 
### GALATIC MENACE

Timothy J. Meyer

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Timothy J. Meyer

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BAD SPACE TRILOGY

HULL DAMAGE (2012)

GALACTIC MENACE (2014)

UNCONSTANT LOVE

www.badspacebooks.com

To Dan,

the original Mastermind

"Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge."

– Herman Melville, _Moby-Dick_

Table of Contents

PART I: A Suspicious Shore Leave

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: The Freebooter Fleet

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: The Pirate King And All His Crooked Court

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Fifth Interlude

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Final Interlude

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Chapter 1

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 and fully extended the stolen electrobaton with a vicious snap of her wrist. Between Moira's bare feet, the first prison guard and his open head wound stain the floorplates cyan.

The second prison guard apparently favors his own chances against Moira. Rather than raising the cry or sounding any alarms, her still-standing adversary snaps open his own baton and charges her.

Moira allows herself a flinty smile.

She slipped out of her magnetic cuffs. She flattened her body into an upside-down Cotor Clutch against the ceiling of her cell for a quarter of an hour. She incapacitated the first guard stupid enough to investigate her inexplicable disappearance – with her bare hands.

Moira's more than earned this.

Like his fallen friend, this prison guard's a Gantor, a six-foot-six nightmare of snow white skin stretched to its absolute limit over ridged alien bones. He instantly closes the gap on 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 skewering thrust to his stomach is blunted by the Gantor's thick layer of riot armor. 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 the TFS 283 Mercy-class Prisoner Transport Vessel _Surimiah_. Moira Quicksilver crouches motionless, the very picture of vigilance, before the deactivated door of her agape cell. To either side lay the slumped forms of two prone Gantorese prison guards, one dead and the other out cold. The corrugated corridor, its curvature stretching beyond her vision in both directions, is still and silent, save the hum of shipborne systems and the occasional snore of an unseen detainee.

Moira had calculated the immediate hour of her escape attempt very precisely. She'd attempted to coincide with the regulated sleeping patterns of her fellow captives, to minimize the chances of some dimwitted or spiteful prisoner spoiling everything with a squawk.

Her calculations also surmised that she'd need to neutralize at least another two prison guards before she reached the service elevator that could take her off this deck. Neither the corpse to her left nor the drooler to her right had wielded anything but humble electrobatons. From this, Moira could reasonably expect both the remaining guards on this deck to be packing much more serious heat. The standard issue Imperium assault rife, the tried-and-true SV7, seemed likely.

Before all that, however, came the looting.

She's dismayed to discover them relatively rich, as far as prison guards go, after rifling through all four pockets in question. 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 glove, the other Gantor's remote cell-door activator and both their electrobatons.

With her right hand strapped uncomfortably into the oversized gauntlet, an electrobaton in each hand and the remote activator in her teeth, Moira gives each end of the corridor a cursory sweep. With nothing untoward in sight, she slinks off in search of escape.

Forward progress is painfully slow. Between waits of arduous length and total stillness, she dares short sprints from cover to cover. She cowers in any available corner, 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. When encountering literally anyone could quickly spell her own destruction, Moira wholeheartedly favors discretion as the better part of valor.

One quarter of a rotation around this layer of the detainment column passes uneventfully, save one steely scowl to quiet an awake Diraaqi prisoner in a passing cell. When Moira does stumble upon her quarry, she manages to sidle into the shadow of a bracing beam before they can take notice.

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 predicted pair of prison guards. One, a female humanoid sporting Moira's pre-prison shaved-head haircut, passes the time with a ThumbSmash handheld console. 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.

Moira stalks up behind on callused feet. A workable strategy, a simultaneous smacking of each unaware guard on their respective temples, is summarily dashed to pieces. Her weapons loose in her hands, her sweaty finger slips and quite accidentally extends her left electrobaton with a ratcheting sound and an energizing sizzle. Both guards, expecting to see an unheard peer simply fiddling with their weapon, glance over their shoulders.

Imagine their surprise to spot guilty Moira five feet behind, in a half-squat, with one massive black glove, one live electrobaton and one remote starter, clenched in stunned teeth.

The tinny melody emanating from the ThumbSmash game underscores this supremely tense moment, a reverie Moira interrupts three seconds later by activating her other baton.

All the parties explode into motion at once. Moira launches forward in a leap. The startled guards shuffle backwards in unison. Two assault rifles are hurriedly unslung. The ThumbSmash lives up to its name against the teltriton as it's dropped.

Cursed with significantly shorter legs, the humanoid guard straggles 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. The hardened fibers of Moira's stolen deflection glove more than adequately squash the guard's windpipe beyond anything but a gurgle.

Confident in the strength of her right arm's stranglehold, Moira employs her other electrobaton to whip 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. 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 simultaneously pray to all the moons that the employee manual issued to each Imperium prison guard frowned upon shooting one's comrades in cold blood.

The gamble pays off as, when faced with Moira's hasty humanoid shield, the Gantor hesitates. Moira returns the favor by introducing his balls to blunt force and electricity. As he reels in pain, 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 struggling to bring the rifle to bear. This 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, the haymaker moment arrives. Moira 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. She performs a flying wall kick off the teltriton behind her and into the Gantor's creepy, emaciated face.

This chain of events the Gantor takes understandably poorly. Slapped senseless more from surprise than impact, he flops listlessly to the deck. Alighting awkwardly on the floor behind the discombobulated humanoid, Moira renders final judgment by seizing the woman's jaw and promptly snapping her neck. In response, the guard performs a lopsided half-pirouette and joins her partner in a heap on the floor.

Moira stands, panting, amid her second prison guard pile-up. The corridor is now clear of any more obvious hostiles; all without a single shot fired from either weapon.

After summoning down the elevator to the Twenty-Sixth deck, Moira hunkers to the floor to collect her winnings. She collects an ammunition belt, an SV7 and spends a moment to further lament this accursed jumpsuit in the face of more useless pocket change.

As if on cue, the service elevator dings obligingly behind her.

The Moira Quicksilver that rises and gives each arm of the corridor a cautionary glance – a suspicious pedestrian about to cross an empty intersection – is that much more stacked than the one who first knelt over both vanquished foes. A soon-to-be-disassembled assault rifle is slung over her shoulder, a belt to clip both batons to is cinched around the waist of her neon yellow onesie and the remote activator is twirled around her right pointer finger. So armed, Moira darts into the service elevator's opening doors.

Once inside, she dials coordinates for the Seventeenth Deck and drops back to her knees to dismantle the SV7. At that moment, the elevator disengages from its present clamps and shoots directly upward.

The HIN _Surimiah_ , like all Mercy-class prison haulers, had a queer design. In order to readily retrieve, transport and deposit all nine hundred of its potential prisoners, 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 and a free-standing tower in its own right, the detainment column allowed the Endless Imperium the peerless ability to 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 créme de la créme 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. There, 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 before the service elevator clangs into place on the Seventeenth Deck. As the doors grind open before her, Moira's forced to abandon her handiwork to a clatter on the elevator floor.

Both her electrobatons unsheathe and extend before either standing sentry can even register the elevator's sudden appearance behind them. With one concluding 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 weaves around the two toppled prison guards on her way. She notes the _Surimiah's_ continued prevalence of Gantorese personnel and wonders vaguely if Gant is the ship's original port of call before busying 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. It offers shrill, teltriton protest, echoing down the hall, when she swats it aside with her electrobaton. Within the next two minutes, she anticipates the arrival of re-enforcements.

Luckily for Moira, the call request transponder is simply located within the control box. A little manual surgery later and she's successfully extracted the transponder and all its attendant cords and wiring. With the remote cell-door activator and the SV7's percussion cap to keep it company, the call request transponder was the final ingredient in the strange cocktail of mismatched mechanisms so integral to Moira's escape.

How exactly any of these random pieces of technical apocrypha intended to spring her from this supremely secure prison hauler mid-warp, Moira deliberately had no idea.

The Seventeenth Deck of the HIN _Surimiah_ is more or less identical to its Twenty-Sixth Deck. The black teltriton corridor is cast in a gentle curve and outlined in wavering pink light from the individual cell doors. Her destination 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. 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. Each cell was protected by 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 eyes of the cell's sole occupant a dim pink color. Whomever may lurk in the cramped chamber's furthest corner, they don't so much as shift their weight or stir themselves at all in reaction to Moira's arrival.

Dropping calmly to a knee before the scintillating barrier, Moira, after waiting a beat, extends her gloved hand through the membrane. Despite the deflection glove, her skin beneath still crawls and creeps unnervingly.

Moira deposits each nonsensical item in a neat little procession on the prisoner's side of the door; remote activator first, percussion cap second and call request transponder third. This done, Moira withdraws her right hand, locks eyes as best she can with the pink pinpricks within the cell 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.

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 remaining 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, she's visibly unafraid but inwardly anxious about the upcoming life-or-death calculations she'd need to pull off. Her most conservative estimate assumed another pair of guards, standing watch over the the opposite service elevator. The possibility of another two remained worryingly distinct, however.

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.

As always, Moira's afforded precious little time to fully contemplate these odds as she rounds a sloping corner onto, she guessed it, four individual prison guards.

All four loiter about the corridor in various states of repose, their bored conversation immediately interrupted and each only too happy to leap off their laurels to meet the unspoken challenge of an escaped prisoner.

She spends a second counting distances, extrapolating each enemy's entrance and praying to all the moons she knows what she's doing.

Two batons, delivered as one directly to the side of his Gantorese head, is more than sufficient motivation to cave-in the skull of the first prison guard to reach Moira. Her introductions made, the two guards furthest away unsling and cock their respective SV7s.

Her headlong charge doesn't slow when she hurls her lefthand 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. She immediately has the second guard, a Sybolo wheezing methane through a breathing apparatus and wielding a baton of his own, as a more pressing concern.

A precision strike to his wrist clatters her enemy's weapon to the floor. Before he reacts, Moira's seized the ecotplasmic prison guard by the scruff of his collar in one gauntleted fist and pressed the sparking 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 two remaining assault rifles was.

The roar of gunfire somewhere behind the Sybolo indicates to Moira the trigger-happiest of her armed opponents. She thrusts forth the unwilling guard as a squishy pink meat shield and advances toward the shooter and his precious assault rifle. The continued sound of his firing, 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.

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. Thankfully, she hears the telltale click of an empty 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, another tall, cadaverous razorback in riot armor, just manages to cram a second clip into the SV7's awaiting chamber.

He levels the firearm point blank at her. 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. Moira Quicksilver, unsure if her fourth and possibly final gamble of the evening had actually paid off, crumples to the deck.

Odisseus has, over the course of his forty-two hour incarceration, become intimately familiar with every nook, cranny and physical facet of his cramped cell. From the piss-scented corner paradoxically opposite from the chamber's tiny toilet, to the disconcerting mosaic of unidentifiable stains that spans the breadth of the floor, to the patternless claw marks marring each of the three walls, Odisseus knows it all. He had, however, resolved himself early on not to spend any more time pondering the specifics of the room's previous tenants than he absolutely must. Temporary as he intended his stay to be, he imagined there were certain matters it simply didn't help to dwell upon.

Hence his excitement at the unprecedented arrival of three pieces of random claptrap in his otherwise commonplace cell.

They were cheap Imperium trash, each one; the manufactured vomit of drone-operated assembly lines on Dubos or Epar and barely worth the fuel spent to ship them across the galaxy. To the eyes of Odisseus, sequestered from all mechanics for nearly two full days, they looked positively shiny, as though they'd been handcrafted by mythical creatures and left on the Ortok's doorstep overnight. Moira, in her wildest get-up yet, had delivered them and departed not fifteen seconds ago.

Franky, Odisseus would love nothing more than to sink his proverbial teeth into his trio of new toys, were it not for the electromagnet shackling him to the opposite wall.

Micne and multe are two of the galaxy's oddest metals. Both found in prodigious abundance in Hivu's crust, it had taken scientists centuries to discover their queer little symbiosis that made them so invaluable to jailers and turnkeys everywhere.

Should one send an electric current through a substantial amount of micne, they would find that any amount of multe, no matter how trace, would be immediately drawn to its sister metal by an irresistibly potent magnetic force. This learnt, the Endless Imperium happened, in a seeming instant, upon the most oppressive and subjugating possible application of this fascinating technology; electromagnetic manacles.

While his left paw is free, Odisseus' right paw is clapped in a stiff shackle of pure multe. That shackle has spent the entire forty-two hour journey aboard the _Surimiah_ irrevocably magnetized to the thick bar of electrified micne that ribbons his and every other prisoner's cell. Beyond that, the Imperium appeared relatively conservative in the use of micne. The security cordon that encircles every floor and deck of the ship and its detainment column was pure micne. More painfully, the very tips of its guard's electrobatons were made from micne, allowing the hired help to manhandle an unruly captive at stick's end.

For the most part, Odisseus had only found the micne-multe dilemma to be a supreme annoyance rather than a serious detriment to the overall plan. He's at least enough personal mobility within his own cell to use its only two amenities; the bed and the toilet.

Staring at the remote activator, the percussion cap and the call request transponder, arrayed pleasantly just inside the door of his cell and just conveniently out of paw's reach, Odisseus thanks all the moons of Jotor for the length of his tail.

Several protracted moments of awkward jostling and flopping later, Odisseus holds in his only available paw the three ingredients he needs to play his designated role in the escape. Both completely dissimilar in function and messily salvaged from three diametrically opposed systems, they were obviously incompatible. Simply by turning each scrap over in his paw once or twice, Odisseus can discern precisely how he'll cobble together the necessary device.

Assuming its success, this jury-rigged device would not only loose him from his magnetic bonds, but also disable the deflection door of his cell.

All of this would amount to a lengthy but relatively simple procedure with two free paws. With his primary paw glued to the wall, it might not even be possible, a contingency for which the Ortok hadn't accounted.

The work, as predicted, is excruciating. A constant juggling act between hind paw, left paw and encapsulated right paw is the only way Odisseus can achieve the finer points of tinkering. In some instances, his right paw clasped the makeshift device to the wall, while the left monkeyed about as necessary. Other times, a hind paw or his tail would serve this function, if his pinned paw could not.

With this utter forfeiture of precision came the desperate need for caution. Moira, likely responsible for the terrible ruckus the Ortok hears further down the corridor, didn't have the time or the inclination to scrounge him up another batch of parts should he carelessly break one.

Thusly, work that, with two paws, would have taken Odisseus a number of minutes to complete drags on over an hour and more. By the time he's nearing what he believes to be a working prototype, Odisseus can no longer hear the clamant sounds of struggle around the column's bend. He's left to assume that, whatever the outcome, Moira ended up on one winning side or another.

Even for all the trial and tribulation of slaving one-handedly over a hot jury-rig, Odisseus cannot help but derive some simple aesthetic pleasure from repair and reconstruction. He'd suffered five meals of synthetic fish paste, an extremely unflattering haircut and nothing else to occupy his time save running mental maintenance on his faraway spaceship. Uncomfortable as it is, Odisseus revels in the experience of furrowing his brow, biting his tongue and getting grease between his claws.

Much ado and the odd bout of strangled cursing toward his restraints passed before a sweaty and cramping Odisseus has finished. With his own one and a half paws, he's constructed the nearest facsimile to a remote wave emitter that scrap metal, three-quarters of an ace mechanic and an hour and a half can realistically make. It's unwieldy, highly sensitive and tremendously fragile but, for Odisseus' purposes, he predicts it'll have to serve.

If it doesn't, he was looking down the barrel of a life sentence in the famously unfriendly Vorse Imperial Penitentiary, a fate he'd only wish on Garrok Brondi.

With the wave emitter placed gingerly on his meager mattress, Odisseus spares a glance up and down the hallway to confirm the necessary lack of interruptions. This done, he peels back a sizable sheet of floor plating with the unbridled force of his hind paw. He'd made several attempts to loosen this particular plate during off-hours and lulls between guard patrols but it still comes away from the floor with a sickening squeal of unhappy teltriton.

Wasting as little time as possible, Odisseus collects his masterpiece off the mattress. He crouches toward the naked cables and wiring revealed by the displaced plate and sets about inserting the device as something of a stopgap along the main feed conduit.

To the best of Odisseus' knowledge, the main feed conduit on a Mercy-class craft of the _Surimiah's_ build runs the entire length of the detainment column, supplying each deck with both electricity and power. Unless Odisseus grossly missed his guess, the conduit was fed directly, via a series of interconnected relays, into the ship's reactor core. Assuming both the equipment and his handiwork were reliable, Odisseus' wave emitter could theoretically send a counter-signal along the same channel and into the core, "theoretically" being the operative word in that sentence.

The installation is slapdash, the emitter itself is precariously positioned and Odisseus can only scoot himself so far away from the contraption, thanks to the electromagnet clamping him in place. With the cannibalized remote activator in his paw, the hemmed-in Ortok cringes as much of his bulk away from the emitter as he can.

He extends a blanket prayer to all the moons, the leviathan deity of his homeworld and any latent engineering gods that might be listening and, clenching his fangs, he presses the button.

Less than encouraging is how Odisseus would describe the immediate reaction. The emitter hums, coughs a few sparks out of unsecured wires and overall disappoints its maker a few anxious seconds. Odisseus considers pressing the button again, a solution his saltbrother certainly would have tried, when the overhead lights, the rumble of the distant engines and, fatefully, the deflection door all flicker.

It's brief enough that Odisseus doubts he actually sees it. Before long, though, a second and a third flicker follow, accompanied by the agonizing moan of everything electronic aboard. A rapid series of following flickers, together with the unfortunate side effect of awakening every sleeping inmate, build to a spastic climax in which the wave emitter combusts and the _Surimiah_ , as if in grief, promptly dies.

The overhead lights click off. The engine's rumble beneath his paws gradually peters out. The deflection door before him fizzes once in frustration and finally retreats back into its wall-mounted projectors. Most heartening to Odisseus, however, the tremendous ache in his strained right arm abates suddenly as the electromagnetic cuff fastening him to the far wall relinquishes its forty-two hour hold.

The Ortok wishes he had more than a moment to either appreciate this sensation or congratulate himself on his latest mechanical victory. Need, however, impels him forward.

Odisseus tromps out of the ineffectual cell and onto the Seventeenth Deck's main hallway. "Auxiliaries activated," a dulcet droidvox coos repeatedly over the ship's internal loudspeaker. Emergency lighting – no doubt part of the _Surimiah's_ auxiliary package, along with life support, inertial compensation and several other necessities – bathes the corridor faded fuchsia, casting immense and eerie shadows into every corner.

Lingering in the corridor's center a quick moment, Odisseus feels a bitter draft, likely displaced air from the now-inoperable service elevator, rifle through his considerably shorter fur and the Ortok shivers. With no time to contemplate the indignities of his new prison-demanded haircut, Odisseus shuffles his bulk down the hallway, grateful at least for a little exercise.

All around him as he plods down the corridor, Odisseus watches his fellow prisoners come to terms with the drastic shift in their surroundings. Convicts of every shape, stripe and species rouse themselves and peer curiously through the conspicuous gap where their cell doors once stood. All the bipeds are dressed in those trademark yellow jumpsuits while those with less accommodating anatomies, Odisseus included, were generally down to their skins.

Some still snore, most engage in guilty, hushed conversation like truant schoolchildren. Odisseus observes at least one scuffle, threatening to break into a true brawl, even on his short jog to the service elevator.

He passes, as he nears his destination, the obvious scene of some altercation or another, to judge from the presence of two freshly-minted corpses, sprawled dramatically on the floor. One, a Gantor heavy, proudly displays his cause of death, in the form of some heinous head trauma. The other, some pink sentient whose actual species Odisseus might have been able to determine had he been left in one piece, is strewn in several wet pieces around the area, as if someone had attempted to disassemble him with a semiautomatic firearm.

"Moira," Odisseus mutters, a suspicion confirmed by the discovery of a third splash of blood, humanoid by the color, Moira's by the smell. The Ortok's bemusedly impressed at her body count, wonders absentmindedly for her safety and waddles into the ajar service elevator.

He has an unbecoming moment negotiating his paunch through the available crack the doorway affords him. After considerable and cumbersome efforts, Odisseus squeezes himself out onto the lip of the elevator shaft.

Seventeen decks tower above him and thirteen more plummet below. The Ortok's claws keep a firm grip on the outcropping behind him as he ponders the heights and depths before him. The draft he'd felt previously is increased tenfold at its source as it whizzes past him. He shivers again, cursing his confoundedly trimmed fur.

Glancing upward, Odisseus is pleased to discover that whomever had last used the elevator had ridden it straight to the top of the detainment column, granting the Ortok a clean climb up the shaft's service ladder. Gritting his fangs against the breeze, Odisseus puts his first paw to the cold teltriton rung and begins the seventeen floor ascent to reunite with his comrades. With each step, he curses Imperium penal procedure.

Moira Quicksilver awakens with the sort of skull-cracking headache that could kill a fully-grown arlaxi troopmother. The thudding pain behind her eyes is her first conscious sensation, dull awareness of her environs the second.

Starchy bedsheets, she apprehends. Industrial lightning in muted purple, she observes. Frantic dialogue, passed back and forth across the spacious chamber she apparently inhabited, she overhears. She's able to crane her neck aside in both directions, catching sight of a plastolieum divider flush against her bed on the right and a deactivated apparatus of blank screens and dead panels on the left.

Moira's regulated her breathing, taken stock of her unimpressive physical status and memorized the patterns on the galvanized ceiling before she registers the freshly-patched hole in her abdomen.

Streams of agony, dulled somewhat by anesthetic, creep up her torso, down her thigh, around her side, across her belly and outward in every direction from the initial wound. She clenches both fists to the bedspread to absorb the brunt of it but it's made thoroughly clear to Moira Quicksilver that she isn't going to be capable to the task at hand without a great many more painkillers.

With a herculean effort, she rears her head off the pillow to confirm her hypothesis. The main infirmary of the HIN _Surimiah_ is located not in the detainment column, but in the main body of the ship proper. A sizable chamber of predictably stark, military accommodations, the ship's medical bay serviced all her injured or sick aboard, prisoner and crewman alike. Automatic restraints serve to keep the former in line.

Now, however, with the _Surimiah's_ current technical difficulties, these restraints dangle limp and ineffectual off the side of her bed. The only thing keeping Moira from misbehaving is the cocktail of pharmaceuticals swimming through her bloodstream.

She wanders her hand off the mattress and investigates to her right, whereupon she discovers not only a small nightstand, but an old-fashioned steel-backed clipboard. Hoping she's unobserved as she does so, Moira discreetly palms the clipboard aside and half-tucks it beneath her body, shielding it and her perusal of it from any unfriendly eyes that might happen to glance in her direction.

"14 fl. spz. of narcotic plozine" is her prescribed poison, according to her physician's chicken-scratch. Another dosage would certainly make her woozier than a bloodless Baziron, but the imperative pain in her abdomen, she imagines, was only going to be neutralized with still more drugs. The dermal sealant had definitely been applied by now, as evinced by the great swatch of bandage that still cinctured her waist.

Despite this, Moira felt confident that, unless she was too careless and ripped her organicon stitches, another helping of "narcotic plozine" would be exactly what the doctor, in this case herself rather than the clipboard's "Surgeon Ixen", ordered.

Moira bides her time for several long minutes, hoping to snag the attention of the nurses, surgeons and other medical staff that come flittering past. The more extant problem of the ship's electrical failure, however, has captured the infirmary's attention rather decidedly.

Impatient, she opts instead to nudge an idle container of saline solution off the nightstand and onto the floor, landing with a dull thud and spray of spilt fluid. Lying entirely still and faking her best unconsciousness, Moira's rewarded several moments later when a Fjoran nurse in a spotless white frock scuttles over to investigate the disturbance.

No sooner has she arrived, however, than the professedly catatonic Moira's burst back to action. She strikes the nurse fiercely in the temple with the clipboard's steel corner, worried momentarily that the blunted tip of her improvised weapon will be rendered toothless by the Fjoran's ridged exoskeleton. To the clipboard's credit, though, the nurse stumbles backward, slips comically on the saline and smacks the back of her head against the floor's teltriton with a disquieting crack.

Mustering what strength she can from her wobbly limbs, Moira does her very best to vault from her bed, as gracefully as possible. She instead clambers into the defunct medical equipment to her left with a clumsy clatter and only just manages to maintain her balance by clinging to them for support.

Voices from afar, somewhere at the other end of the infirmary, hasten her onward and she tosses the place as quickly as she can, in hectic search for the necessary narcotics. Finally, after several desperate seconds, she's got her hands on a syringe of the stuff, neatly labeled "narcotic plozine."

Another several seconds is wasted, debating the best delivery point for her second proverbial spoonful of medicine. Watching the small army of medical technicians bearing down on her, Moira forgoes any semblance of decorum, parts the slit in the back of her hospital gown with one hand and rams the point of the needle into her buttock with the other.

She gnashes her teeth, staggers and props herself bodily on the edge of the nearest infirmary bed not her own. She wrestles to regain composure as her fast-acting medication floods and trickles into every corner of her body.

Moira rises from her slump. Her asscheek remains fleetingly sore as all other sensations of pain, tension or discomfort, gunshot wound included, increasingly drain out of her. Her entire internal system is left cool, shivering and equipped with a deeply, profoundly, nigh unquenchable yearning for a nap on comfy pillows.

She instead turns her body, step by step, toward the wave of oncoming attackers, clipboard in one hand and empty syringe in the other. As best she can, she attempts to foster mental peace with the idea of fighting her way across the entire breadth of the _Surimiah_ in this condition, on her way to the bridge.

Sleepy as Moira might be, the prison break was honestly barely begun.

Chapter 2

Two-Bit Switch, a single point of life among the dunes of dead wreckage all around him, studies the blueprint more as an excuse to ignore her than anything else.

" _Two_ -Bit!"

"Bloom me out, Gasbox." He peels his eyes artificially off the spreadsheet in his hands. "I ord you the first time, alright? Don't wet your wozzers."

In the dingy, flickering light of her scrapbarn, she's almost pretty. In here, everyone's face sports an eerie, greenish cast from the shoddy lighting. Shadows deepen in the depressions beneath everyone's brow. Like this, Gasbox looks furtive, understated, exotic. The natural emerald complexion of her species helps only to improve Two-Bit's perception of her.

In proper lighting, Two-Bit remembers her features as broader, flatter, less appealing. What's more, the cut of her scruffy mechanic's uniform wasn't doing her any favors either.

For that matter, neither was her perpetual nagging.

"Well?" She proposes, a hand to each broad hip.

Two-Bit flaps the creased blueprint aside. "Did you hank something, or...?"

The Moza grease monkey sets her jaw firm, smart enough to suss out that he was running her around but too angry to finger him for it. "We ain't friends, is we, Two-Bit?"

"I wouldn't describe our relationship as such, no."

"So, I ain't gotta do you no favors?"

"Look, what're you jockin' at? I'm a little engaged at the present."

Gasbox extends two stubby fingers. "Two weeks of back rent you owe me."

He steps away from her and back onto his previous path, scoffing audibly. "Oh, come off it, Gasbox–"

"I ain't comin' offa nothing!" she counters, catching up the ambulatory slack behind him.

They weave a path through the mountainous heaps of junk, salvage and other mechanical miscellany that covers the working floor of Gasbox's unnamed scrapbarn. All that distinguishes this scrapbarn from a traditional, open-air junk heap is the actual roof over their heads, a shaky pretense that threatened to collapse atop them at a moment's notice. In all fairness, calling this place anything but a glorified dump was an insult to chopshops galaxywide.

What the tumble-down scrapbarn lacked in nearly every other amenity or accommodation, it bought back tenfold in anonymity. Crowning the sleaziest cul-de-sac of Qel Qatar's worst ghetto, the scrapbarn had the distinct virtue of invisibility to the outside galaxy. Each member of _The Unconstant Lover's_ outlaw crew could consider this a quite salient advantage, at the present moment.

Besides, Gasbox had always proven to be a decent enough middleman, though she was quickly proving to be a less-than-satisfying landlord, what with her apparent proclivity toward getting on Two-Bit's nerves.

"I jabbed you about this," he swears, circling around the deactivated reactor core of a TFS 283 Mercy-Class Transport. "I jabbed you we'd square up soon as we come back from, you know, our foolish venture."

"See, and that's what I've been thinking about. Suppose nobody don't come back from this 'foolish venture' of yourn." She pauses, certainly for effect. "Who's to pay my back rent then, smart guy?"

Two-Bit tosses a hand into the air as he steps into the shade of the Moza's still-dingier office. "Confidence, woman! I find that you are very much lacking in lollies."

"Darn tootin'."

Gasbox's main office, the central junction for each of the scrapbarn's four service stalls, is actually somehow messier than the main warehouse itself.

A smattering of ratty furniture – an expansive workbench, some threadbare chairs, a sagging sofa – is scarcely visible beneath the armada of dusty and deconstructed appliances, household and otherwise, that are crammed between the office's four walls. The aforementioned workbench is where they're thickest, but almost every chair in the joint is stacked with juicers, chocochino grinders and other kitchen sundries. The poor sofa against the far wall plays host to a disemboweled laundry mainframe, its mechanical innards bleeding onto the stained floor.

"Got gashouse news for ya, love. I think you might need to–" Two-Bit stops short and peers up from his blueprint. The room's only occupant doesn't turn to acknowledge either him or the derailment of his drifttrain of thought. "What're you doing?"

The hobnailed heels of her fearsome jackboots are planted daintily on the workbench. The glossy cover of the AccCo Bimonthly Product Catalogue masks her face. Moira Quicksilver remains characteristically unalarmed by Two-Bit's entrance, continuing to refuse eye contact behind her magazine. "Reading."

Two-Bit's unimpressed. "Yeah, well, you're supposed to be unlagging yourself from them bracelets I gave you."

Moira jiggles her boot's wingtip in a lazy point to Two-Bit's right. Following the line of her point, Two-Bit spots, fastened firmly to the side of the micne-smelted toaster oven he'd plugged in ten minutes ago, an empty multe manacle and Moira's wrist inexplicably missing from it.

Two-Bit's impressed. "How did you do that?"

"I have a trick."

"You have a trick." Two-Bit's mouth lingers open dumbly. "Well, what's that, then?"

"That would be telling."

Returning his focus to the blueprint, Two-Bit acquiesces and continues his stride through the office toward the rear garages. "Have it your way."

Moira finally peels back the corner of her magazine to pose. "You were saying? You think I might need to...?"

Allowing himself both a wry smile and a moment's pause to dramatically drop it, Two-Bit stalls a second within the opposite doorway to inform her. "Get shot."

"What?"

Without looking up from his schematics, Two-Bit slaps the doorjamb companionably and exits the office. "Have fun, darlin'." His smile only widens as he jogs onward through the piles of refuse, listening to Moira's shouted objections behind him.

"Two-Bit? What do you mean, 'get shot?'"

"Get your feet offa there!" comes Gasbox's voice from back within the office. Whether Moira's stone cold remonstrance or Gasbox's petulant insistence wins out over the other, Two-Bit hasn't the time, patience or inclination to find out. He, of course, wasn't above exploiting Moira as a temporary distraction from Gasbox so he could potentially put a little ground between himself and his debtor. Besides, he's more important things to look to.

By Two-Bit Switch's count, they required approximately two more months of planning, bribery and rehearsal before they could take this gamble. As a professional jailbreaker, this would be Two-Bit's first attempt at intentional incarceration aboard and resulting escape from an Imperial prison ship midwarp.

Manifold tasks had yet to be accomplished. There were codes to memorize, tests to run, palms to grease, inventories to check and massive amounts of data still to collate about this particular prison ship.

Understandably, Two-Bit had little to no time to waste with Gasbox's over-eager demands. Just as it was the Captain's job to conceive of the stupid notion, it was Two-Bit's unspoken job to plan, prepare and execute his stupid notion.

This time around, the notion was a suitably flashy and suitably feasible method to get caught, get free and more importantly, get Huong Xo off their trail, even if only temporarily.

"Tell you what, Two-Bit," Gasbox proposes, a trace of breathlessness on her voice, "you're unwilling or, more likely, unable to front all that cash you owe me? All's well – gimme the ship as collateral."

"We're still chugging about for a buyer," is Two-Bit's canned answer.

"No, the other one. The one you got sittin' in Stall D. The junker." Two-Bit pivots to face her as she talks, to flash Gasbox the warning in his eyes. " _The_ Whatever _Lover_."

" _Unconstant_ ," he reminds gravelly, "and I hink," he surmises, facing forward again to consider the blueprint, "that the Captain wouldn't much fancy your wording."

"Which part?"

"'Collateral,' for one? Not to mention 'junker.'" He cracks the canvas in his hands once. "Captain gets awful clingy as regards his gantine."

"Your Cap'n don't scare me."

Two-Bit shoots another glance behind at that. "You have bumped him, yeah?"

Ahead of Two-Bit, the slopes of scrap metal part to reveal a yawning service door, the barn's rear two stalls and a fresh junk heap. Arisen over the past hour and situated smack dab in the middle of the doorway, this newest mess is comprised entirely of machinery both minute, meaningless and handheld.

Squatting hard at work in the middle of all this carnage, like a toddler surrounded by Tyrotect tumbler toys, is one shaggy, disagreeable Ortok. In his clumsy paws, Odisseus agonizes over some cobbled-together contraption or another.

Standing apart and seemingly on guard in the doorway, billowing blue smoke toward the ceiling, is one blubbery, agreeable Grimalti. Abraham Bonaventure doesn't seem to agonize over anything but that gaudy, bulbous calabash pipe he'd fallen in love with four months ago at that bazaar on Bennevikos.

As Two-Bit and his annoying tagalong approach, Odisseus barks an order over his shoulder, demanding an unseen someone to "gimme." The reply is confused, protesting and echoes off the thermosteel walls of the scrapbarn's unseen service stall.

"What? The 910s?"

Odisseus barks another affirmative.

"Got plenty of those!" the absent speaker confirms. "One sec!"

Two-Bit attracts everyone's attention with a snap of his blueprint. "Good news or bad news first?"

Odisseus mutters something about "always" and Two-Bit takes a guess.

"Well, as of right now, it vizzes like Moira's probably gonna hafta get plugged."

"Is that all?" Abraham comments around his pipe.

"Yeah." Two-Bit regards him. "What're you doing?"

"Supervisin'."

"Incoming!" The disembodied voice warns.

On cue, a spinning hunk of metal whizzes through the open door and lands conveniently in Abraham's upturned palms. The crusty old Grimalti glances sidelong at Two-Bit as he hands the 910 in question toward Odisseus. Without removing his eyes from his own work, the Ortok snatches the offered device.

"See?" Abraham offers.

Squinting, Odisseus cranes his hairy head up to address Two-Bit with a request about "news."

"Good news is, turns out them lifts they use _do_ got those transmitters we want." He flips the relevant swatch of blueprint around. "Vizz at that." After squinting for several more seconds, even giving the schematics a perfunctory sniff, the Ortok allows himself a fanged smile. "Thought you'd like that."

The Ortok's demeanor immediately changes, however, when consulting his comrade in the other room. He yammers out an angry order for a replacement part and tosses the 910 dispassionately to the pile.

"The 730- _whats?_ You just got the 910s!"

Odisseus snarls something about his "mind" and "changing" before the voice capitulates.

"Don't snap at me. Hold on." This is followed shortly by more mechanical shuffling, as though someone was digging their way through a junk heap until, after a beat, something audibly dislodges in the other room. A metallic clatter of a spare part avalanche, accompanied by a startled scream, resounds awkwardly from Stall D.

"Now, don't freak out," is the voice's first disclaimer on the heels of the accident, "but like, a lot of stuff sorta, uh, fell on me? So, nobody should come back here for a second." This is followed by more floundering and flopping in the detritus, during which Two-Bit drops his head to his palm and Odisseus rolls his eyes. "Hey, so," he reports after a moment, "I can't move, actually. Somebody better come back here."

A huffy Odisseus glares ceilingward and drops the device from his paws. He stomps off into Stall D, to the rectification and rescue of the first point on his impromptu assembly line.

"Is that him?" Gasbox, arriving expectedly late, questions to no one and everyone. "I'mana have myself a word. _Captain!_ "

Two-Bit stops her short, interposing his body between the Moza and the path following Odisseus into the other room. "Gasbox, Gasbox, Gasbox," he stalls. "Let's make a jelly. Whaddya jabb to, I don't know, first buyer's rights, eh? That sound jig to you?"

Gasbox scowls her benighted features. "No foolin'? I heard of your tricks with No Cock, Two-Bit."

"Ancient history, love."

"You ain't pawnin' no rattletrap off on me."

"Take her if you like, derry her if you don't. Your call. Either way, you get your rhino first things first when we coop back here." He makes a gesture into the vagueness behind him. "Let's just not tangle up the Cap'n, alright?" Two-Bit favors his least trustworthy contact with as amiable a smile as he can fake. "Sound savvy to you?"

The agreement doesn't come instantly. "Fine," she pushes through clenched teeth. "Fine. Just, you know," she waves a glove toward Odisseus' caldera of junk, "try not to make such a bloomin' mess, willya? Moons."

Both Two-Bit and Abraham watch her take her leave – discontented, suspicious but placated, for the time being. Pretending to study his blueprint, Two-Bit waits a healthy amount of time, until Gasbox is clearly out of earshot and most likely halfway to harassing Moira in the office.

"Do us a kindie. Keep your peeps peeled, eh?"

"Think she'll talk?"

"Nag. I'm just gettin', you know, a sorta 'steal-your-ship-when-your-drawers-is-down kinda vibe offa her. If you take my meaning." Abraham watches Gasbox depart unmoved. "So, like I jabbed, keep 'em peeled."

"As ye wish." He extracts the pipe with one hand. "Maybe I'm misunderstandin', though. Haven't we the coin just to pay her upfront?"

"Oh, in spades, me chum. Comin' out our beezers. It's just, you know, Gasbox's a bit of a shoveover, is all. The principle of the thing and whatnot."

Abraham almost smirks. "Switch, ye corrupt fuck."

Two-Bit's reply is cut suddenly short by the sudden sound of a second crash. Emanating from somewhere in the stall behind them, this time the commotion comes in tandem with an animalistic yelp that Two-Bit couldn't begin to translate, had he even the knowledge.

"Um, guys? Don't freak out, but somebody _else_ should maybe come back here."

Two-Bit Switch stands, listening to the best and muted efforts of man and Ortok to extricate themselves from a junkslide of fuel cell contractors and energy catalysts in the next room. He eyes the manufacturing blueprint in his hands. The crinkled plans outline the industrial design and overall deckplan of the HIN _Surimiah's_ particular make and model.

Two-Bit wonders absently if his eyes might have been bigger than his stomach.

Two-Bit Switch spots Moira Quicksilver and suddenly has his worst fears about his eyes and his stomach immediately confirmed. "Okay, we're in fucking stook now."

She snores softly, slumped against the room's main emergency console, naked save for her flimsy hospital gown.

Odisseus stands guard at the chamber door, armed with both MI Model DX2 Wreckingball Combat Shotgun and his doofy haircut. He sounds unenthused and less surprised when he grunts a question about "dead."

"Not quite." Two-Bit crouches before the slumbering ex-bounty hunter with a certain degree of timidness, as though about to rouse a resting cobra. "You, uh, hanging in there, love? It's me, Two-Bit – your chummy neighborhood slambreaker."

Her eyelids flutter open and Two-Bit practically recoils. She appraises him drowsily before her expression contorts into the most unholy of sights on that flinty face – a smile. "Hello, Two-Bit," she greets pleasantly.

"Listen. Moira." Two-Bit jiggles the vest of reinforced body armor clasped in his left hand. "We gotta get you threaded. We can't have you bustin' up the joint in nothing but, well," he makes a vague gesture, "that." He climbs to his feet, opening the vest up invitingly. "Here."

With some coaxing, a thoroughly exhausted Moira manages to stand on her wobbly feet. After some suitably uncomfortable jostling, in which Two-Bit's extremely mindful of the placement of his hands, he manages to strap the drugged-up first mate into a padded combat vest. She remains starkly pantless, however and, lacking any means to remedy this, Two-Bit yanks the lower lip of her vest down as far as he dares.

"Thank you, Two-Bit," she responds sleepily. "That was nice of you."

"This is jeebing me out."

"I like your hat."

From where he lurks in the doorway, Odisseus sniffs something impatiently about "moving."

Lockdown Control aboard the HIN _Surimiah_ is a small, inoffensive chamber, tucked around the base of the detainment column and conveniently located only a hop, skip and jump south of the infirmary.

After meeting up in the prisoner receiving area at the very top of the column, Two-Bit Switch and Odisseus had quickly raided the nearby guard's armory. They proceeded to suit themselves up with what body armor they could fit into, Wreckingballs, all the requisite ammunition and, in Two-Bit's case, a riotguard helmet.

Thusly outfitted, the two accomplices had scampered around the other side of the column to meet up with Moira. That's where they found her unconscious – fresh from surgery, fresh from the medical wing and fresh from lifting the state of emergency lockdown the Ortok's wave emitter had rendered onto the _Surimiah_.

Under extreme circumstances, such as complete power failure, the detainment column was programmed to automatically lock down. This prevented the more enterprising of any suddenly-loosed prisoners from escaping the column and running amok in the ship proper. The system of airlocks between column and ship would activate and both halves of the _Surimiah_ were irrevocably sealed off from each other, regardless of the craft's current state of power.

The lockdown had proven to be a most persistent thorn in the side of Two-Bit's best laid plans against the _Surimiah_. The only way to circumvent the emergency protocol was from a set of manual controls, located within the appropriately named Lockdown Control and, of course, outside the actual column itself.

This was the real reason, beyond the pure yuks of it, that Moira'd allowed herself to be shot in the first place. The fastest and most surefire way to place a prisoner beyond the _Surimiah's_ security cordon was to let the establishment cart them off to the infirmary posthaste. As far as this escape was concerned, somebody on the crew was going to have to quite literally take one for the team. The question, of course, only came down to who.

To Two-Bit's thinking, leave it up to Moira to devise the least lethal means of catching canisters with one's body. When pressed, she even professed some bogus method of contorting herself in the face of gunfire to better cushion the blow. Now that she'd, all hopped up on painkillers, somehow fought her way through all the infirmary's security with nothing but a bloody clipboard and recent gunshot wound, Two-Bit was in somewhat less of a position to doubt her.

When he'd initially proposed the idea, he wouldn't have described her reaction as "particularly pleased." As long as Two-Bit pressed how vital it was in their attempts to shirk Huong Xo, however, Moira Quicksilver had agreed right enough and performed the task fairly spectacularly.

What Two-Bit hadn't necessarily anticipated was the physical and mental state the evening's excitement, not to mention the anesthesia, would leave her in. Understandably, she was extremely sleepy but, disquietingly, she appeared actually amiable and, at the moment, also appeared to be having a surprisingly difficult time standing on two feet.

Two-Bit honestly wasn't convinced she'd be anything but a hindrance on their mad dash to pacify and commandeer the HIN _Surimiah_.

This, coupled with the other, unexpected complication that's recently arose, join forces to overwhelm Two-Bit. He's suddenly filled with a nostalgic desire to be back on Qel Qatar, pouring over blueprints back in Gasbox's scrapbarn, when everything was blissfully hypothetical.

"Hey. Where's Nemo?" Moira wonders.

" _That,_ " Two-Bit admits, "is an excellent ringer." He shares an apprehensive glance with Odisseus. "He was _supposed_ to bump us up at the top here."

Odisseus shakes his confused head, completing Two-Bit's sentiment with "never."

"Oh," Moira comments, disappointment painfully visible on her face. "Too bad." She shrugs a moment later. "He'll turn up."

"Sure he will," Two-Bit agrees halfheartedly. "Coulda used his wheel, though."

The other major weak link in Two-Bit's chain of contrived events involved a rather unfortunate deadline they labored under. Odisseus' makeshift wave emitter could only realistically disable the reactor core for a period of approximately twenty-five minutes. With thirteen and a half minutes wasted by Odisseus clambering up the service ladder, that only left eleven and a half minutes to cross the entire length of the _Surimiah_ and neutralize her bridge crew. Needless to say, this left precisely no time to go scampering around the detainment column, searching for their truant Captain.

On one hand, the plan pressed them to carry on and dig Nemo up later. On the other hand, though, the whole plan was concocted under the auspices of having four capable trigger fingers rather than their paltry two and a half, a distinction all too significant for the anxious Two-Bit.

"Jabbing of wheels," he realizes, reaching aside to where he'd set Moira's Wreckingball, "this'll probably do you better than that did," he offers, indicating the bloody-cornered clipboard at her feet.

"Thank you," Moira beams, accepting the shotgun.

Odisseus repeats his idea about "moving."

With that, the _Surimiah's_ three busiest inmates shuffle their way out of Lockdown Control and into the forbidden territory of the main ship itself.

According to a handy plaque about emergency evacuation procedure Two-Bit found outside the armory, the most direct route from Lockdown Control to the _Surimiah's_ bridge was a relatively straight shot from stern to bow. One simply went past the detainment column, up the catwalk, over the passenger wing, down the catwalk, through the deactivated security atrium and into the helm. Simple enough, perhaps, but Two-Bit noticed that the plaque tellingly made no mention of any armed resistance along the way.

They pass the time in pragmatic silence, nervous at every step about the prospect of discovery. Their reverie is interrupted only by the repeated chanting of the loudspeaker's warning and the occasional bar of jovial humming from a drug-addled Moira.

Two-Bit leads and therefore navigates, with his intimate knowledge of the deckplan. Odisseus, as the only other fully conscious of the three, brings up the rear. This leaves Moira in the middle, traipsing innocently along with a shotgun over her shoulder.

The upper hallway of the _Surimiah's_ main body is subtly different from, but altogether cut from the same cloth as, the circular corridors of the detainment column. The walls, ceilings and floor are the same black teltriton, but smoother and more sculpted, as though only those without felony charges could appreciate finer architecture.

Apertures into side chambers have graceful oblong doorways. Fluorescent streams of red guide passengers towards the nearest unfired ejection units. Everything is continually limned in the auxiliary purple lighting from above.

In short order, they mount the short stairs up to catwalk. The narrow passage stretches over the passenger wing, allowing conveniently quick transit from one end of the ship to the other without winding through the dormitories below.

Two-Bit fully anticipates, by the rules of congested traffic, and is summarily unsurprised by the sound of heavy soled boots, clanging up the opposite set of stairs. Within a heartbeat, the three escaped convicts find themselves staring down a trio of similarly armed, similarly armored prison guards across the uncomfortably slender catwalk.

"Maggies up!" Two-Bit shouts, dropping to one knee and immediately letting a round fly. The thick red ditrogen bolt travels on its collision course between the shotgun's snub and the kneecap of the first standing guard, a skin-and-bones Gantorese number. Upon his leg exploding into cerulean spray, he seems to screamingly regret his position several steps ahead of his fellows. He drops instantly to the catwalk, his lower limb practically in pieces and leaving plenty of room for the Fjoran directly behind him to plant a shotgun canister hard on Two-Bit's shoulder.

He's bowled bodily over, plopping backward on the catwalk himself. Miraculously, his stolen riot armor managed to turn most of the blow, rendering a crippling glance into merely a nasty bruise. As best as he can see from his back, Two-Bit watches Odisseus rack off a pair of poorly-aimed shots, certainly attempting to fire around Moira and already nothing much to write home about in the marksman department anyway.

With much effort, Two-Bit yanks himself into a sitting position, cracks the Wreckingball's pump into place and makes his best effort for the Fjoran. His posture fumbles his aim somewhat. Two-Bit's not likely to complain, though, when the Gantorese guard leaning over the Fjoran's left receives the bolt with compliments in the stomach.

Both his compatriots down, the Fjoran primes the shotgun for another round and, rather than retreating, advances, with the clear and obvious intent of finishing off Two-Bit.

It's Moira's first shot that decapitates him. Her Wreckingball burrows a bolt between his eyes. Her shot hits home with such velocity and at such proximity that its momentum through his headpiece literally rips the whole damn thing off his neck in a spectacle of blood, ditrogen and shards of spinning chitin.

Moira, expelled smoke wafting from the shotgun's muzzle, cringes delicately. "Eww."

The firefight over in the space of seven shots, Two-Bit indulges himself a full minute to loot all three on the catwalk. After putting the dismembered Gantor out of his misery, he tosses clips of barely-tapped shotgun ammo to Odisseus and Moira, one accepting them gruffly and the other graciously. As discreetly as possible, he stuffs the pockets of his armored vest with as much pilfered cash as he realistically can. As he relieves the headless Fjoran of his chump change, Two-Bit half-turns back to his waiting comrades.

"We're making good time. At this crackle, we'll be biffing on the bridge door in–"

Two-Bit realizes starkly that neither of them are paying attention to him. Moira flicks blasted brains off the trim of her hospital gown. Odisseus swings his head about, nose twitching, apparently fixated on some scent. "What is it?"

Odisseus' reply is too convoluted a string of Ortoki for Two-Bit to follow. At his obvious confusion, Moira points a blood-tipped forefinger at him. "He says he smells something."

"Well, thank you, Moira," Two-Bit deadpans. "I was speccing what, exactly–"

Without another word, Odisseus turns and tromps, almost violently, down the catwalk, back the way they'd come. "Oi! Where in the shittin' fuck do you think you're going? Odi? Odi!" The Ortok snaps something ferocious with a clamp of his mighty jaws. "We're on the bloomin' clock here!"

Moira, nudging a piece of chitin with her big toe, only shrugs.

Odisseus finds the first corpse sprawled across the doorway to the mess hall and, by instinct, if not by smell, knows he's close. By the Ortok's reckoning, a point blank shotgun blast had done the dead Gantor the courtesy of removing three-quarters of his chest, but his weapon, its ammunition and his pockets were otherwise undisturbed.

Bootprints in blue blood lead ominously away from the body and into the darkened recesses of the mess hall. Some Inner Sector shipwright, apparently, didn't imagine this section of the ship important enough to include emergency lighting inside. With his companions and Two-Bit's protestations both gaining behind him, Odisseus racks his own shotgun and steps inside the doorway.

Without proper lighting, the _Surimiah's_ mess hall is a backless cavern. The tables and chairs are outlined both in ghostly purple from behind Odisseus and in bitter white from another open door somewhere to his right. At present, the hall is populated only by one cautious Ortok and a handful more corpses, strewn haphazardly in the doorway of the adjoining room.

At first blush, Odisseus supposes this room to be the ship's galley and a room his nose supposes to be the epicenter of the beckoning scent. To confirm his suspicions, he hears definitive rooting and rummaging from further within and he watches elongated shadows play against the back wall.

Sidling to his right along said wall affords Odisseus a better look at the pile of corpses. All three sport gunshot wounds that correlate perfectly with those of the dead Gantor standing sentry at the outer door. Another Gantor, a humanoid and a Karracki they're all prison guard., All sent to their respective makers by shotgun fire at brutally close range, they were splattered against the doorjamb, presumably by whomever or whatever was ransacking the galley not ten feet from Odisseus' position.

Inches from visual contact, Odisseus catches a fresh whiff of the mystery scent, scoffs, and lowers his weapon.

"Of course," he mutters, taking one step into the galley.

The muzzle flash nearly blinds him. Before he can flinch, a sizable chunk of the wall a whisker's length from his face is violently replaced with a smoking pockmark.

Odisseus gives it a moment's glance. "So, that could've ended poorly."

Odisseus' saltbrother cuts a guilty, unimpressive figure. He squats before the open chiller, crude light casting his moon of a face into an eerie eclipse, like an impractical burglar who heads straight for the vittles and forgoes one's valuables.

His waifish black mane is disheveled beyond reason. His crayon-yellow jumpsuit is shabbied by bloodstains, sweatstains and stains that require no further contemplation. His DX2 Wreckingball is propped unassumingly against the top of the open chiller door.

Captain Nemo shoots his first glance over his shoulder and grunts.

"Oh, hey. It's you." With his unseen hand, he produces a greasy cylinder. "Eggroll?"

"Blech. No." Odisseus squints. "Where did you get that?"

Tossing the eggroll into his mouth, Nemo reads a name off the polystyrene box at hand. "Um, from Liwwo?" He shakes it twice. "There's a whole thing of them in here."

"Would now be an appropriate time to ask how you got here?"

Biting off one half of the eggroll, he waves the other half around in pinched fingers like a fat, dripping stogy. "I was on the first deck." He chews a moment. "And hungry."

"Apparently." Odisseus shuffles a subconscious step backwards to appraise the Captain's derelict appearance more completely. All things considered, he was honestly expecting something far worse. "You look like boiled shit."

"Thanks."

At the smell of Moira rounding the corner into the darkened mess hall and making her approach, Odisseus has only a few more seconds to squeeze the fateful question under the radar. In theory, forty-two hours wasn't nearly enough time for any truly adverse side effects to manifest but, when it came to Nehel Morel and his substantial head start on insanity, one couldn't be too certain. "Missing any marbles?"

"Probably," Nemo admits, chewing thoughtfully. "I suppose, sooner or later here, we're gonna find out."

"That's not exacting comforting."

"Yeah, but that was always a danger," he dismisses, shifting his weight and his gaze back towards the chiller's open maw. "We talked about this."

"I guess."

Nemo stops his search of the chiller short. "Wait." He turns back. "There's something different about you."

"Don't start."

Moira, her expression utter vacancy, meanders into the galley. A scraping sound accompanies her, as she literally drags the combat shotgun behind her like a child who's forgotten her security blanket. She levels up on Odisseus' right side, him trying his very hardest to simply ignore her.

Nemo spares Moira, in body armor, hospital gown and bare legs, an understandably confounded glance, before focusing his attention back on Odisseus and his embarrassingly short hair.

"No, no, hold on, I'manna figure it out," he resolves with disturbing and apparent sincerity. "You didn't get your hair cut, you..." he eliminates before both his lack of other viable options and realization hit him simultaneously. "No, yeah, you did get a haircut!"

"Fucking hilarious," the Ortok growls.

"What? You don't like it or something?"

Odisseus makes a displaying gesture with his Wreckingball and his empty paw. "It's a prison cut. I'd have thought that would've been obvious."

"I think it's fetching," Nemo opines, vaguely offended.

"Don't. Start."

Moira addresses Nemo suddenly. "What're you eating?"

"Oh." He remembers the butt of unctuous leftover in his hand. "An eggroll. Want one?"

"Yes, please," she smiles, delighted. Odisseus gives her the wary eye as Nemo digs about in Liwwo's box, retrieves another soggy eggroll and tosses it to his first mate. Despite her evident mental infirmity, she catches it perfectly in her left hand.

Nemo bites his half an eggroll into quarters and requests Odisseus. "Tell me what you don't like about it."

"Well. I'm freezing all the moons-damned time. For one."

"You have blubber."

"Blubber doesn't work that way."

"Yeah, I guess I don't really know how blubber works."

Moira, working her way contentedly through the eggroll, offers cheerfully to the room. "These are really gross."

Struck by an epiphany, Nemo contemplates his own under new eyes. "They are, yeah!" he agrees, popping the remainder into his mouth all the same.

Odisseus paws at the floor impatiently. "If we're just about finished here..."

Without warning, Nemo's free hand withdraws a carton of pink fluid, labeled "joojberry milk," from the depths of the chiller. Yanking the cap loose with his teeth, spitting it across the room and swallowing the eggroll, he replies into the echoing carton as he hoists it to his lips. "Just about."

A stream of heavily-accented expletives, certainly containing "bloom," "moons" and "fuck" and less certainly containing "blowbag," "shitmouth" and possibly "doorknob," resounds from somewhere nearby.

Nemo furrows his brow. "...was that Two-Bit?"

"Yeah." Odisseus nods. "He's having kittens."

Jangling his newly-found milk carton in her direction, Nemo abruptly aligns his attention toward Moira. "Okay, I can no longer hold my tongue. Where are your pants?"

Moira looks to her toes. "You know, I'm not rightly sure."

"She's..." Odisseus attempts to phrase tactfully, "under a lot of influences right now."

"Right, right," Nemo ignores, his scrutiny firmly in Moira's direction and the makings of an irresponsible idea abundantly present on his face. "So what you're saying is, that's only a hospital gown under there." He struggles for both words and adequate gestures. "I mean, in the back, it's all sorta... well, there's no, like, coverage on... um... can I see her butt?"

