent dry spell, she'd proved more than successful in such endeavors, with one notable exception. On paper, this Captain Nemo appeared the supreme candidate for Gertie's admittedly diffuse affections – hard reputation, rising star, marvelous ship and tirelessly defiant to boot. To make matters worse, he was ostensibly immune not only to her renewed charms, but seemingly to all charms of a female persuasion, and if there was anything in this galaxy to whet Gertie's appetite more than his particular brand of disinterest could, she'd never encountered it in nineteen years spent tramping the worst parts of Bad Space.

Thusly, they beat around this very particular bush over and over again, at every chance meeting, every in-station stumble-upon, every happenstance encounter that Gertie meticulously arranged; her proposing to knock boots at a variety of locales and instances, him concocting a truly prodigious string of irrational excuses, ranging from dental appointments and urgent comm transmissions to this more recent patch of genital maladies. Gertie wasn't struck with the impression he was askew necessarily, but the amorous advances of even her own voluptuous nature appeared entirely lost on him, much to her pocketbook's chagrin.

"'s Gertie and lemme tell you how you can help me. Get me a job on that _Lover_."

"Pretty sure we had an understanding about that."

"Bloom that. You got space these days, with Shouldermount and the others offed. Plus," she delivers the following in an unnecessarily hushed tone, to add some habitual melodrama, "talk is, you're headlining for Boss Ott now, ain't that right?"

"Might be, might be," he consents with a ghost of a smile.

"Then, your ship got mold too or what?"

"Well, yes, probably," Nemo allows, with a perfunctory consideration, "but that ain't the point. The point, and I've definitely told you this," he elucidates unevenly, while stuffing his dripping member into his unfastened trousers and tapping closed the exhaust vent with his heel, "is that Moira simply will not have it. She, uh, she brooks no rival. I've told you this."

"And why is that again?"

"You'd have to ask her. If you'll excuse me–" Nemo excuses himself with extended palms, but Gertie deftly sidesteps to immediately intercept him.

"And that purple-haired skank what unmoored with you six months back? Switch's current doxy?"

"I actually got a theory Moira shot her in the back of the head."

Gertie sneers. "I can handle Quicksilver."

"Don't doubt that you can. All of this, however, is somewhat beside the point," he asserts with another escape attempt and this time, Gertie grants his passage, lingering only three of his footfalls, each slightly wobbled by intoxication, before posing a question harmless enough to halt him in his tracks.

"What're you even _doin'_ here, skip?"

He doesn't make eye contact as he replies. "Errands. Ott's business in station."

"That ain't what I mean. Coulda sent one of your mooks with a shopping list to run any errands you got. No," she prances a step forward and flattens her hands against the grips of her gunbelt, "you came here special. All those guns pointed at your head makes it just 'bout the most expensive slab of dead meat this side of Inapi and it leaves me wonderin' why you'd even bother flashin' that pretty face of yours down here at the Afterburn. Weren't to run no errands. Weren't to see me, what with the dick mold," she deduces with a sidelong gesture at his crotch, "and weren't for no business either, as you and your posse ain't looked twice at a single stiff in that joint." She shrugs almost playfully. "So, what's the answer, skip? Good ol' fashioned stupidity or somethin' more specific?"

Nemo dawdles another moment before coming about to face her properly again, Gertie perceiving a subtle yet profound shift in his aspect. "I needed a drink," he comments simply, uninterestingly even, and Gertie feels the puncture of his remote gaze. "My, uh, stash was all used up," he explains with a listlessness she can only identify as abject detachment. He does nothing more than blink before it's dissolved away and a boozy grin reclaims his face. "Besides, it's Yarba New Year, isn't it? That's certainly worth a carouse – even a quiet one."

"Suit yourself," she settles. "Only..."

The bait is cheap, Gertie confesses inwardly, and the fact that Nemo's this easily inspirited by such a crude hook remains her most consistent proof of his interest. "You're terrible."

"Sad to say."

"Only?"

"Only unless you're keen on catching laser bolts with your head, you'd best hoof it back to that moldy ship of yours and make tracks outta here. By my count, there's at least three hard cases with your number printed up all nice and clean on bounty posters," she thumbs to her immediate right, "waitin' just inside there."

Nemo ruffles, the truculent eagerness he immediately displays tellingly blatant and therefore strangely exciting. "Anybody I know?"

"Some chick all done up in tattoos and totems. A Saurian fella biggern' the fourth moon of Bohor, calls himself Thood. Froz," she adds as an afterthought. "Plus Traasha and her toadies are about someplace – Vel's got 'em out in force. Somebody musta tipped her."

"Bloom me out," Nemo breathes. "That's some heat for what, two-fifty?"

"More than that, skip. You been upgraded."

"That so?" he inquires with a certain degenerate pride. "How much?"

"Wouldn't wanna spoil any surprise, but let's just say, between Vel, these anglers and anybody else jumpin' outta Second Ring windows to cash in the shiny new price on your brainpan, you'd best take my advise and skedaddle."

Nemo slaps his thighs. "Maybe you're right."

"Get me on the payroll and you got yourself another gun," Gertie advertises with a sly smile and an accentuation of the pertinent hip. "Fuck, best gun on the Defederate Station."

"Willing to bet Moira'd contest that part."

"Which part?"

"Both, I imagine." That said, the stifled echo of shattering glass, followed by a volley of shrieking laserfire, silences the muffled bustle of the merry-making Afterburn for less than a full second, before the removed saloon blossoms into an unharmonious chorus of loosed bolts, broken furniture and four dozen jam-packed souls abruptly dragooned into drunken violence. "That'd be them now, I expect," he edges away from her several more steps, making gradual progress toward the corner. "Should probably see to that."

"Probably. Last chance to change your mind and take me."

"Tempting but, you know, dick mold."

"Of course. Shoot me somebody, wouldja?"

He beams with inebriated finality. "I'll shoot you a whole buncha people."

He spins on a dime, nearly forfeits his balance and vanishes cleanly out of sight, loping back toward the Afterburn's side entrance, with the unexpressed desire to bruise knuckles and waste ammunition with a trio of bounty hunters undoubtedly out of his league and, in all eventuality, find himself punctually murdered.

Good Luck Gertie Guspatch chews her bottom lip and debates her options.

–––

Odisseus is going to throttle him as soon as he comes back from peeing. Through the effective bottleneck of the corner booth's only point of ingress, the impatient Ortok spots Froz Four-Eyes slap a handful of bills to the bar's counter and plop into the unoccupied seat to Herne Halfsmile's immediate left, all four of his eponymous peepers trained unflaggingly on the side entrance. The very same side entrance, Odisseus notes, that his saltbrother staggered out of seven minutes previously, ostensibly to "let the little guy breathe for a minute" but with Good Luck Gertie just moments behind. Odisseus wasn't sure whether he'd simply been too tipsy to reject her earnest advances or whether she'd finally won him over with the rough talk and the vixen smiles, but he was certain that, as soon as Nemo graced the Afterburn's back door with his meddlesome presence again, they'd likely have themselves a piece of action.

Froz has aged considerably since Odisseus had seen him last, at that speakeasy on the bad side of Gallow's Worldshine district eight and more years ago. While he'd certainly grown into his lanky frame and spindly appendages, it was exceedingly unlikely that the Ortok would ever have the slightest difficulty singling the queer Gallweigian bounty hunter out among a crowd. Of an unknown breed, race or species whom no one could ever recall encountering another specimen of, Froz Four-Eyes earned his moniker not from spectacles, but rather from the pair of big hazels on his second head. Each capping an arm's length of serpentine neck, each possessed of perhaps a quarter of a brain, the unnervingly two heads of Froz Four-Eyes had accrued a dubious esteem across several sectors, both for his talents as an idiot savant of a trick marksman and for his inexplicable penchant for arriving at the least opportune moment to ruin one's day. Enemies of old on Gallow, Froz, typically a few degrees above their notice, had probably leapt at the chance to collect the mounting bounty on Captain's Nemo's hated head.

Anchorage, with vision superior only by way of not being Ortoki, had alerted Odisseus to another factor in the bar-brawl-waiting-to-happen that was the Bloody Afterburn's crammed common room: a second rough customer, one the Ortok didn't recognize, but the Aurik evidently did. While he didn't have her name or even a working alias, Anchorage could mutteringly confirm a hard reputation hogtying sizable bounty-heads for live capture. To judge from the manner in which she sat, perched on seat's edge across the tavern and positioned perfectly to share Froz's apparent intent, it wasn't difficult for Odisseus to fathom her purpose here.

Uncommonly short for a humanoid, she sports salmon skin, a strained topknot of coarse black dreadlocks and a flagrantly tribal ensemble. Animalistic tattoos in stark white ink, outlandish garb of dyed hide and boiled leather and an assortment of unconventional weaponry – all part of a transparent effort to capitalize on the hoodlum's bedtime-story-fear of a certain ritualistic Yheum reality feedshow star.

Odisseus privately fumes. Should Nemo emerge from his impromptu bathroom break via the side entrance, in full view of Froz, he'd undoubtedly be gunned down on the spot. Should Odisseus or Anchorage attempt any manner of retrieval, Froz or his petite counterpart would certainly catch wise before they'd made ten feet from the table. As a multitude of valid options fail to present themselves for irascible Odisseus' approval, Anchorage commiserates with a cagey glance.

All Odisseus' saltbrother arts hadn't been capable to the apparently insurmountable task of restraining the squirrelly Captain this evening, though assuredly not for lack of effort on either part. In terms he'd deemed more-or-less relevant to Nemo's interests, Odisseus had repeatedly expressed, upon making berth at the First Ring's Docking Port #2767 a hour ago, how extraordinarily fortunate they'd been in skirting fiery, screaming deaths at the hands of the _Exacting Counterattack_ during their fateful polar exit and there'd be precisely no opportunity to return the favor should they expose themselves to Velocity and all be shot in the head on principle. While the Captain absorbed this revelation reasonably well, Odisseus had taken the added precaution of jury-rigging a pressure catch with a spare transponder to ping his comm unit whenever anyone activated the boarding ramp's extenders; a tidy plan completely circumvented when Nemo snuck off-ship as Two-Bit and Moira slipped away to run their individual errands.

Nearly forty-five minutes had passed before Odisseus, busy remedying the shellshocked jetboosters from last week's events, had crawled out of the belowdecks engine room to fetch his replacement neticgrappler and discovered his saltbrother's disappearance. Roping Anchorage, the _Lover's_ last remaining meathook, along for an escort, a thwarted and cursing Odisseus had tromped off into the obscene revelry of Takioro's Yarba New Year, with specific knowledge, garnered through long months of acquaintance, of his truant Captain's whereabouts.

"A quick drink," had, in fact, been his alibi, though that recognizable sheen of doom to his eyes told otherwise. Now, here they sat, an Ortoki mechanic and a Aurik bare-knuckle bruiser, restlessly awaiting their absent employer to stuff his penis, whatever its recent engagements, back into his pants, waltz into The Bloody Afterburn and be promptly perforated by the efforts of Froz Four-Eyes and his signature showman's pistols.

Neither Two-Bit nor Moira had answered his summons but he'd had words with them sooner or later; it was this immediate business of keeping Nemo alive that vexed him at present.

Moments before Odisseus, bereft of better ideas, throws caution to the wind himself and attempts a headlong bull rush of the nearest bounty hunter, Anchorage scoots fully out of the corner booth, grasps his empty pilsner in the forked fingers at trunk's tip and murmurs to Odisseus, with his broad back turned against their awaiting adversaries. "Inch over into plain sight. I got an idea."

Odisseus upturns his muzzle in consternation. 'Where are you going?"

"I'm empty," he observes, hoisting the sudsy glass and a rascally grin before he strides off to elbow himself a place at the bar.

Odisseus complies after a suspicious beat, motivated partially by his ardent lack of options and partially by pure curiosity, for the guileless Aurik brute was hardly reputed for his subterfuge or his scheming. No sooner has the Ortok squirmed his paunchy form out of the booth's nook and opened himself to view by the majority of the taproom's rambunctious patrons, as per Anchorage's instructions, than the less attentive left head of Froz Four-Eyes, who grants the Afterburn proper the odd subconscious glance, catches sight of Odisseus and narrows his gaze. Half a second later, the right head, though never diverting its unflinching scrutiny of the side entrance, adopts an expression of distrust and disdain to match his opposite number's. Odisseus responds with an upraised glass and a condescending regard of his own.

"Well, well," the left head's annular cadence greets, "long time no, long time no, um, well, that is to say, didn't expect that you'd still be, I mean, considering all the, you know, the time that's passed, I thought, how do you say, long time no, uh, long time no–"

"See," the right head summarizes bluntly.

"See. Right."

"Recommend you make yourself scarce, Four-Eyes," Odisseus threatens over the hubbub, "unless the plan is to get both your necks broken."

"The plan," the left head counters, reaching a corresponding hand suspiciously close to his holstered pistol to retrieve a folded leaflet, "is to retire. What I figure, bounty on your boy's head oughta make that, you know, fait, uh, fait, what is it, fait..."

"Accompli," the right head finishes.

"Accompli." With leaflet unfurled, he paraphrases with a disesteeming tone. "Coupla hundred counts of murder, handful of smuggling, gunrunning, piracy and brigandage charges–" Odisseus opens his mouth to speak, but Froz's left head pays him no heed. "Now, here's the real money – three acts of war, plus treason, sedition and terrorism. Oh, and one lonely count of enthusiastic corruption of the galactic, uh, what's the word, galactic, galactic, not 'peace,' not, uh, 'betterment,' but–" he stumbles, scanning the flyer fruitlessly.

"Good."

"Good. Galactic good."

"Gunrunning?" Odisseus murmurs involuntarily, moments before Froz's left pistol materializes in his hand and finds itself pointed directly at the Ortok.

"So, how's about you set your gun down on the table there and get ready to talk your boy out of his soon as he gets back from gettin' his pecker sucked on?"

Odisseus, as he typically does when confronted with a loaded pistol at point blank range, acquiesces, deliberately unsheathing and placing, gently at arm's length, his timeworn Acathi combat shotgun on the ale-stained wooden table. "Better off shooting me now. Save you some limbs."

"Ain't part of the plan, I'm afraid. I need the whole kit-and-kaboodle to secure my retirement. You, Quicksilver, that jabberhead and the Cap'n are all coming with me this evening."

Odisseus recoils his countenance in thinly veiled confusion. Sufficiently distracted by the ongoing guerilla warfare on Baz, the _Lover's_ crew had neglected to keep tabs on the newest bounty postings, by their own admission. Recent events might certainly have escalated the prices on their heads, Odisseus had no doubt, but in order to extrapolate his, Moira's and Two-Bit's identities from a single scrap in the jungle, Insurgent Company's intelligence would had to have been gravely underestimated.

"Surprised?" The left head of Froz Four-Eyes interprets, "Moons, I even get me a juicy little bonus if I bring that clunker of yours back in one piece. That, uh, oh, what's it now, the _Unconstant_ something, _Unconstant_ , uh, it's a Briza, ain't it? _The Unconstant_..."

" _Lover_."

Allowing himself the lowest of growls at this maligning of his beloved Briza, Odisseus contemplates the aesthetic pleasure achieved when both of Froz's heads are comically smacked together as he challenges, "You think you got enough muscle for that?"

"I got plenty. Why, I practically count for two myself. That bony number back there," he indicates the hateful little Noxix-wannabe with a tilt of his temple, "'s been tracking you since that Haess job and was more than eager to throw in with me for a chunk of the bounty. On top of that, as if the three of us ain't enough, which we are, I got me some insurance."

When summoned, a mammoth shape, occupying space normally allocated for two or three normal-sized patrons, rears its grotesque head off the bar top and climbs to its tree-trunk legs, a full head and shoulders taller than every other swain and soul around him and twice as wide. By the time he's turned completely around to face the seated Ortok, Odisseus is confronted with the single largest Saurian he's ever seen – built like a GF4 HAZtanker, dwarfing an overfull pint in his prodigious claw and boasting both a crocodilian hide brimming with overlapping scales and a crocodilian smile brimming with overlapping teeth. The shirtless, tailless mountain of a brute plants an unequivocal stance and emits a rumbling growl on a pitch to shame even Odisseus' own.

"All the moons of Jotor," he whispers.

"This here," Froz's left head introduces, "is...oh, bloom me out, what was the name now, this is, um, this is, I swear, you told me, it's–"

This time it's the Saurian himself, with a voice so deep it's practically subterranean, who puts the left head out of its misery. "Thood."

"Thood. Of course."

Odisseus attempts to ballpark the Saurian's unmatchable weight. "Hello, Thood."

"Well, Ortok," the right head, finally peeling its stare from the bar's back door, addresses with customary arrogance as Froz's second pistol flees its holster, "you think four-on-two's enough muscle?"

Odisseus frowns in consideration. "You might wanna do that math again."

Anchorage, from his relocated seat at the bar, wheels about, plants a hand on Thood's mountainous shoulder to draw the Saurian's attention and smashes his half-full pilsner directly into Thood's startled face. The Aurik's full bore trunk punch, coupled with the shock of shattering glass and splashing Gitterswitch straight into his eyes, is nearly enough to topple titanic Thood, sending the Saurian stumbling into the clusters of patrons thronging the western bar and unleashing an unholy volley of laserfire from flabbergasted Froz's extended pistols.

Odisseus anticipates this with a violent skyward shove of the booth's table, which plops noisily and upright onto its side, shields him effectively from Froz's barrage and clatters his Acathi, along with his and Nemo's drinks, uselessly to the floor. As Froz Four-Eyes drums a twin-pistol tempo against three thick inches of aged hardwood, Odisseus muses, perhaps too late, that Nemo's minute has expired.

In the space of nine seconds, the Bloody Afterburn, already a veritable powder keg of disorderly, drunken miscreants armed beyond the teeth, predictably explodes into the most unsportsmanlike bar fight Odisseus had, at that time, the dubious honor of participating in, though, at the moment, he wasn't necessarily "participating" in the traditional sense and was rather hunkering on paws and knees behind the upturned corner table. Over the swollen din of random barflies slugging, punting and breaking chairs over other random barflies, Odisseus can discern two clear realities; firstly, Anchorage giving pitched battle to Thood along the southwestern bar, as evidenced by unfamiliar throaty hisses and familiar husky laughter to his left, and secondly, Froz Four-Eyes closing the gap to jointly nullify the Ortok's improvised cover and riddle him with holes, as evidenced by the sudden cessation of his pistols' barking.

To prevent such an ignominious end at the hands of someone as undeserving as Froz, Odisseus sinks eight of ten claws into the boot-licked wood of the table's stem, heaves the whole piece of cumbersome furniture clear off the ground and, hugging it horizontally like a battering ram, takes a blind gamble to hurl the entire number, tabletop first, toward the last known position of Froz Four-Eyes, with a grunting exertion and a relieved wheeze. He's rewarded for his efforts by a dumfounded scream of bodily surprise, followed by a fierce wooden slapping sound and completed by the irreplaceable sight of flailing Froz, pinned wholly to the floor beneath the upside-down mushroom of Odisseus' table, both heads cursing wildly, both frantically attempting to envision a method to extricate themselves after being so thoroughly proned.

Odisseus stalks from the booth, collecting his forsaken Acathi as he treads toward the thrashing bounty hunter, with the bashing, crashing Afterburn upheaving all around him. A nearby Nyvo boozehound treats Herne Halfsmile to a vicious knee-shot in the groin, before bouncing the same foot off the tile and feeding the doubled-over Phnuki corsair captain said knee again, likely snapping free another assortment of the Halfsmile's upper teeth. Anchorage, gripping its steel legs with both hands and trunk, swats Thood full in the abdomen with the business end of a reappropriated barstool to visibly no effect. Unhappy Roger continues to mournfully polish the veneer off an overworked section of the bar top with a marketably clean washcloth, the destructive uproar ravaging his establishment instilling nothing but a gloomier shade of melancholy to his every action.

Skittering a dropped pistol aside with a flick of his broad hind paw, Odisseus racks the Acathi, levels both its sawed-off snub and a disappointed grimace at Froz's right head before receiving a twelve-inch wooden dart, capped in green down, clean through his shotgun's chamber for his trouble. Partially relieved to be spared the grisly duty of shooting Froz between his four eyes and partially baffled by the modus operandi this relief chose to manifest itself with, Odisseus twists to his right to spy the stocky Noxix-wannabe, halfway across the joint and jamming a second such dart, frilled with fuzzy green fletching, into a clasped tube of a weapon that could only be some manner of blowgun.

Despite the foot long shaft of barbed wood forcibly decorating his weapon's firing mechanism, Odisseus listlessly hefts the skewered shotgun anyway and, chancing his second blind gamble of the evening, lets fly. The Acathi veritably ruptures with its swan song, launching both an uncoupled bolt and a piddling ditrogen spray in the general direction of the distant bounty hunter with varying degrees of accuracy. He accomplishes the desired effect, at least, as the narrowly-missed Noxix-wannabe brushes herself off, stows the offending blowgun in favor of a wicked spike of bone and wood and turns to hasten through the scuffling hordes toward Odisseus.

With a sincere pang of fleeting nostalgia for the untimely defunction of his two-year-old firearm, Odisseus lays his inoperative Acathi to rest on the alehouse floor and proceeds to busy himself kicking Froz in the head until his latest opponent arrives.

She circumnavigates a dozen private quarrels and half as many public ones, including Anchorage and Thood trading bruises and broken facial features, before she actually reaches him. Her first uncoiled pounce places her atop the southernmost bar top amongst clanging dishware, her next spanning its western curvature and landing her scant inches from the undeterred Roger, her third, with anomalous weapon clutched two-handed over her head, throws her back to the floor again, less than five feet opposite Odisseus.

He towers over her, to the extent that his first two swings, claws poised to rend hide armor and tattooed flesh alike, sail comically wide above her head. She exploits this window to entice him backward with the blunt prod of her weapon, scoring a pair of miniscule points, which Odisseus consequently ignores, on each of his sides. Her armament of choice is an oblique, feral thing of animal bone and painted wood, drawn from an equally oblique leather cross-draw shoulder harness – a three-foot tribal bastardization of a grapple's hook, a polearm and a fire poker. She brandishes it with a very peculiar stance, equal parts sword and equal parts spear and her thrusts and ripostes are accordingly impossible to predict.

His next blow Odisseus aims true and would have clobbered her midsection into a row of as-of-yet unmolested barstools had she not brought her queer weapon to bear with a rushed parry. She catches the Ortok's meaty paw within her serrated hook and the implanted animal fangs edging the blade pierce his pad. The bounty hunter squawks victorious, Odisseus bays startled and succinctly backhands her with an opposite paw, teaching her temporary flight and tracing four curt red tallies across the artificial white of her cheek before she prangs awkwardly into the floor ten feet off.

Odisseus, with a weather eye to the still floundering Froz, licks his slashed palm and concedes a meager whimper as he attempts a closed fist. The Noxix-wannabe, meanwhile, collects herself, hook-spear-poker included, from her crumpled heap on the ground, smears blood away from her mouth and punishes unfortunate Herne Halfsmile, who unsuspectingly tumbles into her reach, with a vengeful haft clout into his unsuspecting belly, before she clambers to her own squat feet. As the much-abused Phnuki moans and writhes on the floor between them, Odisseus and the Noxix-wannabe circle each other with a respectful duelist's distance, the former with bloody claws at the ready, the latter with bizarre pike loose in her hands, each favoring the other with a distrustful glower of the highest caliber.

"Whaddya think he's doin' back there?" Anchorage momentarily escapes Thood's world-eclipsing headlock long enough to shout. "Taking a fucking dump?"

"Down the emergency exhaust vent? Can't say I'd be surprised."

"Are my ears burning in here?"

Everyone, at least among the interested parties, freezes. Anchorage breaks off his attempts to extricate himself from Thood's vise-grip and Froz ceases his flopping while Odisseus and the Noxix-wannabe both stand panting. With the rest of the fray thundering heedlessly on without them, they all turn regard the Afterburn's newest arrival, flooding the side entrance with boozy bravado. Nemo, his fly freshly zippered, his unwashed hands rooted deeply in his pockets, watches nonchalantly from the doorway, with Good Luck Gertie nowhere to be seen.

"Hey, you made it," Odisseus comments brusquely.

"Who spilt my drink?" he carps, offended, with an irresolute gesture toward the corner booth.

Froz resumes his struggling, only with new fervor. "There! Him! That's, Thood, that's–"

"Froz. Froz," Nemo acknowledges with two polite nods. "How you been?"

"Thood! That's the one! There!" Froz thrusts a spindly finger at the recently entered Captain, while his right head habitually hems and haws. "Get ahold of him! It's time we, uh, time we, oh, moons, time we blow this, whaddya call it, blow this, uh-, c'mon, blow this–"

Thood, somehow able to decipher enough meaning from Froz's misremembered idioms, instantly relinquishes his hold on Anchorage to pound toward the side entrance and the bounty-head waiting within.

"Stewed arlaxi balls in shit sauce," Nemo curses, upon seeing Thood's sudden advance. "Gertie was not kidding. You're one big motherbloomer." Still some distance from the side door, Thood starts wading through the brawling masses en route to the Captain.

"Nemo..." Odisseus warns and his saltbrother instinctually obeys, absconding step-by-step in the opposite direction and yanking his trusty Carbon Industrial piece free of its holster.

"Froz, call your boy off," he recommends haltingly, leveling the firearm at the gargantuan Saurian yet easing himself proportionately away all the same. "Froz? How's about we talk about this before things got a chance to get ugly?"

" _Your_ boy threw a table at me! I'd say they're already pretty ugly!"

"That was you?" Nemo offers to Odisseus, forgetting Thood entirely for a second. "Nice."

"Nemo..." Odisseus repeats.

"Yes. Right."

Nemo squeezes a canister through his pistol and pokes a bloody black hole under Thood's right pectoral. The Saurian brute's forward momentum is unabated, however, and if the live round pumped into his lower ribcage has any measurable impact on him beyond the apparently superficial wound, Odisseus can't distinguish one. "Well, that's discouraging," Nemo breathes.

He opens up the remainder of the chamber to mostly misses and only a scare few actual hits, though entirely grazes and scuffs and not a one with the dubious potency of the first. Anchorage and Odisseus, the latter hastily chucking a handful of nearby bar peanuts at the Noxix-wannabe as a last-ditch distraction, scamper forward to intercept Thood. The Saurian himself stomps ever forward, walloping aside whatever furniture or tosspot Nemo's able to finagle himself behind and sneering through broken fangs, like the jborra that swallowed the rat-canary.

Dropping his lifeless pistol into his holster to lob a limping chair end-over-end, the last conceivable obstacle within arm's reach, Nemo is literally cornered in the Afterburn's farthest booth, loosing a string of wild, muttered invective and eyes darting about for a potential escape route. Thood spikes Nemo's airborne chair to the floor like a skooshball, deflects Anchorage's violent propositions for his scaled knee with a sideways kick to send the Aurik sprawling, utterly ignores the full compliment of gashes Odisseus' claws lend to his lower back and finally succeeds, after some jostling, in grabbing the Captain firmly by the ankle and hauling him, twisting and wrestling, off the floor.

"Oh, no, no, no, no," Nemo sputters in jerky apprehension as Thood rotates fully around to face the Bloody Afterburn's wide storefront and its subsequent bay window, overlooking Takioro's Second Ring and the partying populace without, his true intentions becoming painfully apparent. Odisseus and Anchorage share an unheralded wince of expectant sympathy as Thood elevates the captured Captain over his head in a sidelong grip, expels a wordless reptilian cry and winds Nemo back to throw.

Chapter 20

Two-Bit Switch is going to kick him good and hard in the balls if he knew. This is a sentiment he would have happily shared with anyone who cared enough to listen, had he not snagged the only empty lift tube departing Takioro's Third Ring for its Second. An opportune hiccup of foot traffic had granted Two-Bit forty whole seconds with which to contemplate the newfound depths of Nemo's derangement in relative solitude. Short of regaling the scramble codifier tucked neatly beneath his arm of his less-than-courteous intentions for the Captain's crotch, however, he'd simply need to wait until their meeting at the Bloody Afterburn to deliver on this inward promise.

During the sixteen-minute jaunt between Eidesmoe's ransacked office and the corresponding shoot platform, a station waif in Two-Bit's trust had confided a select piece of previously omitted information regarding the most recent of his planned capers and its direct ramifications. This morsel of news, Two-Bit was infuriated to learn, could very possibly spell neat individual deaths for most of _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ crew, particularly three of her lieutenants and especially her Captain though Two-Bit, in his current truculent mood, wouldn't necessarily mind that last possibility so terribly. According to Two-Bit's source, at the time of their famously successful Haess caper, Nabdres No-Cock was, in fact, no longer a freelance arms merchant but instead, for the past five months, had been sub-contracted, quite under the radar, by none other than Huong Xo.

The evidently exponential spike in the crew's respective bounty rewards, not to mention how exhaustively thorough their postings have lately become, could all be elegantly explained had Huong Xo, rather than simply Nabdres himself, been the party most spurned by the Haess maneuver. Normally, Two-Bit would have shuddered at the sheer quantity of top-flight bounty hunters the Yheum crime lord cabal could personally dispatch to his and his crew mates' ends, had he been seeing any other color but red.

Two-Bit Switch, for the first time, a fingered accomplice in connection to high treason before the Endless Imperium and unhappy recipient of a personalized death mark higher than the market value of a small capital ship, is now charged with the unpleasant task of uncovering whether or not his employer, captain and comrade was actually ignorant of Xo's involvement when he'd initially tapped Two-Bit to plan such a heist. Both likelihoods, the first that he willfully withheld the proper context and objective of the caper from his crew in an attempt to better champion the Galactic Menace's wartime enterprises, the second that he was honestly too bird-brained to recognize the full scope of Ott's mysterious beef with Xo, seem equally plausible in Two-Bit's estimation, as they both rely principally upon Nemo's ever-abiding obliviousness to all things rational.

Whatever the case may be, after a fortuitously well-aimed shoot shot and a six second skyrocketing ride twenty-two years too late to turn his spacer's stomach, Two-Bit Switch seeks nothing less than to track the Captain down, ascertain the truth and potentially boot him in the nuts.

Two steps off the shoot and he's found him. He lies crumpled, moaning and bleeding lightly from a dozen miniscule cuts, at Two-Bit's feet on the sullied Second Ring floor, amid a strewn spray of glass shards obviously emanating from the gaping fracture hole where, when Two-Bit had last checked, the Bloody Afterburn's main window had once stood. Though the telltale sounds of an old-fashioned bar brawl resounded within the tavern itself, whatever passing pedestrians had been debauching in the street between the Afterburn and the shoot embarkation platform possessed enough bleary decency or morbid curiosity to allow the groaning Nemo a substantial berth, though Two-Bit judges he couldn't have missed the Captain's forceful flight by more than a minute, as he hadn't yet been mugged.

With a moment's regard to the smattering of half-interested onlookers, Two-Bit Switch sighs, kneads his forehead with an unoccupied hand and affixes his impatient attention downward. "Why, hello, Cap'n."

"Hello, Two-Bit," Nemo croaks.

"This what you meant by 'maining out of fucking stook'?"

He spews up a mouthful of blood to the tile, as well as the stub of an unbrushed tooth. "They started it," he maintains petulantly.

"It don't matter who started it. What matters is this ain't no low profile." Two-Bit gives the growing bystanders a cursory inspection. "What's it, Traasha in there?"

"I lost another tooth," Nemo notices with amazed annoyance. "We might hafta stop by Joji's place, on the Third Ring, and get it fixed real quick."

Two-Bit scoffs. "What're you, bladdered?"

"Sorta."

"We gotta hoof it and how. Before more heat arrives."

Nemo pinches the lost tooth between thumb and pointer. "I think it's the same one!"

Two-Bit points emphatically. "Nemo, what's the skinny? Is it Traasha or not?"

"Nah, it's only bounty hunters. Froz, a couple others I don't know." Nemo idly attempts to re-insert the broken remnant of his tooth into its former seat, before gazing up at Two-Bit and stopping. "Two-Bit, you spilt mustard on your pants."

"No, I didn't."

"Oh, hey, you got the codifier. That's cool."

"Yes, I did." Two-Bit sniffs. "Did you know Nabdres No-Cock was criming for Xo back when we deered the _Messenger_?"

Nemo frowns with fingers in his mouth. "Where'd you hear that?"

"Threesies. Did you know?"

The Captain contemplatively withdraws the severed tooth from his mouth and intakes a slow breath, exactly the manner of prevaricating tool Two-Bit, a seasoned liar himself, would employ before stretching the truth with a severe understatement or a drastic exaggeration. Thusly, he resolves to render the vouched-for kick.

Nemo wheezes and doubles further over, assuredly more from surprise than actual pain, as Two-Bit's punt lost much of its propulsion when it bounced off the Captain's knee. "For moons' sake, Two-Bit," he whines. "What in the furious blue fist-fucks was _that_ for?"

By way of answering, Two-Bit reels his foot back, aligns his aim more carefully and prepares to launch a second, hopefully more gratifying ball-buster of a kick, when something else, something larger and more pressing, catches his eye.

Stepping cleanly over the Afterburn's three-foot window ledge and into the shard bestrewn space station street comes a colossal hulk of a biped, armored fully in dull blue scales, only registering as a Saurian, Two-Bit supposes, by the most lenient of definitions and completely capable of dwarfing the late Ebeneezer himself by at least a foot and probably more. His fang-filled grin is shivered and split, pitch-black blood oozes unevenly with each step from an open gunshot wound in his exposed torso and an impressive assortment of Ortok-caliber claw marks mar his lower back in a bizarre ebony crosshatch.

His beady glare fixated on the squirming form of prone Nemo, the Saurian covers the glass-spattered distance between the Afterburn and his equally battered quarry in four powerful strides. Spotting his approach only seconds too late, the Captain entreats Two-Bit with wide eyes and a feeble scramble in the opposite direction.

Edging a step further into the crowd entirely on instinct, Two-Bit raises an eyebrow. "What's this, one of them anglers?"

"Yes! What the fuck're you waiting for? Shoot him!"

Pinching the codifier to his side with the point of his elbow, Two-Bit paces several steps backward and plants both hands deep into his pockets in submission.

"Answer the ringer first."

"Answer what first?" Nemo pleads.

"Did you know Nabdres was crimin' for Xo?"

"I didn't _not_ know. How's that?"

Two-Bit scrunches his face as he considers. "That's not _really_ an answer, is it?"

"This isn't _really_ the time for stupid fucking questions, is it?"

As the Saurian, whose massive shadow encompasses even apart Two-Bit, paws up the back of Nemo's duster in a clenched fist and wrenches him off the bloodstained floorplates, the Captain still succeeds in shaking an infuriated fist at his misbehaving quartermaster. "I'll have you peeling my space potatoes until your eighty for this!"

"As though. When was the last time you had a potato?"

The dangling, thrashing Nemo is heaved up to receive a compulsory face-to-face snarl from the Saurian, which he returns with the added bonus of a truly ambitious loogie hawked right between his bloodshot eyes. This achieved, the Captain is roughly tucked beneath the Saurian's spacious armpit, suspended much the same way that Eidesmoe's codifier is suspended under Two-Bit's own arm. The enormous goon, with utterly acerbated Nemo in tow, turns to take his leave.

Just as Two-Bit reasons he's probably had enough fun watching his Captain twist and is reaching for his holstered Dissident, the Saurian hesitates, halting hard in his tracks at the unexpected appearance of bruised Anchorage and breathless Odisseus, clambering over the Afterburn's window ledge and presenting themselves as a pair of fairly compelling impediments to any hope of an expedient exit for the Saurian. Two-Bit frees his revolver as the _Lover's_ last two bruisers make their move in concert, spearing forward from different vectors like tje wolves attempting to topple a bull buhox. It's Anchorage who feints, suddenly conceding Odisseus a split second head start on his charge, hopefully to distract the foe's attention to the left, before shouldering in full speed from the right. The Saurian manages to fend Odisseus off by snatching the oncoming muzzle in a mammoth mitt and wrestling the Ortok's three hundred pounds at bay. Fortunately for the Captain, Anchorage's vicious headbutt to the kidney buckles the big blue crocodile with sufficient horsepower to flummox Nemo free enough to salvage himself a scuttling, undignified getaway.

"You're back!" Two-Bit exclaims.

"You're a fucking douchebag," Nemo reports after scurrying on hands and knees over to Two-Bit's position who, despite himself, acquiesces with a self-satisfied smile.

"I could vizz that."

As Nemo hurriedly shoves round after round into his pistol's depleted chamber, Two-Bit Switch surveys the mounting numbers of bystanders in an attempt to catch a whiff of Traasha or her alleged posse. By this time, a considerable crowd of passerby has accrued, an accidental audience of Yarba New Year celebrants of every shape, size and criminal creed, forming an oblong gladiatorial ring and offering encouragement or derision to one or all of the combatants. Despite spotting the Nomad Café's idling driftcart and more than a dozen hoodlums, hellions and harlots of his acquaintance among the accumulating assemblage, of Traasha there yet remained no sign.

The Captain clicks his firearm complete and they, in unison, raise their weapons at arm's reach to watch the continuing scuffle at barrel's end. Few feasible openings to blast the surrounded Saurian manifest among the shifting and scraping melee. Though Nemo and Two-Bit each unclip a few canisters at opportune moments, Anchorage and Odisseus appear to have the situation as much in hand as one can have a freakishly gigantic Saurian amateur bounty hunter in hand.

"Didn't Odi pack his Acathi?" Two-Bit questions over occasional gunfire.

Nemo cocks his head. "You know, I thought so."

The more urgent matter of the ensuing slugfest is almost succinctly concluded by the coordination of Odisseus' savage pounce and Anchorage's unrelenting assault on the Saurian's elephantine kneecap, the former reeling the goliath precipitously forward, the latter sweeping the left leg completely out. The entire Saurian is swept along with it, pounding the unfortunate floorplate caught beneath into a craterous concave and doubtlessly a novel expense for Velocity to calculate on their always-increasing list of damages, along with the disdained Rith job and Gozzer's eight-percent pledge.

Anchorage, circling around the Saurian's proned and bell-rung body, is about to attach "gargantuan corpse clean-up" to that list with an unforgiving curb stomp to the back of the skull when a wooden dart, longer than Two-Bit's forearm and fringed in fiery fuzz, buries itself in the spongy meat of his exposed back. He corkscrews and arches, straining to extract the quivering impalement with fingers and trunk, until a second fletched dart bullets inches past Nemo. All eyes snap up to the jagged aperture formerly the Afterburn's window and the street fight's two newest contestants; a tribal-themed trainwreck sprouting a bamboo tube between ballooned cheeks and a wide-stanced gunslinger matching the single-criteria description of Froz Four-Eyes.

"Huh," Two-Bit remarks. "Ain't never vizzed him in the meat."

"Oh yeah?"

Two-Bit squints. "He got two different thinkboxes in there or what?"

"Half each. Watch this," Nemo elbows him in proposition, before launching his empty hand into the air with his first two fingers erect. "Hey, Froz! How many fingers am I holding up?"

Momentarily dumbfounded, both brows furrow. "Four," they both declare. "Wait, two."

Nemo beams proudly. "See?"

"Shit. That's antwacky."

"Moons," Froz consternates to himself, "Why did I even–" before raising both pistols.

Froz opens up, his double-pronged bombardment rapidly scrambling Nemo and Two-Bit toward the nearest available cover and instilling similar notions in both Odisseus and Anchorage. The Saurian's groaning bones are abandoned to his advancing compatriot in the animal pelts and, unitedly, the pirates fall back to the comparative safety offered by a station bench. Within sparse seconds, Nemo, Two-Bit, eventually Odisseus and the snoring Obaxi vagrant sprawled across the seat, are each afforded, by the station bench's hard composite back, a decent degree of shelter from Froz's two-pistol salvo.

Anchorage, however, straggles somewhat – suddenly winded and hobbled by a phantom limp that Two-Bit doesn't need more than a moment to attribute to the feathered shaft protruding only a few inches from his lower back.

"Cap'n, I think Anchorage's cabbaged real gashouse," Two-Bit denotes bitterly.

The Aurik stops himself ten feet short of the bench, catching his collapse with an elbow and a trunk to his knees, his left arm already dangling listlessly from the shoulder. With dreadlocks jungling off his lowered pate, he cranes a self-deprecating smile up to his three crewmates, who peek with bated breath over the bench's rim. "I don't know, fellas."

Two-Bit cultivates a slow scowl. "You don't know what?"

His breathing increasingly labored, Anchorage shrugs his pugilist's shoulders. "Might wanna make yourselves scarce, is my meaning. Think this's the end of my line." He eyes Nemo. "With your permission, Cap'n."

"You're blasted if you think we're gonna–" Two-Bit sputters.

Odisseus mutters something quiescent. Nemo, sporting a bittersweet aloofness, a particular brand of cold fire that heretofore Two-Bit had never witnessed in the Captain, nods after a heartbeat's deliberation.

"Raise some hell," is his only stipulation.

"Aye aye," Anchorage agrees with a significant chuckle.

So enthralled is Two-Bit by this exchange that he entirely ignores the screaming charge of the tattooed travesty, hefting high the sort of impractical weapon that one could only purchase from the dime-a-dozen curio arms dealers on the Third Ring's bad side and barreling straight at Anchorage's behind, who, thankfully, isn't as inattentive as Two-Bit.

Unleashing the shameless war cry of a dead-Aurik-walking, Anchorage whips himself halfway around in a wrathful full-body pivot and introduces the unsuspecting side of the incoming bounty hunter's cranium to the business end of his trunk, the business end of his paralyzed left arm and, adding insult to injury, an entire scalp's worth of beaded, knotted dreadlocks. The tricornered centrifugal bitch slap backhands her headlong into the teltriton tile three yards off. Anchorage, completing his pivot and planting his flagging feet defiantly broad, yanks free the blue-blood-tipped dart from his backside, crumbles it between the three fingers of his trunk and receives five of Froz's next shots directly in his brand new torso, which he, being the big-balled bastard Two-Bit knew him as, proceeds to laugh off.

This time, it's Odisseus who hurries them off, shaking fascinated Nemo and distraught Two-Bit from their respective reveries, collecting the scramble codifier where Two-Bit had forgotten it and veritably shoving the pair of them away from the bench and its sole, somehow-snoozing occupant, past the congested gladiatorial crowd and into the confetti, cacophony and salacious splendor of Takioro Defederate Station.

They hustle along the overpopulous curve of the Second Ring's upper thoroughfare at maximum speed and in absolute reticence, equally eager to outrun both the bevy of bounty hunters moments behind and the assuredly gory curtain call of Two-Bit's last recruit. None of the three turn to watch the punch-addled Saurian pry himself out of the shallow grave Anchorage had dented for him, to see the unarmed and poisoned Aurik, reduced to one knee, hold his own against three-and-a-half adversaries with whatever panache and dirty tricks remained to him.

Before them, a pair of painfully intoxicated Diraaqi galoots take turns surfing one-legged up and down an alleyway to Two-Bit's right atop a fraught custodial drone, which mewls its compliant in muffled distortions. A presumably unrelated altercation, involving five Mantrians, seven Xend, a designed-to-be tank-mounted flamethrower and a costumed mascot for the Cuddly Craz's Pan-Fried Cuppi Bear outlet up the boulevard, rages outside The Wet Whistle on the understreet below, complete with customary collateral damage, uproarious profanity and people running about on fire. Starfish Saz, a Zibbian prostitute Two-Bit shared an Iniquity table with once in a Jotor's moon, quite flagrantly services an unfamiliar blueskin, devoid of any pants but boasting an extremely satisfied expression, on his back smack dab in the middle of the street ahead, the traffic's bustle circumventing by a wide berth, to avoid becoming implicated in the cepholopoid-on-humanoid transaction.

The shared silence, stark, sullen and sober respectively, persists between the _Lover's_ mechanic, her captain and her quartermaster for a sizable fraction of their sojourn to the nearest Second-to-First Ring shoot, until Two-Bit tilts his gaze past Nemo to Odisseus. "What happened to your Acathi?"