Odisseus narrows his eyes. "What're you suggesting?"

Nemo finally rises from his squat, replacing the shotgun on his shoulder, kicking closed the door behind him with a bang and splaying the milk carton wide in confession. "That I wanna see her butt."

Bemused, Odisseus can't bring himself to intervene as Nemo advances two steps towards Moira. "What for?"

"Don't look at my butt!" Moira squeals, scooting backwards with a startled giggle and tugging the brain-stained fringes of her hospital gown down as far as her armored vest allows.

Nemo is undeterred in his bizarre endeavor, however, circling around Moira's right flank as he answers oddly. "Blackmail."

Moira's, as ever, too quick for him, though. She darts one loping step aside, covering her posterior with one hand, a sight Odisseus averts his confused gaze from. "Blackmail?"

"What? Don't judge me. When am I realistically gonna get another shot at this?"

What follows is, hands down, the single strangest game of cat-and-mouse meets ring-around-the-rosie Odisseus ever has, or ever will have, the displeasure of witnessing.

In one corner is Moira Quicksilver: naked from the waist down, clad only in blood-spattered hospital gown and canister-resistant riot armor, with an eggroll in her mouth, a giggle on her lips and a Wreckingball Combat Shotgun swinging playfully at her side. In the other corner is Nehel Morel: attired like an escaped, bed-wetting schizophrenic, with sloshing carton of pink milk to one hand and his own Wreckingball to the other.

They both hoot and hop about each other in skipping circles, the latter employing every last trick in his book to steal a gander at the former's bare buttock and the former employing every last trick in her book to evade such a gruesome fate.

Odisseus, standing apart from the whole fiasco, steps back against the nearest wall and declares to the room. "I wash my paws of all of this."

"Wha–" is Two-Bit's initial reaction, having appeared seconds later in the doorway to the mess hall, words plumb failing him and expression of abject astonishment painted on his face. "I don't even know what I'm supposed to be peeved about here!"

The horseplay continues despite his entrance, however. Only Nemo bothers or even notices Two-Bit's sudden presence with a nod and a momentary wave of the milk carton. "Hey, Two-Bit."

The shotgun round buckles the ceiling, clattering an uncoupled plate noisily to the floor directly between the two misbehaving pirates and canceling their tomfoolery immediately. The very picture of stern remonstrance and scarcely-contained rage, Two-Bit Switch, ill-fitting riotguard helmet perched stupidly on his irate head, lowers his smoking Wreckingball to his side, visibly fuming. "We are, unless you've somehow all blanked, smack-dab in the middle of a _fucking_ slambreak! We have exactly six minutes and twenty-one seconds to shoot everybody decking this entire vessel before the power shucks back on and we're fucked thirteen ways from Jotor!"

Moira scuffs the floor with a downcast toe. "Sorry, Two-Bit."

"Now can we all, please, for moon's sake, just blooming deer this ship like good little buckos?"

Nemo perfectly mirrors Moira's crestfallen pose. "Yes, Two-Bit."

Odisseus makes a quick clarification. "I didn't–"

Two-Bit Switch brooks no rival. He jabs his still-smoking weapon in a fierce, forbidding point toward the exit. "March! Now!"

A forlorn little procession of would-be commandeerers – Odisseus first, Moira second and Nemo bringing up the rear – muddle their way out of the _Surimiah's_ galley and onto the task more immediately at hand, all under the watchful eye of their friendly neighborhood jailbreaker. As he passes Two-Bit, Odisseus hears his somewhat bewildered question to the Captain.

"Bloom me out – what happened to you?"

Chapter 3

Two-Bit Switch jogs into the HIN _Surimiah's_ deactivated security atrium with minutes to spare. He thanks all the moons that, upon arrival, the overhead lighting remains its dull purple and the "auxiliaries activated" continues to chime calmly across every corner of the ship.

Now, all that stands between Two-Bit and full accomplishment of his plan – the commandeering of the coveted bridge – were a handful of technicians, probably a stuffed-shirt warden or something and one thick teltriton door, sealed tight against ingress.

Only panting a little, Two-Bit seemingly weathered the sprint through the forward half of the _Surimiah_ the best of all his companions. Odisseus, the heaviest pound for pound, fared the worst, straggling the farthest behind and worked into the most apparent sweat. The most physically capable of the crew, Moira's still only slightly ahead of the Ortok, the tranquilizing effects of the anesthetic beginning to take a more taxing toll. Nemo is actually the closest behind Two-Bit, his only obvious distraction the quarter of a carton of joojberry milk he still nurses.

Standing more or less in the middle of the chamber, Two-Bit catcalls back to his lagging companions. "Would you hustle it up already?"

Odisseus huffs some aggravated response about "coming" and "coming."

"And you thought we wouldn't make it," Nemo chides, spreading his milk and his shotgun in opposite directions in a gesture of demonstration. "You see? Everything's–"

Fate sufficiently tempted, the entire _Surimiah_ immediately undergoes a drastic paradigm shift. The loudspeaker is silenced mid-warning. The comforting purple lighting vanishes and, in its place, that strident yellow lighting snaps back to life.

Most drastically, underscored by a subterranean humming somewhere beneath the deckplates, the security atrium activates. In response, a fresh electrical current races through the multe-made metal cordon that rings the room, much to the fascination of the micne electromagnet shackled to Two-Bit's right wrist.

Lead by the hand into a headlong collision, Two-Bit's pitched unceremoniously to his immediate left. His manacle clicks harmlessly onto the cordon, but the leftover momentum jolts Two-Bit's body into the wall with enough force to drop his Wreckingball and topple his unclipped helmet. Struggling to regain his bearings, Two-Bit glares across the abruptly vacant atrium at the back of his Captain's head.

"Care to term up that sentence, Cap'n? Everything's what, exactly?"

Nemo's manacle had hurled him to the starboard side of the chamber instead, slumped awkwardly with his face pressed to the teltriton and his back facing outward. "You said twenty-five minutes," he mutters, smushed against the wall. "I was expecting twenty-five minutes."

"Yeah, I was expecting twenty-five minutes too!" Two-Bit commiserates, reaching for his castoff shotgun. " _He_ jabbed me twenty-five minutes!"

While his right paw is locked in place like everyone else's, Odisseus is gifted the further difficulty of somehow negotiating his mammoth hairy tail. As the Ortok attempts to wrestle himself into a slightly more comfortable position, Two-Bit catches "closer," "core," "signal" and "stronger" among the grumblings. Somehow he detects, assisted by Odisseus' own smoldering glare in his direction, the stink of blame.

"How am I hooked for this? I had a gashouse enough time greasing that bloke back on Sozzor, didn't I? You're fucking rangu you even fangled a block over the conduit feed in the first place!"

"Intruders apprehended in the security atrium," the loudspeaker pipes in.

"Well," carps Nemo, "any suggestions, then?"

Moira, unshackled, unnoticed and standing obliviously in the doorway, yawns and stretches her arms above her head. "I'm sleepy."

As one, the three restrained pirates stare, dumbfounded, at their unrestrained comrade. As one, they all begin yammering different commands, pleas and requests in her direction.

"Moira! Moira! _Moira!_ " Two-Bit contributes, before happening upon the happy idea of clapping to snag her birdbrained attention. "Oi! Moira!" Her eyes are naturally drawn toward the sound and Two-Bit hurries through his pitch. "Listen to me. You gotta do us a kindie now, love. You gotta save our skins before they clink the shit outta us and we bump ourselves choppin' rocks in some Vorseen yard. That ain't something you wanna do the rest of your life, is it?"

Moira rubs impending sleep from her eyes. "That sounds hard."

Two-Bit rewards her with a smile. "There's a good girl. Now," he indicates the sealed bridge with a point, "in that room, if my bell's still ringin', you oughta vizz a big, black dohick what says..." he dangles, entreating Odisseus with an inviting gesture.

The Ortok supplies a ten syllable answer featuring the word "override."

"That's the one," Two-Bit agrees, snapping. "Alls you gotta do, Moira, is go in there and toggle that dohick. That's all. Anybody tries to nix you," Two-Bit snatches up his shotgun and hefts it momentarily, "you nix 'em first. Savvy?"

"I wanna take a nap," Moira confesses petulantly.

"You can snooze your heart out in, say, five minutes. How's that sound?"

"I guess," she relents and begins pacing across the atrium towards the door. She sidesteps the spilling carton of milk and dawdles a moment before the release control panel. After ramming it with her thumb to no result, Moira looks back incredulously to Two-Bit. "It's too locked."

Two-Bit exchanges looks with Nemo and Odisseus. "Nobody's blanked what this part of the plan was, has they?"

Racking a shotgun of the Wreckingball's size and weight with only one and a half available hands is no mean feat, to say nothing of aiming one. After thirty seconds of undignified floundering, four shotguns manage to align themselves towards the sealed doorway. Following a countdown from Two-Bit, they fire in near perfect unison.

The once resilient bridge door is suddenly the recipient of four unleashed ditrogen bolts. Sturdy as military-grade teltriton might be, there's scarcely a sheet of interior metal aboard thick enough to resist that much unified punch. Having gambled as much, Two-Bit is honestly relieved to see the jagged crevice that rifts the center of the door in two.

The opening is just barely large enough for a humanoid to comfortably slide through.

"Big black button?" Moira confirms, smoking passageway burst open before her.

"Can't miss it," Two-Bit confirms.

Odisseus presumably wishes her "good" luck and, with that, Moira ducks her head and steps out of sight.

An anxious moment, filled mostly with the surprised shouts of the bridge crew, elapses before the shooting begins. The unmistakeable clamor of an unseen gunfight – broken up occasionally by the loudspeaker's recurrent reminders about intruders apprehended – is all that passes during Two-Bit, Nemo and Odisseus' uncomfortable time-out in the security atrium. From what little Two-Bit could glean, Moira likely wasn't encountering an awful lot of return fire, as the booming bark of the Wreckingball seems to comprise much of the noise without.

Before long, the actual resistance, a Gantorese look-alike to every other guard onboard, tumbles backwards through the cleft hole in the door, complaining of a shotgun slug to the belly. For lack of any other way to meaningfully participate, the three magnetized pirates open up on him, further complicating his wounds with four or five more of a similar stripe.

This done, silence falls over the proceedings. For a sizable pause, the three pirates are each unwilling to voice any clarifying question or comment, like three moons-fearing husbands waiting impatiently outside the women's restroom.

After an insufferably long moment, Nemo, face still smashed against the wall, breaks the reverie with a characteristically selfish question. "Can anybody reach my milk?"

They only need to endure a few more seconds before, with a harsh, disappointed buzz, the security cordon releases its magnetic hold on the three wrists in thrall. Two-Bit rises from his cumbersome pseudo-sitting position and instinctively flexes the arm in question. He reaches to retrieves his flopped off helmet and finally exchanges apprehensive looks with Nemo, Odisseus and the smoldering ruin of the bridge door.

With Wreckingball at the ready, Two-Bit is the first of the three onto the bridge, fully prepared to accept the responsibility for what may be an overall botched plan. What he finds instead is a veritable blood bath.

Seven dead technicians, of various Inner Sector species, color an otherwise pacified bridge. The entire chamber is utterly devoid of life, save one Moira Quicksilver. She's crumpled on the floor before a large mainframe console and its attendant big, black button, back to snoring softly with mouth open.

Two steps behind, Nemo swigs the dreggy remnants of his joojberry milk and pats the jailbreaker companionably on the shoulder. "Quick thinking, buddy."

"This might work," Two-Bit mutters, disbelieving.

Standing in the splintered doorway, Odisseus looses a bolt from his shotgun down the corridor they came from, barking something about "company."

"Right," Nemo grunts, tossing the empty carton to the floor. He then hustles over toward a wall-mounted control panel to Odisseus' left.

"I think it worked," Two-Bit opines, nodding slowly and half glancing about at the commandeered bridge as evidence.

Nemo clicks a few switches on the door control. Behind Two-Bit, he hears the telltale sound of the security atrium's outer bulkhead clamping and fastening tight. The four escaped inmates find themselves quarantined within and completely cut off from the incoming "company" Odisseus spotted. "There," Nemo reports. "That's done it."

"It worked!" Two-Bit realizes, spinning fully about to break the news to his partners in crime.

For the main command center of an IMIS-sanctioned military starship, Two-Bit finds the bridge of the HIN _Surimiah_ frankly a little underwhelming. It's a claustrophobic, tiny chamber, practically bulging with consoles and mainframes. Two-Bit has difficulty imagining the hellish experience of stuffing seven technicians and one armed guard into a room like this and expecting anything but bumped elbows and stepped-on toes.

At the moment, however, none of these technicians offer much complaint. Strewn across their work stations, they only bleed profusely from the holes Moira's Wreckingball thoughtfully left in their necks and torsos. Out the visor-shaped viewport, Two-Bit sees only the black oblivion of empty interstellar space. Odisseus' provisional wave emitter must have dropped them abruptly out of warp into blank space and still some distance from their destination.

"Times when I wish we'd brought Abraham," Nemo murmurs, half to himself, as he swings into the navigator's chair. Odisseus comes to hover over his shoulder, squinting at the navpanel's bright blue. The Captain pokes and prods the keyboard some, until a read-out, complete with percentages and progress bar, seems to please him. "Okay, according to this, we're only 28.7 zottibles out. If she'd waited," he indicates the slumbering Moira with an elbow, "five or so more hours to get things going, we'd be on Vorse's doorstep, trying to pull this off."

"Which would've crunched things up somewhat," Two-Bit admits.

Odisseus poses a question about "nearby" and "jump."

Nemo nods, after pressing a few more keys. "That's what I'm scanning for now."

"That still leaves the ringer," Two-Bit points out, allowing the silence that follows to provide his proposed topic of discussion; a muffled banging and many hollered commands. Two-Bit jabs a thumb in the direction of the security atrium's thick bulkhead and the _Surimiah's_ former crew behind. "What do we do about them?"

Odisseus makes an appreciative noise, concluding in "good" and "question."

"The plan originally," Two-Bit recalls, "was to comb through the rest of the gantine, pushing all their buttons individual-like."

Absorbed by the navpanel's continued beeping, Nemo doesn't translate Odisseus' next remark. The waggling of the Ortok paw in Moira's general direction, however, indicates his reluctance to proceed in such a plan of action while their most valuable player earned some most valuable rest.

"Right," Two-Bit agrees.

Nemo stands suddenly from his seat. "Oh, that's easy."

He wriggles his way starboard, between Two-Bit, corpses and consoles. After a moment or two of searching, he arrives at his destination; next to Moira, at the manual security override. Here Nemo toggles a few switches, blazes past a few precautionary screens and finally activates some internal ship's procedure.

The warning "DORSAL AIRLOCKS DEPRESSURIZED" flashes clamantly against the screen as Nemo works his way back toward his previous spot before the navpanel. The resultant sounds of terrified screaming from behind the atrium's bulkhead are gradually whittled away as if by a tremendous wind.

Two-Bit and Odisseus both scoot closer to the relevant panel and stare, with mouths agape.

"Did he just...?" Two-Bit ponders.

Odisseus points to the flashing display of the _Surimiah's_ deckplan and yips in confirmation. On the screen, each of the ship's main airlocks, save those holding the detainment column fast read as wide open to empty space.

"Give 'em a minute," Nemo stipulates, plopping back in his chair. "Shouldn't take long."

"That's cold," Two-Bit appreciates.

"Buh-dum _tssh_."

Odisseus scratches the close-cropped fur of his muzzle, murmuring another question about "problem" and "the other." Two-Bit susses his meaning well enough.

Nemo bites, without removing his eyes from the terminal. "Which other?"

"What to do with the eight hundred and ninety six other crazy murderin' sons of bleeders runnin' wild down abouts the detainment column?"

Nemo plants an arm across the back of his chair and turns his head. "Hm. Good question."

Brov is pretty sure it's a meteor. A humble aggroworld on the uncouth border between Midworlds and Outer Ring, the planet Hazro is no stranger to meteor activity. Brov, country bumpkin, quorki-wrangler and dirt farmer extraordinaire, has never had the misfortune to receive a meteor in the provincial hills and pastures where he drives his flock. Judging by the trajectory of this one, now only a point of growing shadow against the aquamarine sky, that's all about to change.

His jborra is not yet two years of age and still unaccustomed to flaming objects falling from the sky. She arches her back, hisses and cowers behind Brov's left leg. For his part, the quorkherd only squints skyward, shifts his weight to his deactivated prod and attempts to predict where, precisely, the thing's likely to fall.

As it nears and nears, however, his previous supposition about it being a meteor is beginning to seem less plausible with each approaching second.

What does hit the ground, minutes later and a quarter of a mottible away, appears to be paradoxically a skyscraper. Its fall cushioned by a convenient patch of bog, the thirty-story meteor-building tilts awkwardly, looking starkly out of place among the pastoral fields all around it.

Brov stands staring for many long minutes, too curious to avert his gaze but too uncertain to approach any closer. The jborra, however, seems to share no such misgivings. Bounding away across the tall grass toward this strangest new addition to its habitat, the striped feline disappears quickly from sight.

As he watches, multifarious beings clad in queer yellow jumpsuits begin stumbling drunkenly from their wreck of a building. A safe distance away, Brov still has no idea precisely how much trouble said obelisk would spell for the quiet farming world of Hazro in the months to come.

Moira's ass hurts. A dull throbbing, on the underside of her right cheek, marks the needle's entry point. It twinges with each sulking step she takes through the scrapbarn, staying a respectful distance behind the client, Two-Bit Switch and his hundred-yard sales pitch. To distract herself, she indulges in a Yellowtooth cigarette, the first since their capture and captivity on Sozzor, and spews out mouthfuls of foul black smoke to match her foul black mood.

"Overall," Two-Bit appraises, "she's in ace condition – externally, especially. Inside, a few damaged bulkheads, little ditrogen scoring, nothing you ain't, um, accustomed to." He spreads his pointer and pinky fingers apart to indicate the ship's various airlocks. "Four sallies on the main body, plus the big mother underneath." He smirks. "Field-tested."

The client, this dumpy Moza junk jockey with the unlikely name of Gasbox, plants a fist to either side of her overalls and cranes her gaze toward the cruiser's underbelly to better examine the ventral airlock.

The HIN _Surimiah_ is the sorest of thumbs in the second stall of Gasbox's scrapbarn. A sleek, glossy Terro Fleet Systems vessel perhaps three years off the factory floor, its environs are dusty, decrepit dilapidation decades old and more. The ship squats on its stubby landing legs and shines in the rank green light, exuding a palpable monetary worth that dwarfs the entire scrapbarn and its contents ten or twenty times over.

The trick, as far as Moira's limited powers of salesmanship can deduce, appears to be convincing their rube of a buyer of this fact. Gasbox, to her credit, seems to be resisting this tactic with all her might.

"She give you any trouble?" Moira hears Nemo ask, pacing ten paces behind her.

"Near abouts," answers Abraham, after withdrawing that ostentatious pipe from his mouth. "Before ye showed, she was ten feet this side of slapping a 'for sale' sign up on yer old heap."

"How much do you think I could get for her?" Nemo suddenly proposes.

"Had ye asked me last week, just shy of five hundred thou."

"That's a good point," Nemo comments, before raising his voice in an obvious question forward. "Moira, you checked the postings yet?"

"Go fuck your father."

He's momentarily speechless. "Fair enough."

Moira'd come to her senses four nights previously in a bridge full of corpses, with no pants, a smarting sore on her ass and precisely zero short term memory of how she'd ended up there. Her last salient recollection had been collapsing unconscious in Lockdown Control. The only thing concrete following that was the revolting taste of eggroll in her mouth.

She'd subsequently been able to glean, from the scandalous smiles of her comrades – particularly Two-Bit and especially Nemo – that the narcotic plozine she'd suffered under during the _Surimiah's_ commandeering had cost her a significant amount of face. She reasoned the best remedy to this loss of face ought to be sour silence for them all generally and potential violence on their persons individually.

After humiliation, incarceration, hospitalization, anesthetization, liberation, further humiliation and, most recently, indigestion on behalf of an expired eggroll, Moira's simply glad to be returned to her own clothing, her own cigarettes and her own personal effects.

Two weeks abroad on this circuitous scheme were enough to remind her how dearly she missed Righty and Lefty.

"Aw, now there's a pretty spaceship," Nemo coos, stopping in his tracks on their encircling, Two-Bit-led tour of the _Surimiah_ and her manifold virtues.

At first, Moira assumes he's voicing some harebrained corroboration to strengthen Two-Bit's pitch. Glancing behind, she notices his adoration pointed exactly away from the _Surimiah_ and into the adjoining third stall.

An eye less honed than Moira's would never have recognized her. _The Unconstant Lover's_ dented nose is only partially visible through the doorway's narrow gap. Whereas the _Surimiah_ stands in stark contrast to these mountains of musty machinery, the _Lover_ chameleons cunningly into these ignominious surroundings, part and parcel of the crew's decision to stash her here.

Upon spotting her, Moira instinctively recognizes her home and starship. She's forced to inwardly admit that jackboots, Yellowtooth cigarettes and 665 Lawman revolvers weren't the only things she had missed.

Odisseus will eat all the anchovies forever. Odisseus would indeed like to extend this blanket offer to all citizens of the known galaxy: should any of them no longer desire their anchovies, he volunteers to eat all of those anchovies, completely free of charge.

He doesn't care how greasy, how slimy or how synthetic. To the thinking of a piscivore so long estranged from his homeworld, anchovies, paws down, are the undisputed champion among pizza toppings. Also to his admittedly-biased thinking, nobody, in all of Bad Space, could boast better anchovies than Nanosecond Pizza.

A distant third to the Consortium's unchallenged supremacy over alcohol and the ravenous, galaxywide conquest of Pickle Planet, Nanosecond Pizza had nonetheless cornered a very specific but universal fast-food market; the post-warp munchies.

Nanosecond Pizza was founded on the principle that, following a lengthy faster-than-light zip across the galaxy, something hot, something unhealthy and something not cooked by their crewmates was at the top of every space-faring individual's mind. Installed at thousands of Warpgate Service Junctions throughout the galaxy, Nanosecond Pizza Parlors offered the perfect solution in the form of a steaming hot pizza pie ready the very instant one warped into system.

The crew of _The Unconstant Lover_ were far from immune to this phenomenon. While they'd only hopped up from planet rather than warped in from some distant system, Qel Qatar's Warpgate Service Junction possessed just the Parlor to satisfy their mighty, emancipated hunger.

Nemo, seated characteristically at the corner of Moira and Odisseus, devours a grimy slice of the stuff with enough fervor to perhaps even rival the Ortok's own. "Current assets?" he proposes between greedy, anchovy-studded bites.

Two-Bit Switch's concentration is unswervingly planted on the Attaché before him and its new attachment. Even Odisseus can't recognize it – some manner of feedback reader so rusty and so ancient that it must have originated on the shop floor of Gasbox's scrapbarn. "Gantine's fund," Two-Bit stipulates around the sodden breadstick dangling from his mouth, "oughta come to little less than a quarter mil."

"Current bounty?"

Moira peels a pair of anchovies off her slice and plops them onto Odisseus' corner of the box. "Far as I can tell, zilch. Nothing offered by anyone, anywhere."

"Current state of the ship?"

Odisseus immediately scoops up Moira's castoff toppings and munches them happily. "Surprisingly, one piece." The attachment jutting from the top of Two-Bit's Attaché makes a whirring sound. "No major repairs–"

"IT IS AMAZING ONE PART," a harsh, humorless robotic voice suddenly drones from the device's tinny speakers. Unanimously taken aback, the rest of the crew, even the Glothi cashier at the Parlor's counter, stare bemusedly at the Attaché and its owner. "ABSCENCE OF THE MAIN REPAIRS." Two-Bit smiles sheepishly into the resulting stunned silence.

Moira is calm, parental condescension. "Two-Bit."

"Yes, Moira?"

She points. "What the fuck is that?"

Two-Bit props several fingers beneath the Attache's underbelly, to better display its latest addition to his bewildered crewmates. "It's a droidvox, isn't it?"

Frozen with fresh slice of pizza dripping inches from his open mouth, Nemo scowls. "Okay. Why?"

"To, eh," Two-Bit's eyes flick unconsciously to Odisseus, "better facilitate, you know, understanding." When this explanation garners no visible response from anyone assembled, he simplifies somewhat. "So I can understand him."

"I'm speechless," Odisseus admits.

"I AM WITHOUT SPEECH," the droidvox, after contemplation, translates.

"Did this seem like a good idea at the time?" Moira theorizes, almost fascinated.

Two-Bit fiddles, somewhat bashfully, with the attachment. "Obviously, there's still some crunches to be ironed out," he confesses, immediately busying himself with the potentially impossible task of ironing out said problems. Everyone else, meanwhile, in some combination of offended, amused and baffled, returns to their quickly cooling meal.

Even when thousands of zottibles away, the crew of _The Unconstant Lover_ naturalistically fall into the same seating arrangement they'd silently allocated two years ago on that first visit to The Bloody Afterburn. Their customary corner booth is substituted with the wobbly table nearest the holovision set and four foamy Gitterswitch Gins are replaced by a single shared anchovy-and-quorki-cheese Planet Pan.

Captain Nemo slurps his Bubble Blue and challenges the reflected viridian orb of Qel Qatar to a staring contest out the nearest viewport. Moira Quicksilver picks pettily at the surface of her pizza, forfeiting the finest share of the toppings and suctioning residual cheese off the tips of her fingers. Two-Bit Switch now ignores the stack of breadsticks beside him, save the one still drooping from his mouth, in favor of perfecting his glitchy new toy.

Odisseus, on the other hand, savages slice after slice, stacking the surrendered anchovies sky high on each piece. All the while, he keeps a weather eye to the haywire droidvox and its murmuring palpitations.

Around the jabberhead's right wrist, the Ortok notes the clamped and continued presence of his multe bracelet. The rest of the crew had their deactivated and removed shortly after jumping warp to Hazro, while Two-Bit Switch, somewhat inscrutably, elected to keep wearing his. He cited this as some manner of "fashion statement," something the perennially naked Ortok would know nothing about, but Odisseus wondered if there wasn't a more sentimental reason behind his decision, a souvenir to commemorate the Surimiah Slip.

"So." Nemo returns his gaze suddenly from the window. "With the exception of that spooky thing," he prefaces with an open-palmed gesture toward Two-Bit's Attaché, "we should be all jig, right? Nobody wants us dead, we owe nobody money or jobs and shit is good?"

Moira shrugs her left shoulder. "By all appearances."

Miraculously, no one voices a brand new litany of complications to drag them back into public infamy. Honestly a little aghast at the realization how free and clear they were, Odisseus' saltbrother makes a very poor show of hiding his disappointment. Indeed, he merely paws up the remote control in his idle hand, grunts a "Huh" followed closely by an apathetic "Okay" and unmutes the holovision set.

Nine months ago, _The Unconstant Lover_ and her crew fell within the power and protection of Boss Ott, Galactic Menace. Seven months ago, word of Boss Ott's death reached the insidious ears of Huong Xo and all the tenuous security afforded by his blessing ran completely aground. Shadowed cabal of Yheum crime lords and silent puller of puppet strings galaxywide, Xo saw Ott's empire sundered by infighting, his holdings dispersed, his campaign on Baz become a bad joke and, for themselves, a golden opportunity.

Tendrils of the Outer Ring's most influential syndicate crept into nearly every uncivilized corner of Bad Space. Rest for the wicked, then, specifically those wicked enough to earn top billing on Xo's proverbial "shit list," began proving damnably elusive.

The perpetual parade of amateur and professional bounty hunters, all attempting to fill the Noxix-shaped hole in the market, inspired something very insensible in the beleaguered Captain. Hiding out, by Nemo's admittedly backwards logic, would never be enough. Sending bounty hunters packing back to Xo with sore asses and holes in their heads would only further forestall the inevitable. The only way to ensure that no one collected their two point five million-credit bounty, ironically, was to collect it themselves.

"We gotta get caught," is how Nemo'd first phrased it, standing second in the express lane of a Galaxmart on Dragnoor four months ago. At the time, it hadn't eluded Nemo's saltbrother that, while he'd done Moira and Odisseus the courtesy of introducing the idea in their presence, Two-Bit, fast assuming the role of de facto mastermind, was the true party to sell. Assuming he could spark Two-Bit's felonious interest, the marriage of Nemo's impracticable plan with the jabberhead's practiced planning would be the only recipe, everyone was painfully aware, that could spell success for such a topsy-turvy venture.

Luckily for everyone involved, Two-Bit Switch wasn't overly difficult to motivate.

The authorities – a crack response squad of IMIS' finest, led by a certain Jhironese bounty hunter – happened upon the nefarious Captain Nemo in a cheap hotel room on Sozzor. Captured along with his three accomplices, the known outlaw was awaiting them patiently, conveniently unarmed and more than willing to cooperate. After their arrest and capture, they were hastily detained aboard the nearest Mercy-class hauler, the fateful HIN _Surimiah_.

One jailbreak later, the pirates had earned themselves a few well-deserved weeks off the grid. It was Two-Bit's prediction that Xo would take their sweet time in realizing the _Surimiah_ went missing en route, sifting through Hazro and Qel Qatar and any other remaining leads and coming up lonktonk eggs as to their whereabouts.

By then, Two-Bit predicted, the _Lover's_ crew, their bounties erased, would hopefully be halfway to Yarba or some other moons-awful backwoods that would kill bounty hunters, outright, from sheer boredom.

The pixelated melody of a familiar ringtone interrupts the conversation's lull. Popping the rest of the crust into his mouth with a snap of his jaws, Odisseus reaches down, retrieves his ringing comm from its pouch on his tool belt and answers. "Yeah?" he barks around the crust, the droidvox mewing distortedly in response.

"Be the Cap'n there?" Abraham's husky voice questions through the static. "He ain't answerin' his comm."

Without removing his eyes from the infomercial blaring above Odisseus' head, Nemo unloops his own communicator from his belt and spares its blinking red light the merest of glances. "I suppose I'm not."

"Might I trouble ye for a heading, Cap'n?" Odisseus' comm presses.

A listless sigh blows through Nemo's lips. "Hadn't given it much thought."

Moira, as though cued by her Captain's lassitude, gestures with her stub of a pizza slice. "I can't imagine staying here would be the wisest course of action."

"Soon as word gets out the _Surimiah_ never reached her destination," Odisseus poses, "we'd best be somewhere dark and deep."

"SOON IN PROPORTION TO WORD LEAVES SURIMIAH NEVER IT REACHED ITS DESIGNATION WE THE BETTER WOULD BE SOMEWHERE DARK AND IT IS DEEP."

The silence that follows is pure and deafening, heightened by the sound of the blazing HV overhead.

"Who was _that_?" Abraham, likewise perplexed, demands.

Odisseus plants his forehead in his paw so deeply it might sprout flowers. "Two-Bit."

"A PAIR OF TWEEZERS."

"That don't sound like Two-Bit," Abraham contends.

"It also doesn't _sound_ like a pair of tweezers," Moira points out.

"Wait." Abraham pauses, as though he's somewhat embarrassed or terrified by what he's about to ask. "Ye ain't...replaced Two-Bit with some manner a' 'scary death robot,' have ye?"

His attention returned to the holovision, Nemo shrugs. "Thinking about it."

"You were jabbing?" Two-Bit reminds, desperate to further the discussion. "The heading?"

"How's about we make contact with Tarson?" Abraham suggests. "Throw him a buzz, say we'd like to meet, see if he's any ideas as to where?"

Nemo hefts his Bubble Blue unenthusiastically. "I'll drink to that."

"Cheers," Abraham concurs and the comm clicks dead.

After stashing the device, Odisseus proceeds to peel the closest slice of pizza free from the saturated box with a wet siphoning sound. "No particular hideout in mind?"

"ABSCENCE OF THE SPECIFIC SHELTER IN REASON."

Nemo makes an exaggerated frown and a subtle shake of the head.

"You were talking about a place," Moira attempts to goad. "That last bar on the brink."

A cryptic expression, one Odisseus can't quite recognize, crosses Nemo's indolent features for a split second. "No," he decides, "that's for when the time comes."

Before Odisseus can question his meaning, Two-Bit yanks the conversation in a different direction entirely. "You ain't having a change of berry as regards goin' to lavender in the first place, is you?"

Nemo waves the remote about as a means to explicate. "Ostensibly, the plan, the original plan, was to leave Xo in the dust with the whole, uh, _Surimiah_...business."

"The Surimiah Slip," Two-Bit corrects in his capacity as official caper namer.

"And then," Nemo swipes the remote right to indicate the metaphorical blankness before them, "fuck off until such time as the galaxy is ready for us again."

"And you've gone sour on that?" Odisseus assumes, the droidvox fitfully whirring in its fervent attempts to translate.

Nemo's laxness remains persistent, however. "Nah. I don't know."

"AND DISPATCH BY ACID ON YOU," the droidvox finally catches up.

For the third time since they'd all sat down to enjoy their pizza pie, Two-Bit Switch finds himself the center of everyone's confounded ire.

"I'm having some stook with the infomatrix," he offers meekly by way of explanation.

"Well, no," Odisseus confutes, "the trouble's in your intake, not your output. You gotta–" He stops himself, mid-reach for the Attaché, and has a minor revelation. "Why am I helping you?" As the droidvox sibilates in frustration at all the new words to translate, Odisseus returns huffily to his beloved anchovies. "You're doing fine."

"WILL GUSH OUT IN NO WAY ANXIETY IN YOUR PRODUCT NOT YOUR EXIT. YOU OBTAINED. WHERE AM I THAT AID. YOU MAKE EXCELLE–"

Mercifully, Two-Bit Switch disconnects the droidvox from its power source to investigate its underside and it falls blissfully quiet.

Having now abandoned a single holovision channel in favor of racing, at breakneck speed, through all of them, Nemo murmurs "Thank the moons" at the untimely death of the droidvox.

"I'm only trying to–" Two-Bit objects most strenuously.

Moira taps Nemo's bicep with her wrist, her gaze also fixed on the holovision. "Go back."

Odisseus twists about in his chair with enough time to catch Nemo click two channels in reverse and come to rest upon the frequency Moira must've indicated. The dinky, discount holovision, dangling off the ceiling by a set of precarious metal struts, projects outward what appears to be newsplash coverage. The shiny modernized logo spiking each of the hologram's four corners brashly attributes the footage to the galaxy's least trusted name in news; GAC – Galactic Airwaves Corporate.

Tickers, sidebars and real-time responses from the feeds corrupt and clutter the edges of the hologram but, through the tangle of advertisements and analytics, Odisseus discerns what looks like a press conference. A podium is erected on the shapely promenading steps of some sheer corporate structure and emblazoned with the chic emblem of the Valladian Shipping Line. A gaggle of reporters with broadcasting equipment huddle around excitedly.

Definitely Inner Sector, Odisseus presumes, to judge by the garb of both the press and the party holding the conference. His supposition is confirmed by the scrawling ticker which reads "INTRAGALAXY COMMERCE: CARGO MEGACORP CAPTURES IMPERIUM CONTRACT."

Odisseus grunts in recognition. It was impossible to transit anywhere in Bad Space these past five months without hearing rumbling of this news. For the past four decades, the Endless Imperium swore off the Outer Ring and all its resources, calling the majority of the galaxy a useless, unsustainable frontier, recalcitrant to colonization. Both sides of the fence – the entitled, sanctimonious Inner Sectors and the abandoned, anarchic Bad Space – were content with this arrangement.

Now, rumor was, the Imperium was toying with reversing their previous policy.

Certainly, Baz, Nos Mantri and Pequod stood as ironshod examples of the Imperium's willingness to intervene, always on behalf of resources, whenever they saw fit. Evidently, Bad Space was becoming too tempting a target, its riches too plump for the taking, to be left to its own, dissolute devices. For the first time in forty years, the Endless Imperium were making motions about an official return to rulership over the lawless regions of the galaxy.

Some megacorp, one of the massive shipping companies that ferried goods from Outer Ring to Inner Sectors, would be responsible for helping them make that transition. Sponsorship was supposedly the game, but it was no secret that soon, more than simply goods would be flowing through that company's channels. Colonists, warships, civilization; they were all en route to Bad Space, should this contract be successfully signed.

By the looks of things, Valladian Shipping, its logo glimmering proudly in IntraGalaxy Commerce's artificial sunlight, looked about to become the happiest megacorp in the galaxy.

The spokesman, a Karracki mouthpiece attired in an officious uniform, appears to be within the closing statements of whatever announcement he'd assembled all the news coverage for. His pair of humanoid retainers, the male an Imperium official of some capacity and the female evidently some Trijan military officer, stand stone-faced behind him as he dispenses with pleasantries befitting some grand unveiling.

"–extends our sincerest condolences to Zibbian Cargo-Traffic, Mercury Mercantile and the Interstellar Teamsters Union. Valladian Shipping ensures that, as we approach the new century, the official interests of the Endless Imperium will inhabit our highest priorities and attentions." His leonine features wax rhetorical. "Together, with this bold new union, Valladian Shipping will be the first to aid the righteous old order of our glorious Imperium."

On cue, a clamoring chorus of questions, accompanied by the shooting of hands into the air, follows directly on the heels of the spokesman's last statement. "Secretary Jasso! Secretary Jasso!" The Valladian rep instinctively extends a nod toward a humanoid newshound to his left.

"Ulic Traffo. _Anglia Daily._ " He hoists high one end of his palm holocorder toward the podium and speaks his question into the other. "How far shall the Shipping Line extend under these new provisions?"

"The Imperium," Jasso begins, "has expressed interest in distributing its wares to all corners of the Outer Ring but, for the time being, we're limiting our reach as far as Kiesha and the Anoit Cluster. At least for a provisional period." He seems to peruse the thicket of upraised recording equipment for a moment. "Next question."

The reprise of shouted questions is hastily interrupted when the Karracki press secretary selects the next holocorder, grasped in a fleshy pink hand.

"Wezz. _Space Times_."

As though in realization of a poisonous agwaifapede in their midst, the huddle of reporters literally draw back away from the speaker. An incompatible-looking Helker, with more piercings than clothing, is unveiled amongst them.

While the reporter himself was unrecognizable to Odisseus, the moronically-named _Space Times_ held a fearsome reputation in the Ring as the only interstellar feedzine clueless enough to run investigative journalism _inside_ actual Bad Space itself. The _Times_ ran puff pieces about pirates, case studies on kingpins and exposés about the nitty-gritty of the criminal life.

Across Outer Ring and Inner Sector, the feedzine was universally regarded as a trashy tabloid run by a pack of amoral, degenerate muckrakers. Perhaps, however, because they were one of the only galaxywide periodicals that dared attempt to even circulate across the black markets of Bad Space, everyone Odisseus knew harbored a certain degree of misplaced pride for the interfering little bastards. Even the major syndicates – Xo, the Scar, the late Boss Ott – historically gave them a wide berth, figuring, as the rest of the Ring did, that any press was good press.

Jasso's jaw tightens.

"Has the issue of, you know, _piracy_ not been discussed?" The Helker eyesore challenges. "How does Valladia intend to combat Bad Space's rampant criminality?"

Adjusting his position, Press Secretary Pazer Jasso of Valladian Shipping clears his throat.

"If I may speak frankly, _Wezz_ ," he drops the name like a turd, "in light of this new alliance, the rampant criminality of your 'Bad Space' will soon be a thing of the past." He makes several broad, sweeping gestures. "Our expansive network is bolstered by funding and sponsorship from the galaxy's greatest military power. Each of our ten ports is exhaustively patrolled by our own dedicated privateer corps, led by Commodore Charybdis and her personal squadron." The Trijan woman to Jasso's left bows her head slightly. "The Valladian Shipping Line, therefore, has been virtually immune to individual attacks from brigands for nearly a century. With the endorsement of the Endless Imperium, that immunity shall only strengthen."

He puffs himself still higher, preparing to deliver the cherished sound-bite. "As of today, piracy is officially pointless."

Back at Nanosecond Pizza, everyone at the table tries their damnedest not to look at their Captain.

"Valladian Shipping," Jasso continues, making eye contact with the Helker, "urges your brother professionals of the galaxy into another line of work, Wezz." The reporters tittle. Jasso inflates himself a little further and selects a hand across the crowd. "Next question."

GAC doesn't disappoint; reaction coverage fills the tiny HV screen. All six of the Helker's parallel ears flatten more horizontal than the horizon and an expression of bemused irritation is chiseled on his feline features.

His Attaché ignored, Two-Bit is the first to assuage the damage. "Buhoxshit."

Moira is the first to meet him. "Is that what you think?"

"It is. This is still Bad fucking Space, isn't it? Back there," he points absently toward the screen behind him, "in the Inner, Valladia can preen and pose all they like but out here, in the Ring, no goodie contract or no chump change privy is gonna make no difference."

"Chump change?" Moira disparages. "You never heard of Charybdis?"

"Ain't ringin' no bells."

Moira counts on fingers. "Late of the Radiant Armada. Captain of _The Dishonorable Discharge_. Meanest cunt swinging a whip-saber this side of the Breach." She aims her unused pointer finger directly at his chest. "Trust me – Trijans are not to be fucked with in matters of heredity or of navy."

"She's one ship," Two-Bit blusters.

"Three ships, actually, at the head of a whole privateer fleet and name me one pirate in the game," she makes an allowing gesture, "excluding us, with a harder rep."

Two-Bit leans back and crosses his arms, the universal gesture for too cool to care. "Gundeck's been climbing the Consortium's charts, what I ord." He undercuts this aspect by leaning forward suddenly, to hammer his point home. "Word 'round the campfire is, with that Rithese terrorist bloke iced, Consortium's been bleeming for the naming of the next Menace."

Moira leans backwards herself, smearing grease off her lips with a crumpled napkin. "Never happen," she decries calmly. "No pirate, Gertie or Charybdis or us, is ever gonna make the Menace. We don't pose a galactic threat." She tosses the napkin back to the table. "Not on our own."

Two-Bit only scoffs and Moira's judgment call falls on three sets of individually deaf ears. Two-Bit disagrees most immediately and he's the most vociferous about it. Odisseus stays neutral, chomping anchovies and cheese and keeping a weather eye on his saltbrother.

Nemo hasn't been listening.

His eyeline never strays from the holovision set, which now flaunts as holy writ Jasso's quote "PIRACY IS POINTLESS" across tickers and tabs. Nemo is motionless, save for the subtlest scuffing of his finger against the remote's volume button. His face wears an expression somewhere between the limitless extremes of smile and scowl. His posture suggests outward laxity and inward tension, his legs simultaneously sprawled and braced, as though searching an unfamiliar foe for a weakness, a chink in the armor.

For the first time in their twenty-two year association, Odisseus finds himself unable to read the specific mood or disposition in his saltbrother. Some monumental change stirs within him, of this the Ortok has no doubt, but its stew of contradictions renders it quite indecipherable. Moira and Two-Bit are plumb oblivious to the press conference's apparent effect on their Captain and Odisseus is left pondering to himself if perhaps prison had indeed shaken something loose in his saltbrother's mind.

For his own part, Nemo simply turns up the volume.

First Interlude

"Is there a minibar and where?"

"Yes and there."

"Minibar, minibar, minibar. I am a minibarist."

"Help yourself. Yeah."

"All I could think about on the way over. The question is, do they have the little, yes, yes, they have the little chewy bastards. The chewy bastards are my favorite."

"Hey, hooray."

"You don't know what these fuckers actually are, do you? The chewy bastards? I can't, before you ask, read the label. Don't speak Chookese or the fuck knows what."

"I have not had one, matter of fact."

"Wanna?"

"This bastard _is_ chewy."

"Toldja. That's how they should be marketed, really. Chewy Bastards. Not this squiggly shit."

"'Chewy Bastards: Chew on this.'"

"Hey, there you go. What're you, a writer?"

"Somebody thought so."

"Inventory, then. Chewy Bastards, check. Fuck-off thing of spicy nuts, check. Some kinda pretentious-ass chocolate, check."

"You understand this's gonna take, what, an hour? Maximum?"

"The truest test, of course, of any minibar, is the alcohol. You're fucking me in the armpit."

"Not to my knowledge."

"Literally, the only thing alcoholic in here is champagne. Literally."

"Literally?"

"Come look, then, you snide motherfucker."

"You're a primary source. I'm compelled to believe you."

"Moons almighty, though, there is a powerful supply of identical fucking bottles of champagne to be had in this minibar. Could I tempt you?"

"Why not. To Jotor with ethics in journalism."

"Speaking of."

"That..."

"Is money. Yeah."

"That is money. That is so much money."

"All my pocket could carry, I'm afraid. You want your drink, you're gonna need to use your legs."

"There is such a large pile of money on the floor."

"You're allowed to pick it up. It's for you."

"In what way isn't that a bribe?"

"In no way. That is a bribe."

"Then I guess the floor is where it lives now. What I write's gonna be what I write."

"And ethics in journalism?"

"Champagne is one thing. Hush money is another thing."

"Hush money. Listen to you."

"I'm very flattered, but I think I'm gonna for sure decline."

"I did notice you're unarmed, is my only thing."

"Ah. Lemme explain something, then, if this's the direction in which we're gonna head. The most common misconception people have when they take a seat opposite me is that I'm going to slander them. It's understandable, maybe, I did write for _Space Times_ of all places but, believe you me, your pile of money is not the first I've seen. It's the most abrupt and possibly also just, the most, but it certainly isn't the first."

"Arrive at the point."

"You're going to slander yourself. Is the point I'm arriving at. As in, if anyone's going to slander you, it'll be you. I write what you say. Precious little else. I have questions, prepared, with the intent to direct the conversation somewhat but, chances are, if you're dissatisfied with what I write, you're actually dissatisfied with what you said."

"You write whatever I say."

"Within reason."

"You're all a bunch of fartmouthed cunts I'd rather kill than shake hands with."

"That sorta thing, yeah."

"Quuilar Noxix was overrated. Moira sleeps with a night light."

"Does she?"

"Hell, Ikoril wasn't me."

"Hold up a minute. It wasn't you? Ikoril Federate Station?"

"Ikoril Federate Station was them. Not us."

"What you just said? That type of thing is precisely the type of thing that I would write."

"Would you? I don't see no pencil or pad."

"Where's your peg leg and eyepatch? You see that?"

"That? What's that?"

"That. There. In the corner. Against the window."

"Oh, ho, ho. That's jig."

"Records everything we say from wherever we are in the room."

"How many are there?"

"Half a dozen. Scattered throughout."

"Bloom me out. You cased the joint."

"Wanted to give total freedom of movement without missing a word. Come prepared, my editor would say."

"They've been running this entire time?"

"For approximately four minutes, looks like."

"What an auspicious start."

"Most of this probably won't make the cut, to be fair. Except for the fartmouth, Moira, Ikoril stuff. That'll definitely all go in."

"Well, now that you've got me good and liquored me up, where would you wanna start?"

"I'm thinking a fact check. I'm thinking I run some data by you, data I've personally collated about you, and you stop me when I say something inaccurate. Sound reasonable?"

"Reasonable enough. Shoot."

"No confirmed date of birth, no confirmed record of birth, no indication of an Imperial citizenship. Digitwork itself is bloomedly scarce, across the board. As I'm sure you're aware. What I could exhume were arrest records. First one, logged approximately sixteen years ago, has a genetically nine-year-old Morel, Nehel, along with two accomplices apprehended for attempted burglary of, what, a nudie magazine? Nine plus sixteen equals twenty-five, which seems consistent with your appearance. Young, but not the youngest ever. Obwala's got you by a good decade and change."

"Little bleeder."

"Following that first blip, another pops up every coupla months. Carjacking, vandalism, petty larceny, vandalism, vandalism, even an arson count or two. All within a five year span, all in Gallow's Worldshine District. Would Gallow, then, be a safe extrapolation for homeworld?"

"More or less."

"More or less? Anything you wanna add there? No? Then, from there, you drop off the grid somewhat. Word 'round the campfire is, you were a mercenary jockey for a spell, started flying starfighters for a living. Didn't take much latteral detection to correlate the Raptors new hire, this callsign Osprey, to your sudden departure from Gallow. Couldn't get a bead on any of your old quadron mates for an interview, of course, but were I a gambler, I'd wager there ain't too many left alive, are there?"

"You tell me."

"Here's the interesting part. Three years ago, a remix freighter, about 90% Briza, 10% who knows, is unexpectedly sold at the Mannimar Scrapyards and your Condor, of all things, is suddenly up for sale there."

"You found Hook, huh?"

"A few months pass, you're spotted on Vollock, spend some jailtime of Vhase and, after you nearly bushwhack yourself on No'tiukki, _The Unconstant Lover_ takes to the skies for the first time. Fast forward three years, three years of gunrunning, piracy, brigandage, prison breaks and, of course, enthusiastic corruption of the galactic good, and, you know, here we are. Well? Anything ring false in there?"

"Not really."

"Nothing you wanna shed any further light on? No profane comments?"

"Nah, I'm pretty jig with the galaxy believing all that's true."

"Cryptic."

"Thanks."

"Here's maybe a better question. Where would you prefer to start?"

"Piracy is pointless."

"Uh huh. You're saying the rumor's true?"

"There's a rumor? About _me?_ "

"The rumors about Eyer, I mean. That this, all this, even occurred in the first place because of what he said? Because of one bad sound bite?"

"Yup."

"It's no more complicated than that?"

"Nope."

"I absolutely refuse to believe that everything, everyone's cooperation, all this chaos and bloodshed, arguably the single most pivotal event in the history of Bad Space, could possibly have nothing more at its roots than 'piracy is pointless.'"

"Who's telling this story?"

"Fair enough."

Chapter 4

Moira knuckles open the helm door's access button, this visit a flimsy pretense to harass him as much as anything, and instead finds him asleep. Their destination plainly visible through the viewport, Nemo is bodily, encompassingly asleep. The traffic lights of the customs checkpoint paint him and the helm's back wall warning red in variant splashes. His hands droop flaccidly from the armrests, his bare feet are fully splayed and his head is lolled backwards over the top of the helmsman's seat. He snores the tranquil snore of the utterly irresponsible – entirely oblivious to the forces of law, order and immigration lurking only two spaceships further up the queue.

Moira opens her mouth to protest, to shout him from his slumber, when she's promptly shushed by a disembodied voice to her immediate port. She flicks her eyes aside, mouth still dumbly open, to catch sight of a bloated, loathsome shape punishing the communicator's seat beneath its cumbersome bulk. It removes a calabash pipe to press a fat finger to its fleshy beak. "Poor tyke be all tuckered out," it whispers, almost apologetically.

"From what?" she whispers back, despite herself. "Sitting on his ass since Qel Qatar?"

Abraham shrugs warty shoulders. "Evidently."

An idle red light, blinking on the off-beat to the crimson brake light that douses the helm every ten seconds, snags Moira's attention. She points a finger in realization toward its source: the "missed call" indicator light on the comm dangling off Nemo's belt. "That would be why he's not answering," she appreciates.

"Ye need something, missy?"

Moira imperceptibly shakes her head, keeping her answer in hushed tones. "Mostly came up to hear whatever ridiculous alias he was gonna use to get past customs." She questions out of politeness more than honest curiosity. "You?"

The Grimalti wheels the chair partially about, as though in dramatic reveal of whatever machinations he hunkered over at the communicator's station. "Oh," he comments casually, "ponderin' which ridiculous alias be best to get us past customs." One member of the _Lover's_ modest library of scramble codifiers is plugged into the dashboard before Abraham, via various unofficial-looking cables and connectors. At a glance, Moira's not certain which one he'd chosen. "Been a comet's age since we used _The Finder's Keeper_. Figger what's good against Snakeeyes oughta be good against the most bribable way station in the galaxy."

"Good thought," Moira concurs with an impassive nod.

Gallow, the lonely, wanton moon of Criia, dominates the helm's viewport. The _Lover_ and all inbound traffic faces the moon's outer and currently darkened half, known as Dockside in local parlance, as soon as they drop warp in the system. From here, Gallow resembles nothing so much as a black hole punched clean through the blue-and-pink planet it orbits.

Remote green lights on the nearest side indicate the continent-sized starship lot. Here was where all Gallow's trampers and tourists parked their millions of craft. From here departed the hyperspeed drifttram that would take them straight through the moon's cold core and into Worldshine, Gallow's signature sordid side.

Before any of that, of course, before earning the right to land on Gallow itself, one had to pass through customs. Wicked as it may be, Gallow still orbits Criia, and Criia still considers itself a member world of the Endless Imperium.

In a most singular and telling display of Imperium red-tapery, each day's arriving traffic, thousands upon thousands of eager spaceships, was fluted down into one prodigious, dottibles-long queue of tedium and dismay. Spacer lore abounded with exaggerated tales of teamsters going postal after whole fruitless days wasted in the customs queue.

On the whole, though, they were mostly weekend gamblers, hungry merchants, impatient deliverymen and refugee families from the Imperium's war in the Haliquant Quadrant. With the help of Abraham's scramble codifier, " _The Finder's Keeper_ " ought to blend seamlessly in amongst them.

"Ever been?" Abraham offers, noting the direction of her gaze.

"Years ago. On business."

Bounty hunting had brought Moira Quicksilver into Gallow's seedy bosom on two previous occasions, both times on the trail of two separate and distinct bounty-heads. The first, a vainglorious bankrobber, she apprehended by her third morning there. The second, however, a deserter from a major syndicate, she'd frittered weeks away on ultimately losing his scent. The experience had taught her several valuable lessons, chief among them that the squalorous slums beneath Gallow's Underglow district weren't to be treaded needlessly or flippantly.

To the aristocracy of the Inner Sectors, though, to those who don't dare delve any deeper than Worldshine's glitzy veneer, Gallow is nothing more than an urban playground. A garish, gambling haven of bright marquees, burlesque shows and palatial blocks-wide casinos, Gallow shames all the dicing dens and chance houses of the greater galaxy with its opulence. Indeed, the moon's very lunar cycle accommodates this wastrel lifestyle. The sixteen-month "day" is divided into two equal but opposite seasons – night season's eight-month drunken bender and day season's eight-month bleary hangover.

_The Unconstant Lover's_ forthcoming sojourn on Gallow was simultaneously wildly off-agenda and not devoid of a certain degree of fugitive's sense. A confusingly good idea from the Captain, Nemo's notion seemed to be that, as soon as Huong Xo sussed out that the _Surimiah's_ subsequent scuttling was no mere coincidence, they'd immediately begin plumbing the depths of the Offchart Territories in search of the absconding pirates.

Backwards logic, then, seemed to suggest they hole up as far from Xo's assumed hunting ground as physically possible. It was also Nemo who suggested Gallow – corrupt "as fuck," his childhood home, a solid fixture in the Inner Sector's inner sanctum. None of the _Lover's_ crew could muster an appropriate objection.

"In which season?"

"Night," Moira supplies. "Both times."

"Well," Abraham finishes his fiddling and adjusts his posture to better face her, "ye be in for a shock, then. Oughta be day season when we touch down. Swear to the moons, they be two different cities, all depending on where the sun's at."

"Originally, you're all from there, right? All three of you?"

"No, actually." His crooked eye subconsciously glances past the viewport. "We were each of us raised there, but in truth, ain't a one of us were born there."

Moira scowls. "I thought..." The end of the sentence catches quietly in her throat. "No," she realizes, "I guess I just assumed."

Specific references to their pasts were few and far between. Moira could recall several instances in which Nemo, Odisseus and Abraham each evoked their individual youths misspent among Gallow's gutters and alleyways. Moira had taken these to mean that Gallow served as their shared home satellite. Sketchy as the details were, she supposes it was possible she'd misconstrued their meaning somewhat.

As a Grimalti, Abraham conceivably would have been birthed on stormy Grimalt, but this meant that if the Captain and his Ortoki saltbrother weren't native to Gallow, they were native to somewhere else. She had never heard of any planet called Ortok.

As one, the communication matrix at both Nemo's and Abraham's posts click alive with a burble of neon green. The Grimalti navigator replaces his mottled pointer finger at his beak in an earnest appeal for Moira's continued, silent cooperation. With a swift gesture on the control panel, he answers the customs cruiser's incoming hail and opens the comm channel live.