"Says the Noxix-wannabe put one of her death darts right through the mechanism," Nemo translates a beat after the Ortok's grumbling explanation. "Had to leave it behind."

"That's who she looked like! All the moons, that was mithering me. Well, if you're in the market now," he changes topics, "I know a bloke, fact I know two blokes, who could..."

"Uh, Two-Bit? Are you gonna finish that sentence or...?"

"Second thought, no," he amends with some solemnity. "I don't. They're snuffed."

"Which one?"

"Either. Salo and Nabdres both. Jabbin' of which–"

"Oh no," Nemo bemoans quietly.

"Guess who Nabdres was really crimin' for when we blagged his bloomhole back on Haess?" Two-Bit address to Odisseus.

The Ortok crinkles his muzzle in confusion and replies with calm ignorance.

"Xo."

Without two words in Ortoki to rub together, Two-Bit Switch is more or less oblivious to the specific details of Odisseus' phrasing, but the animalistic snarl, partnered with a open-paw cuff across the back of Nemo's skull to clobber a wiser man to the floor in submission, is indicative enough of his general reaction.

"Ten to zilch it was them what cast these sweets out for us, thinkin' we dritched 'em. Which hums it why our sheets went and got all fuckin' indexed and whatnot."

The Ortok growls more invective toward the Captain, who does his level best to placate with assuaging gestures. "You wouldn't."

"Oh, don't get hinked," Two-Bit informs Odisseus. "I booted him in the bollocks once already." Odisseus hoots a response. Nemo, evidently offended, answers the Ortok's cuff with a snapped wrist against his hairy bicep.

"Don't _congratulate_ him."

"So, how's about the full skinny, Cap'n? When'd you get it in that loopsy maggie of yours to fuck with the jeebiest outfit in the Ring?"

"Okay, I'm not entirely clear on what that meant."

"Bloom me mum out," Two-Bit plows onward. "Name me one dapadan in Bad Space what don't sport us a ragin' hate-on."

"I mean, there's probably _one_ but, look," he deflects, nimbly skirting a steaming pile of confetti-speckled animal dung, "I can think of a thousand better times to have this discussion."

Odisseus tenders some vitriol, which Nemo scoffs aside, but Two-Bit only smirks. "I guess have it your way, Cap'n. You can just wait until we tell Moira."

Nemo pales. "You really wouldn't."

"What, you think she ain't gonna notice? The sky-high sweets her maggie's massed up, all of a bloody sudden, courtesy of Our Vindictive Asshats?"

Stepping apart long enough to avoid being sideswiped by a careening tagalong and its Iella passenger, Odisseus poses a brief inquisitive. Nemo shrugs helplessly. "No idea. Said she had 'things to take care of.' Wasn't about to ask."

"No good buzzin' her?" Two-Bit assumes. Odisseus shakes his head.

Nemo grimaces before submitting at proverbial arm's length, "You don't think she's taking care of like," he searches for wording, " _woman's_ things, do you?"

Two-Bit matches his expression. "I suppose she must at some point."

"Blech."

Despite what little Two-Bit knows of Ortoki biology and what less he knows of Ortoki gestation, he's able to approximate _that_ , judging from his extended vocalization, Odisseus is a little sketchy on humanoid gestation himself.

"There is definitely a better time to have that discussion," Nemo concludes.

"I'm gonna try buzzin' her," Two-Bit resolves.

"I mean, it wouldn't be the first gunfight she'd missed because of, um, bathroom, uh–" Nemo halts himself hard, stopping Two-Bit with a right hand on his shoulder and Odisseus with a left to his chest. Two-Bit jerks to a standstill and, after he's dialed Moira's frequency, glances up.

"Crunches?" he finishes, before catching sight of what froze Nemo in his tracks.

Humblest among the lucky few businesses to have snagged storefront space around one of the four stairwell plazas, small circular atriums that grant companionway access to the Ring's understreet, the Freezee-Squeez boasts a dingy holoneon sign declaring same as well as some of the cheapest, runniest soft serve chiller cream available in station. Currently occupying the parlor's two exterior café tables and nursing sugared waffle cones in half a dozen dripping flavors, sits Traasha, along with her handful of heavily armed and heavily scarred hoodlums – a local sampling of whatever desperate, unaffiliated muscle the old Vollocki and her taciturn bodyguard could buy, bully or bamboozle into the Depot-Commissioner's underhanded service.

Upon sighting them across the courtyard, Traasha halts herself, the chiller cream cone less than an inch from her extended tongue. One by one, each member of her entourage ceases their conversation and the consumption of their confections to ogle across the expanse at the petrified pirates. Glares are exchanged. Weapons are drawn. Traasha's chiller cream scoop sloughs off the cone and splats on the floor.

The plaza is sloppily bisected by a sudden stream of multicolored laser bolts from eight dissimilar firearms, Two-Bit committing half a moonclip toward claiming the first kill with two shots to the torso of a Suraaqi too stupid to load his gun before joining a death posse. The press from said posse, however, is quickly too much and Two-Bit finds himself scooting, against the surge of scattering innocents, left toward the only viable option for shelter with the unloading Captain and the unarmed Odisseus before him. Years of unanticipated firefights in troublesome locations had at least taught Two-Bit and Odisseus to hunker some when directly fired upon. Nemo, of course, remained exempt from this piece of gunfighter's etiquette and stood carelessly tall as he returned fire, presenting himself as a prime target and yet somehow made inviolable by his boundless good fortune, at least until Odisseus wrenches him to asylum behind the adjacent Pickle Planet kiosk.

Shooing away the beaproned Zourim vendor and heaving the entire affair, green-and-white striped umbrella, vats of brine and all, onto its side with an Ortoki roar and a metallic clatter, Odisseus, Nemo and Two-Bit, in that order, make their improvised stand sequestered behind an overturned Pickle Planet pushcart at the mouth of the alley between The Pistol-Whip and SQ, Takioro's most violent gay strip joint. Piles of spilt pickles wallow in pooling vinegar, bolts almost too close to call clank and whistle off the edges of the lopsided kiosk and short of bottlenecking themselves down the offhand alleyway, no conceivable escape route is in evidence.

"Well, of course we were gonna run into her sooner or later," Nemo reasons.

"Whaddya think, Odi? Any squeak of hoofing for it?"

Peering past the corner of the pushcart long enough to earn a scorching graze across his whiskers, the perturbed Ortok delivers a definitive "no", before rumbling some manner of complaint to Nemo as he bats away the embers from his muzzle.

"Uh," Nemo breaks off reloading his Carbon Industrial piece to pat himself pointlessly down before, "Well, here," he leans forward and snatches an eleven-inch pickle from the viridian puddle where it floats. "You know what they had before shotguns?" he suggests, offering up the saturated vegetable.

As Odisseus, growling out what Two-Bit surmises to be the Ortoki equivalent of "hardy har har," swipes the offered pickle out of Nemo's grasp all the same, Two-Bit locks his second moonclip into place, waits for a likely enough lapse in the crossfire and, when it comes, hoists himself onto his knees to answer with gunfire of his own.

Traasha's entrenched her position across the plaza as best she can, considering the Freezee-Squeez's flimsy café tables. While that's still zottibles better than his own feeble fortification, Two-Bit, after discouraging the others with a hasty blanket of covering fire, is able to zero a Helker mercenary stringing a fresh strand of linked canisters into the side of his low-slung ratatat. Two-Bit manages to pound three separate shots into his chest before the Helker can even latch the ammunition window closed, but it costs him the majority of the moonclip and of course he clicks the trigger too fast and before he's aware of what he's doing, he's constricted his last round between the cylinder and the firing mechanism. Exactly like his debacle on Haess, his B7 Dissident is once again doomed to the depths of inoperable fire jamming.

"Fuck me in the _beezer_!" Two-Bit curses miserably, sliding back down to cover as retributive fire clips and notches the scummy varnish off the pushcart's rim. "Me wheel's gone and got lagged up _again_!"

"Have you tried–"

" _Yes I've tried biffing it_!" he exclaims, just then whacking the revolver's body with the meat of his palm. "This is all your bloody fault."

Nemo, unconcerned enough about their impending deaths to have helped himself to a pickled pacho paw, shrugs and snaps his pistol closed. "There's always the pickle," he suggests again, around a mouthful of seasoned gopher meat.

"Gimme one," Two-Bit resolves and snags the nearest of the castoff cucumbers.

Honestly about to hurl a wet pickle, for lack of actual firepower, toward the entrenched adversary, Two-Bit Switch, with scurrilous curse on his lips and vegetable held high, arrests his marinated assault when something yet still more distressing captures his attention out of the corner of his eye.

Despite a convulsive left-side limp diagnostic of some truly profound level of knee-related trauma and a full dosing with enough black-and-blue blood to lend him the paradoxical appearance of a personified bruise, he comes onward all the same, struggling his prodigious bulk through the churning rabble of the station street proper and to the cusp of the stairwell plaza. The Saurian, more alive than dead, stands on the edge of the gunfight, heaving agonized breaths, clawed fists clenched promises of vengeance. Shortly, he's joined on his right flank by the battered, bloodied Noxix clone and on his left, the absolutely out-of-breath Froz Four-Eyes.

Two-Bit Switch debates the merits of soiling himself and taps Nemo with the now-lowered pickle. "Er, hey, Cap'n..."

Pacho meat dangles out of Nemo's agape mouth. "I think he means to kill me," he starkly realizes.

"I think he means to kill _us_ ," Two-Bit corrects.

A pair of strident yellow bolts with an apparently dissenting opinion whizz narrowly past Two-Bit and Nemo's shoulders to find smoldering homes in the Saurian – the first in the dead center of his chest, inches from his previous gunshot wound, the second into the side of his scaled head at an askance angle. With heart and brain perforated, he finally furrows the teltriton beneath him with his crumbling death and every head in the plaza whips around to confirm the unheralded entrance of Moira Quicksilver.

Residual ditrogen snaking out of six-shooter snouts, Righty and Lefty loose from the draw in gloved hands and stony expression betraying nothing save the trifling trace of disdain, Moira Quicksilver stands undaunted in the yawning doorway of The Pistol-Whip like the new sheriff in Takioro. Two-Bit, habitually underwhelmed by Moira's posturing, is momentarily frightened of her.

–––

Moira is going to pry his eyeballs out of his skull with a hot knife and wear them as earrings at the next feasible opportunity. First things first, however, she needed to orchestrate as expeditious a retreat from the Defederate Station as she physically could, without running any further afoul of any of the innumerable parties very much interested in the astronomical price on her, her Captain and his crew's collective heads, all the while dragging three brainless, more-than-likely intoxicated scumbags behind her by their ears. To this end, she had every intention of remorselessly gunning down anyone and everyone brave, stupid or somewhere in between enough to stand between her and that shoot platform.

A brief pit-stop at The Pistol-Whip to collect Ebeneezer's bounty, as well some shopping too delicate to keep the crew abreast of and too urgent to ignore much longer, had sufficiently motivated this briefest of outings into enemy territory. While she'd given token discouragement to Nemo's insistence on catching a quick drink at the Afterburn, her evasiveness about her own errand denied her the ability to exhort him any further, lest he decide to accompany her himself. When all five of the idle bounty hunters in the Whip had jumped her in unison, when Lenduza, at gunpoint, had fessed up to the exact amount balanced atop her uninformed head, when she'd stepped outside to discover Nemo, Two-Bit and Odisseus squatting behind a capsized Pickle Planet kiosk to avoid a laser bolt gangbang at the hands of Traasha, Froz Four-Eyes or either of their individual thuggery, she instantly regretted not slapping Nemo in manacles, collecting the exorbitant prize herself and having done.

"Boys," is her only greeting, flinty and forbidding, to her cowering crew mates before she consigns Righty to badger Froz and his compatriot, a miniature humanoid done up like a Whuudi war-doll, back into the beyond crowd and conscripts Lefty to flatten Traasha and her goonage to the proverbial deck with a veritable rain of yellow counter fire. She avails herself of the purchased distraction time by sweeping the plaza for the swiftest possible method of their escape and, in seven seconds, has formulated the most workable plan at her disposal. Adjusting the hang of her shopping satchel over her shoulder, she drops into a combat crouch to issue commands to her outnumbered underlings and to avoid the hail of laser reprisals.

"Nice of you to drop–" Two-Bit begins to snark, but Moira shuts him down cold.

"On my mark, you're going to make for cover behind those trash receptacles out front of SQ. Nemo, if you want to offer a little disincentive, you're more than welcome. I'll follow shortly after."

"Hey Moira," Nemo accosts with a leer. "What's in the bag?"

She slants him her most unamused deadpan. "Shut the fuck up."

"When should we–" Odisseus, a little confused, questions.

"Now," Moira orders and rises from her crouch.

Within another twenty seconds, Odisseus, Nemo and Two-Bit, followed closely by Moira, have dashed unharmed over the first hurdle, both Righty and Lefty promising Traasha and the underpaid brigade splashy head shots should they pop even slightly into view, Froz and his scrawny shadow having disappeared amongst the distant crowd. The three pirates and their bounty hunter babysitter huddle awkwardly behind the four rubbish bins. Moira points their attention to the opposite side of the SQ's garish storefront. "You see those?"

At the junction of the SQ's far corner and where the stairwell plaza estuaries out into the Second Ring's main station street, a pair of ten-year-old tagalongs, a scrappy humanoid girl and a pint-sized Prulish boy with an open sore dotting his cheek, watch the unfolding festivities with pre-teen detachment and unfiltered cigarettes, leaning heavily on the spray-painted chassis of their decommissioned dash bikes. "Nemo, Two-Bit," Moira names, "can you both fly one of those?"

Nemo snorts. "With my _dick_."

Two-Bit creases his greasy brow. "Moira, you ain't seriously propoin–"

"Well, I'm certainly not gonna fly one."

"Thank fuck," Nemo concurs.

"And what do _we_ do?" Odisseus, unconvinced, challenges.

Nemo shrugs. "Hold on, I expect," but Moira's already moving. With the expelled contents of Righty's chamber continuing to stymie Traasha's attempts at evening the score, ten strides have Moira skirted wholly past SQ, have her competently concealed from gunfire by the strip club's architectural curvature and have her planting the steaming hot snub of her AccCo 665 Lawman against the temple of the little urchin girl.

"Your bike or your brains." The girl, understandably flabbergasted, stammers some stationside Jabber too mutated to follow and her Prulish counterpart seizes the opportunity to mount and fire up his dash. The sight of Righty aligned at his own head dissuades him of the notion. "You too." Self-preservation, of course, prevails and the station waifs raise empty hands and shuffle some distance backward down the adjoining alleyway, leaving Moira with her matching commandeered dashes. On her signal and safeguarded by her streaking bolts of super-charged ditrogen, Odisseus, Nemo and Two-Bit clear the crossing and the latter two busy themselves preparing their newfound escape routes for immediate departure.

"Bloom me out," Nemo reminisces as he straddles the girl's unignited dash and, after grinding the thing to life, fiddles its carriage and comportment to better suit a grown man than a child. "Been close on nine years since I rode anything that resembles dash. Takes me back."

Wrapping his blood-soaked paws around the passenger pole and shoving a hunk of unclasped machinery Moira assumes to be Two-Bit's scramble codifier into the luggage pouch, Odisseus climbs onto the tailpiece of Nemo's dash, the scaled-down driftbike greedily absorbing his weight. "Encouraging."

Sliding into her corresponding place around the passenger pole of the Prul's already-ignited rig and similarly stowing her own satchel, Moira throws a last call shout over her shoulder to dawdling Two-Bit. "Dash up or you're getting left!" Some distance away and muttering some jabber-platitude that Moira can't distinguish over the roaring gunfire, Two-Bit surrenders the station waifs a fistful of change and a rushed apology before jogging back to rejoin the others and swinging into the only vacant saddle.

"You couldn't joy one of these if your maggie was hanked on it," he scoffs.

"And we'll take it you can?"

He redoubles his scoff. "Since I was a wee scrogger."

"I'm gonna go ahead and assume that means 'yes.'"

Two-Bit guns the handlebars, Nemo nanoseconds behind, and the two dash scream out of the alley's mouth with gloriously unmatchable speed. Only hours and years of rigorous Tebi-Gali conditioning are responsible for Moira' ability to shift her equilibrium and retain her balance on the tailpiece with both hands preoccupied by shooting parting shots into the Freezee-Squeez's exterior dining area. A corner rounded, two driftboosters spiked and they're zooming posthaste from the ditrogen-scored stairwell plaza and instead into sardined streets of the ceremonializing Second Ring.

The chief encumbrance one faces when rocketing at a preposterous speed around really any of Takioro Defederate Station's famous three Rings is not geographical; were one to judge by the sheer architecture of the Second Ring, as a pertinent example, they'd be hard-pressed to find a simpler circuit. A basic quadrilateral shape, with rounded corners for easier banking, identical to its two counterparts, would theoretically make for an ideal vehicle course. The true difficulty with Takioro, particularly the Second Ring, especially during the Yarba New Year, specifically on Day Three, was the pedestrian element.

Blurred advertisements in flashing colors, the persistent potpourri of brassy, ill-congruous music, torrential confetti and the constantly fluctuating width of the avenue before them thanks to vendors, displays and pushcarts are all considered relatively inconsequential obstacles in light of the capricious whims of Takioro's ten thousand streetwalking transients. Should she lean slightly too far in either direction, Moira would suffer an instantaneous collision with a piece of passing detritus, humanoid or otherwise, at a velocity capable of decapitating her, a fact that Nemo and Two-Bit, evidently older hands than Moira'd imagined, seem both blithely unconcerned about. At opportune gaps and openings, they josh and elbow each other like racing schoolboys, much to the nauseated chagrin of Odisseus and overall something Moira'd attempt to reprimand them for had she not found the entire spectacle so damnably impressive, an opinion she succinctly strangled in favor of her matter-of-course grimness.

"Moira," Two-Bit starts to regale, "you'll never hink what happened to–"

"Squandered your cover, specifically against my advise, at, let me guess, _the Afterburn_ , where you got unsurprisingly bushwhacked by the three-and-a-half semi-sentient outfit of Froz Four-Eyes and the Threadbare Bounty Hunters, ran like hellfire, probably lost Anchorage somewhere along the way, bumped into Traasha outside the Squeez and figured wetting yourselves behind a pickle cart was as dignified an end as you probably deserved anyway." She fingers Righty's cylinder open to lever the spend casings out. "I miss anything?"

Nemo frowns in approving consideration. "Nah, that pretty much covers it."

"Anchorage is dead," Odisseus clarifies.

"Boo hoo fucking hoo. You'd all be dead had I not stubbed my toe on you."

"What the bloom were you doing at the Pistol-Whip anyway?" A peeved Two-Bit somehow chances a glance away from the path ahead to inquire.

"Checking our postings. Watch the road."

"Oh yeah?" Nemo, with a self-flattering interest, perks up. "Don't keep us in suspense."

"998 thou," she enjoys flatlining, the same manner of degenerate satisfaction derived from fantasies about her eventual eyeball jewelry. "Near enough to a million as makes no difference."

"A mil?" Two-Bit repeats.

"That's..." Odisseus' words fail him.

"A big fucking number," Nemo deduces. "Wow. I'm speechless. I have so many people to thank."

"It gets bigger," she continues, shaking the blackened casings loose to a ground made indistinct by such an incredible speed that, had they been fresh ammunition, they would have popped and discharged upon impact.

"I mean, my mom. Odi, Moira. Our friends as Briza Astroballistic," Nemo rattles on.

"Froz mentioned something about individual bounties," Odisseus provides.

"Yep," Moira confirms. "246 thousand a head for Ortoki male alias Odisseus, humanoid male alias Two-Bit Switch, humanoid female alias Moira Quicksilver."

"Ott, Abraham. Hook. Should probably mention Anchorage in there somewhere..."

Moira thumbs a six-canister moonclip into Righty's awaiting cylinder. "Not counting the additional 493 thousand upon delivery or confirmed destruction of a particular Briza Light Freighter we'd all recognize."

"Hell, Velocity even–"

"Oi! What about me?" Two-Bit interrogates indignantly.

"I guess."

"You _guess_?"

"Puts the complete bounty on the four of us and the ship at somewhere in the court of 2 million, 250 thousand. Or thereabouts," Moira estimates, replacing Righty in its holster and repeating the process with Lefty.

Odisseus appears baffled. "All that was posted by the Imperium? In war-time?"

"Some. A good third came through some podunky driftcart manufacturate out of Belena in the Ring ConFed. BackDrift something. Never heard of them."

Odisseus tosses a glance to Two-Bit. "You bet that's a front for–"

"Oh, no, no," Nemo laments almost under his breath.

"Xo," Two-Bit takes his own enjoyment in finishing.

Moira instantly stops reloading Lefty. "You're kidding."

"Nope," Two-Bit, replete with aggravated glee, reports. "Seems Xo's got more'n a few dabbers in the Haess wheel-bootin' scheme." Nemo, with eyes solidly forward, smiles weakly.

"I wonder if your testicles would make a half-decent necklace," Moira ponders aloud.

Nemo's smile falters. "Well, that freezes the blood."

"Did you know?"

"That," Nemo weasles, "is something of a complicated question."

"Might wanna hold off on the bollocks-chopping, then," Two-Bit warns. "Seems we got more handbaggin' yet to do."

Moira folds Lefty closed and dares enough of a lean outward to better gauge the situation. The unforeseen speed boost of the tagalongs had not only left their enemies in the proverbial dust, but also fantastically expedited the not-inconsiderable distance from the Pistol-Whip to the nearest Second-to-First Ring shoot. The third hurdle of their extraction maneuver, the embarkation platform, already swells ahead of the two dash bikes and their four passengers. Nemo and Two-Bit ease their respective throttles and subsequently their advances down at the sight of seven Triomman heavies packing severe heat and loitering aimlessly around the benches and pay-communicator stands of the platform. Normally, this would be a banal occurrence for Takioro on even a slow news day, much less Yarba New Year, had it not been for the inclusion of a comically squat sentient in a stained windbreaker and matching bald spot, leaning sentry across the street from the shoot and against the main floor entrance to the station-renowned establishment he owned and operated – the Astrobounce Gentleman's Club.

"Gozzer," Odisseus breathes. "Of blooming course."

"Bloody hell," Two-Bit mutters as he powers his tagalong to a stop. "Is there one bloke in statee what don't got a beef with us?"

"This is gonna be, uh, delicate," Nemo, doing likewise, appreciates apprehensively.

With both dash parked and deactivated at a respectful distance to the platform and its troupe of Triomman thugs, the four pirates, with scramble codifier and shopping satchel retrieved, dismount and fan themselves out, Gozzer shoving himself off the advert-plastered walls of his nightclub to intercept them. The slimy Ruuvian scuzzbucket, radiating that particularly rancid brand of pheromone his sorely-mistaken species considered both intimidating and sexually arousing, plugs his hairy three-fingered knuckles into his trouser pants and splits a yellowed lounge-singer's grin, his Triomman insurance bristling an array of laser weapons in holsters. "Well, ain't we in an awkward situation, Captain?"

"Funny story, Gozzer, we–" Nemo winds up his legendary weaseling a beat before Moira loses her legendary patience, conjures Righty and Lefty in both fists and excavates a pair of tunnels through the brains of Gozzer's nearest two Triommans, slumping them both to the ground and killing them long before that.

The remaining five shellshocked Triommans jostle their weapons into their hands. The three equally surprised pirates utter three separate curses before diving for cover to the right. Gozzer gapes at his slain muscle before scampering aside himself toward the open door of the Astrobounce. Moira manages to injure a third and kill a fourth before the jiggle joint bouncers can open fire.

With the two station benches quickly garrisoned by the surviving Triommans, the _Lover's_ Captain and three lieutenants surrogate shaky shelter behind the plexishield half-partitions of four pay-communicator posts, neatly processed along the platform's outer wall. Nemo, his exasperation echoed strangely by the torso-and-higher smudged screen, bellyaches between gouts of gunfire. "What the bleeding fuck, Moira?"

"My way's faster. Your excuses would have kept us here until morning. Besides," she adds sourly, "normally, you're more likely to start a gunfight than change your underpants."

"Three in one hour is my limit. Of gunfights," he stipulates.

"I was only after my eight percent, you bastards! Nemo, you promised!" Gozzer's protestations, shouted across the platform, go completely disregarded.

"Oh, bloom it." Two-Bit, after a deep breath, risks a three-step jaunt into the crossfire, timed precisely to intersect with the flight path of a Jhironese gunwoman, fleeing the skirmish by the most direct route. As she passes, he tears the hefty ten-chamber revolver from her hip holster and when she objects most strenuously in Jhironese, he clocks her fully in the jaw with the butt of the pilfered weapon, before hotfooting back to his pay-comm's not-so-impregnable embrace.

"Two-Bit!" Nemo admonishes with mock affront. "You apologize to that poor lady!"

"No lady I ever bumped packs an HH19 Tigress," he evaluates brusquely, after putting the reappropriated firearm to better use against Gozzer's Triommans.

"You never answered my question," Moira reminds Nemo, who recoils in the face of rattling gunfire against his cracking plexishield divider.

"Yeah, got sorta distracted."

"Well, we got more distraction inbound," Odisseus, in the furthest occupied pay-comm, announces gravely. After Righty and Lefty's next salvo cleans up the unfinished matter of the wounded Triomman and successfully chases the remaining roughnecks back down their holes, Moira braves a glimpse behind her, curses blackly and realigns her aim in the opposite direction.

Parting the mingling crowd with spouts of warning laserfire shot toward the ceiling comes a repainted driftcart, in point of fact the Nomad Café, Moira realizes rankly – that low-rent coffee bar that wanders the Second Ring as a trio of chococino-brewers bolted to a stolen driftcart. With the elderly Nokko barista-pilot nowhere to be seen, the Café's new owners, Traasha and what remains of her incompetent entourage, amble their commandeered vehicle forward, harrying the beleaguered pirates from makeshift cover behind chunky espresso machines.

"That was cracklin'," Two-Bit appraises, likewise swinging his fresh firearm about.

Moira ricochets Righty's shot off Traasha's coffeepot cover. "You're really kidding," she implores blankly.

"Yeah," Nemo concurs, scoring a lucky stomach shot on the Café's Ondo pilot, which both plummets him screaming from the seat and shivers the driftcart to a standstill with a belching of spilt coffee. "If you're all pulling my leg and this is some kinda Yarba New Year prank, now would really be the time to tell me."

Odisseus sniggers despite the shelling his rickety plexishield receives. "That'd be pretty great, wouldn't it?"

Hissing red return fire shrieks entirely too close to Moira's unprotected backside, signifying the Triomman's contribution to their overall besiegement. As both arms of the vise-grip begin to constrict, Two-Bit voices their growing concerns with a tentative "Yeah, I'm getting zilched on cover here..."

"Any more brilliant ideas, Quicksilver?" Odisseus requests wryly.

"Thought that was more the Captain's department," she redirects, a point she illustrates by thrusting her pistols diametrically out, Lefty peppering Gozzer's goons hard, Righty tipping then plowing over the cast-iron percolator Traasha's Powosi kneels behind and deluging him in scalding black chococino.

"Hey," Nemo forfeits, "the whole grand theft tagalong thing was your idea."

"Here's another. Answer my question."

"The thing about that–" he stalls as Moira, sidestepping back to the pay-comm's dubious protection to avoid the retribution of Traasha's two remaining guns and Gozzer's four, donates one of Lefty's canisters toward the noble endeavor of splintering the plexishield barrier inches from Nemo's face. "Fine, fine!" the satisfactorily startled Nemo relents, "it was Ott's play, alright, not mine! He needed weapons, he wanted to burn Xo, I knew Two-Bit'd done some gunrunning on Haess, he knew Xo'd recently expressed interest in the weapons market there. What was I gonna do, say no and get burnt alive, or worse, go back to puppy-smuggling?" His countenance is the deepest shade of grim. "I'm not a puppy smuggler, okay? I'm not. Dread pirates do not smuggle puppies."

"Dread pirates?" Moira quotes.

An unprompted Triomman scream interrupts this particular line of thought to usher in both a third wave of assailants and more ditrogen-powered mayhem to the general clusterfuckery exploding outside the Astrobounce Gentleman's Club. A wooden blowgun dart feathers one of Gozzer's conscripted toughs from behind and spills him to floor amid an outbreak of frothing convulsions. Moira resolves never to set one jackboot on this revolting station ever again as Froz Four-Eyes does his best Moira Quicksilver impression with two sidearms ablaze against the Triomman's rear flank and his belligerent opposite number, after having stashed the fetishized blowgun and drawn a tacky imitation of a vallaphant's animal goad, bounds high onto the platform and begins sprinting unerringly towards the Captain.

"Okay, that's just impossible," Nemo reacts.

"Maybe they deered a tagalong too?" Two-Bit proposes dryly.

"More likely they came back around on Third," Odisseus theorizes, an activity Moira, at this point, is flatly uninterested in continuing, having finally heard the telltale bell of an available lift tube.

"Bloom this, boys. I'm gone," she bids farewell. After replacing her shopping satchel over her shoulder and steeling herself with a brief bout of Tebi-Gali breathing, Moira opens by planting two unanimous bolts into the drivefeed distributor behind the Nomad Café's noseplate which promptly deactivates the driftmotor, crashes the entire driftcart sparkingly to the floor and dislodges both of its outstanding passengers into a tumble-down heap. She continues by breaking cover to rush the embarkation platform, all the while hammering Gozzer's three clustered Triommans so hard as to replace all their latent, vestigial "daddy issues" with newly-minted "Moira issues" and even finding the time to cancel the pseudo-Whuudi wash-up's murderous charge with an even more murderous canister to the heart. She concludes by simultaneously pressing the shoot pad's "call tube," "open tube" and "fire tube" buttons with Lefty's last cartridge, waiting patiently while the shoot properly allocates her getaway vessel. Upon hearing those sweet doors grinding open, Moira launches herself fully inside the awaiting lift tube, only to discover that, in fact, Two-Bit, Odisseus and Nemo are crowding in after her, apparently having followed her one-woman vanishing act in a mass exodus of their own.

The Captain, the last of Moira's three hangers-on to claw his way to freedom within the crowded lift tube, squeezes himself inside and only manages to turn around when the final parting shot, fired from Traasha's 387 Absconder no doubt, sizzles the cinched teltriton doors less than an inch from his nose.

Nemo exhales. Moira rolls her eyes.

As the shoot around them prepares itself for its artillery-like departure, Nemo brushes off his duster, cracks his neck and peers aside. "You got the codifier?" he double-checks to Odisseus over his right shoulder, who nods a confirmation. "You got your, uh...feminine hygiene products?" he double-checks to Moira over his left shoulder, who impugns him beneath her most blistering glare.

Characteristically, Nemo only shrugs. "Good trip, then."

Chapter 21

Odisseus' tool belt is fucking resplendent. Armed with freshly-polished auto-cincher, neticgrappler and handheld fusioner, as well as a miniaturized cutting beam, six individual rolls of booster tape and a mechanic's instinctual cynicism, Odisseus stands front and center in _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ disused gundeck – stance wide, arms crossed, the very picture and pinnacle of mechanical vigilance – as he awaits the very latest of Nemo's lunacy. To the Ortok's immediate starboard, Marco the Mange stands similarly equipped, though his suite of belted hand-tools are appropriately smaller, inappropriately grimier and significantly less impressive, Odisseus' unspoken standards falling deaf upon those tufted ears.

The remainder of the crew, sans the Captain, lounge and loiter about the dusty gundeck with an equal level of ambivalence. Glive Garrigan, ex-petty officer of the fabled Imperium Interstellar Navy, sits one of the plentiful Antagonist ammunition crates stacked in each of the spacious room's available corners, Moira Quicksilver standing sourly to his side. Danbonte lingers nearby, leaning against the underturret's housing mainframe that seems to burst forth from the chamber's portside wall. Abraham Bonaventure, grasping a tankard of ghastly gray moonshine as ever, looms near the bow-ward doorway and hums something certainly shantylike inconsciently. Two-Bit Switch feasts on some manner of jam-filled gas station sausage and dangles both lonktonk legs off the side of the deactivated and unused strategic imaging table, his khaki shorts revealing a few faded purple vestiges of the muck leech's bygone suckers. Only Brondi stands alone, aloof in the opposite corner and nursing an anxiety cigarette, this upcoming meeting to represent the first time he'd shared a room with the Captain since the incident outside Ott's mess hall.

Apart from Abraham's distracted humming, an occasional word from Danbonte quickly stymied by Moira's obvious umbrage and the squishing sounds of Two-Bit's meal, the crew concurs on silence, both to ponder the insurmountable odds of the task at hand and their Captain's unshocking tardiness. Parked alone at the Warp Gate Junction above Iogo, there were, in fact, a vanishingly small number of places he could conceivably have eluded the _Lover's_ entire crew. Had Nemo a talent beyond daredevilry and brainlessness, however, it definitely involved shirking all manner of responsibilities, particularly those he'd signed himself up for in the first place.

Without further warning, the doorway adjacent to Abraham wheezes ajar and the hour's man himself saunters inward, the source of his delay painfully evident in his hands. He slurps neon green slush through its bendy straw – the Mondo-size Bubble Blast Green Ice Chill Slushie, undoubtedly purchased from the same over-priced and under-cleaned convenience store responsible for Two-Bit's slimy jellydog. He pauses on the proverbial floor mat, surveys the professional pirates all assembled and opens his green-tinted mouth to make with the skinny.

"Okay, here's the skinny," he announces, digging deep in his right trouser pocket to withdraw a slim datadeck and toss it underhanded toward Two-Bit. "Pop that into the imager for me, willya?"

Swapping the purple-blooded comestible to the opposite hand and giving the datadeck the once-over, Two-Bit complies by inserting it into the imager table's nearest port. "And this is?"

In lieu of Nemo's reply, the imager, after a moment of calculation, flickers to life and begins feeding a string of involved graphics in acrid orange across its holographic surface screen. Everyone present, excluding Garrigan, Brondi and Moira, shuffles forward as one to better examine what the imager displays. Odisseus recognizes technical read-outs at a glance – a Terro Fleet Systems 545 Pylon-class Capital Warship, Mezzrian in design and, to judge by the familiar contour of its ventral docking ridge, the _Exacting Counterattack_. It rotates to exhibit all perspectives, a highlighted cross-section sliding substrate across the craft's entire outline to reveal gunnery decks and power cores, pop-up sidebars rattling off industrial information about shield strength, re-routing capability and the like.

Danbonte, oddly, is the first to speak upon seeing this. "Now, come on," he denigrates, with a vague gesture over the entire display, "you can't be serious about this. About any of this."

Nemo, hanging several steps back from the imager, answers coldly. "Do you think that I'm not?"

"This is a capital ship, Captain. The humdinger of capital ships. Navies, you hear me, entire rebel _navies_ have tried and failed against Pylons."

"I've seen it happen," Garrigan testifies.

"I don't care how much faith you've got in her," Danbonte disavows. "No Briza, yours or anybody else's, stands any chance in Jotor against a Pylon."

" _Agreed_ ," Marco confirms.

Odisseus exchanges looks with Abraham and Two-Bit, though Moira moodily refuses to acknowledge anyone's presence but the floor's. Honest appraisal of the manifold dangers presented, the conscript crew's words eerily reflect Odisseus own opinion. Opinions originally expressed through significant glances and the infrequent muttered aside between the _Lover's_ four officers are now voiced through the mouths of her four marauders as though by some unintended and abstruse ventriloquism.

"So noted," Nemo allows, regarding the dinted lid of his slushie with apparent fascination. "Listen," he commands suddenly, raising that steely, self-determined gray gaze to Danbonte. "I'm sure you mean well but kid, I ain't really talking to you."

"Lad's not wrong there, boyo," Abraham throws in first. "Fool's errand and all that."

"Only way back into Ott's good graces is through that Pylon," Nemo reasons. "And, with us on both Vel's and Xo's shit-list, the Menace's the only game in town that's got the stones to gives us quarter. Not to mention," he adds with a sideways slosh of his slushie, "the bounty he'd shell out should we succeed could buy Two-Bit every fucking hooker in the Ring."

"There's that," Two-Bit appreciates, licking jelly off the tips of his fingers.

"That still leaves us the problem of bein' nothing but a banged-up light freighter and them bein' the bloom-near biggest ship-of-the-line, best not forget," Abraham redirects.

"They're not invincible," Nemo reminds, all traces of good humor vanished from his voice unbidden. "They're made of teltriton and shield projectors like anybody else – the _Shame_ or the _Horizon_ or the _Indurna_ or anybody else we ever pirated. I base most of my philosophy on that fact and it ain't failed me yet." He damns his gaze into the viridian depths of his slushie almost dejectedly. "Took me long enough to figure how, but you all know I'm capable to the task." He swills what remains of the beverage before repeating "They're not invincible" in a small, resolved voice.

The room speechlessly stalls each second with either assessment, contemplation or judgment of Nemo's moment of vulnerability, itself a concept that his saltbrother lacks the willpower to endure for any length of time.

"You're sure?" Odisseus is practically compelled to confirm against common sense.

The absolute specter of a smile crosses Nemo's still downcast face. "Pretty sure."

"Well, now I'm curious, if zilched else," Two-Bit endorses with a shrug.

"One way or the other, it'd be one hell of yarn," Abraham allows.

"Moira?" Nemo, without raising his head, calls back to his first mate. "Where you standing?"

"I have agreed to exactly nothing."

"Good enough." Nemo plunks the gnawed-on straw end back between his teeth and swallows another mouthful of green sludge as he approaches the strategic imager, somber mood entirely forgotten. "The main trouble, as I see it," he begins, both banishing the extrinsic "engine speed" screen and conjuring the more pertinent "craft overview" screen with a few taps on the control pad, "is that the _Counterattack_ 's equipped with a shielding mainframe to rival a planetary defense grid, can, given sufficient time, dispatch nearly ten score starfighters and is packing close to twice that in broadside batteries."

"Granted," Odisseus deadpans.

"Not to mention," Garrigan includes, clambering off his distant crate to fully engage in the discussion, "it's what, one hundred some fucking times larger than we are?"

Nemo curls up a sportive smirk. "That's an advantage. A navy could take fire from most or all of these guns. Thanks to being so small, at most, we're looking at fire from less than half."

"I remember," Odisseus recounts gruffly.

Marco glances up at the Ortok. "He _is_ right, though."

"Warships such as these," Abraham explains from his post at the doorway, "t'ain't made to swap ammunition with ships such as ours. They're made for fleet actions."

"Well, that still leaves something like two hundred other batteries," Danbonte counters.

"And two hundred starfighters," Moira murmurs.

"I'll get to both of those in a minute," Nemo compartmentalizes as he dials a pull-up menu on the imager's port side.

Two-Bit sidles up along his flank. "What're you flashin'?"

"The big idea is basically," Nemo replies mutteringly as the computer's subroutine traces a hoop along the simulated Pylon's hull before trisecting and spacing out the digital rendering into three roughly equivalent portions, "to kick its shields out and break it into big pieces."

Two-Bit, understandably a little dumbfounded, grunts. "Huh. Is that all."

Odisseus, who by now had learnt not to phase himself in face of Nemo's destructive optimism, shifts his weight. "Can we assume you've some idea how to do this?"

"Usually a safe assumption," Nemo grants.

"Wait, what do you mean, break it?" Danbonte advances another step. "Like, apart?"

Nemo shrugs. "More or less."

The redskin scoffs a little nervously and glances around to the rest of the crew as if for commiseration. "There's gotta be a simpler way than that. Could you, uh," he waves toward the imager, "target the thrusters or something? The bridge?"

Garrigan frowns. "Bridge is centrally located on a Pylon. It's right there at the heart of the ship. Not really a target."

"And thrusters like these," Marco indicates with a claw, "are meant to withstand _considerable_ drag. Pair of Antagonists, bloom, even torpedoes would take all week to noticeably damage any of those."

"Assumin', acourse," Abraham stipulates, "their shields be down."

Nemo congratulates with a point and a smile dyed florescent green. "Very astute, sir. That is phase one. In order for any of this to work, their shield projectors, specifically their _bombard shield_ projectors of which there are four," he motions the slushie toward the digital Pylon and its purple wreath, "are gonna have to be disabled."

"And how do we do that?" Odisseus poses.

"We don't. They do." Nemo's following smile surpasses the allowable emission standards of mischief. "Some of you may know, on our most recent trip to Takioro, Two-Bit here was kind enough to relieve an associate of his of a particular scramble codifier for our usage. A scramble codifier," he elaborates, "of a TFS K4 Individual Interceptor Unit."

"Which class?" Marco inquires.

"Spur," Nemo finishes innocently, before taking another drag on his bendy straw.

Two-Bit crinkles his expression. "What's in your maggie, Cap'n?"

"You mean to put that thing on the _Beggarman_ ," Odisseus abruptly realizes.

Around the cockled stub of his straw, Nemo awards, "Ten points."

Two-Bit's momentarily taken aback. "A five-and-five job. Of course. How did I not vizz this earlier?"

"I'm not sure I follow," Danbonte informs.

"You know what a scramble codifier _is_ , though?" Marco clarifies to Danbonte's confounded shrug. The Mruka exhales, closes his eyes in brief frustration and begins to explicate with pretentiously simplistic gestures. "It overrides the ident tags in your sensor package, makes you look like a different ship to anyone trying to scan you. Good enough scramble codifier can pull wool over anything but the most dedicated sensor sweeps."

"And the naked eye," Moira points out.

"You install one on the _Beggarman_ , though," Odisseus slowly formulates, "one that reads it as a Spur, during what I assume will be the starfighter clusterfuck to end all starfighter clusterfucks, you got yourself an invisible ship."

"Not hardly," Moira discredits out of hand. "It's not gonna have a call sign, a relevant ident reading. It's not gonna fly in blooming squadron."

"Give me a pilot good enough, that won't matter. Good enough pilot, plus this codifier and Abraham's old heap, those bombard shields could be down in less the five minutes," Nemo estimates proudly.

"You're not gonna joy her, are you?" Two-Bit checks.

"Eat a dick. Of course not," Nemo brutally disavows. "What, put the _Lover_ on autopilot again? I don't trust that skank any farther than I can throw her."

"Then what?" Danbonte, still unaccustomed to Nemo's briefing theatrics, slaps his hands against his thighs impatiently. "Hire someone?"

"I already have. Garrok?"

All eyes avert and all necks crane aside to the gundeck's far corner where Garrok Brondi stands like a disobedient teenager, expended cigarette a smoking turd between his fingers and his entire sadsack demeanor nearly as haunted as twenty days previously when the Captain now requesting his services had, after popping him one in the thigh, shoved the still-smoking firearm into his mouth.

"Yes?" the smuggler listlessly answers at last.

"You interested in six percent?"

Brondi pinches the smoke's stub between the edge of his lips. "Ten."

"Done."

"Nemo, I–" Odisseus interjects, hoping to exploit Brondi's lack of understanding but his saltbrother merely shrugs his shoulders helplessly.

"We're gonna need everybody, Odi. Besides me, Garrok here's the only pilot we got with stones enough to pull this off. Loathe as I am to admit it, we're gonna need him too."

Odisseus glowers chiefly at the cracked smile ghosting across Brondi's face. "Exactly."

Brondi shuffles six steps out of the corner to level with Nemo. "What's your plan?"

"We'll deploy you," Nemo discloses, shifting his posture to better manipulate the imager's keypad, "as soon as they've scrambled their first few fighter squadrons. You'll take the _Beggarman_ around this elliptical," he highlights in bolder purple the band encircling the ribbed and ridged outline of the Pylon like a bathtub ring, "and knock out these four shield projector arrays – one beneath the port and starboard attitude fins, one halfways down the prow and one above this line of thrusters," he finishes, each indicated area pinging brighter as he enters their coordinates.

"Won't those projectors be shielded themselves?" Danbonte challenges.

Garrigan points a scummy finger toward the imager. "There's gotta be a gap – deflection energy is emitted outward, but at the source, you gotta tiny window of opportunity."

Nemo creates a tiny ring between his thumb and pointer. "On the _Lover_ , we're looking at a hole the size of a coin. On a Pylon–"

"Motherfucker's gonna be fifteen feet across. At least," Garrigan supposes.

"So," Brondi begins to summarize, drawing smoke circles with repetitive gestures of his cigarette hand, "assuming I can hit those, assuming they don't shred me during, assuming Abraham's jockey box has even got the firepower to take them all down, then what?"

"Then you're done – you take out those projector arrays, their bombard shields short, we move onto phase two and you peel off, make for the planet and enjoy your reward."

Brondi frowns in consideration. "Dreadful lot to bank on one codifier."

"That, and the seven years experience of your smuggling career," Nemo constitutes with another sly smile.

"And you, old timer?" Brondi addresses to the apart Abraham. "This plan of action sitting well with you?"

"Unfortunately for me," the aged Grimalti concedes, "I trust the Captain's judgment. Ye just bring her back in one piece now."

"That I can't promise you."

Moira fields the question, "And what're we doing during all of this?"

"Evasive maneuvers," Nemo settles, this thumb absently stroking his scar. "Giving those fighters and batteries something else to shoot at. That is," he conditions, "until phase two."

"Which is?" Odisseus presses.

"Well, with the bombard shields successfully down, we can proceed to the haymaker."

Two-Bit makes a splitting gesture. "This is the 'chaveling into three chunks' bit?"

"You remembered." Nemo is pleasantly surprised as he places the slushie precariously at imager's edge to cue up more schematics with both hands. "Rymple did me a solid and had his boys compute the Pylon's two points of weakest structural integrity, the two places where, if we pile on enough hurt, it should rupture." The imager heightens the colorization of two corresponding areas of the _Counterattack_ 's eponymous support pylon, the warship's six-deck-deep central backbone that runs the entire length of the craft. "At least according to Ott's techs," Nemo points toward each of the designated target areas, the proverbial neck and waist of the Pylon's anchoring spine, "these sections here shouldn't be too much thicker than a Karracki Chaperone, which we've had success busting up before, if you'll recall."

"So, you torpedo the fuck outta them and hope for the best?" Danbonte encapsulates.

Garrigan presses four contemplative fingers against his scruffy cheek. "Theoretically," he qualifies, "that could work."

"Hull's too thick," Marco denies. "Pylon's dressed in three _times_ the armor a Chaperone wears. Even if the decks are approximately as wide, that plating's some of the purest teltriton available. We don't possibly have the magazine capacity to take out one, let alone two."

Nemo deposits both hands into duster pockets. "It's not a matter of capacity. It's a matter of punch." He yanks free his right hand a moment to wave toward the bowside corner of the room, toward the mountain of boxed ammunition upon whose foothills Garrigan had so recently taken his ease. "Everybody see those crates over there? Moira, do me a favor and pop that one open, would you?" Moira interrupts her gainsaid glare at Nemo only long enough to spoil the aforementioned crates with a split second's disdain. "Two-Bit," Nemo resolves, "do me a favor and pop that one open, would you?"

Grumbling some intricate string of jabber-invective, Two-Bit Switch circles the side of the imager, matches Moira's glare as he stoops and presses the nearest crate's hatch release. With an escaping hiss, the insulated strongbox depressurizes and Two-Bit levers open the lid, before rising to his feet and half-stumbling backward, as if in aversion.

Stacked neatly, five wide and two deep, in one of the pair of identical thermosteel chests, are flanged, overlarge and blemished gray missiles, twice the size of a standard shipborne torpedo and housed in dinted secondhand casings. A whistle of impression escapes Two-Bit's lips in reprise of the uncoupled crate. " _Moons_ , they're–"

"Wolfsbane torpedoes," Nemo supplies casually, retrieving his sweat-beaded slushie. "A whole new magazine's worth of repellent-drowned warheads. Think of them as a parting gift from Ott."

"Because he expects we'll die," Odisseus interprets grimly.

"Now, one of _those_ ," Marco re-evaluates with an accompanying shift in posture, "might do the trick."

"How about two? Or five? Or ten?" Nemo hovers the straw's tip inches from his mouth as he rationalizes. "Half a magazine, delivered directly to both of those spinal sections. Ought to more than do the trick," he claims, popping the straw into his now unoccupied mouth.

Danbonte, in analysis, leans over the imager. "Why both?"

Nemo ceases sucking. "Hm?"

"Both. Why both? Why break it into three sections? You don't think severing the thruster bank from the main body and the bridge would be enough?"

"Auxiliaries," Odisseus deduces. "Unless I miss my guess, capital ship of this size is gonna have some failsafes in case of a gate accident or something similar. You sever the back third, I imagine some emergency engines'll kick in, save the front two thirds from crashing. Right?" he theorizes to Nemo who continues to wordlessly drain his beverage while his other hand scrolls and dials through the strategic imager's technical information for several long seconds.

He stops typing and slurping to report tentatively, "Uh, yes. Correct."

"You didn't know that. You were just going to break it into three pieces because–"

"It's cooler, yeah."

"Let me get this gritty," Two-Bit requests. "We joy in, diddle around until they cast off jocks, set Brondi loose in the _Beggarman_ which we got scrambled up as a Spur, he kuckles out their bombard edgies, hoofs it outta there and then we just gotta use these super-zoomers to chavel the whole mess to Jotor in a jalopy, right?" He compels Nemo for confirmation with corrugated brow and splayed fingers. "A 'five-and-five' with a double reserve 'rubble-to-ritz?'"

Nemo's answer isn't immediately forthcoming. "Well..."

"What?" Moira growls instantly.

Nemo approximates with a sideways slush of his sixty-four-ounce cup. "It's actually _slightly_ more complicated than that."

"Care to share?" Moira prompts, ultimatum dangerously present in her voice.

"Rymple had some other news to report," Nemo confesses, as though personally embarrassed. "Apparently, after Kivad's attempt and our latest blockade run, the _Counterattack_ 's sorta had a change of heart regarding their whole 'blindfolding' strategy."

"They've located Ott's fortress, haven't they?" Moira suggests.

"No, no. Not yet. Ott's got a scrambler feed precisely for this reason and, even if that fails, I guess the whole place has a sophisticated enough defense system to withstand a bombardment or two, but they ain't exactly sanguine about their chances of staying hidden much longer, which, first of all means we're on a little something of a time crunch."

"And second of all?" Odisseus urges.

"Means," Abraham concludes without displacing the cockeyed scrutiny of his ale-jack's leathern bottom, "any advantage Kivad might've had's been denied to us – all their sensors will be fully operational. No chance whatsoever of catchin' 'em with their breeches down. They'll likely even hear us warp in, for bloom's sake."

"That last one," Nemo jabs the masticated end of his straw toward the Grimalti, "I might have an idea for. Remind me to talk to you later."

Two-Bit half raises a grimy hand, like a timid schoolchild. "Um, did you have any flashes for the rest of it, or...?"

"It's like this," the Captain, pressed, brackets empty air between his slushie and a vertical palm. "Even if they can only get half their guns pointed at us at any given time, small as we are, we can't afford to take a third or even a tenth of that fire. Shields just won't hold up. And that's," he thrusts the slushie forward with a wet slapping sound, "without even considering the couple hundred starfighters pecking at our bloomholes."

"Yeah, Nemo," Moira reiterates, "these are kinda our problems with this whole idea."

"There is a way around it," he ponies up. "It's just, you know, you're not gonna like it."

"Try us." Odisseus widens his stance.

Nemo's solution is uttered as simply as it is utterly suicidal. "We blindfold."

Odisseus blinks. "Wait, what?"

"You heard me. Blindfolding. We."

Two-Bit, honestly confused, scratches his scalp. "For the whole doggie?"

"I mean, yeah," Nemo shrugs with apparent obviousness, " _That's_ the only way this is gonna work. We present a target out there, we're dead. Simple as that."

"Nemo," Odisseus levels, more out of a desire for full comprehension than in reprimand, "you're suggesting we enter into this broadside action with a Pylon-class capital warship blind. With no sensors."

"I did this all the time as a jockey."

"Not against a capital ship!"

"And two hundred starfighters," Nemo's quick to point out.

"...I don't even..." the flabbergasted Ortok stammers.

"Told you you wouldn't like it," Nemo mutters defensively.

"How about letting him speak his piece?" comes Moira's odd behest from the corner of the gundeck. She stands there, adjacent to Two-Bit and the unclasped crate of torpedoes, having dropped her folded arms to hook fingers beneath the slender belt of her cross-draw combat rig, in this queerest appeal to hear Nemo's new madness.

"Thank you. Moira." Nemo, appreciative of the assist but evidently as suspect of its source as everyone else, rambles his justifications forward all the same. "It's obviously not without its risks. I'm not saying it isn't. What I'm saying is, I can do this. I have, in fact, _extensive_ experience doing this – this is how you fly a starfighter."

"I repeat; this isn't a starfighter," Odisseus feels compelled to remind.

"And won't their jocks delly how to do this too?"

"No – that's my point," Nemo emphasizes with forceful gestures of the slushie. "If there's one thing the Imperium Navy wants to fuck more than natural resources that don't belong to them, it's their targeting computers." He shrugs violently, tossing icy green ooze against the bottom of the cup's lid. "You take that away, these navy motherfuckers couldn't hit the broad side of Baz." He shoves his empty hand across the imager in a four-fingered point. "Garrigan can back me up on this."

"Wish I could say he was lying," the ex-naval officer sniggers helplessly.

Marco calls attention to the nearest flaw seconds before Odisseus can. "With a crew of just under forty thousand, _somebody's_ gonna see it coming and _somebody's_ gonna figure it out."

"Not in time," Nemo defends voraciously. "We can only expect a twenty-five minute window anyway, before re-enforcements from other parts of the blockade show up."

"That woulda been nice to delly before now," Two-Bit comments.

"On top of that," Nemo blazes forward, stacking point atop point with each smack of his slushie's bottom to his open palm, "they're gonna be looking for Brondi and the _Beggarman_. And then their shield generators go out. And then their ship breaks the fuck apart."

"I think we're still missing the most salient point here." Danbonte casts a doubtful expression on his wolfen red face before aligning eye contact with the Captain. "You think you can fly this ship on sight alone? Through the fucking window?"

A reluctant chorus of "No, yeah, he can", "Most definitely he can", "Yeah, I think so", and a blunted "Yes" from Moira mumble out of _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ four lieutenants, each mind undoubtedly recalling the events surrounding the Aerio Accident, the Zaboola Blockade and most markedly the Bozee Bushwhack of eleven months past. Only Odisseus bothers to posit, "Can we shoot back without targeting computers?"

"Eat shit and die, Odi," Moira tasks brusquely.

Odisseus extends a padded digit toward Garrigan. "I was talking about him."

"Oh. Don't, uh, eat shit or die, then."

"Let's assume you're referring to me," Garrigan conjectures politely, "and whether or not I'd like to fuck a targeting computer." He shifts his posture a little haughtily and responds with narrowed eyes and an imperceptible nod. "I'll scrape by."

Nemo concludes his pitch. "Bottom line here isn't can we do this. We can. We collectively have the ability. It's only–"

"Should we," Abraham supersedes soberly. The gundeck and all nine of the _Lover's_ extant crew simultaneously attempt to envision the chaos of the oncoming engagement, the dozes of mitigating variables at play, the hundreds of Munitions Intergalactic laser blasts fired directly at them, the thousands upon thousands of dire mistakes and disasters just waiting to happen, with one missed shot, one lucky technician or one fatefully loose screw.

Moira, again unusually, breaks the reverie with her decision. "We'll go see to our turrets."

Two-Bit edges a foot toward the sternside exit, thumb over his shoulder. "Probably wanna test-joy the _Beggarman_ with the scrambler toggled in before we pin all our squeaks to it."

Brondi follows his lead. "And I should probably get familiar, if that's alright?"

Abraham nods his consent, before shifting his cumbersome bulk off the wall toward Odisseus. "Best see to that sensor package. Will ye be needin' Marco for whatever it is ye'll be up to? Mayhaps I could find use for someone more...appropriately sized," the Grimalti solicits, with a callused hand walloped against his gut.

Odisseus sighs with fatalistic resignation. "I'm gonna need to widen that torpedo tube, if we expect to be shooting those fat fuckers outta there." He waves Marco off to Abraham with a paw, before sliding his gaze to one idle crewmember. "Looks like you just inherited Rooster's old job."

Danbonte furrows his red brow. "What?"

The Captain, crewmen swirling with urgent tasks and modifications to complete all about him, slurps his slushie contentedly and reminds aloud, "We warp out in ten hours, people." He surrenders a step or two, leveling up close enough to Odisseus to mutter to him out of Danbonte's or anyone else's earshot. "You get that pressure helix fixed?"

Odisseus doesn't bother to lower his voice. "Yes? Since when do you care about that?"

"Because, if I'm right, _moons_ are we gonna need it."

–––

Moira finds him in the abnormally abandoned sensor room. For each of the two hours since the dissolution of their improvised war council two doors down, Abraham and his unhappy Mruka ward Marco had exhaustively occupied the abovedecks sensor room with blubber, mange and argument, the mounting attrition of the crew's ten-hour war against the clock evidently taking its toll. Now, however, as Garrigan's chosen rendezvous point, she is surprised to discover it almost entirely empty, save a few idle screensavers, a tankard of unfinished moonshine, a collection of Mruka-sized hand tools and one ex-naval gunner and recovering drug addict.

"You seen this?" he inquires, sitting before the muted green of a computer terminal, with a particular tone of voice to raise Moira's hackles. Moira had spent her last two hours in comprehensive preparation and amelioration of her cherished topturret, including braving a bracing topside spacewalk complete with automated ascender, discount jetpack and personal graviton boots, to scrub the viewport clean. Therefore, she had almost certainly not seen whatever Garrigan indicated. Upon actually viewing it, however, she immediately wishes he hadn't either.

What flickers before Garrigan shares a format more familiar to Moira than the faces of her faraway family. A computerized bounty posting, this one a page from the Ring Penal Authority's feed-wide database, displays vital capture information for a certain malefactor Moira only recognizes by the grainy mug shot – Mollizella "Zella" Ungos, seventeen-year old female humanoid, wanted dead or alive in connection to three armed robberies on Cedano for eleven thousand ICC in hard cash. The profile's most arresting feature, however, is the bolded red "[REDACTED]" entered neatly after her current status.

"Only reason someone redacts a posted reward is the mark either upped and confessed, or they already shelled out the bounty to somebody else," Garrigan supposes, though Moira's certain he doesn't speak from experience. For her part, she fabricates a frustrated sigh, deposits the flats of her palms against the cold steel of her revolvers and otherwise keeps her thoughts to herself.

"It gets worse." Garrigan assures her. With three swift keystrokes, a corresponding trio of matching profiles, a Corgassi, a Myyrigon and an unidentified cyclopean male, materialize upon the sensor room screen, each one bearing the telltale "[REDACTED]" status. "All of 'em's had their bounty collected," Garrigan resolves somewhat fatalistically. "Came in here to check my own posting, you know, see if anybody's connected the dots, and I found this." He traces an idle finger along the contour of the console. "Zella and Salo could be coincidences, but the only people who could have collected Heeko and especially Ebeneezer, woulda been the Imperium, some fucking ktotari birds," he theorizes with a half-smirk, "or one of us."

Moira still remains silent until Garrigan wheels the seat about by his heels. "You understand I wouldn't be going back to the slammer," he predicates. "Imperium gets their hands on me again, shit's gonna get real. Heh. Here," he preemptively offers, a sudden black humor gripping him enough to spin himself back around to the terminal and minimize the four sheets of damning evidence in pursuit of something tangentially-related.

Within several minutes he summons a rap sheet of a similar purpose, but vastly different formatting. Moira only had cause to observe such a thing on a handful of instances in the past – an official posting from the Imperial Ministry of Interstellar Security, displaying the full credentials and court-martial of one former petty officer Glive Tyrell Garrigan, as well as a reward for information leading to his arrest totaling 36 thousand ICC.

"Tyrell?" is the first word from Moira's mouth.

"Yeah. Great-grandfather's name."

"Crazy fucker too?"

"You don't know the half of it."

"What did you even do?" Moira finally bothers to ask.

"Nothing exciting. Nothing the Imperium can afford to waste 36 thousand on me for." He aligns the swivel seat's face to the side in order to prop both boots against the adjacent chair's rim. "Had fourteen hours of leave-time on Nos Mantri after the abbers finally caved. Tried Vapid for the first time. Woke up in a bungalow with a starving belly, a native girl's mouth around my cock and my cruiser, along with the rest of the 16th Fleet, six days warped out. Gone AWOL, been declared a deserter and, without my prior knowledge, court-martialed, all official-like. All in my sleep." He chuckles resignedly. "What was I gonna do, turn myself into the occupation force and apologize nicely? Imperium might be short-handed, but they're still not smart enough to pardon desertion. Besides," he shrugs off, "I never got into that business to subjugate natives."

"You got into it for the blow-jobs?"

"From my targeting computer, yeah." His distant gaze doesn't stop him from thrusting a thumb over his shoulder to remind Moira. "You got an answer for any of this?"

"Danbonte," she spouts.

"That weasel? Really?"

"Yeah. I was worried about this when I first approached him. He's not a pro or anything – he's just exactly spineless enough to supplement his income with a little collection. Especially if somebody else went to the trouble of killing them first."

Garrigan eyes her, the real test. "You think he's a danger?"

"Nah, not to us. I'd hear him think it a mottible off."

"You wanna talk to him, maybe?"

Moira feigns a little concentration. "Can't. Or, not yet, anyway. Don't wanna tip off the Captain. That's the real danger here – we still need him running the tubes for this Pylon business." She shambles a step backward, in the general direction of the door. "Still, thanks for confirming my suspicions, at least. Keep them eyes peeled," she instructs, slapping him with rough companionship on the inner shoulder before striding out of the room and into the hallway, proverbial canister, to her thinking, momentarily dodged.

–––

Two-Bit Switch stands bemused before the chiller. He'd only entered the galley fleetingly, to wash the _Beggarman's_ greasy soot from his palms and potentially snag a yogurt for a job well done, before setting about whatever fresh task Abraham, currently taking his ease with Marco and a bushel of nachos not ten feet away, allocated for him in the eight remaining hours before warping off to Baz. The spectacle newly magnetized to the chiller door froze him in his over-booked tracks.

A pictorial orgy would perhaps be the best description Two-Bit could fathom for it.

Certainly some piece of pornography, Two-Bit could at least deduce, judging by the glossy disposable material it was printed on, the same that constitutes those nudie magazines he was occasionally guilty of leafing through. Making sense of the smutty one-sheet proves impossible, depicting as it did, a knot of naked participants, in ludicrous positions and of various bipedal and non-bipedal species. What most confounds Two-Bit, no xenobiologist by his own admission, about the hedonistic fucksplosion hanging before him, is that each specimen illustrated within appears to be male.

He walks back about his duties bewildered, leaving "Walk My Plank," as it was captioned, to its own sordid devices and wondering whom, in all the moons of Jotor, would have possibly hung something like that on the chiller in the first place.

Chapter 22

Moira remains undecided. With the culmination of this whole Pylon affair only hours and days away, they'd been long overdue for another meeting, despite this being only the fourth overall and their second within two months. As arguments from both viewpoints are weighed or deflated by either party of conflict, Moira, sitting on the lip of the undersupplied bathroom's single basin, still could not fully subscribe to either course of action.

"Odisseus' point bein'," Abraham translates for Two-Bit's benefit, "there's no bouncin' back from this. Real heat be on us now and we'd be bloomwits not to take Takioro's events as a sign a' that." The hoary old Grimalti lingers nearest the door, the least enthused about the location of their meeting and seemingly possessed of some superstitious fear of the place. Considering the dump's general state of disrepair, she couldn't rightly begrudge him the point.

"And act accordingly," Odisseus pointlessly adds, almost to himself. The harried Ortok, barely able to squeeze a few free minutes away from the laundry list of repairs, modifications and other such errands Nemo'd outlined for him, leans against the dinted dryer mechanism to Moira's right and multitasks, fiddling with a compression valve.

"A blinker of what?" Two-Bit fights dirty. "That we're all hard fucking brunos now and any anglers out there better think twice before chaveling with us and our ten-foot teltriton plonkers?" The jabberhead, lounging atop the toilet in the corner stall, appears more comfortable in this locale than even Moira, a thought whose ramifications she's determined not to further speculate upon.

The women's restroom of Iogo's Warp Gate Junction had been deemed by the _Lover's_ four lieutenants, after some reluctant debate on the subject, the only accessible place that Nemo would honestly have no reason to visit and therefore have almost no chance of interrupting their latest covert meeting. The Trijan behind the counter had given each of them the evilest of eyes when all four officers, a woman, an Ortok, a Grimalti and an enthusiastic consumer of jellydogs, had jointly requested the room's keycode and shuffled in together. Considering the gunky, mysteriously stained nature of the place, however, entirely worse scenarios had been enacted in here than whatever that cashier could possibly suspect.

Moira herself elected to squat atop the scuffed and scummy basin, with her sweater yanked up over her nose, unwilling to risk lodging spent condoms or loose teeth between the grooves of her jackboots' corrugated bottoms, a fate she prescribed for each of her comrades, given their apparent readiness to stand on the sullied tile, Odisseus barefoot even.

"Speak for yourself," the Ortok grumbles. "You don't think Takioro was at least some indication that we're in over our heads?"

"Aye," Abraham confirms. "How long until some serious trouble, somebody what puts Froz and his lot to shame, comes a-crawlin' out of the woodwork?"

"How the bloom should I delly that?" Two-Bit disassociates with a mockingly helpless shrug. "I ain't Huong Xo or IMIS or an angler myself, am I?"

"We're sayin'," the Grimalti reiterates, "ye ain't lookin' at the whole kit and caboodle."

"I'm saying," Two-Bit reprises with a forceful point, "you ain't vizzing at the bigger caboodle." He scoots himself to the edge of the toilet seat in explanation. "We stick with Ott, we got a planetary defense edgie, a whole mess of gantines and the bloody fucking Galactic Menace between us and whatever anglers Xo's welcome to throw our way." He spreads both hands wide in a gesture of inevitable vulnerability. "We blow Ott off, add another dapadan and all his klamber to the list of beefed personages soon to be up our bloomholes."

That notion, presented crudely though it was, carries some weight with both mechanic and navigator, causing them both a moment of recoiled recalculation. Once, they'd all shuddered at the prospect of fleeing before the summons of the incensed Galactic Menace, yet here they stand, four months later, presenting retreat and desertion as their only options with their backs pressed to a proverbial wall. Much to her own chagrin, Moira briefly finds herself commiserating with Two-Bit's concerns.

"Ott's house is falling apart," Odisseus devalues with a swaying shake of his furry head. "He's low on soldiers, resources, ships and the Imperium's sniffing around his foxhole."

Two-Bit, after the translation from Abraham, sputters. "Because of us! Don't you feel the slightest bit hooked for any of that?"

"Oh, come off it, ye crooked fucker. Ye ain't never felt responsible fer nothin', not even yer own shite, a day in yer life," Abraham immediately belittles, the effect of which catches Two-Bit's next embitterment in his throat and tosses his gaze to the soiled tiles.

"What we're saying is, Two-Bit," Odisseus attempts to summarize, perhaps gentler than Abraham's blunt rebuff, "that destroying the _Counterattack_ might slow the Imperium down, but it certainly won't stop them. With, what, an entire fleet and change, their lunar base, plus their extensive planetside commitments, its pretty clear they're not going away and even a few destroyed capital ships will only dent those plans." He stops tinkering a moment to pass a significant glance toward the seated jabberhead, who maintains his scrutiny of the floor. "Trust me."

Moira considers voicing something to the ironic defense of Two-Bit's argument, but Odisseus' reasoning rings too true to conjure anything worthwhile.

"Then what're you propoing?" Two-Bit offers slowly.

"I think lamming it," Abraham, fresh from translation, relates. "Assuming the boy's right about his plan and we survive this Pylon business, we take the bounty, cut our ties with Ott and find a nice quiet corner of the Offchart to fritter our winnings away and watch our postings decrease."

"And you think that'll be enough to keep the anglers off?"

"A bloom sight better'n stickin' our ten-foot teltriton cocks of song and story out in the open and invitin' 'em to come take a chomp."

"Wasn't exactly free bounty hunter bludges I had in mind, but..."

"Then what did you have in mind?" Odisseus poses with an encouraging gesture of the compression valve.

Two-Bit interprets the Ortok's tone and gesture correctly and outlines his theory. "Well, minus this bit about his outfit 'falling apart,' I thought Ott's place'd be as ozzy a spot as any in the galaxy to be in the lavender, wouldn't it? They'd need a bleeding army to kuckle us out of there and we'd have the blooming best mummies we could possibly bump until everything was all drongo again."

"They do have an army, Two-Bit. They've got several, in fact, and, more importantly, they've got a position." Odisseus disillusions grimly. "Before long, even if that Pylon goes down, they're gonna get tired of tending the nets and'll come looking themselves." He flops the clasped valve back and forth in with his argument. "Ott's fortress is well-hidden, but given enough time, they'll find it. Ott's fortress is well-defended, but given enough guns, they'll take it."

"Well, alright, then," Two-Bit relents bitterly. "Let's zilch our losses and hoof it deep and dark in the Offchart where we can hide under rocks from Vel, Xo, Ott and the bloody Imperium until, what, more anglers come and find us? What then? That's usin' the old thinkbox!"

"Whatever the case may be," Moira resolves beneath her impromptu black cotton veil, her first utterance the entire meeting and sufficient to draw each gaze in the room, "we won't know the score until after our attempt on the _Counterattack_. As long as we're all still sold on that insanity, seems reasonably stupid to argue about fates not yet assured."

Moira's warning, ruder than Two-Bit, grimmer than Abraham and ultimately gloomier than Odisseus, pitches the four of them into the brooding silence that traditionally followed these meetings, when all their planning, plotting and underhanded machinations ran hard against that immovable object that was their whimsical Captain. Moira was pretty certain she'd killed the discussion outright then and there when the door to Abraham's right clatters open and, through some paradoxical ill fortune, Nemo strides casually into the women's bathroom.

Each of his officers, gathered here in secret to debate how best to invisibly steer the _Lover's_ proverbial rudder without offending his legendary ego, freezes, fears immediate discovery and, with various degrees of severity, envisions the unavoidable violence to ensue. Moira, with hands resting on her folded knees and therefore inches from Righty and Lefty, likes her odds. Nemo, on the other hand, shambles inside, fumbles with his trouser fly and boots open the nearest stall door before even taking note of the room's four other occupants, all staring anxiously at him.

"Hey," he remarks as nonchalantly as though passing them on the companionway, before sidling fully into the stall, latching the door closed behind him and presumably, as Moira doesn't intend to stick around and find out, makes with his business, none the wiser for all their wide-eyed stares.

–––

Two-Bit's jaw drops.

"Oh, no," he mutters upon stepping into the helm, steepling both hands around his nose and mouth to create a private sanctuary for the lower half of his face to panic within. "Uh, no, you can't–, oh, _moons_ ," he splays his cupped fingers apart, "can still we turn around?"

Nemo, practically poured into the helmsmen's chair he's so sprawled, breaks off the rapid evacuation of foamy blue Gitterswitch Gin from his hefted bottle to swallow hard and frown, "Probably not, no," before resuming his gulping chug.

The otherwise abandoned helm is currently engaged in its best impression of a brewery, assuming its irresponsible lout of a brewer had, approximately four hours previously, become very, very thirsty. The disguise is present not only in appearance, Two-Bit notes, but also, more prevalently, in stench. The atmosphere within is veritably humid from the allied stinks of sweat, vermouth and disaster. In addition to the dump's customary collection of clutter, no console, instrument panel or dashboard within extreme arm's reach of Nemo's cherished chair is spared the graveyard spread of empty or nearly-empty booze bottles. These, Two-Bit judges by the Captain's profound state of intoxication, are the only witnesses left standing to what must have been a drunken bender close to six and a half full bottles in duration.

All of which would have been likely both amusing and pathetic had _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ , its anxious crew and its now apparently hammered Captain, been anything but minutes away from executing a dangerous and experimental dirty warp maneuver that would drop them, without the aid of a warp gate, within legitimate spitting distance from the _Exacting Counterattack_ , all of her fighters and all of her guns.

"You're having a laugh, right?" Two-Bit desperately attempts to convince himself. "You're just taking a go at me, like you did last year with my birthday and those laxatives, right?"

Nemo's faces broadens into the drunkest beam Two-Bit'd ever seen, no mean feat to be sure. "That was great."

"Oh, we're totally fucked. We're chaveled right in the bloomhole now."

"Listen. Listen," Nemo entreats, propping himself improbably forward on an elbow and jangling the bottle's dregs to emphasize his arguments. "It's gonna be totally bitchin', I'm gonna be totally bitchin' out there. I promise." He pinches his thumb and forefinger together on the opposite hand and waggles it toward the door. "I've just gotta go vomit a little, and–"

"Are you blasted? Abraham buzzed for all wanks – we're dropping warp in less than two minutes!" By way of urgency, Two-Bit jogs suddenly forward and plops himself, with an accompanied bob from the unlocking gyroscopic rig, into the co-pilot's seat.

"It'll like, barely take a second and–"

"It's gonna take no seconds because you're not wending fucking anywhere. You can ralph all you like after they've iced us," Two-Bit ultimates.

Nemo crinkles his expression. "Which side of the bed did _you_ wake up on?" He inches slightly closer, as though to receive a hushed confession. "Was it the douchey side?"

"There's a brainy flash, Nemo – cheese off the bloke who's running your gantine's edgies." Two-Bit, in grim remembrance of previous bruises, clasps closed both safety belts across his chest anyway. "Do me a kindie, willya, and just act like everything's, you know, peaches-and-unicorns for the next, I don't know, twenty-five-ish minutes? Can you do that for me?" He grasps at the main defensive console and sets about preparing a shielding package for the moment they drop warp. "Moira will jank your plonker up to make her bread, should she catch wise and I don't even wanna spec about Odi's reaction. So, don't you jabb nothing to nobody until we're clear of this."

Nemo reaches for his headset and shrugs it danglingly. "I don't even remember how to work this thing."

"Projected point of withdrawal be closing fast, Cap'n," comes the crackling voice of a busily engaged Abraham, Two-Bit's communication matrix indicating his proper place in the sensor room. "All hands – stand-by to withdraw in two minutes." Odisseus grumbles some reply from the engine room that Two-Bit recognizes, even over the language barrier and the rampant feedback of the _Lover's_ undedicated interior comm channels, as a confirmation. A trio of "I'm in"s, originating from the "topturret," "underturret" and "torpedo chamber" comm ports and therefore from Moira, Garrigan and Danbonte respectively, shortly follow. Seconds later, an exterior link, which takes Two-Bit a moment to recognize as _The Little Beggarman_ , joins the conversation in a fresh burble of interference.

"Um," Brondi's voice wavers under the sibilating static, "having some trouble dialing a clean frequency, what with the warp flux. Should be fully patched in a minute or so."

"Ninety seconds to disengage," Abraham reports on Brondi's heels. "Anything ye'd like to say, Cap'n?"

Nemo, somehow still grappling with the headset, employs the general intercom instead to request, "Yeah, could somebody bring me a bucket?"

A shocked and astringent silence, save for the channel's snowy feedback, ensues. Two-Bit reprises his previous gesture, this time dropping his head to his hand and shielding his eyes from the prompt shattering of the fiction that Nemo's both sober and competent.

"All the moons of Jotor," Moira mutters. "He's drunk."

"He's drunk?" Garrigan struggles to comprehend.

"Putting it fluffy, yeah," Two-Bit confesses with a grimace. "Bladdered. Stinko. Three sheets. Take your pick."

A patched roar, some furious vocalization of Odisseus, tramples over Moira's first attempt at a reply and her second is barely audible over the series of vicious Ortoki castigation that follows. "I don't even care why at this point – I'm just going to kill you," Moira resolves.

"Come on, I never fly totally sober," Nemo explains defensively, both hands monkeying with his headset. "I'm just a little, you know, more less sober than I usually–" he stops suddenly and attempts to free his hands from the connecting cable. "How'd you–, moons, I can't–, why is this so hard to put on?"

"Is he tangled in his headset?" Moira questions after a beat.

"Erm..." is all Two-Bit can muster.

"Abraham, how long would it take you to recalibrate coordinates out of here?"

"Recalibrating unregistered route codes ain't near as simple as changing yer breeches, missy," Abraham disillusions. "An hour'd be risking it, four to make it comfortable."

Odisseus growls something sarcastic and sullen, his meaning illuminated by Moira's resigned addendum. "And we were only gonna have one shot at this anyway."

As, to his left, the cornerstone to their entire scheme struggles to unfetter his fingers from the tricky, twisting comm cord, Two-Bit cocks his head aside and rigidifies the crew's grit. "Everybody's still decking with this course of action?"

"No real choice about the matter," Abraham capitulates. "Thirty seconds to disengage."

Moira's odd calm claims her again. "Wasn't exactly the smartest plan to begin with."

Odisseus, seemingly instinctual senses of caution and custodianship conflicting bodily with the sudden spike in the plan's recklessness, snarls some plea to sanity or reason.

"Sure I do." Nemo shrugs sloppily as he replies with a summary. "We fly around a bit, Brondi does some stuff, we blow the cunt up. That's it, right?"

Clearly not satisfied with Nemo's perception of the events, Odisseus makes some suggestion, only to receive Moira's discredit before he's finished. "And get doxychoraphum enemas in our sleep, courtesy of the Galactic Menace? Thanks but no thanks."

"No time," Abraham behooves. "Ten seconds – prepare to disengage."

"If I'm having second thoughts," Danbonte proposes, "is it too late to drop me off somewhere?"

"I really need that bucket," Nemo appreciates squeamishly.

"Nemo!" Abraham bellows. "Disengage!"

"I'm doing it, I'm doing it, don't rush me," Nemo relents and, within another two seconds, he's disengaged the helm's warping protocols in a matter both mechanical and careless. As if yanked by her proverbial shirt collar, _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ literally screeches to a comparative standstill from the incalculable speeds of interstellar warp, slapping Two-Bit, Nemo and certainly all the crew fiercely against their seat belts. The viewport's dazzling view of the rippled and shimmering wake of the cosmos unfolding before them is replaced by an all-encompassing expanse of solid teltriton wall, which Two-Bit recognizes within the heartbeat before impact as the port side of the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's engine bank.

"Whoa," Nemo murmurs a microsecond before wrenching the yoke back with all his strength and peeling the _Lover_ off at such an acute angle as to instantly nauseate everyone aboard, inertial dampeners included. The freighter flashes her belly and twists away. Garrigan, in the underturret, screams in surprise and only the _Lover's_ shield package, thrown into operation when Two-Bit was tossed violently forward, saves him from being pulverized in a scrapping collision, as the two ships respective bombard shields fizzle against each other and ultimately repulse the smaller craft away. Nemo wrestles a moment to right the bucking Briza, selects an initial approach vector and initiates a hasty strafing run along the _Counterattack_ 's starboard broadside, allowing the pirates their first undiluted view of the proximate Pylon.

Up close and personal, the Pylon is more a landscape than a spaceship; a city skyline, a rocky canyon and a mountain range. An irregular teltriton terrain of attitude fins, docking ridges, sensor arrays, command towers and, most notably, quadroturret broadside batteries, stretches dottible upon dottible onward, like a bumpy beige horizon. From bulging engine bank to distant point of prow, the Pylon is over three times the width, five times the height and thirty times the length of _The Unconstant_ _Lover_.

Without question, the _Exacting Counterattack_ is the single largest, best defended, heaviest-armed and certainly most expensive spacecraft Two-Bit has ever, in his twenty-two years of life, laid his astounded eyes upon. Capital ships, he knew, took assembly crews of thousands painstaking years to properly construct, but he couldn't imagine raw teltriton and electrical wiring transforming into something as bafflingly complex and world-eclipsing as this Pylon-class war cruiser in anything less than a decade. He suddenly remembers, only too starkly, that their expressed purpose here was to somehow destroy this colossus of modern naval might.

The transceiver hisses and hums with the patched indignation of the _Counterattack_ 's baffled communications officers, their official cessation orders and their commands to cut engines and prepare to receive boarders. The _Lover's_ own crew, on the other hand, is silent and circumspect, almost awestruck by the titanic task laid before them as their craft whistles along the Pylon's starboard quarter. Even having previously braced and bolstered themselves beforehand, the pirates undoubtedly all glue themselves to viewports and sensor renderings to view the passing Pylon. Two-Bit imagines, behind layers of displaced defensive energy and hulls upon hulls of hard-wrought teltriton, forty thousand crewmen, caught completely off guard, scrambling about a manifold of duties – angling shields, calibrating sensors, establishing communications, manning starfighter squadrons and arming hundreds of quadroturret batteries, all toward the destructive end of _The Unconstant_ _Lover_.

"I think I'll take that vomit now," Nemo whimpers.

"I think I might join you," Two-Bit agrees.

Without warning, a full third of the panels, terminals and monitors currently limning the helm and its two queasy occupants in the muted green of full operation flutter once and die. In the space of a blink, a second third, including roughly half of Two-Bit's shielding station equipment, apparently succumb to peer pressure and follow suit, both mass suicides survived only by those few screens and sensors related to internal systems – weapon and shield power, life support and the like. Two-Bit envisions his momentary confusion shared in wonderful synchronicity with the thousand some members of the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's gunnery teams as their audacious target simply vanishes from all their scopes.

Nemo, mouth agape, glances suspiciously about at his dead instruments. "That was supposed to happen, right?"

"She's fully blindfolded, Cap'n," Abraham, clearly distracted by the copious mathematical and technical responsibilities placed upon him, explains moments too late.

Nemo's suspicions realign to Two-Bit. "I was just testing you."

The next several seconds Two-Bit would later recall as some of the most harrowing he'd ever experienced aboard _The Unconstant_ _Lover_. Two-Bit holds his breath, himself a voluntary, by the loosest sense, passenger to a plastered Nemo's attempts to relocate his boastful money to the general vicinity of his proverbial mouth and fly a blind spaceship a treacherously close distance from the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's uneven surface on a full speed strafing run.

Swelling obstacles are ducked and dodged via no evasive arithmetic save for whatever passes as such in Nemo's booze-addled brain. For the most part, he blazes the trail with an deftness belied by his current state of gross intoxication, piloting the _Lover_ through the host of obstructions with self-evident ease. In addition to which, Abraham's blindfolding appears to be the perfect tool for this particularly impossible job, each quadroturret emplacement they whizz past entirely oblivious to the enemy in their midst until far too late. As far as Two-Bit can ascertain, their presence goes mostly uncontested, at least until they pass the starfighter deployment gantries.

Each of its four hollow arms sprout some distance from corresponding corners of the _Counterattack_ 's prodigious midsection, forming an enormous letter "X" of crosshatched girders and docking clamps. Already, particularly at the outer corners, the first wave of emergency-deploy Spur-class starfighters churn outward to meet their electronically invisible foe. The under-arches looming ahead prove a more potent obstacle and one Nemo narrowly avoids by tilting the _Lover_ diagonally on her axis and sliding scarcely between bracing beams in the roots of the gantry. Upon somehow emerging unharmed on the opposite side, Nemo straightens the _Lover_ backwards and completes the lazy half-finished barrel roll, skimming underbelly to underbelly along the Pylon's bottom, as upside down as one can truly be in the topsy-turvy of space combat.

As the first red laser reprisals streak past the corners of the viewport, Two-Bit allocates the majority of the _Lover's_ ray shielding to encompass her stern quarter, now undoubtedly dogged by pursuing starfighters, and attempts to suggest helpfully to Nemo. "Maybe now'd be a fine time to cast Brondi about his business?"

Nemo, after briefly recoiling as though noticing Two-Bit for the first time, offers a drunken salute, originating some inches above his scalp. "Aye aye, Cap'n!" he jokes, the comparison a little too close to home for Two-Bit's taste.

–––

Moira Quicksilver never necessarily grew accustomed to flying upside down. Practically, there wasn't much difference between whatever angle Nemo could choose to align the ship at – the inertial dampener, as beleaguered as it may have been, could at least be called upon to regulate consistent "up" and "down" sensations within the _Lover_ herself, but for a humanoid who so rigorously drills the notion of balance and physical equilibrium into her subconscious, the notion of flipping oneself a complete one hundred and eighty degrees on the axis to no measurable difference still discomforted and disquieted her somewhat. Moira votes to vent this uneasiness on the first squadron of Spurs unwise enough to enter her firing arc.

Her ammunition window boasts its maximum allowable magazine. The joints and rotator cuffs of her gyroscopic rig are newly oiled to allow totally unhindered movement. The viewport, interior and exterior, was scrubbed until squeaky. The Antagonist itself had been virtually dissembled and reassembled to clean and polish its gears, hammers and all its moving parts.

Moira immediately tarnishes all of that by screeching the topturret fully around and blasting out her virginal canisters in a brilliant green hellstorm toward the disorganized pack of pursuant starfighters. Without time to properly form into full squadrons or even four-member quadrons, her enemies aren't as neatly organized for their own destruction as Moira would typically prefer, but she makes do. She focuses on spraying as wide a swath as she can across the _Lover's_ dorsal quarter, clipping wingtips, fuselages and occasionally cracking cockpits, all the while attempting to minimize misfires, which more often than not spark and steam up pointlessly against the _Counterattack_ 's mother of all ray shields.

Moira, of course, does not go unaided in this endeavor. Glive Garrigan dispatches more than his fair share of starfighters with expertly minimal ammunition, as well as occasionally amusing himself by planting the odd bolt in that tiny keyhole of ray shield vulnerability in the passing quadroturret batteries. Even Nemo lends a hand or, perhaps more accurately, a double-edged sword. He weaves the _Lover_ through a maddening series of slaloms, each within a hair's-breadth of the nearest inverted impediment dangling or protruding from the _Counterattack_ 's asymmetrical underside, apparently the envy of every member of the local Imperium Starfighter Corps, to judge by how often their attempts to imitate him result in explosions. Yet, for all that his unparalleled evasiveness helps to thin the ranks steadily growing behind them, Nemo's abject drunkenness is painfully evident in the manner of his flying – what was once imperiled only by bravado is further now jeopardized by sloppiness, each dodge and maneuver jarringly imprecise, to the point where Moira's own aim suffers beneath the unpredictability of his swerving.

Despite the best efforts of mice and Moira, however, the number of Spurs swilling about their spaceship actually continues to increase rather than decrease as they near the bottom of the _Counterattack_ 's sweeping prow. By now, enough have broken off from the main pursuit behind to circle halfway around and dart in to strafe the _Lover_ from either side, forcing Moira to open her firing arc still further on her port and starboard peripherals. It's when, following the example of one ambitious smattering of a squadron, the starfighters begin circling fully around and bearing down on the oncoming _Lover_ head-on, from the opposite direction, that Moira first tastes their impending failure – ray shields dwindling, surrounded and outnumbered by what she estimates to total somewhere near forty-five starfighters and all their current hopes auspiciously pinned to one Garrok Brondi.

Brondi, who'd been launched uncounted minutes previously in a particularly harrowing sideways deployment gambit Nemo felt like "trying," had fallen strangely silent in the interim. His initial reception among the other starfighters was expectedly frosty and even a nearby quadroturret, seemingly relieved at the prospect of finally having a target, spared a potshot or two in his direction. With the scramble codifier activated, however, he'd satisfyingly disappeared from the preoccupied attentions of both _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ and her forty some followers. Now, with the enemies rapidly cinching the net closed around them, he was more than a little overdue for an update.

"Garrok?" Nemo, trepidation perhaps sobering him somewhat, addresses on a hailed frequency. "You got any good news for me yet?"

The reply is a little long in the returning and Nemo narrowly sidesteps the _Lover_ around a communications antennae before Brondi answers. "Hate to be a spoilsport, Captain," he reports amid a haze of static earned by the blindfolding and grin entirely unearned from anything, "but I'm afraid I gotta make tracks."