"V&B FF2 Hulk Transport _The Finder's Keeper_ ," the excruciatingly bored voice of a customs officer comes clean through the comm, "you are entering Criia system space. Please stand by–"

Nemo explodes awake, whole body convulsing into action. He snaps his firearm instinctively from its holster and yammers out an indecipherable string of vowels and obscenities.

"–for processing."

For once, Moira Quicksilver and Abraham Bonaventure share an impish and bad-natured chuckle at the Captain's expense.

Two-Bit grimaces. Lifetime patron of gas station and vending machine, connoisseur of all things greasy, grimy and overly processed, Two-Bit Switch had enjoyed chocolate oysters, pickled omelets and lonktonk waffles across the galaxy without even a twinge of indigestion. A literal chum bucket overflowing with slimy, squashed fast food, this "Bucketa Burgers" steaming before the three diners might, however, prove the exception to the rule.

At first blush, Two-Bit had assumed the phrase "Bucketa Burgers" was nothing more than another of the menu's colorful colloquialisms. He was to be quite gruesomely proven wrong upon their meal's actual arrival. At first bite, however, Two-Bit Switch of the cast-teltriton stomach, opted to leave his own buhoxburger rather solidly on the napkin, a napkin it proceeded to almost liquify with its mysterious secretions.

The awning is all that remains to suggest this eatery once resembled a respectable restaurant. Obviously meant to cheerily represent a bright orange burger bun, it was now stained and besmirched practically beyond recognition.

Word of mouth purports the scummy place to be called "Garbageburger." The only actual signage is emblazoned upon the awning's rim in runny, green fractal paint. Whether the phrase "eat here or fuck off" is meant to signify the joint's ostensible motto or possibly even its intended name, Two-Bit's no idea.

Despite the flagrant disregard for curb appeal, the uncommonly rude Garbageburger had achieved a cult following amongst Underglow's most courageous residents. Enough diehard regulars swear up and down by the joint to keep its proverbial doors open.

Two-Bit shares this Bucketa with two such regulars. Like a star-crossed lover, the Captain consummates the reunion between burger and bowel with great mouthfuls. His erstwhile cousin, despite his own recommendation, altogether forgoes the sodden meal in favor of a cigarette and a paper cup of chococino.

Lunch was the first order of the day, after arranging accommodation at some squatter's nest Nemo and Odisseus picked out specifically for the occasion. Two-Bit and his Captain braved the seven-block walk to Garbageburger, through a slumland so despoiled as to give even the desensitized eyes of Two-Bit pause.

Directly across the chasm, two Fivvite brutes armed with electrobatons, badges and police uniforms assault an elderly Swumese vagrant for fun or profit. Two stories above, Two-Bit spies the gutted-out carcass of a crashed driftambulence, protruding ominously from the side of the starscraper. A seven-member street gang, all variably armed, tattooed, chain-smoking or undressed, but all universally under the age of five, create a wide berth among the pedestrians on the catwalk adjoining the restaurant.

Watching these ankle-biting ruffians from a safe distance, Two-Bit Switch has several unanswered questions about the Captain's, and how his cousin's, demeanor and desires suddenly answered.

"Tell me what you think of this, like," Flask, seated to Nemo's right, separates the paper cup from his lips to announce. "5.6 million."

"5.6 million," Two-Bit, seated to Nemo's left, repeats. "What, cred?"

"Yes fooking credits," Flask confirms with vigor. "I'll say it again; 5.6 million credits."

Clutching his buhoxburger inches from his mouth, Nemo stammers for an appropriate response. "Uh, I like it."

"I really like it," Two-Bit adds.

"We both really like it."

"It's an incredible mathematical," Two-Bit spreads his hands wide. "What the bloom are we talking about?"

Armed with fresh knowledge since their last meeting, Two-Bit finally sees the family resemblance between Nemo and Flask. Though possessed of blonde hair, green eyes and full-blown Gallwegian accent in place of Nemo's black, gray and hint of one, the reputed pickpocket shares the Captain's distinct cheekbones and broad brow. They weren't close enough for siblings, perhaps, but they were certainly close enough for cousins.

Whereas Nemo's dressed as the recently arrived spacer, Flask, with his unzippered windbreaker, his cigarette pinched between finger and coffee cup and his husky, occasional cough, is the very picture of the career urbanite.

"Bank job I been planning. Goes down next week. Got all the numbers lined up just this morning and, hear me on this, the take's coming in at 5-point-fooking-6-million credits, like."

Two-Bit scowls. "Vault job pulls in seven figures?"

Flask nods enthusiastically. "This city? You bet your bollocks, it do."

"Jotor's moons," Two-Bit appreciates with a skyward glance. "Where's this filthy bunghole been all me life?"

"Told you you'd like it," Nemo grunts around his meal.

Two-Bit approximates a hand shake or a pat on the back with a vague waving gesture. "Well, gratz are in order, then, mate. Job like this, what's your greez vizz like?"

"I charge a nice, modest fifteen percent for me premium services. And that's casin', plannin', and retirement advice, if necessary."

Nemo swallows. "Hitting Ozwo Capital again?"

Flask grins beneficently. "IIC, actually."

"Imperial Intergalactic Credit?" Two-Bit susses out. "The feds?"

At this, Flask's smile only deepens.

Nemo grunts into his dripping burger. "Why, cousin, what big balls you have."

"Everything goes according to my _genius plan_ ," Flask prefaces, plucking the cigarette back between his lips, "nobody's even gotta fire a shot."

"How'd you scheme that?" Two-Bit wonders.

"Well, goes like this," Flask scoots himself several inches forward on the counter, to better shield his story from the Myyrigon burger-flipper before the grill. "As is always the sorta thing happening this time of season 'round Worldshine, these banks and these casinos be back at each other's throats again, like. One casino shutting another down, one bank buying another up. All corporate warfare, you understand me, all elbowing each other for position and real estate before them high rollers come back in time for the night season."

"Granted," Nemo allows.

"Now, I got me a little bird in a financial planning office topside and she tells me IIC," he asides towards Two-Bit, "biggest bloody banking firm in the Sectors and on the moon, yeah?" he turns back to Nemo, "is fixin' to make a move on this piddly little bank what went tits up last season. Classic corporate take-over, you get me?"

"A square job." Two-Bit nods. "Sure."

"Most of the time, they take fooking everything but the fooking building and most of things they take, they take digitally. The clients, the credits, all that." He inches still closer to his two confederates. "But there's one thing they gotta move the old-fashioned way, one thing they ain't found a work-around for. The lettuce. The jangle. The hard stuff."

Nemo chews cluelessly. "...which means?"

"Means," Flask feeds, "they actually gotta send a physical fooking car around to pick up all the physical fooking money."

"Means that," Two-Bit finishes, "for however long it takes to joy between them two vaults, all that physical fucking jangle's gonna be in one spot."

The notion finally clicks behind Nemo's eyes. "All 5.6 million of it."

Flask rewards himself for his brilliance by craning back in his seat and enjoying a prolonged drag on his cigarette. "That's more or less the fooking gist of it, yeah."

Admittedly predicated on very little personal experience working with him, Two-Bit would have best described Flask as a criminal fixer. He ran interference, he made introductions and he gathered supplies on any number of simultaneous jobs. Any fixer, Flask included, brought home their bacon by keeping as many fingers in as many profitable pies as physically possible, all the while avoiding as much of the actual limelight as they realistically could.

From his humble pickpocket beginnings, Flask maintains a reputation as a top-flight middleman for any underhanded dealings in the Inner Sectors. Although they'd only collaborated on one gunrunning stint several years in the past, Two-Bit could vouch nothing but professionalism for the Captain's cousin and childhood playmate.

Plus, all reports indicated Flask had quick fingers, decent aim and a steady enough hand at a driftmotor to make even Nemo take note, all three valuable virtues indeed for a hoodlum.

"Wow," Two-Bit comments. "Gotta fess, that's right clever of you."

"Best part is," Flask continues from his reclined position, "day of a bank transfer like this, they would have just finished unmarking all those bills. Shit's gonna be fooking untraceable."

Two-Bit grunts in half surprise. "I suppose that's one of them Inner Sector crunches I ord so much about – traceable jangle and law enforcement and such."

"Lemme guess," Nemo resurfaces from the cheesy quagmire of his burger long enough to ask, "you dug up Stubb and that girlfriend of his, whatserface with the mandibles, to pull the job for you?"

Flask reaches for his chococino. "Fooker's dead. Two years back."

Nemo halts chewing. "You're blasted. What got him?"

"Whatserface. With the mandibles."

Hunger, rather than grief, is the Captain's next visible emotion. He returns to his lunch, pausing briefly to attach the addendum, "You know, I warned him," before devouring what remains of his burger.

"So," Two-Bit advances into the gap, "what you're jabbing is..."

"Normally," Flask returns to his more secretive position, depositing what remains of his beverage and propping both forearms against the counter, "this kinda work, I turn to Bash and his boys."

Two-Bit masterfully masks any disappointment. "Good brunos?"

"The best. But, as it so happens, Bash recently got himself pinched and the rest of the boys are under 'federal investigation' until further notice."

"Oof," Nemo remarks. "Bad luck."

"So," Two-Bit repeats, mimicking Flask's earlier posture and nudging himself further up the counter to better conspire with Nemo's cousin, "what you're _jabbing_ is..."

Gazing into its chocolate depths, Flask swills his coffee in tight circles, as though to shake something loose from the paper cup's bottom. "Looking at a four-man crew. Action-capable, but, like I said, hopefully that won't be necessary." Dissatisfied with his spinning, he returns the cup to the counter and pops the cigarette into his mouth instead. "For the plan to work, we're gonna need approximately a week's prep time and somebody who knows his way around a cutting beam." He coughs inwardly, shortens his cigarette of its ashes into an available tray and reaches again for the paper cup. "Spotter with a police-band radio wouldn't hurt fooking either." He pauses before quaffing the remainder of his chococino, makes direct eye contact with Two-Bit and smirks suggestively. "Know anybody?"

An overenthusiastic toddler spotting a puppy through the pet store window, Two-Bit ardently tugs Nemo's sleeve. "Pretty please, Cap'n?"

"Hmm," Nemo intones around a mouthful of buhoxburger. "You know, I'd love to, Flask, but hiding out was kinda sorta supposed to be the whole reason for coming here in the first place. I agree to another job on the sly, Moira'll eat my heart."

"Fuck Moira! 5.6 million!"

" _Yeah_ , fuck Moira, 5.6 million," Nemo caves.

Flask chuckles in earnest. "You fooking scumbag," he directs toward Nemo. "Do I know you or what?"

"This kinda jangle can lavender us for months! Xo'll keel over from blooming boredom before they snuff us out!" Two-Bit slaps Nemo on the sleeve. "He's my new blooming favorite of your cousins."

Flask winces and makes a tiny pinching gesture with the hand not occupied with his cigarette. "One tiny snag."

"Hoo boy," Nemo reacts before stuffing a truly prodigious portion of the soggy burger into his agape mouth.

"An Ortok, most likely, is gonna arouse too much suspicion," Flask relays, a certain degree of regret and even apprehension present on his features. "The plan unfortunately requires our big furry buddy to be benched, and four robbers of a more or less humanoid persuasion. Which'll be you, you, your bounty hunter girlfriend–"

Nemo freezes solid, terror in his eyes, mouth further agape and morsels of hyper-processed buhoxmeat tumbling out. "She's not my girlfriend."

"–and someone else," Flask finishes.

Two-Bit opens his mouth to respond, but Nemo's a second too fast. "You've got ideas, I take it?"

"I've a list of potential candidates, if that's what you fooking mean." Flask counts on fingers. "There's Pierro. There's Lummox. Cile Clunk does have that club foot, if you remember–"

"–but Jotor's own right hook," Nemo evaluates.

"Hang on," Two-Bit interjects. "What're _you_ doing?"

Flask crinkles his brow. "Pardon?"

"You. You schemed the thing, didn't you? You know the ins and outs. I mean, why bother scoring us another wank, why jank up the take even further, when there's always you?"

Nemo scoffs, spewing beef across his corner of the counter. "Oh, he doesn't do the heavy lifting. Flask doesn't get his hands dirty."

The party in question shrugs helplessly. "Personal rule."

"Buhoxshit," Two-Bit protests. "If he gets to squat out, I get to squat out."

"Are you bein' thick? I planned the fooking thing, I earned the right to 'squat' out."

Popping the remainder of the burger into his mouth, Nemo pushes back his stool and rises suddenly to his feet. "Nobody's squatting out."

"But, he–"

"Hey, now–"

"I'm going." The Captain points respectively. "Two-Bit's going. You're going."

With a protestant scoff, Flask's suddenly all petulance. "We're not eight fooking years old anymore," he appeals. "We're not spray-painting tiny little pricks onto the headlamps of Officer Drofka's fooking squad car."

"Aw, you remember that?"

"Point is," Flask counters Nemo's finger with his own, "you're not the fooking boss of me no more."

"Oh, yes I am," Nemo snarls with childish relish.

Quick as a flash, he shuffles behind his cousin's chair and suddenly ensnares Flask by the neck in a sloppy imitation of a wrestler's headlock. With surprise and the dread of great familiarity, Flask flails to escape. Caught unawares, he cannot displace the implacable Nemo, who's already begun to knead the top of his cousin's skull with the bony part of his knuckles – a "noogie" or a "scalper" by Takioro station waif parlance.

"Who's the boss of you?" he chides with playful menace.

Flask thrashes. "Youse fooking cunt, you!" The burger joint is momentarily usurped by the clamor of creasing leather, scraping barstools and immaturity. With a creeping smile, Two-Bit bears witness to a six-second reversion to their previous dynamic, a dynamic they'd established two decades younger and two feet shorter.

"Three little words! Who's the boss of you?"

"You're the fooking boss!" Flask relents chokingly. Nemo relents a second later, releasing his hold on his cousin and chuckling companionably. Flask flops to the counter, massaging his neck and muttering unknowable obscenities.

"See? How hard was that?"

"What caffles me about it," Two-Bit remarks to both, though neither is probably listening, "is the bloomin' _synchronicity_ of it all, you know?" He weaves his fingers together for emphasis. "I mean, you couldn't bugger for better timing than this, even if you tried!"

Two-Bit gapes. "What?"

"I cannot believe you fell for that," Moira, in the aisle seat two rows ahead, intones.

"You cannot believe I fell for _what?_ "

Seated across the aisle and only one row ahead, Odisseus listlessly turns a brochure over in his paws and grumbles something about "coincidence."

Occupying the same row as Two-Bit but the opposite end, Abraham does his level best to speak around the mammoth pipe brimming from his fleshy beak. "Ye're suggestin' what exactly?"

"He's suggesting," Moira supplies, "Flask didn't just have a spare caper lying around. And we didn't just come to Gallow for no good reason. And somebody very deliberately wanted this to happen."

A sinking sensation made its presence known in Two-Bit's stomach. "Who? The Cap'n?"

Odisseus growls an affirmative. A weighty silence passes between the four crewmates.

"Explains," Abraham supposes at length, "why we ain't lamming it on Nym or Bril or some other Offchart rock right about now."

"Also explains," Moira adds with evident derision, "why he was so uncharacteristically chipper at the prospect of hiding out for bloom knows how long."

"Also also hums it," Two-Bit finally supplies, a hand tossed up in frustration, "why he couldn't be mithered to jabb a fucking word at that eatery yesterday."

For his part, Odisseus mutters something about "spooky" and the crew, for several more seconds, stew in joint embarrassment.

"And if you look to your left," the Byori woman blares through her megaphone "you'll see the R. Jalton Grand, home of the galaxy-renowned TripleXXXettes, Gallow's second-largest all-sibling burlesque show."

The ongoing search for Nemo-proof locales to conduct these covert crew meetings in continued apace. This time around, the _Lover's_ four lieutenants each shelled out seventy credits a head to congregate in the last three rows of a local sightseeing driftbus circumnavigating Gallow's spectacle-studded Worldshine District. Accompanied by a single bemused tourist couple and an underwhelming Byori tour guide, Gallow Uptown Tours completed a ninety-minute closed loop of the Arrival Tier's greatest attractions and amusements.

Odisseus' idea originally, they each prayed they'd found absolutely the last place a native born Gallwegian ought to bump into his errant officers and the ideal locale to discuss the merits of Flask's proposed bank job.

Despite the matter at hand, Two-Bit, always latently guilty about having never visited Gallow, cannot help but indulge in a little peripheral sightseeing himself. Their double-decker craft obliges him, ambling between city starscrapers made topless from height and bottomless from depth.

Crowds, confinement and claustrophobia are the most apt descriptors of Takioro life, where the only expansiveness is horizontal and where even that is something of a vain pretext. Here, though, verticality is the order of the day. The city abounds ten thousand feet below the driftbus' current position and ten thousand feet above it, a panoramic urban immensity that encompasses a full fifty percent of the moon's surface. Even from his limited vantage atop the humble tour bus, Two-Bit is struck by the idea that he could wander Gallow's boulevards in any direction for months before reaching the city's outer limits.

Ten weeks into the day season, however, Two-Bit looks upon Worldshine for the first time at its most lusterless. The sky perennially overcast, its advertisements are disarmed and the whole city seems suffused with a vague sense of stagnancy, despite its obvious vastness.

Denoting points of reconstruction like scar tissue on otherwise unmarred flesh, steel and canvas scaffolds bristle from facades of every starscraper, complete with the combined chorus of whining power tools and chattering day-laborers. Presumably designed to be read exclusively in darkness, the many billboards, marquees and storefronts Two-Bit sees are rendered almost invisible by daylight, their wares unadvertised, their promises unheeded. For all the limitless industry and endless manpower it would require to build everything within the mere view of Two-Bit's vision, he sees precious few actual people, barring the workmen on their scaffolds and the occasional passing pedestrian. The streets and catwalks more or less abandoned, Two-Bit can only imagine how jam-packed with people Gallow's upper reaches would be during the day season's wasteful sister, the night season.

"Why specifically a bank job on Gallow?" Moira poses. "What's his interest?"

"Well," Two-Bit, somewhat flustered by embarrassment, scrambles to save face, "'cause it's a gritty ace gig, isn't it? We pull this job, it stands to be the most profitable we ever pulled."

Abraham plucks the pipe from his mouth. "Are we pullin' it?"

"Are we not?" Two-Bit challenges, inching slightly forward in his seat. "Key here is how solid the caper is. Sure, maybe Nemo wasn't exactly facting upfront about it but, by all rights, the Cap'n should have no jazz in a bum job. We know he ain't flipped, that's for blooming sure," he denounces with a dismissive wave. "Way I vizz it, we play along, we blag this bank and we ask ringers later." He props up a reasonable shrug. "Sound feez?"

The clear opposition to all things risky, Odisseus rumbles out a minutes-long sequence of involved phrases Two-Bit doesn't quite follow, but that certainly contains the words " _Surimiah_ ," "suspicious" and "asses." After the Ortok concludes, Two-Bit makes a non-verbal plea to his left for translation.

"He's, quite naturally, suspicious," Abraham supplies.

"Course he is."

"He worries," the Grimalti asides to Odisseus a moment, "I'mana just directly quote ye on this," he cocks his bloated head back toward Two-Bit, "'that Nemo's obvious ulterior motives are gonna come around and bite us when our asses least expect it.'"

"Course he does."

"But Xo is his main concern," Moira clarifies. "He doesn't see how coming to Gallow changes anything. He says, even if they haven't read between the lines about the _Surimiah_ thing, intentionally dropping us back on Xo's radar, which, he claims, is exactly what this bank job will do, is just about the dumbest possible course of action he can imagine."

Two-Bit chews his lip. "No squeak you've checked our postings, Quicksilver?"

"Not recently," she admits.

"Well, until Moira's checked and we're certain Xo's back on the warpath, there's no razz we can't be prepping for the future. Case you all blanked, we've less than a quarter mil in the gantine's fund and, at our current crackle, that'll be fumes in three months, probably less." Two-Bit conducts a brief visual survey of his crewmates. "Vault job like this, quick and hoovy, high risk, sure, but higher sweets – could be just what the stitch ordered."

Both undeclared crewmembers match glances, attempting to gauge the other's stance.

"And on your right, you'll see Highroller Mac's, the very same nightclub where Nivvie "The Vannaphant" Ganti gunned down Marmos "Three Thumbs" and his men in the famous Temperance Day Massacre."

"All things being equal," Abraham first stipulates, "I'd agree with Odisseus." An unusual expression, one Two-Bit doesn't quite recognize on the Grimalti's withered mug, crosses Abraham's normally champion pokerface. He detects traces of mirth, anticipation and uncertainly all equally present. "But, me better devils have me curious. Boy's plannin' something. Don't know what it is. Mayhaps I got a vested interest to find out." He re-inserts the pipe and casts a moody glance towards the passing city beyond. "We don't follow along, may never find out."

Odisseus fails to stifle a faint growl of frustration. Two-Bit, the bigger man, sticks out his tongue. The Ortok tosses a question in Moira's direction, one Two-Bit manages to translate as simply "And you?"

After a moment of apparent internal debate, Moira offers a reluctant shrug and a reluctant reply. "I'm actually kind of agreeing with Two-Bit?"

His obvious disbelief betraying his meaning as simply, "You can't do that," Odisseus appears momentarily baffled.

"Much as I'm repulsed to admit it, 5.6 million makes a convincing argument. Assuming this isn't a terrible idea and assuming Nemo hasn't gone well and truly off the deep end," Odisseus makes some snorting comment at that, "a million a head ought to be more than enough to cover our tracks for life. Not that I'm suggesting this," Moira allows, "but that's retirement."

Two-Bit commits several seconds on his fingers to mock arithmetic. "Lemme just do the mathematicals on that; three in favor, one opposed." He locks eyes with an inwardly fuming Odisseus. "Vizzes like we're knockin' this bank over, then." In order to perfectly combine insult with injury, he reposes back in his uncomfortable bus seat and plants hands behind head. "Democracy works."

"Now, if you look directly overhead, you might just catch a glimpse inside the 66-million credit summer home of feedfilm star Dein Drisco through the kitchen's stylish Voyeuro850 TranspoFloor."

"No excuse for lettin' yer guard down, though," Abraham warns after a sizable silence. "Keep yer peepers peeled, keep yer ears to the ground for the first sign of trouble out of the ordinary but, I think the lad's right there. Long as we stay one step ahead of the Cap'n, no harm, no foul, far as I can tell."

Sorest of losers, Odisseus makes some snarling rebuff with paws tossed futilely in the air. Two-Bit leans inches towards him.

"Sorry?"

Moira's translation manages to capture ten times the portend of Odisseus' actual comment. "He says we're clearly not one step ahead. He says the real question is how no one could see this coming. How did Nemo, of all people, pull the wool over each and every one of our eyes?"

This successfully strikes a grim chord within all four of them. Nemo's confidantes chew the ominous silence that so often concludes these backdoor meetings of theirs.

Duplicity, tact and other tools of delicate social manipulation were better left for finer minds; Nemo was quite clearly more a being of bold strokes and boastful intentions. Despite this, however, he'd somehow managed to clandestinely arrange an entire off-the-record caper, appear completely surprised, even reluctant, upon the job's unveiling and finally puppeteer his hesitant crew into nearly unanimous acceptance.

What truly unnerves Two-Bit, though, is that, beyond feeling vaguely exploited, he's honestly unable to muster a proper objection to the bank job. That sort of seamless logic originating from Nemo inspires a wholly original sinking sensation in Two-Bit's stomach, the sensation that perhaps, over time, their bumbling oaf of a Captain had become drastically underestimated.

Chapter 5

Odisseus shivers. Benumbing gusts of wind push past him, funneled at a furious speed by Underglow's narrowed alleyways, and so Odisseus, complete with drastically shortened fur, shivers. A decade ago, the much younger and shaggier Ortok barely noticed his city's cold. Lately, ever since this demeaning prison haircut, Odisseus had found most places – Gallow, Qel Qatar, not to mention the vast vacuum of interstellar space – a few degrees colder than he'd personally prefer.

The elements seem to have no effect on his saltbrother, arriving across the rooftop, other than dramatically whipping his coat out before him. Beyond his habitual tool bet, Odisseus never really bothered with clothing. To someone so hirsute, they were stifling and suffocating and not much else.

However, the longer his fur remained brutally short and the longer he was forced into these frigid conditions, the more and more appealing the idea of wearing this insulting welder's apron around everywhere seemed to the Ortok.

Across the rooftop, Odisseus watches Nemo disembark, underpay and bicker several prolonged moments with his drifttaxi driver. The Ortok deactivates his fusioner, edges the bridge of his goggles up over his brow and trundles out to meet his saltbrother halfway.

Available garage space wasn't terribly difficult to come by in Underglow. This assumes one was generous enough to qualify an empty hundred square feet of canopied-in rooftop as "available garage space." This unnamed lot's landlady was both a one-eyed purpleskin and amenable to the hefty bribe Odisseus paid her to refrain from asking too many questions about any less-than-legal activities she may observe.

As the Ortok passes them, he spares a suspicious thought for each of his next-stall neighbors and wonders if they shouldn't perhaps be extended the same offer. To his left, a Ruuvian hammers heavily away on his overcompensation machine. To his right, a Szarzarr screws and unscrews a badly dented hull plate in a fruitless attempt to jam it into place.

"Flask is a speciesist and a prick," Odisseus calls towards his saltbrother, now less than ten steps away.

"Why this time?" Nemo returns without missing a beat.

"Two-Bit mentioned his little 'No Ortoks On The Caper' initiative." Odisseus spreads his hind paws and crosses his forearms, preventing Nemo's way forward. "I'm less than thrilled."

"Flask says you'll be too conspicuous," Nemo parrots. "And, unfortunately, I gotta trust his judgment on this one."

"I don't care what you trust," Odisseus rebukes. "If Flask knows what's good for him and his fragile neck, he's gonna change his mind."

Suddenly concerned for his own, Nemo rubs the nape of his fragile neck and glances back towards the idling drifttaxi. "I was pretty sure I had a reason to come down here besides my daily haranguing..."

Sniffing once in mild contempt, Odisseus turns on his heel and begins waddling back towards his reserved space. "Wanna show you something. Needs your stamp of approval."

Nemo doesn't move but furrows his brow. "You've never needed my stamp of approval before."

"I went a little unorthodox on this. Thought I should buzz it in."

With an equally suspicious scowl, Nemo follows Odisseus step for step. They pass between disassembled vehicles parked atop and steaming ventilators jutting from the re-appropriated rooftop. When he arrives, Odisseus lingers several feet outside his designated workspace and waits for Nemo to level up on his left side.

The Captain plants both arms akimbo and examines Odisseus' partially finished handiwork with a bemused eye. "What is it, even?"

"You don't recognize her?"

Nemo squints, cocks his head, points. "Is that...?"

"You do recognize her," Odisseus smirks.

Nemo's astounded. "Bloom everybody out. How in the moons you manage to find her?"

"I have many mysterious powers," answers Odisseus, with another cryptic smirk.

Considering her current state of repairs – disemboweled and slumped so gloomily in the rooftop's hexagonal corner – Odisseus isn't necessarily surprised Nemo couldn't recognize her. The shipwreck, all corroded thermosteel and multicolored stains certainly doesn't resemble a driftchiller, much less the very same driftchiller that once ferried the pair of them around Underglow in their youth.

Penelope, as she was called then, lead a long and eventful life. Like most driftchillers, she spent many years serving chiller cream cones to the squealing children of Underglow. Like most driftchillers, she was fated to be melted down for her composite alloys when her time came. It was here that the timely intervention of a ten-year-old Ortok rescued Penelope from a fate worse than incineration.

Many more happy years the two spent together, sharing the sacred symbiosis of craft and craftsman. It was Odisseus who refurbished and restored Penelope into a serviceable driftcraft once more and it was Penelope who was the primary means of transportation for the Ortok and his degenerate saltbrother on errands – plus one doomed heist – around the city.

When he departed for the Outer Ring, on the trail of that same saltbrother, Odisseus sadly sold Penelope to his former employer, a crotchety junkyard proprietor, and never looked back.

Imagine the Ortok's surprise, then, when trolling Underglow's junk halos for a capable craft to play into this upcoming caper, he discovered Penelope, parked exactly where he left her seven years previously.

Until recently, her exact make and model had escaped the budding internal index of young Odisseus. Upon her rediscovery, a short session of matrix-diving would eventually betray her manufacturate – none other than Terro Fleet Systems, the same proud people who produced the warships and starfighters of the Imperium Navy.

This last feature had been the determining factor in convincing Odisseus of Penelope's particular worth to the caper ahead, despite her less-than-stellar history with the Captain and his capers.

"She's Civ-Class," Odisseus provides, "B3 Low-Atmo Driftchiller," Odisseus identifies, with a few companionable steps towards his workstation. "We needed a TFS definitely, no more than a ton in weight, a two-seater cab and a high performance, low-audible driftmotor." Nemo's expression does little to convey confidence. "New transmission," Odisseus denotes, pointing out each future amelioration of the vessel with vague waving gestures. "Serious reduction to the cab's overall size. Disconnect the heat pump. New paint job, coupla necessary decals..." The Ortok sidles up alongside the cabin and seals his pitch. "You're gonna be looking at the spitting image, I swear to the moons."

"Sure." Nemo shifts his weight, thinly-veiled skepticism bubbling to the surface. "You don't think we should be looking for something with a little more, I don't know, backbone? You don't think you're maybe getting a little, uh, sentimental?"

Rage swells in the Ortok's chest. "My understanding of Flask's master plan," Odisseus reminds, with tangible disdain, "didn't involve her backbone in the first place." He scans his saltbrother's uncertain expression. "Have I been," he pauses to lace the following word with a little bared-teeth bile, "misled?"

Nemo's categorically oblivious. "No, no. Asking for the sake of asking."

Biting his tongue on the topic of Nemo's now-obvious deception had proven simple enough for Odisseus. Years of crossing forearms and standing over his saltbrother's shoulder as silent support had instilled in him an instinctive sense of bodyguard's reticence.

Swallowing his pride in the face of Nemo's now-obvious deception, however, had proven significantly more difficult.

"She's built right," Odisseus presses, "she's gonna handle right and most importantly, she looks right." He pads forward a few inches, planting a paw companionably on Penelope's bent fender and turning to face his saltbrother. "Gotta remember – this isn't about tough. It's about cosmetics."

Nemo visibly chews the idea, his bottom lip curling into a cartoonish frown as he gives in. "You win." He displays both palms. "You're the expert."

"Damn skippy."

Two-Bit imagines that, were Flask on Takioro rather than Gallow, he'd be practically asking for a canister to the brain. Here, however, on Criia's only slightly lawless moon, murder remains a crime and, in this case, a crime considerably worse than hijacking somebody's parked driftcar.

Flask, therefore, goes about his business unmolested, utterly unconcerned about the prospect of gunfire from the driftcar's currently absent owner. As he jimmies open the vehicle's front door, Two-Bit stands idly by, sipping his chococino and perfecting his well-rehearsed impression of an innocent bystander.

In Two-Bit's current mood, blacker and fouler than Gallow's deepest depths, he half-wishes the driftcar's commuter would appear, simply to throw a neticgrappler into Flask's most recent seemingly flawless plan: to boost an afternoon's transportation.

With an electronic beep and an unlatching sound, Flask's attempts to gain unlawful entry bear fruit. He buckles the driver's door open with a creak of rusty hinges. Two-Bit follows suit with the passenger door, sparing the ten-thousand foot drop between catwalk and hovering driftcar a brief and dizzying glance.

The driftcar, a neon-yellow Concord Industries number a decade or so past its prime, receives their combined weight with a mild dip from the idling driftmotor. Flask plucks his own steaming paper cup off the driftcar's roof and plants it into the single remaining cup holder. While he hunts across his ring of skeleton igniters, Two-Bit gives the interior of the vehicle a cursory inspection.

"Apologies about the condition of the ride," Flask mutters, slotting the selected key into the ignition. "Woulda grabbed that shiny TFS bugger up the block a ways back there, but some bastard fookin' slapped her with an impound clamp when I weren't lookin', so."

Two-Bit makes a noncommittal grunt, surveying the car's cluttered interior and noting the odd cloying scent with disinterest. He rifles absently with the radio as the driftcar ignites and Flask pumps her into stuttering operation. With a disconcerting shudder and fuzzy astropunk on the radio, the stolen driftcar tips sideways, away from the adjacent catwalk and rattles forward into Underglow, ferrying Flask and Two-Bit about their afternoon errand.

Two-Bit's spirits were high when they'd landed on Gallow four days previously. He'd been finally fulfilling a lifelong ambition by visiting what his professional peers often considered a miscreant's paradise. He reconnected with an old acquaintance over grimy fast food and he'd received a multimillion credit caper for his trouble. Two-Bit couldn't have been more delighted.

At the realization that it was Nemo himself who'd been pulling their strings, who had clandestinely arranged for Flask to plan the multimillion credit caper rather than simply approaching Two-Bit, his mood blackened and blackened. By the fourth morning, when he'd agreed to accompany Flask on a preliminary scouting of the route his caper would lead them on, he discovered himself positively sullen. His previous excitement vanished, he instead stares daggers out the window and mentally writes Flask out of the caper-to-end-all-capers that currently ate up space on Two-Bit's Attaché.

Flask navigates the hairpins and blind alleys of Underglow with the nonchalance of a long-time resident. Even at the busiest of times, though, Two-Bit cannot imagine the traffic below Gallow's surface presents any real hazard. On a lazy afternoon smack dab in the middle of the day season, they're practically alone in the polluted skies.

Occasional patches of sunlight, crosshatched through the Arrival Tier's thickly-grated demarkation grid, sprinkle down onto them. Tiny slivers of the undercity are revealed, for split seconds, as the purloined driftcar whizzes past.

In accordance with some obscure Gallwegian property law, all permanent housing was mandated to be constructed below a certain altitude, conveniently just beneath Underglow's proverbial water line. That way, no unsightly tenement buildings need ever blemish a city skyline viewed from bridal suite or gaming floor.

All the streets within Two-Bit's view display evidence of the Gallwegian slumlords best attempts to circumvent this issue.

Great honeycombs of individual housing units cluster together, bolted directly onto the side of the mammoth starscrapers. These low-income hives, these chaotic nests of poverty, sickness and malnutrition, certainly re-enforce Gallow's perception of its working class; insects huddling desperately around the afterglow of the real civilization above.

Before long, however, the driftcar ambles up through the stratified grid and rises into the proper light of that supposed civilization. Flask's adept hand steers them between the scaffolds and construction sites that populate the Arrival Tier during Gallow's day season. Seven more sips of chococino and they've reach their destination.

This once austere building, conceivably a bastion of commerce and finance in happier times, was now reduced to an abandoned husk. A holographic ticker reads "SOLD TO ICC" in ceaseless, spinning circles.

Their driftcar the only occupant of the parking pad, Flask idles the vehicle and yanks loose the key from the ignition. "Well, here we are, like," Flask announces quietly. "First stop."

A moment's worth of scrutiny, a once-over across the building and Two-Bit feels qualified to make his own announcement. "This'll never work."

Flask scoffs. "Fook makes you say that?"

Craning forward, Two-Bit presses a finger against the viewport in a point. "Ident scanner. Plain as day." He works the extended hand back into his jacket pocket. "Ain't gonna take them more than a second to delly we ain't nothing but a rubbish bin."

"Scanner like that," Flask counters calmly, "don't read ident. Driftvault's don't even buzz ident. Armor's too thick, like." He copies Two-Bit's own point. "Scanner like that's gonna read the barcode they paint on the lefthand side."

"Are we gonna have one of those?" Two-Bit poses incredulously.

"Odi oughta be paintin' her on tonight, like. Far as I heard."

"And," Two-Bit keeps questioning, "they ain't gonna be vizzin' for one specific driftvault? It wouldn't be easier to simply deer a fresh one ourselves?"

"No, a driftvault goes missing the day before, they'll triple security and we'd never even make the lobby." As he talks, Flask fishes about in his inside jacket pocket, before withdrawing a trim Attaché not at all dissimilar to the one Two-Bit carried in his own back pocket. "Yes, they will be lookin' for one specific driftvault and that's the barcode I set Odi to re-producin'."

He taps a few icons on the device's touchscreen, spacing his speech between taps. "Know a bloke who knows a bloke who knows a bloke who cleans the garage they park these driftvaults in." He palms the Attaché and it displays its grainy, holographic evidence. That, Two-Bit surmises, must be the red-paint barcode he referred to, sprayed onto the burnished teltriton side of a parked driftvault.

"Fair enough," is all Two-Bit can muster and limply at that. He clears his throat and shifts his weight, more to rid himself of his previous argument than out of any actual discomfort. "Security?"

"Medium to heavy, like," Flask admits, stashing the Attaché again. "They ain't as fooking stupid as they may sound. They understand the, er, inherent risks in stacking all this jangle in one place and have prepared accordingly." He cocks his head aside in allowance. "But–"

"And you don't think that's like to be a crunch for us?"

"–but," Flask continues, a note of annoyance coloring his voice, "assuming everything goes according to plan, they ain't gonna be flashing on trouble from the fooking driftvault." He makes a few accommodating gestures to strengthen his argument. "Assuming the Ortok pulls his angle off and assuming we play our part right, to them, we're gonna look like the blooming cavalry, won't we?"

"'Medium to heavy', though," Two-Bit quotes. "Still."

"Worst case," Flask's quick to correct.

Two-Bit's reaching for his chococino before Flask's even uttered his caveat. He remembers all the flak he's earned from the _Lover's_ crew whenever he, the designated mastermind, outlays the details of their latest caper. Two-Bit's hell-bent, then, on uncovering at least one hole in this seemingly seamless plan of Flask's – a plan his four confederates had pretty much accepted at face value.

He was not, it should be noted, above puncturing said hole himself.

"Delly me the side entrance?" His suggestion is both amplified and muffled inside his paper cup. "The one we'll use?"

With the skeleton igniter re-inserted, Flask begins cruising the driftcar surreptitiously around the defunct bank branch in discrete loops. He'll occasionally detour around a side street or up an alleyway to avoid any semblance of suspicion.

"Simple as piss," Flask relates, on the vehicle's second pass by the bank's service entrance, located in a sheltered alcove around the rear of the building. "Driftvault pulls in," he represents the driftvault with a blade-shaped hand gesture, "loads the cash through them doors there and backs straight out." When no immediate acknowledgement or recognition comes from Two-Bit, Flask preempts him with a stifled sigh. "Questions?"

"Bit of dead end, ain't it?" Two-Bit estimates, attempting to imagine Odisseus' bulky converted driftchiller squeezed into the cramped loading stall. "I mean, if the whole thing goes lollies-up and we're caffled in there, it's gonna turn into a blooming bloodbath in one hot second, won't it?"

Flask thumbs a button on the dashboard and his window grinds laboriously downward. "Not with a good enough driver, like."

"Somebody's plonky," Two-Bit mutters.

"And anyway," Flask continues, "who the fook're you plannin' on runnin' away from? This," he gestures emphatically, "is the fooking point of the disguises."

Two-Bit shifts ground. "And that's all squared away?"

"Been sitting on 'em for weeks." Flask hawks a concentrated wad of saliva out the window, to plummet thousands of feet below with the speed of a ballistic missile. "Waiting for the perfect chance to use 'em." He replaces his finger on the dashboard and the window begins its weary trek closed again. "Got, er, Quicksilver whatserface out there right now, seeing about ident tags from this bloke I know."

"Who knows a bloke," Two-Bit supposes.

"Who know yet another bloke, yeah," Flask finishes.

The driftcar hovers patiently, Flask waiting to see if Two-Bit can muster any more objections. When he doesn't – only grinds his teeth and twists the multe bracelet on his wrist – the driftcar accelerates lightly and Flask diverts up a side street to approach the bank building from a different angle.

Two-Bit, once again, fascinates himself with the passing scenery – indentured workmen on wobbly scaffolds – until another avenue of conversation presents itself.

"Which bank is this, then? First or second?"

"Second. 's closer to my place, is the reason we came here first." Two-Bit opens his mouth to word the next question, which Flask predicts and answers. "Near abouts fifteen minutes or so, between 'em. Not close, certainly, but ain't too far, like."

"Do me a kindie," Two-Bit pretends to sip from his drained paper cup between statements, "and take me through your timetable, wouldja?"

The driftcar emerges from the side street in full view of the derelict bank building and Flask, with the slightest of sighs, begins. "Well, the actual driftvault, the one we're impersonating, is due to arrive at the first bank at noon. On the fooking dot." The driftcar returns to its preordained path, the gradual circuit around their intended target. "And these're the types of blokes what get crucified if they're even a second blooming late to the drop-off, so we can expect perfect fookin' punctuality, like."

"Then, how're you–"

"Bloke who knows a bloke who knows a bloke who knows me in the driftvault's garage, remember him?" Two-Bit gives a slow, noncomprehending nod. "Well, let's just say, snagging that holo ain't the only favor he's doin' me, eh?"

"Meaning..." Two-Bit dangles.

" _Meaning_ ," Flask catches, true irritation finally coloring his voice, "I've paid good fooking money, out of pocket, for that driftvault to experience technical fooking difficulties that morning, if you'll pardon me the fooking cliché." His mouth is a sliver of annoyance for a long moment. "Bloom me fookin' out."

Two-Bit waits through an uncertain moment. Flask steers the stolen driftcar back into the shadow of the towering building and descends back onto the parking pad.

"Well, what if they–" Two-Bit starts.

"On top of sabotaging the blooming other driftvault," Flask marches forward, irritation an obvious undercurrent to every word he speaks, "we also make a point to arrive thirty some minutes early, a wide enough window that, were they to get the fookin' thing operational again, we'd be free and clear by the time they even arrive at the first bank, like." Somewhat breathless, he refuses to make eye contact with Two-Bit. "That make sense?" Two-Bit offers a cautious nod, but is certain Flask doesn't notice.

"We make whatever excuses we make," he continues, "start unloading the strongboxes. We're s'pposed to have those, what's the fooking word, the little, er–" Flask proceeds to pantomime some manner of handheld device, indicating a nozzle and wiggling his fingers.

"Handheld gravitons?" Two-Bit attempts in a small voice.

"Yeah. Them." Flask doesn't seem even partially relieved at finding the right word. "We're supposed to have 'em, the driftvault fellas'd have 'em, but I never heard back from me bloke, so, bare hands'll be–"

Almost in astonishment, Two-Bit seizes his chance. "You can't get your wanks on some handheld gravies?" he clarifies, perhaps too eagerly.

A moment of bemused silence from Flask. "Well, I ain't exactly made it a priority–"

"I can get you gravies," Two-Bit assures him suddenly. "Ball it up for me, if you want gravies, I can get me wanks on a few." He shoots a few glances out the window, as though he might spot a handy graviton purveyor somewhere in his line of sight. "Even here." He turns his attention back to Flask, twirling his multe bracelet around his wrist as casually as he can. "How many you hank? Three, four? Ten?"

The following silence practically deafens Two-Bit. "Look," Flask admits simply, "I understand what you're doing." Two-Bit fights the flushing feeling in his face and battles to retain his composure. "I played along, 'cause, you know, no harm, no foul, everybody wants the caper to be as good as it can be, but I think maybe you proved your fooking point, yeah?"

Two-Bit draws breath to offer either denial or excuse, but no words find him. He doubts there's any logical way to explain this sudden anxiety, this inexplicable need to best, belittle or prove his worth to Flask.

Perhaps, he reasons, it was simply their similarity. To the naked eye, they occupy the same role in the criminal ensemble that encircles Nemo and the _Lover_. They were both the well-connected underworld aficionado, the man with the plan, as Two-Bit would certainly describe it, the bloke who knows a bloke, as Flask likely would.

Perhaps it was simply that – competition, the inherent elbowing for position one feels in the presence of someone so similar.

This, Two-Bit suspects, however, is only a portion, a comfortable veneer across the true nature of Flask's intrusion into Two-Bit's well-earned position. What sticks most in the jabberhead's craw is the lingering idea that, once, decades in the past, Flask performed these same duties for Nemo, years before he'd struck out for the Outer Ring and eventually made Two-Bit's acquaintance. Try though he might, Two-Bit could not shake the feeling that, when he'd been hired over Bile Backwashes all those months ago, he was simply substituting a role originated by Flask.

Now, he feared, with the star's return, the understudy would be forced to slink back into the shadows once more.

Bereft of any believable excuse for his behavior, Two-Bit Switch, seasoned liar and possessor of the galaxy's most honeyed tongue, opts in favor of confessing his embarrassing insecurity to his newest and seemingly bitterest rival. "Gritty be jabbed, mate, I–"

"Nemo sends you down here to pester me, yeah, see if there's anything to be improved upon?" Flask supposes knowingly. "Bloom me out, he ain't changed one fookin' iota, like."

Two-Bit Switch, seasoned shirker and possessor of the galaxy's most opportunistic mind, opts suddenly in favor of shifting the blame and pleading the fifth. "You caffled me," he confesses, palms in the air. "You seem like a toasty bloke, you know, hated to do this." He shrugs, overcome with mock helplessness. "Cap'n's orders."

Flask regards him with a sage weariness. "Wanna, say, grab me a handful of gravitons and call it even, then?"

Two-Bit splits into a smile, even partially genuine. "Why, that'd just chuff me to bits."

Moira calms her breathing. An objective assessment of the entire apartment and its three rooms, gathered over a short, several-minute-long search, revealed nowhere more comfortable and less odious than the rickety cot she'd called home the past three nights. With her overworked feet screaming inside her unforgiving jackboots, comfort was slowly beginning to win out over cleanliness on the list of priorities for Moira's seating. With several steadying breaths, Moira wrestles down her better angels and lowers herself to a sitting position, on the absolute edge of the least muzzy couch cushion.

The sofa, a monstrosity only classified as "furniture "in a vague, taxonomical sense, had been Two-Bit's haunt since they'd broken the quarantine on this condemned apartment their first day on Gallow. Upon spotting the couch, Two-Bit'd veritably leapt across the expanse of the living room to claim the inviolable right of "bagsies." The subsequent cloud of expelled mildew and dust had nearly blinded Moira.

Ever since, she had steered entirely clear of the couch, compelled by a superstitious fear to bodily avoid anything that ten years of Underglow's most persistent looters would ignore.

Instead, she'd favored the lumpy, disagreeable cot, seemingly navy issue, that Odisseus had unearthed from the hall closet for her use. Nemo occupies the master, Odisseus occupies the second bedroom and Abraham seeks shelter elsewhere. Moira, then, had been confined to share the living room with Two-Bit and his "bagsied" couch.

After three nights upon the wretched thing, however, its unfeeling steel bars carving canyons into her back, she'd finally begun to envy the slovenly little jabberhead his sleeping arrangements, repellent as they might be.

Moira had frittered away an entire morning on the circuitous task of acquiring the uniforms and keycards they'd need for this week's upcoming deception. Flask's contact, a Fjoran fixer oblivious enough to his own insectoid anatomy to throw several lurid suggestions Moira's way, had pointed her in the direction of a black market tobacconist's a district beneath Underglow. This, turns out, was simply a front for an all-Akishi gunrunning ring, the chief representative of whom, in turn, made a few discreet comm calls on Moira's behalf. The last of these calls finally resulted in a clichéd, goods-under-the-café-table, hand-off with a painfully suspicious Walkeen bagman up on Arrival Tier.

That morning, Moira met enough lowlifes that she probably could have made up her entire cut of the upcoming job on their bounties alone.

The uniforms, all four sleet gray and appropriately sized, were neatly folded and awaiting the crew's return in a tidy pile by the apartment's main entrance. Her three-hour Tebi-Gali routine, lately adjusted to include her twin electrobatons, was completed early this morning, once the apartment was agreeably vacated. Righty and Lefty had been cleaned, polished and oiled the evening previous. Her lunch, a watercress sandwich she'd purchased from a small counter three blocks from the drifttram station, was mostly eaten. The leftovers, folded in checkered paper, awaited her dinner on the chiller's third shelf.

Moira is bored.

Harmlessly snooping, then, was to be the order of the day. Moira moves between the three-and-a-half rooms of the cramped apartment with the shuffling and listless air of a disinterested renter. With her boots, the cruel jailors of her aching feet, finally removed, the floor's cold thermosteel feels heavenly against her bare soles. Moira does her level best not to consider the sheer amount of grime she was exposing her naked feet to.

Even empty, the apartment within is depressingly tiny, an assessment not to be undervalued, coming as it did from someone who'd spent the majority of the past two years aboard a spaceship. All in all, their temporary lodgings comprise a total surface area small enough to fit comfortably inside the _Lover's_ mess hall.

The kitchenette, adjoining the living room by the pretense of a low wall and complete with toilet and uncurtained shower, is Moira's first stop. It looks, she imagines, much as it must have a decade previously. The chiller is the main remnant, the looters unwilling or unable to abscond with something so bulky. Its only contents, beyond Moira's half-a-sandwich, was a jar of heinously expired pickles which Nemo continued to eat, despite their warning label.

The living room she's exhaustively familiar with, having spent whatever majority of their time not pursuing the bank job there. It was these bedrooms, the ones Nemo and Odisseus guard like territorial tje wolves, that piques Moira's lukewarm curiosity the most.

Both doors ajar, Moira pads cautiously into Nemo's bedroom first. Her instinct scans the room in search of hidden occupants, as though there was any chance someone'd avoided her notice this long.

Like the living room and the kitchenette before it, the master bedroom is bereft of anything but the barest, bleakest furniture. A single queen-sized bed stands supported on iron struts, with its vermin-ridden dressings tossed chaotically about, congruent with the Captain's sleeping habits. He hadn't bothered with any luggage and, apart from the decrepit husk of a bed and those few broken hangers swinging in the open closet, the room is nothing but dirty, unremarkable and empty.

Odisseus' room, across the truncated hallway, is both considerably smaller and an iota more interesting, predicated entirely upon the presence of the bunk bed. Barring Odisseus' luggage and both dethroned mattresses, pushed together on the floor to accommodate the Ortok's bulk, it comprises the room's single notable feature.

What strikes Moira oddest is the bunk bed's relative size. Both bed frames and both mattresses are comparatively puny, more properly suited for sleeping children than sleeping adults. This hypothesis is further fortified by the wooden bed frame's liberal scuffing, scratching and crayon-based graffiti.

Something strikes Moira suddenly about the scribblings. The wild, anarchic spray of colors faded with both time and abortive attempts to wash them away – clearly the work of an undisciplined or undisciplinable child. Something about them unlodges in her memory, but refuses to be fingered down.

Something about that graffiti reminds her plaintively of Nemo.

They'd chosen the apartment at random, Moira is certain. They could've chosen any other apartment among the thousands of derelict housing units that infested Underglow's upper reaches; another honeycomb in an endless hive.

Such ignominious lodgings were explained away – by Nemo, come to think of it – as a necessary precaution, a safeguard to ensure they weren't recognized or harassed by bounty hunters. Even now, she couldn't necessarily argue his reasoning. Condemned by the Imperial Municipality of Gallow all of six years ago, these apartments would have their bones picked clean by looters within the first few weeks. With a willing Ortok to shoulder down the barricaded doorway, they seemed simple, if perhaps discomforting, accommodations.

In the recent light of her Captain's quiet conspiracy, however, each of Nemo's perfectly rational decisions and suggestions since Qel Qatar spoil and sour upon a few days reflection. Moira doubted very much that Odisseus had been any more privy to this covert bank caper than the rest of the crew. She still resolves that he very probably could have colluded with his saltbrother to arrange their staying in this very specific apartment.

With crazed crayon stains as her primary evidence, she might have discovered the reason why.

Stepping gingerly over both mattresses, Moira places inquisitive fingers against the grain of the bunk's wooden ladder. On every single step, she discovers gouges and pricks, such as those the petite hind claws of a juvenile animal might make, eroded by time immemorial.

She repositions herself back in the living room, as though a wider vantage might unearth further evidence to support her blossoming theory. Something else, a miniscule, unobserved detail, catches Moira's eye. She lingers in the doorway leading from bedrooms to living room.

Running her fingers along the doorjamb's corroded thermosteel corner reveals yet more grooves. To judge by the angle and jarred nature of each cut, these are demonstrably the work of blunt blade rather than curved claws.

Most interesting to Moira, however, are the ratios between the grooves. Beginning a few feet off the ground and ending at approximately her own height, they were interspersed as though to measure the height of a growing child. A hand extended across the doorway and onto the opposite corner confirms another constellation of growth measurements, this one starting far lower and concluding much higher, nearly a foot taller than Moira herself stands.

Arms braced across the doorway, physical evidence of Nemo's past to both hands, Moira inspects the Captain's childhood home under new eyes. An unconscious glance toward the empty master behind her steers Moira's mind towards the person who might once have occupied said bedroom. This same person, she determines, might once have notched these reminders into the wall and might once have been saddled with the herculean labor of supervising a certain adolescent boy and his fretting Ortoki shadow.

Moira feels an unquestionable pang of empathy for said hypothetical person.

Chapter 6

Flask's heart and the anxious tapping of his thumbs against the steering yoke stop in concert. There were only two sensations, primal failsafes in the criminal consciousness, that are each sufficient to instantly shrivel the cock of any working felon and they both strike Flask simultaneously.

The first is the blinding, blue-and-orange splay of police strip lights. The second is the piercing whoop of a warning siren.

Flask sits frozen in the driver's seat of their disguised driftvault for an entire ten seconds, an instinctive reaction driven home by years and years of cutting purses on Gallow's avenues and alleyways.

On the eleventh second, when he finally does muster speech, what he says is startlingly unproductive. "Bollocks," he breathes, staring dumbfounded out the window. "Tie me bollocks in a fooking sheepshank knot, like."

The other driver, the driver of the actual driftvault they were currently impersonating, is barely visible through the craft's triple-plated viewport. Upon making eye contact with Flask, he makes some vague and impatient gestures towards his shoulder strapped comm unit. The passenger, a Karracki seated immediately to the driver's righthand side, makes no such gestures. He instead levels the awfully businesslike business end of a combat shotgun directly at Flask, the driftvault's passenger side window converted into a gun-port for this precise purpose.

Flask's very welcome wits flood back into his brain. He nods in an over-exaggerated fashion, grasps his own shoulder strapped comm unit and presses the call button. "Nemo, we've a very interesting problem out here, like."

Nemo's voice, chirping through the comm, is breathless with exertion. "How interesting?"

Flask frowns, considering. "Life-in-prison interesting."

"That is very interesting," Nemo admits.

"You blokes might consider pickin' up the fookin' pace, like," Flask advises.

"We ain't half done over here." There's more grunting, the sound someone makes when lifting something heavy, on his cousin's end of the line. "Can you stall?"

Flask shrugs, with a particular eye to the combat shotgun leveled unerringly at his head. "Let's find out, shall we?" He clicks the comm channel closed.

The truly frustrating aspect of this whole dilemma was that now, in the eyes of both Nemo's forbidding first mate and that incorrigible prick Two-Bit, Flask looked like an amateur wet-end. Certainly the imminent threat of incarceration or his skull becoming a ditrogen-smoking crater was concerning, but the last thing Flask needed was the appearance that he couldn't pull a decent caper together with both hands and untraceable fingerprints.

Everything'd gone so swimmingly up until this exact moment. The first bank cooperated fully, the uniforms flew flawlessly, no alarms were raised. Yet, here they were, not quite halfway through emptying out the second bank when trouble, incarnated this week by a thickly armored driftcar and matching pair of shotgun-wielding rent-a-cops, arrived.

These exact types of snags, these random spells of ill fortune, were never the sorts of things that afflicted Flask's jobs. Rather, they never afflicted Flask's jobs anymore – ever since his gatecrasher cousin flew off for parts unknown to chase his fortune as a fighter jockey a decade ago. Flask really should've anticipated this exact scenario when his cousin returned to town.

The driftvault, the real driftvault, floats impatiently some dozen or so feet past the driftchiller named Penelope's left bumper, exactly preventing their clean escape and exactly fulfilling Two-Bit's three day old prophecy. The narrow loading dock now provides an easy bottleneck for anyone attempting to prevent the bankrobber's escape.

Perhaps there was some mechanical prodigy working in the driftvault garage this morning. Perhaps the Nyvo grease monkey whose palm he'd greased to sabotage this very particular vehicle was struck with a bolt of conscience, incompetence or ditrogen this morning. Flask had no method of discerning which and truth be told, that wasn't the most immediate concern on his checklist at the moment.

Flask is three seconds into a convincing enough pantomime that his comm unit is malfunctioning when his intended audience, the Karracki guard, fires.

The shotgun's expelled round instantaneously informs Flask of two separate but not unrelated facts. The first fact is that his pantomime was evidently not as convincing as he might have guessed. The second fact is that, while Odisseus might have done a bang-up job with the cosmetic transformation, Penelope was, by no stretch of the imagination, actually an armored driftvault.

Flask's driver's side door is crumpled. Flask's driver's side window is obliterated. Flask's driver's side arm is missing a considerable chunk of its flesh. Red smoke residue streams into the cab and the door dangles off the frame by one desperate hinge. The driftchiller suddenly appears to be a child's flimsy cardboard imitation of a driftvault, one supercharged shotgun round the only thing required to break the fragile facade.

A distant ringing in his ears and profound shock currently replaces Flask's arm pain. In thanks, he flops sideways onto the bench seat, jerks his secreted pistol from its holster and fires a chorus of ill-aimed ammo through the toothy maw of the shattered window. If his desperate attempt at return fire makes any impact against the fortified foe, Flask has zero time to check. His shoulder-strapped comm is suddenly alive with an incoming transmission.

"So, uh, how's that stalling coming?"

Flask draws bloody fingers away from the nasty wound streaking a red line up his arm. "This is why I don't fookin' ride along!"

"Could be mistaken on this one," Nemo caveats with queer calm in his voice, "but, uh, pretty sure we heard something that sounds an awful lot like, well, gunfire." A pregnant pause elapses. "You got shot, didn't you?" A second expelled shotgun round, this one whizzing millimeters past Penelope's viewport, answers Nemo's question for him. "I think Flask's somehow shot," he offers as an aside.

Barely audible through the comm, the bounty hunter's voice is laden thick with incredulity. "Who shot him?"

"The fookin–"

"Driftvault." Flask snaps his head upward; Two-Bit's voice is unexpectedly present and devoid of the comm channel's static. He stands immediately above the prone Flask in his slate gray uniform, one gloved hand flat against Penelope's scratchy bench seat, staring, astounded, out towards their hovering, identical antagonist. "All the moons," he breathes, turning suddenly down toward Flask. "You had one job, mate!"

"Oh, get bloomed, you fooking jabberhead!" Flask snaps in return. "I had forty fooking jobs, didn't I? You're thinking of yourself, like, with your blooming fooking gravitons and all."

Appearing in his opposite fist, Two-Bit waggles his handheld graviton in Flask's face. "I'm the one who did his blooming job!"

Flask waggles his blood-soaked sleeve emphatically towards the standing Two-Bit. "I'm the one they fooking shot!"

Another canister, the third the Karracki gunman had the distinct pleasure of firing that morning, collides interruptively into Penelope's port side. A fashionable new dent, nearly a foot thick, appears in the side of her rear compartment. The entire vehicle is rocked hard enough to practically somersault Flask backward into the opposite door.

Once he's righted himself, Flask lobs another batch of discouraging fire out the window to little visible or audible effect.

"Cap'n," Two-Bit barks, his comm clamped urgently to his mouth, "I'm vizzing at the nitty deal out here. We don't hoof and I mean crackling, Penelope here'll be taking the long fall to the floor, you delly me? Plus," he adds, with the dirtiest of looks at Flask, "you gotta come joy, 'cause our regularly scheduled fucking joystick went and got himself cabbaged."

"We ain't exactly finished in here," Nemo replies shakily. "Four or fives boxes to go."

With the tortured shriek of metal grinding metal, the valiant last hinge connecting the dangling door to the driftchiller's frame finally gives way. Its rivets pop free and the door itself bounces against the cab's floor a moment before tipping out of sight. As his only tenuous cover plummets away, Flask barely has enough time to scramble over the bench seat. He crashes into the stacked piles of strongboxes in Penelope's rear compartment. The shotgun fires a fourth time and the passenger side window sprays its glass against the bank's nearest wall.

"Coming!" Nemo reports cheerfully.

From his new vantage in the rear compartment, Flask catches a fleeting glimpse of the bank's interior, through Penelope's open loading doors. Nemo fans himself with his uniform's gray cap and trots amiably toward them. Quicksilver, their ruse blown, encourages browbeaten bank employees to load the remaining handful of strongboxes at pistol point. Nemo waves the hat as he boards, the driftmotor dipping slightly to accommodate his weight.

"What seems to be the trouble, boys?" Nemo inquires, in the manner of a pediatrician.

Two-Bit cranes as far over the bench seat as he dares to exchange fire with the distant driftvault. He shoots Nemo a sardonic look. "Have a vizz, why don'tcha?"

In response, Nemo shrugs, tosses his hat aside and plants both hands on the top of the bench seat.

"Wait, don't–" Flask attempts to warn him.

With utter heedlessness, he hops over and settles himself into Penelope's driver's seat –in full, uninterrupted view of both the gun-port and its shotgun-wielding occupant. Nemo gives the floating driftvault one confused glance, cranes a look back over his shoulder towards Flask and calmly shifts Penelope into reverse. The shotgun manages to loose two shots and, any second, Flask anticipates seeing the contents of Nemo's head decorate the scratchy wool of the bench seat. Instead, one shot clatters into the vehicle's bumper and the other misses Penelope entirely, a seemingly impossible feat.

As Nemo calmly repositions the driftchiller to allow them a straight shot out of the loading dock, Flask catches eyes with Two-Bit a moment.

"He still fookin' does that, eh?"

"I guess so."

"Hey, so," Nemo poses, his head and shoulder turned to accommodate Penelope's backward motion, "I guess I thought that driftvault, the one out there, was supposed to be knocked outta commission today?"

"It was _s'pposed_ to be," Two-Bit's quick to condemn.

"It _was_ s'pposed to be," Flask agrees virulently. "That little Nyvo gobshite what works in their garage gave me his fookin' word, up and down, like. I had everything all fookin' arranged, I did!"

"Did you?" Nemo comments, almost uninterested. "I wasn't really paying attention."

In short order, Penelope is appropriately arranged, ready to jettison straight outward from the loading dock at a moment's notice. Nemo spends another moment counting strongboxes with extended fingers and inaudible muttering. The distant shotgun inexplicably unable to land a successfully damaging blow this whole time. Nemo, when satisfied, forgoes his comm to simply shout through the vehicle's rear compartment. "Moira!" he calls in the voice of an impatient parent. "We're leaving!"

Seemingly without need of reply, Nemo rams the accelerator and Penelope, poor old girl that she is, sputters once, twice. On her third attempt, she motors unevenly forward, propelling away from the bank at any alarming rate. Flask stares, deeply confused, at the shrinking image of Quicksilver, attired in her stolen bank uniform, on the edge of the loading dock.

His unworded question is immediately answered when, with six feet of running start, the bounty hunter bounds off the extreme end of the loading dock. She sails over the growing distance between bank and Penelope and comes to a crouched landing upon the latter. The resulting dip from the driftmotor is severe enough to flip even Flask's stomach.

Rising from her crouch, Quicksilver returns a bloodless, deadpan version of Nemo's original "Coming!"

The driftvault's barricade is circumvented by, of course, Nemo and his aerial acrobatics. Penelope tips nearly forty-five degrees on her axis and her driftmotor repulses the two craft apart. The contents of her rear compartment – namely Flask, Two-Bit, Quicksilver and twenty some crates of currency – are tossed about willy-nilly.

To save himself from being crushed beneath hundreds of pounds of untraceable cash, Flask scrambles out of the rear compartment. While Two-Bit and Moira are still righting themselves, Flask plops down in the passenger seat, amid a spread of broken glass shards.

"Oi!" Two-Bit protests, peeking into the front seat. "Who keeled and made you shotgun?"

"'cause it's my fookin' caper, isn't it?" Flask shouts back, once again brandishing his wounded arm as evidence. "'cause my arm is fookin' shot, isn't it?"

"Oh, bloom me out," Two-Bit balks, "wouldja quit queeging 'bout that already? They scanty scraped you!"

With Worldshine's scaffolds and starscrapers zooming past through the empty doorjamb, Nemo makes a placid gesture to indicate Flask. "I don't mind if Two-Bit sits up front."

"See?" Two-Bit proclaims petulantly.

"I'm Flask," Flask reminds Nemo gently, planting blood-stained fingers on his chest.

Nemo stares absently at his cousin for too long a moment. "Of course you are."

Catching wise, Two-Bit's mouth gapes open, as though he's undecided somewhere between astonishment and offense. "Did you call _him_ Two-Bit?" he demands, with an accusatory point towards Flask.

"He did," Flask agrees grimly. "He fooking did."

"Fellas." Eyes forward, Nemo makes an excusing gesture with one hand, the other steering the driftchiller at top speed through steamy streets. "You're both dressed the same, you both have silly voices–"

"Silly voices?" Flask scoffs, aghast. "It's you blowbags with the silly voices." He returns Two-Bit's accusatory point. "He's a blooming _jabberhead_ , by all the moons!"

"Least I know how to pronounce the word 'fuck!'" Two-Bit spits.

"Idiots?" The bounty hunter's voice comes as a sudden shock to all three occupants of Penelope's cab. She's somehow audible over the sounds of the open driftmotor, Gallow whipping past and all the name-calling and finger pointing. "Sorry to interrupt, but they're still following."

Peering back through the rear compartment reveals the oncoming driftvault, perfectly framed by the yawning portal of Penelope's loading bay door. It hangs a respectable enough distance behind to allow the occasional shotgun blast to veer dangerously close or even occasionally clip the driftchiller's edges with a spritz of sparks. Subtle shifts of Nemo's hands, intentional or not, adjusts Penelope's bearing such that the majority of the previously well-aimed bolts are denigrated to narrow misses.

With each occasional hit, however, the whole vehicle lurches spasmodically. Each one forces Flask to reconsider his previous stance about simply stealing a driftvault. Had he known the caper would go south in quite this particular way, he would have opted for thicker armor over increased surreptitiousness.

Standing with defiance practically in full view of the advancing driftvault, with only a smattering of unstowed strongboxes as meager cover, is Nemo's pet bounty hunter. Her splendid pair of silver revolvers shine in the sunlight. Her return fire, carefully placed and carefully timed, splashes weakly against the authentic diamond-smelted Niasi steel of that implacable driftvault. The viewport, Flask observes, is no more susceptible, deflecting and ricocheting supercharged ditrogen until kingdom come.

Two-Bit matches his gaze. "The bloom? Thems is some plucky crushers," he comments, not without a certain impression in his voice.

"Sub-contract, this firm," Flask reminds. "They lose a shipment, the losses come outta their end. Hence," he splays his fingers condescendingly, "them still following."

"Whaddya think," Nemo proposes, "shake 'em beneath?"

"Worth a shot."

Without further preamble, Nemo cranks the steering yoke upward and Penelope plummets, her forward view of Worldshine's edifices replaced by the limitless fathoms below. A mere moment's descent brings the demarkation grate skyrocketing up to meet them. With a nauseating yank of the controls, Nemo twists Penelope to squeeze perfectly between one of the twenty-foot by twenty-foot thermosteel lattices.

The ambient shift is both immediate and drastic – from generous lanes and monolithic heights to punishing alleyways and abyssal depths. Once again, they were skidding through the dusty, confused tangle of Underglow, Nemo at the wheel, Flask riding shotgun and with catwalks, clotheslines and all the other assembled impedimenta to falter the unaccustomed authorities in close pursuit behind. For his part, Flask's cousin could be ten years younger, exploiting his craft's superior maneuverability to help compensate for its easily damaged hull.

For their part, the driftvault seems likewise immune, not just to Moira's projectiles, but to whatever obstacles Nemo attempts to intersperse between them. The opposing driver makes zero attempt to avoid any of them and chooses instead to simply plow, unharmed, through rotted fabric, broken chain link and rusted thermosteel alike.

"Here's a flash," Two-Bit shouts between blasts of his gripped Tigress. "How's about, 'stead of, I don't know, sittin' there winging your bloomhole off 'bout your meat wound, you tryta raise Abraham on the comm, get some blooming buzz support?"

"Maybe I will," Flask resolves, already reaching for the transceiver dangling off Penelope's dashboard and deciding better against sticking his tongue out at Two-Bit.

This broadwave comm, the one Odisseus had scavenged from the junk halo, would've been ancient when the Imperium was young. It takes Flask a number of awkward moments fiddling with one good hand to dial the frequency for his trusty police scanner.

"This don't bode well," the weatherbeaten voice crackles through the inset speakers.

"That you, old timer?" Flask addresses the static. "Do you copy?"

"The only reason I can speculate," Abraham reasons, "that ye'd be callin' 'twould be if somethin' went wrong. Police scanner wrong."

Nemo pauses before suggesting conspiratorially, "This coulda been part of the plan."

"For the record," Flask states, "it ain't."

"You got your equipment on hand?"

"Aye?" Abraham confirms tentatively.

"Need you to keep that one good eye of yours out." Nemo is cavalier, unaffected by high speed pursuit or shotgun fire. "Chances are, we'll be drawing a modest amount of heat before too much longer here and we'd sure appreciate a heads-up."

"Where are ye?"

"Uh–" Nemo's eyes dart about for a landmark, a nicety Flask, lifelong resident, need not bother with.

"Cannery District. Ninth and Tymoko."

"So noted," Abraham grimly reports. "Ye'll hear from us soon, I've little doubt." Before Flask can ask what he means by "us," he detects the muffled sound of several undecipherable Ortoki growls in the background of Abraham's feed. The channel hisses out.

Metal wheezes, Penelope lists lurchingly left and Quicksilver's voice is raised in polite annoyance somewhere aft. "Nemo? Could you maybe do some of your ace pilot shit and stop flying in such a straight moons-damned line?" Pistol fire staccatos her request. "It's doing wonders for their aim."

"Fair enough." As advertised, Nemo executes some ace piloting and weaves Penelope across a bisecting side street and down a parking shaft fast enough to dribble Flask's equilibrium against both sides of his skull. His ears battle mightily against popping and his eyes are accosted by an overwhelming cascade of lights. In all the parking shaft's confusion, Flask nearly misses the skidding scrape and the scarlet muzzle flash that signifies the driftvault's presence behind them.

Gravity greatly aiding her speed, the driftchiller emerges from the parking shaft mere seconds after entering. A sharp tug of the yoke starts Penelope braiding through the maze of pillars that keeps the parking compound aloft.

They're each columns of solid thermosteel, thick enough to crumple Penelope like a Bubble can upon collision. The pillars shuffle past the viewport at a disheartening speed, Nemo tapping bored thumbs against the yoke's leathern grips.

Some small amount of distance is gained on the pursuing driftvault. They're content to only partially avoid the interspersed columns and compensate for their lack of maneuverability by simply demolishing the edges and corners they can't avoid.

Whatever little distance from their pursuer Nemo's aerial stunts buy them are more or less nullified by the time they scoot out into a broader avenue Flask predicts to be Seventeenth.

Three unwelcome sounds stack against Flask's ears from the rear compartment. A shotgun blast impacts on plastolieum. A startled Two-Bit shrieks. Streams of rippling paper disappear from distance.

"Moons," someone curses and Flask glances behind to spot Two-Bit, hunched over a ruptured strongbox, attempting to stem the squall of unstowed currency.

"We keep this up," Quicksilver comments, "we'll be broke, incarcerated and dead."

"Have you tried," Nemo suggests in a manner he must assume to be helpful, "just killing the one with the shotgun?"

Even through the whirlwind of escaping cash, Flask has a pretty decent view of the driftvault still hounding their trail. The gun-port is perfectly insulated, its single possible angle of attack the tiny opening through which the gunner slots his weapon. "I mean, he's–" Flask begins to object.

"I did that. Twice." Quicksilver grunts noncommittally. "Seems they pack them in there like sardines."

"This sure woulda been habbier," Two-Bit muses, flipping a bleeding strongbox onto its face, "if you'd fangled actually rooning that driftvault, eh, Flask?"

"That weren't my fault and you blooming know it, Switch," Flask counters, face flushing with either anger or embarrassment, even he isn't certain which. "Boy promised me he uncoupled the main input relay and that should–"

He suddenly stops, struck with an improbable notion. These driftvaults were tough old birds. Assuming his otherwise trustworthy Nyvo associate did, in fact, sabotage the driftvault, there was an infinitesimal chance the sabotage may not have taken, may not have impeded the vehicle enough to keep it grounded. There was an even more infinitesimal chance they might be able to finish the job themselves right now.

Nemo takes his eyes off the path before them. "Shoulda?"

"Shoot the grille," Flask blurts suddenly, shaken from his reverie.

Two-Bit's face crinkles. "The grille? Like, the cheesegrater?"

"The grille, like. On the fooking front." Flask takes a breath to steady himself and to adjust the clutch on his wounded arm. "Boy says he uncoupled that relay and that's where you'd find it. It probably ain't gonna–"

He's interrupted by the sharp retort of an AccCo 665 Lawman and the pleasant sight of the pistol making actual purchase by shattering the driftvault's slender grille. An interior explosion follows, forceful enough to buckle the driftvault's hood into a lumpy mess and potent enough to spew red flames from between every adjacent plate. Where once the driftvault's engine was housed, now black smoke pours out. The driftvault veers drunkenly left before nosediving directly into a boarded-up storefront with a shattering of glass and a twisting of thermosteel.

Nemo putters the driftmotor to an audibly relieved stop. Penelope's four passengers share a stunned silence, interrupted only by the compounded city noises and the chattering of the comm.

"Told ya," Flask sneers at Two-Bit who, collecting all the errant bills scattered across the rear compartment, deigns to reply.

"Remind me never to steal anything on a civilized planet again," Quicksilver remarks, simultaneously popping open both chambers to reload her revolvers.

Ever the blind optimist, Nemo only shrugs. "Coulda been worse."

"And that weren't even the real heat, like," Flask attests, inspecting the mess of crusty, dried blood that was his upper arm. "Private contract from ICC, like I said. Those blokes just had a reputation to maintain." He smears a sanguine hand on the bench seat's scratchy wool cover. "Those blokes ain't even cops."

" _They_ sure are," Two-Bit informs dryly, his eyes fixated out the forward viewport.

For the second time that morning, Flask is flooded with that familiar fear that freezes his felonious blood, the anathema to all Underglow's street-level hoodlums. Bearing down on them through Penelope's gunky viewport come a loose quadron of bulky, angular driftcars, complete with blazing lights, whooping sirens and the dreadful initials "GDLE" stamped authoritatively across their hoods and doors.

"This is the Gallwegian Department of Law Enforcement," booms a particularly unfriendly voice from the quadron's vanguard. "You will power down your engines and drop your weapons from the vehicle. Failing to comply in this way may result in your forfeiting any and all rights to an attorney, a speedy trial or due process. Do you understand?"

All four of the driftchiller's occupants share another moment of stunned, exasperated or infuriated silence.

As one motion, Nemo guns the engine and pulls punishingly back on the yoke. Penelope launches upward at as rakish an angle she can conceivably manage without pouring strongboxes out her open rear doors. She rockets up almost a full echelon, bringing her parallel with the crosshatched grate that separates Underglow from the Arrival Tier. At this height, she coasts cleanly over the oncoming police quadron by nearly a hundred feet.

The prowlers follow awkwardly behind, evidently embarrassed to have been outmaneuvered by a cheap imitation of a driftvault. They skid, screech and sloppily pull themselves around to give chase, their sirens all the more distorted by their sudden changes in direction.

"Wasn't this also somebody's job?" Two-Bit caterwauls from the rear compartment. "Am I the only one on this whole blooming caper," he emphasizes his point with a handheld graviton, "who actually _did_ their blooming job?"

"Abraham!" Nemo shrieks in the general direction of the comm. "I've got some awfully vivid memories of me asking you to keep us abreast of this shit!"

Some reply comes buzzing and hissing through the speakers but, under the peal of the sirens, Flask, nor seemingly anyone else, can actually make it out. Leaning forward, grasping the dial in two bloody fingers, Flask spikes the radio's volume.

"–weld it up, boyo!" comes Abraham's incensed voice. "I can't hardly keep abreast of yer blooming position, can I, what with ye zipping all around like ye undoubtedly are!"

"We're on Seventeenth, heading south past–" Flask rattles off.

"Seventeenth?" Nemo mutters, seemingly to himself.

"Never mind where ye are now!" Abraham complains. "Minute I get ye triangulated, ye'll be somewhere bloomin' else!"

Two-Bit leans forward onto the bench seat to ensure his voice can be heard over the comm. "Can you not scramble 'em?"

"I can scramble a car or two, aye, but that ain't like to be yer salvation here." A weighty pause before Abraham portentously adds, "I don't think ye boys realize just how popular ye've become."

On cue, the humming sound of an approaching driftmotor warns Flask of the additional pair of prowl cars, dropping down through the grated framework to flank Penelope on either side, seconds before the loudspeaker does. Nearly deafened by the sudden blaring of repeated arrest orders, Flask is practically relieved when Nemo tips the driftchiller into a heart-stopping dive. His next righthand bank is so jarring, the Captain nearly falls out of the driver's seat and through the empty doorjamb. Behind them, those irritating half dozen squad cars struggle to keep pace with his erratic driving.

"Tell ye what," Abraham poses moments later, as they scream down some claustrophobic alleyway Flask doesn't recognize, "I got the code for the ol' Jolly Roger memorized. Maybe," he theorizes with growing certainty, "I could run up the colors on a counter-frequency to the scanner's own."

"Uh, sure," Nemo endorses. "Do that, maybe."

"Be awful public, though," Abraham considers. "Think ye could stall for a few minutes while I make the requisite calculations?"

"I'd be delighted. Give us a holler when you're ready?"

"Aye aye, Cap'n."

Flask remains dubious. "The colors?"

"The colors." Nemo nods absently, his attention, for once, focused on his surroundings. "Virus he cooked up a few years back. Shorts out their screens in favor of this, uh, coat-of-arms thingie, of sorts."

"Skull-and-crossbones," Two-Bit adds, crossing both forearms under his neck and pulling a face.

"It's a pirate thing," Nemo dismisses offhand.

A pair of gentle impacts, seemingly harmless when compared to the supercharged shotgun of their previous pursuer, nudges Penelope lightly in the aft. "Well, they've started shooting," Moira reports, sarcasm heavy in her voice. "Anyone object to a little return fire?"

"Knock yourself out," Nemo shouts approvingly back toward her. "Got some time to kill," he adds quietly, more to himself, as he scans each passing cross-street.

Before Flask can ask Nemo what he's looking for, Penelope is tearing a furious left. Strongboxes slam against the opposite wall of the rear compartment and Flask splays against the passenger-side door, nearly tipping headfirst out the window.

They rumble through the industrial cracks between Underglow's starscrapers. Plumes of yellow steam billow upward from exposed vents. The following howl of the prowlers' sirens distort and echo hauntingly in the cavernous space.

Through the ditrogen-scorched rearview imager, Flask watches Quicksilver's summoned saffron bolts poke, prod and pester the middle squad car of the three jockeying for position behind them. She's visibly pleased to find them considerably softer than the dearly departed driftvault.

Electing the viewport as their weakest point, Quicksilver proceeds to batter a clean hole through the center of driver's side with a trio of canisters, each shot perfectly aimed to weaken the point of the previous one's impact. The fourth laser bolt, sailing unimpeded through the hole its three predecessors created, finds a home in the heart of the prowler's driver. The purple-skinned humanoid is astounded enough by this feat of markswomanship to audibly scream.

The sudden, unexpected murder of this driftcar's driver predicts dire consequences for the squad cars on either side, especially while flying at such speed through such cramped space. With several more sparks, screams and skidding, three of the pursuing police are explosively dealt with.

Nemo clears the cagey crevice and they've suddenly surfaced on Saqiroy Street, a stone's throw from the old stomping ground. Their adversaries, like worms from the woodwork, continue to manifest as stout squad cars, brandishing blaring police strips and standard issue pistols through open windows.

One prowler is bold enough to position itself flush with Penelope's lefthand side. Its passenger side officer, a brawny Braaca, is bold enough to threaten Nemo with her outstretched handgun.

In response, Nemo simply scowls, does exactly nothing to avoid the pair of searing red laser bolts that harmlessly burn holes into the ceiling and shucks Penelope hard enough to port to remind the police craft of her weight. Thermosteel scrapes thermosteel and still more sparks fly. The squad car is averted off, mere seconds before wrapping its bumper around the stem of a traffic light, launching both inside forward fast enough to shatter the viewport.

As they pass, Nemo blows a raspberry through the doorless gap.

Flask whites his knuckles against the passenger handle and attempts to calculate. With Moira claiming three and Nemo one, only two of the original half a dozen squad cars ought to remain. This, of course, said nothing for those additional two cars, slanted together some distance ahead, to create an impromptu barricade against further progress up Saqiroy Street.

Nemo takes no notice, too busy, for whatever reason, scanning the shops and storefronts to either side of the high speed chase. Both Flask and Two-Bit do take notice, however, and choose to voice this at precisely the same moment and with precisely the same tone.

"Nemo..." they utter in unison, an expression, Flask estimates, that Two-Bit now employs nearly as much as he and Stubb had a decade earlier.

When prompted, Nemo cranks the parking brake practically erect. Penelope bucks into an almost instantaneous, hissing halt and nearly tosses the unbuckled Two-Bit over the bench seat and onto their laps. This done, Nemo peeks his head and shoulders out the driver's side expanse a second too late. The blurred form of their pursuers races past their suddenly still quarry, unable to react fast enough to properly apply their own brakes. The four squad cars, two screeching to stop, two skidding to escape, collide in a moment of telling incompetence for the Gallwegian Department of Law Enforcement. Flask must squint and look away from the fanfare of flame and twisted metal, it's so bright.

"Oh, I think they closed it," Nemo bemoans, scanning up and down the strip, his face half-cast by the explosion's rippling orange light. "Did they close down Tentacles By Graxgor?" he poses accusing toward a speechless Flask. When he makes no reply save for a bewildered shrug, Nemo pouts his lip, disengages the parking brake and motors Penelope obliviously forward. The starscrapers on either side still smoke and smolder from the crash barely a minute old. "That blows."

They skedaddle along unmolested for nearly fifteen whole seconds before more of Worldshine's Finest grace the car chase with their presence. Another full quadron, hauling driftmotor up Twenty-Third, moves to intercept them with pistols afire, strips awhirl and sirens engaged.

The combined commotion of loudspeaker, siren and pistol fire nearly drowns out the sound of Abraham's voice wheezing through the dashboard's inset speakers.

"Well, that's either the colors or some other twenty-eight digit number I got memorized, so," comes the Grimalti's vote of confidence. "Guess we'll be momentarily findin' out, won't we?"

"Guess so," Flask confirms weakly.

"Think ye can disappear on a count of three?" Abraham presumably addresses to Nemo.

"You know they closed down Tentacles By Graxgor?" Nemo relates moodily, his lip set firmly in its previous pout. "Shit's all boarded-up. With a sign and everything."

Flask opens his mouth to attempt steering his cousin back on course. A frightening roar of feedback from the comm, a burst Flask belatedly realizes to be some Ortoki protest, beats him to the punch.

"You loved that place!" Nemo continues to argue, police driftcars swirling about behind them now as they blaze onto Twenty-Third Avenue.

"Three," Abraham counts, seemingly as heedlessly as Nemo.

Odisseus' reply, chopped and mangled by distance and static, isn't quite intelligible to the bemused Flask, ten years out of practice with his Ortoki. He does discern the words "time" and "place".

"Two," Abraham continues, surprisingly calm, considering how ignored he is.

Nemo's voice reads with a little honest offense. "I cannot believe you aren't on my side about this."

"One."

The driftmotor changes octaves as Nemo upturns Penelope at nearly a ninety degree angle. The viewport points unerringly toward the demarkation grate. The rear compartment is usurped by a chaos of tossed strongboxes and crewmen.

Through the inverted rearview imager, Flask is afforded the briefest of glimpses at their four followers. Confused cops squint at the confused consoles of their squad cars, all hopefully displaying nothing but Abraham's beamed-in pirate sigil.

Seconds later, Penelope clears the demarkation grate by such a narrow margin as to actually scrape her roof against the grate's thermosteel. That elicts a second's startled scream from everyone aboard, Nemo included.

No sooner have they surfaced in the Arrival Tier than Nemo's swung Penelope completely around and bolted back down Twenty-Third, in the complete opposite direction they were headed a moment ago and three hundred feet below. Their daring, vertical roundabout seemingly successful, Flask is unsure whether to collect his wits or his breath first.

Their gambit doesn't prove truly successful, though, until no pursuant police materialize through the grate to give further chase. For good measure, Nemo weaves the driftchiller through a few approximate side streets and alleyways, shaking the last possibility of any tail, before ducking Penelope back down into Underglow.

Quicksilver's the first to break the silence. "That cannot have worked."

Two-Bit, pivoting about to spy through all available windows and vantage points, frowns condoningly. "It sure vizzes like it has."

"My arm hurts," Flask finds himself carping quietly.

"My estie suggests, however," Two-Bit continues, ignoring him, "we oughta have twenty-four strongboxes and I'm only vizzing twenty-three. Conject we lost one somewhere back there."

"Not to mention our cover," Quicksilver remarks grumpily.

"Hm?" Nemo grunts, mind clearly zottibles away.

"The colors? The skull-and-crossbones?" Quicksilver mocks Two-Bit's previous gesture with crossed wrists under her chin. "You think plastering that calling card you and Abraham are so blooming proud of all over a botched bank heist on Gallow won't have its repercussions?" She sheathes both pistols in one motion. "Ten-to-one, Xo'll drop the pin right back on us."

"It ain't botched." Nemo flaps a hand in the general direction of the rear compartment. "That's 5.6 million in hard cash back there, is it not?"

Two-Bit deepens his frown. "More like 5.3 million, at this point," he corrects quietly and, when his stipulation is met with nothing but scowls from both Flask and Quicksilver, makes a swift addendum, "which, may I jabb, is still more than enough jangle to lavender us in the Offchart for blooming months, you know. Xo's dropped pins notwithstanding."

"My arm hurts."

"Can we not at least agree," Quicksilver sighs, "that, come tomorrow, Gallow oughta be the last place we should be?"

"Agreed," Two-Bit's quick to confirm.

Nemo shrugs noncommittally. "Sure."

His hand stays clenched to his clotted wound. His eyes absorb Arrival Tier's fractured facades as they flick past the destroyed window. Flask, author of this courtesy caper gone quite embarrassingly south, couldn't possibly agree more.

Second Interlude

"Is piracy pointless?"

"No, is the short answer. Fuck you, is the long answer."

"Explain to me why it's not, then."

"It's not because it isn't. Piracy broke Takioro. Piracy founded Bad Space. Piracy is what drove the Imperium outta the Ring with their tails up their bloomholes. Sure, they make noises about 'unsustainable occupations' and 'taxation deficiencies' but the word they mean is 'piracy.' What's most ironic is that, end of the day, Imperium's nothing but pirates themselves."

"Not sure I follow."

"That's the classic MO, ain't it? Century ago, too much pressure comes down on 'em, they're stretched too thin across the Ring and what do they do? They abdicate, tuck tail, like I said, and scamper back within the Midworlds to their precious Inner Sector and you know what? Fine. Good fucking riddance. Few decades and a few wars pass, though, and Bad Space, with all our territory and resources, is suddenly all sexy again. Before long, it's strap on your assault rifles, boys, we're off to shoot the natives and steal their stuff."

"You're referring to Baz now?"

"Or Nos Mantri. Or Jhiron. Or, shit, Twin Telta, even. The list ain't short and it ain't likely to get any shorter anytime soon. Long as they've the biggest cock in the galaxy, long as nobody's the stones to challenge them, the Imperium'll rape and ravage every round planet in the Ring and what, we're supposed to wipe our chins and say 'thanks very much?' Fuck that and fuck your slutty mother too."

"I'd no idea you're so political."

"Guy in my position can't afford to be some hood anymore. I mean, _you_ wouldn't be here, were that the fucking case."

"And Valladia?"

"Valladia's the tool the Imperium's decided to use today. They're tired of watching buhox, carbon petro, lumber, bloom knows what else, profitably change hands in the Ring, zottibles beyond the reach of their meddling. They've got warmongering to pay for, don't they? So, what do they do? They dangle a juicy contract over the heads of every legitimate cargo corp in Bad Space and watch the fuckers jump. Valladia wins out because of course it fucking does and now, Imperium's got hooks, taxes and flags down on ten of the richest independent ports in all the Outer Ring."

"Would you describe all this, then, as delivering them justice?"

"Fuck justice. Justice is for Brock Rocket and His Patriotic Twats. This is about delivering fucking punishment."

"Was punishment always the goal? Where did you get started?"

"Qel Qatar."

"What's on Qel Qatar?"

"Above Qel Qatar, actually and there's a Nanosecond Pizza. Where I saw the 'piracy is pointless' broadcast for the first time."

"Tell me about that."

"Ain't mucha story, really. Fresh offa jailbreak, saw the–"

"You broke outta prison?"

"Another story. Check the status of the HIN _Surimiah_ , if you're curious later."

"Will do."

"Saw the broadcast, made me angry."

"Angry enough to organize all this?"

"Angrier. Didn't all come to me instantly, that'd be lying. What I knew at the time and, remember – this was back when you couldn't warp one system without hearing the fucking buzzwords on every blooming radio station, without reading them on every blooming holoadvert – was that I wanted to take the point of piracy and stab someone through the eyeball with it."

"Heh."

"What?"

"Oh, no, nothing."

"You'd be a fuck of a lot less snide if I threw you out that airlock."

"You're welcome to try. No headline, then, though."

"You don't think 'Nehel Morel Throws Unknown Journalist Into Fwelk's Low Orbit, Worshipped As God' would make headlines?"

"'Unknown Journalist?' You wound me."

"I'll defenestrate you, is what I'll do. Bloom, but I'm still thirsty."

"Where's next? Qel Qatar inspired you, how soon would the full idea form?"

"Soon. Not immediately, again – my first ideas involved going solo, for lack of anything smarter, but what little common fucking sense I had eventually won out. No, it was help I was gonna most need and, in my experience, help in this business don't come without a flat and juicy fee. So, Gallow."

"The bank heist."

"Showed up on your radar, did it?"

"Showed up on everybody's radar. Flashing your colors like that didn't trip your common fucking sense?"

"Said that shit was scarce in me, didn't I?"

"How much you pocket from the bank heist? Six million?"

"Five and none of that was pocketed, least not by me. An expense account's maybe the best way to explain that, in hindsight, something my crew probably would've appreciated more than what I ended up telling them."

"Your crew. That interests me. They take the news well?"

"They didn't take the news at all, matter of fact. Not until much, much later. Thing you gotta understand about my crew is that they're capable but shortsighted. They see danger, they see derring-do, scares 'em off. They want money, they want minimal risk, they want no complications."

"Can't say I'd blame 'em."

"I can. Pain does have that relationship with gain, you realize."

"Crew didn't see things that way?"

"Oh, moons, no. Crew practically skinned me for new fucking hats, soon as they learnt something was up. Can't say as they feel the same way now, of course, but this is what I'm saying about short-sightedness."

"What about this Switch character?"

"You know his fucking name, you cocktease. Two. Bit. Switch."

"According to my sources, he's been a confidant of yours this entire time. Some even claim Two-Bit's the one pulling your strings."

"Them's fighting words, what you're saying to me. You learn two things about me today, okay, it's these two – I don't take orders and killing those who give orders stiffens my boner. Two-Bit Switch is a textbook fixer. It's why I hired him. He solves problems for me, sure, he irons out wrinkles that arise but, believe you me, Two-Bit was just as reluctant as any of the rest of them, soon as he found out. Just needed to bring him into the fold sooner, is all."

"That work out?"

"You tell me. Are we not sitting here, sipping champagne in a private lovepod? Nah, tell you the truth, had I known the shitslide that I would cause, getting this thing off the ground, maybe I woulda handled things somewhat differently."

"You don't say."

"No, never mind. I'm fucking perfect."

Chapter 7

Moira Quicksilver is pretty far from an expert in the field of interstellar drug smuggling. Even she, however, understood that only a moron would attempt to transport contraband drugs across interplanetary borders under the guise of canned fish. If she, a common layperson, recognized this stereotype, certainly those four highly trained Inner Sector customs officers, standing watch over Worldshine's single choke point, would also recognize it.

As one might imagine, she was having difficulty, then, following Flask's logic.

It was, after all, his idea to send them, five known criminals wanted in connection to yesterday's very public bank heist, strolling toward said security checkpoint, their rented driftcart stacked high with cans upon cans of freeze-dried fish.

They were all attired again in street clothes, the five pirates and their contact, and they spread themselves out in a loose circle around the laden driftcart. Moira elects to hang the furtherest back, determined to grant herself enough shooting room should Flask's "tried-and-true" method of moving cash offworld go south. Two-Bit's opposite Moira, Odisseus is directly ahead and Abraham, citing old age, is seated in the driver's seat.

It's Nemo and Flask who spearhead the maneuver. The latter palms a small stack of sporefin sardine tins and extends pleasantries towards the first customs officer, an uncharitable-looking Lhovuss in full body armor.

There's some code, Moira gleans, a correlation between what type of fish is outwardly displayed and what type of narcotic is inwardly contained. Sporefin presumably translated as Spicion. A bathtub-quality sample of same was included inside all five of the tins that Flask passes openly to each of the customs officers, ensconced within a healthy padding of actual fish. These necessary props – both drugs and fish – were acquired thanks to Odisseus and Abraham sniffing around Cannery District the following evening.

An actual expert in the field of interstellar drug smuggling, Flask hadn't seemed remotely concerned about the feasibility of smuggling 5.3 million credits offworld. Righty and Lefty loose in her holsters, Moira remains dubious until this, the eleventh hour.

Watching the Lhovuss pocket the offered bribe and even chuck Flask companionably on the shoulder, Moira realizes how drastically she'd underestimated Worldshine's deep-seeded corruption. On Gallow, it seemed the least suspicious cover for incriminating contraband was simply less incriminating contraband.

Nevertheless, Moira's careful to keep her face neutral as they slide past the security checkpoint and onto the waiting landing platform.

The atrium they pass into could've been cut clean from Takioro's Second Ring and no one would've been the wiser. The corrugated thermosteel box – all grit, graffiti and semen stains – is peopled entirely by bums, beggars, buskers and muggers pretending to be bums, beggars or buskers. Moments after they pass customs, a series of rumbles under their feet signify the disengagement of the lift's docking clamps and its descent begins, dropping the entire chamber hundreds of feet into the moon's crust.

The seven-minute tram ride back through the moon's core would be its own marvel. Powered entirely by godlike electromagnets, the five-car drifttram could evidently transverse the entire breadth of Criia's moon faster than Moira could say "electromagnetic hyperspeed drifttram." How the local government had managed to safely drill a subway tunnel straight through Gallow's mantle, crust and core, not to mention design, construct and maintain the tram itself, she couldn't possibly imagine.

Whatever their methods might have been, seven minutes would whisk _The Unconstant Lover's_ crew, all their luggage and 5 million in untraceable currency from the squalid Worldshine Drifttram Terminal to its pristine cousin, the Dockside Drifttram Terminal.

Flask, wearing his left arm in a sling as an affectation rather than out of any true medical need, would not be joining them.

"Were I in your fooking position, like," he opines to Nemo, when they were far past the earshot of the above customs officers, "I wouldn't even bother with the Ring." He makes a sweeping gesture with his one working hand. "Straight Offchart, you know, and as few jumps as possible."

Nemo, however, pays him with the merest sliver of his attention. His eyes are instead riveted to a scrolling series of holoadverts bleeping and blurting against the lift's far wall.

Too fidgety to notice or comment, Flask continues. "Cash might be untraceable, aye," he mutters, "but they're just as like to get all lateral on you, look for any big cash expenditures galaxywide, you know?"

"Yeah," Nemo deigns to comment.

"What world you got in mind?" Flask presses, raising his cigarette to his lips for the second time in thirty seconds. When no reply is immediately forthcoming, he jabs Nemo's shoulder. "Coz?"

"Oh, uh," Nemo is shaken from his fascination with the irreverent ThumbSmash advertisement, "probably, like you said, one of the Offchart ones. You know, Ald or Quar or, uh, a different Offchart one."

Moira creases her brow. While she couldn't claim the level of familiarity that saltbrotherhood seemed to bestow upon Odisseus, Moira easily qualified as a seasoned student of the many moods, morals and mannerisms of Nehel Morel. She could recognize, at thirty paces, the uncomprehending expression the Captain wore when he not only ignored someone, but when he was actively clueless about what they were talking about.

Seeing as how Flask was attempting to talk exit strategy with him, to re-solidify plans of hideouts and mattresses they'd most likely made months ago, Nemo's abject ignorance could translate into only one thing.

The Captain had absolutely no intention of lying low.

Out of practice at reading between his cousin's lines, Flask takes no notice of this, preferring instead to shuffle his feet and gnash the end of his cigarette between anxious teeth. "Far as I'm concerned, there's nothin' for it, like," he resigns. "I'd entertained thoughts of skipping world too, you know, least until things cool some." Moira detects the merest trace of dangled plea coloring his voice, something wholly unappreciated by the scatterbrained Nemo. "Push comes to shove, though," Flask admits, "I ain't willin' to leave Gallow for any money. That means, 'acourse–"

Nemo earns himself a respite from Flask's prattling, not to mention a considerable berth from bystanders, by drawing his unprecedented firearm and suddenly shooting out the next holoadvert.

Startled commuters scoot aside to allow the maniac his space. Each of the Captain's crewmen, Flask included, open a mouth to voice an objection. They all freeze the words unspoken at the sight of what the advert continues to blinkingly display, below the impressive shatter mark Nemo's laser bolt left behind.

"Visit Beatific Baz!" the juddering hologram exclaims. In three glorious dimensions, it depicts an idyllic coastline fringed by familiar white flora and splashed by endless tides of a tropical sea. The holoadvert, Moira notes, did not depict the fields of exploding repellent, the bloodsucking ecosystem or any of the planet's aboriginal population, the either assimilated or dead Baziron.

No objection is ultimately made as Nemo returns his smoldering pistol to its awaiting holster. Even Flask, mouth agape, doesn't bother resuming his carping the entire lift ride down.

Odisseus ladles the tin's entire contents into his mouth with scooping fangs and eager tongue. He lingers a moment, savoring the saline explosion on his taste buds and picking out the plastosealant package inside. After swallowing the mouthful of sporefin, Odisseus spews out what's left, landing on the tabletop with a furiously wet thud – a thick fold of creased bills, wrapped tightly in sealant and sodden with Ortoki saliva.

Moira ceases thumbing through her own fold of bills to give Odisseus a gruesome grimace. "Must you?"

"You're just jealous," Odisseus replies joyfully. His claws already make impatient work of the next tin on his mountainous stack.

"Jealous," Two-Bit repeats bitterly, scooping bundled cash from its fishy prison across the table. "Yeah. Nailed it."

The Ortoki mechanic made no bones about his disapproval of Flask's ill-fated attempt at the 5 million in hard cash they were currently counting. Indeed, his opinion had been loudly stated, loudly ignored and remained loudly unchanged, even with each of them returned safely to the _Lover's_ mess.

Of Flask's markedly more successful attempt to smuggle said 5 million past Gallwegian customs, on the other hand, Odisseus was the crew's staunchest supporter. He was inclined to blame this on the enormous pile of unclaimed fish at the attempt's end.

None of the weary crew members, Nemo included, expressed any interest in the tins upon tins upon tins of sporefin, jiihu and zegofish, which only left more for the hungry Ortok.

Each of the _Lover's_ four lieutenants labor at the seemingly insurmountable task of counting, re-counting and distributing their considerable prize into its individual shares. Three hundred thousand is lost to Flask's fee, one point six million is lost to the ship's fund and the remainder is then divided into five equal portions.

The crew's oldfangled galley table of weathered Ujad mahogany is stacked, stocked and surrounded by the cheerful cans of freeze-dried fish. Each one contains both several hundred credits and a mouthwatering morsel for Odisseus.

While he'd gleefully volunteered to spearhead the seafood portion of the chore, both Abraham and Moira'd quickly voted to handle the actual currency. This left Two-Bit, his hands safeguarded in a pair of klutzy vacuum mitts, as Odisseus' unwilling fish-unwrapping accomplice.

The Captain was, quite mysteriously, nowhere to be found when manual labor was suddenly called for. Most likely puttering around in the helm was Odisseus' best guess.

"Ald'd be me bet," Abraham opines suddenly, somehow able to lick his thumb to better count cash and maintain his calabash pipe firmly between his wide lips. "Quiet, outta the way, ain't got them nasty stinksnakes what Ond's got."

"Ald's," Two-Bit interjects, "something of a no-go for me, actually."

Odisseus pauses before dumping a tin's contents, fish and currency both, into his mouth. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," Two-Bit nods. "Bad juice with one particular liz joint."

"Second choice then'd be Gren," Abraham downshifts smoothly, flicking his way through his latest stack. "Little more populated," he allows, "little more accessible, but–"

Two-Bit pulls an over-exaggerated cringe. "Ex-tomato of mine's a mayor or something out there, I hink."

The Grimalti, stymied, stammers out an "Erm–"

"Yon," Moira tries as a sudden suggestion to Two-Bit from across the table.

"Sweets on me maggie," Two-Bit reports, tapping his left temple with the thick fingered mitt.

"Bril," Odisseus offers next, Moira's translation of which causes Two-Bit to ponder absently a moment.

"Bril's–" he begins, stopping himself almost immediately. "No, hold up." He shakes his head vigorously after a moment's more consideration. "Nag, Bril's out. Owe somebody serious jangle there."

"How'd ye get to be persona-non-grate on e'ery damn Offchart world comes to mind?" a mystified Abraham puts to Two-Bit.

His answer is accompanied by the most innocent of shrugs. "I had a bad month."

Moira slaps her handful of cash down atop one of the mounting six piles scattered across the table. "There's Tarson to rendezvous with first."

Odisseus grunts. "I'd forgotten about Tarson."

"Love," Two-Bit addresses to Moira, ensuring that, no matter what he has to say, she's certain to ignore him, "it were a fluffy flash and all that, but were I this guy you'd never see me again. Guy's got a million credits in his pocket, he could be anywhere in the galaxy; at this point, motherbloomer's got carte blanche."

"Lad ain't wrong there," Abraham admits.

"He'll show," Moira threatens. "If I ask, he'll show."

"I wouldn't." Two-Bit jabs a thumb toward Abraham. "He wouldn't." He converts the outstretched thumb to an outstretched finger towards Moira. "Bloom, if it was us asking, you wouldn't show."

"We're not asking. I'm asking."

"Yeah and what I'm jabbing is," Two-Bit explains, frustration finally tinging his voice, "he's a bounty hunter. This whole plan of yours revolves around him not being a bounty hunter, and he's a bounty hunter."

In order for the Surimiah Slip to adequately satisfy the forces of law, order and Huong Xo, somebody, some lucky bounty hunter, would actually have to catch them. Enter Tarson: a Jhironese ex-cop, middling bounty hunter, and an old understudy of Moira's. The original arrangement was for Tarson to nominally collect their one-million-credit bounty and, once the _Surimiah_ was slipped, to reconvene and redistribute that million into six equal shares.

Moira herself had been particularly amused at the thought of collecting their own bounty, more as a means to thumb their noses at Xo than out of any real desire for the actual cash. Whether or not Tarson would honor the original arrangement, however, seemed to be a matter of some debate.

Before Moira can muster a counterargument, however, Nemo blusters into the room. His hands are preoccupied with wrangling a confusion of charts and his attention is focused solely on making sense of them. He takes no notice of his counting crew, making instinctively for the chiller. When he's closed to within a few feet, Odisseus recognizes his reading materials as Abraham's moth-eaten navigational charts, a fact not lost on the Grimalti.

"What do ye think ye're doing with those?"

Lingering in the galley doorway, the Captain doesn't take his eyes from the grasped charts. He acknowledges Abraham's presence with only a nudge of his posture. "Oh, we got clearance, I'm trying to figure out a heading – how in the fuck is this even read?"

"Boyo, sit down afore ye do yerself a further injury." He extends a open palm to receive the charts, a gesture Nemo flat doesn't notice. "What heading ye need?"

Odisseus cranes an inch closer to Moira to inquire in sotto voice. "Where do you think we'd find Tarson?"

It's nearly in unison that they respond, Nemo answering Abraham's question and Moira answering Odisseus'. "Takioro."

The Captain eyes his first mate. "Tarson?"

The first mate eyes her Captain. "Afterburn?"

This accord struck, Nemo relinquishes the charts into Abraham's capable hands. He chucks the Grimalti companionably on the shoulder. "Takioro, then, old sport."

Odisseus expectorates another package of cash onto the table, much to Two-Bit's obvious displeasure. "This," he barks towards Nemo, "would normally be the point where I'd argue against both Takioro and Afterburn, but fish hath dulled my temper into magnanimousness and I advance no such argument."

Nemo grunts some affirmative. The chiller voices general protest to being opened. Two-Bit peels Odisseus' latest deposit from the center of the table with his triple-thick gloves.

"Hey," Nemo comments a moment later, his enunciation mangled by a chewed something, "whatcha doin'?" His pointed finger indicates the table's contents, the crew's efforts for the past odd hour or so. His voice indicates newfound depths of ignorance, as though only now noticing their labors.

"Janking up the jangle," Two-Bit supplies, matter-of-factly. "Mathematicals oughta be, with the gantine's fund accounted for–"

"Oh, no, no," Nemo objects, a look of sudden embarrassment crossing his face. "We're not deducting a third for the ship's fund." He waves a generalizing gesture over the entire table. "That's gotta be in five equal shares of a million each."

A moment of baffled silence passes amongst all assembled. No amount of fish could make Odisseus magnanimous enough to neglect the ship's fund. He opens his mouth to object, but Two-Bit precedes him. "Well, I mean, that's awful fluffy of you, Cap'n," he stammers, somewhat bashfully. "I mean, strictly jabbin', the _Lover_ weren't really involved in the caper, so, I guess it makes a certain–"

"I," Nemo interjects cautiously, "wouldn't thank me yet."

All four of the _Lover's_ lieutenants freeze. Odisseus' call for clarification follows an ominous pause. "What do you mean?"

"Those five shares aren't for us," Moira blurts. "Are they?"

The Captain swallows whatever he was chewing hard. "Not immediately."

"Not immediately?" Odisseus growls out of clenched teeth. "Meaning 'no?'"

"Meaning 'no,'" Nemo confirms a second later.

The news seems to fully fluster Two-Bit. "Oh. Well. Okay, then. Well. Er..."

Odisseus hangs his head and plants both paws firmly on the table. "Of course. Of course," he mutters, his voice tight with both fury and resignation. "There was no way something like this wasn't going to happen." He swipes another tin of sporefin off the dwindling pile to his right and claws it open in two swift motions. "Fish is all mine, then. You can get fucked." He levels a sodden claw directly at his embarrassed saltbrother. "I'll fight you, Nehel Morel."

"You'd win," Nemo concurs.

To punctuate this point, Odisseus empties the tin into his yawning mouth.

Moira's posture, volume or timbre doesn't change with her accusations. "We know why we came to Gallow. We know you've been in cahoots with Flask since Qel Qatar. We know you've no plans to hide out anywhere." Chewing, the Ortok once again almost objects on this point, but Moira spreads her arms and continues nonetheless. "Care to cut the buhoxshit?"

From abashed to arrogant in four seconds flat, Nemo pockets both hands and tips forward on his toes, like an impatient toddler. "Pretty smooth, huh?" he allows himself, with that "guilty-as-charged" smile ghosting across his face.

"We're having this conversation, so, no," Moira deadpans.

He indicates the room with a lazy swing of his finger. "I tricked all you guys."

Two-Bit words the only congratulations. "No, yeah, whoo, hurray. You boozled us."

"Well?" Moira prompts.

Nemo takes his sweet time gathering his thoughts. "This isn't gonna make any sense to you now–"

"Good," Moira grunts.

"–and I know what I'm about to ask is historically a bad idea–"

"Of course."

"–but you're gonna need to trust me. This once. I swear." He goes overboard on the pacifying gestures as he explicates. "I do have a plan, there is a purpose for all this, but if I tell you now, well, that would sorta spoil everything. How about–"

"How about 'go fuck yourself'?" Moira counteroffers. "How about I shoot you, we take the money that we've earned and then watch Odi mangle your corpse?"

Nemo appears entirely ill-equipped to parry this suggestion until Abraham, quiet this whole exchange, comes to his rescue. "Ye do that, we'd never know what he's plannin'."

The Grimalti's timely intervention earns him a grateful snap-and-point from his Captain. "Smart."

"Know what I just flashed on?" Two-Bit comments flatly. "Flask got scored. He got his share, so. You know, there's that."

"An interesting point," Moira piggybacks off Two-Bit's realization. "Five equal shares, you said, a million each?"

Apparently sensing entrapment, Nemo begins , as casually as he can, edging backward, step by step, toward the door. "Uh, yes."

"And no one in this room will receive a share?"

"Uh, no."

"Begs the question, then," Moira concludes. "Which lucky five, among the galaxy's trillions, _will_ be the recipient of our hard-fought cash?"

Standing in the doorway, seconds away from his ignominious exit, Nemo steeples his fingers to make his final plea. "Can we just get to Takioro? Tell you what, we get to Takioro, everything's gonna make so much more sense."

"Takioro?" Moira poses archly.

"Takioro. You have my blooming guarantee," Nemo avows.

With a whirl of snapping duster, the Captain beats his hastiest retreat down the betweendecks corridor. He's off to parts unknown but certainly separated by several layers of reinforced teltriton from his seething crewmates.

A pause pregnant enough to give birth passes amongst the four pirates. They sit in agree-upon stillness, as though the thickening of the plot around them would make their slightest actions sluggish.

Odisseus chews unhappily. Two-Bit gazes despondently at his mountains of lost capital. Moira stares daggers down the hallway, as though debating her odds at pegging the fleeing Captain the back with a pistol. Only Abraham seems unaffected, cockling and creasing Nemo's conflagration of charts back into its proper shape. Eventually, he rises to his stubby feet.

"Any objections?" he tenders to the room, gaining a certain grandiosity in the action. Whatever stake Abraham held in this whole affair, Odisseus couldn't fathom – the cantankerous old Grimalti could prove as indecipherable as the Captain could.

"Gotta touch base with Tarson anyway," Moira evaluates, not removing her gaze from the hallway or the departing Nemo. "Certainly gonna need his million now."

Abraham sucks in the breath needed to conclude the matter, but is interrupted by Two-Bit flying forcefully to his feet, with enough dynamism to rattle the entire table and everything on it. With two violent efforts, he yanks the sodden vacuum mitts off both of his hands, clatters them onto the center of the table and stomps from the room, seeming in that moment like nothing so much as a petulant child, sentenced to bed without supper.

Watching him go, Odisseus vomits another package of reneged cash, swallows the mouthful of sporefin and paws up the next awaiting tin.

Two-Bit Switch wasn't bothered about the money. Of course he could have used the cash. One million in hard currency would be precisely the sort of capital he'd need to convert his daydream caper-to-end-all-capers into a job worthy of presenting to the _Lover_ and her crew. That wasn't what currently stuck in his craw.

What bothers Two-Bit most, as he storms down the abovedecks corridor, is Nemo's blithe indifference to the crew's morale. Far be it from he to suddenly wax sentimental, but here they were, barely having escaped Gallow with their lives, their freedom and even the payday in tow. Now, mere hours later, they were expected to simply wipe their chins, say "thank you" and surrender all their hard-earned winnings without so much as a "by your leave"?

Two-Bit wants answers. After a week's worth of holding his tongue and tugging his forelock around Nemo's disconcertingly subtle scheming, he has every intention of banging on the Captain's door and demanding those answers.