Moira's chest tightens. A second silence, awe replaced with dismay and accompanied by a heavy bout of static, floods out from each of the _Lover's_ seven live comm ports and Moira receives her second helping of their imminent defeat. Nemo's reply is no less shaken, though the alcohol is certainly to blame for that. "That'd be mutiny."

"Oh, I don't think so. Not technically," Brondi counters, ensconced in feedback. "I'm the captain of this ship, ain't I?"

"Ten percent wasn't enough for you, Garrok?" Moira deduces bitterly.

"You've got me all wrong. No, Captain, what I want you to take away from this is that I don't much like people hanging my friends out to dry. Or sticking guns in my mouth," he sneers, in a fashion he certainly imagines to be clever. "And for the record," he adds after a moment, "no, it wasn't enough."

The transmission shorts a moment and dies altogether a moment later.

"Fucking smugglers," Nemo sputters, a sentiment Moira mirrors by jerking her Antagonist around and annihilating the nearest starfighter under a shower of ammunition.

"He stole my ship," Abraham comments blandly.

Odisseus is, somewhat understandably, suddenly beside himself. "I tried to warn you, Nemo, I tried to warn you!"

"You've tried to warn him about a lot of things," Moira concurs.

"This seems like a good enough reason to throw up," Nemo appeals, certainly to Two-Bit.

"This seems like a good enough razz to wend back home!"

"Repellent enema," Moira reminds pointedly.

"He stole my ship."

"Well, what then? How do you figure we kuckle out their bombard edgies without the five-and-five?"

Obviously improvising, Danbonte suggests categorically. "Somebody else's gotta shoot their projectors off."

The conclusion is as inescapable as it is unspoken.

"Fine," Moira relents after a beat. "What, prow, stern and under those attitude fins? Could somebody patch me through a copy of those plans? Might wanna give 'em a quick look-see."

"Uh," Odisseus stammers, "maybe I could get Marco to do it. Marco – go, uh, do it."

"Well, you might wanna look lively," Two-Bit instructs. "That's the prow up ahead there."

Moira grudgingly grants the swarming Spurs behind them a moment's respite to crane her neck around and spy, racing toward the _Lover_ at an alarming rate, the bottom point of the Pylon's prow. "Garrigan, think you can handle these clowns?"

"Biggest circus I ever saw, but I'll do what I can."

"That asteroid-humpin', buhox-suckin' brainless son of an odorous motherbloomin' sack of blah, blah, blah stole my _ship_!" Abraham trumpets, undoubtedly spraying his headset microphone in a fine mist of furious spittle. For a split second, Moira notices several of her turret's previously darkened instruments, most notably her targeting sensor, waver to fuzzy life.

"Abraham, asteroid humping later," Odisseus admonishes. "Blindfolding now."

"Everybody hold onto your wozzers," Two-Bit warns with a grimace. "Nemo, are you–?"

"Yeah, yeah," Nemo deflects, alcohol's muddying presence returning full force, "zoom zoom."

Contrary to all her attempts to gird her stomach with lead, even Moira bites back a mouthful of vomit as Nemo dips the _Lover_ Bazward for a fraction of a second, like the recoil on a springboard, in preparation to vault her back upward at full velocity. He opens both boosters for the first time in the engagement and traces the curve of the _Counterattack_ 's sloping prow with the gawky outline of his Briza. The freighter flops rightwise again and it costs Moira most of her finely-honed reflexes and all of her upper body strength to wrench her gyroscopic rig perpendicular to the vertical _Lover_ , Antagonist aimed directly at the prow's passing crest. Without anything resembling the time it would take to properly calculate the generator's actual position or even to visually locate the damn thing before she starts firing, Moira mimics Nemo with his clutchlever and opens her magazine fully up, mourning the truckload of ammunition wasted against the impregnable ray shield covering the prow's lower half. She audibly thanks all the moons when her gamble pays off, an iota of unshielded machinery near the center of her Antagonist's warpath finds itself the unhappy recipient of half a dozen or so blistering hot ditrogen bolts. A shivering ripple sweeps all across the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's enveloping bombard shield.

Moira, halting the canister massacre and withdrawing still-quivering hands from the controls, smirks. "Pew pew."

With both jetboosters so thoroughly activated, skyrocketing past fifteen decks worth of capital-class warship is a speedier, if not necessarily simpler, matter for _The Unconstant_ _Lover_. Seconds later, she surfaces splashingly above the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's proverbial waterline. In the moment before Nemo scrapes her skiddingly to starboard, the flagship once again eclipses Moira's viewport in a breathtaking vista of beige against the bleached white of Baz's polar cap below. She's little time to be struck by its nautical majesty, however, as Nemo pitches his vessel so cruelly into the next turn that Moira's politely whiplashed into next month, courtesy of Gitterswitch Gin and its abusive relationship with her Captain.

"How'd she do?" Nemo barks, flicking the _Lover_ away from a fishtail messy enough to nearly sideswipe the _Counterattack_ and make the Yeltain jetboosters weep.

"No points for style, I'm afraid, but she got the job done," Garrigan's the first to report.

"Ye're sure?"

"Saw the shield buckle myself. If she can make three more shots like that, we might just make it through this after all."

"You know she can hear you," Moira retorts.

"Sure hope she's shellin' attention, then," Two-Bit advises, "'cause I'll be buggered if that ain't the portside attitude fin up ahead there."

With an eye behind toward the starfighter stragglers struggling to copycat Nemo's latest maneuver to explosive results, Moira positions herself, her gyroscopic rig and her residually hot Antagonist fully forward to face her next feat of daring, improvised markswomanship. She also notes, more pressingly perhaps, the fresh squadrons upon squadrons of Spurs boiling out of the deployment gantries ahead. She locates a likely enough bulge on the _Counterattack_ 's teltriton hide to correspond with her admittedly dim recollections of Nemo's pilfered plans and, her target thankfully a ways off yet, settles herself hard in to meet the three score starfighters closing fast.

"How we coming on those schematics?" Moira inquires to anyone within earshot, the cloud of approaching adversaries materializing into specific squadrons and targets. Several telling seconds pass, in which finer details of weapons systems, wing patterns and hull plating introduce themselves on sixty separate starfighters, before Marco's voice, out of both breath and amusement, answers.

"Give me a minute, willya? I only just _made_ it to the gundeck."

"Oh, no rush," Moira snarks. "Really." With that, she wrings the life out of both her triggers to the ensuing onslaught of gunfire. Everything in her turret, the lifeless control panels, the love handles and ladylike curves of the lovely Antagonist, even Moira's own face and limbs, reflects the vibrant green afterglow of the laserfire, busy maiming, mangling and otherwise punishing the advancing flight group for every inch towards the _Lover_. She's able to effectively neutralize a squadron and a half before they break the threshold of their outer range and open some fire of their own. The _Lover's_ forward ray shields absorb a grievous beating. Seconds before they shriek by, Nemo slides the freighter to the port, almost close enough to kiss bombard shields again with the _Counterattack_. He reprises his dance of drunken obstacle dodging, the two fighter hordes regroup and amass for another pass, the attitude fin looms and Marco interrupts the action with more frivolity.

"Captain, what did you _name_ it?"

"What?"

"The schematics. The file they're in," the Mruka implores, frustration more than coloring his tone. "I'm at the imager and I can't find the _fucking_ thing. What did you name it?" Moira prepares a preemptive eye-roll for Nemo's fessing up.

"Uh, try 'My Evil Plan 4.'"

An awkward beat passes as Nemo adjusts the _Lover's_ bearing a notch or two lower to take her cleaner beneath the looming attitude fin. "Yep. _Found_ it."

"Well, whatever – just buzz it up to me," Moira orders harshly, less than confident at the sight of the innumerable hunks of more or less analogous machinery tucked neatly into the fin's capacious shadow.

"It's loading," Marco snaps.

"Fucking sublime."

"We ain't scanty got the edgies for a second go-round," Two-Bit surmises.

Moira wheels the weighty Antagonist to port. "Guess I'm doing _this_ again!" A second before she utters a prayer to the sharpshooter gods she honestly half-believes in, a blank screen to her left bursts into flagrant orange life. Moira sacrifices another second to studying the simulated projector array Marco'd gone to the trouble of highlighting in royal purple. A third second is spent correlating between screen and viewport and, literally as they roar past, Moira flakes four shots against the nearby corners of ray shield and lucks out with the fifth shot directly into the projector's exposed mainframe. The veneer of displaced energy quakes again, seemingly from impact, and returns the favor by rubbing shields together and subsequently elbowing the _Lover_ ever so roughly outward.

"Oh, for moon's sake," Moira invokes in agitation, as she and _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ careen callously to starboard. "That's two of four!"

"Don't get too snuggly," Two-Bit alerts. "We got the big number three coming cracklin' in." Moira relieves her left thumb and pointer finger of trigger duty to scroll, as quickly as she can, through dozens of "My Evil Plan 4"'s attendant screens and schematics in search of her next quarry. Her right hand, the Antagonist and the remainder of her attention occupy themselves by properly positioning the turret for Nemo's upcoming hair-pin turn and submitting a sampling of fresh green punishment to the Spurs flocking together some distance behind the Briza's twin boosters.

"How close you planning on cutting this one, Nemo?" she inquires.

" _Pretty_ close," Nemo admits in a tone one requests a haircut with.

"Excellent," she murmurs, pinpointing the third projector array on the small screen and zooming the object to its highest possible resolution. As near as she could tell, the third projector's position, nestled tightly beneath the second row of engagement thrusters on the _Counterattack_ 's mammoth engine bank, could easily be kept in her sights during Nemo's upcoming hair-pin turn. The engine bank, that gargantuan rectangle of teltriton they'd nearly warped into what felt like hours ago, swells and swells in the viewport ahead, Moira prepares her pivot by placing a jackboot against the cupboard coincidentally containing her hidden top-shelf Gitter vintage, considers a hasty swig, thinks of Nemo, immediately decides against it and, as said boozehound tilts the ship to starboard slightly in preparation of its quite sudden pitch in the opposite direction, holds her breath.

What Moira hadn't anticipated was quite how disastrously Nemo would mistime his turn. He banks to port drastically too early, a mistake even laughable pilot Moira recognizes the idiocy of at a glance. On top of which, he attempts the turn at such a rapid speed that, should the _Lover_ even so much as clip the side of the Pylon's engine bank, the force of impact would not only power their own bombard shield into nothing, but also peel the Briza open on her portside like a CryoChew Extinct Jerky carton.

Nemo's habitual avarice meant his turn of course hadn't taken velocity, torsion or any other mathematical factor into account. The six and a half bottles of alcohol so recently ingested meant none of his seven some years of practical flying experience could realistically be relied upon. All things considered, Moira's honestly surprised that his first major tactical error had come so late in the game; had she any more time before collision or any more space within her cramped topturret, she'd kick herself.

She kicks instead off the compartment in tune with Nemo's calamitously-timed turn, reasoning that if she's about to be sucked into open space and die a horrifying, asphyxiating death, she's at least going to bring one more projector array down with her. The Antagonist grinds around, triple-chambers ablaze toward the last supposed location of the _Counterattack_ 's bombard shield projector. By some miracle almost certainly unintentional on Nemo's part, like a boozy hiccup or a twitch of the yoke, _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ skirts inches past the engine bank's corner. Their contradictory bombard shields butt heads for the third time, shoving the freighter outward on its curving trajectory and straight into the path of the _Counterattack_ 's titanic blue engine wash.

A three-part harmony of patched screaming erupts from any of the _Lover's_ crew close enough to a window to see their instant doom-by-incineration coming. Moira herself, attention still focused on the finally bull's-eyed projector array, doesn't notice this specific doom until Nemo's practically dismembered the yoke from the helm in his frenzied attempt to pull up. Her Captain again blessed by some evasive godsend, the _Lover's_ ray shields receive the brunt of the blistering blow, scorching them entirely into oblivion and only Garrigan's continued scream of fright indicating the narrowness of his survival. Unharmed save for their dearly departed ray shielding and the undoubtedly extensive scorch marks all along her underside, _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ scampers, wounded, away from the rank and file of thrusters and into the relative safety of the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's starboard broadside once more.

"Would you fucking _quit_ that?" Garrigan protests in a decidedly "outdoor" voice. "I almost got flambéed back there!"

"Whoops," is all Nemo can offer as an apology.

"Did Moira at least tag that edgie projector?" Two-Bit attempts to confirm.

"You all owe me a drink," she informs by way of confirmation.

"What about me? Who owes me a drink?" Nemo huffily objects.

"Nobody. That's who," Odisseus is quick to deny.

"Maybe we'd best hink about the after-party beanos later," Two-Bit recommends nervously. "We got the terming projector to hink about just now."

For the first time since her hasty conscription into Brondi's vacated job, Moira marvels they've lasted three shields projectors at all. Only in that small crevice of her animal brain where Moira enjoys gunfights, pistol-whips and riding topturret did she even half-expect they'd somehow claw a victory from the covetous grasp of overwhelming defeat. On one hand, they're opposed by superior firepower, approximately twenty-two squadrons of enemy starfighters, the _Lover's_ general state of advanced disrepair and a Captain hammered completely out of his gourd. On the other hand, their foe boasts nothing but a single working bombard shield projector between themselves and relative helplessness.

Weighing both possibilities as they race toward their next target, Moira logically can't pick a side.

Chapter 23

Belton Grange graduated with valedictorian honors from the Imperial Naval Academy on Mezzr with a primary scholastic focus on Practical Astrocommunications and his first love and personal hobby, Theoretical Warp Engineering, relegated to an auxiliary focus. He'd shipped out, the day after graduation, as Thirteenth Deck's Second Chief Warrant Communications Officer aboard the newly christened flagship, the _Exacting Counterattack_ , under the command of Campaign Admiral Dreffek, bound for Baz and the Galactic Menace. Subsequently, he never looked back.

Only on four separate occasions during the past seventeen months aboard had he been summoned personally to the second command bridge of the Pylon, a ship so extensive it required three individual control centers to operate with any degree of efficiency. Only on this most recent sojourn from his regular posting in the midship's engineering deck, this fifth such summons, did he actually bother to hustle.

Specific details were more than a little nebulous at present, particularly for a link so low on the chain of command it was practically dragging on the floor. However, the "engagement stations" alarm flooding each of the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's fifteen decks had persisted approximately seven minutes too long to indicate another blockade run from one of Boss Ott's numerous vassals and approximately three minutes too long to indicate a second ill-conceived frontal assault against the Pylon by those same powers. Therefore, Belton Grange or Bel8, as standard military shorthand for the alphabetically eighth "B-E-L" non-combat personnel aboard had dubbed him, deemed it unwise to keep his commanding officers waiting.

For all his haste, it's an exceedingly brief voyage from his technician's nook to the centrally located Bridge Two, though over a considerable distance. A short jog to the nearest lift tube, a bogglingly fast flight past Decks Twelve through Seven and, before he's even fully registered the transition, he's standing at attention in Bridge Two, the official heart and brain of the _Exacting Counterattack_ , before Second Captain Jeldine and Campaign Admiral Dreffek.

Jeldine, outfitted somewhat unnecessarily in full dress uniform and leaning possessively over the shoulders and instruments of the hapless crewman before her, opens her mouth to acknowledge Belton's arrival, when the siren blaring overhead suddenly switches to an unrecognizable pitch and the screen before her bursts into fresh alerts and warnings. "And that's the last projector. Bombard shields are officially deactivated."

Dreffek stands some distance officiously apart from the proceedings, garbed in a mildly more casual version of the High Commander's uniform, woven a specialized silk no one beside top military brass and perhaps the Emperor himself are even permitted to wear. The Admiral remains the only Sybolo Belton has ever laid eyes on; complete with methane processor masking the majority of his face and minute pink cilium dotting his exposed pink ectoplasm. "And the auxiliaries?"

"Won't go online for another three or four minutes," Jeldine reports gravely. "If they're going to have a shot at whatever it is they're planning, it's going to be now, Admiral." Dreffek's expression remains inscrutable beneath his mask and Jeldine, stymied, returns her attention for a beat to the technician seated before her. "Inform the _Valdega_ and request top speed. Warrant Officer Bel8," she addresses abruptly, adjusting her focus to Belton, "we have a situation."

"I've gathered as much, Captain." He extends due platitudes to Dreffek. "Campaign Admiral."

The Sybolo nods politely. "Sailor."

"A rogue vessel, lightly armed and lightly armored freighter-class with only circumstantial ties to the Menace's network, emerged out of an illegal warp transaction within blockade airspace thirteen and one half minutes ago," Jeldine hastily briefs. "In those thirteen and one half minutes, they've somehow managed to incapacitate all four of our primary bombard shield projector arrays. For the moment, the ray shields remain intact, we've deployed almost a fourth of our starfighter reserves and manned every battery on board but, to put it commonly, we simply can't find the bastards."

"Captain," Dreffek chides.

"Apologies, Admiral." Jeldine inches toward the console, as if to prove her point. "Whether they've somehow obtained a cloaking device–"

"For the last time, Captain, they don't have a cloaking device," Dreffek again counters. "That technology is years beyond even our own field testing."

"Well," Jeldine, further stymied, straightens her posture. "Whatever the case may be, all our shipborne sensory systems – gunnery targeting, your own astrocommunications, even the individual computers aboard the deployed squadrons, have utterly failed to even register their presence. Only via old-fashioned eye-sight targeting have the fighters been able to engage and even there, only limitedly."

"Any ideas?" Dreffek proposes.

Belton shrugs. "They're blindfolding."

Both of his superior officers bristle a moment. "Your ploy with the inverted sensors?"

"This isn't some manner of tampering?" Jeldine suggests.

Advancing toward the nearest of the command disk's four terminals, Belton begins to unbutton the restrictive cuffs of his operating uniform. "Not if they disappeared from the fighter's sensors as well. A scramble feed wouldn't have that kind of precision. No," he resolves, pushing and clasping the sleeve in place above his elbow, "this sort of thing is always something internal, something they've done to themselves." He glances back once toward the Second Captain and the Campaign Admiral, freezing in his actions. "Beg your pardon, Admiral."

Dreffek waves him off as Jeldine questions, "But you claimed this 'blindfolding' technique was extremely taxing to maintain, even while stationary. A ship like that–"

"Is vastly smaller than a Pylon, Captain. Sure, their sensors might be more primitive, but they've got much less ground to cover. Even in motion, a talented enough technician could, with some effort, achieve these sorts of results."

Dreffek raises his approximation of an eyebrow. "Could you?"

"With time."

"We need to be able to target them, Bel8," Jeldine confesses. "With our bombard shields offline, we–"

"Have they targeted our ray shields?" Belton attempts to clarify, reaching for the opposite sleeve.

"No, though–"

"With all due respect, Captain, what do you imagine they're attempting to do?"

The Admiral and the Captain exchange looks. "Captain Jeldine," Dreffek summarizes, "fears the worst. Can you find a way to target them?"

"Affirmative, Admiral. I'll need a direct connection to the main sensory computer, override clearance and any industrial information you have on the ship in question." Finishing fastening his second sleeve, he shoots a glance to the adjacent technician. "Probably that chair as well."

At signal from the Captain, the crewman scurries aside and Belton usurps his position, requiring less than half a minute to familiarize himself with the relatively extrinsic controls he'd only once before personally operated; when he'd established the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's recently discarded blindfolding procedure. By the end of that minute, a digital dossier pops onto screen, introducing Belton Grange to the engineering nightmare that was _The Unconstant_ _Lover_.

"Briza Light Freighter, Model IZ36. Legally registered under the name "Osprey," quite clearly an alias. Current captain's one Morel, typical pirate scum. Substantial posting throughout the Ring. This number's been a fairly visible thorn in our sides lately. Tangled with Insurgent Company, destroyed the _Indurna_ a number of months ago."

Belton blinks. "Is that...?"

"Obviously," Jeldine allows, words catching in her throat. "some _modifications_ are present."

"They removed the..." Belton reasons. "And instead there's a..."

"Is there a problem, Bel8?"

Belton banishes the bewilderment with a shake of his head. "No, no, Captain. That just, uh, never occurred to me." He dials a few establishing commands to the _Counterattack_ 's sensory package as he makes his hypothesis. "Normally, blindfolding leaves a sensory shadow, if you understand me, a void or a lacuna, where there should at least be empty space. But here, with these, um..." he clears his throat, " _engines_ , I suppose, there'll be exhaust."

"Exhaust?" Jeldine struggles to comprehend.

"These outmoded Yeltain models were embarrassingly poor at waste recirculation. Needless to say, with not one, but two of these accelerator jetboosters, there'll be a substantial exhaust trail. An exhaust trail we can trace."

Dreffek shifts his weight. "How?"

"With an algorithm." Belton deposits one hand to the keypad, the other to the control wheel and launches into operation.

Abstruse work such as this granted Belton as decent an excuse as any to phase out the protocol, the doctrine and the dogma of his stratified life in the Imperium Navy and devote his considerable mental energy to unraveling a problem worthy of actual consideration. Jeldine, Dreffek, even Bridge Two's scores of display screens and buzzing population of crewmen, fade into tableau as Belton knuckles down. With all the _Counterattack_ 's sensors employed to detect traces of the chemical residue, a few computational prerequisites extrapolated and the resulting formula beamed to every targeting and communications matrix aboard, this _Unconstant_ _Lover_ is rendered visible on all external scopes within a matter of seconds from the final keystroke of input.

"You've done it!" Jeldine exclaims.

Dreffek nods in modest approval. "Excellent work, Warrant Officer Bel8."

Belton, however, only scowls at the projection of his revealed spaceship. "What are they doing?"

Depicted as a Briza-shaped silhouette of brilliant cobalt on Belton's sensory window, _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ loops wide, unmitigated circles around the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's stern quarter, at improbable speed and with extremely erratic handling. Broadside batteries, just recently gifted with accurate targeting, fire their quadroturrets more or less as blindly as they had a moment ago. Meanwhile, equally disoriented Spur squadrons, represented on Belton's screen by clusters of red pinpricks, attempt strafing runs past and around the freewheeling freighter to no avail, so unpredictable are the _Lover's_ fluctuations of bearing and angle as it zips its inscrutable circuits around the Pylon.

To judge from the infectious silence behind him, both the Second Captain and the Campaign Admiral are stricken as baffled as Belton is. A few keystrokes and some control wheel scrolling later, Belton regards the lopsided heat expenditure readings and flops back in his seat, checked entirely by amazement. "They've deactivated a main engine. I believe the tramp term is 'clubhauling'? You see here," he indicates with a middle finger, "only the portside jetbooster is functioning, allowing them to rotate with all that torque and speed. Masterful."

"Why?" Jeldine stammers.

"Evasive maneuvers," Belton hypothesizes. "They ascertained, somehow, that we'd managed to pin a bead on them and so they started," he waves a vague gesture toward the screen, "doing this."

"What does it mean?" Dreffek presses.

"That whomever is commanding that vessel a strategist of the purest genius."

–––

Odisseus just wishes he'd stop screaming. Bedside manner notwithstanding, _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ Ortoki mechanic, voice of reason and, at this particular moment, last real hope of survival, finds it strangely difficult to regain what's left of his own composure when the vessel's Captain, the man ostensibly responsible for the individual lives of each and every crewman aboard, won't stop screaming like a little girl.

From what admittedly little information he could glean during the sixteen seconds tameless inertia has him pinned against the helm's navpanel, Odisseus surmises that something in Starboard, the rightmost jetbooster, has gone quite indisputably haywire and made the executive decision to, rather than simply rolling with this latest punch, deactivate entirely. With the spastic inertial dampener returned to its old tricks and the unsung entrance of the _Lover's_ brake light on the ignored dashboard as his evidence, Odisseus deduces, in less than thirty seconds, the identity of the culprit, having mentally gathered the combustion cavity, the pressure helix and the fuel contractor as suspects in the proverbial library.

Two-Bit Switch whips wild circles, strapped into the co-pilot's gyroscopic rig tighter than a mental patient in a straight jacket. "So, anybody got any fucking flashes?"

"The pressure helix blew!" Odisseus reveals at the top of his lungs.

"I thought you _fixed_ it!" Nemo accuses at the same volume as his panicked screaming.

"It's the _other_ one!"

In a scene unhappily reminiscent of their penultimate arrival at Takioro Defederate Station, _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ , one booster blaring, the other dead as Danboowui, flies perilous and unintentional circles with some rear section of the _Exacting Counterattack_ as their epicenter. Nemo, while voicing his apparent concern most vociferously, somehow manages to maintain the Briza at some dubious level of control despite both the ship's obvious infirmity and his obvious inebriation. Two-Bit would need to be a good deal less hogtied to be of any use to anyone. As for Odisseus, who'd intended to visit the helm for a brief moment to reroute power from a handful of auxiliary systems to the expired ray shields, found himself decorating the opposite wall with all three hundred of his furry, press-ganged pounds, courtesy of a little displaced gravity.

That very same gravity currently barring him from his duties in favor of an awkward canoodle with the navpanel rather suddenly releases Odisseus from its artificial grip and is subsequently responsible for tossing him tumblingly toward his erstwhile objective across the helm. Landing practically head first into the shielding mainframe's regulation controls, the Ortok weathers the storm with five claws sunk deep into the cushioning of the nearest crewman's chair as he fiddles with the delicacies of combination codes and power percentages. Three-quarters of a revolution later, at the expense of onboard plumbing and a few minor electrical systems, the _Lover's_ ray shields are laboriously returned at a not-unimpressive sum of 42%. This achieved, it's of course Nemo who advances Odisseus' next seemingly impossible task.

"So, is anybody gonna do something about this whole death-circles thing, or...?"

Growling a string of garbled profanity that Odisseus himself would have considerable difficulty translating into Commercial, the Ortok extracts his claws from the bracing support of the chair, literally bumps into the door release button and stumbles bodily out of the helm.

Ortoki physiology doesn't care two whits about hours logged aboard a moving starship or the accumulation of space legs thereof. Try as he might to retain some level of personal balance, Odisseus is left entirely to the mercy of the malfunctioning inertial dampener as he staggers his way through the corridors and hallways of a spaceship pitching as violently as might an ancient wood and canvas number upon actual seas. The remedy, he supposes, would be a relatively simple matter of programming a little more sense into the drive motor via the emergency deactivation panel. In order to even be presented with such a chance to save the day, however, Odisseus would need to actually _reach_ the engine room before Nemo crashed into something, which was, all things considered, no small feat indeed.

The journey between helm and hold reminds Odisseus more of some cruelly abusive funhouse than the spaceship upon which he'd lived and worked these past sixteen months. The observation ceiling roofing the main abovedecks corridor flashes terrifyingly nonsensical images of the Pylon's surface as the _Lover_ rockets around it, as well as split-second out-of-context glimpses of Spurs flying, firing and otherwise ducking for cover from the rampaging freighter. An outlandish yet unmistakably accented voice chants something forbidding and nautical from the direction of the sensor room. To both his and Odisseus' surprise, Marco the Mange, certifiably weightless amongst all the rollicking gravity, plows ungainly out of the ajar gundeck door and into the opposite wall. With no further explanation necessary, Odisseus snatches the airborne Mruka by the belt and elbows open the door release to the hold.

If her abovedecks is a demented funhouse, the _Lover's_ cargo hold is a homicidal tilt-a-whirl. Like Marco, any of the assorted detritus lighter than the average humanoid, from empty consignment crates, loose Iniquity cards to even the much-maligned sacks of unspaced garbage, are susceptible to the charms of both partial weightlessness and being hurled carelessly about on the whims of the seemingly maniacal inertial dampener. After one embarrassing spill down the companionway stairs that could possibly have broken Marco's nose, the Ortok, with bleeding Mruka in tow, navigates the crossfire of flung items with little incident, before scrambling top speed down the access ladder into the cramped, but markedly safer engine room.

Having formulated his plan of attack on the scramble down, Odisseus sentences Marco to fuel adjudication duty while he clings to the emergency deactivation panel for support. Prepping the shutdown routine and waiting for Marco and his smashed muzzle to squeeze into position at the manual intake lever, Odisseus hails Nemo to warn him of the sudden pending amelioration of his vessel.

"Try not to vomit on everything," he advises and, on signal from Marco, toggles two switches, snaps three valves closed and whacks the instrument panel once for good measure. With all his weight, Marco shoves the three-foot-tall lever as erect as he can manage.

Wailing like a misbehaving toddler, Port settles into her more normal spewing and hissing and, after a beat, Starboard resurrects herself to similar sputtering and eventual hissing. The entire _Unconstant_ _Lover_ shudders and retches from recoil, as though recovering herself from a boozy bender identical to the one her Captain still labors under.

The situation was far from ideal. The pressure helix remained completely out of commission, probably broken into multiple pieces. Thusly, a certain underling who shall remain Marco the Mange would be required to doggedly man the fuel intake lever anytime Nemo needed to brake or turn. With some elbow grease and much more of Nemo's habitual good luck, however, it would at least keep them afloat, something Odisseus needed, for his own sanity's sake, to mark up as a victory.

All Nemo needed to do now was switch from automatic to manual.

"Okay, you're gonna open the panel next to your...starboard kneecap, alright?" Odisseus instructs into the comm as Starboard continues its slow grind into full operation. "Inside, there'll be two green switches and you're gonna flip both of them. Tell me when you've done that."

"I see four switches," he reports.

"You should see two."

"Yeah, I'm not seeing too good."

Odisseus slaps his thighs helplessly. " _Fine!_ " he barks, storming as much as one can storm on hands and knees, toward the access ladder again. Marco whimpers something unintelligible, Odisseus retorting with further orders against moving from his post on not only pain of personal death but also potentially those of everyone else aboard.

Minutes later, after a return trip made uneventful by the now-functional and seemingly repentant inertial dampener, Odisseus practically punches the relevant door release into a concave and stomps into the helm, sweaty, out of breath, claws extended and passingly contemplating mutiny via good old-fashioned disembowelment.

Nemo shoots a glance over his shoulder at the incensed Ortok. "What kept you?"

"I was busy not killing you." Odisseus tramples his way across a helm the recent engine trouble had made yet messier than the one he'd left behind, were such a thing indeed possible. Two-Bit seems to have ceased his senseless spinning and now busies himself manning what remains of the ray shields. Nemo, apparently cool as a space cucumber, calmly coasts _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ far starboard of the _Exacting Counterattack_ at a comparatively reduced speed, considering both boosters still struggle on automatic.

Batting Nemo aside with a cuff across the scalp and a fangs-bared glower, Odisseus stoops before the aforementioned open panel and, in the space of about two seconds, locates and flips both indicated green switches. No sooner has he done this, of course, that the entire ship hiccups emphatically to the starboard, as though from impact. Odisseus, fortuitously positioned, slams his temple into the nearby dashboard, yelping in pain and surprise.

"Wasn't that supposed to fix it?" Nemo complains, professedly as surprised as his saltbrother.

Odisseus draws a bloody paw away from his brow. "It was supposed to."

"Nag, somethin' biffed us!" Two-Bit updates. "Edgies just dropped to 28%."

"Fighters?"

"Gee, lemme just stick me maggie out the window and have a vizz!" Two-Bit snaps.

"I've got visual and you're not gonna like it," the patched voice of Moira volunteers from Odisseus' belted comm and Nemo and Two-Bit's headsets. "The Pylon just opened up on us."

All three pirates simultaneously pale.

"Lucky shot?" Nemo proposes, the poster child for wishful thinking.

"Don't think so. No idea how, but I think they found themselves targeting. I recommend you move your ass."

"So noted." He turns to Odisseus for approval. "May I...?"

"Be my guest," Odisseus growls and rises from his stoop.

With a heartbeat of delay and an ensuing roar, Nemo motors the clutchlever to the floor. Odisseus belatedly regrets standing up as he's backhanded brusquely into the navigator's seat. To Moira's credit and everyone's dismay, an ocean of hateful red laserfire, launched from so many quadroturret batteries, washes over _The Unconstant_ _Lover_. Only by Nemo's rapid boost and Two-Bit's sudden re-angling of the ray shield do they prevent instantaneous destruction. The Briza still takes a sizable beating, buffeting from side to side as though shaken by the shoulders and half a hundred dashboard and console lights blink furious warnings from the shield mainframe.

"Edgies at 6%!" Two-Bit hollers above the commotion of the rattling freighter and Nemo's continued attempts to muscle more speed from the boosters.

A second volley, originating from an entirely fresh stretch of the _Counterattack_ 's broadside batteries is averted with a harsh dive down toward Baz's distant atmosphere and another flipping of Odisseus' apparently acrobatic stomach. A third volley quickly thwarts this evasion, from yet another fresh section of quadroturrets that evidently anticipated Nemo's dodge and aimed accordingly. Streaking red death comes racing toward the recovering _Lover_ and is only ducked when Nemo paradoxically rolls into the blast. The dregs of the ray shield are utterly obliterated by the lower limits of the barrage. The freighter skirts still deeper toward the planet in response.

"Edgies're gone – Odi, you'd best fangle something or we're bannies in a boo-boo."

Odisseus, forcing himself out of the chair, makes time to eye Two-Bit strangely as he plods his way to the mainframe. "Well, we can't have that."

For all his previous ramming of the panic button, Nemo appears oddly unperturbed by these dire events unfolding around him and his adored spaceship. At least, such is how he certainly appeared to a superficial and cursory glance. The firmness of his jaw suggests clenched teeth and the near imperceptible twitching of his upper lip implies something like the ghost of a snarl, both idiosyncrasies discernible only to Odisseus, the galaxy's foremost expert on the mutable moods of Nehel Morel.

While Odisseus converts a considerable chunk of system power from both turrets toward the revival of the ray shields, Nemo negotiates _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ through various ditrogen-related embroilments via every last trick in the deep space jockey's handbook. All the while, the Briza banks sharply away from the Pylon at an obtuse angle, much to the chagrin of the Ortok's best efforts to keep any stable footing. With ray shields restored to 63% strength and both turrets little more than shiny expensive popguns, Odisseus slams himself back into the shield station chair. Nemo initiates phase two with a shrill bellow into the comm. "Danbonte!"

"You rang?" The redskin's voice is calm to the point of counterfeit.

"You ready to get off your ass and do something?"

"Just gimme the signal, Cap'n," Danbonte affirms, "and things'll sure get interesting in a hurry."

"Little too interesting for my taste as it stands," Abraham opines.

Two-Bit nods vigorously. "I'll second that."

"Odi!" Nemo shouts into his headset, before catching sight of the Ortok over his right shoulder. "Or, um, whoever's in the engine room, I guess?"

"That'd," Marco chimes in with a wheeze of exertion, "be me."

"On my signal, you're gonna give me half of whatever fuel we got left and on my second signal, you're gonna give me the other half."

"Uh," Marco hesitates, clearly sharing Odisseus' about-to-be-voiced objection, "aye aye?"

"And what about afterwards, Nemo? What about landing?"

Nemo flashes him a half-grimace as though his bottom lip was snagged by a fisherman's hook. "Don't remind me."

With an apparently acceptable distance from the Pylon achieved, he twists the yoke in the opposite direction harsh enough to perfectly center the _Exacting Counterattack_ in the viewport and coincidentally in their forward-facing torpedo launcher's sights. "Two-Bit," he commands in a queer foreboding mutter, "angle everything double-forward. Marco, feed me the first half of the fuel. Danbonte," he squeezes in before an incoming wall of capital-class laserfire rocks the ray shields and the ship beneath it, "pick your target and start shooting."

With that, the clutchlever kisses the plate. After a second for the fuel to properly feed into both boosters, _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ springs forward with such thrusting velocity that Odisseus fleetingly imagines a cartoonish dust cloud kicked up behind them. The mounting momentum doesn't abate, however. All the emptied fuel into the boosters gooses them to still higher and higher speeds, the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's two further points inching past the edges of the viewport.

The first of Danbonte's launched Wolfsbane torpedoes achieves even greater speed. Like a mother lonktonk leading her tonklings across a dangerous street, it spearheads a chain of identical missiles straight into the waiting arms of another quadroturret barrage.

One might call it providence or fate or something equally esoteric but, considering Nemo's presence, Odisseus was inclined to blame sheer dumbass luck as the string of repellent-loaded projectiles hurtle unharmed past the expansive cloud of laserfire. The barrage is not entirely toothless, however; forced to content itself by obliterating both Odisseus' recent hard work and the last scraps of the _Lover's_ double-layered ray shield instead. Still, the _Counterattack_ swells and swells through the viewport and, by the Ortok's hurried calculations, the procession of war-crime-level explosives ought to reach their intended target, a pleasingly narrow section of the Pylon's anchoring spine, before the broadside batteries can muster another round.

Out of the corner of Odisseus' eye, Nemo begins to mouth murmured obscenities with growing intensity. "You fuckos with your standard operating procedure and your manifest blowbagging destiny and your chipper little uniforms with those pretentious fuckin' cufflinks and shit..." The _Lover_ chases the torpedo parade toward their targeted area, Odisseus has the foresight to clip his own safety belts into place and Nemo's stream-of-drunken-consciousness tirade increases in fervor and lunacy, all directed toward the Imperium warship closer and closer ahead. "You blooming fucking bastards think you own everything you shit on. You're those cunt-guzzling sons of bleeders that wanna stamp everybody with a bar code and buy them health insurance and throw bread to the lonktonks on sunny afternoons."

"Uh, Nemo...?" Odisseus coughs, as the _Lover_ and her ten Wolfsbane torpedoes close to spitting distance to the _Counterattack_.

"Well, you're shit outta luck today, bitches, because I'm Captain fucking Nemo and bloom me, is it getting hot in here or am I just _blowing you the shit up_!" he screams, a nanosecond before the vanguard torpedo makes first contact with the side of the Pylon.

The effect is immediate and galaxy-encompassing. With no bombard shield to protect it, the Wolfsbane torpedo ignores any excuses to the contrary and soars straight up the Pylon's proverbial skirts to detonate clean against the naked hull. Having never actually seen a Wolfsbane torpedo fired in action before, Odisseus has little frame of reference, save one very unpleasant afternoon in the jungle, on what precisely to expect, but the ensuing explosion, compounded tenfold by the following nine torpedoes, certainly doesn't disappoint.

It seems to the Ortok, in that breathless, harrowing moment before Nemo twists the yoke entirely to port and weasels mere inches past the outer edges of the chaos, that a significant portion of the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's port quarter has been instantaneously replaced by a blossoming flower of orange fire, big as life and rending to smote ruins anything unfortunate enough to be caught between. Hunks of blackened teltriton, contorted beyond recognition and still traced in burning doxychoraphum, shoot past the viewport at such incredible speed and frequency that Two-Bit's forced to raise their own bombard shields at maximum power to prevent being shredded to bits themselves. As Nemo slants the freighter on her invisible axis to prepare for the second run, Odisseus is equal parts thrilled and horrified to catch sight of the carnage in their wake.

Through the haze of wreckage, igniting repellent and the silent screaming deaths of hundreds of crewmen, Odisseus can clearly discern the _Exacting Counterattack_ in two separate and drastically disproportionate pieces, the area sundry to the prow ripping free of the Pylon's main body even as he watches. The last defiant strings of hull plating and power cable caught between wrench and snap loose, the pure dynamism of the explosion spinning the smaller section lazily away. The longer section, somewhat resembling a decapitated snake bleeding doxychoraphum and naval officers out its neck wound, reels somewhat, thruster failsafes engaging to absorb the brunt of the blow and maintain some shaky degree of frontal integrity. Odisseus exhales and shares an expression of mystified terror with Two-Bit at both their seemingly berserk Captain, the act of mass murder he just committed and its counterpart he was currently preparing. By all appearances, as appalling as it now appeared, their plan was somewhat successful, thus far, at least.

Their progress flying far to the _Counterattack_ 's port goes entirely uncontested by the broadside batteries, understandably preoccupied by the small problem of the front of their ship going 'boom'. "Danbonte?" Nemo calls into the receiver. "You ready for another?"

"Uh, sure," the somewhat-traumatized humanoid mumbles back. "Lemme just..."

"You got maybe, twenty seconds?" Nemo estimates. He grinds the freighter into another nail-biting swerve to properly face the remaining two-thirds of the _Exacting Counterattack_ and shoves more orders down the comm. "Marco! Feed me the rest of the fuel."

Odisseus fumbles for his comm. "Wait, Marco, maybe you should–"

Before he can muster a proper objection, _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ stalls, churns her boosters a moment and belches forward again toward the lopsided figure of the headless Pylon. Struggling against the surplus G-force left behind by the lax inertial dampener, Odisseus leans as close to the helmsmen's chair as he physically can, to shout over the sound of the blasting boosters. "Nemo? Did we forget about landing again?"

Nemo's reply, partially muffled by the sound of Danbonte firing the eleventh through twentieth Wolfsbane torpedoes, hardly serves to comfort Odisseus' compounding concerns. "Oh. Landing. Right."

Odisseus jabs a finger directly at him. "Exactly. How do you propose we do that with no fuel?"

This Nemo seems to ruminate over a moment, zoning distractedly out towards a nearby blank panel on the dashboard as _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ and her ten-torpedo-long lance of soon-to-be-exploding doxychoraphum charge once more unto the breach. At the last moment, mere seconds before the first torpedo's impact, he spares a glance back to Odisseus, seemingly to tender a theory. "Do you think we could–"

"Nemo!" Two-Bit howls as the first Wolfsbane ruptures into the pertinent patch of the Pylon's exposed hull and all the viewport is painted flagrant orange.

Years later, Odisseus, nor any crewmember aboard, could never quite be called upon to reliably explain or depict precisely what next happened. Beyond the pervasive and unmitigated orange that seemed to burn itself into his eyeballs, Odisseus would dimly recall a dreadful shake and rattle such as the _Lover_ had never experienced. A recurrent rain of shorn teltriton shards, odd and ends literally thrown into the lurch and corpses, half on fire, the other half frozen, were fleetingly visible in the Ortok's memory, as well as the nebulous sensation of two massive metallic hulks, cross-sectioned like a schematic, drifting apart on either side of the viewport, their individual borders traced in vibrant, glowing doxychoraphum.

The next sensation Odisseus is keenly aware of involves the rapidly growing shape of Baz's blanched ball, the terrified whining of all the dashboard's emergency alerts and, most saliently, the distant sound of both of _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ jetboosters stuttering independently once or twice, wheezing an impressive quantity of exhaust and, apparently deciding to simply call it a day at that, both dropping dead in complete unison.

Fifth Interlude

Two-Bit Switch had a secret weapon. In his considered opinion, there was no better circumstance under which to negotiate a standing contract with a potential business partner than that potential business partner's potential drunkenness. To Two-Bit's specific knowledge, there was no faster, cheaper or more efficient way to ensure the level of wretched, ruthless, balls-to-the-wall intoxication that he preferred for such circumstances as that sordid chemical nightmare known only as the Bile Backwash.

A station-wide oddity and the signature drink of Takioro's dirtiest tavern, the Bile Backwash, according to local legend, had first been spawned during an especially happy hour in The Bloody Afterburn, uncounted years before Two-Bit's time. In order to service the thirsts of his clamoring patronage, antediluvian bartender Roger, yet to be deemed Unhappy, had apparently been forced to combine the disparate dregs of several dozen some remnant boozes into the single hodgiest-podge of a slipshod grog imaginable.

The validity of this tale Two-Bit certainly couldn't attest to, but whatever the case may be, the Bile Backwash had established a well-earned reputation as the single hardest drink in station, a cruel joke to play on tourists, some weapon of high-octane chemical warfare and the ace up Two-Bit's sleeve when it came to the negotiation of freelance crime.

By way of example, the trick had worked famously with Nabdres No-Cock. While, to be fair, that partnership had so recently ended with harsh words and four canisters delivered to Two-Bit's lower extremities, he remained hopeful that this new potential client would be as susceptible to the Backwash's charms as the old Diraaqi had been.

Come to think of it, his most recent business meeting to date, the one his potential client had so thoughtfully flown him to distant Laerto for, might possibly have gone Two-Bit's way, if only he'd had the foresight to bottle a little Backwash to ply his promising patron with.