He knocks thrice, awaits a reply, knocks thrice more and is seconds away from blustering off towards the helm in search of the errant Nemo when the muffled reply comes from within. "Yes'm?"

"A word, Cap'n?" Two-Bit makes little effort to mask his contempt.

"Uh..." comes the voice's closest approximation to a reply. "Yes," it resolves a moment later. "Um. Yes." Another pause follows. "One moment?" it stipulates at last.

Thirty more seconds find Two-Bit still waiting before the door to Nemo's personal quarters. Two-Bit briefly imagines him crawling out a porthole and scampering away from responsibility across Dockside's steppe of blinking landing lights. With Two-Bit's knuckles hovering inches before the teltriton, threatening another knock, the door clasp finally releases with a weary hiss.

Two-Bit then finds himself in the presence of Nehel Morel, altered since their meeting two minutes previously by a sudden and unexpected lack of pants.

"You rang?"

His shirt is blessedly lengthy enough to cover any unpleasantness that may dangle free below. The Captain stands in his doorway with all the innocence of a church-goer, crunching into a sphere of uncooked Jowna noodles like it was a Gitterpeach.

Behind him, the darkened interior of his mystery-shrouded quarters is occasionally painted by colors both diffused and vibrant. His holovision set left running and muted, Two-Bit supposes, since no sound, save the Captain's crunching, can be heard from within.

Two-Bit blatantly refuses to comment on the impossibility of Nemo's missing pants, him having less than a full minute's head start on the pursuing Two-Bit. He motors forward instead, savoring his anger.

"That? Down there?" He points a trembling finger toward the floor and, beneath that, the _Lover's_ mess. "What you pulled down there? You can't pull that – not on me, not no more. Not after Gallow and Flask and all that blooming wankery of yours."

If the Captain comprehends, nothing in his expression – guilelessly chewing his dried ball of instant noodles – betrays as much.

Two-Bit continues undeterred. "I weren't gonna jabb nothing, you know, when we first sussed out something were up with you and Flask." He chews his tongue a moment before adding, "It did vex me some, that I'll fess," in the interest of full disclosure. When Nemo doesn't react further, Two-Bit takes the trouble to explain. "Why you didn't come to me straightaway if you wanted a vault job blagged. But, I figger," he grants, with two upraised palms for allowance, "you two got history and, for a jig million each, thought it better to batten down me hatch and jack how it was all gonna play out."

He bestows a brief pause on his argument, for dramatic and respiratory purposes. "But now, with this," he points another accusatory finger towards the beneath mess, "it's become beyond clear that you are scheming something, something blooming big, and you're only too happy to keep me and them at arm's length about it."

Reaction or no, Two-Bit's advanced too far at this point to turn back. He tosses both arms out wide. "Is there something about the way I scheme a job that so peeves you that you can't even be mithered to jank me in your big, mysterious buhoxshit? Did you not like the Surimiah Slip? If you don't like the way I do my quitty, you know, I'd sure fuckin' groof it if you'd just blooming jabb me so."

No answer comes from the munching Captain and frustration shakes Two-Bit's head. "Bloom me out, I thought we had a fluffy little system worked out – you choose the target, I scheme the job – but with this," his voice reaches its peak of irritation, "I wouldn't know the target from the job if you chaveled 'em both up me bloomhole!"

His apple-shaped meal reduced to its core, Nemo motions meaningfully at him with the hunk of remaining Jowna. "You wanna know?"

"You know," Two-Bit blurts, blindsided by the Captain's bluntness, "I hink that I do."

"Okay," Nemo consents cautiously, "but you gotta wait a second."

With that, he was gone, scampering back into the shadowed recesses of his quarters, amid the sounds of shuffling garbage and toppling furniture. Standing both still and surprised, Two-Bit catches occasional glimpses, courtesy of the flashing holovision screen, of his partially-naked Captain, as though in swift search of something.

Wrappers are swept aside, laundry displaced, chairs upended and cluttered counters are rifled through. He turns to toss his Jowna remnants into his awaiting pot, lying discarded atop an accumulation of dirty clothing. When he turns, he then spots Two-Bit, lingering outside, uncertain whether he should enter or ask permission to.

Nemo repeats a beckoning gesture. "You can come in."

Observing the mayhem via short flashes of the holovision, Two-Bit thinks twice before accepting. Morbid curiosity eventually wins out over prudence and he crosses the threshold.

Over the past two years, the Captain's unseen quarters had accrued a certain mystique for Two-Bit. Through the course of his normal duties, the jabberhead had been granted at least glimpses of every other chamber aboard _The Unconstant Lover_ , the two-foot high crawlspace beneath betweendecks and Quicksilver's own quarters both included.

For whatever reason, the Captain was supremely private about his actual living space. Two-Bit occasionally harbored suspicions about what, precisely, he had hidden within, be it buried treasure or insane wife.

The threshold duly crossed, however, he discovers neither – simply a messy room, more spacious than his own living quarters by half, perhaps, but a messy room nonetheless.

Dirty laundry carpets the floor thicker and more efficiently than any true carpet could. Crumpled Jowna packets, moldy fast food containers and dredgy bottles of Gitterswitch break the morass occasionally. Several fixtures of bulky furniture, camouflaged in clutter, ring the room. Of them, Two-Bit's only really able to identify the bed.

The bed – its blankets, sheets and pillows scattered to the four winds – is fully large enough to accommodate not one, but two additional partners. Nemo quite saliently doesn't appreciate this feature, as more piles of junk are his only sleeping companions.

Two-Bit's guess about the holovision had been correct, as well as its predictable programming choices; silenced re-runs of _Quuilar Noxix Wants You Dead or Alive_.

Reruns were a necessary evil with _Noxix_. Gone quite suddenly downhill in the middle of its sixteenth season, the show's eponymous hero disappeared under circumstances not especially mysterious to Two-Bit or the rest of the _Lover's_ crew.

All in all, the Captain's quarters conjure nothing but the helm to Two-Bit's mind, having already seen the effects of Nemo's indolence given four walls between which to expand.

He does note, however, among the maelstrom, a few bizarre items he hadn't expected to see among the Captain's private possessions. A shattered potted plant spills soil across the mattress. A boomerang ball racquet juts, like a scabbarded sword, from the topmost dresser drawer. The graffitied husk of a Zibbian arcade game stands forlornly in the far corner and bears the improbably translated name of _Squishy Squashy Tentacle Wrestling!_

Nemo's search is somehow unsuccessful. He moves with familiar ease about the room, bypassing many stained, wrinkled and yet perfectly acceptable pairs of pants he could don with only a moment's effort. After he stoops once to search within a solitary boot, Two-Bit averts his eyes too late from a fleeting glance of the Captain's bare buttocks.

"I don't suppose there's any squeak of you doin' me a kindie and jabb, pulling on a pair of trows, is there?"

"Eureka!" Nemo exclaims. Peeking between spread fingers, Two-Bit discovers the Captain clasping the familiar brown rectangle of an Iniquity deck in pinched fingers.

"Oh, mate, if you needed a stack–" Two-Bit admits, his hand reaching unconsciously towards the back pocket of his denim, where he, ever the compulsive gambler, habitually kept a spare deck.

"Have a seat," Nemo commands instead, plopping himself onto the bed and gesturing towards a laundry-draped mound that could possibly reveal a chair of some kind, should it choose to shed several layers of skin.

Two-Bit considers Nemo's kind offer. "Think I'll stand, mate."

At this, Nemo only shrugs, his attention focused on dragging an HV tray across the uneven floor to provide a relatively flat surface on which to place his cards. "First things first," Nemo begins peremptorily, spreading out, as he speaks, the makings of a one-player Iniquity game. "Gimme your word you won't say squat to the others. I'm trusting you to go along with this, but if they catch wise, I'll have to endure every flavor of 'are you out of your mind' and 'what were you thinking' imaginable." He raises both eyebrows as he makes his ultimatum. "Time being, lips sealed. Savvy?"

"Savvy," Two-Bit agrees guardedly, excitement mounting despite himself.

"Second things second," Nemo continues, "I'm bringing you in because, at this point, I need your help. I've gone as far ahead on this frankly mad venture as I can without the resources and contacts you provide. My telling you, then, has gotta go hand-in-hand with you agreeing to come aboard permanently." Once again, he pauses in his dealing to fix Two-Bit with those steely gray eyes. "Once I tell you, you're in, better or worse. Savvy?"

Two-Bit nearly voices one of the hundred objections that well in this throat, but once again, burning curiosity, the potential doom of them all, overtakes him.

He consents with a grunting "Savvy."

Nemo gives Two-Bit a smile, the sort of smile that harbingers further mischief to come; not only for themselves but, in this case, for the galaxy at large. "Excellent. Here's what I'm thinking."

Chapter 8

Two-Bit Switch was raised and reared by trouble and truancy on the truculent streets of Takioro Defederate Station. As all good station waifs should, he retains a healthy miscreant's fear for the authority represented by Velocity, Takioro's beleaguered Depot-Commissioner.

Since swearing allegiance to the Captain's colors, however, unhappy circumstances had conspired to plant him before the Depot-Commissioner's unimpressed hooves not once, not twice, but on five separate and suitably awkward occasions. Thusly, it was to Two-Bit's imminent relief that, at least on this visit, they brought nothing but a scintillating business offer into Velocity's court, rather than another messy gunfight or pack of bounty hunters.

That said, Two-Bit was imminently more relieved to finally, _finally_ understand what in all the moons of Jotor the Captain was actually planning.

"And who exactly," the Vollocki queenpin poses, the muscles of her bare back simultaneously rearranged by thirty or forty deft fingers, "is gonna cover those damages?"

"All the extra business is gonna cover those damages, way we figure it," Nemo's quick to counter. He reclines luxuriantly on the mountain of ratty, red throw pillows massed in the far corner, his pointer finger picking distractedly at the scabby surface of the nearby wall. "Vel, you gotta understand the sheer numbers we're talking about. If everybody brings everybody?" Something unsatisfactory sticking beneath his fingernail causes him to flick his finger spasmodically towards the center of the room. "Yarba New Year's gonna look like your sixth birthday party."

"I remember my sixth birthday party, actually," Velocity recalls with a sudden wistfulness. "My father choked out the clown."

"Fairly memorable," Nemo appreciates.

The parlor the four of them occupied was almost unbearably hot. Standing in the curtained doorway, Two-Bit benefits the most from any breezes that may choose to wander in from the station street and he still sweats like a Kythene rainforest. He cannot even imagine how Nemo's survived this long, in duster, boots and breeches.

Velocity and her Dho companion, on the other hand, both benefit from the distinct advantage of their unabashed nakedness.

Happy Endings, a Third Ring "massage parlor," made no pretensions of anything but abject brothelry. Each member of its workforce is equally adept at both the delicate art of massage and the somewhat less delicate art of prostitution. The fact Velocity'd scheduled their meeting to coincide with her weekly appointment at the place was either a display of trust – somewhat unlikely – or ambivalence – much more likely – toward Captain Nemo, renowned troublemaker.

Of course, Happy Endings' lobby was positively lousy with the Depot-Commissioner's hired muscle. At the merest whiff of something amiss, they'd have eight unfriendly meathooks to suddenly contend with; not to suggest that their intentions today were anything but honorable.

Cutting out a share for Velocity – a comparatively small and back-end share perhaps – but a share nonetheless, was both Two-Bit's suggestion and just generally good politics. Hopefully, the galaxy would interpret the gesture as giving back to the criminal community.

Considering the amount of heat liable to descend upon Bad Space should they pull this whole madness off, putting the right proceeds in the right pockets amongst the Outer Ring's high and mighty could hopefully save their necks further down the road. This point, despite Nemo's protestations, Two-Bit was rather insistent on, considering their previous history with outraged crime lords.

Upon hearing the full extent of Nemo's mystery plan, Two-Bit had found himself torn between a small handful of seemingly contradictory emotions. He was bamboozled by its sheer scope. He was convinced of the Captain's complete and indisputable insanity.

Mostly saliently, Two-Bit was overcome with the sudden and unquenchable desire to actually see the impossible thing accomplished.

How precisely to best achieve this last goal, he was less certain. He had ideas, undoubtedly – when hadn't he ideas – but the only caper he'd ever planned that could even rival this in ambition remained a nebulous collection of blueprints and sketches on his Attaché.

What Two-Bit was certain of – partially for this reason, partially out of sheer spite – was his ardent desire to succeed in this, to quash any lingering doubt. He, not Flask, was the ideal mastermind for this most grandiose of Nemo's bad ideas, and therefore, by extension, whatever other bad ideas the Captain might conceive of.

Their private conference over the Iniquity deck a great boost to his downcast spirits, Two-Bit had since hell-bent himself on proving to be the perfect accessory after the fact, exactly the tool Nemo needed to achieve his victory.

It was no accident that the first step of his evolving strategy brought them conveniently to the Defederate Station. His stomping ground of old was practically bursting to the brim with useful contacts, valuable resources and streams of information only Two-Bit knew how to tap. Like many other fortunate souls scattered across the Outer Ring, the station's Depot-Commissioner had been chosen to play a part, however small, in Nemo's unfolding masterpiece. To this end, Two-Bit would brave a thousand sweltering massage parlors and a million nude Vollocki battleaxes, should the caper require.

The Dho masseuse, naked as the day she was hatched, pillars herself over the table with only two of ten limbs, the rest concentrated on bunching and squeezing, pressing and kneading every available inch of Velocity's exposed back. In response, the Depot-Commissioner's eyes remain firmly closed, as they have the meeting's entire duration, in an expression of supreme relaxation.

"This mess your idea?" she presumably extends towards Two-Bit, the simple utterance quite possibly the most kindness she'd ever afforded him.

Two-Bit points needlessly. "This flaster's all him. I'm very much second nanner on this."

"What's the verdict, Vel?" Nemo affects near-perfect boredom. "People to see."

The Vollocki savors the following silence nearly as much as she savors all the Dho's eightfold efforts. "If you survive," is her first stipulation, but far from her last. "If anybody else agrees to this idiocy. If no bloomin' pressure lands on me from no bloomin' anywhere. If any of you yahoos even make it this far and if you yahoos don't destroy my whole fuckin' station in the doing." She cracks an eye open, revealing them to be, as ever, brutally blue. "If I don't change my mind."

"Sublime." Nemo clambers gracelessly to his feet. "Mum's the word, now."

She snorts with genuine amusement. "Who'd believe me?"

"This joint any good?" Two-Bit ventures to Velocity, with a subtle gesture of the chin meant to indicate the entire parlor.

The Vollocki inclines the stubs of her shorn horns towards the hovering Dho. "I wouldn't fuck her with yours, if that's what you're askin'." If offended by the Depot-Commissioner's cavalier comment, the masseuse makes no outward sign.

His person gathered to depart, Nemo thrusts a knowing finger toward the decumbent Velocity. "Watch the skies."

They thread through tight passages, pirates with purpose. Together, they breeze through a crowded lobby, past overeager madames, bored hookers and a full compliment of Velocity's goonage, complete with nicotine halos and holographic tees. Twenty seconds clears Happy Endings entirely and deposits them both back onto the Third Ring's bustling boulevard.

Two-Bit's pleased to note that bustle is significantly less than normal levels. They'd intentionally timed their streak of errands to coincide with one of the Station's agreed-upon meal hours. Ninety percent of the Third Ring's vendors, shop keeps and peddlers currently forage for food one Ring above, reducing the foot traffic from its usual raging rapids to a babbling brook.

All the better, Two-Bit reasoned, to conduct their clandestine affairs in.

Barriers – some juddering pink deflection doors, some old-fashioned steel grates, most a combination of both – shelter storefronts as best they can from the inevitability of undeterable looters. Peddlers, desperate or obstinate, continue to bark their wares to those few pedestrians who do remain. Gutter-grown flowers cost ten credits, kitschy "I Heart Takioro" tourist trinkets cost fifteen, bags of buttery popcorn sold by an enterprising Mruka vendor are a steal at seven.

Station waifs, made bold by the Ring's relative depopulation, scamper and sport about the street in small clusters. Two-Bit keeps a knowing eye on the gamboling little ruffians.

"Think she'd squawk?" Two-Bit ponders aloud, once they'd put a comfortable distance between themselves and Velocity's legendary earshot.

"Probably," Nemo predicts offhandedly. "Question is, who'd she squawk at?" He flicks each finger on his left hand as he cites each possibility. "She's no ties to Xo, the Scar's slumming the pen on Taardia and an old school buccaneer like her'd just as soon drink ditrogen than talk nice to the Imperium." He shrugs helplessly. "Sad to say, but I think our dear Vel's becomes somewhat unfashionable."

"Plus" adds Two-Bit thoughtfully, "if her jabbing her hatch off results in us not seeing this thing through, she stands to miss out on a mountain of docking fees and ten-percents."

"That too," Nemo concurs, but his creased eyebrows foreshadow some second point. "Thought," he declares. "We haven't given Xo much consideration in all this. Should we?"

"Depends on how cracklin' we go," Two-Bit reasons calmly. "Xo's slow, is the thing you can't blank on; they scheme and they tug strings and they blooming machinate more'n they do much else. Long as we touch down on Talos II in, what, two month's time?" Nemo gives a confirming nod. "Long as we do that," Two-Bit continues, "Xo's still gonna be clawing their maggies while we're in full swing."

"Plus," Nemo also adds, "with their well-established fear of the limelight, they're gonna think thrice before wading into an intergalactic incident like this's gonna be."

"That too," Two-Bit allows with a toothy grin. "Easy to blank on how stupid this flash you've come up with actually is, Cap'n."

Nemo frowns sagely. "It's a common problem."

The shoot platform, passing on their lefthand side and congested with commuters heading up to the Second Ring, seems to capture the Captain's attention. He hustles ahead a few steps, so that he might walk backwards and pitch full frontal to Two-Bit. "Hey, so, since we're pretty much done here, nobody would mind if I swing by the Afterburn and grab a–"

"Sifer," Two-Bit reminds.

"Sifer. Yes. Bloom."

"And Tarson, depending."

"Who?"

Two-Bit opens his mouth to offer explanation, but Nemo's scowl only deepens and he extends a point past Two-Bit's waist, seemingly to something or someone approaching behind. "Who's your buddy?" he questions quietly, his finger indicating the shape of a tiny, familiar humanoid.

His skin is a vibrant viridian. His bare feet and shabby attire mark him a station waif unquestionably. Malnutrition caps his prepubescent height at just shy of four feet. The sight of him scurrying up in their wake curls the corner of Two-Bit's mouth in a smirk of recognition.

He's early, even.

"Gimme a mite, wouldja, Cap'n?" Two-Bit requests of Nemo, shifting his attention to fully receive the incoming pipsqueak.

"Sure thing," grants Nemo distractedly, somehow already preoccupied by shifting through the wares of the nearest kitsch kiosk within reach.

The scamp closes the gap a moment later and instantly doubles over, propping both elbows on his bony knees to recapture what remains of his breath. Two-Bit fights the spreading smirk. "Moons, you scrogger, don't purple yourself."

Threesies glances up with brown eyes blazing. "Dewey a kindie," he pants, "and chomp a plonk."

Hearing even such a small snatch of his home dialect is enough, that jumbled and inbred argot of Jabber spoken exclusively by Takioro's specific breed of guttersnipes. Two-Bit's transported immediately back to his own youth, an existence of table scraps, tagalongs and territorial disputes. He adjusts his own cadence instinctively and addresses Threesies in his mother tongue. "Howdee zero me?"

"Is no gashouse," Threesies states, matter-of-factly. "Ezzie jabber she vizzee, swaggin' out a siddown with Deep-Com at R5I and comee I hoofin'," he explains, dropping Happy Endings' Station Identification Numeral. The archaic system, used for classifying the station's businesses, was exclusively the tool of Velocity and her street urchin population. "On the neath wazee I. Is the gritty gashouse." Two-Bit applauds the boy's initiative with a moment's calm golf-clapping. Threesies sticks out his tongue.

"What rumpus this is, Threes?" Two-Bit cuts to the chase. "Bringee what I jabber you?"

"'course I bringee," Threesies spits huffily. "Is me, blankee you?"

Two-Bit beckons the little rapscallion with a gesture. "Fesswe, then, or scoree I don't."

Threesies inches conspiratorially forward and Two-Bit lowers himself into a crouch, to better receive the waif's whispered information. "Jabber 'round the trash fire is," Threesies relates, "this Greatgullet mate of yours be, howzit, 'strapping on the Belt'?"

"Veraspo," Two-Bit mutters, a hint of incredulity coloring his voice. "Factee you?"

"Factee I," Threesies, so easily offended, confirms hurriedly. "All the moons and that." He tosses both arms wide, in a familiar gesture of assurance. "Jockee you out Veraspo-way, zero you he." One outstretched hand is immediately diverted from its previous gesture and presented, palm up, before Two-Bit. "Thirteen rhino scoree I."

"Ten."

"Twelve."

"Eleven."

Two-Bit strokes his stubbled jawline contemplatively. The term "strapping on the Belt" references the Veraspo asteroid Belt specifically. A spattering of asteroids located so conveniently on the border between decent society and unchecked criminality, plundering the fat merchant barges that routinely pass through the region eventually became somewhat amateurish amongst the interstellar space pirate community. The notion of a celebrated buccaneer of Greatgullet's reputation haunting those rocks was practically unthinkable and wouldn't, to the casual observer, appear to be especially reliable information.

Two-Bit Switch withdraws his sheaf of folding money from his jacket pocket. With the longtime grace of a career information broker, he parcels out sixteen hundred credits worth of crispy, untraceable Imperium banknote and plants them discreetly in the orphan's empty hand. With a satisfied grin, Threesies closes his fist around the cash. He then proceeds to spend a heedless moment, counting his exposed currency in the effective broad daylight of Takioro's Third Ring. Perspicacious as the little bugger might be, he wasn't nearly out of school yet.

Upon discovering the substantial bonus Two-Bit proffered on top of his declared fee, Threesies appears momentarily baffled, but hides his surprise well. He hastily stores the crumpled wad of cash in the nearest approximation of a pocket his trousers possess. "For the hoofin' didee you," Two-Bit explains, a fact Threesies seems to absorb in stride. "Hankee you another pile of rhino like that?" he proposes.

"Pends," Threesies, the canny negotiator, stipulates. "What thinkee you?"

"Hoofee you again on the neath, jabber to Sifer." Two-Bit halts in his instructions a moment and double checks, "bumpee you Sifer?", which is met by a flurry of nodding, "Jabber to Sifer comee I after messes and we jabber quitty. Follow?"

Threesies ceases nodding suddenly as an idea obviously strikes him. "Half first, half later, when is job termed."

Two-Bit chews the thought a tasteful moment or two before retrieving his swollen money clip. Doling out another five Cadafrey-minted bills, he indulges Threesies his shrewd business practice. "Thinkbox gotee you," Two-Bit compliments a moment later.

Threesies' shrug is pure precociousness. "Hinkee I always so."

Rising to his full height again, Two-Bit casts both wrists out in a dramatic ushering gesture, as though he expected live doves to come flapping out of his sleeves. "Hoofee you, then, you schiesty little bleeder, fore squeezee you all me rhino."

With tiny green middle finger extended behind him, Threesies darts away. In three seconds flat, the waif has entirely melted into the thinning crowd of pedestrians with the ghostlike smoothness of one whose entire survival depends solely on unobtrusiveness. Watching him vanish with a wry smile, Two-Bit shuffles a few steps back to reconvene with his Captain.

Perfectly on cue, Nemo spins his attention from the Kybrellian vendor and the tourist trap he was inexplicably patronizing. His pointer finger laxly twirls a cheap plastic keychain emblazoned with the slogan "I Heart Takioro," the gushy red heart symbol even encircled by three Rings of its own. "Ready?"

Two-Bit nods pleasantly at both Nemo and his impulse purchase. "Aye aye, Cap'n."

Falling into mutual step, they continue their circuit through the Third Ring's sparseness. They both sidestep the occasional driftvehicle or fistfight, Two-Bit ruminates the next few rungs on their stepladder and his Captain concentrates on hooking his newfound keychain to the _Lover's_ keyring.

"What's the haps?" Nemo questions finally, with an inattentive nudge of his head behind, at a Threesies five minutes disappeared.

"To ord him jabb it," Two-Bit relays, "Greatgullet's strapping on the Belt."

Nemo grunts. "Heh. He would."

"I ball it up fast enough," Two-Bit admits, "but what's the flash? That motherbloomer's been gouging gantines near a decade longer than we have."

"Like as not," Nemo rationalizes, chipping away at the keyring with a dirty thumbnail, "he ain't preying on the pigeons passing through." His finger slips and he snarls a silent curse, before meeting Two-Bit's gaze. "He's preying on the rookie pirates."

Two-Bit snorts involuntarily. As tempting a target as Veraspo presented, it invariably tended to draw the piratical crap of the crop. These were bush-league buccaneers who'd somehow managed to beg, borrow or steal an operative spaceship, load it full of boozy bozos and cut canvas for Veraspo – ostensibly the perfect practice yard for the inexperienced pirate. The majority of them ultimately fail. Most meet untimely ends when their piloting skills aren't up to snuff to navigate the asteroids. Some are bested or butchered during ill-conceived boarding actions. Even fewer actually manage to jumpstart a decent career in piracy off the prizes won whilst "strapping on the Belt."

"Veraspo's something of a jump," Nemo confesses. "We're certain he's there?"

"We're certain," affirms Two-Bit.

Truth be told, Two-Bit Switch'd known about the whereabouts of Captain Greatgullet and _The Rule of Thumb_ an hour after touching down on Takioro. His exploits were lauded in the Haliquant Quadrant and it was almost difficult to find a street corner in station where his name wasn't being uttered with typical hallowed reverence.

Employing Threesies' superlative talents as a rumormonger served dual purposes for Two-Bit; firstly, to solidify the swirling rumors into one concrete location and, more importantly, as a pretense to float the brat some capital.

Certainly, Two-Bit could've simply awarded Threesies the sixteen simply on principle but, in his experience, those in station who become beggars learnt nothing except begging. He couldn't rightly send the cocky little twerp out into this bad galaxy without all the necessary tools he needed to survive.

Try though he may, it was impossible for him not to see simply a younger Two-Bit – shoeless, smeared with stains and struggling against starvation – whenever he saw the boy.

So he'd deploy Threesies on these superfluous reconnaissance missions whenever he could, dispatching the kid about the manifold tiny errands that earned Two-Bit his keep and surrogated an education during his own wasted youth. Threesies was already zottibles more competent as a scrounger, a scrapper and a sneak thief that he would've been at his age, a fact that occasionally caused Two-Bit a glimmer of disquieting pride.

"Can somebody please, by all the moons," Nemo pleads, wrestling fruitlessly with the supremely uncooperative keychain, "just piss battery acid in my fucking mouth already?"

In three motions, Two-Bit's pinched the keys in question from Nemo's grip, slipped "I Heart Takioro" effortlessly onto the loop and passed it back, without comment.

Nemo's dumbstruck. "Oh, hey, thanks."

An Ortoki comment, something about "vomit" and "gutter," draws their collective attention forward, where they discover their awaiting companions.

"What the blooming fuck are you wearing?" Nemo blurts and hustles forward to confront his saltbrother.

The same sentimental lobe of Two-Bit's brain that pestered him with irritating waves of sympathy for the plight of Threesies and his ilk was, by his thinking, the same party responsible for the wave of pity he felt whenever he looked upon Takioro's forlorn playground.

Years ago, before the coming of criminality to the Federate Station, some civic-minded astrotect had apparently thought to include a partially-enclosed child's play area in Takioro's initial blueprints. Complete with graffitied slide, rusted jungle gym and lonesome swing set, the ill-frequented corner of the Third Ring must have originally been intended as a deposit point for the offspring of whatever legitimate merchants the station intended to draw.

Today, however, the place was looked upon with distaste by the superstitious crowd of malcontents and child-killers, most often simply afforded the same deferential berth one might grant a house reputed to be haunted. To those unconcerned about such matters, it served as a handy locale for an off-the-record meeting and little else.

The first thing Two-Bit notices is that Odisseus is garbed somewhat comically in an ill-fitting and ratty orange sweater. The Ortok reclines languidly at the mouth of the slide, both forepaws straddling his belly and exhaling laboriously. The massive mechanic grumbles something unpleasant about "vomit" and "face" to the ceiling of the slide he lies decumbent within.

"I'd prefer," confesses Nemo indignantly, "you to answer my fucking question." He points a determined finger towards the Ortok's starchy orange midsection. "Where'd you get that?"

A sizable pause passes before an Ortoki conjugation of the verb "to find" answers from the darkened interior of the slide.

"You _found_ it in my moons-damned quarters, is what you mean." Nemo turns his astonished expression on Two-Bit, his point still aimed unerringly at the Ortok. "That's my sweater he's wearing."

"Scandalous." Two-Bit plants a palm on his own stomach, screwing his face into a sympathetic grimace. "Still squeamy from all them fishes?"

A meek whimper is all the conformation Two-Bit gets, but Nemo's evidently unsympathetic to the Ortok's digestional woes.

"Is there any point in asking, say, _why_ you might be wearing my new favorite sweater outta the blooming blue?" Odisseus' muttered no more than three words, one of them "cold" before Nemo's tirade tramples over him again. "Can you not buy your own sweater? Must you stretch mine all the way to Jotor instead?"

"With what money?" a voice barks from further into the playground. A short distance away sits Moira and her Jhironese boytoy, each propping themselves awkwardly atop a paintless child's bouncy rocket ship.

"You see what he's wearing?" Nemo demands, not missing a beat.

"Can we maybe," Moira requests wearily, with a nudge of her head towards her wingman on the rocket ship, "not do this in front of the kids?"

"Oh, hey, you found what's-his-balls," Nemo realizes.

"Tarson," Tarson corrects. "Is my balls."

At seventy paces and through a thick fog, Two-Bit Switch could still have recognized Tarson for what he was; an ex-cop, a fact that almost immediately unnerves him upon realization. As with a large percentage of the amateur bounty hunter population, this thick-necked Jhironese bears all the hallmarks of a corrupt cog spewed forth from the well-oiled machine of law and order. His shoulders slouch, he wears his street clothes like some kind of costume and a service revolver is still strapped to his left thigh. Whatever else this Tarson might be, he'd been an unworthy policeman first, a bush league bounty hunter second.

"Fess you the gritty," Two-Bit addresses to Tarson. "Didn't think you'd face, mate, what with a square million and every place to lavender."

"Thought crossed my mind, I won't lie." He considers Moira after a moment. "But, you know, I gotta vested interest in keeping both my balls attached, so."

"You know me so well," Moira croons, no dollop of sweetness in her voice.

"That the rhino?" Two-Bit inquires, nodding towards the satchel lying between the springs of Moira and Tarson's mounts.

"Yep. Minus my share, oughta clock in around 834 thou." Two-Bit glances to Moira for confirmation before Tarson supplies. "Ask Quicksilver. She counted."

Moira make a generalizing gesture to encompass both herself and Tarson. "So, if we're finished and–"

"You're a bounty hunter, right?" Nemo directs to Tarson, not waiting for a reply. "I will pay you cash money if you can retrieve _that_ sweater," he aligns a condemning finger at the torso and lower abdomen of the Ortok jutting disproportionately from the child's slide, "from _him._ "

"Uh–" is Tarson's stuttering response.

Odisseus whines something about "bounty" from within the depths of his plastolieum tube.

"Hey–" Moira attempts to interject, but Nemo thoroughly ignores her.

"Are you not a thief?" he poses to Odisseus. "Are you not wearing my property?"

The Ortoki answer is shouted, further distorted by the shape of the slide and contains the plural forms of the word "pirate" and the word "thief."

"Hey, shitpants!" Moira barks at Nemo which, surprisingly, he seems to respond to. "If we're finished with Tarson and you two secret assholes have finished with your secret thing, that means we're finished with Takioro." She slaps both thighs exasperatedly. "Are you gonna fucking tell us now?"

"Well–" Nemo prevaricates, grasping for some method of deflection.

Two-Bit swoops into the rescue. "We're ain't termed on Takioro, matter of fact. There's Sifer to bump still."

Moira's expression anneals homicide hard. "Yeah?"

"That'd be my cue." Tarson rises properly to his feet, sending the rocket ship into bouncy hysterics. "Been a pleasure, folks," he farewells, shuffling back toward the street, "and if y'all're ever lookin' to turn yourselves in again, gimme a buzz. Easiest takedown of my career," he adds, rounding the corner in the direction of nowhere in particular.

Moira makes no motion to acknowledge her decamping colleague and only spits "Who the fuck is Sifer?" at Nemo.

"Someone very integral to our cause, believe me," Nemo attempts to assuage with grand, placating gestures. "Two-Bit assures me he's the best there is."

"Does he? Sublime," Moira snarls, climbing to her full height and sentencing her own bouncy rocket ship to the same wobbly fate as Tarson's. "Let the fucking record show that I do, in fact, outrank Two-Bit–" she's briefly interrupted by Odisseus' yawlping agreement, "but, you know, why should that matter?"

"Me wanks," Two-Bit confesses with a satisfied grimace, "is caffled, I'm afraid."

"In the fullness of time," Nemo explicates grandiosely, "everything shall be–"

"My fucking tits it shall be," Moira denounces, brushing violently past the Captain and nearly bowling him over with a shoulder shove.

After she's stormed three defiant steps onto the deserted Third Ring street, Two-Bit points meekly in the opposite direction. "Sifer's that way."

Odisseus always made a conscious effort to be nice towards Zibbians. He did this as unironically, as unpatronizingly as he possibly could; he honestly held no personal grudge against the species. It was simply difficult for someone of Odisseus' disposition to look upon a member of the Zibbian race – with all those delicious-looking tentacles – and see something other than lunch.

The moral dilemma surrounding his people and the various fish-like sentient species of the galaxy represented an issue to quagmiry to parse. For decades and decades, his own species were casually considered a voracious predator to the galaxy's Corgassi, Obax and Zibbian populations. Odisseus occasionally found himself wishing there was a race of sapient, bipedal cheeseburgers running amok and that everyone else might have some food-versus-friends ethical issues to sort out.

All that being said, looking at Sifer, Odisseus was overcome with, rather than disquieting hunger pangs, another fresh wave of nausea. The combination of the post-warp queasies and a stomach full of freeze-dried sporefin had sentenced Odisseus to indigestion for the remainder of the afternoon.

For the foreseeable future, then, Sifer had nothing to fear. For the foreseeable future, the Ortok would honestly rather meet, rather than eat, any fish he happened to encounter.

"And with Valladia-them, now, whole situation-thing's going down the shitter-drain," Sifer prattles on, all six tentacles busily engaged hunting and pecking across three separate keyboards. "You heard about Valladia-that, right? Those fuck-beaks bought every feed-anchor on the Line." He unfurls a forked tentacle before Two-Bit. "Do you have the footage-film?"

In response, Two-Bit simply inclines his head towards Nemo, already burrowing a hand into his inside jacket pocket to retrieve something. Several seconds and some leathern jostling reveals a slender datadeck clasped in his fingers. With an irreverent flick, he tosses the datadeck forward and Sifer snags it with one of his tentacular hands.

Selecting an open port at random, the appendage inserts the datadeck without comment while Sifer continues his grim prognostications, "This is how the fun-times end, Sifer-I'm telling all-you."

"Shall we," Moira sulks, her attention focused on the blinking stub of the datadeck, "be afforded the pleasure of knowing what's on there?"

Two-Bit indicates one of several scummy-looking holovision display screens, this one currently afire with silent fistball coverage played in reverse. "Sifer, do us a kindie, when you get a mite?"

"From Kezz-here to Kiesha-there, their feed-anchors are already churning out their lukewarm, Inner Sector blowhole-shit, what Sifer-I hear." With an offhand swat, he splatters a twelve-legged Akuddi roach, transgressing onto his kiosk counter, into a gooey mess. "Way ahead of Switch-you." The screen in question surrenders its previous picture in favor of silent static. "Those used to be freecaster signal-waves. They-waves _all_ used to be freecaster signal-waves."

They each occupy one of the cardinal four seats drawn up to Sifer's ramshackle kiosk. Around them shambles and squirms all the sordid squalor of the Third Ring understreet. Paying as little attention as he possibly can, Odisseus is only aware that drugs are dealt, marbles are rolled and sewage drips.

There are two conceivable reasons one would visit the Third Ring understreet, a cesspool in all but name. The first was dealings too unsavory for the upperstreet. The second was to seek the skills of Sifer, the station's preeminent freecaster.

The main method of sending information across the vast reaches of interstellar space involved a tangled cobweb of satellite-broadcasted transmission feeds. A feedcaster could employ this network to relay infinite volumes of media to every corner of the galaxy. They send breaking newsplash and political commentary and educational programming and sports coverage and, most importantly, pornography.

While the Inner Sector feedspace is a strictly regulated government commodity, the derelict satellites adrift in the Outer Ring have since been hijacked by anarchistic radio radicals who self-apply the pretentious title of "freecasters."

With his antiestablishment tirades and his workspace overflowing with geeky paraphernalia, Sifer could expound ad infinitum on the virtues and valors of freecasterism. He could also reach a wider audience than anyone else on this side of the Ring. For whatever reason, a freecaster's skill set had been deemed an instrumental facet of Nemo's ever-evolving mystery plan, and in a revelation that surprised no one, Two-Bit knew a guy.

Nemo fiddles distractedly with one amongst the manifold children's toys that line the edge of Sifer's nest– a green plastic arlaxi with a miniature top hat. "What kinda range're we talking?"

"That'll depend on sight-views," the Zibbian returns robotically. "Off the start-bat, Sifer-I cast out of two quadrant-spaces, but, you get enough sight-views, caster-others're gonna pass the info-leak along." He attempts a tentacled approximation of a shrug. "Footage-film's what Switch-he says it is, should go viral in hours-day, maybe days-week?"

Nemo pauses his fiddling, "Veraspo's in which quadrant?"

"Haliquant," informs Two-Bit.

"To start, then," Nemo prefaces, "let's say Haliquant and, I don't know, Uklio? Give them something to think about."

"Veraspo." Moira blandly states, before muttering almost to herself, "What's in Veraspo?"

"Imperium-they," Sifer rambles forward, "keeps making push-inroads into Bad Space, sooner rather than later we're all gonna be watching _Brock Rocket, Star Patriot!_ " The rhythmic cadence of constantly clicking keys suddenly stops. "Have any-you seen that fucking balls-thing?" The expression of suspicion and fear is somehow still distinguishable on his squid-like features. "Hey, feed-loop's live," he chirps, inclining a tentacle at the previously static screen.

On the tiny, smeared screen, Odisseus watches a grainy rendition of a tired tableau. Moira struggles in the snow. Quuilar Noxix brandishes his harpoon. A bolt of blue ditrogen bores a hole in Noxix's skull and Nemo jubilantly guns down camera operator after camera operator. He'd viewed the whole spectacle an innumerable number of times at Nemo's behest and what plays out on Sifer's screen holds few surprises for him.

The fact that it played out on Sifer's screen, however, made the true events surrounding the unexpected cancellation of _Quuilar Noxix Wants You Dead Or Alive_ take on a distressing significance.

Now the truth would come out. Now the unverified rumors would be verified. Now, with this seventy-second video beamed to every corner of the galaxy on a perpetually repeating loop, any chance they might had at shirking responsibility for Noxix's death was obliterated.

Here, made easily available to the eyes of Huong Xo, GalaxCom Interstellar Media, and every wanna-be badass with a camera and a speargun, was indelible proof of Nehel Morel's culpability to the murder of their employee, cash cow, and idol respectively.

"Oh, shit," Odisseus blurts.

Chapter 9

Gertie Gundeck, as she was called these days, wasn't above a little spaceway robbery. Certainly this spaceway robbery was simply a means to an end; six pockets full of change and the contents of one cash register clearly weren't the real prize. The real prize was the GCF _Dividend_ , a cushy cargo cruiser on the payroll of the Gitter Consortium she was carrying a considerable quantity of top-shelf Gittertea, the kind panty-waisted Anglian nobles take with their buttered scones and crumpets.

Before reaching Anglia, however, the _Dividend_ had to pass through Yelfo Minor, an exhaustively dull system that would normally contain absolutely nothing of interest, today being the obvious exception. Today, Yelfo Minor contained three things of interest; namely Gertie Gundeck, a V&R IV1 Belladonna-Class Assault Sub-Frigate and her restless band of bloodthirsty boyfriends.

In the meantime, though, Gertie had seventeen hours to kill. She reckoned knocking over the Warp Gate Junction might be an amusing way to waste at least one of those hours.

"Darlin'," she reasons with the shopkeep, shoving the snub of her shotgun against his Diraaqi cheekbone, "is the cash in the drawer worth more to you than the brains in your head?"

The shopkeep is surprisingly salty for a backwater station agent. He shrugs defiance up at her. "The ten cred you'd find in there wouldn't pay for the canister."

Gertie returns the shrug. "Fair enough."

With one brutal chop, she clubs the clerk in the temple with the bloodstained butt of her weapon. Sheathing the shotgun, she bunches her skirt in both hands and prepares to scramble, ladylike, over the counter, when a squelching voice interrupts her from behind.

"Uh, Captain...?"

Gertie, frozen with skirt hoisted above her knees, turns laboriously back to face the speaker. "Yes, Evileye?"

The Laquian lackwit stands stammering for a moment, incessantly licking that damned ruin of an eye with the tip of his adhesive tongue. "I'm thinkin'," he manages, "you're gonna wanna watch this."

Releasing her skirt to waft about her ankles, Gertie daintily dismounts the counter. She strides across the Junction, over the quivering forms of its prostate customers, between shoddy plastic displays of Happy Yum-Yum Bars and Carcinocrisps, all the while giving Evileye's namesake a run for its money.

Her current first mate, one of the last holdovers from her husband's original crew, was quickly dwindling through the final vestiges of his usefulness. Gertie inwardly wondered, watching him repeatedly tongue the blackened orb that was his right eyeball, how much longer she'd endure him. Sooner, rather than later, she'd be forced to jettison the loutish Laquian in favor of some even stupider, even more ambitious beau to serve as her newest right hand.

After all, aboard the _Magnet_ , there was never any shortage of lusty deckhands willing to do nearly anything to gain the ever-dangled affection and much-sought favor of their lovely Captain.

"What'm I watchin'?" she questions innocently, glancing about at nothing but packaged junk food and bottles of engine coolant.

"That."

Evileye's padded fingertip reveals a previously unnoticed holovision set, caged into the Junction's back wall as some manner of ill-conceived thief deterrent. Through the corrugated thermosteel bars that crosshatch the screen, Gertie watches the concluding seconds of some newsplash story that smash cuts, without warning, to some shakily-filmed eyewitness footage. She gathers voice for an objection when, paradoxically, she recognizes one of the figures on the screen.

Against a swirling white scrim of unending snow, Gertie recognizes the butch haircut and unfriendly face of Moira Quicksilver, second fastest draw in the Ring. She suffers a savage blow from the pleasure end of a wooden polearm of some kind and falls to the frost. Her attacker is a spear-wielding Yheum colossus who, despite being encased entirely in arctic survival gear, is identifiable only as the AWOL Quuilar Noxix by size and skill. He rears back to strike, the harpoon's barbed point aimed directly at the heart of proned Moira.

When, like cavalry over the proverbial hill, a lone streak of blazing blue introduces itself bloodily to the side of Noxix's unsuspecting head, Gertie discovers her mouth hanging open. When the shooter in question emerges from the blinding blizzard – firearm raised, spent ditrogen mingling with the whipping white flakes, expression of sheer untameable badassery on his face – and reveals himself to be Nehel Morel, Gertie Gundeck finds herself cursing.

"That son of a bitch," she murmurs, watching, uncomprehendingly, as the footage re-loops to the beginning of the minute long clip. "That son of a bitch. I _knew_ it."

Moira successively sizes up both potential opponents with each slow step down the companionway stair. Both are Gungi'noojian, both are unarmed, both genders are indiscernible, both are standing stupidly on the opposite end of the entrance of the betweendecks corridor. They were startlingly identical, save for a single dissemblance each.

The goon on the right's underbite is a thicket of mismatched and intersecting fangs. The goon on the left's three nostrils weep copious amounts of green mucus, thick dollop by thick dollop, onto the besmirched hold floor.

Moira stops herself seven steps from the floor and glances down to her right. "Any preference?"

"I'm thinking left," Odisseus mutters contemplatively. The hulking Ortok is still attired in Nemo's borrowed pullover. He reclines across five stairs, his elbows propped atop the eighth, his hind paws gripping the third, his thickset tail dangling between the fourth and fifth. His beady black eyes study the pair of silent intruders with all the selectivity of a deli counter customer. "Snot is less of a problem at paw-to-paw range."

"See," Moira reasons, squatting down to claim a seat beside him, "but actually look at those teeth." She nudges her head towards the orthodontially nightmarish Gungi'nooj. "All crisscrossed like that, he couldn't possibly gain any purchase on a bite." She clasps her mug in both hands. "He probably thinks he can, is convinced he can, and that's gonna be his first and last real mistake."

"That one's a female," Odisseus corrects.

Moira scowls. "Based on what?"

"My understanding is that the head-ridge is slightly higher on the female." He shifts most of his weight to point a foreclaw. "See?" Returning to his fully reclined position, he adds, almost casually, "That and the boobs."

Pursing her lips to banish columns of steam from the surface of her spacer's tea, Moira is, after long moments of examination, forced to concede. "Granted."

Both Gungi'noojians, perfectly within earshot of the entire conversation, simply drag their knuckles, stare vacantly ahead and deign to comment.

Moira was forced to admit, only inwardly of course, that the Veraspo Belt wasn't actually the downright stupidest place to lay low. There were much worse places to seek shelter from the shitstorm the Quuilar Noxix footage, sure to shake Bad Space's outlaw populace overnight, was certain to unleash. At the best of times, the Belt was far from easily navigable. It was generally peopled by pirates too small-fry to even fantasize about tangling with the confirmed murderer of Quuilar Noxix. By and large, it was considered, by the majority of the Ring's rougher customers, to be vaguely "antwacky," to use Two-Bit's terminology.

One could certainly do much better than the crags and crooks of Veraspo for a temporary hideout, but one could also conceivably do much worse.

Days spent slinking between the shadows of asteroids also hadn't afforded them much opportunity to view the media's response to Nemo's tacit confession. Moira was anxious to return to space unclouded by spinning hunks of rock and beam in a halfway decent feed to check the story's scope, status and, most importantly, the current bounty postings of its chief characters.

She was made further anxious, a feeling only freshly brewed spacer's tea could abate, by the presence of strangers aboard the _Lover_. She was especially anxious about playing hostess without specific knowledge regarding the prices on their heads.

Nemo's contention, however, had been that, should there be one sentient breathing in this galaxy with less concern for the reward offered for their capture, it would be Greatgullet, remorseless captain of _The Rule of Thumb_.

While they engaged in prescribed board-and-butcher piracy at occasional intervals, _The Unconstant Lover_ and her crew were, in point of fact, really more freelance lawbreakers than workaday buccaneers, necessarily. They smuggle, they rob banks and they swindle, cheat or bushwhack by whatever means necessary.

_The Rule of Thumb_ , however, represented the prime, even paragon, example of that other species of pirate. Their craft was a redoubtable weapons platform bristling with disabler cannons and airlocks. Their crew was a savage swarm of rapacious plunders and pillagers from half a hundred species. Their captain a sword-swinging ransacker of every brand of spacecraft imaginable, the _Rule_ was known far and wide as the single specimen that expertly straddled the line between cunning criminal and unabashed barbarian.

While locating one particular ship amongst the jostling asteroids, merchant passerby and the preening court of beginner brigands was to be no mean feat, wrangling Greatgullet and his Thumbs for a sit-down would even more impressive. Once again, Moira'd been unpleasantly surprised at the relative ease with which Nemo and his new talking pet rat-canary Two-Bit arranged the entire affair with the ferocious freebooter. The _Lover_ and the _Rule_ were both magnetized to the same spinning space rock and conjoined at the airlock, while both Captains currently powwow in the former's mess.

Moira, of course, was denied attendance to the boy's secret circle jerk and could only speculate on the meeting's outcome. She, the eternal pessimist, speculated the worst.

For what it's worth, they were both, Moira and Odisseus, relegated to the same rank as Greatgullet's clueless entourage of Gungi'noojian muscle. There was nothing for the _Lover's_ first mate and mechanic to do but talk shop and stare daggers at the competition.

"I'm left, you're right, then?" Odisseus clarifies with resignation.

Moira hoists her spacer's tea an inch higher in toast. "I'll drink to that." After a scalding sip, she considers the Ortok again, under a new notion. "You sure you don't wanna go fetch your piece?"

"Eh," he grunts disdainfully. "Not really my taste, quite frankly." Clearly anticipating Moira's expression of mock outrage, he doesn't bother making eye contact to confirm this. "You'd be amazed how much your aim would suffer if you had my trigger finger," he posits, wiggling the relative digit of his padded paw; fat, furry and far more cumbersome than her own adroit humanoid fingers.

"Can't argue with the safety presented by distance, though."

"Shitty eyesight and superior sense of smell are crap at distance, though," he counters.

"I don't spend all the time I spend on the bag," she recalls, the soreness granted her muscles by three hours of Tebi-Gali rehearsal rising to her defense, "not to appreciate a little melee contact, don't get me wrong." She make a cautious gesture towards the compliant pair of meathooks across the way with her still-brimming mug of tea. "But, going toe-to-toe with Gungi'noojians is asking for broken bones and not much else."

"Somehow, I'll manage."

"For instance," Moira offers with an air of sham neighborliness, "I could, without much trouble, do you the kindness of plugging yours in the kneecap for you, when the time comes." She holds the spacer's tea a breath's breadth from her mouth before adding, "Free of charge."

"I don't need your charity," Odisseus protests petulantly.

"You might against her," Moira snarks into her mug.

He, in response, determines himself to have the last word. "Him."

A silence three feet this side of chummy elapses between the four of them. As the humanoid and the Ortok ruminate their murderous designs against the two Gungi'noojians, Greatgullet's bodyguards return this voiced hatred with nothing but vapid stares and the occasional snot spatter. Moira, as predicted, burns her tongue.

It's Odisseus who breaks the silence. "Think he'll tell us this time?"

She indulges a knowing sigh. "You know, I wish I did."

The betweendecks door clatters open without warning, causing everyone present to snap to attention. Who steps through the open portal, however, is neither of their employers but instead a tubby, shirtless Grimalti, whistling another tired sea shanty and stuffing tobacco into the chamber of his ostentatious calabash pipe.

Abraham first spies the Gungi'noojians and reacts bodily, opening his mouth to honk some protest or expectoration. He then catches sight of recumbent Odisseus and decumbent Moira atop their companionway roost. He thrusts the pipe's stem towards both of Greatgullet's reticent bodyguards and gives his fellow crewmen a confused expression.

"Greatgullet," Moira supplies.

Abraham's features only creases further. "Greatgullet? I thought he weren't expected 'till half past."

Moira shrugs a shoulder and an eyebrow simultaneously. "He's early."

"Wait," Odisseus realizes. "Were you not just in there?"

"In where, precisely?"

"The mess." Odisseus waves a paw fruitlessly, as though this would somehow explain the matter any faster. "Are they not meeting in the mess?" he presses Moira first and, moments later, the Gungi'noojians.

"Oh." Abraham's answer contains a certain degree of bashfulness, a strange emotion to see displayed upon his lumpy Grimalti features. "Well, er, I were takin' a dump, so."

There is no universal reaction to this revelation among the four members of Abraham's audience. The Gungi'noojians, as rote, make no indication of understanding. Odisseus nods grimly, as though now burdened with dreadful mental imagery. Similarly, Moira presses her forehead hard against the rim of her mug, as if the issuing steam might somehow permeate both her forehead and her skull and evaporate what her knee-jerk imagination had planted there. "My fucking brain," she murmured into the ceramic.

With his trademark, cock-eyed glare of disdain paid to both Gungi'noojians, Abraham bustles his bulk towards the companionway and, leaning an elbow against the railing, joins the gossip circle. "Have we any new theories?"

"Too many," Moira intones. Since departing Gallow, the crew had endeavored their best to divine some meaning, some obscure purpose, lying substrate and unseen beneath all Nemo's actions. Thus far, they'd collectively concluded on nothing.

It was Odisseus' contention that time spent imprisoned may have done some irreparable damage to the Captain's psyche, a stipulation supported by Abraham, who claimed firsthand experience with an incarcerated Nemo. She could hardly follow their argument, of course, between all the significant glances and the Ortok's unwillingness to divulge even the barest sliver of their shared personal history. His implication was that something, some flimsy barrier to moderation or hesitancy had, with the evident trauma of jail time, finally caved. Nemo was now, by Odisseus' reckoning, directly on the warpath of some imminently destructive and probably suicidal mission.

Vengeance upon the Endless Imperium, for the fall of the house of Ott and other, more ambiguous slights, had been an early favorite. Moira, for her own guarded, personal reasons, took exception with this theory.

In her own mind, Moira lent credence to a hunch that'd only materialized with the abrupt and unprecedented inclusion of Two-Bit Switch thirty days past. With that slippery sneak brought into the fold, the likelihood, in Moira's opinion, that this whole song-and-dance would be revealed as nothing more than a needlessly byzantine and hopelessly ambitious caper became a foregone conclusion. One does not commission the specific services of someone like Two-Bit Switch unless one has a very distinct goal, universally that of breaking into somewhere one doesn't belong and absconding with any valuables in sight.

Neither of her confederates concurred, of course, citing the lateness of Two-Bit's arrival as proof positive of something substantially more sinister. Whatever their individual opinions, however, the barefaced facts were indisputable.

Nemo was waist-deep in orchestrating something outlandish, something that included or incorporated a number of puzzling and contradictory factors. A multimillion credit bank heist on Gallow was involved. The blessing of an unknown Takioro benefactor was involved. The publication of the Quuilar Noxix footage was involved and, most recently, a parley with Captain Greatgullet, terror of decent society and aspirant pirate alike, was also somehow involved.

"I do agree Two-Bit's the key," Odisseus half-concedes. "At least to some honest answers. You think," he muses, lowering his pitch into the telltale conspiratorial range, "with a little pressure, he might–"

"Nemo's where the pressure belongs," Moira redirects, swallowing a mouthful of her quickly cooling spacer's tea. "What baffles me is the reason behind all the secrecy. At this point," she gestures openly across to the patient pair of dimwitted thuggery, "these motherbloomers are liable to know the whole score before we do, dependent on what that motherbloomer in there tells them." Moira shrugs thickly. "What threat does our knowing pose?"

"Well, what'd be the advantage presented by Greatgullet?" Abraham ponders, striking an old-fashioned stick match against the warty surface of his stomach. He applies the flame, amid several huffing movements of his cheeks, to the pipe's full bowl and the smell of woody tobacco swamps about the stairs. "What's his use in all this?"

"I will advance good credit," Odisseus wagers, "towards the belief that he disembarks this ship today with somebody's million-credit share in his hand."

Moira grunts. "Him and Velocity both, huh?"

The Ortok curls his muzzle in an expression Moira recognizes as polite disagreement. "Velocity I think's a stretch. I mean, remember," he reminds pointedly, "he'd rather stuff his asshole with repellent and light a match than pay Vel any favors. Who I don't consider a stretch, however," he continues, with a toss of his chin towards the unmoving double doors, "is Two-Bit."

Abraham's whistle is a gruff, throaty sound. "That's devious."

Moira frowns in helpless agreement. "That's Nemo."

"Hence my thoughts about pressure and its application to Two-Bit," Odisseus relates. "Nothing drastic, obviously, but I can't imagine a little growling wouldn't open a few–"

Voices, muffled somewhat by distance and mostly by closed teltriton doors, interrupt the Ortok midstream. Succumbing instantaneously to a guilty silence, the conspiring crewmen each downshift into stereotypical methods of looking busy. Abraham scratches a suddenly urgent inch on his hanging wattle. Odisseus uncovers a most captivating ceiling plate. Moira enthralls herself in the semi-poisonous depths of her spacer's tea.

A booming laugh sounds just within the entrance to the betweendecks corridor. The laugher's unrecognizable to Moira but it's the precise medicine to erect both slouching Gungi'noojians to some semblance of an attentive posture. Moments later, the doors themselves skate apart with a hiss and a scrape.

Tapping contentedly on his clutched Attaché, Two-Bit Switch is the first into view. As he precedes both Captains through the door, he's utterly ignorant of the five figures actively attempting not to watch him.

Without further fanfare, Nemo and his guest stride abreast into view. The former is several minutes into the throes of reciting, for the umpteenth time, the overwrought account of his victory over a certain Yheum bounty hunter. The latter digests each word with great belly laughter and greater gusto.

He's more than earned that nickname, Moira cannot deny that. _The Rule of Thumb's_ imposing figure of a Captain possesses a mouth that, when pledged to the act of a full-blown guffaw, could, on the level of raw square footage, rival most spaceship harbors. With his beady black eyes, his hairless skin slick with slime and his four pair of fleshy barbels, drooping from his lipless maw, the Obax's resemblance to a whiskered bottom-feeding fish is unmistakable.

His entire ensemble, from purloined pants to scavenged shirt, stands as a prismatic collage of the spoils of piracy, all festooned with totems and trophies. Ten fingers sport ten rings, a clanking host of bracelets blankets both wrists and the bounty hunting licenses of his vanquished enemies dangle off the beaded tips of his many beards.

The nondescript satchel he carries in his beringed mitt is doubtlessly large enough to accommodate a substantial amount of their cash, possibly even a clean million.

When Greatgullet laughs, a startlingly glottal sound, his toothless maw is darker and deeper than a black hole. His mucus-lined gills squelch apart and all his pendant licenses flap and clatter against each other. "Moons," he remarks, "I woulda cut ten _thousand_ throats to get another shot at that spindly bastard."

Nemo's visibly astounded. "Episode eighteen. I forgot about that."

"Wanna see the scar?" Greatgullet volunteers brightly. Before Nemo can nod his enthusiasm, the Obax's wrinkled up his shirt to reveal a sizable blemish, a whitish puckered thing healed all wrong, against the scaleless swarthiness of his midsection. Nemo whistles his opinion. "Ain't no great number," Greatgullet mentions, considering his own harpoon scar, "of us breathin' in this galaxy can say we rumbled with Noxix." Moira makes a deliberate show of slurping her tea. "You snag his license?"

When Nemo withdraws the _Lover's_ ignition keys from his trouser pocket and confers it onto the Obax for closer examination, Moira is surprised to discover two new items looped onto the keyring she didn't recognize.

A gaudy "I Heart Takioro" keychain is present, but also, a cumbersome holocard, identical in size and layout to all those bouncing off Greatgullet's neck and shoulders is among their number. "Keep it close to my nuts," Nemo waxes sentimental.

Lacking lungs and lips, Obax aren't really capable of whistling, but the sound that burbles out of Greatgullet's gills must surrogate the same emotion in their culture. "Powerful jealous of this trinket here," he admires, turning the license over in his hand as though some kind of precious treasure. "Right clever of you, though, gettin' that video on the record 'fore coming to meet me, else I'd just be pullin' this off your corpse right now, like as not!"

This joke somehow fails to amuse Odisseus nearly as much as it does Greatgullet and even Nemo, both sharing a shoulder-slapping laugh. The merest rumble of an Ortoki growl finally draws the Captains' attentions off each other and onto the uneven circle of onlookers overhearing their conversation.

While Nemo pays his saltbrother a puzzled expression, it's Moira who unwittingly captures eye contact with Greatgullet. Recognition almost immediately floods those fishy features. "This is, whatsername, Quicksilver?"

"Moira," she supplies.

The Obax thrusts a thick thumb over his left shoulder. "We're just done watching the episode in there," he explains, before returning his fist to his belted hip. "Bloom, but you gave him one fuck of a fight. Sure were lucky this blowbag," he chortles, pummeling Nemo across the upper back with a companionable blow, "were to hand, save your ass, huh?"

Moira's careful to keep her expression painstakingly neutral. "Sure was."

"Everything drongo out here?" Two-Bit extends warily, twisting his multe bracelet on his wrist. As a rule, Two-Bit's zottibles less oblivious to Moira's murderous deadpan than Greatgullet, complete stranger or even Nemo, longtime companion.

"Peachy," she returns placidly, planting the empty mug onto an empty space of thermosteel-grated companionway stair with a soft clank. "Shooting the shit with these two fine gentlemen." She nods towards the still silent Gungi'noojians, blank stares that follow their Captain's movements dully. "Not sure I caught their names."

Greatgullet's shrug is the epitome of crass ignorance. "Fuck if I know. I call 'em Boogers and Teeth."

Satchel in hand, he stomps past with all the swagger accrued from years and years of leading by violent example, his newly-named shadows falling into place habitually behind him. "Bonaventure," he acknowledges to Abraham with a respectful decline of his broad head.

"Cap'n," Abraham acknowledges back with a similar, if perhaps shallower, nod.

"Good luck out there, Gull," Nemo well-wishes with an upraised palm.

Even halfway across the hold and without his turning around, Greatgullet's chuckle is visible in his shoulders. "Got good looks and a winning personality." He twists his thick neck around to expose a great crevasse of a grin. "No need for luck." Six more strides and the three hulking hooligans cross the threshold from cargo bay to airlock tunnel. The Obax throws a parting "See you on Talos, boss," towards his hosts and rams the door release button with a balled fist hard enough to dent it.

"Gull?" comments Abraham first.

"Boss?" repeats Odisseus second.

"Talos?" speculates Moira third.

Two-Bit fans his Attaché once. "That went off without a crunch."

Moira archly raises an eyebrow. "Did it?"

"It did," Two-Bit confirms cautiously, with a careful eye to the Captain. He sniffs peremptorily, an overture to an excusing sigh. "Well, if you don't mind–"

"Talos, huh?" Moira conjectures innocently. "Which moon?"

Two-Bit spreads open palm and Attaché with equal innocence. "Me hatch is battened."

"Oh, yeah? It is?" Moira shifts her weight testily, always eager of late to pursue this particular line of inquiry. "Seems it was battened when we left Gallow and then it was battened on Takioro and now it's still battened here in Veraspo."

"I've noticed," Odisseus chimes in, as though to Moira exclusively, "it does unbatten awful quick in front of complete strangers, though."

"Vel's no stranger," Nemo ventures somewhat defensively.

"So that were Vel, then?" Abraham, the most purely curious among them, pounces.

"Uh," Nemo stalls, suddenly glancing to Two-Bit for reassurance, "all the things that apply to his hatch also apply to my hatch."

Moira's unsurprisingly the one who cuts to the chase. "Can you answer one question for me?"

"Probably not," Nemo admits.

"Where's the harm? In telling us, I mean. Flask knew. You say Velocity knows. Greatgullet, whomever the bloom _he_ is, apparently knows." Moira sweeps an expansive gesture towards the airlock door. "What do you stand to lose–"

"Except our loyalty," Odisseus pipes up.

"–by keeping us in the dark?"

She'd expected another cheap evasion, another shoddy shirking of the honest question. What Moira doesn't anticipate, when it suddenly arrives, is the straightening of Nemo's resolve and the confrontational aspect he suddenly adopts. "You wanna know why?"

"Yes. I asked."

He breathes once, twice before compiling, the words falling out of him in a sudden petulant rush. "Because you wouldn't understand and you'd say no without even thinking about and it's not worth it."

"But Two-Bit understands?" Odisseus presses.

"Two-Bit's," Nemo points a pouty finger towards his accomplice, but his eyes remain locked on Moira, "not mean to me all the time and he thinks it's gonna be super badass and he's not a total butthead like some people."

"Er..." Two-Bit stammers, visibly uncertain whether or not to ally himself to this unexpectedly juvenile defense.

"I'm going to my room!" Nemo announces abruptly, shoving past his chastised first mate and mechanic to clomp childishly up the companionway. Upon reaching the topmost stair, he suddenly twists around and addresses Abraham in a casual tone. "Can you set course for Xathik Major? Cool."

With that, the abovedecks corridor coughs open and their Captain disappears from sight.

It's upon Two-Bit that the crew settles their collective confusion. Nemo's baffled co-conspirator still stands with hands and Attaché spread in a latter-day gesture of his blamelessness. "I literally have no flash," he's quick to renounce.

Odisseus was frankly underwhelmed by Xathik Major. A lonesome moon orbiting a lonesome gas giant on the most lonesome end of a particularly lonesome sector of the galaxy, Xathik Major could at least lay claim to one solitary virtue. A point of primary pride that elevated the ignominious rock every so slightly above the many pointless planetoids and navigational hazards of its ilk – Xathik Major boasted a breathable atmosphere. A thin and vaguely queasy one, albeit, but Odisseus, staunchly opposed to the humiliation presented by donning a vacuum suit, was unlikely to begrudge the moon any of its atmospheric caveats.

"24.1% oxygen, 0.7 degrees substandard gravity, geothermal instability" read the full transcript of the local travel advisory's entry on the moon. Surveying the scenery arrayed all around him, Odisseus couldn't necessarily elaborate on this description any.

A featureless gray horizon in every direction, broken only by unimpressive craters and insignificant mounds revealed to be open geysers by one alarming explosion after another, Xathik Major was the textbook definition of nowhere. Its utter triviality was the only salient asset Nemo could possibly hope to be milking with this latest and most stereotypical of rendezvous.

The Captain loiters an uncomfortable distance away, twisting the handles of his satchel around his fist for lack of any other available affectation to distract himself with. His mechanic, his first mate and, unexpectedly, his accomplice tap toes and twiddle thumbs at the foot of the _Lover's_ boarding ramp, staring across the negative space for the eventual appearance of Nemo's mysterious meeter.

The distance, of course, had been the Captain's insistence, demanding a demeaningly twenty-minute exercise of call-and-answer to establish the outer reaches of their respective earshots. Denied traditional methods of eavesdropping, Odisseus is relegated to his sight and smell to glean what clues he could to the unseen contact's identity. Unfortunately, the former remains poorer than piss and the latter is fatigued beneath the onerous stench of the geysers, consistently venting sulphur into the air at annoyingly frequent intervals.

The newest development involved Two-Bit Switch and his alleged ignorance of this next portion of their plan. Despite all the vociferous protestations about his having been excluded from Nemo's inner circle, Odisseus and Moira had privately discussed the remarkable dichotomy between previously out-of-the-loop Two-Bit, sullen and sulky, and currently out-of-the-loop Two-Bit, vocal and vaudevillian.

The notion of a fully-informed Two-Bit, potentially on Nemo's orders, pleading ignorant wasn't necessarily beyond the realm of believability. When pondering such possibilities, however, both Odisseus and Moira were forced to acknowledge the inevitable onset of paranoia when dealing with so many ulterior motives and unspoken intentions.

Tapping contentedly on the touchscreen of his Attaché, Two-Bit bulldozes the conversation forward. "Any flashes what's in the sack?"

"Cash," Moira provides. Standing between them, she renders herself as cushion to protect Odisseus' composure and Two-Bit's neck. "By weight, somewhere between 750-thou and an even million."

"You hink?"

"Stands to reason. Same size, same weight as the one Greatgullet carried off."

"Oh yeah?" Two-Bit's voice betrays no confirmation or contradiction. "Certainly weren't interested in my opinion on the subject, that's for sure." When neither of them takes a swipe at his low-hanging fruit, Two-Bit feels the unwelcome need to reiterate. "Really gets me goat."

"I can only imagine." Odisseus sets his jaw in the aftermath of the unwise comment and bides through the sound of the grinding servomotor.

"I CANNOT DOUBT," the droidvox translates and is met with another all-pervasive silence. In all fairness, the device adherent to the top of Two-Bit's Attaché had markedly improved since its last appearance in the pizza parlor above Qel Qatar. Even with veritable buckets of its owner's elbow grease, however, the kitbashed droidvox was unlikely to ever manage a passable grasp of subtext, idiom, irony or colloquialism.

Instead, the flavorless drivel it spewed forth in place of language conferred no true translation to Two-Bit and nothing but vexation to Odisseus.

Moira's buzzing comm offers blissful interruption. "Options?" she answers.

"Precious few." Odisseus can barely discern Abraham's lilt through perpetual static and the interruptive explosions the geysers provide. "Whatsoever this bird be, she don't come equipped with a reg number. Far as IntraGalaxy Transpo be concerned, she don't exist."

"Of course not."

"Wanna pick his brain? Some notion of a make and model would help zottibles."

Moira considers Odisseus across her shoulder. "Can you manage make and model?"

The first and primary conundrum associated with identifying the spaceship parked two full earshots away, supposedly flown by Nemo's enigmatic contact, was the metal.

Generally speaking, the number of metallic alloys in the entire galaxy capable of withstanding all the peculiar rigors of spaceflight could be counted on one paw. Teltriton dominated this market, entirely thanks to the tireless efforts of the Endless Imperium to stomp out any research or competitors that might challenge their monopoly. As a result, nearly every craft airborne was made of teltriton and subsequently stamped in the Imperium's records.

This boat, all angular plates and panels akimbo, wasn't made of teltriton, however.

Iridine, the primary shipbuilding material of the defunct Hesko Planetary, was a coarse, copperish alloy, currently embargoed beyond belief. Solxite, the exclusive technology of the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija, was a hyaline material with the auspicious ability to transmute reflected solar energy directly into shipborne power. Classified by size as only shuttle or starfighter, matte black within an inch of its life, and devoid of decal, insignia or manufacturer's mark, Odisseus would honestly be hard-pressed to definitively determine which of the two metals the ship was actually made from.

While not especially copperish, had the ship in question been constructed of solxite the merest glint of sunlight should have refracted off its surface in a billion brilliant colors. Failing that, and given the extreme unavailability of solxite as a building material, iridine and Hesko Planetary were declared the uncertain victors.

"If my options are Trija or Hesko," Odisseus stipulates gruffly, "at gunpoint I'd say Hesko. Don't quote me, though."

"No on the make or model," Moira returns with equal or greater gruffness. "He–"

"IF ARE MY OPTIONS TRIJA OR HESKO BY FORCE OF ARMS I WOULD LIKE TO SAY HESKO."

Moira impatiently resumes, "He says either Heskite or Trijan, and it's–"

"NOT CITATION ME UNTIL."

Moira stabs out each word deliberately. "Not. Trijan. So."

Before Abraham can warble any disappointment, the canopy seal on the whatever ship hisses broken. There, clambering out of the cockpit, comes a Trijan.

The three crewmen gawk confusedly at the disembarking pilot. Humanoid, male and bald, he's melanistic as all his people and attired head-to-toe in the epaulletted finery of a Trijan naval officer. None among the _Lover's_ crew is willing to advance this newest and most preposterous theory that Nemo was somehow in cahoots with the Radiant Armada.

The proceedings pass in almost unchallenged silence, six ears straining to glean whatever details they could from the distant exchange. The interaction they observe is a pitch perfect cutting from an espionage holofilm: a covert handoff in an undisclosed location between supposedly enemy operatives.

With satchel passed from Nemo to Trijan and scarcely a word uttered between them, they part in peerless synchronicity. They're a pair of cloak-and-dagger paragons until Nemo grimaces, thrusts a hand into his trousers and adjusts the hang of his crotch.

"The bloom's he truckin' with Trijans for?" Two-Bit dangles significantly.

"Who knows," snarls Odisseus through clenched fangs. This said, he closes his eyes and grinds his molars in anticipation.

"ANYONE TO KNOW HOW," the droidvox supplies glibly, until some internal mechanism skips a beat and begins clicking erratically. "ANYONE ANYONE ANYONE ANYONE"

"Uh," Two-Bit stammers helplessly, as his pet project yakkety-yaks off the deep end.

"ANYONE ANYONE ANYONE ANYONE"

Odisseus sighs and gestures towards the device with a beckoning paw. Having no doubt awaited the Ortok's offer of assistance with the device since he'd scraped it off the floor of Gasbox's scrapbarn four months ago, Two-Bit eagerly slaps the Attaché and attached droidvox into Odisseus' capable paws.

Giving the whole affair a few perfunctory sniffs, Odisseus turns the Attaché and its attachment over in his paws a few times, checks the connection and quite delicately unclasps the droidvox from its perch above the device. After a second or two of further examination, Odisseus suddenly whips the droidvox dismissively aside, where it clatters against and eventually falls over the rim of the nearest geyser.

Two-Bit nearly screams an objection, but Odisseus' remorseless stare dares him to comment. A moment later, the geyser erupts in an expelled gout of steam, sulphur and boiling liquid. As the smoke settles, Odisseus politely returns the Attaché.

Nemo, flicking something off his finger with obvious disgust, closes the gap. "You fix the droidvox?"

"Yes," Odisseus returns flatly, his answer succeeded by nothing but joyous silence.

Moira tips her temple towards the decamping Trijan, climbing toward the open canopy of his mystery ship. "How's your friend?"

"Hm?" Nemo shoots a glance over his shoulder. "Oh. Quiet." Parting the folds of his duster, he splays both hands against his waist and considers his stomach a moment. "Bloom me out. Anybody else like, super starving?"

"Where to next?" presses Moira.

"I don't know – I'm thinking oysters? Is that weird?"

"Which planet?" Moira, fully anticipating his digression, restates without missing a beat. "What's the next stop on our round-the-Ring tour of mysterious buhoxshit? Talos?"

"Oh," Nemo barks his sudden understanding. "Mannimar."

Swallowing this with a mixture of puzzlement and resignation, Moira champions her wearied cause. "Gonna tell us why?"

To his credit, Nemo at least frowns in concentration before confessing, "Probably not," and traipse back up the boarding ramp, his mind occupied not by Trijans, Mannimar or the abysmal morale of his crew, but undoubtedly only by oysters.

Chapter 10

Odisseus should be able to puzzle this out. From the Gallwegian bank heist, to Velocity and the Quuilar Noxix footage, to Greatgullet and eventually Talos, plus Two-Bit Switch's involvement and, seemingly, an anonymous someone amongst the ranks of the Trijan Radiant Armada – he was missing something.

Plus, where did all these airlocks fit in?

The latest thicket of evidence stands staggered, like a pantheon of towering trash, under Mannimar's pale green sun. All these factors swirled about the solution, each clue connected only tangentially to another, but in no discernible pattern, weaving no readable web, at least not from where Odisseus stood.

Yet still, the Ortok palpably understood how thin the pretense was rapidly becoming. Circumstances now forced Nemo to approach Odisseus for his technical expertise. Try though he might, the Captain couldn't quite exploit the Ortok's knowledge base and ingrained spaceship appraisal without tipping his saltbrother off about the scheme's true nature. Odisseus knew it only required one verbal gaff, one slip of the tongue on Nemo's part and all the conspiring and conniving would be, at last, laid bare.

"First things first, they're perfect," Nemo opens, exhibiting his skills as the galaxy's worst haggler. "I mean, don't wanna speak too soon, but," he appeals up to Odisseus, "I think I've seen all I really need to see here. Why don't we take–"

"I'd strongly advise against that," Hook counters with his own galactically worst salesman routine. "These, uh, _items_ would've been discontinued pre-Expantionist Conflicts, unless I'm very much mistaken. You're gonna wanna examine these more closely – individually, if possible – before you make another, uh," his eyes flick to the _Lover_ , the ship enjoying a heartfelt homecoming surrounded by her childhood junk, "impulse buy."

Palisades of mismatched "merchandise" subdivide the Mannimar scrapyards into nebulously-defined departments, such as acid-damaged refuse and backfired weaponry and haphazard hunks of miscellaneous metal. Once section in particular was the subject of Nemo's entire sojourn on this, the planet of the _Lover's_ rebirth. Odisseus couldn't fathom a single reason why the Captain would be so interested in these obsolete airlocks, beyond simple contrariness.

The three of them – the shopkeep, the customer and the customer's saltbrother – stand before column upon crooked column. This grove of upright airlocks, jutting tipsily from the surface sand, are little more than forty-foot teltriton tubes capped on each end by a pressurized door and a suite of driftjets. The copse of Gond-class exoejection airlocks resembled nothing so much as a tottering temple to some bizarre junkyard deity, a collection of slanted monoliths meant to monumentalize an obscure ritual.

Under any other circumstances, Odisseus would've been less than impressed and voiced same immediately. Under these circumstances, the Ortok was far too preoccupied racking his brain. He knew there was some pathway that connected the dots between these airlocks and Velocity or these airlocks and the Quuilar Noxix footage or these airlocks and Greatgullet.

Nemo, meanwhile, busies himself by putzing about with Two-Bit's borrowed Attaché, jabbing and smearing his thumb against the touchscreen to seemingly little avail.

Hook, in that Ufaki way, somehow manages to cross all three of his arms in a manner Odisseus can't precisely parse. He stands several feet aside, as though to distance himself from these proceedings and to wash all his three hands of the sale he was reluctantly about to make.

The dichotomy between Odisseus' mental image of the _Lover's_ original peddler and the Ufaki standing to Nemo's right is astounding. Somehow, whenever Nemo mentioned Hook, Odisseus imagined a cunning charlatan, who paid his bills by duping naïve patrons into exchanging perfectly serviceable vessels for perfectly unserviceable jalopies.

Never, in all four years since their reunion on Vollok, had Odisseus imagined that Nemo could've been the main aggressor behind the negotiation. Instead, he'd always inwardly cursed and blamed this Hook character for installing this romantic notion of _The Unconstant Lover's_ infallibility in the Captain's brain.

Nothing, it seemed, could possibly be further from the truth, with Nemo one-hundred-percent committed to buying these decrepit artifacts and Hook, in fact, the voice of reason, evidently against his better vendor's judgment.

"Well, brother," Nemo addresses to Odisseus, before peeling his eyes from the Attaché's screen, its contents in indecipherable by the sun's emerald glare. "Shall we indulge him?"

Odisseus exchanges glances with Hook, an immediate kinship kindled between mechanics against the oblivious customer. The Ortok shambles the short distance forward and clicks claws against the corroded teltriton of the nearest airlock. "Correct me at any point here," he tosses toward Hook as a courtesy, "but these're Gond-class, aren't they?"

"Mostly," Hook confesses, shades of embarrassment visible on his face. "A handful near the back actually predate Gond, if it can be believed."

"My admittedly dim understanding was," Odisseus allows, "that these pre-graviton airlocks would actually be stuffed full of marines and magnetized to the side of a capital ship. Then, once the cruiser closed to engagement distance with another capital or, more likely, a space station, they were, what, launched off towards the enemy's airlock?"

"Model depending." Hook spews a saliva bullet onto the sand inches from Nemo's unnoticing feet. "These newer ones here," he untangles an arm to make a generalized wave that encompasses the front half of the standing airlocks, "have been retrofitted with driftjets for basically that purpose, but those?" A second gesture indicates the smattering of pre-Gond boarding craft. "Magnetic grapplers and not much else."

"Even with driftjets, though," Odisseus stipulates, weaving his footpath between the tottering teltriton tubes like a lumberjack inspecting each trunk for an ideal candidate to chop down, "you'd be looking at such small fuel reserves that one outta five shots, they're gonna be too far away or miss their mark entirely or clamp harmlessly onto some random patch of the target's hull."

Memories of Takioro's defective shoots, who employ effectively the same strategy, suddenly flare up. Odisseus momentarily imagines the cylinders chock full of long-dead boarders that must be floating somewhere in the expanses between planets. "Space travel being the blooming grab-bag it was back then, one outta five must've sounded real jig," Odisseus muses, withdrawing his paw from the airlock's surface and imagining the tube suddenly stuffed to the brim with skeletons.

"Lucky graviton was invented when it was," Hook agrees, "else we'd still be boarding with these. Not much call for 'em, as you'd imagine, ever since."

Nemo's attention bubbles to the surface, yanking his eye contact from the evidently confounding Attaché. "Where'd we land on this? Yes or no?"

Hook is comparatively polite. "I think, what, 'no', was decided?"

Odisseus is baldfacedly rude. "'No' is where we landed on that."

To his credit, or discredit, Nemo is categorically unconcerned by their joint judgment. He mutters a token "Shame" before the Attaché captures his attention again. "Answer me a question, Odi?" he poses between the staccato of pokes against the screen.

Odisseus pads between the airlocks, back towards his bemused saltbrother and the clutched source of his confusion. "Two-Bit's notes are a little sketchy on these details." Nemo whips the device around and Odisseus squints against the glare to better read what's displayed there. "What kinda airlock is this?"

He tilts the tablet ever so slightly upward with an extended claw to better view what the screen, for some reason not in hologram mode, evinces. Blueprints, Odisseus discerns, blueprints of, unsurprisingly, an airlock of a make and model he immediately identifies.

This done, he feigns deliberation for as long as Nemo's likely to believe, as he frantically scans the proffered Attaché for any conceivable clue that he can glean. The airlock in question, highlighted and enlarged, dominates the display, but several running tickers and cornered tags betray the title and outline of Qabb 8 – a jackpot of a savory specific.

Whether Nemo catches wise or not, Odisseus is too preoccupied with scanning the screen to determine certainly. When the Captain inverts the Attaché to resume punching with his fierce pointer finger, the Ortok offers his prognosis. "V&R IE5 Series II."

The information is as meaningless to Nemo as weather patterns on Greva would be to a sunbather on Criia. "And can a V&R EI5–"

"IE5," Odisseus corrects.

"–mate with one of these?" Nemo nods halfheartedly past Odisseus.

The Ortok pays the stand of ancient airlocks an unnecessary glance over a furry shoulder, as though requiring visual conformation of their uselessness. "Uh, no. Like we said, there's practically a hundred years separating these two technologies."

"Fair," returns Nemo.

Reading anything into Nemo's nonchalance is always a double-edged electrochette. Odisseus' keenly aware that it could as easily denote disappointment as it could excitement.

At the very least, Odisseus could count the unearthing of Qabb 8 as an untarnished victory, one he'd doubtlessly mull over and over in the company of Moira and Abraham at the earliest possible opportunity. The twenty some floating fragments of the formerly unfractured planet Qabb sported little beside a smattering of inset trading posts – Qabb 8 amongst them. Now, in light of the recent developments, they also sported some role, important or insignificant, in Nemo's unveiling scheme.

"How about this one?" Once again, Nemo inverts the Attaché for Odisseus' perusal. Once again, the Ortok is forced to hem and haw over the angle and distance like some sightless old litterbearer.

"TFS Civilian N4 and no," Odisseus reports after devoting another few seconds to scrutinizing. The airlock in question, another spinning schematic, plays through a brief repetitive animation, slotting recurrently into the side of a spindly space station, complete with the helpful label of Yime Orbital.

Notable for its unchallenged monopoly on buhox meat, leather and milk, Yime and its lonely polar space station were the foremost staging points for the exportation of beef across the galaxy. The only parallel to be drawn, unfortunately, between Yime and Qabb, however, were their relative proximity, on either end of the Uklio Quadrant.

"Same problem?" Nemo supposes once the Attaché is returned to him to poke at. Odisseus barely has time to nod his reply, let alone ponder the ramifications of all this new intel, when a third rendering is thrust before his squinty eyes. "This one, finally?"

The image brandished before Odisseus could, in a younger, happier time, been a dead ringer for Takioro Federate Station, back before she'd added the fashionable "De–" suffix to her middle word and lost her dependable central spire. The subtle, yet noticeable differences, between this hologram and the sordid space station the _Lover_ called home help Odisseus distinguish its actual identity.

Ikoril Federate Station was the Outer Ring's second and less successful attempt to create an omnipopular merchant hub, afflicted by its poor location and subsequent obscurity.

The airlock Nemo wishes classified is child's play, following that. "No and AirTite 918 Adjustable." His mind awhirl with possibilities, Odisseus publishes only mild skepticism, for appearance's sake. "You should be sensing a pattern here."

Nemo's mouth is an uneven line, neither frown nor smile, as he returns to his Attaché. "I unfortunately am."

Qabb, Yime and Ikoril must all intersect with the various other pieces of Nemo's ongoing gambit – Greatgullet, Trija, Quuilar Noxix – in some, albeit esoteric, manner.

The connection between Ikoril, Takioro's twin, and Velocity, Takioro's Depot-Commissioner, seems too blatant to ignore. When no other piece of evidence presents itself for connection, however, Odisseus is forced to entertain alternate theories.

Qabb 8, Yime Orbital and Ikoril Federate Station are all, obviously, space stations. Qabb, Yime and Ikoril are all located, however variably, within the Uklio Quadrant and also, Odisseus notes with mild interest, points on the Valladian Shipping Line.

The Ortok's heart plays hooky on a handful of beats – Valladia.

The Valladian Shipping Line, a string of corporately affiliated ports, anchorages and space stations, ranging from the depths of the Outer Ring all the way into the heart of the Inner Sectors, was the galaxy's single most profitable merchant enterprise. Every day, billions upon billions of credits worth of cargo pass along the Line from Imperium member worlds to Bad Space rogue planets and back again. The Imperium sanction, the official stamp-of-approval to represent Imperial trading concerns in the abdicated regions of the Outer Ring, would only quadruple, perhaps quintuple, the amount of capital, in raw goods and raw cash, flowing up and down the Line in days to come.

An attack, an attempt to plunder some wealthy target somewhere along the Line, was the most obvious and, in his estimation, most likely conclusion Odisseus could draw between the dots. Qabb, Yime and Ikoril, then, were logically Nemo shopping for marks. The Captain lingered the bull's-eye over each one long enough only for Odisseus to render his assessment and was evidently counting on the Ortok's inability to piece together the puzzle.

The airlocks themselves seemed a somewhat overblown tactic, but nearly everything else – Velocity's connection to Ikoril, Greatgullet as a potential collaborator or distraction, the Noxix footage to ingratiate Greatgullet – clicks together progressively like the teeth of a turning gearbox.

The connection to Valladia made, Nemo's motive crystalizes clearly. The pizza parlor above Qel Qatar, the holovised press conference and that sour sound bite "piracy is pointless" are suddenly salient in Odisseus' memory.

"Well," Hook concludes, with a bizarre three-handed clap, "if we've officially decided _against_ these–"

"Oh, no, no," Nemo corrects, thumbing the Attaché off and realigning his attention on the conversation around him, "we'll take them. All twenty."

With Odisseus too absorbed in his own mental epiphanies to pay much attention, Hook is forced to flabbergast for two. "Uh," he stammers, stalling for some manner of objection, but only comes up with a clarifying question. "All twenty?"

Nodding Nemo is reaching into the trusty inside pocket of his duster, undoubtedly to withdraw another significant sheath of cash when he freezes. "And you offer delivery?"

"Depends," Hook's wise to stipulate. "Delivery to where?"

It's Odisseus, much to the surprise of Hook and especially Nemo, who supplies the Ufaki's answer, unable to keep a certain self-satisfied smirk off his whiskered muzzle. "Talos."

Moira punts the pulverized part – a pressure helix, in point of fact – with a jackboot, sending the hunk of thermosteel skirring across the sand, splaying purple grains in every direction. After a hop, skip and a clatter, the helix connects with a protuberant sheet of teltriton and breaks upon impact into a spread of dislodged metal pieces. Unfortunately, Odisseus is nowhere in sight and therefore unable to appreciate Moira's little act of vengeance against the pressure helix and all its malfunctioning ilk.

The five of them meandered about through the wreckage like disinterested tourists forced to spend an afternoon paying their respects at an abandoned memorial crash site. They'd spread pretty liberally over the ruins, which were extraordinarily extensive, to the point where Moira'd not encountered another member of _The Unconstant Lover's_ crew in the past thirty minutes of idle wanderings.

Frankly, she'd been enjoying the solitude afforded her immensely, only having to ignominiously gun down a single deranged Moshi vagrant who menaced her with a shorn shard of plexishield. For Talos, that was considered comparative peace-and-quiet.

Seven of the eight moons in orbit about mighty gas giant Talos each inhabited some distinct niche in the Bad Space life cycle, allowing visiting criminals to most conveniently cull their vices a la carte.

Porttown 5, for example, was committed to the fine art of dash racing, the entire community constructed around the twisting circuit that, once a galactic year, would play host to the exclusive Khali Rhon Classic. Porttown 8, meanwhile, was effectively one pervasive red-light district, so choked with brothels, bordellos and cathouses that one couldn't spend a credit anywhere on Talos VIII without the bill eventually coming to line the pocket of pimp, madame or prostitute. Porttown 6 consisted only of a junk heap and an auction block. Porttown 4 played host to a diverse menagerie of squabbling drug cartels. Porttown 7 placed high in the running for the galaxy's most despoiled urban ghetto and so on and so forth.

Talos II, then, was the marketable exception to this otherwise effective system, containing, as it did, no actual Porttown. Instead, all Talos II contained was a shipwreck.

The moon's one defining feature was the wreck – the enormous skeleton of some immeasurably huge, pre-Imperium capital ship that once made an explosive, nose-first landing on the moon's purple dunes decades earlier than even Abraham's memory reached. Scavenged, salvaged and scraped clean of all valuables uncounted years past, all that remained of the humongous hulk were its meatless bones, protruding from the surrounding sands for a mottibles-wide radius.

With a population in the double digits and an ecosystem meager enough to be counted with five fingers, only gorjo geckos, occasional half-crazed vagabonds and, currently, the crew of _The Unconstant Lover_ had any conceivable interest in Talos II.

Benign breezes insinuate sand between the towering pieces of eroded hull. Sunset, refracted off the looming enormity of Talos Prime, spreads storybook shadows from the gnashed and gnarled wreckage.

Moira is a pedestrian, navigating an unfamiliar city at dusk. She ambles through spires formed by upended turbines. She patronizes art galleries that exhibit only ruined landscape paintings, seen through row upon row of smashed portholes. She gazes upward at colossal cathedrals, constructed only by scrap chance and buttressed by interlocking debris.

Currently, Moira didn't care what Nemo's machinational reasons for arranging the rendezvous with Greatgullet here were. She was suddenly prepared to forgive the twenty-six day, galaxy-spanning warp, in the light of these several free hours to explore the improvised museum to fractured flotsam and jagged jetsam.

While they'd both religiously refrained from commenting on Odisseus' new theories, neither Nemo nor Two-Bit bothered denying the well-accepted fact that the aforementioned meet-up with Greatgullet was what brought the _Lover_ to Talos II. Upon touching down, they'd each been issued the same vague orders by their tight-lipped Captain – "scope the place out" but "don't get lost."

The crew knew they were killing time until Greatgullet graced them with his bewhiskered presence. Moira chose to murder that time by strolling through the bygone crash site, her first act of honest-to-moons tourism in ever.

The Captain and his accomplice had been, following the most recent revelation on Mannimar, commendably more circumspect about any further details. They'd departed that night on a straight shot for Talos II and, seemingly, the resolution of all the mysteries. Both guilty parties kept largely to their own quarters, where they'd occasionally host covert conferences, doubtlessly to twist their oily mustaches and practice their villainous monologues.

The counter-tactic, of course, was for the remaining three members of the crew to hold their own secret councils. These consisted primarily of evaluating what little evidence remained and complaining about the Captain's staunch refusal to cooperate.

When all spelled out, Odisseus' logic had overall been the most sound. The vast majority of his baseline assertions she and Abraham could easily agree to.

The plan appeared to be to pillage some Valladian port and potentially to throw in with Greatgullet. The pillage somehow involved an ill-conceived notion to utilize all twenty of Hook's bought airlocks and relied on Two-Bit to concept and chart the rockier areas of Nemo's supposedly genius ideas. This was all generally agreed upon and, with Moira and Abraham's help, they'd even managed to solder several of the outlying factors more firmly into place.

According to Abraham's testimony, Greatgullet and Velocity'd once engaged in a brief and bloody romance, when both were younger and rival buccaneers. It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility, then, that Nemo would have slid the Depot-Commissioner a healthy bribe to arrange the necessary introductions in Veraspo.

It had fallen to Moira to make the Trija connection. She quickly ascertained that those mysterious uniforms paid off on Xathik Major likely did not, as it happens, represent the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija at all. Rather, she surmised they represented a certain rogue element, a certain Captain Socorro Charybdis, Trijan privateer-turned-pirate-turned-privateer-again and currently number one on Valladia's mercenary payroll.

Thusly, it stood to reason that with approximately two million credits worth of bribes, all doubtlessly drawn from their hard-won currency, the Captain had cemented an allegiance with two of Bad Space's most puissant picaroons. One was purchased for her silence and mysterious elsewhereness come the day of the actual attack. The other, Moira theorized, was for the use of his prodigious number of cutlass-swinging boarders.

Questions remained unanswered, of course. The release of the Noxix footage would seem to socket neatly into the need to charm Greatgullet, celebrated bounty hunter hunter. That gain, however, was so minor compared to the widespread ramifications of so publicly claiming responsibility for the murder of Huong Xo's favorite lapdog. In even his most imprudent mood, Moira couldn't imagine Two-Bit endorsing such a drastic tactic.

The timing surrounding the suite of airlocks purchased from the Mannimar scrapyards and their contingent delivery was also majorly out of sync. According to the Ufaki's estimate, they wouldn't be due to arrive for some weeks, a date far too removed to necessitate any manner of sit-down with Greatgullet this early.

The main point of contention, however, what persistently stuck in the three's collective craw, was the niggling feeling that they were underestimating the overall scope of Nemo's ambition.

Certainly sacking a Valladian port, especially one along the Shipping Line, was no mean feat. It would require planning, significant capital and no small supply of muscle.

The investment of time, risk and money Nemo was cascading on what otherwise would be a month, perhaps two month, caper, at the most, however, was making the uninformed members of his crew more and more anxious.

The possibility of a more ambitious prize, Valladia Prime herself, perhaps, had been discussed, but it was Abraham who held firm in his original belief. To his thinking, the whole enterprise, from boosting banks on Gallow to scoping shipwrecks on Talos, would manifest as something substantially more grandiose than any three of them could predict.

Moira's padding through the cobbled dwelling of some marooned desperado, his bones long dissolved into purple sand, when she first spies it. Whether her crewmates have already spotted the descending shape or whether she's the keen-eyed first, Moira's not sure. Simple fate grants her a makeshift window, little more than a point of total corrosion in the decay-colored wall, within which the spaceship is perfectly, almost idyllicly, framed.

Hustling out into the open better assesses the incoming craft as friend, foe or foreigner. Moira wastes several seconds halfheartedly wishing she'd somehow remembered to pocket a Spyglass as the ship gradually passes through the lower layers of the moon's atmosphere and materializes into full view.

Recognition dawns later still. At first, Moira's memory doesn't clock the pentahedral teltriton sledge of a spacecraft, both port and starboard bristling with what appear, from a ground-level vantage, to be steering vanes of some kind. A score of unexpected driftjets ignite, the ship's angle shifts considerably and the "steering vanes" are revealed to be the craft's most distinguishing feature. A full dozen circular hull plates are thrust far enough from the cruiser's main body to effectively shield the gun emplacements and airlocks beneath from return fire.

Moira positively identifies _The Rule of Thumb_ as soon as she's afforded a clear view of these shields. Each is reinforced by scads of bolted-on scrap and each is painted to appear as the snarling or sneering visage of a dozen different alien species. Captain Greatgullet's flagship is a formidable TFS Onslaught-Class Heavy Troop Transport, known galaxywide for plundering and puissance.

If only, Moira muses, the Imperium could see in whose diabolical hands the handiwork of their industrious shipwrights were landing.

She's shuffled several steps back, already mentally retracing her path through the refuse jungle to the most logical place to encounter another of her scattered crew. She stops when two more shapes, little more than airborne specks, also break the cloud cover and begin to descend, following in the _Rule's_ wake.

Moira lingers long enough to at least attempt to identify either of the arriving spacecraft. The fading sunlight glints off the copperish hull and pumping pistons of the easternmost ship, revealing its Hesko manufacturer. The westernmost ship, however, is cut from a wholly different cloth. A spiny remix, Moira supposes, fashioned from disparate sections of half a dozen unlikely specimen. It's accompanied by a thin cloud of lumpy, irregular starfighters, like droning flies encircling a wallowing buhox.

Moira adjusts her hustle to a run. She sprays purple sand with each bootprint as she circumnavigates the junk labyrinth to locate Nemo or Odisseus or Abraham to deliver the news – Greatgullet has arrived and he brought friends.

Two-Bit considers Nemo's kind offer. "Think I'll stand, mate."

At this, Nemo only shrugs, his attention focused on dragging an HV tray across the uneven floor to provide a relatively flat surface on which to place his cards. "First things first," Nemo begins peremptorily, spreading out, as he speaks, the makings of a one-player Iniquity game. "Gimme your word you won't say squat to the others. I'm trusting you to go along with this, but if they catch wise, I'll have to endure every flavor of 'are you out of your mind' and 'what were you thinking' imaginable." He raises both eyebrows as he makes his ultimatum. "Time being, lips sealed. Savvy?"

"Savvy," Two-Bit agrees guardedly, excitement mounting despite himself.

"Second things second," Nemo continues, "I'm bringing you in because, at this point, I need your help. I've gone as far ahead on this frankly mad venture as I can without the resources and contacts you provide. My telling you, then, has gotta go hand-in-hand with you agreeing to come aboard permanently." Once again, he pauses in his dealing to fix Two-Bit with those steely gray eyes. "Once I tell you, you're in, better or worse. Savvy?"

Two-Bit nearly voices one of the hundred objections that well in this throat, but once again, burning curiosity, the potential doom of them all, overtakes him.

He consents with a grunting "Savvy."

Nemo gives Two-Bit a smile, the sort of smile that harbingers further mischief to come; not only for themselves but, in this case, for the galaxy at large. "Excellent. Here's what I'm thinking." The first card, the Three of Nooses, snaps daintily to the HV tray's surface. "You remember Qel Qatar?"

"The planet? Yes?"

"The last time we were there," Nemo clarifies. "After _Surimiah_. After Gasbox." He compliments his Three of Nooses with its partner, the Three of Truncheons. "Nanosecond Pizza? Remember?"

"Cap'n," Two-Bit pleads with sudden exasperation, "me droidvox is comin' along, I'm facting. I don't hink–"

"The press conference," Nemo reiterates. "Valladia."

Two-Bit's jaw settles firm. "'Piracy is pointless'?"

The Valladian Shipping Line, ten lustrous ports from Kiesha to Kezz, ever tempted the more ambitious breed of Bad Space's buccaneers. Their increased presence in the media, thanks to the signing of the Imperium contract, doubtlessly only heightened the temptation and, ironically, made them that much more inaccessible. Two-Bit's summarily unsurprised to discover the Captain eyeing a target vastly outside the range of the _Lover's_ capability.

"Got me thinking," Nemo confesses, considering each card in his hand. "Why's nobody move against them? What makes them so invincible?" He plants a third entry, the Hooligan of Fisticuffs, onto the tray perfectly in sync with the planting of his second question.

"Backing's the short answer, these days. And Moira's gal, whasserkisser, Charybdis?" Two-Bit splays out an open hand from his back pocket. "I mean, finger any one of them ports and it's too tragged for anybody on the market to tackle right now. Moons, you'd spend more rhino on ditrogen than you'd jank back by tossin' the place. And that," he further stipulates, "is assuming you don't bump this Charybdis herself and only one 'a her cronies."

"Suppose–"

Two-Bit reads Nemo's withdrawn expression easier than his dismal hand of Iniquity. "Suppose you was jazzed in blagging one of these ports, learn Valladia a lesson 'bout jabbing things they shouldn't?"

Nemo smiles breezily. "For starters, sure."

"Well, me instinct would be to jabb that it ain't possible but," Two-Bit allows, "moons know, scrapping that Pylon weren't supposed to be possible neither, so." He shifts his weight, as much as the rubbish accumulated around him will allow. "My ringer wouldn't be whether or not such a job's possible. Would be whether not such a job's any kinda earner." He shrugs. "You fume all five mil into the caper, sure, it may become more possible, but who's to jabb you're feez to coop your investment back?"

"Indulge me," Nemo requests beneficently, completing his current incident, _A Poor Choice of Weapon_ , with a Pickpocket of Stilettos and subsequently wiping all four cards into the further corner of the HV tray. "You've got five million to spend. How'd Two-Bit Switch, criminal mastermind, pull it off?"

It requires all of Two-Bit's swindler skill to prevent the phrase "Two-Bit Switch, criminal mastermind" from curling his mouth into a smirk.

"Chief crunch is how many gantines you gotta caffle," he advances, matter-of-factly. "You know? Most of the rhino don't come from the station, place like that – it comes from the traders, their goodies and their gantines." He gestures beckoningly towards the Captain, determined to prove his villainous valor and earn the compliment he'd just been paid. "Which one you vizzing to blag?"

"Kiesha Shipyards, say," Nemo answers, entirely too quickly.

"Sure, then, with them Shipyards, you've got all the station's normal defenses to hink about, their jocks, their wheels, their edgies, yeah, plus you've gotta specc some way to deer or deck all or most of the trader's gantines in statee to even turn an earnie and you've gotta do all this while fending off whatever privvy scum Valladia's scored for just such an occasion." If Nemo's remotely daunted by all the adversities arrayed before him, his outward demeanor makes no indication. "Possibly Charybdis herself, depending on how hard your cheese is," Two-Bit adds momentarily. "What you hank, mate, is more gantines."

Nemo draws an additional three cards off the stack and mingles them in amongst his hand. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," Two-Bit realizes, becoming more and more enamored of this idea. "You mate up with another buccaneer, suddenly there's another somebody to absorb half the hurt, deck half the gantines, pulp half the privvies." His brow furrows as the thought expands. "You mate up with a wankload of other buccaneers and you could–"

Language falls behind Two-Bit's accelerating thought process. He stares, speechless a few moments, as ambitions and arguments inwardly clash. Nemo's patient, sliding the first card of a new incident, the Picaroon of Stilettos, onto the tray. "And you could?"

"And you could," Two-Bit repeats numbly, until the objection strikes him in the face. "Nag, nag, nag, that ain't feez – the mathematicals don't work out. First rule of hiring more brunos, yeah, the more wanks, the smaller the takes're. With all the goodies split four, five, ten ways, individual earnie goes down and, with five mil investment up front, it ain't vizzing so tomato no more."

Nemo scans the various options splayed before him. "Unless?"

"Unless," Two-Bit dangles, fully expecting Nemo to supply the caveat and is duly surprised to discover himself arguing Nemo's own lunacy. "Unless you, what, pull more jobs? Plunder more ports?" Nemo smiles. "How many more ports?" Nemo's all smiles. "You're propoing," Two-Bit apprehends slowly, savoring the sheer insanity of each word, "we assemble some manner of mad, what, _armada_ of blooming pirates and lay blooming waste to all ten ports along the Valladian Shipping Line? From Kezz to Kiesha?"

Nemo's response is minimal. He plucks a second card from his hand, slides it onto the tray, the Picaroon of Nooses, to keep his original Picaroon company and curls his smile from breezy to bastardly.

"Bloom me out," Two-Bit breathes, feeding all ten fingers through his greasy hair. "Here, I hinked you were scheming something safe and habby, like knocking over the Skelta installation," both brigands spit instinctively, "or, I don't know, heeling Huong Xo in their literal lollies or something."

"Oh, no," Nemo consents. "Much worse."

Two-Bit converts both hands from scratching his scalp to kneading his brow. "First things first, we don't–" Eyes still closed, he brandishes both hands before his face as he backpedals. "No, wait, first things first, 'are you outta your thinkbox', 'what're you thinking', all that."

"Granted."

"Second things second, then," Two-Bit continues, returning his hands to massage the meat of his face, "if you've any flashes on how, precisely, you expect us to bump, never mind for the present convince or organize, but simply bump any buckos bloomin' antwacky enough to even be jazzed about this, well, then, I'm all ears, mate."

Nemo tenders his reply as though drawing the most logical conclusion in the galaxy. "That's why I'm bringing you in."

For once, the Captain diverts his eyes from the irrelevant Iniquity game to consider Two-Bit honestly. "I need to know how and where and when to attack. I need to know who to invite to table and how best to invite them. I need to know how to keep Valladia from catching wise and the Imperium off my back." He taps three fingers against the edge of the tray as he counts out each his manifold needs. "I need weaknesses, strengths, tactics, schematics, tricks, strategies–"

"I'm a slambreaker," Two-Bit interrupts, suddenly pleading at this immediate influx of responsibility. "Cap'n, people get clinked, I unclink 'em."

In hindsight, Two-Bit Switch wouldn't attest the Captain's next words, "You're a criminal mastermind," as what ultimately convinced him, but rather, the smile that accompanied those words. The unforced smirk is the precise combination of knowing parent and willing accomplice that would cinch Two-Bit's loyalty until the absolute culmination of this very, very bad idea.

In realization of precisely how deep Nemo'd sunk his hooks into him, Two-Bit squeezes his temples between thumb and middle finger and swallows a breath before posing "Any razz in asking why? To any of this, really?"

In answer, Nemo pinches another and third card from his hand, which he deliberately plops onto the center of the tray amid its two brethren. Two-Bit withdraws palm from head to examine the Captain's play arranged with conspicuous neatness across the entire breadth of the tray, each card very delicately spaced to conform to the platform's proportions.

A Picaroon of Stilettos, a Picaroon of Truncheons and a Picaroon of Nooses could only coalesce into one qualifiable combination The salient feature of that combination is not which suit – Fisticuffs, Nooses, Stilettos or Truncheons – they belong to, but rather, what face – in this case, Picaroon – they display.

Three Picaroons, of any suit, amount to a particularly potent third-tier incident in the game of Iniquity known as _The Freebooter Fleet_.

"'cause piracy ain't pointless," is Nemo's rejoinder.

Two-Bit scowls and points. "You stacked that deck, right?"

"Oh, yeah."

Chapter 11

Superior Hjeg can't comprehend what, in all the moons of Jotor, this Briza thinks it's doing. On the future incident report he was going to have to file, the shift manager for the Kiesha Shipyards Space Traffic Controller division would probably say "lurching directionless circles through the station's airspace" or "spewing gouts of temperamental exhaust in its rickety, uncertain wake," if he was feeling poetic.

In theory, Hjeg was years promoted past the grueling grunt work that his flock of underpaid peons were tasked with. There was still one condition, however, that would require the Kieshan floor boss's actual presence. Every so often, a visiting ship would so flummox the tower crew that Superior Hjeg would need to decamp from his cushy office and set actual talon onto the main bullpen himself.

For a quarter of an hour, they all watched the representative red triangle continue its careening circuit around the station on each and every one of the Space Traffic Control tower's monitors. Too much more of this and Hjeg would be due for another promotion and, more importantly, another raise.

Fifteen minutes ago, when the ship first dropped warp, it was an amusing enough distraction in the middle of another brain-numbingly banal workday. As the minutes rolled on, however, and the queue of impatient starships awaiting docking procedures lengthened and lengthened behind the Briza, the ship's once-amusing antics were fast becoming tiresome.

The ship, a Briza remix bastardized beyond belief, was the epitome of uncooperativeness. Seeming to suffer severe system damage, she ignores all docking protocols, refuses all hails and positively cannot remain still enough for the six seconds needed to establish a graviton lock. Instead, she cavorts uneasy circles around the station's primary tower, complete with erratic fluctuations to roll, pitch and yaw. To complicate matters, a stream of vicious exhaust pours from somewhere starboard.

The furthest port on the Valladian Shipping Line, Kiesha Shipyards still attracts a wide consumer base from all across the Outer Ring. Remote as the station is, the starship prototypes, alternate weapons technology and cutting-edge robotic innovations cooked up by the scientists, researchers and pioneers of Kiesha Laser Corp are commodities not to be undervalued. Law-abiding and law-breaking citizens alike routinely brave the unpleasant commute to the Shipyards to attend the company's frequent auctions, expos and unveilings.

Kiesha's three orbital platforms are quite capable to the task of accommodating the daily influx of ship traffic that arrives to patronize the station's wares and services. From their towering vantage high above Platform A, Superior Hjeg could watch Kieshan service crews scramble about the platforms below. All appareled in their sealed vacuum suits, they attended to each of the dissimilar craft parked on the platforms, performing paid-for modifications to gun emplacements or shielding mainframes or torpedo launchers.

In every cursory glance the shift manager pays to the platform, he espies V&R blockade runners, TFS corvettes, ConcInd schooners, Starlight Inc. dreadnoughts and, every thirty seconds, one gallivanting Briza Astroballistic.

A familiar sound chimes from every speaker available in the traffic tower. Yet another vessel arrived through the system's Warp Gate and was rapidly approaching Platform A.

More vessels, in this case, only meant more hold-up. Until this Briza calmed down and answered for its behavior, the queue of obedient paying customers would only continue to grow.

"Superior?" Idne keeps his microphonic transceiver implant fully retracted, so as to better squawk at Hjeg from his post near the incoming terminal. "Newest craft's a Hesko Planetary 7762 Destroyer Medium, _The Loose Cannon_ and–"

"Superior?" repeats Wute. The tiny retina display that hovers before his left eye currently broadcasts the same bizarre transmission broadcast across each of the four monitors at his communications hub. "Briza finally answered a hail," Wute explains as Hjeg waddles closer for inspection, "and tagged back this transmission."

A white symbol fizzles against gray-and-black snow static – a Powosi's distinct three-eyed skull, two brandished pistols, eerie silence broken by spasmodic snatches of distorted sea shanty. A lifetime resident of Bad Space, Hjeg and all his underlings could recognize a Jolly Roger at thirty paces.

"They can't be–"

Hjeg raises a talon to silence his subordinate. He shuffles several steps forward and grips the observation railing to squint out the planetside bay viewport. Quite without warning, the IZ36 Briza Light Freighter suddenly ceases smoking, dramatically re-aligns both boosters and sets a surprising new course to strafe the traffic tower. Before Hjeg or any of his technicians can squawk a command, a warning or even a reaction, the Briza's topturret sparks to life and spews a barrage of brilliant green directly at Platform A.

The traffic tower and all its occupants reel from a pair of impacts. The unexpected cannonade connects with the station's ray shields first. The control tower shudders and shakes as the freighter, a yellowish blur past the starboard viewport, pulls a full-speed flyby.

Superior Hjeg scrambles to the opposite observation railing, shouting more orders to his tech team below. He's preempted by more alarming shouts and shouting alarms.

"Damage to the primary shield projector, Superior," reports Xusl as she struggles to make her voice heard over the squealing klaxons. "Ray shields dropping from 23%!"

Wholly unprepared for a frontal assault this effective, Superior Hjeg shrieks down at his underlings. "Activate aux–"

His order, however, is interrupted by a second torrent of streaking laserfire from the Briza's topturret. The weakening ray shields are suddenly pounded through and ditrogen connects explosively on the surface of the platform.

Once he's recovered his footing, Hjeg overhears Xusl cry "Auxiliary projector's gone!" and confirms the fact on every available monitor. The Superior tightens his talons on the observation railing as he watches the Briza, doubtlessly some enterprising brigand, motor away from the temporarily defenseless platform.

In seconds, she'd pass directly into range of the row of defensive batteries.

"Activate autoturrets," Superior Hjeg commands, replete with certain knowledge.

However skilled they might be at mimicking the unpredictable flight of a ship in distress, no pilot could possibly avoid a point blank barrage from a full suite of Kiesha Laser Corp's automated defensive batteries. Moments from now, the Briza would be reduced to a mere cloud of shrapnel. Tech Superior Chevo would no doubt reward Hjeg for his quick thinking and decisiveness. Kiesha Shipyards would survive, nearly unscathed, its first direct act of piracy in nearly two years – practically a record for Bad Space.

All of this accomplished without hide nor hair of those meddling Trijan subcontracts buoying about like hired thugs. Kiesha Laser Corp, let it be known, was perfectly capable of vouchsafing her own interests.

The escaping Briza crosses the threshold. Immediately, Kiesha's quadroturrets unleash their blue crosshatch of return fire. Slick maneuvering on the part of the pirate pilot avoids a third of the bolts. The surprisingly sturdy ray shield shrugs off another third. Tragically, the remaining third of the opening salvo never leaves the barrels of their turrets.

One of the queued starships colluding with the Briza, a pair of planted pirates, was conceivable. Indeed, a single freighter, working alone, presented nothing but a laughable distraction to the Shipyards as a whole. Two marauders, then, working in concert, could perhaps provide more peril to Kiesha and her customers.