Unhappy Roger, whose continued existence was attributable only to divine intervention by the patron saint of old farts, had placed a quartet of the frothing, poisonous bastards atop Two-Bit's table at arm's length and with nothing more than a melancholy grumble for a further comment. Two of his prospective clients, oblivious to their incipient liver damage, had pawed up their respective tankards with matching eagerness and suspicion, though the third client had altogether neglected to move a muscle toward the offered alcohol.

As encouragement, Two-Bit Switch offered his favorite toast: "to taking what don't belong to you." This latest mug represented the fifteenth or sixteenth such helping of the pungent mess he'd ever imbibed and subsequently, he favored his chances on coming out the other side with his metabolism more or less intact, a decision he immediately regretted upon allowing the vile fluid to touch his lips.

Had he performed fellatio on an exhaust vent, Two-Bit couldn't imagine the sensation would be quite so unpleasant as this sudden reminder of the Backwash's dreadful potency. Certainly intending to cause further mayhem in the following minutes and hours, the cocktail immediately set about dissolving his teeth into a paste and sludging its way unbidden down his throat.

To say Two-Bit coughed or cleared his throat afterwards would be a laughable understatement, as he endeavored to hack the revolting swill and the majority of his innards with it back into the steaming depths of his ale-jack, a sentiment clearly shared by his drinking mates.

Nemo, the one Two-Bit assumed to be the leader, a black-haired humanoid only remarkable for his capacity to cram that much mischief into his smile, reeled backward in his chair as though shot and actually managed to wrestle out a curse as the alcohol had its heinous way with his mouth. "Oh, tie my balls to the fuselage and keelhaul me all the way to Spithax!"

"Moons," Two-Bit shivered after the swallow, "I always blank on how painful that actually is."

Directly across the table, Odisseus, the one Two-Bit assumed to be the bodyguard, a three-hundred pound behemoth of shaggy brown fur and distrustful glowers, practically hyperventilated himself with his frantic sniffing and tossing of his head, repeatedly batting at his nose with the massive paw unoccupied by holding the tankard. He snarled something unintelligible, though Two-Bit was unclear whether it was some bestial tongue he simply didn't understand or merely a sound of animalistic protest.

The Captain commiserated emphatically. "I know! I can't feel my tongue!"

"Oh, that'll hoof it in a few hours. You don't wanna hink about that."

"You wanna worry about the hangover." To his right, Quicksilver, the one Two-Bit assumes to be the hard case, folded her arms sourly, her own flagon undisturbed at the center of the table. There was something quite decidedly wrong with this one, he resolved, something that made the greasy hair on the back of his neck stand on their greasy ends.

Her all but shaved head did its level best not to advertise the color of her hair, which Two-Bit determined to be brunette after some scrutiny. The drab green of her eyes, the well-toned shoulder muscles suggesting an athlete's arms and the pair of obsessively-polished AccCo six-shooters strapped beneath and coincidentally to either side of a nonexistent rack all contributed to shriveling any lewd thoughts Two-Bit might have harbored into nothing.

The one called Odisseus growled something at her yet still indiscernible to Two-Bit, to which she spared her own brew a cursory glance. "It smells like piss and malaria."

"Bloom me out, Two-Bit," the one called Nemo remarked. "How do you even stomach this shit? On a regular basis?"

"Bruno your way past the gag reflex," Two-Bit advised with a nauseated burp, "and you'll be all drongo."

"Appetizing," the one called Quicksilver commented. "Listen, can we cut to the chase here, what was it, 'Two' something?"

"Two-Bit. Switch."

She scowled deeper. "The hell does that mean?"

"Well, you fess me what Quicksilver is supposed to mean, maybe I'll do samewise." The combined chuckling of Nemo and his big hairy friend clearly scored Two-Bit a few valuable points and he situated himself a little straighter in his chair. "But fair enough, tart – gimme a mite here for me thinkbox to nix melting out me ears and I'll sit right up and pay attention." This Quicksilver character certainly had no taste for backtalk, Two-Bit clearly observes, but to judge from the churlish way she settled further back in her own chair, it was clear she'd dealt with more than her fair share as of late.

Two-Bit seized this window to snatch up his discarded copy of this week's _Bargain Bonanza_ , a flimsy catalogue of coupons and clearances scattered across Takioro's three floors every few days by desperate businessmen, planted both sneakers in typical crossed fashion on the edge of the table top and cued Nemo with an idle wave. "So, what seems to be the flaster and how much you willing to score old nuncle Two-Bit to fangle you out of it?"

Nemo contemplated another sip of the Backwash, thought better of it and dropped both elbows to the scummy table. "Well, we've come into a situation. A situation, as it happens, with a particular prison."

"Heh. Bad luck. What happened?"

"Gunboats," Nemo grit his jaw in remembrance. "It's a long story. Suffice to say, whilst pulling a stash-and-blast on Nos Mantri, a rather important fixture among my crew got pinched by the law and it's my intention to spring him."

Two-Bit carefully concealed the smirk behind his catalogue. "Taardia or Nemen Uil?"

"Hm?"

"If he was still caffled on Nos Mantri, you wouldn't be chugging for a slambreaker, now would you? You'd unclink him yourself. But, if you came vizzing for Two-Bit Switch, he's someplace a lot fucking dodgier than all that and the only two blockhouses within lagging distance from Mantri are Taardia and Nemen Uil. So, which is?"

Nemo rubbed his mouth with four fingers of his left hand before answering, as if embarrassed to make with the skinny. "Nemen Uil?"

Two-Bit chuckled with impression, cracking the periodical once. "Your boy's got himself a bit of a sheet, don't he? Ain't never had the straws to unlag somebody outta Nemen Uil."

"Then what're we doing here?" Quicksilver appealed bluntly.

Two-Bit peeled his _Bonanza_ fully down. "Fuck me, aren't you just a merry-go-round of sunshine-and-butterflies?"

Odisseus made some brief optimistic comment to Nemo, which Moira countered with a grave, "You're on thin fucking ice."

"Much as I hate to admit it," Nemo confided to Two-Bit, "she might have a point. This ain't outta your league, is it?"

Two-Bit replaced the catalogue. "Ball it up for me – you bring me mathematicals on any blooming clinker still standing in this bad old galaxy and I'll find you a way in, a way out and whatever leftovers they got in the chiller."

Nemo favored the jailbreaker with another smile too wicked to be true. "Glad to hear it."

"Now, before we go any further, we gotta jab a minute about the sweets. My, uh, consultation, you know, don't come buckshee or nothing," he disillusioned, "and the rhino's gonna get a good deal more fat you looking for my participation."

"We're a little short-handed," Nemo confessed, "so I'm thinking that's on the menu."

"Fair enough. What're you prepped to offer?"

Nemo shrugged. "Well, what're your rates?"

"Yogurt!" Two-Bit exclaimed, forgetting himself for a moment.

All three gathered hoodlums enacted a triple-pronged scowl of confusion. "Excuse me?" Quicksilver was the first to clarify.

Two-Bit slapped the _Bargain Bonanza_ onto the table top to the immediate right of his since untouched Bile Backwash. "They don't hardly ever run vouches for yogurt," he informed, indicating with a dirty fingernail. "Gimme a second here," he requests, beginning the careful process of ripping the precious coupons free from the rest of the leaflet.

"You eat yogurt?" Nemo scoffed.

Two-Bit shrugged. "When they got vouches for it."

"Yeah, I don't know. I don't like the consistency. Don't you find that–"

"Somebody shoot me already," Quicksilver sighed.

"Well, for Nemen Uil," Two-Bit explicated as he cockled the catalogue's center page once, "scheming'd only chunk you back fifteen, but you want my personal wanks on this, you're vizzing at more like thirty-five."

Quicksilver snorted. "Nobody's 'personal wanks' is worth thirty-five, especially not yours."

"Good thing I ain't jabbing to you then, ain't it?"

"Thirty-five's maybe a little high," Nemo reasoned, reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket to withdraw a significant sheaf of cash as a sign of good faith, "but let's start with that consultation."

"Delighted. What're our goodies?"

"You're looking at 'em," Nemo concluded with an open gesture to suggest his two companions. "Four guns, one Briza, about a hundred thou and the three of us sorry blowbags."

"Well, you wanna go proper, you're gonna need blueprints, crusher patrols, time cards and daily schedules, prisoner transfer forms, schematics for necessary transports and detainment gantines – probably even a few low-level security digits or even keycards'd be better if you can fangle 'em."

Nemo sniggered nervously. "Uh, assuming we don't have any of those?"

"Probably gonna get clinked yourselves, but," Two-Bit canted his head aside, "lemme see what I can think up extemporaneous-like." He finally freed the yogurt coupon from its waxen prison and held it up for closer inspection. "Briza, you jabbed?"

"I did."

"Your best hazard then," Two-Bit estimated behind the coupon, "is gonna be thumbing it up, unless you feel breezy blindfolding a heap like that."

"The whole ship?" Nemo grimaced with unconvinced calculation. "Uh, better not, especially with our technician behind bars."

"I'm not sure I follow," Quicksilver weighed in. "Blindfolding?"

"You take your gantine's sensors, see," he demonstrated with a cupping gesture of his right hand, "and you bumble 'em, maxed bassackwards right, so rather than your peeps vizzing outwise, they're dusting your tracks. Sure, you ain't exactly starsy like that, but that way, any fuzz comes snuffing, ain't nobody but nothing where you oughta be."

Quicksilver blinked. "That was supposed to be an explanation?"

Odisseus tossed a question in Two-Bit's direction, who passed a bemused expression onto Nemo. "He wants to know what you have in mind instead," Nemo translated.

"Thumbing up," he repeated, raising his own thumb in the intergalactic "hitchhiker" symbol. "As an untethered space station, creeping into the Maximum Security Imperium pen at Nemen Uil ain't gonna be as habby as one-two-three. Not like you can stroll through a couple hundred dottibles of open nebula in this Briza of yours."

"Which means?" Nemo pressed.

"Unless my thinkbox is missing a few screwers, Nemen Uil ougta still be using those old pre-blooming-Imperium model W14 deep space barge buggers for prisoner transport. That you can probably advant, assuming, of course, you can find your merry ways onto a touchdown pad."

"What, stowing away?"

Two-Bit canted his head in the opposite direction. "Ain't got mucha choice, I'm afraid. Luckily, these W14 fuckers had some gashouse crunches with engine overheating and therefore, had these wanky little exhaust vents, situated right along the underchambers and even, as I recall, accessible from the blooming exterior of the gantine, assuming, of course, that soggy sod joying the bloody thing blanks on closin' 'em when he touches." He shrugged with allowance. "It's jammed and sweaty as all the moons in there, but each one should be big enough to hold even your big hairy bruno here and only the hinkiest fuzz checks 'em."

"Then how do we get off?" Quicksilver demanded.

"Well, I don't know about you, love, but I typically use a hanky and nudie ragger." More chuckles, more scored points and Two-Bit craned forward, depositing both elbows on the table to better explain. "The missus ain't far wrong, though. Once you boost this blowbag from his box, thumbing back down ain't exactly an option. Gig'll be up faster'n you can jabb 'B&E' and your best hazard from _there_ would probably just be deering the wankiest transport and hoofing it the bloom outta Jotor."

"That I'm fully capable of," Nemo attested. "That's my specialty." Odisseus intoned something both snide and gruff, which Nemo acknowledged with a point and no eye contact. "That too."

Two-Bit shifted the Backwash into his grasp, more out of habit than any desire to actually drink the thing. "Now, who exactly are you sticking your meat out for, if you don't mind me ringing?"

"Grimalti fellow by the name of Abraham Bonaventure. You familiar?"

"Bloom me out," Two-Bit muttered. "I ord he was shipping out with an amateur crew, but I didn't..." Abraham Bonaventure had a harder reputation in Takioro than even the Bile Backwash. Rumor currently upheld that he'd taken to signing onto upstart pirate crews and working bilge jobs like sailing master or navigator. Had Bonaventure seen something in these rapscallions, perhaps this wasn't an opportunity Two-Bit could affordably pass up.

The kind of corsair crew that Bonaventure endorsed might be exactly what the doctor ordered for his blossoming caper to end all capers, though Two-Bit would readily admit that, on first appearances, they didn't exactly look the part.

Nemo splayed his hands in some manner of presentation of himself and his unimpressive compatriots, one still scratching Backwash out of his nose, the other moodily sulking like a petulant child trapped in the waiting room during her father's doctor's appointment.

"Maybe," Two-Bit reconsidered a moment, "if that horny bastard's on the line, we could biff that ride-along price down by say, ten or so?"

Nemo sneered a sneer that Two-Bit would eventually regret agreeing to. "Twenty-five? Now we're talking."

"Oh, no," Quicksilver murmured a moment later.

"What now?" Nemo snapped.

"There. At the bar."

Nemo matched her gaze. "Oh. Hm. Shit."

"What?" Two-Bit twisted his torso in the indicated direction.

"Now, Moira," Nemo began to chide.

"I'll be good."

"Remember what happened last time you came here?"

"Quite saliently," she flatlined with an unflinching expression.

The only fixture currently indulging The Bloody Afterburn's centrally-located bar that Two-Bit Switch could possibly have interpreted as noteworthy was the solitary spaceway robber relieving Unhappy Roger of three shots of his worst Gitterswitch. Two-Bit recognized the pissant little shit of a hired gun with delusions of adequacy and three-fourths of a Kelkian Battle Chassis on sight; he'd bought the armor ridiculously cheap off Eidesmoe because it was so drenched in the piss of its previous owner and no other customer would touch it.

"What, Buckethead?" Two-Bit guessed, glancing back to Nemo and Quicksilver.

"Switch?" Buckethead's voice called across the Afterburn. Caught-in-the-headlights disappointment was evident upon each of his client's faces. "Moira. Heh," Buckethead leered after a beat. "Didn't know you still drank here."

"Don't try it, Buckethead," Quicksilver warned, her vision planted firmly on the table.

"Hey, Moira."

"Just don't, Buckethead."

"Moira."

"I swear to all the moons, Buckethead, if you–"

"When you gonna roll over for me, Moira?"

Two-Bit almost snickered but before he could open his mouth, Quicksilver was on her feet, both AccCo 665 Lawman revolvers glistening at the end of extended fists. "Bloom me out, Buckethead, I warned you–"

With exactly no time to draw his own piece or even to duck to cover, Two-Bit Switch's very first bar fight with the crew of _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ began, Moira Quicksilver and Buckethead both drawing down and filling the Afterburn with the raucous shrieking and polychrome flashing of their individual laser weapons. Two-Bit managed to scamper off his chair, share a knowing glance with Nemo and Odisseus under the table and allow himself that denied snicker as Moira's tagged in the side by one of Buckethead's lucky shots.

"Every blooming time!"

Chapter 24

Two-Bit Switch has never, for all his thirteen years of experience as a freelance tramper, survived a shipwreck. He'd only personally known a handful of lucky spacers who could make such a bold claim. Indeed, one Abraham Bonaventure was almost more famous for that than for anything else on the laundry list of his apparent exploits, but each and every one of those survivors had walked away a profoundly changed being, with whole bundles of deeply-ingrained neuroses and paranoias that haunted them for the rest of their fidgety lives. As far as Two-Bit understands the exact proportions of the pickle that he and the rest of _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ crew had landed themselves in, this was the absolute best-case scenario.

"Two-Bit!"

The cry comes as if from a great distance or underwater.

" _Two_ -Bit!"

Suddenly, something shakes Two-Bit Switch. He's immediately back, strapped firmly into the shield station's gyroscopic rig, co-pilot to the shouting Captain Nemo and staring down the barrel of Baz, a stark white globe whose curvature is only faintly visible at the outermost edges of the viewport. It all returns instantly following, as if suctioned back into his brain – the terrible jouncing and tossing of the helm, "FATAL ENGINE FAILURE" lionized across the dashboard's thousand alerts, repeatedly frightened cursing in Ortoki somewhere behind him and, to his right as ever, the hollered commands of his Captain.

" _Two_ -Bit! The bombard shields!" On instinct, he reaches out and grabs the console the gyroscopic rig dangles before him with trembling hands that barely remember its function.

"Where?" he finds himself asking.

"We're heading into atmo, Two-Bit," Nemo reports, not unpanderingly, "so, the front and, uh," he adds, eyes flicking out the viewport, "probably the bottom." Two-Bit complies, muscle memory aiding him to puzzle out the suddenly confounding mechanics of the shield station. All the while, his attention is firmly focused following Nemo's previous gaze; out the window.

The first traces of the aerodynamic heat, manifesting as fire duller, more natural and yet no less deadly than the astringent orange of doxychoraphum, begins to play along the contour lines and bracing arms of the viewport, a haunting overture for the flames that will soon engulf the entire front section of the ship.

Whether Nemo had somehow managed to dodge the incoming Pylon and subsequent explosion of Wolfsbane torpedoes or whether they'd actually soared relatively clean through the gaping hole those torpedoes had torn, Two-Bit couldn't rightly recall, for all the residual orange burnt behind his eyelids. Whatever the case might have been, both the jetboosters had evidently been knocked cold by the blast. While they'd since lost considerable thrust in the seconds between, the leftover momentum from Nemo's initial headlong charge had been precisely enough to nudge them neatly into Baz's gravity well. Now, seemingly out of control, _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ plummets headfirst toward the planet's northern pole on her rollicking ride to ruin.

All around Two-Bit, the helm is in a state of civil unrest. Alarms wail, cabinets flap, teltriton groans, bottles break, lights falter, garbage flies and all three of its occupants grasp for any possible means to combat their inevitable destruction, with no time to bite nails or wet pants. Two-Bit completes the preliminary shielding procedure and takes a modicum of comfort from the knowledge that the rippling waves of heat are held at bay, if only for a few moments.

Likewise helpless, Nemo locks antlers with the unresponsive yoke. "Nothing – I've got nothing. With boosters gone, I've got no handling, no steering, not a fucking thing." He toggles a pair of green switches behind an open panel at the level of his knee. "What, auxiliary?"

Odisseus is measurably less idle. Two-Bit watches, uncomprehending, as the massive Ortok, struggling to retain his footing on the fluctuating floor and with an ear to the teltriton of the helm's back wall, knocks every few inches with a furry fist, as though looking for something. He barks out an answer to Nemo's question and, compounded by the all-encompassing clamor and the Ortok's own frustration, the words sound even less like language to Two-Bit and more like strange animal noises.

"...okay," Nemo returns, obviously disconcerted by something. "So, a jump-start, then?"

Odisseus returns more of a roar than a reply, a level of anger present in his voice Two-Bit cannot ever recall hearing.

"Then what're you–"

With a single syllable Two-Bit reasonably translates as "This," Odisseus budges his claws beneath an oblong piece of plating and shoves outward, literally ripping the paneling clean off the wall and clattering it against the floor. Wasting no time, the Ortok seizes forth a two-foot long lever, rusted entirely brown and disused for decades, from the look of it. Piling all his tremendous weight atop it ratchets it fully perpendicular to the wall.

Two-Bit immediately feels a dramatic deceleration of the _Lover's_ plunge, as though Odisseus had somehow pulled a massive hand brake. From the corner of his eye, Two-Bit can spot, even from her dented nose, flaps, hatches and fulcrumed tabs now standing erect, jointly creating significant drag and lending the freighter the appearance of a spined brushvezzer.

Upon seeing this, Nemo exchanges a dire look with his Ortok mechanic. "You really think?"

Odisseus snarls an obvious affirmative between grunts of exertion.

"What? He really thinks what?" Two-Bit suddenly attempts to desperately ascertain.

With no further trace of insobriety and a celerity uncommon to him, the Captain Nemo yanks loose his headset, rams the meat of his palm into the general intercom's address button and rattles off a series of orders with more genuine fear than Odisseus' genuine anger. "All hands! All hands! Emergency stations! Make sure you're strapped down!" This achieved, both Nemo and Two-Bit share a second sidelong glance out the viewport. With white whipping clouds beyond both, an envelope of piggybacking flames is barely repulsed by the overtaxed bombard shields.

"Cap'n, there's gotta be–"

The faintest spark of inspiration, a glimmer of outrageous hope, enkindles in Nemo's gray eyes. "Driftjets," he mutters, before tossing the chair fully around to face Odisseus. "The driftjets! We might not have engine power, but there's no reason the jets won't still fire!"

"Those are only used for touching down," Two-Bit objects. "They ain't gonna have enough oomph to nix a fall like this!" A little distracted by strangling the impressive kickback of the _Lover's_ impromptu hand-brake into submission, Odisseus still voices an agreement to Two-Bit's reasoning.

"If we shoot 'em at the right second, they'd cushion the crash," Nemo theorizes ardently. "Fuck, they might even stop the crash, if we can time it out."

This course of action, a splinter of hope flimsy enough that even Nemo couldn't quite fathom its effectiveness, simultaneously strikes the three pirates as preferable to an unrestrained nose-dive from short orbit. They, as one, spring off about new duties.

As Nemo fiddles with the ignition keypad and Two-Bit grapples with the buckles of his safety belts, he notices, apparently for the first time, the chatter warbling out of the internal comm. A cacophony of voices, originating from Danbonte, Abraham, Marco, Moira and Garrigan, all yammers into one patched, panicky mishmash.

Once he's freed of his belted prison, Odisseus waves Two-Bit forcefully over to the lever and issues some command whose meaning he can well imagine.

The lever to hold open all the _Lover's_ dragging flaps, Two-Bit discovers, is excruciatingly heavy and requires an oppressive amount of strength to lock in place. He's about to call the Ortok back and plead inability, but the mechanic is immediately engaged in aiding Nemo with the driftjets and Two-Bit resolves himself around doing what little he can. The slightest slackening of his efforts could easily snap the lever back into its furrow in the wall, an eventually Two-Bit does his level best to prevent by practically folding his entire body over the rusty bar.

As Nemo and Odisseus scramble about the helm, preparing to jury-rig a truncated and bastardized version of a landing sequence, Two-Bit, quivering from sheer strain, attempts to divert the sinking feeling of pending annihilation by listening to the din of frenzied intercom babble blaring from every available ship's speaker. A voice belonging to no one but Abraham chants, Danbonte whines nauseatedly from the belowdecks crawlspace, Marco screams for recognition in the engine room and some urgent back-and-forth conversation flies between Moira and Garrigan about legs and hands.

Two-Bit's a second from shouting something to Nemo or Odisseus when his hand, slick from sweat, slips and the majority of his weight goes with it, toppling him off the yanked lever nanoseconds before its furious cracking back would have severed his arm.

_The Unconstant_ _Lover_ teeters sickeningly forward in response to the flaps snapping shut. Their angle of attack toward the planet whets itself that much shearer and the vomiting gravity casts the _Lover's_ crewmen about like dice in a jar.

Two-Bit tumbles straight into the side of the navpanel like a clumsy acrobat, Odisseus is slapped into the co-pilot's gyroscopic rig with a whimper and the habitually unbuckled Nemo's thrown clear over the dashboard and into the viewport with enough rapidity to crack the glass.

The immediate shift of pressure has more radical effects on the helm itself, however – if once it was at unrest, it now riots. The persistent rattling spikes tenfold in strength and speed. Internal screens and monitors splinter. Screws and rivets twist and contort. Deck, wall and ceiling plates buckle and pop out of place. The ship's very bones quake, threatening instant dismantlement.

Out the cracked viewport, the ground is abruptly visible through a whiff of cloud fleeing _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ apparently adamant header toward the planet below. Only white, speckled by the occasional patch of rock or water, can be determined on the surface, but no one cursed with such a view doubts they've any more than a minute to live.

It costs Two-Bit the utter reserves of his strength to crawl up the mountainous incline of the helm's tilted deck, wrap both hands around the retreated lever and wrench with all his might. Despite his best efforts and the eventual extending of the freighter's exterior flaps and hatches, the plunge's angle is only scarcely adjusted to their favor. Try as he might, the fate of _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ and all her souls passes from Two-Bit's hands.

In the half a second since his unscheduled flight, Odisseus has gathered Nemo by the scruff of his aviator's duster and thrown him with equal force back into his beloved pilot's seat. Understandably somewhat disoriented, the Captain, with vomit trickling down between clenched teeth, is only given the remainder of the second to gain his bearings, comprehend the inevitability at hand and act. With the hasty, glanced approval of both Two-Bit and Odisseus, Nemo, when faced with spectacle of solid ground racing toward himself and his doomed spaceship, jams the ignition button hard.

The following second tries its damnedest to compensate for the events of all those previous. _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ seesaws uncontrollably, angle of axis flipping completely as rocket-powered lift erupts from the underside of the ship's bow. Two-Bit, Nemo and Odisseus are all temporarily weightless in the interim between paradigm shifts, each of their hair scarcely brushing the ceiling in the unexpected jump. After the squeal of protest from all things teltriton, the overwhelming howl of the driftjets pops and fizzes suddenly, leaving a breath of stomach-flipping silence broken only by a woman's scream.

With a monumental splash of displaced snow, _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ , its hysterical descent curtailed only by the suicidal intervention of the burnt-out driftjets, freefalls a story and more to belly flop onto the surface of Baz's north pole with an atrocious chorus of rending, snapping, screeching and chewed metal. The impact bangs all three of the helmsmen hard against the ceiling, thoughtful enough to deposit them quickly back to the floor afterward. The once-orange viewport shatters and caves beneath an onslaught of powdered white.

–––

Moira's banged up her ankle. She imagines she should probably be thanking all the moons of Jotor that she miraculously wasn't more seriously injured in the crash. The collision with the ground launched her an effective fourteen feet in the air, from the near bottom of the underturret's access ladder up onto the floor of the gundeck proper.

She ought to be more grateful that when her ankle caught between the second and third of the ladder's rungs and she swung stupidly about to slam her back into the gundeck floor, only her ankle suffered the worst of the damage, as opposed to her fragile spine or still more fragile skull. On the other hand, the universe had just deemed it necessary to squash her best remaining friend into a fine paste, so, at this point, she's inclined to call it even.

The polar wind toys playfully with the folds of her poncho, but Moira's hardly in the mood. Her mighty jackboots stand as obelisks amid the snow shifting about her feet, carried forth by the same frisky wind Moira predicts also secrets a hidden blizzard somewhere past the horizon. She watches over the smoldering wreck of _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ , more specifically the pulverized ruins of the underturret, as a single dot of life amongst the immeasurable white waste in every direction. Had she not other very specific duties to perform, she would have volunteered to, in her current mood, stand vigil over his remains until the Endless Imperium came to end this world.

He'd been the crash's only casualty, through some freak of coincidence. Danbonte had managed to squirm his way from the torpedo chamber into the dubious safety of the gundeck itself while Marco'd strapped himself into the engine room's emergency seat at the first sign of trouble. As for the other officers, Abraham never left the sensor room and while the three in the helm were likely suffering some mild cranial trauma, they each appeared devoid of any serious injury, a fact Moira was privately dismayed to realize.

Only ex-Petty Officer Glive Garrigan, trapped in the forsaken underturret, hadn't been spared.

Long after the initial injury on his leg had superficially healed, he continued to show muted signs of impairment, despite his half-hearted attempts to disguise them and Moira's equally half-hearted attempts to ignore them. He'd rarely left ship at all over the past seven months and he sat or even lied down whenever either was available or socially acceptable. Most obviously, his efforts at climbing down the access ladder and into the underturret had never truly recovered and remained a clumsy, ungainly affair.

Over the alarms, sirens and other spiraling sounds of the crash, Moira couldn't hear his specific objection – whether his leg was stuck, had slipped or simply wasn't responding. Either way, he never reached for her extended hand, not until she was already flying and he was a second from obliteration.

A spurt of movement to her right and any lingering funeral thoughts are messily banished from her mind by that most intrusive sound of puking. Thirty-five some feet to her right, propping a forearm up against the half-sunken shell of the _Lover_ to support himself, is Nemo, doubling partially over to paint the snow between his boots beige-and-blue with another throatful of vomit. He's lucky too, Moira ruminates grimly – it's a comparatively warm day on the pole, lest his largely liquid upchuck freeze before impact and shatter in his face. As she watches her Captain, callously losing his proverbial lunch of gin, gin and more gin not fifty feet from Garrigan's final resting place, she's starkly reminded that the universe itself, in all actuality, hadn't deemed that final belly flop necessary.

Someone else had.

She awaits him with perfect patience, fully equipped, provisioned and capable of departing off into the frozen wilderness with her next step, but indulging him his vomit, the consequences of his irresponsibility. A not-inconsiderable length of time later, he spits the final dregs into the pile of steaming, soon-to-be-frozen slush at his feet, wipes his mouth, predictably with the sleeve of his jacket, and approaches her.

"My head feels like people are fucking in it," he moans when he closes to fifteen feet. He's attired warmly, as she is, though, in his case, it's less a matter of precaution and more of Odisseus' repeated insistence.

In place of her thick woolen poncho and skin-tight survival suit beneath, he wears one of the insulated and ribbed black leather winter coats from the _Lover's_ emergency supply, a distant and hooded cousin to his typical aviator's jacket. Whereas Moira covers her exposed pate with a nondescript stocking cap and even bothered to include a kerchief tied around her neck to guard her lower face from the wind, Nemo can only be bothered to raise his fur-lined hood as well as, somewhat nonsensically, a pair of welder's goggles too massive to belong to anyone but Odisseus.

He must notice her split second's remonstrance as he budges them down over the bridge of his nose. "What?" He splays his hands out defensively, the enormous black orbs where his eyes once were lending him the unhappy comparison to a Spith spinner. "They're for locating electrical signals, alright? I borrowed 'em from Odi." He finishes zipping his coat to his neck before he amends the statement. "Well, it'll be borrowed when he finds out."

Moira sniffs and continues to refuse eye contact.

Stunningly, Nemo doesn't take the hint. "This is the part where you call me a colossal asshole, isn't it? This is the part where I'm a massive fucking douchebag and how dare I and all that, right?"

Moira sets her jaw firmer.

"Well, if you wanna know my opinion," he stipulates, with no actual concern for the condition he's just set into place, "I think we came out alright. The ship's more or less in one piece, we're only a couple of mottibles from being rescued and I'd like to direct your attention to _the other guy_." He makes a sweeping dramatic gesture past Moira's point of gaze, certainly to indicate the absence of the _Exacting Counterattack_ in the overcast sky, though she doesn't avail him of this either.

She does, however, catch sight of the global intuiter's smallish antennae, bobbing out of his coat's left-hand pocket, reckon him ready to depart and stomp away north.

He dallies half a minute behind, buzzes his lips and follows.

_The Little Beggarman_ absconded with and their only driftcart confiscated by Insurgent Company several thousand dottibles to the south, the lucky seven remaining members of _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ crew had no vehicular transport to send north in search of rescue or Ott's fortress. Moira's inclusion in the foot patrol was a foregone conclusion, considering her experience as an overland tracker and the vast majority of the crew, save Odisseus, had been only too happy to send their untrustworthy wastrel of a Captain off into the polar wastes to die a cruel death by cold or predator.

Despite all his pleas to the contrary, Odisseus himself had been practically forbidden to accompany his "saltbrother," as his technical expertise was desperately needed onboard to initiate repairs and, though no one dared say as much, convert the _Lover's_ wreck into some kind of a shelter, should their first foray on foot not return.

When she'd initially volunteered, Moira'd been looking forward to a little quiet time in the singular company of Righty, Lefty and maybe the odd boot knife. She was, of course, less than ecstatic to suddenly have to share the journey with Garrigan's, however inadvertent, murderer. On further reflection, traveling alone into the tundra certainly wasn't the wisest tactic available to her either. Danbonte had refused her offer, Odisseus was barred from abandoning the ship and there was no one else among Two-Bit, Abraham or Marco that she'd have necessarily preferred over Nemo so she'd, however begrudgingly, given her consent.

The snow is waist high in places and Moira does what little she can to navigate around the deeper drifts and dunes that continue to crop up across whatever path she chooses to take. Their lackluster pace is less than half the rate she'd hoped to undertake, but factoring her bum ankle into account, she can't honestly press herself much faster without fear of compounding or complicating her injury.

Nemo, for his part, spends his time glued to the global intuiter, reminding Moira every few hundred feet which direction is north, a fact she's keenly aware of without the aid of a bleating handheld device. While Baz's northern pole isn't actually an ice cap and is truthfully more of a continent with a solid bed of rock somewhere below them, Moira finds scarce trace of any mountain, hill or true topographical landmark during the entire seven mottible trek. Only shifting mounds of snow span effortlessly in all directions, like a desert bleached white.

The landmarks they do encounter, the ones Moira mentally denotes so as to mark their eventual progress back to the _Lover_ , are universally wreckage. The majority of them are torn, twisted and submerged deep enough in the sea of snow that only their shadows are visible, blackness beneath a dusted membrane of white.

Every now and again, however, they'll encounter a more recognizable shape, protruding like scorched signposts on their road to nowhere. Sometimes, it's even discernible; two-thirds of a Spur, the blackened and blast-shorn hulk of a tugger that can only be the remains of _The Business End_ , but more and more as they tromp further and further from the _Lover's_ own ruin, they stumble across pieces of the Pylon.

As most of its smaller debris would have burnt to a crisp during atmospheric entry, what they happen upon are the larger chunks of the _Exacting Counterattack_ , those few pieces substantial enough to survive the strain of the aerodynamic heat and thrown clear enough from the blast to land anywhere within sight of Moira and Nemo's route. Most of it is indistinguishable to Moira, all hunks of contorted and besmirched teltriton that perhaps Odisseus could identify on sight but look like nothing but wreckage to the otherwise naked eye. They pass at least one carcass, however, that Moira recognizes as a section of the attitude fin, complete with collapsed cross-section of decks and crowd of attendant corpses.

One survivor, crushed under a hunk of machinery and showing the beginnings of frostbite, even cries to what he must expect to be a mirage for mercy, but neither Nemo nor Moira stir their weapons from their holsters to oblige him.

Through the occasional break in the appropriately gloomy cloud cover, the flagship's final fate is fleetingly visible high in the troposphere. One third, either the prow or the midsection, is completely gone, certainly crashed to the planet someplace before the _Lover_ did. Another third, again either the prow or the midsection, must be that meteoric ball of fire streaking westward toward the nearest ocean by the fastest means possible – down.

The final third, clearly the engine bank, has somehow managed to keep itself aloft by rotating fully on its axis and employing all its thrusters to effectively hover its way lower and lower into the atmosphere. Moira catches occasional glimpses of it, between passing sheets of cloud, and every time, it's worked its way closer to the surface. She momentarily wonders how it'll attempt to land.

She entirely loses sight of it as the blizzard rolls in. She'd foreseen it somewhat, brooding past the horizon when they'd first departed hours ago, but she, in retrospect, should have anticipated conditions this bad or worse on the north pole.

Visibility plummets to a handful of feet in any direction, Trudging several paces behind, Nemo becomes more of a blurred black notion than a corporeal being, and the wind howls with such vehemence that the global intuiter's incessant beeping struggles even to be heard. All landmarks and any real hope of finding their way back are summarily dashed by the whipping, whirlwind of white moving fast from the east with no obvious signs of relenting.

Yet for all the ferocity of wind and snow, what Moira simply couldn't have adequately prepared for, had she tried her absolute hardest, was the cold.

It's a unique brand of cold, entirely foreign to Moira who'd, over the years, grown accustomed to, if not necessarily comfortable with, the unfeeling chill of dead space. This terrestrial cold is malignant, resentful and harrows something deep in Moira's psyche as she continues to slog forward; the pervasive notion that, no matter her equipment or technology, humanoids were never meant to dwell in this place.

Fifteen minutes into the blizzard, her bones ache where they suddenly didn't before, the kerchief across her face has annealed hard as stone from frozen moisture escaping her mouth and she's laughably beyond the point of shivering. The wound on her neck flares in memory of another such hopeless march through this planet's wilderness barely a month previously when she hears something.

Far to her right, piercing the wind's boisterous opera is a note on a different key, not unlike a person's voice, but faint, strident, alien and screaming. She stops hard to listen and discovers, three steps behind, Nemo has similarly stopped and is casting glances about in every direction.

Moira withdraws the kerchief from her face with a crackle and opens her chapped lips for the first time in hours. "You hear it?"

Nemo musses up his face. "Hear what?" he shouts over the wind and its strange neighbor, before shoving a fingerless glove down the back of his trousers. "My ass itches."

Not bothering to sigh or even roll her eyes, Moira brushes aside her poncho's folds and retrieves Righty and Lefty, the discordant sound rising in volume and therefore almost certainly in proximity at an alarming rate over the past moment. Before she's even a chance to spin and face the incoming noise, the screeching whoosh reaches its zenith and an incredibly piercing pain explodes from her right calf. Via some irresistible force, she is yanked, calf-first, into the blizzard with enough whiplash to drop both Righty and Lefty fruitlessly in the snow.

Moira slams her stomach to the ground several feet off and is evulsed away to an unknown fate exactly in time to hear Nemo breathe "Sweet fuck."

As excruciating as the continued jolting pain in her left leg is, it doesn't take skidding and skimming across the snow backward on her stomach at top speed for terribly long for Moira to both feel a pang of belated sympathy for the late Ebeneezer and suss out that whatever so thoroughly wrecked her calf was almost certainly a hooked grapple on a line of some kind. A hasty glance over her shoulder confirms this, in the form of a wickedly notched skewer with a truncated haft, trailing a taut cord off into the hazy white nothingness some distance behind her.

In theory, all she needed to do was extract the emergency survival knife from her left boot, contort herself into some kind of Talosian pretzel wherein her blade could actually reach the cable dragging her away to doom and simply sever said cable before she reached whomever waited at rope's end, all while being trolled backwards across the tundra with a banged-up angle and a barbed speartip threatening to tear her calf to shreds with every bump and every bounce.

The knife riding in her left bootstrap is surprisingly difficult to extract, all things considered. After enough careful flailing, she's able to pinch the pommel between pointer and middle fingers and slide it succinctly from its holster, after nearly dropping the whole affair, boot and all, as she cleared a passing snowdrift. Boot knife achieved, she switches hands and, ever careful of its delicate placing in her lower leg, establishes a firm yet gentle grip on the skewer's shaft.

Arching both her knife arm and her spine, Moira holds her breath and slashes at the grappling line with the blade of her boot knife. She's rewarded with some purchase, a few of the cable's strands out of place, and the unwelcome but expected jostling of the barb from the impact's recoil. She bites back tears of bewilderment and strikes again, this time sentencing the cord to dangle by only a pair of resilient threads but again, further slicing into her much-abused leg. Moira allows herself an agonized cry as she nicks both remaining strings with the edge of her blade and is unceremoniously loosed from the reeling cord, flopping and tumbling into a heap of soreness, skewer and snow.

As was seemingly customary for this festering shitstorm of an afternoon, she's not given the pleasure of more than a minute to physically right herself, snap loose and consider the queerness of the skewer's haft, specifically scored to create that distinctive screaming sound when flying through the air, before he appears.

Like death's own visage, he materializes out of the depths of the whiteout.

Eight feet tall if he's an inch, chameleoned all in colorless camouflage and complete with adverse climate gear, matching thermal mask and offending, heavily-modified speargun slurping up her sundered rope, the pseudo-humanoid figure prowls outward from the blizzard's embrace on lanky shanks of a height with Moira's shoulders. He's terrifyingly silent as he stalks forward, each expansive stride congruent to three or four of Moira's own. She struggles to stand, knife clutched in her trembling grasp, to meet this strange, baffling attack before he could close the distance and finish her.

After seven mottibles of arctic trailblazing and her wild ride of the past forty seconds, however, Moira lacks anything resembling the necessary strength for a last stand. Her left leg, shooting veins of anguish all the way up into her torso, crumples beneath her and plops her back to the snow. To her calf's credit, the stumble causes her to unwittingly dodge her assailant's opening shot with the spear gun, the crazed and notched projectile quivering in the snow inches beyond her kneeling form.

With no disappointment or any other apparent emotion on that skull-like thermal mask, her inscrutable enemy frees a particularly nasty polearm from the speargun's racked arsenal and tosses the firearm aside like an unwanted toy. Complete with a spear-fighter's stance to shame and embarrass that Whuudi-wannabe bounty hunter Moira'd dispatched back on Takioro, he takes her two titanic steps forward, each step accompanied by a devilishly-aimed swipe of the polearm's cruel spearhead that Moira only rolls away from by sheer chance.

The third such swing she actually counters by rolling the opposite direction, slipping unbidden inside his weapon's impressive reach with another variant of the Wheeling Tvorka somersault, this version modified to conclude with a brutal sidelong kick to the kidney, which she succeeds with satisfying give. Her opponent strangles a gasp as the jagged point of the skewer, still rammed into her wounded calf, rends both the side of his insulated covering and the flesh beneath, dying the barb's tip an ashen gray.

Her opponent staggering several steps back, almost more in shock than pain, Moira wastes a moment thumbing through a mental index of potential antagonists at large with gray blood and fitting this rather peculiar description.

As she does this and reaches no valid conclusion, she almost fails to notice the emergence of three additional figures, hanging a considerable distance back, made extremely indistinct by the blizzard blaring between them and hefting what she dubiously identifies as massive, shoulder-mounted personal artillery, each one pointed more or less in her direction. Her adversary, regrouping a dozen feet away, pays these newest entrants no heed, suggesting them to be his accomplices and yet further threats she'll have to neutralize should she even survive this encounter with this tall, dark and scary stranger.

She remains bemused as to why, if they have her so exhaustively covered, they don't simply open fire and smear her across the snow. Whatever this one-on-one combat is meant to signify, it's a ritual she, in her current state, doesn't have the wherewithal to decode.

Long before she's ready for him, her opponent rushes her, winding the polearm back for a strike with all his considerable upper body strength behind it. She rises to a full kneel, preparing to dodge left and gamble at sinking her knife in her preciously scored wound on his midsection. He feints like a master, however, faking the two-handed swing to instead feed her a mouthful of haft.

Moira feels at least one tooth crack before she hits the ground. She manages to spew one such shard from her mouth before she sees him, her incipient murderer, standing proud in a pose of mastership and dominion that's vaguely familiar somewhere in the cluttered backroom of her brain.

Moira paradoxically wonders if she'll die by exsanguination, like Heeko before her, as her foe one-handedly hoists the harpoon high over his head, like vo Obxo before him, and is subsequently shot in the head for his trouble.

Craning her neck quizzically off the snow to see whatever newest craziness has reared its head now, she's forced to admit to herself that she's maybe almost relieved to see Nemo. He stands at vision's edge, goggles drooping around his neck and smoking snub of his Carbon Industrial piece guiltily pointed toward the smoking hole in her would-be-murderer's head, as if meekly admitting to its own handiwork.

Moira's statuesque attacker teeters once and topples like a tower into an adjacent drift, the weapon slipping from his lifeless hands and sinking into the snow. His thermal mask, its clasp shattered by Nemo's one-in-a-million shot, lolls off his dead skull, revealing a deathly and triangular face that Moira recognizes as painfully familiar and yet somehow still elusive.

Nemo practically skids forward, pistol completely extended and loosing three, four, five more canisters into the quite obviously dead corpse, expression of horrified glee slowly dawning on his face. Stranger still, none of the three lurking gunmen paint Nemo to the ground under fire, flee or even move a muscle.

"He's dead, Nemo," Moira croaks at last, wary eye on the unrevealed enemies.

"He's Quuilar Noxix, Moira," Nemo returns with as toothy a smile as ever she's seen.

"What?"

As if only suddenly noticing them, Nemo snaps his firearm to the nearest of the three gunmen and plants a round into his chest to a surprised squeal. A hasty word of warning from the second and still no return fire as Nemo clips his shoulder and buries a solid shot in his abdomen. The third drops his weapon and bolts eastward with all speed. It costs Nemo three canisters and a steadied gun arm to succinctly conclude their final fleeing foe, after which he contentedly drops his pistol and strides apart, both hands raised as though in mock-powerlessness. "That's it. It's official. I'm the best."

Moira squints. "Nemo. Would you please fucking explain what in all the buttfucking moons of Jotor is the fuck going on here?"

Nemo marches proudly over the familiar corpse, whose brains discolor the snow, and peels him off the ground by the cuff, where he hangs comically off Nemo's fist. "You don't recognize Quuilar Noxix, ace bounty hunter, holovision star and card-carrying badass?" He heedlessly drops the body with a sickening squish and prances with immense pleasure toward the second nearest dead body, a humanoid female lying beside her bulky, discarded weapon. "I mean, a mysterious harpoon comes flying out of nowhere to snag ya and you don't immediately suspect Noxix? Come on."

Moira squints harder at the half-headless face, already accruing considerable snow cover, and everything immediately clicks into place.

An inexplicable ambush at an extremely inopportune moment, the towering golem obviously a Yheum in a retrospect unclouded by fear and pain, the strange, showmanship-style markings on the harpoon; she was almost embarrassed. She props herself onto an elbow, finally engages in a thorough examination of the skewer protruding from the meat of her calf and is unsurprised to discover a tiny recording device cleverly mounted atop it. "You're not kidding. This is Quuilar Noxix."

"Of course I'm not kidding," Nemo snorts, stooping over the body of the distant humanoid to examine her equipment. "Our price is right enough, isn't it?"

"And he's practically Huong Xo's lapdog," Moira corroborates. "How'd he get out here? Through that blockade?"

Nemo shrugs, fiddling with the dropped device. "He's Quuilar Noxix."

"Fair." She adjusts her weight to better see. "Is that–"

"You bet it is," Nemo confirms, spinning about on his haunches with an expensive hunk of machinery Moira'd assumed to be weaponry and now blearily identifies as a high-end holocorder, of a brand and model tens of thousands of credits too ritzy for private citizens. "They recorded the whole thing," Nemo realizes with a deepening of his already fathomless smile.

Moira can't help but join him and grin. "Fuck me. So, what does all this mean?"

"This means I've got the hardest cock in the galaxy. This means all bounty hunters will know my name and fear. This means I shot Quuilar Noxix in the head and have proof."

"And the arm and the pelvis and the thigh."

"Well, yeah," Nemo concedes condescendingly. "I've seen Season Six, okay? I'm not falling for that."

"None of which matters," Moira's keen to point out, "if we freeze to death out here."

"It also means," Nemo continues, a fresh zeal catching fire in his eyes as he rises from his squat, corder entirely forgotten, and jogs hastily to the Yheum legend's messy remains. After rifling through his pockets for several long seconds and turning up a fair sheaf of cash and a handful of grisly trophies, he finally closes his fist around whatever he sought and wrestles it free of the dead bounty hunter's pockets.

Nemo unfolds the creased leaflet with growing excitement; Moira only groans and reaches from the discarded pile of cash and tribal fetishes. The paper's identity as a wanted poster is painfully visible through the sunlight peaking over Nemo's shoulder. Reading rapidly, his smile wilts almost as quickly.

"Okay, that's just uncanny. I do not know where they took this picture."

Picking listlessly through the contents of Quuilar Noxix's pockets, Moira uncovers a key ring, outfitted with several more dangling teeth, a smattering of various ignition keys and a thumb-sized gray wad of metal that appears to be a remote starter.

They exchange glances. "You don't think...?"

After snatching it from her palm, Nemo presses the central call button to no immediate avail. He swings about, clicking the button in all directions until, a small distance to the east, a muffled motor revs hopefully and two pinpricks of light poke holes in the white smother.

"Can you walk?"

"Not so much," she admits. "I don't know if you noticed, exactly, but our friend here shot me in the leg with a blooming harpoon gun."

Nemo snaps once in satisfaction. "I can't wait to watch _that_ footage."

Moira also isn't ecstatic about leaning against him for support while they investigate their possible escape from the snowy hell of Baz's northern pole, but Nemo offers no complaint and she decides to count her blessings. As predicted, no more than two hundred feet eastward, with the help of Odisseus' imaging goggles, they uncover, cunningly disguised beneath a computerized camouflaging tarp, a scuffed, battle-scarred and intergalactically famous driftscull, _"The Wendengo_ " painted crossways on its fuselage.

They stand silently in the driving snow a second, with four corpses, among them the galaxy's most feared bounty hunter, a pile of salvaged camera equipment and a crashed space ship behind them, with a soon-to-be-commandeered drift vehicle, a direct route to Ott's hidden palace and an astronomically large pile of money awaiting them when they arrive.

With both bum ankle and speartip still jutting from her lower leg, Moira turns to Nemo and tilts her head. "Shotgun."

Chapter 25

Odisseus would be the first to admit that, in the grand scheme of the crash, the negative flux coupling didn't feature too impressively high on the list of busts, breaches and major points of breakage that required his immediate attention. It did, however, excel in the department of "things Odisseus actually knew how to fix." For this reason and this reason alone does he choose to devote the next several minutes to its repair, rather than the innumerable multitude of more pressing problems that featured in that somewhat different department, the esteemed "things Odisseus had no idea how to even begin fixing in the first place."

In fact, the negative flux coupling's main "problem" honestly only required a few minutes work with his handheld torquer, work that had thus far taken Odisseus fourteen minutes and counting to satisfyingly complete less than half of.

In his defense, he's perhaps distracted by the tragicomedy of Ott's "ace mechanic," a pseudo-professional, low-riding, Swumese chopshop grease monkey with the exact demeanor of every talentless incompetent Odisseus has ever had the displeasure of sharing a garage with. The Swum and his circus of lackwits lock graviton clamps into place all along the damaged hull of the bruised and battered Briza, in preparation for air-lifting _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ out of its slushy sinkhole via a magnetic driftcrane.

"You know," Marco, shivering to Odisseus' immediate left, mentions, as though the Ortok was truly of a mind to listen to further advice from amateur repairmen, "you actually probably want _new_ rivets in there, as opposed to just torquing the old ones back in place. 'S safer, probably."

"Ortok's a mite ornery, boy," Abraham, unaffected to Odisseus' immediate right, warns, with an apparently honest desire to see no one mauled this morning. "Mayhaps ye might wanna leave Odi be."

Odisseus demurs moodily at last. "We don't have any _new_ rivets."

The tundra dawn is a muted, unremarkable thing – little more than the vague implication of the sun, a hazy pink glow, discoloring the eastern horizon. Most of the nearby illumination comes from work lights, installed at a perimeter of posts around the crash site and the cluster of headlights bristling from the bracing arm of the driftcrane, lending the entire area the faint appearance of a crime scene.

The three of them, what passed for _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ crack repair squad, stand apart in a neat little procession a sizable distance from her starboard side, knee-deep in the swirling snow drifts, watching Boss Ott's wrecking crew attempt a less-than-convincing impression of a craft recovery team.

Last night's doozy of a blizzard had only slackened two hours before dawn and in its wake came the proverbial cavalry, as uninspired as a drove of neticgrappler-wielding ass-scratchers could potentially look. They galloped up with the dawn; a trio of slaved CC76 heavy ground haulers, the aforementioned driftcrane and the restless escort of Mutha Be Mean, currently ranging farther afield in search of any _Counterattack_ survivors to gun down.

On the whole, Boss Ott's extraction crew left Odisseus with a tangible unease and the unflagging notion that they were little more than a trumped-up salvage crew who were entirely unaccustomed to recovering ships actually still in one piece.

The head oaf, this brainless Swum with a visibly lax methodology as regards starship repair, had received a thorough interrogation upon arrival, courtesy of one particularly overwrought Ortok. While the Swum's answers had proved obtuse and unhelpful at best, Odisseus had at least been able to draw something of a sketch of the previous evening's events, enough to mollify him until their return to Ott's fortress this evening.

From what admittedly little this knuckledragger knew, Nemo and Moira had reached their destination around nightfall aboard some vehicle the Swum couldn't positively identify but, to judge from his description, was either a driftsled, a driftscull or a narrowdrifter, with a handful of non-lethal injuries and claims about being waylaid by some bounty hunter while en route.

This knowledge attained, Odisseus could officially shift the focus of his hemming, hawing and hand wringing from his prodigal saltbrother's fate to the inevitable bungling of _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ recovery by this addlebrained pack of corner-cutters.

"If ye don't mind me askin'," Abraham prefaces, for once not shirtless and sporting instead one of the _Lover's_ emergency survival jackets unzippered over his blubbery bulk as an affectation or pretense more than anything else, "where do ye figure ye'll start?"

Odisseus torques with slightly more muscle. "I guess the steering column got cracked?"

Marco winces. "Ouch."

"Yeah. So, that'll have to be top priority. Test flights'll be impossible without an intact steering column. Beyond that, though," Odisseus allows, "there was surprisingly little actual structural damage. Barring certain, uh, sections of the undercarriage," he circumvents, "she didn't break any really major bones. The skeleton is more or less undamaged."

Abraham crosses his arms. "But?"

"But," Odisseus repeats, "that doesn't mean we don't have weeks and weeks of work to look forward to."

Marco sniffs and shifts his weight. "What do you mean?"

"Well, _I mean_ ," Odisseus reiterates, tweaking the relevant rivet on the coupling that much harder, "there's everything else. Whenever something of this nature happens, some sort of shipborne calamity, especially a crash like this, it more or less behooves you to check everything – all the tiny modular systems, all the nooks, all the crannies, everything." He ceases his work a moment to gesture aside with the torquer grasped in his left paw. "There's never any way to extrapolate all the latent effects of something like this, you know, on all the mechanisms and all the little systems and the stuff you take for granted. It's as good an excuse as any for a totally comprehensive re-haul."

Some distance before them, the chains securing the graviton clamps to the driftcrane snap taut and ponderously, with a great groan of teltriton protest, _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ embarks on its shaky, unstable flight from the crash's impact zone to the awaiting train of cargo haulers. Watching with bated breath, Odisseus is palingly reminded of an invalid settling into a wheelchair for the first time until the graviton clamp securing the starboard bow fizzes once and promptly deactivates.

The entire freighter heaves hard to the side, the starboard bow nearly scraping the ground, but the remaining seven graviton clamps hold true, keeping the _Lover_ aloft for the moment. Biting back an outraged roar behind fangs capable of ripping out ever so many rinky-dink mechanic throats, Odisseus instead wrenches the coupling's current rivet with enough force to twist and jam it inside its hole indefinitely.

"Did we ever actually ascertain what 'twas went wrong?" Abraham seems to realize at once.

"Boosters just overheated," Marco supplies past Odisseus.

"No," he corrects, torquing still harder and swallowing a sigh, "they didn't just overheat. I've been down there – those scorch marks you're seeing, the ones on the insides of the booster? That's not regular heat scoring."

"Then _what_?" Marco challenges with an open paw.

"Doxychoraphum."

Abraham scowls. "Really? How?"

Odisseus shrugs his massive shoulders. "I'm a little fuzzy on details, but I imagine the exterior cooling vents musta swallowed some on our way through the Pylon."

"A lot?" Abraham clarifies.

"Not as far as I can tell, but it doesn't really take much – the boosters are damaged, certainly, but they're not destroyed." Odisseus tilts his head aside as he concedes. "A good deal of the interior parts are pretty near destroyed, but, all in all, we're not looking at replacing them. As a whole."

"... _could_ we?" Marco proposes offhandedly after a moment.

Odisseus halts torquing the latest rivet, inhales a long, low breath and turns a glower individually crafted for Marco and this very specific question to his left. "What?"

Oblivious, the Mruka waves a paw in the general direction of the pendant _Lover_. "The jetboosters. How much does Nemo even know about them?"

"Little enough," Abraham admits, "but I don't think ye–"

"You're suggesting we," Odisseus conjectures with mounting intensity, "in lieu of actually fixing the problem, tell Nemo that both jetboosters were irrevocably damaged in the crash or the explosion or whatever our story is, trash these two warhorses that literally carried us through that shitstorm back there and instead, what, replace them with a bar engine?" He's snarling invective faster and nastier now, tiny droplets of spittle collecting at the corners of his muzzle. "Some glossy, underperforming piece of Terro Fleet Systems buhoxshit? Or, wait, maybe you meant a Concord Ind. N-Type 619 Thruster Package, so we can overtax the propulsion mainframe's contractors and flood the engine room with carbon fuel? Maybe a nice pair of Vbeck & Rhissol KX9s? You wanna talk about overheating boosters, there you fucking go. Well? Which was it?"

Marco stares dumbly into the snow between his feet as Odisseus finishes his fuming, still clutching the torquer and coupling in opposite trembling paws at his side.

"I think what Odisseus was maybe tryin' to say," Abraham interjects after a weighty pause, "was that it weren't the ship's fault we crashed."

"What Odisseus was trying to say," Odisseus concludes huffily, adjusting his attention back toward the coupling, "was that you took an oath, Marco. I suggest you keep it."

They chew silence for only a minute or less until, apparently judging three feet above the heavy hauler's cargo bed was exactly as acceptable a place to release the graviton clamps as zero feet above the cargo bed, the Swumese foreman driving the driftcrane drops _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ said three feet like a disinterested child with a massive teltriton toy. She clatters to the platform with the skin-crawling shear of metal on metal and undoubtedly a dozen new malfunctions for Odisseus to amend.

Unmindful to the coupling he's currently clasping, the incensed Ortok attempts to clench both paws into fists and, in the process, completely crumples the held device like a wad of paper.

He glances toward the cleft machine part in his paws with an embarrassed sigh.

"Now we have to replace _that_ too," Marco comments quietly.

–––

Two-Bit Switch regrets not starting a tontine between the original ten members of _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ conscript crew. As macabre an idea as it might be, had he the foresight to instigate such a death-pool, with six crew members dead, one captured and one deserted, he could be currently sitting on a fat stack of cash instead of just his haunches in the betweendecks crew quarters, picking the laughably simple lock on Ebeneezer's footlocker.

He's collectively a little disappointed in the somewhat infantile security measures he encountered on the three such footlockers he's looted thus far, those belonging to Zella, Salo and Heeko. Thus far, Ebeneezer's proves to be little of an exception.

Off the rack, these footlockers ironically came minus any locks or other measures preventative against intrusion and therefore it had fallen to the individual crew member to protect their belongings however they best saw fit. Two-Bit, as much a student of habit and humanoid nature as he was, found this an excellent barometer of character: the means one will employ to protect their personal effects.

Considering the exceedingly brief time she spent aboard, it made perfect sense that Zella, irresponsible to a fault, wouldn't have even bothered to lock up her possessions. The majority of them, save for the customary emergency stash of credits and one fuzzy pink sweater that still clung to a trace of her signature scent, hadn't been awfully useful to Two-Bit anyway.

For his part, Salo Shouldermount had stayed true to his inherent love of tinkering and trinketry, making use of a small booby-trap inset behind the locker's clasp that would render a mild electrical shock onto whomever attempted to open it. As all Corgassi possessed an inherent immunity to certain extremities of electricity, Salo apparently hadn't thought to include any manner of bypass and Two-Bit was forced to pry the box open from a distance with a bit of leverage. Its contents, unsurprisingly, overflowed with various firearms, handheld explosives and their sundry accessories, as well as a small gratuity of bills and a wobbly hologram of a caged rat-canary singing silently adhered to the lid's bottom.

Heeko, on the other hand, had only a solitary padlock standing guard over his footlocker, an ancient device that would have been old when Abraham was a street waif cutting purses in the bowels of Gallow's ghettos. A single snip from Two-Bit's bolt-cutter grants him access. "Sparse" would be a gregariously flattering term to describe the inside of Heeko's footlocker. Apart from the smattering of food wrappers and crumpled credits, Two-Bit finds only the tattered blanket of oily green roughspun with which the Myyrigon had insulated his cherished carbine.

Only three such dispossessed storage bins remain, those resting before Ebeneezer, Anchorage and Garrigan's beds. Two-Bit's still somewhat undecided on that last count, as rummaging through the personal property of Moira's dead _whatever_ wouldn't exactly endear Two-Bit to Moira any and he's still on fence about the risks versus the rewards of peeving her even further off. For the moment, though, he's more concerned with disposing of Ebeneezer's oddly devilish lock.

It's strikingly silent within _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ herself, especially considering all the workers and repairmen scrambling like Spith around her outer hull. Two-Bit had specifically selected this day, a month and seven days since their now-famous confrontation with the _Exacting Counterattack_ , to slink his way into the crew quarters and perform a little twice-removed grave robbery while most of the attention focused on the ship was centered on her exterior rather than her interior.

Every now and again, Two-Bit would hear one of Ott's mechanics pass by the betweendecks corridor, or a harsh reprimand in growled Ortoki. As the majority of the crew were deep within the fortress itself, carousing with Nemo over the twenty-first consecutive replay of the Noxix footage, nobody has thus far disturbed his three previous and three, potentially two, planned acts of impiety.

After what equates to an impressive resistance in the company of such easily hoodwinked locks, Ebeneezer's own finally succumbs to the charms of Two-Bit's electronic lock pick and clinks satisfyingly free. Pressing his palm to the lid, Two-Bit levers the trunk open to rifle through the discarded leavings of his dead compatriot.

Unlike Heeko or Salo's footlockers, spare clothing constitutes the majority of Ebeneezer's chest which, Two-Bit realizes belatedly, is at least passingly logical for a humanoid of the cyclops' considerable stature. The cash is easily located and Ebeneezer's stash of rainy day funds, a grand sum of nine hundred and seventy-five credits, quickly finds a new home in Two-Bit's own pocket. Brushing aside shirts that would dwarf an extra-extra large and trousers with an estimated length of no less than 47 Tall, Two-Bit Switch nonetheless uncovers a handful of mementos and knickknacks unexpected enough to give him pause.

The smallish oaken case with an elaborate clasping mechanism of cornered wooden teeth Two-Bit recognizes almost immediately by scent as half a dozen thickly odorous cigars. Upon popping the case free and running one along the length of his nostrils, even Two-Bit, who'd never been accused of being an expert in the field of tobacco, could easily identify them as the respective crème de la crème, a cut significantly above the skunk weed the cyclopean bouncer'd blown into Two-Bit's face upon their first meeting. Without previous knowledge of them, Two-Bit couldn't testify as to what special occasion specifically but Ebeneezer had clearly been hoarding these six cigars for some unexpressed purpose. He finds himself wondering if he'd intended to share them, and with whom.

Deeper within the baggage bin, carefully wrapped in a towel whose threadbareness is second only to Heeko's bereaved blanket, Two-Bit stumbles upon three shafts of wood and fiberglass, over a foot and a half in length, of tapering thicknesses and clearly intended to screw together into one cohesive pole. Only by its distinctive rings and markings does Two-Bit realize it's a bankshot cue and, to judge from its wear-and-tear, the bankshot cue of a particularly avid bankshot player, a sport Two-Bit, in his seven months of association with Ebeneezer, couldn't recall any mention or indication of his predilection towards. Running his thumb across the butt of the bluntest section, Two-Bit feels the impression of two carved letters, "E" and "N", obviously Ebeneezer's initials, though Two-Bit had never known his last name and now, in fact, never will.

Lastly, crumpled in the trunk's corner, seemingly as an afterthought, Two-Bit Switch unearths a frayed, frazzled and bedraggled stuffed animal, revealed to be a cartoonishly bovine buhox after some examination. Its once unmistakably vibrant polka dots of periwinkle and lavender is faded almost to the point of invisibility against the off-white of its main body; its once virginal downy cloth sports stains, stitches and a coarseness indicative of its years and years of handling. Two-Bit Switch squats for minutes longer than he intended to, appreciating the companionable weight of the orphaned toy in his hand, before rolling it over to confirm the sloppily scrawled "-neezer" on the scrappy remnants of the buhox's tag.

–––

Ott appreciates _Quuilar Noxix Wants You Dead or Alive_ as much as the next Galactic Menace, but after the seventy-ninth viewing of the same purloined footage that had quite unexpectedly become the series finale, its trademark blend of shocking brutality and tacky sensationalism might perhaps begin to lose its specific charms.

This argument, however, held no water for the amalgam throngs of raiders, reavers and buccaneers packing Ott's amphitheater almost past capacity. If every cacophonous cheer and every line of dialogue drunkenly quoted by the crowd below is any indication, the seventy-ninth viewing held all the thrill, exhilaration and black humor of its impromptu premiere more than two months ago now. Occupying the second most comfortable chair of his private box suspended from the apex of the amphitheater's volcanic ceiling, Ott is more than willing to indulge the peanut gallery below and particularly their ringleader to his immediate right their well-deserved fun, even if said fun necessitated overzealously repetitive screenings of Quuilar Noxix's final minutes.

To his somewhat sophomoric credit, Captain Nemo, the man of the hour, the cause celebre and the current favorite folk hero among the Galactic Menace's cutthroat hordes, was no different. He had, if Ott's extemporized calculations were indeed correct, proposed no less than fifty-six of the footage's separate viewings and continued to shout, jeer, cat-call and laugh uproariously throughout the well-trod video, even with a mouth jammed full of imported Bozee calamari.

"Morel has a well-known reputation for arrogance and charging into a fight without the proper preparation," he quotes Dranab in perfect unison with the screen above, the hack Szarzarr criminologist whose camera crew follows the perpetually wordless Noxix around and conjectures listlessly on the bounty hunter's motives and tactics, "which Noxix plans to exploit by harpooning one of his bodyguards and drawing him into a snare." Chuckling to himself, Nemo slurps the suckered end of the precious tentacle between his greasy lips.

The calamari had been an especially difficult acquisition and an important cornerstone, apart from his considerable pay, in Ott's continued campaign to remain firmly within the mercurial Captain's good graces. Inspired by an idle comment Nemo had made three weeks previously about the apparently subpar quality of the Galactic Menace's in-house calamari, Ott had contracted his chief smuggler into a milkrun the old Chook scoundrel had initially balked at, it was so pedestrian.

With a little minor detective work, a small gratuity into the long-suffering paws of his Ortok minder and a two and a half week transit into the Inner Sectors, Ott had surprised Nemo this morning with a month's supply of fast food calamari dinners from Tentacles By Graxgor, a greasy spoon on the bad side of Gallow, professedly the single greatest source of deep-fried squid in the galaxy and one of the Captain's childhood haunts. Properly enthusiastic, Nemo currently chomps through his sixth such helping and the white slime-stained fold-up boxes lie sprinkled about his chair, like fruit fallen from the Gitterpeach tree of gluttony.

What Ott hadn't bothered to mention, in hopes of further surprising Nemo when the soon-to-be-dwindling calamari supply was summarily consumed, was that the Galactic Menace had taken the precaution of sending a ruffian crew along to kidnap all of Graxgor's cooking staff and had seamlessly integrated them into his normal culinary roster, planning only to reveal them at the precise moment with more steaming piles of deep-fried squid for Nemo to enjoy.

In the wake of the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's destruction, Ott had temporarily shifted the primary focus of his efforts off his underfunded war against Insurgent Company, the 10th Campaign Fleet and the covetous wartime whims of the Endless Imperium as a whole and onto the single-minded goal of securing the continued service of _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ , her Captain and her crew. These efforts included a complimentary reconstruction of the miraculous Briza from stem to stern, all the fat-saturated cephalopod one could realistically cram into a single mouth and, most saliently, exorbitant piles of money. For all Nemo's previous faults, errors of judgments and improprieties, Ott wasn't in the market of disregarding or neglecting the most effective weapons in his arsenal.

"Here," he offers during a convenient lull in the clamor, reaching to his left to withdraw a small thermosteel strongbox and extend it toward Nemo's lap. "This is for you."

With hands slippery from his utensil-less consumption of the previous three boxes, Nemo, one by one, suctions any residual grease from each finger before taking the strongbox's nearest handle in one hand and balancing both the calamari container and the offered case on separate knees. A moment later, he's unlatched the box and gazes down into his contents – ten neatly-arranged stacks of crisp ICC bills from Aerio and Cothmozar and Okberrin and a thousand other planets currently or formerly members of the Endless Imperium.

"This is what," he estimates, budging one pile with wet fingers, "250 thou some? This is the bounty for the Pylon? For the flagship?"

"235 thousand, actually," Ott corrects, "and there are about nineteen more of those stacked outside." He thumbs a gesture upward into the theatrical box's atrium. "I just couldn't carry them all myself."

"Uh," Nemo stammers, glancing stupidly toward the spiral staircase, as though expecting to see the mountain of identical strongboxes peeking shyly around its corner.

"4.7 million, if you're curious. Rymple tells me that, at my current rate, 3.7 million equals the Pylon's approximate worth in doxychoraphum, but I thought I'd do you the favor of simply translating that into hard cash as, from what I hear, you're persona non grata on Takioro these days." Ott steeples his upper hands together, while allowing his lower pair to dangle freely off the armrests of his chair, watching the enormous holographic representation of Noxix steady himself and his famous harpoon gun into a suitable crouch behind a rocky knoll. "I do trust that's enough, though? You don't feel short-changed?"

Nemo aligns his gaze back to the Galactic Menace and narrows his eyes to elucidate. "I've never seen _half_ of 4.7 million. I don't think the Emperor and his solid gold balls would feel short-changed."

"Heh. Good."

"But, uh, why the extra million?"

"Consider it a retainer," Ott suggests with an inward smile. "Further incentive to remind you how well the Galactic Menace treats his friends."

Nemo nods, impression impossible to mask on his face. "Duly noted." He redirects his attention back toward the strongbox's contents again, certainly attempting to visualize nineteen such duplicates, likely in an enormous heap or flooding a swimming pool.

As overwhelmed as the Captain appeared to be by all the trappings outlaid before him, Ott would gladly have shelled out twice, possibly three times what he'd just offered to Nemo, had he the slightest inklings the impulsive pirate was even mentally debating a better offer. Two months had been plenty of time for the ripples of gossip to reach nearly every interested ear in Bad Space; that up-and-comer Captain Nemo had somehow, seemingly with elbow grease and nasty insinuations about their parentage, single-handedly destroyed an Imperium flagship over Baz. Any enterprising kingpin with occasional cause to fight the law, from Smerdyakov "The Scar" Svetlova to even their allegedly hated rival Huong Xo, could realistically find suitable uses for someone of Nemo's unique skill set. Ott certainly wasn't about to surrender his chief advantage, particularly not to an ostensible business rival.

All the ramifications of the _Exacting Counterattack_ 's unprecedented destruction were yet being tabulated in the ongoing competition for Baz and all her natural resources. At present, no other member of the 10th Campaign Fleet had dared resume the _Counterattack_ 's duties as a polar window deterrent, not even one of the seven other Pylons that cincture the planet's equator, apparently for fear of Nemo and his mysterious capital-ship crushing powers.

For the time being, the enemy displayed every appearance of a major regrouping and auditing of their forces. While the _Counterattack_ 's defeat didn't spell any major dangers for the ground campaign, it should serve as a severe sucker punch to the Endless Imperium's morale almost galaxywide, Insurgent Company included.

The _Counterattack_ itself and its subsequent crashing had presented an entirely different challenge. While Nemo's tactic of using a multitude of Wolfsbane torpedoes against dubious points of the Pylon's structural integrity had been quite obviously effective and Ott had no intention of micro-managing, capital ships of that size have hundreds of failsafes in place for precisely those kinds of scenarios, including sealed bulkheads and years worth of emergency rations. Though typically designed to combat warp gate miscalculations, these precautions had complicated the aftermath of the victory somewhat.

The three distinct sections of the Pylon not immediately destroyed in the Wolfsbane onslaught had each crashed to the planet in drastically different locations across the north pole and wrangling the survivors, all in all a plucky handful of technicians and marines, had proven a new thorn in Ott's side these past two months.

One such section, the Pylon's prow, had the misfortune of falling relatively close to Ott's fortress, if one could reasonably consider eighty-five dottibles "close." Another section, the engine bank, had finally slumped to the earth after considerable ado three or four hundred dottibles to the east, apparently in a hurry to distance themselves from the last known position of the Galactic Menace. The third and largest portion of the obliterated Pylon, its midsection, had actually crashed into the western expanses of Baz's polar sea and hadn't exactly been seen since. While Ott was keenly aware that the sunken midsection would somehow find a way to vex him in the future, he possessed no underwater craft and the more pressing issues of the prow and the engine bank demanded his immediate attention.

Fundamentally, the problem inherent in the Pylon's splintering and crashing within a stone's throw from Ott's fortress was that two equally armed and armored effective fortresses of the Imperium's own had dropped out of the sky and onto the Galactic Menace's doorstep. Complete with quadroturret batteries, squads upon squads of marines and even the occasional undeployed flight of starfighters, each "fortress" also came equipped with teams upon teams of dedicated technicians working around the clock to jury-rig and restore any systems lost or damaged in the crash.

Thusly, as soon as Ott's most exterior sensors detected the _Counterattack_ 's inevitable sundering from low orbit, he dispatched what reavers he could to hamper and harry each section's descent into the atmosphere.

The engine bank had faired the best of the three, considering its improvised method of cushioning the plunge with its tremendous thrusters, but its slowed fall allowed Mutha Be Mean and her pirates more time to utterly destroy any communications equipment left to them before touching down. The prow hadn't been so lucky, however. With no convenient engines to buffer its plunge and with a host of hungry buccaneers snipping at its heels, the frontal section of the _Exacting Counterattack_ took drastic damage in the crash and thus far, while they've held a decent defense, haven't had the gumption to launch any strikes themselves. The engine bank, on the other hand, had been considerably more active.

Two months had seen three attempted incursions, two by land with infantry and ground vehicle, and one by sky, in the form of two squadrons of starfighters. The Galactic Menace had rebuffed both these advances out of hand. Nemo had actually begged and stomped his feet in demanding to helm a starfighter himself during the following reprisals, but this was one request Ott was forced to deny him, not willing to risk Nemo on such an ignominious chance.

Nevertheless, the engine bank had proven likewise resilient against Ott's own incursions and the Doreen outlaw king only recently shifted his tactics, favoring classic hit-and-run maneuvers which required a laxer supply of troops, while he focused his attentions elsewhere, such as repairing relations with the Baziron of the north continent and placating the latest of Nemo's capricious inclinations.

"Let me ask you a deliberately leading question," Ott requests of Nemo as, during what the Galactic Menace imagines to have been a tedious three-hour wait on Noxix's part, the show flashes a comprehensive compilation of Nemo's previous career, complete with shaky footage of bar fights and space battles and accompanied by Dranab's over-saturated narration. "Where do you imagine you'll be in say, a year's time?"

"Buddy," Nemo addresses, propping bare feet against the balcony's railing, "I can't imagine where I'll be in an hour." With an askance glance to the battlefield of spent calamari boxes all about him, he amends his statement. "Probably pooping."

"I'd like to imagine," Ott volunteers, shattering the steeple of his upper fingers to gesture forward, as though conjuring his vision from mid-air, "that in a year's time, the Imperium's tucked their tails and is majorly reconsidering their long-term goals here. Also, maybe a headquarters with a little less snow. That's all a little, shall we say, sanguine, perhaps, but if it's definitely not going to be possible without talented individuals like you and your crew. So, the reason I ask is," he explains, finally turning to make eye contact between loosed headtails, "whether or not you had anything on the horizon we'd need to work around." He awaits Nemo's own turn of the head to catch his gaze before continuing. "That is, of course, assuming you're even interested."

"There's Xo to deal with," he mentions at length.

"Well, believe me, there're more ways to deal with them than you'd think. With Noxix so decidedly," he flaps a flabby blue hand toward the holoscreen, "out of the picture, they're deprived not only of their best bagman, but it'll also be difficult for them to save face with the jborra actually out of the bag. What I will do," he stipulates, replacing his fingers to their previously interwoven position, "for the time being, is extend feelers and spread the word around that Captain Nemo's officially under Boss Ott's protection. I'd personally be very much surprised if Xo won't simply cut their losses and go back to denying your existence."

"Just like old times," Nemo simpers, with apparently fond remembrance, before he begins a string of nearly imperceptible nods. "You make it difficult for a fella to say 'no.'"

"Quite intentional, I guarantee you," Ott relates, smiling gregariously.

A hush falls suddenly over the masses beneath as the holographic projection of Quuilar Noxix, evidently having spotted that tall drink of bitch serving as Nemo's first mate, lets a tethered harpoon fly. In doing so, the point-of-view immediately shifts to the signature camera mounted atop the soaring spearhead.

Every hoodlum in the amphitheater, despite the three-quarters of a hundred viewings, holds their breath as they ride a flying harpoon bareback across the tundra snows before finding purchase, and deafening cheers, in the unsuspecting Anglian's left calf. The blackness cuts immediately to the last of several carefully-crafted commercial breaks Ott's team of technicians had sporadically inserted throughout the edited footage, based on exhausting hours of research watching re-run after re-run – all for toward the entertainment of Nemo and the adoring rabble.

A truncated version of the show's theme song, a twangy, blood-and-thunder nightmare, shakes the room's foundations, aided by its rhapsodic recitation by every pair of vocal chords in the room. Ott, who'd sat only smiling through all seventy-eight previous, finally, almost subconsciously, joins in.

–––

Moira Quicksilver hides out of habit, but from no one. The room, kind enough to oblige her insecurities with its darkened state, provides ample corners and triangles of shadow within which to crouch out of sight. Truthfully though, as she and her misgivings remained the chamber's sole occupants, her whole stealth act wasn't likely to buy her much soap. Yet there she squats, behind an enormous Ujad mahogany trunk, situated parallel to the door's wall, pistol loose in her hand and needlessly counting seconds to a million.

All her meticulous preparation and arrangement had now coalesced into Moira kneeling here almost absurdly in darkness. Indeed, the deeper into this business she delved, the more absurd it seemed to become.

The weapon she'd acquired after a surprisingly elaborate exercise in larceny. Garrigan's emergency stash of Vapid, discovered in the depths of his footlocker, would help nullify the chances of a potential alibi. Hours and hours of surreptitious study of the chamber in question had facilitated as ironshod an escape route as one could realistically hope for under these circumstances. Lastly, the actual date she'd chosen should hopefully discourage much further investigation. Despite all her precautionary measures and provisions, the various mitigating factors gnaw at the fringes of her composure, not least of which are an unpredictably homicidal Captain and all sixteen claws, thirty-six fangs and three hundred pounds worth of unquestioningly loyal Ortok.

She's spared any further apprehension when the main entrance to Boss Ott's spartan penthouse cracks open, spreading a yellow rectangle across the center of the floor and the Galactic Menace himself shambles inside, visibly weary. He dawdles with a held Attaché a moment in the entryway, simultaneously slides the door sealed behind him with a fist lightly into the door control and engages the overhead lights with a thumb hard against the appropriate button. Moira Quicksilver is suddenly revealed, standing behind his oaken trunk with FZ091 Concord Industries Paramour Semi-Automatic Laser Pistol at arm's length.

The Doreen's expression upon seeing her is blank as oblivion. "Any particular reason?"

Moira chokes the trigger and the first canister loses itself somewhere in the tangle of blue headtails. Its effect, however, is immediately visible on Ott's face as he stumbles, eyes agog, mouth slackened open, three of four hands grasping for support on the nearby walls and finding none. He finally loses his balance altogether after several moments of gawky wavering, shattering the Attaché against the thermosteel floor and slumping comically against the left-hand corner of the entryway.

The mortifying silliness of his inauspicious death shocking her back into action, Moira Quicksilver, immediate danger steeling her nerves anew, withdraws the vial from her pocket, stoops before the warm, quivering corpse of the former Galactic Menace and mentally reviews the second stage of her plan.

Chapter 26

Two-Bit Switch can't imagine what he would have done if Mutha Be Mean had shot his fingers off. Screaming would probably have been his initial reaction, followed shortly by cursing and concluded with a nice healthy dose of running the fuck away. His career as expert cutpurse, safecracker and cardsharp would definitively have been history, his effectiveness as hired gun, jailbreaker and all around ne'er-do-well would seriously be called into question and "Two-Bit Switch" would likely cease to be his official moniker, in favor of something along the even less flattering lines of "Half-Wanker" or "Fingerfuck".

He certainly wouldn't have been able to calibrate _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ bombard shields for her forthcoming departure through Baz's polar window, as he does now. He cherishes each and every finger on his left hand as he dials an adequate power frequency to encompass the skyrocketing Briza as she hurtles herself toward open space. He also, without the expressed permission of the laconic Captain, prepares and stores a separate ray shielding sequence to properly protect the _Lover's_ hind quarters, ready to be engaged at a moment's notice, should the late Boss Ott's incensed vassals scramble any of their ships in time to give chase.

_The Unconstant_ _Lover_ rattles familiarly from the successive layers of gravitational force exerted by the beginnings of its atmospheric exit through Baz's polar window, her first jaunt into actual orbit since the crash three months previously. Two-Bit numbly realizes it's likely to be her last such voyage from the forsaken planet below. Strange indeed would be the circumstances that would drag _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ , her Captain and her crew back to a Baz devoid of Boss Ott, the former Galactic Menace.

Said Captain is erect and sullen in the helmsman's chair, demonstrating a caliber of his frightening reticence zottibles beyond anything Two-Bit had ever beheld. Only his hands, almost synonymous with the yoke they grip, display any signs of movement, twitching every other second to adjust the ship's alignment into the atmosphere. His face is a stolid mask, lacking any crease or line to indicate mood, attitude or opinion.

"Cap'n, you mind if I cadge a little into aux power?" Two-Bit ventures, less to actually seek approval and more to attempt to provoke some manner of response. "Case of a pressure flux, don't wanna get caffled with our plonkers in our wanks." Nothing, not a nod, not a sniff, not even a blink, escapes the unflinching stillness that had swallowed Nemo. "I'll just help myself then, shall I?" he mutters after a moment, leaning the co-pilot's gyroscopic rig to the edge of its starboard reach to toggle open the auxiliary conduits, inadvertently smearing pink Mrukese blood on the necessary switches.

_The Unconstant_ _Lover_ shreds the uttermost edges of Baz's atmosphere in the haste of her fleeing and not twenty minutes before, Two-Bit Switch had been blissfully ignorant to the unheralded upheaval that would necessitate their flight. At the time, the four fingers of his left hand hadn't yet been imperiled and Marco the Mange, penultimate member of the conscript crew, had been alive and well, loitering by Two-Bit's side.

Having just completed the last superficial repairs during the _Lover's_ three-month post-crash overhaul, Marco, being the precocious windbag he was, had wandered Ott's labyrinthine fortress in search of someone to complain to and had been fortunate enough to discover Two-Bit himself, agonizing over Bubble flavors outside the boosted vending machines beneath the East Spire.

A few pleasantries and an extensive one-sided rant against Odisseus and his general cantankerousness later, a brute squad, commanded by none other than that most incorrigible Powosi Mutha Be Mean, boiled out of a nearby lavatory, looking for blood and not looking for answers.

From what admittedly few specific details Two-Bit had been able to glean before things became rather messy, Ott had quite suddenly been found dead in his penthouse, courtesy of an unasked-for ventilation in his skull. Upon learning this, Mutha had somehow gotten the wild notion that some bounty hunter on Nemo's payroll had done the dirty deed in pursuit of the thirteen million credit reward. Without bothering to properly interrogate the two nearest suspects, Mutha had let slip her bevy of goons. Before Two-Bit could yank the unarmed Marco out of the way, the hapless Mruka had been sloppily brained by the business end of the resident Gung'nooj's warclub, splashing a disquieting volume of the mechanic's pink blood all over Two-Bit and subsequently toppling him to the floor in surprise and horror.

At this point, Mutha Be Mean, her infinite wisdom certainly enhanced by a considerable quantity of good-morning alcohol, resolved to open fire on the prone, hopelessly outnumbered and blood-spattered Two-Bit with her underslung machine gun. Fortunately for Two-Bit, that third eye apparently didn't improve this Powosi's aim any measurable amount and the first half of her clip strafed the thermosteel inches from his hurriedly retracted fingers.

By the time Mutha's stopped to check her aim, Two-Bit'd freed his own piece, the HH19 Tigress borrowed on Takioro, from its holster and paid Ott's last remaining pirate captain back with a trio of canisters smack dab in her chest. Mutha's mooks subsequently distracted, Two-Bit took the initiative to gather his feet under him and bail before the muscle could close the distance.

As labyrinthine as Ott's headquarters might be, word of his death reached its every corner and cranny with surprising speed. By all reports, the scattered members of the _Lover's_ crew encountered similar misunderstandings all across the fortress, though the headcount indicated only Marco, among the crew, had gone to meet his maker. They'd reconvened aboard the ship and, with vengeful pirates on their heels, there'd been too much pandemonium surrounding their escape to either confirm or disconfirm the potpourri of conflicting rumors each crew member had been assaulted with.

To this moment, co-piloting _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ through the uppermost pinhole in Baz's rotational momentum, Two-Bit Switch had no concrete notion of how Ott had died, who had killed him or whether, truth be told, he was actually dead. From what he'd ascertained, the only of the _Lover's_ crewmen to see allegedly have seen a corpse had been Nemo and Two-Bit wasn't of a mind to further press the obviously unwilling Captain.

With a last convulsion of opposing pressure that buffets the ship ever so slightly to port, the _Lover_ breaks finally free of Baz's gravitational grip and tastes open space for the first time in the new year, never to return to the world of doxychoraphum, Baziron and Quuilar Noxix's resting place for as long as she flew. Abraham, from the warp room, patches through the convoluted string of dirty warp coordinates that even Two-Bit, a rank amateur of a navigator, recognizes at a glance as a blank point, an unoccupied patch of open space in the vast void between established and unestablished warp routes. Whether this is a judgment call on the old Grimalti's part or Nemo's expressed wishes, Two-Bit can't rightly say.

Upon receiving this routing information, Nemo doesn't even spare it a cursory examination, instead dialing an involved sequence of commands into the dashboard to his port. On cue, the co-pilot's rig aligns its exact center of gravity, locks into place and the monitors before Two-Bit burble out information on speed, attitude and navigation.

"Take the helm until further notice," Nemo orders at once, in a voice to perfectly match his passionless expression. Rising to his feet, he peels the duster off the chair's back in one swift motion, sliding it over his shoulders and disappearing down the stairway into the abovedecks corridor, entrusting Two-Bit the helm in an unprecedented act of either trust or neglect.

–––

Moira Quicksilver wholeheartedly believes that assiduous firearm maintenance is the most distinguishing characteristic between the psychotic gun-toting morons that dominate the marauder trade and the actual professionals like herself. Aside from Moira, practically none among the _Lover's_ crew, not even the otherwise conscientious Odisseus or the late Corgassi gun-nut Salo, cultivated an appropriate level of care or concern for their weaponry. This distinction Moira wore as a point of both private contention and personal pride.

Her austere worktable, one component of her uniformly austere living quarters, is precisely large enough to service cleaning and minute repairs for only two relatively attenuate firearms, the only two weapons Moira's ever owned. For all the infatuated special treatment she spoils her Antagonist with, at the end of the day, Moira only has eyes for Righty and Lefty.

Crisp and clasped and fully loaded, Lefty glimmers even in the soft light of Moira's dim lamp, a perfect poster child from one of those pristine, pseudo-sexual AccCo advertisements Moira used to worship as a child. Righty occupies all her attention at present, however, popped open and receiving its first coat of polish into all the pistol's dimples, depressions and curves via the very cleanest cloth in Moira's kit.

Sequestered within her quarters, Moira savors the silence and isolation sweetly, only the contented hum of the distant jetboosters disturbing her reverie.

The door behind her she leaves agape, however, in anticipation of an eventual visitor. All things considered, she waits practically twice as long from the warp's initial jump as she'd expected for his arrival. When he finally does darken her doorway, she recognizes him immediately by the shape of his silhouette against the wall before her.

"I get Odi to toss this place," he theorizes, dangerous detachment evident in his voice, "I'm not gonna find a little vial of Doreen blood, am I?"

Moira peels her gaze off the unlatched firearm in her hand to feign consideration. "What an odd question."

His shadow shifts its comportment, burying spectral hands in spectral pockets and standing loose with the stationary swagger of a brawler daring to be punched. "Word 'round the campfire is, whomever killed Ott collected a blood sample shortly thereafter."

Moira crests both eyebrows and cants her head aside. "You know what that means."

"Somebody's after the thirteen million." His silhouette doesn't shift, budge or stir. Her hackles mounting, Moira drops her left wrist to the worktable as casually as possible, within finger's distance of the fully loaded, fully primed Lefty. "Well?" he prompts in a small voice.