Superior Hjeg's words fail him utterly, then, when all three of the vessels waiting in queue mobilize to the Briza's cause, converging on Platform A en masse with weapons alight.

The first ambusher is a Terro Fleet Systems Onslaught-Class heavy-hitter and she immediately broadsides. She swings about to present a full compliment of shielded turrets and snarling countenances against the station's quadroturrets and she demolishes a third of them in the process.

The second ambusher, the Xendo model remix that profoundly redefines the term "ugly," unexpectedly vomits out a pestilential cloud of irritated starfighters. In squadron-less swarms they swoop, shoot and strafe about the station.

The third ambusher, the newly-arrived Hesko Planetary destroyer, targets every customer's vehicle, arrayed across the parking pad that they can with twin torrents of sparking white disabler fire. Each spacecraft struck goes suddenly limp and lifeless with internal system failure.

The original ambusher, that ballsy Briza Light Freighter who seemingly brought all this bedlam to Kiesha's doorstep, buzzes the traffic tower a second time. Superior Hjeg involuntarily half-ducks as he watches the Briza's booster flare retreat away towards Platform B, its topturret already potshotting towards a certain ray shield projector.

Superior Hjeg finds a moment's worth of quiet serenity to simply watch the unfolding chaos all around him. All the klaxons form some strange, clamant orchestra, sounding all at once. His terrified control crew compliment this music, with their shrill shrieks of "intruders detected" and "communications offline" and "collision imminent."

Laserfire pummels the platform. Explosions flare up at the edges of his vision. Civilian craft are browbeaten into scraping crash landings under waves of disabler fire. The entire airspace thrums thickly with enemy starfighters.

One of these starfighters in particular, a constant amid the chaos and confusion roiling in every direction, catches the attention of Hjeg and his lackeys, mainly for its unwillingness to swerve and avoid the top of the traffic tower.

Technicians point, caw and bumble from their chairs in their haste to evacuate. The Xendo divebomber is unwavering, gradually becoming clearer and clearer through the massive viewport.

Superior Hjeg stands his ground, clutching the observation railing ever tighter.

In seconds, the starfighter will shred through the viewport and convert every inch of its forward momentum into enough firepower to crumble the entire tower. Hjeg is forced to wonder, in the heartbeat before destruction, who could possibly be responsible for all this.

Which four bloomholes amongst all of Bad Space's braggarts, possess the sheer, unimpeachable balls to provoke the limitless commercial and military might of both Valladian Shipping and the breadth of the Endless Imperium itself?

Odisseus stifles a yawn. One of the chief advantages to employing Abraham Bonaventure, warp navigation exemplar, was that one could consistently rely on reaching one's destination that much faster than anyone else. This seemed like a worthwhile investment but, in logistical matters, it usually meant arriving with three extra hours to kill before every agreed-upon meeting time.

The strike against and subsequent sacking of Kiesha Shipyards was such a whirlwind success, there'd been scarcely little actual repair _The Unconstant Lover_ required. Odisseus, of course, had performed what superficial maintenance there was to perform – some minor re-wiring, popping a few loosed hull plates back into shape and securing the smoking diffusion cable that'd proved so vital during the initial deception above Kiesha.

Following this, the bored mechanic was eventually forced to join his companions inside the wreck to await the arrival of their corsair confederates.

The crash's central cavern, certainly once a large percentage of the cruiser's cargo hold, could easily accommodate three _Lovers_ , parked end to end, within its capacious walls. For now, of course, wreckage is the chamber's primary occupant.

Scads of random teltriton are contorted into unearthly shapes. Coolant-damaged capacitors are strewn across the purple sand like poorly-irrigated seeds. A few practically unscathed derelicts of ancient fighter-craft lie belly up, presumably trapped in the deployment hangar when this colossus of a capital ship arrived at its final, earthbound destination.

Since their initial arrival on Talos II weeks previously, Odisseus had appointed it his inward and personal duty to properly identify the make, model and potential cause of crash for this eroded behemoth. The combination of the craft's indisputable antiquity and the expansive and all-encompassing damage both time and crash had dealt it were conspiring to make this practically impossible. Hours devoted to aimless meanderings through the rubble had only resulted in sore hind paws and a growing appreciation for the supreme sprawl of the crash site.

Sunlight lattices the sandy ground through myriad cracks in the chamber's firmament. A solitary gorjo gecko, master of this domain, skitters about, flaring its frill territorially at these new arrivals – the collection of strongboxes consolidated on the center of the chamber and the quintet of gargantuan intruders responsible for them. The crew of _The Unconstant Lover_ , boredom nearly overtaken them all, awaits the incipient arrival of their first confederate, Captain Greatgullet, from the overheard sound of his RepulsoBrand ZC3 driftjets firing.

Odisseus and Two-Bit lean, in a mock-casual fashion, on either side of a junk heap. The Ortok fiddles with the connection head to the diffusion cable he'd been fiddling with since landing. The jabberhead leafs through a well-thumbed, secondhand phrasebook Moira had loaned him: _300+ Ortoki Phrases and Idioms For The Confused._

Moira squats precariously atop said junk heap while Abraham, fussing with his temperamental calabash, stands some distance behind, all three of their working eyes pointed unerringly towards the entrance they expect Greatgullet to emerge from. With arms outstretched and seesawing gait, Nemo stomps from strongbox to strongbox, like a child navigating a babbling brook, stepping stone at a time.

An encroaching clamor of footsteps, weapons clinking and conversational chatter crescendos with Greatgullet's approach.

"Boss!" guffaws Greatgullet, immediately chased by a handful more hair-trigger guffaws. The Obax buccaneer, flanked by Boogers and Teeth, followed by a crowd of criminals, absolutely clogs one of the hull breaches broad enough to approximate an entrance. The act of throwing both his arms wide jumbles Greatgullet's collection of bounty hunter's licenses and invites Nemo to walk willingly into his own spine's snapping in one magnificent gesture.

Nemo skips off the lid of the strongbox he currently stands upon. He lands with a splash of sand and returns Greatgullet's gesture as the Obax closes the gap. "Gull," he addresses with a brotherly air.

When they do collide, Odisseus half-suspects that Nemo will be fully swallowed by Greatgullet's barn door bear hug and vanish completely. Of course, the black mop of hair and the leathern tails of his aviator's duster remain unvanished. When they separate, Greatgullet once agains laughs fully in the Captain's face and gives his shoulders one vigorous shake. "Tell ya what we need here, boss."

"What's that?"

"More fucking boarders," Greatgullet confesses, "is what we need here, boss."

It fell upon Greatgullet and his personal platoon of marauders to perform the jborra's share of boarding duties across all three of Kiesha Shipyards' expansive orbital platforms. As populous as the Thumb's crew might be, it proved a task not easily undertaken by an army.

As the pillaging wound down, all the four participating pirate ships indeed kissed airlocks and ventured aboard to lend a hand toward pacifying the station. By and large, though, it was Greatgullet's goons who absorbed the initial hostilities, with the highest casualty count and with the unenviable responsibility to secure gunbanks, airlocks and, most importantly, plunder. Meanwhile, the spaceships of their accomplices tangled with Kiesha's redoubtable defenses, with much less risk to their individual crews.

For all the difficulty that confronted them, however, Greatgullet's vastly outnumbered thuggery provided quite visible results. Strongboxes, stamped with the corporate logo of Kiesha Laser Corp and overflowing with booty, are plentiful in the hands of the _Rule's_ disorganized throng of crewmen. One by one, they're each deposited into the quickly-towering stack of similar strongboxes previously stacked by the _Lover's_ crew.

As he watches the chests accumulate, carried by colorful character after colorful character amongst Greatgullet's cast of cutthroats, it strikes Odisseus how atypical a pirate ship _The Unconstant Lover_ truly is, with her crew so skeletal.

The posse that accompanies Greatgullet and each adds another strongbox or two is easily thrice the size of the _Lover's_ entire five-member crew and doubtlessly only makes up a single digit percentage of the _Rule's_ full compliment. From an albino Aurik to a shaved Zourim, diverse the Thumbs might be but they shared one common denomination. Perhaps inherited from their festooned Captain, they shared a rather public penchant for tattoos, totems and ornaments.

Among their celebrated ranks, Odisseus spies a shaggy Quarg brute sporting a scaldingly pink mohawk the length of her spine. Behind her comes a shirtless Corgassi enameled so thickly in tiny loops of piercings as to create improvised chainmail for his torso. Odisseus nearly snorts at the sight of the pheromone-exuding Ruuvian self-aware enough to tattoo an enormous biohazard warning onto his back.

Compared to the charming self-mutilation of his crew, Captain Greatgullet, with his dangling baubles and clacking beads, appears almost underdressed.

Even their ship, the commandeered and repurposed Terro Fleet Systems 773 Onslaught-Class Heavy Troop Transport, plays the intimidation game. _The Rule of Thumb_ couldn't realistically hope to drop anchor in any respectable port without her cannons ablaze, the evidence of her lawlessness literally painted on both of her sides.

Odisseus actually recognizes two of Greatgullet's irregulars from their portraits, painted onto the _Rule's_ host of broadside shields. An ugly Umijo with a pair of golden replacement fangs and an obese Vyorn with the _Rule's_ trademark Jolly Roger inked over her face have somehow both earned this dubious honor.

What she sacrifices in subtlety, however, she more than buys back with pure pugnacity. More well-endowed with weapons than any of her contemporaries, _The Rule of Thumb_ boasts broadside batteries, forward-facing cannons, rearward-facing torpedo launchers and practically enough gravitons and airlocks to yank Talos II clean free from its orbit. Her battlefield prowess need never be further questioned once she'd obliterated a third of Platform A's quadroturret defense system in a single sweep.

The _Rule's_ true talent, however, was her unprecedented ability to install a hundred murderous psychopaths onto a single target in under five minutes. As such, any attempt to deny Greatgullet's request for more boarders could prove thorny.

"I agree," Nemo immediately relents. "Trick is where from?"

Greatgullet expertly combines a laugh and a scoff. "That ain't no trick. There's no shortage, you know, of muscle-for-hire in Bad Space. Trick is," he confesses, with a slimy thumb over his shoulder, "where to keep 'em. _Rule's_ ranks are thinned some, sure, after this last thing, but I fly her full fucking capacity most of the time." Both thumbs are hooked thickly into his voluminous leather belt. "Life support on my boat couldn't hardly handle another beating heart."

Odisseus is already shaking his head before Nemo glances back for confirmation. " _Lover_ won't support more than twenty. Absolute maximum."

"What we hank," Two-Bit chimes in, a finger pointed directly at the disapproving Ortok, "is a steady pool of brunos."

Greatgullet furrows his fishy brow. "How's that?"

"This is gonna be a common crunch, isn't it?" Now given license to enter the conversation, Two-Bit slaps his manual happily onto the junk heap and saunters four steps forward. "Between the four gantines? Your scrubbers can only fangle so much, our scrubbers can only fangle so much." He mimes an imaginary box with two vertical hands, as though presenting a perfect idealized gift wrap of their solution. "We hank a mondo pool of willing volunteers each gantine can draw from whenever they run scanty on bad motherbloomers." A thought, a lightning bolt of inspiration, visibly strikes him. "And I hink I know where to bump that."

"Like your boy, boss," Greatgullet comments, inflating Two-Bit's runaway ego all the more. "He's clever."

"Your new job, then," Nemo assigns Two-Bit immediately with a pointed finger of his own. Seconds later, he swings that same finger around to spear Greatgullet. "Your new job–"

"Captains," greets a new voice.

Before he can make a visual on the chamber's newest entrants, the Ortok's heightened sense of smell is suddenly overcome with an influx of new pheromones. The smell sympathetically instilled in him a wave of suspicion and fear. When his subpar eyesight does manage to grok the speaker and the cloud of figures moving behind him, Odisseus is unsurprised to discover Captain Vobash, his own bevy of bodyguards and, most saliently, his pet brushvezzer.

"We've too many ships."

As speciest as this may sound, Odisseus quite frankly would never have imagined that Ciff Vobash, conniving captain of _The Loose Cannon_ and the most successful pirate nobody's ever heard of, would've been a Triomman.

On the whole, Triommans were a thuggish people from a crumbling planet with an exhaustively-earned galactic reputation for their willingness to be paid to punch people in the face and not ask an awful lot of questions about why. They were not necessarily known for their leadership, discretion or initiative.

In his eight short years of tramping about Bad Space, Odisseus had made the acquaintance of an entire population's worth of Triommans. To this day, he'd never heard one string as many words as cleanly together as Vobash just had. As a culture, they were somewhat less keen on conversation and decidedly more keen on collateral damage.

Vobash shares little in common with the rest of his race, however. For a Triomman, he's exceptionally thin, a weedy specimen from a brawny breed, with lanky legs and knobby elbows. He seemingly scorns the skullcaps also adorned by his species, preferring instead to display the stunted ridges sprouting from his head. Like Nemo, his most distinguishing feature is his crimson mountebank's coat, rivaling Nemo's own duster in length and trumping it in craftsmanship, stitched to perfection by a master tailor.

For a Triomman, he's also exceptionally wily, should the allegations about him prove accurate. The Captain's main claim to fame, reputedly, was his utter lack of one. Few were well-connected enough to have even heard of Vobash, an accolade Two-Bit Switch could evidently claim.

By his report, the Triomman took a strangely businesslike attitude towards brigandage. Among the preeners and poseurs of Bad Space, this was a bizarre affectation indeed. It was this, his mathematical, risk-minimizing mind, that was the biggest contributing factor to his overall wealth and what separated him most from his peers in piracy.

For most, this was an industry dominated by presence, reputation and the perverse glory to be gained by stacking bounty postings to the ceiling. Vobash, though, was reputedly shrewd, cautious, circumspect and appreciated more than most the virtues of flying under the radar.

Odisseus was ten feet this side of respecting Vobash for this, were it not for that accursed little vermin. What truly stood the Ortok's fur erect about Vobash was the tamed brushvezzer that roamed free inside the territory of the Triomman's scarlet jacket.

One subspecies among many of the mustelids native to the grasslands of Patessh, the striped brushvezzer juts its ferrety snout out from the shadow of Vobash's voluminous sleeve and tastes the air with a few sniffs. Like all the members of its species, it emits a constant stream of musky pheromones designed for communication with its brood and the discombobulation of its enemies. The Captain doubtlessly carried the creature for some cunning reason – to pacify and bewilder his fences and middlemen with chemical warfare, no doubt.

Odisseus, meanwhile, is separated from the brushvezzer by fewer evolutionary steps than most. He struggles against the creature's broadcast hunger toward the gorjo gecko darting between the boots of Vobash's men as they tender their own strongboxes to the hoard.

He surrounds himself with a slimmer sheet of security and hangers-on than Greatgullet does, this Ciff Vobash. The Triomman's retinue more resembles Nemo's own, with a mere five members. Four of the five are unremarkable, indistinct hoods from a sprinkling of various species, but it's Vobash's first mate, pinpointed as the only crewmember exempt from the manual labor, that catches Odisseus' immediate attention.

She's, against all odds, a Baziron, a bloodsucking member of Baz's insular, indigenous population. Natively of some kojaj Odisseus wasn't familiar with, she's now costumed as an interstellar criminal, complete with ditrogen scar, nicotine halo and sidearms strapped to her vaguely viridian thigh. Pariahs, by all appearances, put more hands to _The Loose Cannon's_ capstan than most.

Odisseus had been bodily surprised to discover _The Loose Cannon_ a Hesko Planetary vessel. These spacecraft were designed with an internal logic so bizarre that no non-Heskite engineer could ever hope to make sense of one. Even in this, though, there's an ulterior motive that directly benefits Vobash.

So long as he continues to employ a team of Heskites to oversee maintenance aboard his vessel, the _Cannon_ is never in danger of ship-jacking. Better still, it prevents the ever-present danger of a reverse boarding action, unless the reverse boarding party in question thought ahead to subcontract a Heskite of their own.

Ultimately, the _Cannon's_ crew size falls somewhere between the vast expanses of the _Rule's_ teeming hundred and the _Lover's_ meager five. Her modus operandi, however, couldn't be further from either school of thought, the former's philosophy of storm-and-boarding one's targets and the latter's tendency to select targets using eyes wildly disproportionate to one's stomach.

Odisseus didn't require Two-Bit's testimony to realize that _The Loose Cannon_ and her crew were utterly devoted to the very profitable ideal of commandeering a ship intact. Her twin DF498 ConcInd Cascade Heavy Rapidfire turrets, heavily modified to maximize disabler power and minimize permanent damage, told him that much.

Frankly, though, the Ortok couldn't argue the logic. This way, any prize captured was that much easier sold, through whitewashed channels, to an upscale clientele for a practically sticker price. This virtue was lost to those with more interest in savage slaughter or personal plunder.

For better or worse, Captain Vobash appears to be a pirate of a particularly different color than the vast majority of Bad Space's bandits, brigands and barbarians.

"Too _many_ ships?" Nemo expectorates. "In one ear," he gestures from Greatgullet's mouth to his own ear, "I'm hearing we don't have enough boarders and, in the other–"

"That I agree with also," Vobash consents. "We have _captured_ too many ships, I should say. How many ships did we each cart back here with us?"

A somewhat embarrassed silence passes. With vivid memories of the two days of mayhem and madness following the sack of Kiesha Shipyards, each person present is saliently aware of the point Captain Vobash is driving home.

"Only three for us," Nemo confesses. Through the joint methods of dividing the crew in half and magnetically slaving two spaceships together, _The Unconstant Lover_ had managed to truck a paltry three prize ships – two TFS barges and one V&B rigger – back from their explosive victory on Kiesha. In normative circumstances, three ships of this size and quality would be an enormous haul for any enterprising pirate but, given these unique circumstances, they constituted a tiny percentage of the ships captured.

"Three?" Greatgullet snorts, somehow attempting to bolster his own claim. "We brought ten."

"I managed ten as well," Vobash offers, whilst simultaneously relaying a gesture of nonjudgmentalism. "A similar number, I imagine, Her Majesty will report." He pauses significantly. "How many ships did we leave on those platforms?"

"Lots?" Nemo ventures hesitantly.

Vobash savors every syllable. "Seventy-seven. You believe that?" The brushvezzer suddenly appears, coiling about its master's neck. Odisseus detects a suddenly territorial spike in pheromones as the Captain's voice raises slightly. "A hundred some fucking spacecraft, all disabled, all defenseless, all prime for the market, and we could only scrape back, what, a third of those? That's millions of credits we left sitting back there." The last of his goons, a Qhem with a whirring bionic leg, plops the last of his strongboxes onto the stack. "There's gotta be some way to exploit that."

Nemo immediately deflects the notion to Two-Bit. "Ideas?"

A helpless shrug is his first reaction. "More pirates is me only flash off the bat but, again, the more wanks we hire, the more hatches that is to mess. Take goes down for all of us. Ends up no different." This time, no inspired solution appears from thin air and Two-Bit is forced to simply massage his stubble in contemplation. "Hmm."

"You keep thinking, then, huh?" Nemo tasks. "Lemme know the–"

Conversation ceases once again at the unannounced entrance of a fourth party. Upon seeing who's joined their merry gathering, the chamber's atmosphere becomes somewhat too eerie for any conversation to continue.

A twenty-member parade of Xend – a churning river of clicking chitin, flexing mandibles and hunting legs – enters the chamber via another opening several yards to Moira's right. Once they've arrived, they spend a tense moment simply waving antennae about, seemingly to smell the room's chemical composition before progressing any further.

When seemingly satisfied, they begin, along their snaky route, passing forward their own strongboxes, drone to drone, until they arrive at their mountainous destination.

The unnerved silence that accompanies this act is broken only by the persistent skittering sound that seems to plague every movement of the Xend's carapace, multiplied twentyfold for each insectoid present. Odisseus can only imagine the disturbing cacophony of squeaking, chittering and clacking that must resound within the uneven walls of their ungainly eyesore of a colonyship.

To an outside observer, these Xend would all appear to be identical. Largely, they are – very little physically distinguishes one drone from another. Odisseus can only manage to highlight some slight dimorphism, possibly between castes, as the unsettling assembly line continues their wordless work.

Consigned the thankless duty of managing all the crates, the workers are relatively uniform with the galaxy's conception of what a Xend looks like. These are diminutive, six-legged and segmented insectoids with dull red carapaces and curious antennae, constantly waving about and brushing nearby objects.

The soldiers, however, those standing guard on either side of their brethren's column, are substantially larger, almost of a height with a fully-straightened Odisseus. At a glance, these sport more powerful mandibles and more powerful legs. Rumor was, even their antennae –hypersensitive feelers comprised of many moving fronds – were more powerful than their worker cousins. This was widely corroborated, Odisseus supposes, by the fact that the soldiers lack eyes or eyesight or any kind.

They all move with that unspoken coordination that spells a hive mind, something not found among any of the galaxy's other major species of sentient insects, from the Kezzerak to the Mezzrians and even all the way out to the Spith. Traditionally clustered into colonies whose populations climb into the tens of thousands, the Xendo drones themselves could barely constitute intelligent life, each one an insignificant cell in the queen's single consciousness.

It is the secretive Xendo queen who pulls the strings of each colony member, each of the Xend that march out into the center of the shipwreck and each of their hundreds of peers that lurk aboard their parked colonyship.

This most unlikely ally came as a connection, unsurprisingly, to Vobash. Neither Nemo, Greatgullet nor even Two-Bit could vouch for the dependability or reputation of the rogue Xendo colony queen, with the unbecoming handle of Aju Vog Xah Qaj. From what pitifully little xenoentomology Odisseus could reasonably command or have explained to him, he understood that Xendo queens enforce their own morality slavishly, religiously, amongst their subjects. Luckily, for the most part, the Xend are a benevolent, if somewhat stern and autocratic, people.

When a bad apple is hatched among the Xendo queens – an individual who may not subscribe to the codified ethical standards of her culture – she drags her entire colony, each falling into line with fanatical devotion, into her subversive philosophy along with her.

Xendar's rulership does everything in their conceivable power to stomp out such a threat whenever one rears its ugly, chitinous head. The very occasional rogue queen will still, however, escape their nets from time to time.

Such was the case with this Aju Vog Xah Qaj and, in the very particular case of Aju Vog Xah Qaj, that rogue queen chose to become a pirate captain.

All her fervid followers still couldn't hope to rival the sheer numbers of the major hives. In total, they numbered a sum much closer to Greatgullet's own legions.

Nevertheless, Aju Vog Xah Qaj posed such an alien threat to the chubby merchant ships and unsuspecting cargo haulers of Bad Space that any who survived her predations were less likely to compare her to a calculating criminal and more like a ravenous creature.

What would possibly drive such an unknowable intelligence into a life of piracy, Odisseus couldn't possibly fathom. What was certain were the fates of those who fell prey to Aju Vog Xah Qaj's nameless remix colonyship – equal parts cargo tanker, pleasure barge and calcified Xendo saliva. Her greatest strength, however, were all her loyal swarms of remix starfighters, each one piloted by a kamikaze Xend willing to die for their queen's glory.

Once the final strongbox is successfully stacked, the total accumulated wealth amounts to a seemingly impregnable citadel of consolidated cash. The rank and file of Xend then proceed to shuck forward something else to the head of the column, with a certain reverence.

An ordinary-looking Xendo worker stands before its ranked people.

Each and every non-Xend in attendance is simultaneously disgusted when this individual peels away its pronged mandibles to reveal a disquietingly normal pair of humanoid lips beneath the chitinous exterior.

"We are Aju Vog Xah Qaj," the speaker informs in alarmingly clear Commercial. "We speak with one voice."

During the initial parley, when the strike against the Shipyards was first orchestrated, the Xendo queen had dispatched a similar envoy, possibly the same one, to treat with the gathering pirates. This, then, confirmed their standard operating procedure moving forward.

Nearly forty feet long, lacking any reasonable mouth parts for the act of speaking Commercial and perpetually in a state of birthing more egg sacs to man her swarms, Aju Vog Xah Qaj wisely preferred to confer with her allies from afar.

"I are Nemo," Nemo, master of subject-verb agreement, returns. "I speak with one voice too."

Unbothered by Nemo's potentially offensive comment, the speaker offers a tri-digited gesture towards the mountain of money. "We have brought forward the currency to be divided, as requested. We do, on behalf of our hungry people, take exception with the amount of meat denied us at the Shipyards above the planet Kiesha."

Nemo whistles out a sigh. "Ah, yes. The meat."

The prodigious number of civilian survivors was a circumstance the pirates found themselves unprepared for and, by and large, was a issue mostly skirted. Good piratical wisdom, as championed by Abraham, demanded no survivors be left alive in the first place, under the Grimalti's lauded "dead men tell no tales" clause.

However, when the Shipyards finally did surrender, the captains were quite unexpectedly faced with over two hundred helpless, unarmed Kiesha technicians, scientists and shipwrights, rather than the typical handful of standoffish devouts found aboard every commandeered ship in Bad Space.

Commendably or otherwise, Nemo had surprisingly little stomach for such sanguinary work and asserted that any cooperating survivor remain restrained but unscathed. He argued that any survivors should of course be allowed to tell whatever tales they like, directly in conflict with Abraham's credo.

This, of course, quickly developed into a point of contention between the buccaneers.

"I'd like to take this opportunity," Vobash voices with utmost politeness, "to remind everyone exactly how damaging a roomful of survivors can prove." His gaze inevitably falls on Nemo. "The Xend's way is cleaner, distasteful though it may be to we omnivores."

"Like it or not," Nemo bottom-lines, "word'll reach Valladia sooner rather than later. I mean, there's no way we pull even another of these jobs directly under their noses." He shrugs with a certain feigned helplessness. "Jborra's outta the bag either way."

"Afraid I've gotta toss in with Vobash there, boss," weighs in Greatgullet. "No reason to ratchet up the heat before it's necessary."

"Now," Two-Bit preambles, shifting his posture to better address the Xendo ambassador, "how's about all them Kieshans what didn't surrender and got iced during the boarding action?" He shrugs suggestively. "Them don't qualify as meat to you?"

There's a sizable pause, enough time for chemical signals to be secreted, travel to the colonyship, be received and counter-signals to be secreted and interpreted. The ambassador's fleshy lips part again to answer Two-Bit's question. "Carrion degrades we. We demand meat cultivated by our own mandibles."

"Sensitive palettes, these buggers," Two-Bit mutters, ostensibly to Nemo, before positing another theory for the ambassador's approval. "How would you feel," he prefaces, adopting all the mannerisms Odisseus once expected Hook to have, "about mating up with the boarding party?" He spreads his arms, in a gesture meant to seek approval from all his comrades. "Take some of the pressure off you, provide the Xend someone else to munch on. Two birds, one stone."

Greatgullet and Vobash shrug in unison. Nemo stops long enough on his inexplicable expedition to climb to the top of the mountains of haphazardly piled strongboxes to extend Two-Bit a corny thumbs-up. Everyone waits for another substantial pause as chemicals are exchanged and the ambassador can ratify Two-Bit's proposal. "We find this solution potentially acceptable."

The collected pirates, perhaps fifty faces in all, watch Nemo, some stupefied, some speechless, some unemotional, as he completes his peril-fraught ascent up the unstable slope and onto the thermosteel summit of the strongbox mountain. Panting with the pitiful amount of effort required to clamber the short distance he uselessly has, Nemo surveys those assembled all around him, a crazed prophet imparting idiocy down unto his captive flock. "How's about this shit, huh?" He sweeps his hands across all the amassed loot, undoubtedly a staggering amount of raw cash, not counting the capital likely to be made on the resale of the captured spacecraft. "We're all still in agreement to divvy the winnings into four equal shares?"

Before anyone can respond, a new speaker Odisseus briefly mistakes for Moira replies from somewhere behind, offering an addendum. " _Best-make-that-five._ "

Glancing over his shoulder in time with every other occupant of the crashed hold, the first indication to Odisseus that Moira couldn't have been the speaker was that the comment was, in fact, sung rather than spoken. The second indication, of course, was that Moira herself appears to be as surprised as anyone else, standing alert now, with Righty and Lefty trained immediately on the singer's point of origin.

Who emerges from the ripped opening behind Moira's junk heap shouldn't truly have shocked anyone, considering the musical nature of the interruption. Nonetheless, Odisseus cannot help but be taken aback when three Trijans, each appareled in full epauletted dress uniform, step, one by one, into the main chamber, like three stage magicians materializing from a hidden compartment.

The first surprise Trijan is unrecognizable. The second is revealed to be none other than Nemo's bald mystery contact from Xathik Major. The third is unmistakable to everyone present by both appearance, reputation and process of elimination.

Her uniform may have once have ben considerably more resplendent than those of her two fellows, with filigreed cuffs, a bejeweled cummerbund and an impressive tangle of golden lanyards. The ravages of time and rampant misuse, however, have tattered, discolored and made threadbare her once regal attire. A bizarre-seeming firearm, stashed in an equally bizarre-seeming holster rides her hip. Her callused black hand rests upon an even less obvious weapon – a rolled-up whip with a sword's hilt and pommel – on her opposite hip.

The item that most adequately establishes her rank and position above those two accompanying her, however, is the elaborate, feathered wig, doubtlessly once pampered and powered and now stringy, scrappy and sallow, yet still sitting defiantly upon her head.

"I'm afraid you've already been paid your share," Nemo calls down, without missing a beat. His hand floats to his own firearm, where it rests in his own hip holster. "That was a one-time deal."

" _You-misunderstand-me, Captain_ ," sings Socorro Charybdis, Captain of _The Dishonorable Discharge_ , disgraced deserter of the Trijan Radiant Armada and Valladian Shipping's pet privateer. " _It's-not-a-hand-out-I-come-seeking. I-want-in._ "

Chapter 12

Two-Bit Switch is immensely relieved that the need for reticence, secrecy and innuendo has passed. Now, he can finally speak openly, honestly and forthrightly with his fellow crewmen about what the months and weeks to come will bring them. That being said, there was a fair amount of carping, complaining and straight-forward explanation the _Lover's_ three nay-sayers were entitled to, a task assigned to Two-Bit by a Nemo perpetually shirking his duties.

"Recap this for me," requests Moira, swiping her forearm across her brow to replace its sweat with gun oil. "One million went to Greatgullet. One million went to Vobash and one million went to Aju Vog Xah Qaj."

His muzzle six inches beneath the surface of the hull, Odisseus rumbles some addendum containing the words "million" and "Charybdis."

"And one million went to Charybdis," Moira quickly adds.

"That's all facting, yeah," Two-Bit answers, squatting his short distance away. When the answer doesn't seem to appease the scowling Moira, he takes it upon himself to elaborate. "Chartered piracy's perhaps the best way to vizz at it." She opens her mouth to voice the obvious objection, but Two-Bit doesn't grant her the opening. "Except, of course, in Charybdis' case. That was hush jangle, no mistake."

Moira's mouth resets into a displeased line. She continues her handiwork for several more seconds in silence. "And why, exactly," she mutters after a moment, "are we footing the bill for all this chartered piracy?"

This time, it's Two-Bit who's preempted by, of all people, Abraham. "An investment, lass. Best think of it as an investment." His voice warbles in eerie stereo through their three belted comms. "Ain't that right, Switch?"

A surprised Two-Bit makes grateful eye contact with Abraham through the glass canopy of the topturret. "That's, er, right."

Considering the somewhat imperious location they'd chosen to set this most recent crew meeting – the roof of _The Unconstant Lover_ – the centuries-old Grimalti elected, perhaps wisely, to attend this powwow remotely. Abraham had installed himself in the comparative comfort of the _Lover's_ topturret and converses via a frequency dedicated to their three individual comms. Even Two-Bit had been hesitant about this particular meeting's locale as well, until Moira had consented to his borrowing her pair of graviton boots.

He squats, magnetically anchored to the hull. With Moira and Abraham to his left and Odisseus to his right, the thirty-foot fall off the _Lover's_ roof and onto the sandy ground slopes away behind him.

Besides its relative isolation, the chief advantage to staging their first assault against Kiesha Shipyards were the shiny new toys. A significant portion of the non-cash plunder had materialized as functioning, Laser Corp-produced prototypes, augments and new technologies just waiting to be installed aboard the victorious pirate ships.

Each crew had gleefully staked out a handful of trinkets their ships could be modified to include. Therefore, much of the time spent since arriving back on Talos II was devoted to beefing, buffing and bolstering the ships of the Freebooter Fleet with everything Kiesha Laser Corp had to offer.

_The Unconstant Lover_ was little different. Both Moira and Odisseus had veritably squeed like schoolgirls at the prospect of attaching amplification nozzles onto her beloved Antagonist and replacing the Briza's outmoded shield mainframe with a state-of-the-art interlocking projector array, respectively. Two-Bit, on the other hand, had contented himself with a state-of-the-art chocochino maker looted from one of the Shipyards multifarious break rooms.

To this end, they convene on this precarious perch to allow Moira to screw her nozzles into place and Odisseus to yank free the decrepit old mainframe while they chat. Two-Bit had, now erroneously, hoped that these circumstances would somehow improve the pair of their huffy, still somehow offended moods.

To the _Lover's_ port and starboard, her sister professionals in piracy commence their own improvements, repairs and modifications. Their augments, however, were applied using methods completely alien to the humdrum elbow grease the _Lover_ employed.

On the starboard side, a small navy of Trijans, armed with rags and spray bottles, laboriously wipe down every expansive inch of their craft's reflective solxite panels. Each solitary speck of dust, grit and grime can reduce their bizarre spaceship's potential power that much more.

On the port side, a swarm of Xend amuse themselves by plucking irregular sheets of teltriton from the crash, munching them into new shapes between their mandibles and vomiting up the ingested metal to create their signature slurry of shipbuilding material. This allows them to craft whole new hulls for starfighters to replace those scuttled or sacrificed in the previous fleet action. It's a handy tactic, if unpleasant to watch, to no one's shock.

There'd been little intermingling between the various pirate crews as of yet, a situation Nemo hoped personally to change. Following the initial meeting, the Captain had immediately departed on a roundabout well-wishing campaign, visiting with crewmembers from each ship. Two-Bit imagined him making acquaintances, shaking hands, kissing babies, whatever else the dubious admiral of a pirate navy does to gain the trust and cooperation of his underlings.

While Odisseus and Moira went to pick through the Kiesha-brand loot and Abraham oversaw the cash-counting committee, Two-Bit sought to formulate his various plans for the Fleet's next steps. The task fell to him to ensure that, when the Captain came to him for advise on how to proceed, Two-Bit could come out swinging with idea after idea.

Odisseus resurfaces his fuzzy head from the dusty interior of the shielding mainframe and barks an ample series of syllables Two-Bit's way, not one of which he recognizes.

"How do you mean?" he ventures hopelessly.

With a short huff, the Ortok rephrases, only dropping one remotely comprehensible proper noun, "Valladia," across the entire scope of his diatribe. After seven or eight seconds of this, Two-Bit raises a hand to stem the mechanic's nonsensical flow.

"No, I seriously don't understand what he's jabbing on about," Two-Bit pleads to his Commercial-speaking crewmates, now regretting leaving his Ortoki phrasebook on his footlocker.

"What happens," Moira cheerlessly translates, "when Valladia catches wise and sends somebody to squash us?"

Two-Bit draws in a substantial breath to make his prepared argument. "First, you've gotta assume they can even bump us out here. If we warp dirty, in and out, and nobody squawks, there's a decent chance we'll make another two or three attacks without them learnin' our port of call." He shifts his weight as much as he can, his feet clamped unerringly onto the hull. "And then, when it comes down to it, who the fuck are they gonna cast after us, anyway? With Charybdis gone," he waves a hand in the direction of the parked _Discharge_ , "their privies have lost their dapadan and their best blooming gantines both."

Odisseus poses some further question, centered around the word "Imperium."

"That caffles things somewhat, true." In truth, Two-Bit had a potential solution for the eventual issue of the Imperium's inevitable involvement but it was an outside shot so outside, that he held a superstitious fear about voicing it. Instead, he retrieved the canned answer he'd given Nemo when the Captain had brought such concerns to Two-Bit's attention early on. "In that case, I jabb we just relocate, find some other boondock moon, let the blighters come snuff us out again."

This answer seems to pacify the Ortok as much anything might. He submerges his muzzle and forepaws into the mainframe again without another word.

Moira squats down herself to meet Two-Bit's eye level, more to rest after fitting the second of three barrels with an amplification nozzle than to commune with her fellow crewman any. "And you're still hopeful we can even sack all ten ports? I mean, on the scale of suicide, Kiesha Shipyards is pretty near the bottom. What about Adrog? Ikoril? Valladia?"

Two-Bit nods appreciatively, each name a challenge he'd already met and mentally bested. "Way we schemed it, any of them ten ports becomes habby, if you know what you're doing. With Kiesha, we went full frontal 'cause they couldn't possibly have been speccing on it. Tactics do change going forward, though."

"What're ye boys thinkin', then?" Abraham, ever the patient parental figure, presses gently, from within the safety of the topturret.

Two-Bit frowns involuntarily. "That ain't been decided yet. All the Captains wanna meet on the subject. Specc on that becoming a fixture." He converts his frown into a powerless shrug. "Freebooter Fleet's more or less outta me wanks these days, what with all these buckos tossing in now."

Moira can't contain her scoff. "Don't call it fucking _that._ "

Odisseus gives voice to the next question, forgetting that he's still shoulders deep in the _Lover's_ hull. After three words, he realizes his mistake, emerges and yammers something containing the phrase "stupid question" back towards Two-Bit.

"Shoot," Two-Bit beckons.

Odisseus' complaint isn't especially long or difficult to comprehend, but Two-Bit silently seeks Moira's aid, as he wishes to understand the Ortok's precise wording. "Is there a reason for any of this," she recites, flatlining Odisseus' question into a statement. "Besides Nemo throwing a tantrum."

Two-Bit steadies himself and his argument before answering the question. As a matter of principle, he'd specifically avoiding wasting any mental energy on the "why" portion of this Valladia debacle, as questions so existential tended to bog down the engine of nefarious cunning. As such, he'd still holstered a defense, should the fairly legitimate question be posed him.

"Let's nobody front that we've any flash on what goes on in that fucking thinkbox of his," Two-Bit disillusions. "When I came to him and demanded the skinny, he jabbed he wanted this schemed and not much else." As the answer visibly fails to satisfy, he proceeds without a pausing breath. "For the time being, what I will jabb, is that I'm chuffed as fuck with the rhino we're like to rake in and once we get confirm on the precise mathematicals, I hink you will be too."

Moira punctuates each word between twists of the final nozzle. "Any ballpark on that?"

Intentionally avoiding eye contact with Abraham, Two-Bit fakes a shrug. "Our original estie for Kiesha, not counting whatever gantines Vobash could turn over and the market value of all the mods and augments you lot's helped yourselves to, was 10 mil."

A ripple of impression passes through the crew of _The Unconstant Lover_ , enough to cause both Moira and Odisseus to simultaneously cease their work and glance up to read Two-Bit's expression. Mental arithmetic colors both their faces, dividing by four, subtracting a third, dividing into five equal shares and arriving at approximately 350 thousand a piece. A not inconsiderable sum, but one approximately half of what they stood to make from the Gallwegian bank heist.

A mouth, of course Moira's, is opened to protest, but the crackly voice that interrupts her through the comm couldn't possibly come a moment too soon.

"Count's off by some, boyo," Abraham supplies, exactly as Two-Bit anticipated he would. "Me and the boyos been at it all morning – total comes clockin' in near 14 mil, actually."

"And that don't count gantines yet to be sold, augments yet to be sold and them seventy gantines we left at the Shipyards," Two-Bit's quick to capitalize on their collective shock. "Ten more of these, each one bigger and beedier than Kiesha? Mates, we play our faces right here, we stand to become billionaires offa this." He points a forefinger directly at Moira. "And you was jabbing about retirement from the measly Gallow take."

No objection is mustered. In the face of all this endless, cascading cash, neither of the ship's two strongest skeptics can find cause to disparage or discourage. No one present can claim that, should the ports continue to shell out these kind of winnings, the reward wouldn't justify the risk. At the same time, Two-Bit was also saliently aware that, at the first whiff of the scheme failing to result in paydays at least this profitable, they'd immediately vote to tuck tail and run with whatever booty they'd managed to score. He held few illusions these pirates were anything but pragmatic.

"Mind giving her a trial for me?" Moira requests towards her belted comm as she stands, the third and final amplifier now attached to her Antagonist's corresponding barrel.

On cue, both Odisseus and Two-Bit shuffle back, the former his curved claws fully extended and the latter with the halting, clamping gait the graviton boots give. Within his plastolieum bubble, Abraham suddenly putters about self-consciously with the controls. In that moment, he's just someone's grandfather, fumbling with the ThumbSmash console he's been handed.

"Erm," he stammers, peering all around for hidden controls and eventually reaching below the bucket seat, as though to find some hidden clasp.

"No, you warty asshole, don't you dare move my fucking–"

Abraham scoots the topturret's seat back, inch by inch. The ratcheting motion seems to simultaneously satisfy him and sour Moira with inverse proportionality. Eventually, the seat's perfectly positioned to accommodate both his prodigious girth and the turret's handle bars.

With an electrical whine, the turret pivots and, with a corresponding clicking noise, the Antagonist pivots with it. Abraham's expression is redolent with sudden power.

"Anything ye'd like to see annihilated?"

Moira shrugs and Odisseus abstains. Two-Bit frowns and points high, towards the looming shipwreck. "That viewport? Second from the top?"

This close to the Antagonist, the ditrogen shriek that explodes from the tripartite lips of the minigun nearly deafens Two-Bit before his too-slow hands can reach his ears. For a strabismic old scallywag, Abraham could claim competent marksmanship, scoring a hit scant feet from a target six hundred some yards away.

It's the Antagonist that overshoots, utterly mowing through the mottled metal. Nothing but a smoking crater that punches unevenly through two layers of the crashed cruiser's hull is left to show.

Through their comms, Abraham whistles once, softly.

Moira's complaint catches in her throat. "I'm assuming you–"

"Whazzat?" Abraham croaks. The navigator's chair screeches around to reveal the sailing master, so demonstrably besotted that the very motion of spinning about to face her sloshes alcohol over the lip of his tankard and causes him to literally hiccup.

Momentarily speechless, Moira invests several seconds to composing her words. "Of all the people I expect to find drunk in the helm." Abraham deems the comment unworthy of reply and doesn't but blink at her. She stands in the open doorway with an equally vacant expression. "Where is he?"

His bumpy brow furrows. "Well, he's here!" he exclaims with gusto, immediately giving way to suspicion. "Am I not he?"

Moira's totally unaccustomed to managing this level of stupidity this early in the morning. "Nemo," she cuts to the chase. "The Captain." No recognition appears on the Grimalti's hoary features. "Long coat, dumb face, stupid head?"

His deepened scowl completely inverts, seemingly at mention of Nemo's stupid head, into an expression of delight and understanding. "Nemo! The Captain! Why did ye not say! He's–" His enthusiasm abuts against confusion at the realization that, in fact, the helmsman's seat is empty. "Well, he ain't here, at present," he helpfully informs Moira. "Care to leave a message?"

She plants a jackboot fully outside the helm, with every intention to decamp off elsewhere to seek Nemo and to abandon Abraham to his booze and his inane babbling. "You and I aren't on speaking terms. Not after that chair incident."

"She sure looked eighteen to these old eyes, officer!"

Moira halts her exit and casts one bemused glance back over her shoulder.

The awe-inspiring view of _The Unconstant Lover_ plunging at ungodly speed along the Talos–Hazro route – constellations and nebulae whizzing past faster than the mind could comprehend – is belittled somewhat by the sight of the hammered Grimalti buccaneer. He's been made utterly legless with liquor and sways with the shudders of the ship, as though he wasn't himself the proverbial forefather of space travel sea legs.

Certainly an intoxicated Abraham was an act with plenty of precedent. No master moonshiner of his caliber could concurrently claim teetotalism. Rarely could Moira recall, however, seeing Abraham truly bladdered, plastered, sloshed or whichever of the uncounted euphemisms was most appropriate for this level of supreme drunkenness.

More disconcerting, of course, than the anomaly of the situation was, in fact, its timing. In a relatively short span of hours, the Grimalti's superlative skills as a dirty warp navigator would be called upon to withdraw the _Lover_ from her faster-than-light shell and deposit her within Hazro airspace. Not to cast aspersions on his unrivaled prowess in the field of warp engineering, but Moira would be mightily surprised if a cask's entire contents wouldn't, perhaps, inhibit his abilities somewhat.

Hazro became their destination on the heels of a maddening new scheme Two-Bit Switch had cooked up, which would see this "Freebooter Fleet" supplied with a fresh supply of boarders. Let it be known how horrified Moira was to discover herself internalizing Two-Bit's pet name for the pirate armada, but no other option yet presented itself.

"Dare I ask?" she ventures to Abraham, against her own better judgment. "About any of this?"

"It's a celebration, missy!" Abraham expectorates merrily. "Do I not look celebratory?" He waves a warty hand across to the shield operating station, where he'd clumsily propped one of his impromptu kegs into the adjoining seat. "Please, please, avail yerself."

Moira spies an opportunity, this once, to satisfy her growing curiosity about what, precisely, Abraham's homemade, engine-brewed moonshine would necessarily taste like. She busies herself with selecting one not especially besmirched cup among the diaspora of neglected dishware Nemo scattered across the helm. She wipes out what dust and sediment had accumulated with the cloth of her sleeve, before, as he'd requested, availing herself of his moonshine. "What's the occasion? Your seven-hundredth birthday?"

For a joke any sober person would consider fairly corny, Abraham seems particularly tickled by this, an occurrence Moira's inclined to blame on something other than his advanced inebriation. "Seven hundred," he titters to himself, as though supremely amused. "Nah, nah," he waves the joke away, struggling to contain his giggles, "it's a, er, a changing of the guard. A funeral. A wake! Out with the new, in with the old!"

Moira stares into the stygian blackness of her cup. "Those were all words but somehow I didn't understand any of them."

Abraham spoils Moira with the sort of expression one might an uncomprehending child. "The lad, missy. The Cap'n." He spreads his arms wide again, splashing more ale onto the floor panels. "He's done it. He's doing it. Can't ye see?" Abraham straightens his posture, as though swollen with pride. "There ain't any colors in this galaxy I'd rather be servin' under than these, now, at this time."

Moira's cup doesn't come near her mouth before she's forced to make her stipulation. "Listen. This is a point that seems somewhat lost on you crowd of self-congratulators." She gestures forcefully forward with the cup, careful not to contribute more spilled alcohol to the floor's spread of stains. "We sacked one port. We sacked one port because they didn't see us coming. There's nine more to go and that's a trick which ain't gonna work twice."

Clarity cracks through suddenly onto Abraham's face. "They'll come. Ye'll see." Before Moira can question further, his boozy mood returns. "Tides're a-changin' now, missy." He leans forward conspiratorially, but continues to speak in his full throated voice. "Why ye think I joined up with this crew of yers inna first place?"

"Wasn't my crew then, to be technical," Moira echoes into her cup, before the sudden salty snap of Abraham's rotgut touches her tongue, "but enlighten me."

"Story time," Abraham grunts and he scoots still further forward in his chair. Soon, Moira catches a whiff of his brewery breath in each exhale and she keeps expecting the drunk codger to fall on his geriatric ass with every gesture.

"T'ain't no secret me best buccaneer days be behind me. Seven hundred years, as ye say, and all that." He shrugs mildly and more moonshine drips between his fingers. "Time for one to retire, find a nice distillery someplace, where I can peddle me poison, and look back on a career well-spent, aye? And see," he continues without pause, "had me path not crossed with Nemo's, that's where I'd be still today, boiling khepu root for cash and sweatin' out the occasional summer in the Coggi County prison hole."

At various points during this tipsy recounting could Moira have interrupted, offered contradiction or simply disparagement. Something truthful, some veneer of honesty beneath the Grimalti's slurred speech and stuttering manner, prevents her, though. For perhaps the very first time, Moira Quicksilver finds herself strangely curious about the inner workings of Abraham Bonaventure's brain.

"Times were different, I was his age. Aye, the Imperium held their sway in mucha what we call Bad Space today, and we unlawful types were pushed somewhat to the brink, 'strue." He taps the wrinkled skin beneath his sightless gray eye knowingly. "To the naked eye, Ring today looks rougher, wilder – a pirate's paradise, anyone would say – and yet," he frowns dramatically, a grandfather indulging his grandchildren with a bedtime story, "what do we have nowadays?"

He extends the forefinger of his free hand. "Valladia, the Gitter Consortium and the rest – megacorps with twice the influence, thrice the capital and none of the Imperium's moral high ground to exploit." He extends the following middle finger. "The Scar, Xo, bloom, even Ott – these kingpins who buy up pirates and bounty hunters both, a dime a dozen, and make them fight for their entertainment." His thumb extends from the side of his fist. "Charybdis and her ilk – pirates happy to prey on other pirates, they're so eager to take coin from the corps or the kingpins or the bloody Imperium itself."

He sighs wistfully and Moira catches a lungful of his fetid breath. "Life were simpler in the days of yore is the old saw, missy, but I'll be moons-damned if it weren't true. Ye served yer captain, yer captain served nobody and ye both tried to pillage and plunder as much as ye could afore the Imperium caught ye and threw yer bloomholes in prison. That's all." His cockeyed gaze sinks into the depths of his clasped ale-jack. "T'were a simple formula, I'll admit, ye know, them cops and us robbers, but, with everything this bad old galaxy's seen these days, moons if I don't hanker for them old ways."

He meets Moira's eyes, growing progressively more sober with each word uttered. "There's the reason I ain't in charge of a Vhaseen bootlegging outfit right now. Something 'bout Nemo reminded me of the days of yore and I been waitin' near two years for that hunch to bear me fruit." The next question comes without warning or preamble. "You?"

Moira squints. "Me?"

His tone is so ameliorated from his previous drunken behavior that Moira needs to spend an extra moment in processing. "Is there a reason ye ain't chasin' chump change bounty-heads across Saurian Space still?"

The charcoal dregs at her cup's bottom become captivating. "Not something I try to question too much, actually."

"Oh, I doubt that very much," he coos knowingly. He quirks an eyebrow towards the chair occupied by his darkwood cask. "Ye can move that keg. She won't mind."

"Much as I'd love to." Moira shrugs one shoulder and collects herself to leave. "No idea where he might be?"

"Suit yerself," Abraham consents without protest, before attempting to quaff deeply from an empty tankard. Raising the ale-jack to his one good eye for proper inspection, he scowls with profound confusion. "Ye might try the galley?"

"My, uh, compliments?" She sloshes her own remnants, plants the cup back onto the counter and strides toward the doorway, stopping her finger an inch from the door release button. "You sure you're okay to disengage warp like this?"

Tweaking the keg's tap open, Abraham's reply comes with all the carelessness she would expect from their Captain. "I engaged warp like this, didn't I?"

Unable or unwilling to present any proper objection, Moira takes her leave, jackboots down the helm's six steps and the abovedecks corridor.

Abraham's actual question, stripped of the raw shock value of its "from the mouths of drunkards" premise, truthfully hadn't rattled her as much as she might've let on. It was a matter she'd committed some serious hindsight to. When she'd produced no sensible results from all her speculation, though, she'd dismissed the thoughts as idle musing.

As she clomps from companionway to cargo hold and cargo hold to mess, however, the matter refuses to be banished from her thoughts. She's confronted now with the uncomfortable possibility that a degree of sentimentality may factor somewhat into her reasons for, in light of all the clear and present danger there associated, remaining aboard _The Unconstant Lover_ all these years.

"Bounty's back up," Moira announces at first sight of Nemo, seated across from Two-Bit, at the crew's personal table. "2.25 million dead from Xo's puppet corp BackDrift whatever on Belena, 250 thou dead or alive from GalaxCom Interstellar Media, plus Valladia's triangulated faster than we thought and is pitching in 500 thou alive as well." The lack of response, verbal or physical, she attributes to poor mathematics. "3 million even, before you ask, but there's no way anyone could _oh by all the fucking moons–_ "

"What's that" is perhaps what Nemo meant to reply with. The bottle of Gitterswitch Gin planted between his teeth muffles his speech into mere grunts. Moira face-palms so forcefully, she nearly spears her thumb through her eye socket.

"You thirsty?" Nemo offers slurringly after surfacing long enough to swallow. He extends her the bottle half-empty, with what he imagines to be a winning smile.

Two-Bit's resolve has never, sitting silent and sullen to Nemo's right, been weaker. This whole idiotic venture was planned almost entirely by elbow nudges, innuendo and behind closed doors. It now faces its most serious threat in the form of its sunshine survivability.

The warp to and from Hazro he'd rode on the euphoric high of concrete, confirmable success. His take from the Shipyards sack weighted heavy in his pockets. Nemo's and paradoxically Abraham's spirits were high, congratulatory even. The sheer number of the _Surimiah's_ condemned who, at the promise of murder, money and mayhem, cheerfully shrugged and signed on the dotted, staggered him. All these factors contributed to fill Two-Bit with a feeling of both an outlaw's giddy elation at "getting away" and an eagerness to cement that success with another profitable plundering.

Here, however, he was surrounded by bickering buccaneers, each asserting their superiority until the proper nouns used lose meaning and their faces turn blue. The harsh reality of attempting to herd five pirate captains onto one path nearly knocks all the misbehaving wind out of Two-Bit.

"I have a solution," he mutters, unheard, unnoticed and twisting his multe bracelet back and forth on his wrist.

"Predictability," expounds Captain Vobash in his polite tenor, "is what kills us. Absolutely." The Triomman reclines, arm draped casually over the chair's back, that furred serpent of his gnawing voraciously at some morsel he clutches in his fingers. "The very minute Valladia can predict our actions is the minute they hammer us with the full might of the Imperial Interstellar Navy." He sniffs once, utterly unperturbed by the conflict encircling him. "Ohostoi, as a second target, is right out."

"Predictability's also gonna breed a pattern, though," Nemo argues. He was no less guilty than any of the other captains, despite his proximity, of ignoring Two-Bit's suggestions. "Once a pattern's established, breaking it's all the fun."

"Fun is not a chemical we recognize. We would attack the plumpest targets, those targets least defended," monotones the standing Xendo speaker. Captain Aju Vog Xah Qaj's ambassador utterly neglected the chair it was allotted, seemingly out of confusion towards its intended purpose. "To any action that would forearm those targets we cannot give our consent."

"Tell me then," blurts an also standing Greatgullet, though his restlessness seems to stem from a wholly different source. "Is there any fucking action either of you fuckers would give consent to?" He halts his pacing to immediately stab at Vobash with a greasy gray finger from across the table. "Don't fucking say Moqu. Don't you fucking give me Moqu again."

" _See, you've-torn-me,_ " opines Captain Charybdis from the table's opposite end, her pair of inferior officers humming harmoniously under her every sung word. " _A-minute-ago, I-too-would've-agreed-with-Vobash-but, to-hear-Nemo-tell-it, there-may-be-something-to-this-pattern-breaking-idea._ "

"I have a solution," Two-Bit repeats for the umpteenth time.

Sunrise siphons through the wreck's easternmost cracks and crevices, its rosy light rendered virtually invisible on the chamber's purple floor. After much heated debate about individual gundecks and galleys, the crash's cargo hold was nominated to serve as the primary meeting spot for the Council of Captains – another of Two-Bit's carefully crafted alterations he'd attempted to popularize. In an act of unprecedented charity, Greatgullet had donated the use of an enormous ale-stained mess table and accompanying suite of chairs, professedly from his "banquet hall," for the use of the Captains and their shadows, either three or thirteen apiece.

While each of his contemporaries flooded every available seat with firearm-toting insurance, Nemo had, wisely or unwisely, elected only a pair of additional hangers-on beyond Two-Bit: Odisseus and Abraham, the former as an act of good faith towards his saltbrother, the latter as an act of good faith towards the other Captains. Pugnacious as they each might be, the mere presence of Abraham Bonaventure, stern grandfather of space piracy, was seemingly enough to stifle any roughhousing impulses that may arise.