"I ain't that stupid," is Moira's delicately fashioned slice of truth to substitute her excuse. She delivers this behind the thinnest smirk, more or less exactly how she'd inwardly rehearsed over and over again on the seven-dottible march across Baz's northern pole.

The entire gambit, the entire misdirection and all Moira's elaborate planning over the past three months hangs starkly in the balance. As the silence behind her endures nearly half a minute, Moira inches her forefinger into Lefty's trigger gap and makes mental peace with the idea of gunning the shadow in her doorway remorselessly down.

"So?" he grunts and all that remains is to thread him onto the bait, sentencing her scapegoat to a fate she imagines he richly deserves.

Moira's shrug barely upsets her shoulders, returning her left hand to the task of Righty's upkeep. "Who is?"

The conclusion certainly isn't foregone on the one-way-track of his quietly vengeful mind, to judge from the process of elimination she can practically hear through his skull. After some seething deliberation, he arrives on the mark. "Danbonte." The realization is cold condemnation.

If Moira feels any lingering guilt or pity for her comrade thrown beneath the proverbial drifttrain, her demeanor hides it entirely. "Try not to make a mess," she requests with a pinch of domestic weariness she deems appropriate for the circumstance.

Confident in the apparent success of her long-winded deception, Moira collects up the bristled black chamber brush to clean out the first of Righty's six cylinders. She doesn't catch sight of the shadow pushing apart the left side of his duster and placing a hand atop the stock of his holstered pistol before she's far too late to retaliate. Caught unawares with a brush down the chamber of an unloaded pistol and Lefty effectively mottibles out of reach for all the good it could do her now, Moira's blood runs colder than the space just beyond her teltriton walls as he asks his final question.

"You're not harboring anything on account of Garrigan," he intones blackly, a statement, rather than a true question – rigid, unfeeling and devoid of interpretation.

Never a celebrated liar the caliber of someone like Two-Bit, it costs Moira every last ounce of her composure to sneer, moments later, "If I had, I would have killed _you_."

Something about this answer, be it the pluck, the defiance or simply its sheer logic, strikes enough of a chord within him to vanish the shadow, after four excruciating seconds, from her doorway and down the corridor with the determined footfalls of a man about to commit a crime of passion.

With only the familiar yellow rectangle behind her, Moira exhales and hastily loads Righty despite trembling fingers, her cherished principles of firearm maintenance conveniently forgotten.

–––

Odisseus has caught his scent. Nineteen months in the company of such singularly odiferous characters as _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ unwashed crew had ingrained a veritable library of individual scents, musks and perfumes deep in the Ortok's sophisticated pallet, each one tied to a specific crew member. Most of the time, Odisseus ignores the sensation out of paw and is often only subconsciously aware that he's taking such detailed notes on the comings and goings of those around him.

In the very occasional matter of locating a unique crewman, however, the Ortok need only follow the unintentional trail of interaction patches left behind by his quarry.

For instance, as he stomps down the abovedecks hallway, Odisseus positively identifies Abraham Bonaventure, taking his ease of the sensor room via the distinctive blend of moonshine, Grimalti and the unexpected aid of a high quality cigar. Radiating his signature fusion of avarice, alcohol and aged leather as well as a corresponding pinch of blood's ironlike tang, Nemo shuffles listlessly several paces behind the rampaging Ortok. Danbonte, however, had placed a swab of exhaustion sweat, certainly from his hand, at shoulder's height on the corridor's corner ahead. He'd also, Odisseus predicts, coughed once before entering the hold, leaving behind a lingering cloud composite of vomit, Borsk brandy and something vaguely fungal that Odisseus can't place, most likely the byproduct of his breakfast.

Odisseus practically breaks the hold's door release button, he slaps it so forcefully on his approach. The door blusters open with an electric crackle and a hydraulic hiss, the _Lover's_ cargo hold yawning open before them both, comparatively spacious when held against the comfortably cramped corridors.

With only Noxix's pilfered _Wendengo_ , parked over the _Beggarman's_ pre-established post in the starboard corner and without any crates of consignment taking up space between beams, the cargo hold of _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ is as barren as Odisseus has ever seen it. The odd piece of neglected detritus, trash swept carelessly into a corner rather than properly disposed of, a smattering of placeholder empty crates stacked as a pretense and the portside storage lockers are all that remains of the previous year's piracy.

Were it not for the one doomed soul, huffing and puffing over a hefted strongbox near the hold's heart, the belly of _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ would have looked more like a shipwrecked ruin at the bottom of a scrap heap than the main body of an operating starship.

In their initial haste to depart the headquarters of the former Galactic Menace ahead of his wrathful mobs, the twenty crates of Ott's 4.7 million credit payout had been piled and abandoned within spitting distance of the boarding ramp. As the last remaining member of the conscript crew, the duty fell to Danbonte to shift the score of strongboxes into the care of the _Lover's_ de facto accountant, he of the sensor room, the moonshine and the cranky disposition.

After tromping down the companionway stairs, his tail thumping behind him with every step as always, Odisseus feels the cold teltriton of the hold floor, vibrating wanly from the booster's strain, against the hardened pad of his hind paw before Danbonte even notices him. "Guess that old Grimalti motherbloomer wants to count everything out in the galley now? I don't fucking know." Menace clear in his comportment, Odisseus closes to a handful of feet away and still Danbonte's oblivious, obtuse enough to hoist the next strongbox out as an offering toward the oncoming Ortok.

It isn't until he's swiped the strongbox out of his hands, latch knocked open as it clatters to the floor and splays out its contents in an avalanche of currency, that the redskin finally comprehends the basest portion of Odisseus' intent. He opens his mouth to cry a protest, but the Ortok engulfs his meager humanoid throat with an enormous right paw. With a single shove, he forces Danbonte back into the nearest of the hold's bracing beams, a foot and a half off the floor and entirely at Odisseus' mercy to close his fist and sentence the throat beneath to the same fate as the _Lover's_ old negative flux coupling.

Expectedly thrashing some, but understanding, at least on some primal level, the predicament of his soon-to-be-broken neck, Danbonte croaks in surprise and outrage. "The fuck? Lemme–"

"Got some questions for ya," Nemo's voice interrupts the struggle, ominously apart from the distance and height of the companionway's top platform where he'd lingered. Danbonte altogether ceases his flailing to instead hang limply and behold the faraway visage of his accuser.

"Nemo," he murmurs in a hush, before remembering himself. "Captain, your dog's gone rabid–" he curses. Odisseus, in thanks, exerts enough pressure to blockade his vocal chords against whatever sixth word he was about to utter.

Of course, the Captain ignores him. "Did you think no one would notice?"

"What?"

Fiddling with a trinket made indistinct by this distance, Nemo explicates calmly and without eye contact. "I'm curious – what exactly would your excuse have been?" He glances up to suggest, "The space lottery?" He continues turning the trifle over in his hands idly. "Some long-lost and heretofore unknown relative, great uncle Aloysius or fucking somebody, kicked it and left you a convenient pile of Inner-Sector-minted cash?"

"Captain, Captain," Danbonte attempts to address, jamming fingers at the edges of the Ortok's vise-grip, probing for purchase, "I don't even know what you're–"

"Found this little beauty in your personal effects," he confesses, his tone of voice vaguely evoking a spouse cornering their disloyal mate.

He holds aloft, pinched between thumb and forefinger, the small, stoppered vial of blood he'd showed Odisseus four minutes previously. This, the original evidence, had commanded Odisseus' undying loyalty in this ghastly business and all matters this close to the collective hearts of both saltbrothers. "Wrapped up in a tube sock. Like you were trying to hide your wallet at the beach."

Danbonte squints and turns an interesting shade of pink, evidently his equivalent of pale. "What is that, blood?" Danbonte shifts his weight fruitlessly "Look, look," he squeaks, "Tell Moira I'm sorry, alright? I know they were friends and all and it wasn't nothing personal but I mean, an ex-naval officer? There's bound to be something there. Worth a look, anyway."

Nemo almost smirks. "You think this is about Garrigan," he appreciates bluntly. "You think Odi and I came all the way down here to talk to you about Garrigan." He switches the vial to his left hand. "Garrigan," he reports, "isn't worth thirteen million credits."

"...oh, moons, you don't think I–"

"I'm not sure," Nemo admits with a shrug. "He, on the other hand," he gestures the vial towards Odisseus, who obliges his saltbrother with the throatiest of growls.

"Convince me otherwise."

No translation is necessary, potent threat rumbling behind Ortoki fangs the universal language. Danbonte sputters. "You gotta believe me, I wasn't anywhere near there, I didn't even–"

Palming the vial and entombing both hands deeply in his duster pockets, Nemo questions conversationally. "Where were you?"

Either confusion, embarrassment, guilt or some mixture therewith crosses Danbonte's red features before he scrapes together a mere "...I, uh," as a reply.

"Hm?" Nemo cranes forward. "Where?"

"Listen, I'll tell you the truth, alright, even if it don't make me sound any more innocent," Danbonte stipulates reluctantly. "I could lie, you understand, make up something that'd sound better, but I'm gonna be honest and tell you what actually happened."

"It's appreciated," Nemo broadcasts withering faux-benevolence.

"I fucking don't remember."

While too far-off to visually confirm, Odisseus knows, from long acquaintance, that Nemo's biting his lower lip with clenched frustration. "That a fact?" he manages at length.

"I swear," Danbonte pleads. "Last night, I remember drinking some, I remember marbles with some of Mutha's bottom-rung guys but, for whatever reason, everything after that, everything until this morning's gone, my hand to all the blooming moons."

Odisseus grits his teeth. "He does have brandy on the breath."

"What?" Danbonte quivers, visibly terrified of everything originating from the Ortok.

"You're suggesting," Nemo clarifies to Odisseus, "that he killed Ott in some kind of what, drunken haze?"

"No, no," Danbonte reaches both arms out to their limits, as if either to somehow physically distance himself from this latest theory or in a desperate attempt to recover the slack of the conversation, "I'm saying that I, I don't know, passed out or something. That I couldn't have done it – I wasn't conscious."

The Captain withdraws both hands from his pockets, the left still absently twiddling the vial between his fingers, deposits both elbows to the gangway railing before him and leans with a casual firmness forward. "Should I go through the rest of it, then?" he proposes, his tone adjusting somewhat to better resemble a parent reprimanding a guilty child who's stubborn about their alleged innocence. "Putting aside your thin as fuck story about booze amnesia and also the sorta salient fact that you were hiding, you know, a sample of his fucking blood," he grants with a sharp point of the sample in question, "Rymple said, judging from the wound, a semiautomatic pistol's to blame for taking the back of Ott's skull off."

Danbonte points before Odisseus can stop him. "That don't mean–"

"On top of that," Nemo continues to nonchalantly tabulate, "I did a little research. You remember Zella, Salo, Heeko, Ebeneezer and it sounds like Garrigan too? Turns out they've all been posthumously cashed in." His voice corrupts fully, up until now deceptively casual with that flinty hint of malice, into the pitiless tone he reserves for the servants of the Endless Imperium. "Turns out your _bounty hunting_ license got renewed six months ago."

The redskin thrashes anew with fresh vigor, a decision Odisseus advises against with a blunt force reminder of the beam's unflinching teltriton reason. "This is a frame-up job, you fucking lunatics–"

Odisseus roars pure fury into his face, certainly inflicting some minor ear damage and flecking his flailing red features with castoff spittle.

On the edge of the Ortok's hazy peripheral, Nemo press the palm unburdened by Ott's blood against his temple. "Probably it's just the coin. Maybe the Imperium made you a special deal. Bloom," he remarks, shuffling said hand through the stringy stands of his ebony mane, "what if you just did it for the laughs? Because, you know what, I think you're exactly the flavor of spineless pissant little lonktonkshit who'd damn an entire planet and arm the Imperium with all the repellent they can waste, just to make your cock look that much longer."

Sensing the climax, Danbonte digs his feeble nails into the coarse brown fur of Odisseus' knuckles, a last ditch endeavor to shirk the comeuppance enabling eventual genocide had afforded him. "It's, it's not–" he wheezes.

Even had Danbonte been forming coherent sentences or thoughts, Nemo, and by proxy Odisseus, is entirely deaf to them. With a simple motion, Nemo releases the pinch his left fingers hold over the vial.

In the space of a second, the tiny glass capsule splinters on the galvanized teltriton plates below the companionway, blood worth a Galactic Menace's ransom seeping into dents and imperfections in the metal. "There's your fucking thirteen million," he offers mutteringly, before adding an conclusive evaluation. "In my mind, the only thing worse than you is them."

His ghost of a nod is many times more prompting than Odisseus requires.

Snarling all the while, he raps the back of Danbonte's skull once, nice and hard, against the teltriton pillar for good measure before resolving to let the bracing beam off easy and to handle the heavy lifting himself. The blow to the back of the head rendering intelligible speech something of an impossibility, Danbonte lolls forward, groaning stupidly, as Odisseus closes a second mitt around the other half of the bounty hunter's throat. Prying him off the pillar with both paws, the Ortok begins to throttle him. Four shakes in, Danbonte's body convulses spasmodically like a landed trout and the Ortok's thumb claw first pierces skin. Soon, all nine of its counterparts join in, rending flesh, tendon and esophagus beneath. Eight shakes in, Danbonte's nearly headless and long past dead, Odisseus' rage not subsiding until the shorn stub of an artery had exhaustively doused the Ortok, the beam, the floor, anything unfortunate enough to land within a certain radius from the messy murder, in thick gobs of the redskin's inky black blood.

At last, with only a scuffed and shivered stretch of spinal cord still attaching Danbonte's head to his shoulders, a huffing, blood-drenched and slowly becalming Odisseus, with images of his childhood gradually banished from his animal brain, relaxes his hold on the corpse. What's left of Danbonte piles to the deck at the Ortok's feet and continues to ooze blood. Where once a berserk beast stood and remorselessly squeezed loose a life, now only a humble mechanic, frightened by the horror before him and still more by the horror the Endless Imperium has brewed within him, staggers awkwardly back from the emptying carcass of the _Lover's_ last mercenary.

High on the companionway, Nemo leans heavily over the rail, having evidently watched the spectacle of his saltbrother's savagery unblinking. The faintest suggestion of a satisfied smile plays about his lips.

–––

Moira, sudsy to the elbows, suddenly stops scrubbing to wonder if her uncharacteristic volunteering for the extremely unpopular dish duty might actually have given her away. In all honesty, she didn't much mind the actual task of dishwashing. Her persistent refusals whenever Odisseus attempted to threaten, bribe or cajole some hapless crewmember into the kitchen-work stemmed from a spirited desire to stave off the servile housewife comparison. With a pair of certifiable misogynists aboard, one could never been entirely too careful concerning such a comparison.

There was something calmingly familiar about the methodical way one washed dishes by hand and, on those rare occasions when she offered up her services, she privately imagined it as some manner of recompense for Odisseus' culinary endeavors.

This instance, however, with each of the original five crew members in some heightened state between suspicion, dread, outrage and self-loathing, she'd perhaps invited too much scrutiny with her anomalous offer. After a moment of recoil, they'd accepted readily enough, or at least without audible complaint. Twenty minutes later, she and the scrub brush had been left virtually to their own devices, excepting Abraham's lingering presence in the main galley room with the copious piles of dough.

The automatic scrubber across the aisle had gone the way of oft-forgotten laundry mainframe installed in the hold's port corner and promptly committed ritualistic suicide during Moira's first week aboard. The crew, denied the hands-off convenience the scrubber provided, had roundly rebelled against the very notion of minute manual labor ever since. From that point on, the _Lover's_ disparate mismatch of plates, glasses, bowls and flatware, comprised mainly of leftovers from the previous owners and donations from each of the original five crew members, were stacked from sink to ceiling. Every few months, chagrined amateur chef Odisseus was forced to engage in an hours-long dishwashing binge, during which anyone aboard with any love of their own life steered entirely clear of the galley.

Following the hiring and successive killing of the bygone conscript crew, Odisseus had instituted a new policy. After whittling the entire volume of _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ dishes to a single set for all fifteen aboard, the Ortok would, upon the latest death of a hired gun, destroy, dispatch or otherwise remove one such set, to better represent the number of mouths to feed and subsequently clean up after.

Danbonte's death is therefore confirmed, after the first hint of the voluminous pool of black blood staining the hold floor, by the sight of a fresh bowl, plate, glass, fork, spoon and knife, all smashed and shattered on the top of the galley garbage can. Upon seeing this, partially for the kicks and partially to further fuel her specifically composed air of amused ambivalence toward the entire affair, she collected a sampling of Danbonte's spilt blood, in the minutes before Odisseus' belatedly prepared lunch of zulfshell clam chowder.

She knew the redskin was almost certainly too small time to be worth the effort and that any posting he might had accrued on whatever bloomhole rock he originated from would be the chumpest of change, but Moira supposed it was the principle rather than the payday that granted the idea irony.

The chowder, not a bad outing on Odisseus' part, had been consumed in absolute silence, each of the _Lover's_ crewmen mired in individual thoughts of gloom and doom. Moira was the first finished, her unaffectedness an affectation she might have compromised by her willingness to tidy up. Two-Bit completed his secondly, departing the galley for parts amid the ship unknown. Odisseus took his leave shortly thereafter, certainly toward the engine room, the aftereffects of Danbonte's murder a palpable weight around his neck. Nemo'd only relinquished his empty bowl and thousand-zottible stare at prompting from Abraham, toward the end of setting coordinates toward Takioro, their inevitable destination and the necessary platitudes, outrageous tributes and groveling at Velocity's hooves therein. Three quarters of the dish work and an engaged warp later, the Grimalti returned to his post at the center of the crew's tables. There he now sits, carefully parceling out enormous individual shares toward _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ and her last five souls, all of this presided over by a scrappy purple-and-blue spotted plushie Moira couldn't recall seeing before.

The soup pot, a cast-iron son of a bitch whose tendency to stain would give most disintegrators pause and subsequently the last dish, grants Moira an appreciated window to meditate on the ramifications of her previous evening's handiwork.

She only killed two people, one directly, one indirectly, one the Galactic Menace and guilty of a litany of crimes and atrocities that Moira, a hired murderer herself, couldn't comfortably take the moral high ground against, the other a weasel-faced prick capable of small cruelties but otherwise undeserving of the death he'd received. She'd also, potentially, bought some small degree of retribution for Glive Garrigan, an unjust casualty of a war he'd deserted years ago.

Beyond that, she'd torn Ott's campaign to tatters and therefore had won Baz for the Endless Imperium. She'd inadvertently assimilated the complacent Baziron, like the Dancing-Horizon, and she'd subjugated, if not outright slaughtered, the defiant Baziron, like the Scream-Weeds. Lastly, she'd supplied the forces of law, order and good government, forces she, as a professional pirate, was diametrically opposed to, with a practically infinite supply of capital-ship-busting weapons and, in all likelihood, destroyed a planet, in the time-honored tradition of Nos Mantri and Twin Telta.

None of this, of course, accounted for the resultant and apparently profound psychological repercussions amongst _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ depleted crew, those, she reminds herself, who were professedly her allies and now, however unspoken, her closest approximation of friends.

It's this last point, the one missing all the grandeur and galaxy-shaping fanfare, that sticks so firmly in her craw as she stows the soup pot, dries her hands with the dish towel dyed beige by overuse and strides apart from the galley, with the unexpressed intention of hiding in her topturret's non-judgmental haven.

A sentence from the craggy voice seated behind her halts her hard in her tracks.

"That Danbonte of yers spent the night pissing himself sick in the back corner of Ott's mess hall," Abraham instigates, like a peal of thunder past the horizon that harbingers a storm.

Frozen in her tracks at the doorway, Moira is keenly aware of the weight of her revolvers in their shoulder holsters. "Yeah?"

"Ye poisoned him. Vapid, I expect. Only way to blank the memory that bad." He takes the sudden small breath of realization. "Wager it was Garrigan's stash, come to think of it."

"Anyone else know?" she presses carefully.

"Ye fed Nemo what he wanted, somebody disposable, and now that's had his fill, he won't go lookin' anymore. Goes double for the Ortok," Abraham speculates. "Two-Bit'd be a concern if he weren't so blastedly bribable." She can imagine him nodding behind her, wattle wagging more from condescension than from the movement of his bloated Grimalti head. "Ye did good, missy, ye did passable fair but I'm afraid there be more'n one hole in that little story ye cooked up for the Cap'n and, worse still," the smile is painfully present in his voice, "ye forgot about me."

With a gunfighter's patience, Moira turns herself completely about face in four languorous steps. The Grimalti navigator threatens his chair with toppling he's leaned his bulk so far back, exact image of magnanimous mockery Moira'd imagined painted across his crinkled blubbery face. "Do we need to have a talk?"

"Just that little one," comes his customarily enigmatic answer. They lock gazes for a moment, two brands of obstinance butting heads, his the arrogance born of exhaustive personal experience, hers the confidence of exhaustive personal conditioning. "Think it suffice to say," Abraham explicates, breaking the stalemate, "I got me some plans for our boy up there and they sure as moons didn't involve no Boss Ott." That said, with a cockeyed smirk to match his cockeyed countenance, Abraham Bonaventure slumps his capacious build forward to the table top and advances, at arm's reach, two strongboxes, visibly brimming with her cut of the cash. "Here ye be, missy."

Not entirely convinced this isn't some ploy to occupy both of her hands while he produces his pre-Imperium blunderbuss from nowhere, Moira reaches tentatively out and takes ahold of the two strongboxes. With her best impression of an appreciative nod, she turns to stride down the betweendecks corridor.

The burden of her secret is, through Abraham's tacit approval, lifted, if only in a small and untrustworthy way.

Final Interlude

_The Unconstant_ _Lover_ whimpered like a muzzled beast when the graviton lock hit. At first, her whole mismatched hull only growled from the shock of impact. With the sudden cancellation of her forward momentum, however, the old JR1 Nautiloid Shell-Class jetboosters began to sputter and whine with their denial, refusing to let up. Instead of continuing forward, the infinitesimal difference in fuel efficiency between the two boosters forced her to list as far to port as the still-establishing graviton lock would allow, an action the propulsion computer belatedly compensated as best it could. _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ , caught between the two extremes, began to sway back and forth, like a shark swimming in place.

Her helm, in response, splashed a confusing and contradictory array of warnings and alerts across the dozen and more available display screens. To the two humanoids occupying the pilot and co-pilot's seats, neither of whom had quite acclimated themselves to all six hundred some of the Briza's unique and thorny quirks, this development seemed worthy of a certain degree of confoundment and consternation.

"The bloom now?" Nehel Morel, known more colloquially by the handy portmanteau Nemo, surveyed the objecting monitors surrounding him with thinly veiled embarrassment. As her Captain, he felt that a general understanding of all the _Lover's_ inner workings fell solidly under his list of responsibilities. With only four months behind the wheel of anything larger than a one-man fightercraft, however, he was often still clueless as to a problem's specific nature long after trial-and-error had reached an agreeable compromise.

In the wheeling gyroscopic shielding station to the Captain's immediate starboard, his co-pilot squinted into his sensory equipment. "Something didn't fall off, did it?" Two-Bit Switch, hustler, scofflaw and maker of a dozen varieties of trouble, was the crew's most recent recruit, following a famously successful prison break on Nemen Uil Maximum Security Imperial Penitentiary. By his reckoning, he had only served as the _Lover's_ co-pilot and point man for a month and four days.

Nemo bit his bottom lip and tapped three random keys on the nearest keypad to no success. "Hope not. Pretty sure this was the last weekend on the warranty."

"Fuck me in the exhaust pipe," Two-Bit suggested, hopefully hypothetically, as the centralized sensory computer finally got its lonktonks in a row and flashed a rather salient read-out on the co-pilot's main screen. "Cap'n, we got a graviton lock."

"What? From where?"

"You ain't gonna ball it up," Two-Bit warned gravelly. "It's from the _Eye_."

In unison, both pilot and co-pilot broke eye contact and turned their gaze directly out the viewport before them. An irregular black blot against the cerulean ice ball beyond, the Vbeck & Rhissol UZ4 Asylum-Class Medium Cargo Transport currently broadcasting ident as _The Weather Eye_ had, when it first arrived at their rendezvous point above Bozee, appeared every inch the gawky, unfashionable middleweight hauler they'd been expecting. In the light of these new graviton-related developments, however, the abnormally shaped silhouette before them had abruptly taken on an ominous and perhaps even sinister aspect.

"...the fuck?" Nemo muttered, swapping his attention between the distant _Eye_ , the bleeping controls and the incredulous Two-Bit. "Mongoose swore up and down by this guy!"

Two-Bit tilted his head aside. "Well, what does that jabb about Mongoose?"

"Whaddya think?" the Captain theorized. "More pirates?" Two-Bit only shrugged and Nemo allowed himself a momentary bluster. "Better not be. I need to get winked-and-wooled like I need another hole in my hull." After several unsuccessful attempts to do anything useful by twisting switches and ramming buttons, Nemo finally reached for a set of controls he was comfortable with. " _Unconstant_ _Lover_ to _Weather Eye_ , _Unconstant_ _Lover_ to _Weather Eye_ ," he hailed and, as soon as the connection comes live, tossed his arms wide. "All the moons, man! It's only toothpaste anyway! We'll give you a fair price!"

Crackling over the comm channel came their paling reply. "Unidentified captain-lord of smuggler vessel-craft ' _Unconstant_ _Lover_ ,' on the authority-powers of the Zibbian Federation, you are hereby ordered to power down your–" the mangled Commercial of an overpaid Zibbian police captain droned until Nemo muted the channel from fear.

Two-Bit swallowed hard. "Oh, shitstains."

"We got stung," Nemo appreciated.

The helm's door slid open so silently, neither Nemo nor Two-Bit, especially over the sounds of strident alarms and straining starship, noticed the entrance of Odisseus. Real name unpronounceable in Commercial, the paunchy otterfolk served an unenviable double duty as Nehel Morel's saltbrother and _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ mechanic. His first sentence, to Two-Bit only a string of growls, yips and snarls but to Nemo a coherent and intelligible thought, surprises the both of them nonetheless.

"Are we graviton locked?"

"Um," Nemo stalled, "why do you ask?"

The Ortok thumbed a claw over his sloping shoulder. "'cause the manual override is shooting sparks again and, call me crazy, but the only reason that should be happening would be, you know, if we were graviton locked."

Nemo planted both palms together in an assuaging gesture. "We're maybe a _little_ graviton locked. Two-Bit, how much are we graviton locked?"

"Dohick here says we're into them for 29% rigidity."

"See? Not even thirty."

Odisseus contorted his mustelid features. "Into whom for 29% rigidity? The buyer?"

With obvious apprehension, Nemo reached over to unmute the comm frequency between _Lover_ and Eye. As though they'd never been interrupted, the authorative voice on the opposite side of the call rattled on. "–repeat, on the authority-powers of the Zibbian Federation, power down your weapons system-guns, cut your engine-motors and prepare to–" Nemo replaced his thumb on the mute button.

"...you're shitting me," Odisseus intoned.

"'fraid not. I guess Mongoose hung us out to dry."

Odisseus shook his head with frustrated disgust. "Told you he was wearing a wire."

"Guy's had skinworms for the past seven months," Nemo exclaimed defensively. "I see a weird bump under his shirt, I'm not gonna say anything, alright?" He inched the helmsman's chair to face his instruments again, before adding, "Plus, he's the only fence I know, so."

"I got a bloke in statee we could jabb at next time," Two-Bit offered cheerfully. "Oh. 38%," he followed up less cheerfully.

"So, what?" Odisseus questioned. "This is it? We're cooked?"

"Surrender?" Nemo blurted. "What're you, new here? You wanna be dropping the soap in some Zibbian prison the rest of your life for contraband trafficking?"

"Federation'll only clink for fifteen, iffen we can jank it down to Stolen Goods," Two-Bit informed out of hand. "That, and the joint they got on Zulfo's got big fat exhaust vents, the fucks."

"Bloom that," Nemo opined. "Time makes me lose my marbles. You remember the forty-five minutes I spent in the drunk-tank at the Underglow Precinct House?" he directed over his shoulder to his saltbrother. "I near about chewed my nine-year-old arm off."

Odisseus sighed wistfully. "How could I forget?"

"Oh, hey, the party's in here," the singularly feminine voice of Moira Quicksilver, also not her birth name, observed. Her entrance was likewise masked by the hush of the helm door and practically jumped the _Lover's_ captain, cutpurse and mechanic out of their respectively sweaty, slimy and shaggy skins. The ex-bounty hunter rarely visited the helm, preferring the privacy of the topturret, the medbay and occasionally her own quarters in what four months had taught her to be something of a proverbial sausage factory.

She lingered jauntily in the doorway, squinting forward through the viewport. "Is that the buyer out there? Flashing those police-strips?" She snorts. "That's a clever trick." The awkwardness of the abounded silence that greeted said observation seemed to speak for itself. "Unless they're actual police strips on an actual police cruiser and we're about to get fucked. Are we about to get fucked?" A heartfelt reprise of the crew's previous silence confirmed Moira's suspicions better than words ever could. "Sublime. I knew that wasn't a skinworm."

Nemo pitched his hands into the air. "Well, excuse the fuck me!"

"We're thinking of repelling boarders, then?"

Two-Bit grimaced as he pivoted about to face her. "If they've been diddling out here all day, fixing to kuckle us, they'll be decking bloody task forces of camos with fire-breathing plonkers and every blooming thing."

A spark, a light the fledgling crew of _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ had not yet learnt to fear, enkindled behind the ashen eyes of their Captain, the beginnings of a truly piratical notion. "Zibbians'll be looking to take us alive, right?" he asked of Two-Bit, his attention focused nowhere.

"Should be."

"Then let's do something stupid." Uttered with honest simplicity, these words boded for the crew the beginning of a continuing career of mitigating said necessary stupidities from those decidedly less so, as, in the Captain's book, there were quite nearly always the same thing. "Abraham!" Nemo shouted into the interior comm channel. "You doddering old bastard, you awake?"

A fumbling sound, the unmistakable clatter of shattered glass and the hoary snorting of an immortal Grimalti yanked rudely from sleep all proceeded Abraham's groggy reply. "Haul on the main brace!"

"Uh, sure," Nemo agreed. "Listen, I need dead point coordinates outta here and I need 'em last year! Don't ask questions! Two-Bit, where we at?"

"43% rigidity."

His blatant disregard for segues breaking the sound barrier, Nemo flipped several switches with considerably more purpose than previously while barking new streams of orders. "Get ready to double-fold bombard shields dead bang over the bow. For this to work, I'mana need Moira in the turret and Odi in the engine room."

"Aye aye," Moira complied with relish before disappearing down the corridor.

"To do what? Make peace with my gods?"

"No time for talking. Move!"

With a stifled grumble and the meanest of mean looks, Odisseus shuffled his bulk down the helm's half-flight of stairs and plodded with as much speed as his stubby rear haunches would allow.

By the time Moira'd made the comparatively short jog into the gundeck and up the access ladder to the _Lover's_ practically unused Antagonist and Odisseus has completed the significantly longer trek down the abovedecks corridor, across the hold, down an access ladder of his own and through the cramped orlop tunnel to the slightly-less cramped engine room, Two-Bit reported 59% rigidity on the _Eye's_ graviton lock. The plan percolating in the untamed regions of Nemo's brain had spiked a considerable amount in both difficulty and danger, which he was less than loathe to admit was part and parcel of the idea's entire attraction.

"Those shields ready yet?" he pressed.

"Coupla seconds here," Two-Bit delayed with one hand placating Nemo, the other dialing around the rig's main control panel. "Still getting a feel for all the bells and whistles."

"Soon as you get them, shoot 'em up. Moira," he addressed into his headset, "you know what a graviton projector looks like?"

The unimpressive reception quality of the _Lover's_ undedicated comm channel distorted her reply. "A general impression."

"Second you get a bead on theirs, you give that sucker everything that gun I stole for you's got."

Granted exactly the length of leash she preferred, Moira was only to pleased to affirm with another "Aye aye."

"Did you send me down here for something specific," Odisseus, joining the comm chat with the scuffing and scraping of his headset, piped in, "or just out of your overall disdain for my physical wellbeing?"

"No, I need you to keep the boosters all simpatico for me. Odds are," he predicted, anticipating a similar such reaction from the crew, "they probably ain't gonna be big fans of this next little maneuver, so you gotta make sure they don't get the wrong idea and shut down on me, 'cause then, bloom, would we be sunk."

A pause of advanced pregnancy followed. "What do you mean, 'not big fans'? What's in your head, Nemo?"

"I said something stupid."

With two last taps of his keypad, Two-Bit hurriedly announces "Edgies're live!"

The effect was instantaneous and jarring. A barricade of undulating energy, so thick as to blur anything visible out the viewport past recognition, suddenly materialized between predator and prey. Upon arrival, it immediately gave furious battle with the _Eye's_ graviton lock.

The empty space some distance off the _Lover's_ bow exploded into a battlefield of invisible forces, the bombard shields polluting the purity of the graviton's hold and taxing the Briza with more frenetic whipping and jouncing. Each crewmember, unprepared for the extreme turbulence, only barely avoided losing their individual lunches as their spaceship lurched to and fro.

Seeing this, The _Weather Eye_ -come-police cruiser sidled itself forward in an attempt to successfully reel the _Lover_ , an unyielding fish who's swallowed the bait and seems determined to drown its angler rather than be taken, toward its airlock.

With this action did Moira, sighting down the length of the turret's trifecta of a barrel in deference to that newly-installed know-it-all of a munitions computer, spotted the graviton projector, mounted obviously atop the Asylum-class freighter's airlock. She reveled in the thunderous sound of the Antagonist dumping its practically untapped ammunition reserve through its flanged barrels but found the result less satisfying, the _Eye's_ ray shields crackling and frying her best efforts into futility.

"No dice on their projector," Moira was peeved to announce. "We really need an undergunner. Ray shields'll take punishment from me all day."

Nemo treated himself to a then-novel grin of a certain wicked magnificence. "I was hoping you'd say that."

He spent a moment hunting beneath the dashboard with one hand until, discovering it an agreeable distance from the yoke, Nemo's fingers brushed against the clutchlever for the very first time. Whomever its previous owner, they'd evidently very little use for such a feature, as Nemo discovered it practically pristine, a true oddity on a ship this haggard. He wrapped an appreciative hand around the stick's contour, feeling the points of traction prick the meat of his palm. A breath of impression, a clarion call to the drastic events to come, escaped his lips before he floored it.

Deep inside _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ , surges of fresh fuel sluiced down connector cables, her very veins, and flooded into the appropriate wells at the head of each booster, lovingly and unimaginatively named Port and Starboard. Within a moment's notice, they converted said fuel into reservoirs of additional thrust, enough to propel the _Lover_ forward at a speed unmatched by any ship her size this galaxy can offer. This thrust, considering the graviton lock, was more or less wasted, if not for the ferocity of the freighter's new bucking and thrashing, exacting an incredible toll on both the graviton lock and the ship's own skeleton.

"Oooh, okay, I _like_ that. Let's do that some more," Nemo resolved. Ignorant to the incoming objections of his crew, the Captain pumped the clutchlever a second and third time, both jetboosters pouring more heart and more stomach into the effort until Nemo and everyone else aboard actually felt the lock's rigidity suffer a palpable blow. Seeing this, the lurking police cruiser gained speed, suddenly anxious not to surrender its catch to such an idiotic tactic. The _Lover_ herself, boosters included, was none too happy about the turn of events, as Nemo'd predicted, and her chassis, stretching itself too thin inch by inch, creaked and cried in metallic pain.

"Nemo!" Odisseus' bellow echoed around the engine room with remonstrance second only to the freighter's own. "What're you _doing_? She's not build for this, you're gonna–"

Murmuring some nonsense mockery, Nemo hammered the clutchlever entirely to its possible limit, holding it firm with a prolonged squeal from both the stem and the stern. The graviton struggled against caving and the boosters streamed through more and more fuel to their obvious displeasure. Still, their hold held fast, a nuisance Nemo dealt with by clasping the center of the yoke in a single hand and swerving the whole Briza as far starboard as its maximum confinements would allow, only to snap in the complete opposite direction and send a shiver of whiplash back up the graviton to trouble the encroaching _Eye_.

As apparently effective as these evasive maneuvers seemed to her Captain, _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ was laboring under astonishing duress, duress she, by all rights, couldn't endure for any realistic stretch of time without the very real possibly of ripping herself in half.

To the four other members of _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ crew, it appeared as though their Captain, having already exhibited numerous indications he was perhaps several proverbial torpedoes short of a full magazine, had, at best, chosen an extremely inappropriate time to rev the ship's engine and feel like a big man. At worst, he'd gone stark screaming mad; the kind of mad where one feels inclined to tear a nice hole in their starship and take a swim in space. As both options would probably result in their death or, at best, incarceration, each crew member felt a very potent and understandable need to voice these concerns, coincidentally all at once and less coincidentally all on the same comm channel.

"–only gonna destroy–", "–must be outta your–", "–she can't handle it–", "Cap'n, are ye–" and half a dozen other such objections, coupled with a veritable hurricane of static interference, erupts out of every live communications port aboard, a cacophony the Captain is magically deaf to.

For her part, the _Lover_ protests via every means available to her – screeching sirens, flashing alarms both relevant and otherwise, the boosters' own strenuous vociferations, even her beams, girders, plates and frame, the starship's very bones, expressing an increasing level of agony as Nemo continued this ostensibly aimless torture of her.

"I know, baby, I know," Nemo cooed under his breath, despite the evident fact that no one aboard, including Two-Bit less than five feet away, could possibly hope to hear him, over their own babbling, the patched hiss of static and everything teltriton screaming all around them.

In what could only be his last ditch attempt to realize this harebrained pipe dream of an escape plan, Nemo increased the speed and frequency of his yoke hand and his clutchlever hand respectively. He milked the clutchlever hard enough to actually push The _Weather Eye_ scarce inches back with the displaced force of their own graviton lock shoved slowly back into their face. He zigzagged the yoke fast enough to slap centrifugal force upside both cheeks of the police cruiser's bow until it was practically teetering on the thinnest link of its graviton chain. Both actions, of course, contributed greatly to the chorus of cracking, peeling and bending sounds resounding fatally across the _Lover_.

In each second before he broke through, Moira Quicksilver, the Ortok known as Odisseus, Two-Bit Switch, Abraham Bonaventure and _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ herself each imagined their respective deaths and simultaneously rued the day and specific circumstances that had facilitated their first meeting with Nehel Morel. For the very first time, the four pirates and their spaceship bore witness to that inexplicably queer and unpredictably reliant attribute of Nemo's they could later ascribe only to the cliché of "good luck".

By whatever power they cared to name it, The _Weather Eye_ 's graviton lock died, its projector burst and it spun stupidly aside, paving passage for its prey, the somehow victorious _Unconstant_ _Lover_ , to blast dottibles past with the velocity her Captain had been so thoughtfully choking both boosters with.

They were exonerated from either cold space death or a deeply unpleasant fifteen-year sentence in a Zibbian prison. They were burdened with both an excess of unmovable stolen toothpaste and a burning desire to kick a certain tattletale fence named Mongoose directly in both balls. They were seconds away from activating a miniscule dirty warp to carry them three zottibles to complete safety aboard a starship obviously damaged but by some miracle still flyable. The _Lover's_ crew, as one, were struck wordless by the event they would eventually come to call "The Bozee Bushwhack," cultivating, if fleetingly and extremely begrudgingly in some cases, an appreciation for the occasional bout of lunacy from their Captain.

In return, he laughed with unprecedented glee until they jumped warp.

On his cue, the machinery deep with the heart of that certain Briza Light Freighter, Model IZ36 once called _The Poetic License_ , once called _The Poetic Justice_ , now named _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ clicks perfectly into place. By a power unknown to all aboard, the starship cuts a swashbuckling swath across the sky as it vanishes, leaving behind only a trace of residual star stuff on its rocketing road to vice, villainy and the nearest possible drink.

Chapter 27

Two-Bit Switch smiles and nods. He had smiled and nodded at the first of Velocity's demands; he had smiled and nodded at the tenth. In fact, here at the twenty-eighth of said demands, each and every one of Two-Bit's current activities fell neatly beneath the two headings of either "smiling" or its complimentary cousin "nodding."

It had been made profusely clear to Two-Bit that he was, under no circumstances, to speak even a single word at all during these negotiations. It had first been made clear by each member of the _Lover's_ crew on their initial approach into Takioro Defederate Station. The point was repeated by that same evidently well-meaning crew during their twenty-one minute walk and thirteen second shoot ride from Docking Port #3194 to their arranged rendezvous at, of all places, The Bloody Afterburn. The point was lastly belabored by Velocity herself, once expressly spoken and the remainder through her utter yet tacit disdain of his entire presence.

With his twenty-eight smiles, his twenty-eight nods and not a syllable between them, he, in truth, is beginning to wonder why they'd even brought him along in the first place.

"That'd put us at, what, nineteen-fifty?" the Depot-Commissioner tirelessly tabulates, her eyes locked in the ceilingward gaze of joyful contemplation. "For a new window, six tables, eleven chairs, twenty-three glasses and the cost of general repair and maintenance?"

"That, uh," Nemo comments, glancing down to the battle-scored tabletop beneath him, bearing a litany of wounds and bruises from altercations decades old and deciding once again that discretion is the better part of cowardice, "oughta, you know, cover it."

"Oh, that's just for this dump," Velocity disillusions merrily, reaching out to accept an offered tankard from the approaching Unhappy Roger with an appreciative nod and no mind to her phrasing. "I couldn't care less for this putrefied bunghole if you fed it to me – I'm just raking you over whatever coals I can find." Roger himself actually smirks at his own slander before shambling away, ten thousand happy hours past caring and obviously in cahoots to squeeze them for money he'd rather liquefy and shoot into his eyeballs than spend on repairs.

"Of course," Nemo swallows. "How silly of me."

They occupy their usual places in their usual booth, Two-Bit across from Moira, adjacent to Odisseus and crosswise from Nemo. Velocity sits reverse-style, like the cocky teenager she no doubt imagined herself to remain, in a chair she'd dragged to the table's outer end when she'd made her original entrance, emptying the tavern's patronage and launching in with orders and decrees from the get-go. No alcohol sits within reach of anyone but Velocity, as Roger'd only scoffed when they'd attempted to order any, and the unanticipated sobriety, coupled with the persistent need to bite their tongues so hard as to almost dribble blood out of the corners of their mouths, was beginning to undermine their clamant need for acquiescence.

"So, with nineteen-fifty to our depressing-as-dick friend back there," Velocity indicates with a thumb, in the second's space before planting her cracked lips to the tankard's rim. After only one mouthful, she's frozen, glancing to each assembled pirate for one awkward moment and then oozing the tepid liquid back from whence it came. "What's that shit made of?"

Shuffling back behind his bar, Unhappy Roger only shrugs. Nemo opens his mouth for a quip, makes eye contact with Velocity and, after a beat, closes it again.

"That still leaves reparations for Pickle Planet, SQ, Gozzer and, of course, me." She numerates each plaintiff on a callused blue finger, complimenting her ring and final finger with a self-satisfied smirk.

Nemo makes a nebulous quantifying gesture over his lap. "Could we maybe get some of like, grand total or ballpark figure, rather than going through each–"

"Nope," Velocity's pleased to announce. "Pickle Planet's asking twenty-one hundred for a new kiosk and six hundred for the stock you ruined."

"What, the pickles?" Nemo snorts. "Six hundred for pickles?" If anyone in evidence agrees or commiserates with this assessment, they don't dare show it. "Seems like a good price," Nemo finishes, after an awkward moment. "I like pickles," he assuages finally in a small voice.

"SQ," Velocity blazes forward on the next finger, "only had superficial damage to their storefront, something like two-seventy to refurbish, but I talked them up to five hundred." She reprises her earlier merriment. "Just to be safe."

Odisseus grumbles some disparagement to Two-Bit's immediate right.

Velocity counters with a blissful smile and blithe shrug. "My goons are exempt from collateral damage when they're shooting at you."

"That, uh, makes all the sense," Nemo appreciates as he creeps a hand across the table to reach for the Depot-Commissioner's discarded tankard of booze. Still distracted by Odisseus, Velocity doesn't notice this encroachment until Moira's caught Nemo's wrist as it trespasses past her and holds it hard to the tabletop.

"Get your grubby dickbeater away from my drink," Velocity commands with palpable scorn. Nemo, glancing up at her from his protracted position, backpedals into the most accommodating and unselfish smile he can muster and, with Moira's wordless permission, slithers back to his seat. "On the subject of dickbeaters," Velocity gracelessly transitions, "there's the whole Gozzer matter."

"Oh, moons," Two-Bit mutters behind his teeth.

Velocity grips the chair's backrest and leans fully backward before dropping her extortionate bomb. "He wants twenty-four percent which," she cants her contemplation aside to conjure mathematics somewhere past their booth, "off what Xo threw at you for that piece of Hourly Wage nonsense, would equal out to be near abouts fifty two thou."

Nemo blinks. "Is he here now?"

Velocity returns his scrutiny with blatancy so potent it crawls Two-Bit's skin. "No."

"Then fuck him," Nemo resolves, shrugging and frowning in remarkable symmetry.

" _I_ want twenty four percent," Velocity corrects pointedly.

"I'd be delighted."

Moira parts lips perennially sealed since departing Baz to point out. "That's three times what we offered him."

The Vollocki queenpin adjusts targets like a master duelist. "Think of it as interest then, darling," she condescends out of hand. "Plus, you personally gunned down three of his employees in cold blood."

"Self defense," Moira parries.

"What have you," Velocity ripostes. She ameliorates her posture somewhat, planting both hooves delicately on the chair's stretcher. "Those three together come out to be about seventy-two thousand."

With a snarl upraised to obviously indicate a question, Odisseus challenges Velocity in a manner even Two-Bit recognizes as witheringly sardonic.

"Positively," Velocity replies with mildly mocked shock. "Never been so pleased to memorize anything in my entire life. All that's left, then, is the little matter of me." She changes gears smoother than an automatic transmission. "Total damages to my station, you know, the bench, the pay-comms, the shoot control box you iced," she directs toward Moira, "the Nomad Café, those two dash you stole–"

"That's rich," Two-Bit blurts, before he's entirely realized the implications of what he's done. "I scored both of them tagalongs plenty of the use of their dash. Ring 'em both, if you like. And all you bastards," he swings a finger towards the crew, "vizzed me doin' it. On top of that, we didn't even roon 'em or nothing! They're one hundred percent f–" the letter suddenly catches on his lips. Everyone at the table, Velocity included, stares at him wide-eyed, in stark, screaming tension. "I know, I know," he blusters after a beat, "'Two-Bit, whatever you do' and 'Two-Bit, don't jabb anything' but come on now, she's bending us over the table and she fucking dellys it!"

The Afterburn's silence deafens Two-Bit. His own echo in the distant corners of the empty saloon is the only sound for many long seconds, save his breathing, shifting weight and the chorus of beating hearts as everyone present attempts to anticipate, wince from or steel themselves for Velocity's reaction. At length, she seems to remember the legs beneath her and rises gradually out of her chair, relishing the moment's taut indecisiveness for her own benefit. For not the first time since shipping out aboard _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ , Two-Bit Switch wonders if this might be his last hour aboard Takioro Defederate Station.

"We had an agreement," she reminds Nemo at last, though never faltering the stream of smoldering blue eye-daggers at Two-Bit. "Dipshit opens his mouth for anything but air, you're all out on your bloomholes."

"Dipshit forgot," Nemo becalms with cool collectedness masking furious schmoozing, "He's dumb like that."

"Yeah, I'm–" Two-Bit starts.

"He's shutting up now, isn't he?"

Compelled to comply, Two-Bit rams his mouth closed and raises both palms in surrender.

"And you?" Velocity dangles toward Nemo.

"I'm shutting up too."

The Depot-Commissioner lingers undecided another second before guardedly lowering herself back into her chair, glare dead set on Two-Bit and legs still coiled to spring back up should this be some elaborate ploy for him to speak again. "Overall damages to the station," she concludes in the moment before sitting down, "comes to thirteen thousand."

"Eighty-five total?" Moira calculates. "Tidy."

"We ain't done yet," Velocity chuckles. "Eighty-five's for the station and everybody else. That's not me." She plunks an elbow to the chair's crown, extending her thumb, pointer and middle fingers as conditions of some unquestionably domineering and irrefutable pain-in-the-ass yet to be inflicted upon their unhappy selves. "I want three things; take them or go fuck yourself. First of all," she begins with the slightest flick of her thumb, "I need assurances that no Galactic Menace or no Huong Xo is gonna come kicking my airlock door down or humping my leg off to find you. You don't lie to me, you'd don't bring trouble to the station and I do not abide the merest whiff of any more buhoxshit, understand?" This surprisingly reasonable request is met with exuberant nods all around. "Secondly," she continues, tucking the thumb away, "I want sixty-five. For myself. A gratuity. You know," she tags on with a sneer.

Nemo breaks the silence with a sidelong nitpick. "... _little_ high for a gratuity."

"Well, then," Velocity rephrases, "for pain and aggravation and whatever the fuck. Sixty-five ICC. In cash. Before you leave today."

The Ortok voices the obvious question.

"Rith." The word is chocolate in Velocity's mouth and she savors it as such. "That's number three," she confesses, dropping her pointer finger and leaving the middle finger still standing in a manner she must imagine to be cheeky.

Nemo buzzes a disappointed sigh. "Aw, Vel–"

"Consider it a favor to Baigo and me. Or, rather," she amends, "don't. Consider it me fucking with you." The following smile is cheap theater. "Non-negotiable." She replaces thumb, pointer and middle to their previously extended position, retracting each as she reminds the reluctant pirates of each of her specific demands. "No shenanigans, one hundred fifty thou, that year-old Rith caper." She holds her middle finger fast as a reminder of the consequences of refusal. "Yes or fuck off."

The decision's crux weighs clearly on the crew. Resolving to return to Takioro's ribald Rings with their tails between their legs, make peace with Velocity by begging from scraps at her already reasonably scrappy table and move on with their lives as best they could had been a simple enough decision to arrive at fifteen days ago, in cold theoretical space. Here, though, even under such obvious and apparent duress, Velocity's scraps had quite suddenly become a surprisingly hard pill to swallow.

If anyone in Bad Space is ballsy enough to refute the Depot-Commissioner in her own house on her own terms, it must be the Captain. "One twenty-five," he proposes, as though this was actually the price she'd named.

Velocity doesn't blink. "One fifty."

Odisseus follows up with a statement of three syllables, whose meaning is no mystery to Two-Bit.

"One fifty," Velocity counters and confirms.

Even Moira takes a crack. "One forty-five."

"One fifty."

"One forty eight?" Two-Bit, the born haggler and entirely unable to help himself, squeaks meekly.

"One _sixty-five_."

"One fifty it is!" Nemo agrees with a certain degree of desperate conviction. Each pirate exhales, either in relief or confusion. Extraordinarily eager to be removed from the situation and left to their own devices as fast as Velocity's hooves can carry her, all four shift and budge uncomfortably in their seats in the manner of impatient restaurant patrons, waiting for the bill. Nemo even half-stands, limited though he is by the ratio of table to booth, and addresses the crowd of onlookers as though charged with imperative business requiring immediate attention. "Now, if you'll all quite excuse us, my good hoodlums, we have ourselves some puppies to smuggle."

The ring of eight gunmen that encircles their booth, all armed with and currently brandishing heavy assault weapons of various varieties and all specimens Two-Bit recognizes, as an unofficial expert in Takioro's personnel and patronage, as the very happiest of the trigger-happy variety of hired muscle, glance to Velocity. As she nods, they each inch several steps away, but don't dare remove their weapons from their carefully trained positions at the crew's heads. The only exception, of course being Traasha, one arm in a sling, the other clutching her 387 Absconder carbine in claws quivering with rage, who doesn't move a single muscle and instead bores holes into Moira's head with a glare that could burn nitroglycerin.

Velocity rises unceremoniously from her seat, signals her bevy of goons with a bored gesture and tromps with equal boredom toward the exit, tossing her last remark over her shoulder without a scrap of eye contact. "Square up with me before you leave or don't bother coming back."

The necessary arrangements made, the unnecessary platitudes extended, Velocity and her squad of hard-bought bruisers march out of The Bloody Afterburn and disappear among the agog spectators crowding the Second Ring street outside, each hoping to catch a glimpse of the million credit bounty head and the bane of capital warships galaxywide. For their part, Captain Nemo and his three lieutenants, each with assholes sore from the hour and more of their proverbial chewing, wallow sullenly in the corner booth where the Depot-Commissioner had left them for many silent minutes as the Afterburn's patronage begins to trickle back inside.

As clamor and carousal returns to the oddly calm tavern, Odisseus finally extends some manner of question an allowable interval past Velocity's mighty earshot. Nemo responds with the deadliest of possible responses.

"I mean, sure. What could possibly go wrong?"

–––

Kolfo, of Yezza, Kolfo & Associates, raises his hand and forearm to block the strident rays of the Rithese noontide sun and jangles the clump of change and bills in his closed left fist. His morning duties and clients had cut severely into his lunch hour and he was now possessed of less than twelve minutes to jaywalk across the busy thoroughfare in front of his offices, purchase a Pickled Pacho Paw from the Pickle Planet kiosk across the street, devour his briny meal and jog back, hopefully with a few minutes to spare, in which to prepare for his first afternoon appointment.

Unfortunately, the flow of traffic at this particular time of day is dizzyingly thick, especially in this particular neighborhood so close to the city's center. The stream of driftcars, occasional wheeled vehicles and the passing divisions of the inner city tramway complicate the issue of his crossing into a near life-and-death scenario. After several tempting but ultimately too risky chances, Kolfo's opening comes and he shoots the gap, walking the semi-hurried walk of a rabbity pedestrian ready to break into a bolt at the first sign of his miscalculation.

The Pickle Planet kiosk is ideally situated directly in front of the point of his crossing, as though by design. The earthy Duutho teenager operating the stand is polite, pretty and forgettable, with her swarthy skin and fragrant dreadlocks of coarse black nerve endings, and is only too eager to indulge Kolfo's weekly indulgence of grease and gopher meat. Rather than joining his colleagues in their firm's recreation room with a bowl of iced fruit salad, Kolfo, once a week, fed the behemothic corporate monster that was Pickle Planet with his 22.75 ICC and fed his own craving for decadence and salt with a Pickled Pacho Paw.

His wife, of course, would be horrified, but as long as he wasn't careless enough to leave the receipt or the wrapper in his blazer pocket, she didn't necessarily need to be kept abreast of his lunchtime dietary habits.

He's wandered a handful of steps away from the Duutho, to safely consume his morsel under cover of a turned shoulder and he's even lifted the dripping paw to his mouth before he first hears it. Initially, it's the sound's distance that's its primary virtue and Kolfo stops his meal short to strain his ears and attempt to discern or detect any more salient details about what, precisely, he's hearing. Within seconds, though, he's doubly repaid for his efforts, as the sound materializes, with stark surety: an engine, opened entirely to full throttle. An aircraft or low-flying spaceship is Kolfo's best guess, judging by its apparent altitude, approaching with incredible speed from downtown.

Before he's really registered its passing, it's whizzed by overhead. A blockish teltriton blur, a displeasing shade of yellow in color, spews behind twin gouts of blistering blue flame that trace thick clouds of unwholesome exhaust as it flies past, low enough to the ground to pop both Kolfo's ears and rumble the very street below in its wake. He's not able to remark to anyone or even recover his eardrums before another layer of the original distant sound announces its presence split seconds later with a squeal.

A disconcerting number of low-atmosphere driftcraft, perhaps ten or fifteen, each stamped boldly with both the "Rith Policing Corporation" logo and a corresponding strip of flashing lights, thunder past a blink of an eye behind their apparent prey, the ugly urine-colored spaceship, sirens in clamorous complaint and engines apparently overtaxed to catch their fleeing culprit.

Three seconds later, the whole spectacle is vanished, rampaging over buildings and streets blocks away to the north. Kolfo, once frozen in surprise, remembers himself, exchanges a confounded look with the Duutho behind the pushcart, muses privately on the wonders and annoyance of living in Bad Space and bites into his pickled gopher meat.

–––

Odisseus wallows in his usual spot in the usual corner booth at The Bloody Afterburn, complete with three broken teeth, a deeply ingrained aversion to Duutho gourmet cooking and a blistering sunburn. Their triple-pronged confrontation with the local Port Authority, the Rithese Policing Corporation and even some renegade members of the neighborhood terrorist element twelve days past had left the remainder of the crew also in various different degrees of personal injury.

Bandages still swaddle Two-Bit's head. Nemo's throat is encircled with obviously swollen lacerations. A multicolored mural of bruises is painted across Moira's knuckles, the sort one only accrues by punching someone literally to death. Each pirate, Odisseus included, stares down the barrel of their individual alcohols, privately wondering whether the deceptively simple act of lifting said tankard to their lips would also find some way to blow up in their collective faces.

The Bloody Afterburn they ignore somewhere to their left is diametrically opposed to the tavern they'd left behind a month previously. The rambunctious discord of an especially wild weeknight debauch bounces about the room beyond their secluded booth.

Some bush league buccaneer Odisseus didn't recognize, a Mantrian boasting an amalgam of piercings sprouting from seemingly every orifice on his body and an exhilaration too overwrought to indicate anything but a first-timer, had apparently knocked over some drifttrain on Prash that had been in the process of making a transfer between local bank branches and was, unsurprisingly, stacked to the ceiling with untraceable cash. His and his crew's celebration having now trampled far past the three-hour-mark without indication of ceasing any time soon, Odisseus would normally have entertained thoughts of strangulation, but with Danbonte only days cold and his mood quite completely in the toilet, he nurses his Gitterswitch and grumbles moodily instead.

Twelve months previously, it'd been the four of them, Nemo ebullient with the promise of fresh and exciting piracy, Moira fidgety at the sight of anyone's hand any number of inches from their respective holsters, Two-Bit receiving an over-priced lap dance from an alive and unhired Zella and Odisseus, admittedly surly and unpleasant, but with all his teeth and a nose oblivious to the horrors of the Rithese desert sun, carousing and cavorting about the Defederate Station like they'd commandeered the place themselves. To see them now, they were another four and entirely dissimilar handful of desperadoes, soiling the Afterburn's penultimate corner booth with the depths of their despondency.

Nemo drums listlessly against the table's lip at an irregular and unresolved tempo, more from the habit he's unwilling or unable to shake than from any more of his heedless exuberance. Two-Bit's leaned fully back in his seat, bandaged head propped against the booth's backboard as though asleep, only sparing the occasional glance at the posterior of the passing new waitress, a Trijan girl with yellow streaks through her musty hair and the subject of a great deal of in-station speculation as to her relation with Roger, be she mistress or daughter. Moira's not even concerned about the possibility of being shot she's so distracted, her gaze fixated at the dregs of her drink rather than scanning the saloon for potential assailants or exit points.

Odisseus himself, watching all this with gloomy resignation, reasons this'll soon be ended to everyone's satisfaction. Velocity would doubtlessly arrive within the hour, ream them out over their inept bungling of the Rith puppy caper with that certain coarse thoroughness unique to her and, this tribute paid, the dejected crew of _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ could retreat back to their spaceship to sulk in private. He's passingly wondering which of the _Lover's_ dozens of systems so recently damaged by police disabler cannons to begin his cathartic repairs with when Nemo finally usurps the sustained silence.

"Okay, so, idea," he proposes with a certain apprehension but clearly something to address, "let's do a little survey. How many of you knew he had a cybernetic arm?" Sequentially, each of his three officers, first Odisseus, then Two-Bit and lastly Moira, raise their hands. "Really?" he objects rather than questions. "And none of you smug fuckers thought to mention this?"

"We assumed you knew!" Odisseus finds himself protesting quite stridently.

"He had a tattoo!" Nemo counters.

"You can get tattoos on cybernetic arms," Odisseus assures him. "I've seen it before."

"Least they didn't do a strip search," Two-Bit mutters.

"Where?" Nemo continues defiantly. "Where have you seen it before?"

"Boy Blaster has one. Fuck, he has like, seven."

"Cybernetic arms?"

Moira, never missing a chance to correct Nemo, utters without eye contact. "Tattoos."

"On his cybernetic arm," Odisseus provides.

Nemo musses up his expression. "Right or left?"

"Left."

"Shit in my pants," his saltbrother remarks amazed. "I did not know that." He ponders this a moment, the conversation nearly dying, before he opens his mouth with another asinine observation. "Not to change the subject, but I always sorta wondered how that 'cybernetic arm thing' would work. You know, for the whole business of..." he insinuates with a wholly unsubtle hand gesture.

"Yeah," Moira interjects, eager to prove everyone's understanding of the topic at hand.

Nemo, however, being Nemo, is entirely oblivious. "Milking the one-eyed crotch worm of the Pants Nebula."

Moira and Odisseus share an exasperated sigh and a face-to-palm moment respectively, though, in truth Odisseus is somewhat relieved to have a discussion at all. As Nemo's lewdness threatens to condemn the conversation back into doldrums, it's Odisseus who risks stoking the flames some to suggest, "Maybe you should have asked him. That customs officer, I mean."

His hand returning reflexively toward the redness of his neck, Nemo squints in appraisal. "Little difficult to get a word in edgewise. You know, when you're being strangled to death."

"I'd imagine."

"Still," Two-Bit comments, not rising from his slouched posture to properly engage. "Very rangu, us not gettin' strip-searched."

As the sound of the uninvolved festivities fills their conversational lull, Odisseus is stricken by the fleeting, self-extrapolating and irrational fear that no one will bother to fill the void with more conversation. In that unheralded and ignominious moment, Odisseus fears _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ crew has reached the end of its effectiveness and relationship. Before he realizes what's happening, Odisseus will be returned to Dirty Djembe's Discount Engine Repair with Nemo and all these strange, infuriating people vanished from his life once and for all.

Ironically, it's morose Moira who speaks next and rescues Odisseus from a fate worse than death. "Baigo smelt fucking awful." The pirates, as one, chuckle or bluster out breaths of bewilderment in recollection and the Ortok cannot help at smile at the first mate's seeming self-sacrifice.

"Thank you!" Odisseus exclaims suddenly in sheer commiseration. "Thank you!"

"Like stir-fried shit," Nemo hypothesizes.

Moira crinkles her brow. "Who stir-fries shit?"

"And bad, bad carbon petro," Odisseus conjures from his olfactory memory, his vastly superior nose purchasing him unwittingly front row seats to the spectacle of unadulterated repugnance that was Velocity's brother. "And arlaxi piss. And tabasco sauce. And jborra litter."

"I was about to say something," Nemo boasts, as though this probability would come as a bald-faced shock to his companions.

Rather than snarking, Moira corroborates with something unseen on her harsh, pale features – a smile. "I know you were. I could tell."

"Yeah?"

"You had that," Odisseus confirms with two knowing nods and the vestigial beginnings of a smile on his own muzzle, "'I-have-some-douchey-remark-all-chambered' face. Plain as day."

Nemo scowls to mask his somewhat flattered smirk. "I have a face?"

"Yes, Nemo," Moira deigns with playful mockery. "You have a face."

"Tell you what I wasn't expecting," Odisseus supplies for further fuel. "Those puppies to grow up so blooming fast."

Groans, nods and "yeahs" of agreement resound from each of the table's four corners, each spending a mental moment to envision the boxes of scraping, clawing and howling monsters they'd, for some reason, imagined as adorable if troublesome infants through the timeless haze of procrastination.

"I guess tje wolves really spring up," Nemo comments idly. He spreads hands wide against the table, as though to finally clear the air. "I think it's fair to say that if I ever agree to smuggle any live carnivore, no matter how cute, ever again, you're all encouraged to mutiny."

"So noted," Moira agrees.

"Coulda been worse," Two-Bit warns for the third time. "Coulda strip-searched us."

"You keep saying that," Nemo abruptly appreciates. Odisseus and Moira likewise shift their attention to the reclining jabberhead. "What is so fucking horrifying about a strip-search? Ain't like you were smuggling the wolves in your bloomhole or anything." He winces suddenly as a disquieting notion pops into his mind and onto his face. "Were you?"

When challenged at last, Two-Bit Switch peels his eyelids open, straightens his spine and carps defensively, almost prudishly. "Well, I don't know. I just get sorta prickly, you know." He gestures in a manner apparently intended to surrogate his meaning but, as no one present follows, he's forced to fess up, somewhat bashfully. "About my man bits."

Moira closes her eyes. "And now that's in my brain forever."

"What? His prickly man bits?"

"Not helping."

Odisseus raises a tentative paw. "...they're not actually prickly, are they?"

Both humanoids seated across him exchange glances a moment and evidently fail to produce an anatomical consensus. "Uh..." Nemo stammers.

"What?" Two-Bit sputters indignantly. "No! Of fucking course not!"

Moira shrugs coyly. "I didn't want to presume."

Nemo shrugs considerably less coyly. "Number of diseases you've probably caught off every willing pair between here and Talos, wouldn't really be too surprised to discover your pecker had some prickle."

At this statement, each of the seated pirates turn slowly to notice, apparently for the first time, the curvaceous figure of the Afterburn's newest waitress, standing stock still before their table, raising a quizzical eyebrow toward Two-Bit and collecting his empty tankard at the extreme end of arm's length. Odisseus snorts, unable to stifle more chortles as she saunters skeptically off. Two-Bit fumes hot enough to catch his bandage on fire.

"Nice work, fuckface."

Moira pats the Captain companionably on the shoulder. "It was the decent thing to do, Nemo."

"First time for everything, I guess," Odisseus evaluates.

Nemo scratches the exact curvature of his scar with a restless finger. "I miss my hat," he announces without prompting. A general murmur of disagreement ensues, the crew balking, scoffing and recoiling respectively at the hated bowler hat's mere mention. The Captain opens his mouth, finds himself incapable of mustering a proper objection in the face of overwhelming censure and closes it meekly again.

The thwarted Two-Bit, after watching the one that got away literally get away, changes the subject somewhat drastically. "So, what do you think?"

Nemo hoists his Backwash. "About?"

Two-Bit gestures toward the Afterburn proper, partying as ever, and lets his hand drop empty to the wood. "The rest of it. Where do we go from here?"

"Well." Nemo stalls before wiping the pond scum mustache from his lips with the forearm of his duster, already blanching off-white from repeated use of this tactic. "We're nice and square with Velocity now, much as I'm loathe to admit it. Should probably re-establish this as our temporary base of operations," he confesses, with a glance of remembrance and delayed pride at the grungy mess of the Afterburn's common room.

"Sublime," Moira huffs.

"The bounty hasn't decreased," Odisseus is eager to remind.

Apparently discerning his meaning, Two-Bit nods with as much sageness as his doofy bandage allows. "And Xo's gonna be none-too-giddy about that whole Noxix situation."

"And we've got the footage still," Moira adds.

"You want my opinion," Nemo conjectures, "I think we can still squeeze some mileage out of the Boss Ott angle." Scowls meet this chain of logic but, undeterred by common sense as a general rule, Nemo proceeds. "If whomever's scraped his campaign back together has a dick's worth of brains, they ain't gonna spread around word of Ott's death."

"It'll leak eventually. Too many jabbers," Two-Bit disillusions.

"Eventually, sure. Until then, though, until we can think of a better idea, that'll be our shield against Xo or bounty hunters or whomever else wants a piece."

"Xo's after our juice," Two-Bit disagrees. "They ain't ever gonna blank about us, especially considering Noxix."

Moira's humor has dissipated. "I'd rather deal with them sooner than later."

At this prompting, Nemo draws the farthest corners of his mouth into the faintest suggestion of a smile. "I might have a few ideas."

"Care to share?" Odisseus offers, knowing the answer full well.

"Well, I didn't say they were good ideas." He plants four fingers along the side of his tankard and slides the sloshing beverage about. "Way I see it, Xo's like the _Counterattack_. As shadowy and badass and blooming scary as they might seem, as hard as they try to suggest otherwise, they're anything but invincible. There's a way to deal with them. There's a way to deal with everybody." He plucks the drink off the chipped hardwood to the protests of the condensation beneath. "Noxix only needed a canister to the brainpan. Can't promise it'll be that easy with Xo, of course," he admits, "but I can promise it'll be fun."

Moira sneers. "I'll quote you on that, shall I?"

"For the time being, though," Nemo frames, with a shrug and more gesturing with the raised tankard, spilling minute quantities of booze over its rim, "I say we keep our mouths shut and our ears to the grindstone. Vel wants to throw work at us, we'll consider it, but right now, we've got a goofy amount of capital - plenty to keep us in the green long past the point when Xo'll come a-knocking." He sips the alcohol out of hand and, when he returns from behind the drink, he's a different Nemo.

Glimmers of that deadly coldness are present somewhere behind his eyes. The Captain's tone is swapped away entirely from his blind predictions into something nearly vulnerable, something nearly defenseless, yet still painted on a canvas as inconstant and mischievous as Nehel Morel. "You know, whatever happened with the whole..." he stalls himself a moment and the muted menace flares momentarily, "Ott situation," he settles upon, "I think we probably came out ahead. People know who we are. People are scared of what we can do."

Odisseus cannot restrain a smirk, knowing precisely which people Nemo refers to. "We destroyed their capital ship," he points out with precise and growing intensity.

"We did."

"We killed Quuilar Noxix," Moira comprehends next, as though coming into full realization of this fact at only this moment, and the thought somehow conjures another small smile where once her habitual frown belonged.

"We did."

"We have 4.5 million credits," Two-Bit remembers quite vividly, his own grin far past humbleness or introspection and solidly in the rarefied category of pure greed.

"We do."

The Bloody Afterburn thunders with the guffawing, quaffing excitement of a novice pirate crew and their hangers-on glorifying a virginal heist successfully accomplished with booze and bravado. Unbeknownst to the revelers, another such crew, now haggard, weathered and threadbare, savor a somber few seconds of piratical solidarity, their homecoming from hell and back unlauded by anyone but themselves.

Their Captain, with newfound vigor, heaves his half-full tankard only inches high. "Commission blows," he substitutes for his usual toast. "Freelance forever?"

Two-Bit Switch, nefarious mind positively swimming with thoughts of further booty, cracks his tankard flush to his Captain's with such vigorous force as to mingle spillage from their drinks.

Odisseus, understandably enthused to rediscover his saltbrother's inexhaustible pluck, won't be left behind to supply his tankard and it's the third to the center of the table.

The final person to render her verdict is predictably Moira Quicksilver but the impish fire igniting her normally lusterless green eyes stands as a testament to her imminent conclusion: to hang her misgivings and raise her own tankard so they perfectly clash.

Acknowledgments

To my loyal band of fans and supporters, whose generous donations allowed you to read all these words in the first place: Mary Ann Boeff, Kelli Breslin, Roger Cherry, Christina Dundee, Jay Dupree, Scott McClure, Eric Meyer, Robyn Meyer, Connie Molony, LKJ Slain and Jesse Toldness.

To Chris Allio of The Hydrilla, for his stellar cover design.

To my family, for their unflagging support despite how uncomfortable "self-published e-novelist" must be to report at dinner parties and family reunions.

To the crew of _The Poetic Justice_ , who, I'm sure, all contributed in their own way.

To Dan Glaser and Steven Molony, for their selfless and tireless aid in the creation of the book's promotional campaign.

To Hallie Clawson, for literally everything.

About the Author

TIMOTHY J. MEYER is wanted on five counts of piracy, two counts of brigandage and one count of enthusiastic corruption of the galactic good. If you have any information on his whereabouts, please contact the local branch of the IMIS (Imperial Ministry of Interstellar Security).

Preview

GALACTIC MENACE

Book II of the BAD SPACE TRILOGY

Coming 2014

Moira's out of her cell.

In the space of the next three seconds, she's strode into the harsh light of the corridor proper, straddled the corpse of her first felled foe, fully extended the stolen electrobaton with a vicious snap of her wrist and now, she readies herself to clout the oncoming guard upside his creepy, emaciated face. This second prison guard, another Gantor, apparently favors his own chances over those of his counterpart, whose open head wound stains the floorplates cyan between Moira's bare feet, and, rather than raising the cry or sounding any alarms, her still-standing adversary withdraws his own baton and charges her.

She allows herself a flinty smile; after slipping out of her magnetic cuffs, flattening her body into an upside-down Cotor Clutch against the ceiling of her cell for a quarter of an hour and incapacitating the first guard stupid enough to deactivate the door control and investigate her evident disappearance, Moira's more than earned this.

The Gantor, a six-foot-six nightmare of snow-white skin stretched to its absolute limit over ridged alien bones, instantly closes the gap on his unearthly, elongated shanks. He strikes first, swinging the bludgeon in a wild, left-handed clobber. Moira parries neatly and scrapes his baton aside, both weapons fizzing as their electrical charges kiss and clash. Her following thrust, what would skewer him were she wielding a proper weapon, is nullified by her baton's blunted point and the thick layers of riot armor the Gantor is encapsulated within. Instead, he doubles hard over, weapon spilling from his gauntlet, helmet spilling off his head and his exposed scalp presented before Moira as though he awaited her to oblige him a knighthood. Moira christens him unconscious instead, spinning the electrobaton once and cracking its micne-capped tip hard upon his cranium.

He screams in shock and agony on his two-foot fall to the floor, a scream she muffles by stooping and planting a hand over his mouth to ease him onto the deck.

After ten seconds of chaos, silence once again reigns supreme across the Twenty-Sixth Deck of TFS 283 Mercy-class Prisoner Transport Vessel _Surimiah_. Moira Quicksilver crouches motionless, the very picture of vigilance, between the slumped forms of two prone Gantorese prison guards, one dead and the other out cold, and before the deactivated door of her agape cell. The corrugated corridors, whose curvature stretches beyond her vision in both directions, are hauntingly hushed, save the hum of shipborne systems and the occasional snore of an unseen detainee. Moira'd calculated the immediate hour of her escape attempt to coincide with the regulated sleeping patterns of her fellow captives, to minimize the chances of some dimwitted or spiteful prisoners spoiling everything with a squawk.

Her calculations also surmised that she'd need to neutralize at least another two prison guards before achieving the service elevator that could take her off this deck. Seeing as how neither the corpse to her left nor the drooler to her right had wielded anything but humble electrobatons, Moira could reasonably expect both remaining guards to be packing much more serious heat, likely in the form of the standard issue Imperium assault rife: the tried-and-true SV7.

Before all that, however, came the looting.

She's dismayed to discover, after rifling through all four pockets in question, that both of the vanquished two sprawled at her feet were, as far as prison guards are concerned, comparatively affluent; both boast fat stacks of tender Moira's woefully unable to pocket in her pocketless jailbird's jumpsuit. She does, however, make meaningful prizes of one Gantor's insulated deflection gloves, the other Gantor's remote cell-door activator and both Gantors' electrobatons. With her right hand strapped uncomfortably into the oversized gauntlet, an electrobaton in each hand and the remote activator in her teeth, Moira cursorily sweeps both corridors and, with nothing untoward in sight, slinks off in pursuit of her exoneration.

Forward process is painfully slow, as she only dares skirting sprints from cover to cover after waits of arduous length and total stillness. She cowers in any available corners, often with an ear pressed hard to the teltriton of the floor or walls, in rapt attention for any sound or signal of her discovery. Nothing quite raises Moira's hackles like an ardent need for stealth; in a circumstance in which encountering literally anyone could spell her own destruction, Moira wholeheartedly favors discretion as the better part of valor.

A quarter of rotation around this layer of the detainment column passes uneventfully, with only a steely scowl to quiet an awake Diraaqi prisoner in a passing cell, before Moira stumbles upon her quarry. She manages to sidle into the shadow of a bracing beam before they can take notice, but standing an aimless vigil at the foot of the elevator's embarkation platform and with both backs turned mercifully away from her position are the potential pair of prison guards. One, a female humanoid sporting Moira's pre-prison shaved-pate haircut, passes the time with a ThumbSmash handheld console while the other, a third Gantor, leans heavily over her shoulder and offers the odd word of ignored advise. Slung carelessly over each of their shoulders dangle the sought-after SV7s.

A workable strategy, a simultaneous smacking of each unaware guard on their respective temples, is summarily dashed to pieces when, as Moira stalks up behind on callused feet and with weapons loose her hands, her sweaty finger slips and quite accidentally extends her left electrobaton with a ratcheting sound and an energizing sizzle. Both guards, evidently expecting an unheard peer simply fiddling their weapon, glance over their shoulders to spot guilty Moira five feet behind, in a half-squat, with one massive black glove, live electrobaton and remote starter clenched in stunned teeth.

The tinny melody emanating out from the ThumbSmash game underscores this supremely awkward moment, a reverie Moira interrupts seven seconds later by activating her other baton.

All the parties explode into motion at once. Moira launches forward in a leap, the guards shuffle backwards in startled concert, two assault rifles are hurriedly unslung and the ThumbSmash lives up to its name against the teltriton as it's dropped. Cursed with both her handheld contrivance and significantly shorter legs, the humanoid guard staggers a second behind her partner and subsequently earns Moira's unforgiving headlock. She thrashes, flails and makes every attempt to wrest herself free from Moira's grasp, but the hardened fibers of her stolen deflection glove more than adequately squash her windpipe beyond anything but a stifled cry.

Confident in the strength of her right arm's stranglehold, Moira employs her left hand and its subsequent electrobaton into whipping the Gantor brutally in the kneecap. He stumbles, losing his grip on his assault rifle and purchasing much needed time for Moira to wheel her impromptu hostage around to face her towering opponent. By the time the Gantor's regained both his footing and his firearm, Moira's positioned the humanoid woman advantageously between herself and the SV7's snub, both women praying to all the moons that the instructional manual issued to each Imperium prison guard frowned upon shooting one's comrades in cold blood.

Moira's gamble pays off as, when faced with the hasty humanoid shield, the Gantor hesitates. Moira returns the favor by introducing his balls to blunt force and electricity. As he reels, she gambles again, tightening her grip around the humanoid's throat and inching a step backward, a step closer to the opposite wall of the corridor.

Again, he takes the bait, wincing while he limps forward and still struggles to bring the rifle to bear, an impulse Moira rewards with a shocking swat across the chin, followed by another step back. Soon, she's sufficiently goaded him and it's a dance, each participant exchanging as many injuries as steps, until Moira's an arm's length from the intended wall and the Gantor's a bruised, burnt and bloodied mess. Finally, as a haymaker, she does her level best to counterbalance herself, sucks in an anticipatory breath and, using the unwilling guard as a point of pivot, takes her third and certainly not final gamble of the evening by performing a flying wall kick off the teltriton behind and into the Gantor's face.

This chain of events the Gantor takes understandably poorly, flopping listlessly to the deck, slapped senseless more from surprise than impact. Alighting awkwardly on the floor behind the twisted and discombobulated humanoid, Moira renders final judgment by seizing the woman's jaw and promptly snapping her neck. In response, she performs a lopsided half-pirouette and joins her partner in a heap on the floor, constituting both Moira's second prison guard pile-up and a corridor clear of any more obvious hostiles; all without a single shot fired from either weapon.

Her bounty of pilfered equipment suddenly swollen twofold, Moira, after summoning down the elevator to the Twenty-Sixth deck, hunkers to the floor to collect her winnings before the noise of her scuffle attracts any undesirable company. She immediately deprives the humanoid of her ammunition belt, the Gantor of his SV7 and further laments her accursed jumpsuit in the face of still more unobtainable pocket change. As if on cue, the service elevator dings obligingly behind her. Moira Quicksilver, with soon-to-be-disassembled assault rifle slung over her shoulder, a belt to clip both batons to cinched around the waist of her neon yellow onesie and the remote starter twirled around her right pointer finger, gives each arm of the corridor a cautionary glance, as though she's about to cross a busy intersection, and darts into the service elevator's opening doors.

Once inside, she dials coordinates for the Seventeenth Deck and drops to her knees to dismantle the SV7 just as the elevator, after disengaging from the present clamps, shoots upward.

The HIN _Surimiah_ , like all Mercy-class prisoner haulers, had a queer design. On spec, the craft was markedly similar in shape to any average spacefaring vessel and was only nominally larger than _The Unconstant_ _Lover_ herself; all in all, barely room enough to house one hundred prisoners, much less nine times that. In order to readily retrieve, transport and deposit such prodigious numbers of passengers, however, the _Surimiah_ made use of a three-hundred foot cylinder, jutting straight out of the ship's underbelly, called a detainment column.

Ostensibly a thirty story building, a free-standing tower in its own right, the detainment column allowed The Endless Imperium the peerless ability to, seemingly on a whim, transfer entire wings of their planetary prisons to and fro across the civilized reaches of the galaxy. With relative ease, the _Surimiah_ had charted a checkered course throughout the Midworlds, collecting the very crème de la crème of convicts, Moira Quicksilver included, from holding cells and provincial prisons along the way. Her coffers full, she cut canvas now for the fifth planet of the Prash system, freezing and lifeless Vorse, where she'd detach the column, the Seventeenth Deck would become the Seventeenth Floor and the _Surimiah_ , thus unburdened, would depart for Medroteria or Jotor or wherever empty, idle prison ships go.

Moira, on the other hand, harbored other plans for the HIN _Surimiah_ , plans one wouldn't find on any official Imperium manifest or procedural.

She's scarce enough time to wrest loose the SV7's percussion cap in the time she's allotted before the service elevator clicks into place on the Seventeenth Deck and Moira's forced to abandon her handiwork with a clatter on the cross-hatched grating as the doors grind open before her. Both her electrobatons unsheathe and extend before either standing sentry can even register the elevator's sudden presence behind them. With one culminating motion, she claps both their skulls together with fierce strikes to their corresponding temples. They collapse comically together, their bodies propped against one another in an unconscious canoodle before the yawning elevator doors.

After confirming a clear coast and recovering the assault rifle's component parts from behind her, Moira, weaving around the two toppled prison guards, notes the _Surimiah_ continued prevalence of Gantorese personnel, wonders vaguely if Gant is her original port of call and busies herself with the elevator's nearby motor control box. Prying the main panel free certainly wasn't Moira's definition of easy, nor her definition of silent and, to judge from the shrill teltriton protest that echoes down the hall when she swats it aside with her electrobaton, she anticipates the arrival of re-enforcements within the next two minutes.

Luckily for Moira, the call request transponder within the control box is simply located, as no one had ever accused her of being an expert in elevator design. A little manual surgery later and she's successfully extracted the transponder and all its attendant cords and wiring. Coupled with the remote cell-door activator and the SV7's percussion cap, the service elevator's call request transponder represented the final piece of that strange cocktail of mismatched mechanical oddments so integral to Moira's escape.

How exactly any of these seemingly random pieces of technical apocrypha intended to spring her from this exhaustively secured prison hauler mid-warp, Moira had precisely no idea.

The Seventeenth Deck of the HIN _Surimiah_ is more or less identical to its Twenty-Sixth Deck; a black teltriton corridor, cast in a gentle curve and outlined in the wavering pink light of the individual cells. Cell 17P is halfway around the column's circuit and Moira dares it openly, trio of disjointed machine parts in one gloved fist, electrified baton in the other. She fails to run afoul of any more guards along the way, though she does earn the semi-occasional hoot or catcall from an awake prisoner, a form of attention Moira's habitually deaf to. She lingers before the deflection door of Cell 17P, a shimmering membrane of projected pink energy entirely impermeable to anything but the insulated gloves worn by the _Surimiah's_ guards and now Moira. The door's reflective light only manages to spike the wide-set eyes of the cell's sole occupant dim pink and, whomever may lurk in the cramped chamber's further corner, they don't so much as shift their weight or stir themselves at all in reaction to Moira's arrival.

She drops calmly into a knee before the scintillating barrier and, after waiting a beat, extends her gloved hand through the membrane. Despite the deflection glove's best efforts, her skin beneath still crawls and creeps unnaturally as she deposits each nonsensical item in a neat little procession on the prisoner's side of the door; remote starter first, percussion cap second and call request transponder third. This done, Moira withdraws her right hand, manages the best eye contact she can with the pink pinpricks within and makes a single stipulation.

"Get busy."

A gruff noise, either a grunt or a growl, signals an acceptance and heralds the next and least pleasant of Moira's tasks.

Unsaddled with her late errand and its resultant cargo of knickknacks, Moira Quicksilver now intended to run down the nearest gaggle of guards, preferably armed, and pick the nastiest, noisiest fight possible. She rises to her feet, banishes any arrant thoughts of stealth and suddenly stomps out of sight of Cell 17P and its wordless occupant.

Moira dashes further down the hallway at full tilt, with both electrobatons extended and armed, visibly unafraid but inwardly anxious about the life-or-death calculations involved with this oncoming gambit. Her most conservative estimate placed at least another pair of guards, standing watch over the opposite service elevator, on this deck and the possibility of another two remained worryingly distinct. To date, Moira had never engaged more than three individual combatants at once and emerged victorious. Considering that any resistance she's likely to encounter would almost certainly be armed with more than electrified sticks, she doesn't necessarily like her odds.

She's, as always, afforded precious little time to fully contemplate these odds as she rounds a sloping corner onto, she guessed it, four individual prison guards, all loitering about the corridor in various states of repose, their bored conversation immediately interrupted and each only to happy to leap off their laurels to meet Moira's unspoken challenge.

She spends a second counting comparative distances, extrapolating estimable gaps between enemies' entrances into the fray and prays to all the moons she knows what she's doing.

Two batons, delivered as one directly to the side of his skeletal head, are more than sufficient motivation to entirely flatten the first prison guard to reach Moira, an unfortunate Gantor who ends his life with a moment's regret and a caved-in skull. Her introductions made, the two further guards unsling and cock their respective SV7s toward the charging Moira. Her momentum doesn't slacken when Moira hurls her left-hand electrobaton at the leftmost of the two marksman, a humanoid male who appears understandably astounded by the sparking projectile whizzing end over end toward him. Whether or not the tossed baton suitably distracts or even comes close to hitting him at all, Moira can't say as she immediately has the second guard, a Sybolo wheezing methane through a breathing apparatus and wielding a baton of his own, with which to concern herself at present.

A precision strike to his wrist clatters her enemy's weapon to the floor and, before the ectoplasmic prison guard can properly react, Moira's seized him by the scruff of his collar in one gauntleted fist and rammed the business end of her baton neatly beneath his chin, as though holding him at sword point. The Sybolo attempts physical protest, but the hissing tip of Moira's baton reminds him exactly how fragile his respiration equipment could be. At this moment, killing this idiot wasn't her main priority. Closing the gap between herself and either of the apart assault rifles was.

The roar of gunfire somewhere behind the Sybolo indicates to Moira the trigger-happiest of her armed options and, thrusting forth the unwilling guard as a squishy pink meat shield, she advances toward the thus far unmolested prison guard and his precious assault rifle. The continued sound of his firing, especially when contrasted against the yielding wet sounds of the Sybolo's skin popping, further indicates to Moira that this Gantor shares few of his former comrades scruples against shooting one's co-workers. She can only hope he retains some scruple against breaking regulation and shooting detainees that are practically asking for it.

By the time she's taken five steps, the Sybolo is little more than a ragged hunk of dead flesh, rent body armor and transparent blood, supported only by Moira's fist around his collar and Moira's baton at his throat. Upon hearing the telltale click of an emptied magazine, Moira commends the Sybolo for his sacrifice by pitching his corpse unceremoniously aside and risking the home stretch fully exposed. At sight of her, the Gantor rifleman, yet again a tall cadaverous razorback in riot armor, only just manages to cram another clip into the SV7's awaiting chamber. He levels the firearm point blank at her and Moira, a million mottibles away for all her electrobaton can avail her now, tries her hardest to contort her body in such a way as to minimize the grievous internal damage the oncoming laser bolt is likely to deal.

The Gantor squeezes the trigger, supercharged ditrogen plows a hole through her midsection and Moira Quicksilver, unsure if her fourth and possibly final gamble of the evening had actually paid off, crumples to the deck.