Abraham, meanwhile, need contribute practically nothing to the conversation for this effect to be present; in fact, he spends the majority of the time administering to his calabash pipe.

Even minor logistical concerns were hotly contested. Which fences should the plunder pass through? How many of the _Surimiah's_ newly-recruited convicts should each ship's boarding party would be bolstered with? The current issue of debate was especially destined to become an old saw: which of the nine remaining ports on the Valladian Shipping Line should they attack next?

All five Captains, with Nemo the notable exception, were far more accustomed to passing out unquestioned orders than debating the merits of individual theories or tactics in a chaotic quorum of competing egos. One faction – Vobash and Aju Vog Xah Qaj – favored humble Moqu, unpretentious exporter of cagonut and considered by most to be the least wealthy of Valladia's ports. The other faction – Nemo and Greatgullet – favored Ohostoi, booming hub of the Outer Ring's carbon fuel industry and Kiesha Shipyards' next door neighbor on the Shipping Line. Well beyond the two-hour mark, the two competing factions were nowhere near any manner of accord.

With breakfast passing and the previous night's supper a distant memory, Two-Bit Switch bemoans his unsatisfied stomach and awaits another momentary lull to propose his ignored solution.

"Pattern-breaking could have its uses, mainly to help disarm somewhere especially thorny," Vobash admits, a rare concession. "I'm talking about Valladia Prime here. Trick is," he stipulates in the same breath, "surviving that long."

" _They're-ready-to-underestimate-you_ ," Charybdis points out.

Vobash's reminder is nothing if not gentle. "Us."

" _To-underestimate-us_ ," Charybdis corrects with equal or greater gentleness, even replicating the musical cadence of the sentence that came before.

Two-Bit considered himself reasonably cosmopolitan, mostly by virtue of his upbringing aboard the rampantly interspecial Takioro Defederate Station. The only Trijans he ever had cause to encounter, however, were all second or third generation expatriates. In every aspect beyond skin color, these were identical to any other member of the assimilated potpourri of humanoid subspecies.

Socorro Charybdis and her three-ship flotilla of Radiant Armada rejects were the only first-generation exiles of the Supreme Sovereignty he was ever likely to encounter. Two-Bit became convinced, over their comparably short association, that, despite their virtually identical anatomies, he likely shared more cultural framework with the Ortok seated to his right than he did with any of these true Trijans.

The choral conversation were hands-down their most bizarre trait. High Trijan, the language spoken on their isolated homeworld, communicated the vast majority of its subtext through intricate subtleties of pitch, rhythm and even vibrato in some cases. Low Trijan, what Charybdis and her cronies spoke, transliterates the actual words sung into understandable Commercial, while retaining the musical underpinning and imbedded significance of the original dialect.

Not much of a linguist, Two-Bit was honestly more impressed with Charybdis' seemingly limitless ability to compose distinct ditties for every single thing she said, tuneless and unmelodious as they might be.

" _Given-certain-previous-statements-they've-made-regarding-'piracy'-and-'pointlessness', Valladia-will-be-eager-to-classify-the-authors-of-these-attacks-as-nothing-but-thoughtless-brigands,"_ she chants smoothly before attaching a brief coda. " _In-my-experience._ "

"And Ohostoi's as undefended now as she's ever gonna blooming be, that gem," pipes up Greatgullet, his gills gasping with the force of his vitriol. "Imagine the coffers on that bitch," he croons. "Imagine the sheer coinage they've vaulted up in there."

"I've a hard time," carps Vobash pointedly, "imagining anything but her turrets, I'm afraid."

"I have a solution."

"Afraid? You?" the Obax laughs, his voice replete with mock outrage. "That surprises nobody, eh, boss?" At that, Vobash is chucked companionably on the shoulder with enough force to make the vermin squeal and disappear up his master's sleeve.

When Vobash refuses to be goaded, the displeasingly humane voice of Aju Vog Xah Qaj forces the proceedings forward. "This palaver wastes time. Our hunger grows."

Nemo spreads both hands. "Are we merely down to votes, then?"

Vobash sniffs again, re-adjusts his posture from the impact of Greatgullet's shoulder swat and clears his throat. "Moqu."

"We _vote_ Moqu," the ambassador concurs immediately, spewing out the word 'vote' as though somehow profane.

"Sorry, kids," Nemo apologizes. "Gotta say Ohostoi."

Greatgullet's vote comes as less of a shock to anyone present than do his opinions of Vobash's supposed cowardice. "Ohostoi."

Ultimately, it's Captain Socorro Charybdis who becomes the focal point of every gaze in the room, drumming her dirt-deep fingernails against the hardwood of Greatgullet's table in the classic pose of indecision.

The silence persists another three seconds before "I have a solution" makes another appearance.

Bodies groan as they twist in wooden chairs. All assembled pay him with befuddled scowls. As though angelic illumination suddenly spotlighted him from above, Two-Bit Switch is finally the recipient of that hard-fought attention he'd been persistently, if not passionately, seeking these past two hours.

"You have a solution, Two-Bit?" prompts Nemo danglingly.

He shrugs. "Why not blag both?"

Chapter 13

vo Veaff obeys orders.

She mows the final security officer to the blood-stained floor amid another angry salvo from her stalwart SV7 assault rifle. Thankfully, the Moqu Planetary Police Department entrusts the safety and security of their space station to no one but these flimsy credit-cops. Popping free her weapon's empty banana clip, vo Veaff stalks forward into the now-pacified airlock. Confirming their landing is secure, she gestures beckoningly over her shoulder.

At her motion, a cadre of colorful creatures – a bruiser broader than a battlecruiser boasting a three-foot trunk, a skinny sapient that exudes slick spines with each exhale, an eyeless, hairless something that resembles only a sapient earthworm – spills forth from the _Cannon's_ open airlock. They pass into the visitor's atrium and cluster all around their leader.

Only three years departed from Baz following the extermination of her kojaj, vo Veaff couldn't assert much specific knowledge about any of the Outer Ring's menagerie of monsters. Despite this, she remained somewhat less than impressed with the crack squad of madmen and murderers assigned to her boarding party.

Her new koj, of course, issued orders to this effect and vo Veaff obeys orders.

Sarge is thankfully not far out of arm's reach and, spotting her, an original _Cannon_ amongst all these fresh recruits, vo Veaff issues her own string of orders. With an intricate argot of silent hand-signals and delicate finger-gestures, she commands the cutthroats to form up behind her, weapons ready, as they prepare to sweep through and commandeer the remainder of the station.

As adept at interpreting the Baziron's secondary tongue as anyone aboard the _Cannon_ , Sarge receives these instructions with a succinct and militaristic nod. The former commando proceeds to translate those orders into that detestable mouth-speech the majority of the galaxy, lacking throatsacs as they do, favored as a means of communication.

Someone had invested a considerable amount of time and effort to convince the patrons of the Moqu Planetary Galleria that the visitor's atrium and perhaps the entire station were not, in fact, in space. Every corner is populated by a potted plant. All the walls are painted warm and welcoming colors. An overabundance of landscape paintings maintain a homely and domestic atmosphere for the disembarking.

This hard-won atmosphere is undercut somewhat, vo Veaff appreciates, by not only the spread of slaughtered corpses but also the cowering citizenry, who clump behind interposing furniture and whisper tears or prayers. Her boarding party entertains itself by snarling or snapping their jaws comically at any civilians they encounter.

This seems to produce only screaming children and subsequent irritation from vo Veaff.

Days prior, when _The Unconstant Lover_ returned to Talos with _The Low-Hanging Fruit_ – a commandeered passenger cruiser crammed to the gills with escaped convicts turned volunteer vandals – in tow, the general consensus was overwhelmingly positive. Four hundred some extra bodies to absorb bolts and bash skulls would go an incredibly long way towards the raiding and ransacking of each of Valladia's nine remaining ports. Even koj Vobash agreed.

Shortly after the goons were divvied up for the purposes of the sack of Moqu, _The Loose Cannon's_ Baziron first mate received her first doubts about their crop of Fruits. This ragbag of random convicted criminals may not, she theorizes, contain the conviction and discipline necessary to cut it under her and ultimately koj Vobash's leadership.

Despite how simple this particular sacking was shaping up to be, vo Veaff, a pessimist amongst a pessimistic people, wasn't holding out much hope for the swabbies.

Her posse of neophyte pirates fall into sloppy rank behind her. vo Veaff marches through the lobby and its carnage, ignoring the shivering survivors and focusing her attention instead on reaching the agreed-upon rendezvous point at the station's heart.

In truth little more than a glorified Warp Gate Junction, the Moqu Planetary Galleria is revealed to be a humble shopping center, cropped up around a cargo redistrib. Here can the provincial peoples of the planet below most effectively peddle their cagonut milk, their cagonut meat and their cagonut novelty shells to the mostly uncaring galaxy at large.

The visitor's atrium shortly gives way to the main shopping center without. The corridor of glitzy outlet storefronts represents seemingly popular or important corporate galactic chains, with names like "Pickle Planet" or "Bubble" or "Nanosecond Pizza" emblazoned across their signage. These supposedly important names vo Veaff is, much like species of alien or models of spaceship, equally ignorant of.

Holographic advertisements, mainly in the form of voluptuous humanoid females or fizzing cans of carbonated beverage, babble, chitter and entice at the passing pirates. Those customers too stupid, stubborn or unlucky to evacuate before the _Cannon_ could seal airlocks with the station are duck behind racks of merchandise or begging for mercy from any marauder who happens to glance in their direction.

Through the latticed glass viewport overhead, vo Veaff catches intermittent glimpses of the asymmetrical frame of a stray Xend starfighter whizzing past or a spray of familiar white disabler fire. After each such sight, a booming impact or blaring afterburner reverberates, with satisfying strength, through the station's metal framework.

vo Veaff's daydream is rudely interrupted by the metallic hiss of an adjacent door opening. Two additional security officers – one a Gord, one a Jrosk, both plastolieum-armored mall cops come lately to a party bloodily concluded – bumble into view. With uncertainty and service revolvers, trained forward in trembling hands, they attempt to bar the pirates' further passage into the station.

The shower of reprising ditrogen she expects to paint these hopeless heroes onto the vending machines is tardy in arriving. Her own slack-jawed swarm of gunslingers are too surprised to do anything but receive a canister through one of their moronic ribcages and vo Veaff surges into action.

Her weapon too unwieldy at this close range, she strides a step forward to swing the SV7 upward, clubbing the offending Jrosk in the jawbone these outlanders are so proud of. He stumbles back, his mandible shattered, into a pyramidal display of something called "Radioactive Chew" and is lost amid an avalanche of tiny tins. vo Veaff, meanwhile, is immediately pivoting her weight and lunging at the backpedaling Gord. Before he's scrambled six feet back, the sharpened tip of the Baziron's blood-sucking proboscis dives into the arterial junction between head and neck. vo Veaff drinks deep of his tangy, terrified blood.

It's Sarge who flexes her lateral reasoning muscles to surmise that perhaps the drab, unmarked entrance the security officers ambushed them from could, in fact, provide the swiftest route to their destination.

Before long, vo Veaff, Sarge and their train of trigger-sad thugs are padding through austere, industrial corridors that're so dissimilar from the brassy commercialism of the station's main thoroughfare they seemed almost like an apology or a retraction.

A smattering of staff – mostly torch-wielding patrolmen with a life expectancy equal the time it takes to open a door and pull a trigger, plus one very courageous accountant – reveal themselves on the pirates' corkscrewing journey to the cargo hold. Most likely caused by the removal of the flashing lights to distract them, vo Veaff's boarding party feels no compunction towards cooperating this time around. A veritable flash flood of ditrogen gushes past her at each enemy as they appear.

Once again, it's Sarge who uncovers the necessary door from among a host of more or less identical options. She guides vo Veaff and the rest of her raiders from the redistrib's restricted internal hallways and into the refreshingly expansive cargo bay.

The cargo bay is a mammoth rectangle of negative space that dominates the center of the Moqu Planetary Galleria. Upon their entrance, it also appears to be predominantly devoid of hostiles. This seems greatly to disappoint vo Veaff's flock of freelance Fruit, now denied the chance to gleefully butcher more innocents in violation of their parole.

Only one craft is present, dwarfed somewhat by the sheer volume of available space all around it. It's vo Veaff's amateur estimation that the vehicle might have been some manner of cargo vessel, but she can't confirm this for reasons other than simply her ignorance.

Its hull literally crawls with Xend.

The insectoid boarding party carpets the confused spacecraft as though they were magnetized to its hull. Watching them agog, their mass is so solid and singleminded that it hurts vo Veaff's brain less for her to consider the Xend one continuous creature rather than dozens of smaller creatures. Its segmented legs click and clatter against the teltriton, its sensitive antennae lick and scrape every square inch of the ship and its mandibles continually find purchase in viewports and exhaust vents.

The pilot, understandably confused as to the recommended course of action should your craft become enveloped within a patina of living insectoids, uselessly putters about the bay on the ship's bouncy driftjets.

Surprisingly, this at turns horrifying, at turns comical spectacle is considerably overshadowed by the space opera unfolding through the shimmering purple of the cargo bay's embarkation shields. vo Veaff orders Sarge and the rest of her pirate platoon to fan out and poke through crates until they invariably each discover their own lifetime supply of cagonut. In the meantime, vo Veaff herself stalks forward, giving the Xend-decorated cargo ship a significant berth, to watch the ship-to-ship slaughter unfolding outside.

She was born and raised in the deserts of southern Baz, with very little practical conception of galactic civilization beyond the goose-stepping jackboots of the Imperium invaders. As a newly-enrolled galactic citizen, vo Veaff never lost her wonderment at the sight, sound and indeed, very concept of spaceships. To see them jostling about for position like massive teltriton leviathans would always give her pause.

Through oscillating waves of embarkation shield, this is what vo Veaff watches – the utter routing of Moqu's pitiable planetary defense forces.

Outnumbered orbital squad cars, the only resistance this one-two space pirate punch still faces, are thronged by teams of Xendo divebombers. The Xendo colonyship, that eyesore, is the unmoving nexus of all this swarming chaos, as though simply providing an anchor for its legions of expendable minions to dock was enough justification to kick back and enjoy the fireworks.

The entire airspace surrounding the station and Warp Gate is choked with powerless civilian craft. One hapless privateer, the one unlucky enough to be assigned Moqu duty this week, is visible among their ranks, its systems shocked into lifelessness by a certain pair of high-powered disabler cannons.

Heralded by an unrelenting storm of that selfsame cannon fire, vo Veaff's very particular slodzen in this fight, _The Loose Cannon_ , comes rocketing into view. She unloads the full brunt of optimized weaponry on that one pesky fruit freighter which somehow managed to evade pacification with all the rest. The freighter in question hiccups from the electrical impact, its engines sputter and, with a whimper rather than a bang, the Moqu Planetary Galleria is succinctly, and with minimum loss of life, sacked.

vo Veaff's throatsac hums contentedly, relieved she and her colleagues weren't attempting to bushwhack Valladia's surface refineries on Ohostoi right now.

Moira switches her munition computer on.

Under normal circumstances, such an act would be utterly inconceivable to Moira Quicksilver, celebrated sharpshooter and snubber of any targeting technology more advanced than a crosshairs. In this circumstance, however, she's forced to consider both her Antagonist's newfound concussive power and the explosive ramifications of any misaimed shots. Not only were the flammable commodities they hoped to preserve pretty clearly in her line-of-fire but, at the present moment, each of those flammable commodities were surrounded by hordes of otherwise "innocent" marauders.

Therefore, Moira reasons that, in this specific instance, a little computerized assistance could potentially spell the difference between a jubilant victory and a despondent defeat.

She thumbs the activation switch. The algid blue of the munitions computer's too-ritzy-for-the- _Lover_ software washes over all three of her inset screens. The program purrs "assisted targeting enabled" suggestively at her.

Moira immediately reintroduces her thumb to the activation switch of that insufferably smug, self-satisfied ponce.

A few oil drums may explode. A few boarders may be incinerated. In lieu of enduring the entire pillage at the suffrage of that computerized twat, these are risks Moira's willing to take.

Below her and the banking Briza she rides atop is nothing but abject pandemonium. The entire installation is crosshatched with a panoply of polychromatic ditrogen, originating from hundreds of firearms and terminating in hundreds of skulls, shoulders and shins.

Anti-aircraft emplacements are installed conveniently on icy ridges, bluffs and precipices surrounding the facility and are therefore uncommandeerable by ground forces. These extend the pyrotechnics into the air and mostly in the direction of _The Unconstant Lover_ , to the consternation of everyone aboard.

Seventy-foot gouts of flame jet unprovoked and skyward from the facility at chaotic intervals, either a direct byproduct of the incipient attack or simply some bizarre feature of oil refineries.

While far from an oil tycoon, Moira's still passably impressed with the sheer scope of the operation Valladia's banking down here on Ohostoi's brumal surface. The epicenter of a continent-spanning constellation of drilling rigs and oil platforms, the GalaxGas Refinery Complex rivals most planetary cities in both size and population. The sprawling speck of civilization, nestled into a remote valley amid miles of snowy wastes, was so similar to Boss Ott's polar stronghold that Moira practically went into flashbacks the moment they dropped atmo.

Smokestacks smoke, pipelines intersect and every thirteen feet is an enormous storage tanker filled to the brim with a cocktail of chemicals so volatile its likely to explode at the mere mention of the phrase "supercharged ditrogen."

To this end, reams of reavers, representing the conjoined armed forces of the veteran _Rule of Thumb_ and the amateur _Low-Hanging Fruit_ , storm across the breadth of the facility, bandying laser bolts back and forth without precision or discretion.

"Did you just," comes the discomforting voice of Nemo across the ship's internal comm channel, "switch the munitions computer on?"

Moira suffocates a curse toward all Odisseus' dedicated inter-wiring. "It was a moment of weakness."

"I was gonna say," mutters Nemo, his voice laden with faux-concern. "Who are you and what have you done with–"

As though colliding with some manner of midair speed bump, _The Unconstant Lover_ hiccups jarringly. This exact sensation Moira's finely-tuned equilibrium has come to perfectly equate with the ray shields receiving a pounding from some high-powered surface-to-air laserfire. It's no great leap to point the finger at any one of those pesky anti-aircraft turrets scattered strategically atop the cliff-face.

In keeping with the task assigned her during their briefing on Talos, the _Lover_ flies a series of wide circuits around the installation's perimeter. The piratical powers-that-be wisely chose to rely on the ship's most enduring strength, the crackshot riding topturret, to troubleshoot tangled areas on the ground and generally provide air support for both Greatgullet's irregulars and the _Fruit's_ hodgepodge of volunteers.

This, of course, necessitated the freighter flying high enough to maintain their bird's-eye view over the entire surface engagement. Doing so, however, inevitably painted a metaphorical and enormous bull's-eye across her hull for the amusement of those accursed anti-aircraft batteries.

"Edgies at 68%," the voice of Two-Bit Switch reports before, with another electrical scream and unexpected bump, the _Lover_ and her poor, maligned ray shields suffer another impact. "58%," re-reports Two-Bit, with increasing grimness.

"Is, uh," stammers Nemo, "this something anybody should be worrying about?"

"Surprisingly, no," an unfazed Odisseus pipes in from his usual post in the engine room. "Do you not remember?" the Ortok sighs into the pervasive silence that follows. "That new shielding mainframe I installed? The prototype we looted off the Shipyards?"

"Ah, uh, yes," Nemo grunts unconvincingly. "Of, um, course."

"Edgies at 63%," Two-Bit finds himself reporting. "70%." Another beat passes before he mutters, apparently mystified, "Cap'n, somebody's feeding power back into the ray edgies and I don't–"

"They regenerate," Odisseus informs. "Over time, the ray shields will gradually recharge themselves. I'm telling you, Kiesha Laser Corp's changing the game before the rest of the manufactures even understand that they're playing. Sooner, rather than later, all technology's gonna–"

Another ship-shuddering jostle botches her aim a millisecond before the trigger's squeezed and Moira accidentally sends three canisters of vehicle-class ditrogen into a parked driftcart. "Could we maybe bottom-line any of this?"

"Current settings are such that, as long as you aren't deliberately hurling the ship into crossfire, her shields should regen fast enough to absorb any damage they might receive." Odisseus pauses an appropriate length of time. "Now that I've said as much," he stipulates thoughtfully, "I've little doubt you'll find someway to countermand that."

"You're sweet," Nemo blushes. "Topturret, can we, just for shit's sake, maybe also try shooting those turrets back?"

Moira sets her jaw firm. "This angle, I've no line of sight, _helm_ ," she snarls sardonically. "You're barking up the wrong turret."

Nemo's next request is full of reluctance. "Would...underturret care to take a crack?"

The response that crackles up from the underturret is, as expected, a rampageous ramble of what Moira must assume to be Iella profanity. This is Jargon, the _Lover's_ temporary undergunner, espousing her own opinion on the matter and seemingly expressing some manner of consent or another. Several seconds later, the underside Antagonist opens up and, according to Moira's inset sensors, peppers the surrounding cliffside with a fortune in wasted ammunition.

Among the four hundred plus yardbirds liberated from Hazro, Moira canvassed for a halfway talented marksman to ride underturret aboard _The Unconstant Lover_ during her next daring, high-profile air raid through the ditrogen-streaked skies above Ohostoi. Of course she anticipated rather a large number of unqualified wannabes, attempting to bolster their claim on the strength of their braggartism and bravado.

Nearly a dozen different sources, however, many of them boozy, most of them unreliable but all of them consistent, had professed the sharpshooting skills of a non-Commercial-speaking Iella with the inexplicable nickname Jargon. Hearing this, Moira conscripted the daft lemurfolk and had done.

Now, however, confronted with the absolute buhoxshit of Jargon's aim, Moira wonders if perhaps she'd been incorrect to trust the judgment of even a dozen psychotic murderers.

"I don't know if you're seeing this but," Moira addresses towards Nemo, "unless you're actively trying to waste ammo, how about we just flip the ship?"

Without another word of warning, _The Unconstant Lover_ tips totally on its axis, tilting Jargon and her Antagonist cleanly away from the offending turrets and positioning Moira perfectly to pulverize them with her own.

"Happy?"

"Very."

Her internal chambers start their gradual spinning with that anticipatory whine. Moira's GG912 ConcInd Antagonist Heavy Autofire Laser Cannon ignites, pouring a stream of continuous green down onto her nearest target. The receiving turret, whipping about as though to answer, combusts long before the _Lover_ even enters into its crosshairs.

The freighter screams past nothing but a column of smoke and a diaspora of gunners and technicians fleeing the blaze their weapon emplacement once was.

The same pattern – realign her aim, rattle off a rain of ammo to wreck and ruin each successive turret built along the western promontory, realign her aim again – continues virtually unchanged for the next six to seven targets.

What most amuses Moira, however, is that each impending turret appears wholly able to anticipate the disastrous approach of _The Unconstant Lover_ and the nasty anti-escort cannon riding bareback atop her. Short of magically sprouting legs and heading for the hills, though, they're each woefully unable to do anything but fire back, a strategy rendered pointless by the unexpected windfall of Odisseus' wonder shield.

It is with grim satisfaction that she glances over her shoulder to see all the western batteries have been reduced to identical smoke signals. Amid all the posturing, preening and pirate politics, Moira Quicksilver remembers precisely how she likes blowing things up.

The pandemonium that continues below Moira is afforded a spectacular view of as the _Lover_ careens across the northern end of the valley. To judge by Nemo's subtle steerings, he's preparing to sweep her along a second strafing run, presumably based on the success of the first, against the eastern anti-aircraft emplacements.

Down below, the combined forces of _Rule_ and _Fruit_ seem to be, ever so slowly, encroaching further and further into the facility, the defenders' holdings more and more resembling cornered prey than stalwart defenders.

Otherwise, comm chatter about ray shield percentages continues unimpeded and Jargon even makes a few laughable attempts to contribute to the unfolding action below. Moira, deep in the tranquility of the topturret, ignores both.

The gap closed between them, Moira's about to introduce this upcoming turret and all its brethren to a steady diet of her Antagonist's brand of ditrogen. An unexpected salvo, fired from somewhere high above, connects with the _Lover's_ ray shield a mere five yards from Moira's position within the topturret.

Even with the ray shield's buffer, the ship still dips some from recoil. The nearest anti-aircraft turret opens its own fire and _The Unconstant Lover_ veritably buckles under both barrages. Recovering what she can of her aim, Moira practically avalanches the entire hillside in her eventually successful attempt to destroy the turret in question. All the while, she devotes the majority of her mental energy to both searching out this sudden new attacker and ignoring Jargon's derisive sniggering.

"Edgies're at, er, 12%!" barks Two-Bit. "Who, in all the–"

"This," Nemo declares simultaneously with a wild outward swing of both yoke and _Lover_ , "I'm choosing to be worried about. Can anyone confirm visual? Topturret?"

"The sun's in my fucking eye," Moira announces truthfully, the approach of any aerial intruder obscured by the friendly rays of Ohostoi's benevolent sun. "How about, I don't know, asking the asshole in the sensor room?"

"Craft comin' in, Cap'n, 155 degrees," Abraham relays exactly on the heels of Moira's chastisement. "Specs're live. ConcInd Convoy Escort. L-Type. 864. Called _The Arrowhead?_ " Five brains, plus whatever Jargon keeps in her skull, scramble through known bounty hunters for ten seconds before Abraham connects the dots. "Bloom in me bloomers, Cap'n. It's one of them privateers."

"Figures," Nemo carps. "Tall order for one Trijan."

Three of the Council's Captains – Nemo, Greatgullet and Charybdis – elected to tackle the petroleum capital of the Outer Ring between them. Greatgullet spearheaded ground operations and Nemo provided air support. It was the sing-a-long psycho herself who, owing to both insider experience and some perverse dark humor, volunteered to entertain in low orbit whatever privateer forces Valladia had amassed for the welcoming party. Vobash's prediction about all the opposition Valladia would array before them had, of course, been one-hundred percent accurate.

Their new friend, _The Arrowhead_ , was still the first member of the asswipe armada to evade Charybdis' seemingly ironshod defenses. Considering the number of enemy ships clogging Ohostoi's atmosphere and stacked against the Trijan's three-ship flotilla, even Nemo, habitual under-appreciator, couldn't muster a real complaint.

With that, the growing sunspot resolves itself into the convoy escort unimaginatively named _The Arrowhead_. She arcs her incoming trajectory just diagonally enough to intercept them, assuming, of course, that the person gripping the _Lover's_ yoke was educated at some posh Imperium naval academy someplace and not Nehel Morel. In short, the incoming privateer succeeds only in revealing themselves to the full sunlight.

A triangular-shaped slab of teltriton, the entire _Arrowhead_ is speckled with a graffitied admixture of buccaneer tags and Valladia's corporate logo. She's powered by triple-stacked, triple-housed booster engines that protrude from its aft like the fins on a zegofish. The only feature of _The Arrowhead_ , paltry pirate turned petty privateer and precisely the breed of brigand Greatgullet would love to meet up a dark alley some midnight, that Moira Quicksilver's even remotely interested in are the front-mounted cannons.

In the business of stomping on the dreams of upstarts, Moira lobs a volley at _The Arrowhead_ for good measure, an act Jargon, coattail charioteer, mimics a moment later. Moira's unpleasantly surprised, though, to discover both their ray shields engaged and their pilot not a brain-dead incompetent.

Their own gunners face no such difficulties and somehow manage to whittle away what remains of the _Lover's_ ray shields under the percussive patter of laserfire. Approximately seven billion wailing klaxons proclaim this event across every inch of the ship with extreme prejudice.

A noncommittal Ortoki noise, expressing some manner of bewilderment, vibrates through the comm. "Am I hearing," Odisseus restates more coherently a second later, "what I think I'm–"

A strident squeal, loud enough to trump even the conjoined clamor of all the ship's internal alarms, shakes through the Briza's very bones, as that same anti-aircraft turret spatters the exposed _Lover_ with ammunition. The chaser to this abhorrent sound of rending teltriton is, of course, the impact that tosses about everybody aboard.

Two-Bit's presumably the first to recover his seat. "Damage to outer hull!" he expounds, a certain degree of hysteria abundant in his voice. "Impact's on the–"

"I spent days installing," Odisseus reminds with his trademark tone of increasing impatience, "the most sophisticated piece of shielding technology the galaxy's ever seen and now, three seconds later, I'm listening to this fucking alarm and Two-Bit talk about hull damage?"

"What've you been doing down there, whittling some fucking scrimshaw?" wonders a baffled Nemo. Somehow, he retains the peace of mind to wobble the _Lover_ away from the turret's unfriendly fire and weave a perplexing course through the refinery's thicket of smokestacks. "Fix it!" he commands, part skittishness, part urgency.

Odisseus' reply could only contain more vitriol if he was literally strangling his saltbrother while he spoke it. "Yes. Captain."

_The Arrowhead_ is obviously unable to keep up with the freighter as it flies across the facility and instead, it maintains its superior altitude to lob down potshots. Thankfully incapable of actually connecting with the spasmodically zigzagging _Lover_ , they connect instead with the especially sensitive sections of the petroleum processing plant below her.

Scorching green skyfall results in subsequently smoky explosions on the surface sixteen feet below _The Unconstant Lover_. When combined with Nemo's circuitous steering, this conspires to further confuse Moira's aim. For all her impotent efforts, Moira tosses a bucketload of ammunition towards their skyward tormentor, now cleanly outlined against the afternoon sun, to no visible effect.

"Boss!" barks a shiny new voice on the comm frequency, inbound from an external channel marred by static and the unmistakable sound of nearby small arms fire. "Maybe you've noticed all that oil that's mysteriously blowing the fuck up?" Despite his clearly besieged state of affairs, Greatgullet still possesses the good grace to allow for an ironic pause. "We fucking need that. Any time you feel like lending us some air support, you go right the fuck ahead and help yourself."

"Be right with you," chimes Nemo, frustration barely contained beneath a cracking veneer of pleasant good cheer. "How're those ray shield com–"

Interrupting their cue, the pearlescent shimmer of repulsed energy that blessedly are the ray shields winks into view several inches above _The Unconstant_ _Lover's_ hull. Imminent and momentary relief is felt from every corner of the ship.

"Edgies're 61% and climbin'," Two-Bit indicates, full of purpose.

"Oh, what's that?" The Ortoki that warbles through the comm is so laden with sarcasm Moira, a secondary speaker, almost can't comprehend it. "Did Odi fix the problem again? Did Odi fix the problem with almost superhuman speed? I stand here," he continues with feigned grandiloquence, "with bated breath before the mainframe access panel, awaiting the moment when you bloom everything to Jotor again."

At verbal and visual confirmation of the ray shields begrudging return, Nemo jerks the _Lover_ upward out of the refinery's thermosteel tangle. He pinpoints her prow directly towards the hovering _Arrowhead_. "Double forward. Let's strafe this bitch."

"And nobody thanks me."

"Thank you, Odisseus," prattles three of the Ortok's five fellow crewmates, one of the abstainers an ignoramus of an Iella and the other just a clueless prick.

"Yeah, thanks, whee!" the prick belatedly adds before proceeding to wank off the clutchlever.

_The Unconstant Lover's_ abused boosters, Port and Starboard, both springboard into acceleration and the Refinery Complex immediately hazes away into blurry shapes beneath them. Moira, of course, is more concentrated by the suddenly presented promise of actually shooting down that accursed _Arrowhead_. Only moments previously, it was smugly sniping at their unshielded backsides from the relative safety of the inside of its own ray shields.

Despite Jargon's hilarious ability to strike every empty patch of sky around her target, Moira must imagine there's not quite so terrifying a visual to an up-and-coming young bounty-privateer than what _The Arrowhead's_ viewport treats them to currently.

An enraged _Unconstant Lover_ , with maniac at the helm and spewing green hatred from perhaps only one turret accurately, bears down on their position with every visible intention of ramming her torpedo launcher directly into their undercarriage.

If a convoy escort was capable of pissing its pants and shuffling backward nervously, _The Arrowhead_ would. She quickly converts as much power as she can to her driftjets and cranks into reverse spare seconds before _The Unconstant Lover_ would've smashed both their bows to bits.

In olden days, every member of the _Lover's_ crew would've voiced some flaccid complaint or ignored jibe at this. Today, the crew is either too knowledgable of people's reactions to a charging Nemo or eager enough to annihilate the _Arrowhead_ that they don't necessarily object to the closeness of this call.

For her part, Moira pleases herself with the act of pummeling the privateer's ray shields into a pittance. Thanks to the _Lover's_ skyrocketing route, she predictably loses her line of sight before she can cinch the deal.

"Sods," Two-Bit manages to squeeze in edgewise.

The vertically-pointed _Lover_ clears the scrambling _Arrowhead_ by a few ship lengths. Nemo adjusts her bearing to swing the freighter around for a second and hopefully final pass. Moira is cautiously optimistic toward her chances of actually shooting the peevish little privateer down. It's at approximately this moment when everyone aboard the Briza fails to notice that they've crossed back into the firing range of a certain swath of anti-aircraft turrets.

Jargon's shocked screams are the first indication. They come heartbeats before the ray shields take their customary dip under the harsh reprimand of four individual turrets. Two-Bit yelps out a handful of percentages that're immediately made meaningless by the increasingly familiar sound of a certain recurring shipborne alarm.

The bone-chilling sights of the ray shield promptly vanish and _The Arrowhead_ swoops up from beneath.

This time, it's _The Arrowhead's_ who finds purchase on the _Lover's_ naked hull. Only by bracing both boots against the nearby consoles can Moira prevent herself from being tossed down the topturret's ladder well and into the gundeck below. Three more terrible tremors seize the ship, each one accompanied by that same shearing sound and a storm of screaming and swearing over the comm.

In a moment of desperate evasiveness, Nemo jackknifes both boosters at almost right angles, plummeting the previously ascending _Lover's_ into a nosedive. Seconds following this, the contents of Moira's stomach debate the merits of a full evacuation.

Clamoring klaxon and Ortoki curses blend together into strange music in Moira's earpiece. A rainbow myriad of poorly-aimed laserfire paints the air about them. The very concrete and unrelenting ground, dotted with smokestacks and covered snow, rushes forward to meet the Briza's dented bow. The nosedive lasts precisely one second long enough to convince Moira that all-important screw in Nemo's head finally came fatally loose.

He inevitably pulls up, of course, with a sickening slap of inertia. Before her vertiginous mind can precisely sort out which direction's up and which direction's west, she realizes that the anti-aircraft turrets have ceased fire.

The ray shields were demonstrably still offline, as evinced by Odisseus' grumbling and, most obviously, the lack of ray shields encircling the ship. Despite this, however, the turrets simply stare resentful daggers down at _The Unconstant Lover_ as she skirts around the refinery's perimeter. Uncertain as to the why but more than willing to exploit their sudden ceasefire, Moira whirls the Antagonist fully around and, in so doing, first notices the line of blatantly labeled oil tanks that line the facility's perimeter to the _Lover's_ immediate port.

One missed shot from the perched turrets would almost certainly ignite the entire supply, destroying millions of credits worth of the refinery's finest in a single stroke. Moira opens her mouth to offer the Captain cursory congratulations on the passing cleverness of this scheme. The notion strikes her then that, should one ambitious turret gunner call his bluff, the unshielded _Lover_ and all her hapless hands would also be obliterated in the ensuing blast.

"Does anybody miss the ray shields?" poses Nemo wistfully. "I sure do."

"Is there anything you miss more?" Odisseus is quick to return. "Engines, perhaps? Sensors?" He presses further. "Weapons is always an option."

Flattening both triggers beneath her fingers, Moira and her fully functional Antagonist reduce the next turret into rubble. "Get bloomed, assfur."

"Only way these shields'll be coming back online is if I swap power from some other system," Odisseus warns significantly. When no one volunteers their own system to be lobotomized for the sake of ship's power, the Ortok sighs heavily. "How's about the underturret? Would anyone besides Jargon object?" The radio is blissfully silent another second longer. "We have a winner."

Undercut by a colorful new cornucopia of Iella invective, Two-Bit, in his capacity as co-pilot, cheerfully announces the return of the ray shields. "Underturret's zilched to 14%. Edgies're" he states, mere moments before the familiar sheen triumphantly returns to lacquer the length of the ship, "live at 74%!"

A general uproar of good cheer ripples through the _Lover's_ interior comm. Moira, in celebration, mercilessly destroys another of the defenseless gun emplacements that so plagued them minutes earlier. "Shields! Huzzah!" Nemo exclaims. "We can–"

At this moment, the vannaphant in the room, a certain painfully persistent privateer and its uninspired name, drops seemingly out of nowhere to intercept the _Lover's_ forward progress from the opposite corner of the refinery. A groan of collective displeasure chases away the sounds of fleeting relief that flooded the comm only moments before. The first order of business for _The Unconstant Lover's_ freshly restored ray shields are to absorb the brunt of _The Arrowhead's_ return fire.

"I will personally pay topturret," Nemo proposes calmly, "one hundred of my own Commercial if she can blow that fucker up before I'd have to dodge it."

Her skills challenged, Moira pivots bouncily in the bucket seat. She points her trifurcated Antagonist perfectly through the viewport and directly where her best guess supposed the brain, right lung and left lung of whatever unfortunate blowbag happens to be piloting _The Arrowhead_ this morning would be. "Normally," she stipulates, "I'd ask to see the money first."

Before he can counter, she's off, contributing her own bright green stream to the ditrogen exchange whipping between both stubborn spaceships. The beating the _Lover's_ own shields endure at the hands of _The Arrowhead's_ cannons is plenty punchy. The privateer's shields, crucially lacking all the regenerative wonders that Kiesha Laser Corp can bestow, bruise, buckle and are eventually banished.

The Antagonist, as expected, performs flawlessly, whittling _The Arrowhead's_ shields away to nothing. Without warning, Moira's ammunition window blinks warning red and her very last canister shorts out the last scrap of ray shield the foe can muster.

"Of course," comments a frustrated Moira, fumbling with the release hatch for the crossed leather seat belts that meet over her sternum. Before she can stumble from her seat and insert a fresh chain of canisters, she catches sight of a faint green flashing, originating from _The Unconstant Lover's_ underside.

Moira watches, frozen with horror, as a string of enervated green bolts from Jargon's 14% Antagonist puncture the rack of stacked engines on _The Arrowhead's_ port quarter. With a sudden suffusion of smoke, the craft careers unpredictably, tilting sideways on its axis and headbutting the cliffside.

"Of fucking course," continues a griping Moira as the shockwave of the ensuing explosion, a bubble of soot, smoke and snow, practically starts another avalanche, its so forceful. Nemo cranks the deceleration with enough speed to avoid the cascade of shorn rock, tumbling boulder and the river of snow that deluges the southwestern corner of the refinery.

"One hundred credits to underturret, then," Nemo awards with surprise, as he pumps the clutchlever and soars _The Unconstant Lover_ away from the rockslide. The sound of the anti-aircraft cannons, firing with relief at the once-again airborne freighter, is nearly drowned out by the sound of the deranged Iella cackling from her seat of victory in the underturret.

Third Interlude

"Why Greatgullet and why him first?"

"Muscle, mostly. You sway somebody like that to your cause, a real skullcracker, it'll make the other psychopaths consider your offer twice. We went the extra mottible to win Greatgullet over but, to see how fast he signed on the dotted, eh, maybe we didn't have to."

"The extra mottible meaning?"

"The Noxix footage. Never seen somebody with more of an appetite for bounty hunters than this guy. You ever meet him? Wears a moons-damned necklace of their fucking licenses around his neck. You utter the words "county" or "punter" anywhere in his slimy earshot, you best be ready to run 'cause he'll go berserk at first whiff."

"Must've been difficult to stage."

"What must've been difficult to stage?"

"The Noxix footage."

"You think that footage was staged?"

"I assumed so. I mean, I applaud you, the move's grade-a, publicity-wise, and the forgery's absolutely top notch. I'm sorry, though – you bury a canister in the cranium of Huong Xo's poster child, you brag about said murder to the entire galaxy and then Xo doesn't paint a target on your face so large that guns don't just naturally point towards you? I'm sensing now, from the gun in your hand, that perhaps the footage was not staged."

"You like?"

"It's a very fancy gun. Vintage. Will that very fancy, vintage gun be returning to its holster anytime soon? I'd really feel more comfortab–"

"This's the gun responsible, believe it or not. This is the very gun that buried a canister in Quuilar's cranium. Allegedly."

"Those allegations are not–"

"Where did that impression come from? Tell me, what brainless sack of quorki-fucking shitgargler gave you the impression the footage was staged?"

"You shoot me and there's no column. You shoot me and the galaxy thinks Ikoril was you and the Noxix footage was staged."

"Tell me who else thinks that."

"Logical people. People who understand politics and crime. You've gotta understand, if you actually did shoot Quuilar Noxix in the head, there're better and more reliable means to advance that information that leaking some shakily-shot footage. These days, faking holoreel is no insurmountable feat."

"And what, bribing a journalist is supposed to be one?"

"Bribing me is."

"What're you implying?"

"Remove the pistol from my temple. Allow me to write the column. Watch people's opinions change."

"That quickly? We like ourselves, don't we?"

"Listen, Noxix could've met with a thousand and some unlikely and ignominous ends. He's disappeared or dead two years and you think you're the only claimant? The best claimant? Sure. Not the only one, is my point. Footage, as I said, can be faked. You shoot me and there's no column."

"I heard you."

"Bears repeating, I think. There. See? Much appreciated."

"That goes in."

"That you pressed a gun to my temple? For your credibility's sake–"

"That I shot Quuilar Noxix. That the footage wasn't staged."

"Long as it's true."

"Take a shovel, visit beatific Baz and find out."

"And the others? Who was next to fly the colors?"

"Vobash. And my own sources tell me he was the most difficult get, more difficult even than Charybdis."

"Those sources being Greatgullet?"

"I was under the impression a journalist never reveals their sources."

"You're not a journalist."

"Thank fuck. No, I did not have the misfortune of conducting Vobash's interview personally. The whole fucking purpose of recruiting Greatgullet first was that the water he draws might drag the other big nuts with him. Vobash, I guess, being among them."

"Can't say as I've heard much about him. That is, prior to the Freebooter Fleet."

"Not many have. Weaselly motherfucker tries rather extremely hard to keep his profile low and his ship under the radar. You know the type, I'm assuming, very cautious, very uptight about professionalism and all that shit. Thing is, that's great, we're all impressed and stuff, but might as well be a blooming actuary, right, at that point? Way he plays, even I can't find mucha point in piracy. You want me to repeat that one, 'cause I can, if you wanna make special note. Way he plays–"

"Pretty sure it got picked up. No worries."

"Alright. Use that, though. That's good, 's ironic. Tell you the truth–"

"I'd prefer that."

"Could he hear me now, he'd be abso-fucking-lutely livid, the shitsnake. You hear that, galaxy? Ciff Vobash, captains a Hesko Planetary 7762 Destroyer Medium _The Loose Cannon_. Triomman, red coat, you believe this, keeps a live honest-to-moons brushvezzer up his sleeve to fucking confuse people or I don't know. I do know, for a fact, that he's personally responsible for that bit of skullduggery that saw Artelse's fourth moon pushed outta orbit some four years ago, much as he'd like to avoid that being widely known."

"I'm sure he'll be delighted to hear this."

"No, I think he'll be really fucking pissed off."

"Who's left? Charybdis? Ajuvog?"

"Aju Vog Xah Qaj. Had I a credit for every time a Xend corrected me on that buhoxshit, I'd probably have like ten fucking credits."

"How's working with the rogue queen?"

"Weird, as you'd expect. She I didn't know. Practically nobody, among my crew or Greatgullet's knew her personally. Was Vobash, believe it or not, who made contact with her. Her work, obviously, we're all familiar with. What I hear, half the layout of the Crawk's Locker is the handiwork of her and that eyesore she slimes around inside. Tell you why I'm lucky, I've never met the monster face-to-face. You ever see a holo of what they look like, those Xendo queens? Moira pulled one up, in another attempt to gross me out and blech, blech, with a side order of blech."

"Does that create tension, though? That you find the Xend gross?"

"Tension? Nah. I mean, I don't trust the creepy fuckers near as far as I can throw one but, truth be told, there's tension everywhere, between everybody. Much as Gull and I're maybe boon companions, shit arises pretty regularly that we just don't fucking agree on. Vobash and Aju Vog Xah Qaj can typically be relied upon to agree on whatever, I suppose, but it's Charybdis none of us can predict."

"She's becoming quite the cause celeb in her own right."

"She's a fucking weirdo, yeah. That can't be argued. Assume for a minute she wasn't Trijan, you know what I'm saying, assume she didn't wear that spooky fucking naval uniform everywhere she moons-damned goes, and she'd still be weirder than smiles on Moira. You putta gun to my head, I couldn't tell you why she joined up. We're glad she did, obviously, but totally clueless as to why."

"Bad blood with Valladia?"

"You assume, sure, but, in all honesty, that's never the vibe I got offa her. All signs point to her just, I don't know, being a fucking lunatic. Gives me the creeps."

"The creeps? You?"

"Listen. You ain't met her. She's a privateer, right, and we're pirates. Dad's suddenly pinching cigarettes and spray-painting schoolbuses with his teenaged sons again, you understand me? Either she's a spy and a dumb one, or she's a complete psychopath."

"And psychopaths creep you out?"

"Other ones do, yeah."

Chapter 14

Odisseus is thirsty from all this morning's manual labor. En route to the galley, he scowls at and waddles past a queer queue of unrecognizable strangers. Had Moira Quicksilver, standing sentry at the shaded foot of the boarding ramp, not given him expressed verbal warning, the Ortok might be inclined to righteous outrage at the purple Talosian sand this intrusion's freshly tracked all over the _Lover's_ admittedly unclean deck plates.

With full knowledge of their purpose aboard, Odisseus can only marvel and scoff.

If the parched mechanic could've predicted one outcome from the repeated raidings of the Freebooter Fleet, it would have been progressively fewer pirates, not more.

Three distinct cliques comprise the majority of the foot traffic paraded down the betweendecks corridor. All of these beings Odisseus must sidle, shoulder and snarl past in order to gain access to the galley.

The first cluster, whom Odisseus neatly sidestepped, consisted primarily of Triommans, a half-dozen drooling males encircling with instinctual protectiveness an elderly female of the species. His patience waning, Odisseus then stomps through the second group, three Mungabs and a Vollocki, each broadcasting their colors on blue bandanas tied around scalps and biceps, each reacting with the same boyish standoffishness that's such an epidemic among petty hoods. With as fearsome a growl as the dehydrated Ortok can manage, Odisseus scatters those remaining, a flamboyant posse including a sashed Saurian, a pantalooned Prul and an epauletted Cyngok.

The hurdles overcome, his sweaty, sweatered bulk arrives, after much effort, in the mess hall. "Holding court" was the term Moira had attributed to Nemo's activities in the hold. At the time, Odisseus had, evidently erroneously, assumed she was just being poetic. The scene that occupies the main well of _The Unconstant Lover's_ mess hall is, he discovers, a decidedly medieval one.

The throne's part is portrayed by a certain Ujad mahogany chair, positioned away from its table to face the open doorway and the string of supplicants who've neatly lined up to supplicate themselves. The chair in question, in fact, was the one favored by a certain black-haired, long-coated asshole whose irresponsibility in the action over the GalaxGas Refinery Complex was responsible for Odisseus' morning and a half of mending hull plates.

The throne's occupant, the ostensible king of this crappy kingdom, slouches dispassionately, affecting the air of a crowned barbarian, outwardly bored by matters of state and inwardly seeking any excuse for conquest. At ten thousand paces and through a thinly-veiled disguise, though, Odisseus can always recognize his saltbrother's self-satisfaction.

The holovision set hanging above the doorway – "MARAUDERS OVER MOQU" blasts the holographic headline – plus the empty turbine cap that he grips in his right hand both serve to distract His Majesty from those so desperately seeking an audience with him. In this case, it's a swashbuckling Suraaqi, flanked by burly Simvesti bodyguards, that quite literally kneels before Nemo's seat.

The role of court vizier appears to have fallen upon a gleeful Abraham, seated to Nemo's immediate right. The Grimalti balances a bottle of Gitterswitch atop one knee, the sacred box of turbine caps atop the other. The court jester, on the other hand, is fulfilled by Two-Bit Switch, seated to Nemo's immediate left and thumbing through his Attaché.

As the Ortok eyes his saltbrother on his trajectory to reach the chiller and the galley basin, he cannot help but be reminded, by the whole regal spectacle, of Boss Ott.

"–Captain of _The Deaf Ears_ ," recites the Suraaqi in gormless monotone, "swear to follow your orders, fly your colors and portion you the agreed-upon percentage of any plunder I take from a Valladian port, at least as long as..." she halts herself, scowls her thorny brow and glances a wary eye up to Abraham. "As long as?"

"As long as the winds," Abraham relates patiently, "remain favorable."

"As long as the winds remain favorable," the Suraaqi repeats by rote, the old-timey phrase devoid of meaning or comprehension through her scabby lips.

"Rise," commands the Captain dramatically, obeyed somewhat clumsily by his Suraaqi counterpart. Once she's regained her proper footing, she's cued, once again, to reach out and receive the brimming turbine cap Abraham hands her.

As both Captains toast to _The Unconstant Lover_ , Odisseus washes his paws clean from the prodigious purple grime one accrues while performing exterior repairs on a windy Talosian morning. As Captain Whasername strides from the room, a newly loyal peon to Nemo's ignoble cause, Odisseus fills his canteen, swigs the entire container dry and refills it in preparation for his eventual reunion with the blistering sun and the blasted hull plates.

"And fourteen percent," Two-Bit mutters towards his Attaché, as Odisseus scans the thoroughly uninteresting contents of the chiller as a thin pretext to bask in its cooling breath, "from Captain, er, Lhogo of _The Deaf Ears_." The information recorded, his tone abruptly changes and he's suddenly giving Abraham's crooked vizier act a run for its money. "So, this gantine, yeah, the one I were jabbin' about, she's called _Sunrise Over Criia_. Antwacky handle, I know, but vizz at this," he remarks before flipping the Attaché's screen to allow Nemo to view what's displayed there, "she's a cusher, you follow?"

"A pleasure liner?" Nemo comments skeptically.

"Bang on. Shiniest of the shiny, what I ord." He leans still closer to his Captain, exuding so conspiratorial aura, they might as well have been conducting the conversation beneath the rim of Two-Bit's shadowy cape. "Here comes the jazzy bit. I specc it's on some special kinda mission from the Valladia brass to show this boatload of Imperium toffs around the Shipping Line, you know, like a vote of confidence in their investment or what have you. She's jockin' untragged, carryin' fuck-all for an escort and, as we jabb, diddles in orbit above Crander."

"An unarmed pleasure liner, full of Imperium hostages, on a walkabout only three systems from Moqu?" Nemo's skepticism holds fast. "So, a trap?"

"Sure vizzes that way, Cap'n. Awful tomato-looking prize, for a trap, though."

Slamming the chiller closed with a grateful growl of its machinery, a refreshed Odisseus weaves around the countertop and levels up on Abraham's right side. "As long as the winds remain favorable?"

"An old saw," Abraham explains, a certain shade of reminiscence in his craggy voice. "We be talkin' to pirates here, ain't we? There ain't that much loyalty there worth demandin' in the first place."

"With _The Deaf Ears_ ," Odisseus tabulates, "and the three more waiting outside, what's that put our total at?"

Abraham doesn't need a moment to calculate. "Nine."

The Ortok makes an impressed huff. Nine was nearly half.

Over the course of the past week, twenty-one pirate ships trickled their way towards Talos II, with the expressed intention of swearing fealty to the Freebooter Fleet and parceling out a piece of the prize for themselves. Which Freebooter the newcomers approached seemed to be matter of preference and reputation. For arguably the least prominent of the five original members, forty-two percent of those recruits were evidently prepared to queue up on behalf of _The Unconstant Lover_.

They were, of course, none of them especially potent or established pirates. Odisseus couldn't recognize a single one from the admittedly little he knew about the galactic underworld's cast of notables. Certainly Two-Bit or Abraham or even Moira might recognize some of them.

By and large, they were nobodies, bottom-feeding hooligans in hijacked moonhoppers, the type of sycophants that'd normally be bedeviling the Veraspo Belt with their numbers and their inexperience. How they deduced Talos II as the Freebooter Fleet's staging point seemed somewhat irrelevant now for surely, any information stream these ruffians could feed from, the Imperial Ministry of Interstellar Security already was.

With their numbers swollen from five ships to twenty-seven ships and their combined crews totaling a number rapidly approaching a thousand, however, any Imperium task force they dispatched would certainly have their work cut out for them.

Initial reaction to the recruits was seemingly mixed, to judge by the differing opinions voiced by the assembled Captains. Those who most recently chose to assail Ohostoi and therefore the majority were passionately in favor of more pirates, despite the severe decline in booty each buccaneer was likely to receive. Odisseus assumed this had something to do with the clusterfuck the refinery sack had blossomed into.

The minority, in this case represented by Vobash and Aju Vog Xah Qaj, were opposed or indifferent to the batch of eager newbies, citing security risks or payment decrease at intervals.

Personally, Odisseus was innately suspicious of bloating Nemo with any more power or influence than was absolutely necessary. Considering the less-than-charming manner to which he treats his current underlings, Odisseus felt nothing but pity and a vague sense of camaraderie with those poor souls determined to place their lives in his chronically irresponsible hands.

On the other paw, with the capital from all the pilfered spacecraft, cagonuts and carbon petro cascading into his and everyone else's pockets, Odisseus couldn't realistically bemoan any cash surrendered by the presence of more bodies. On an even more practical level, each Jolly-Roger-waving idiot that joined their forces would represent one more target for Valladia's turrets and privateers and subsequently less hull damage to Odisseus to repair.

"You're loving this, aren't you?" probes Odisseus, not without a certain tactlessness.

"Reminds me of old times," Abraham beams, oblivious to any sinister undertones or grumbly portends in the Ortok's words.

"Captain Xesk," announces the Prul underling standing in the doorway, making a sweeping gesture towards the supposed Captain Xesk like some carnival barker shilling for sideshow attractions, "of _The Welcome–_ "

She, along with her captain and fellow Cyngok crewman, are shoved roughly aside.

The party that blusters into the room, the queue shucking them forward vomitously, are approximately seven members in strength. They represent a wild array of mismatched races but share both a common gender and a common comportment. All are male and all are motherfuckers; criminals several notches more scarred, tattooed and gun-toting than the smattering of lowlifes assembled for Nemo's knighting ceremony.

The vanguard of this wedge of thuggish muscle, the principal pusher and shover, defies each of these descriptors, however – unscarred, holstering only a single firearm and, most demonstrably, female.

"What's all this, then?" demands Captain Gertie Gundeck.

Nemo nearly crawls over the back of his less-than-regal throne in recoil. "Swap my dick for a Patesshi prickly pear." He cranes his neck to shout over everyone's heads. "Moira!"

"Don't fucking start," comes a faint and familiar voice down the betweendecks corridor.

"You had one job!"

"What was I supposed to do, shoot her?"

"Yes!"

"I ain't ruled out shootin' you myself," states Gertie Gundeck significantly, monkey in the middle of this shouting match.

Gertie Guspatch was the snot-nosed doxy flaunting both her trick-shooting prowess and her upper thighs around Takioro Defederate Station with equal panache. She was a far cry from the corsair queen now standing before them, whose current hands-on-hips posture and expression of parental disapproval could've been a direct transplant from Odisseus' own litterbearer.

The unheralded appearance of one of the Gitter Consortium's most wanted provokes a variety of reactions from all assembled. It provokes an undulation of whispers and mutterings amongst the lesser rabble. It provokes abject terror in Odisseus' saltbrother and it provokes the manner of frosty stiffening from Abraham that only appears in the presence of betrayers and mutineers. Both categories, for all her bellicosity, Gertie Gundeck fulfills in spades.

Her finger, aimed dead center at Nemo's chest, earns more reaction than her shotgun might. "You call this shindig together, bringin' in all the Ring's best buccaneering talent, fixin' to put to the torch Valladia and all she holds dear." She pauses precisely long enough for Nemo's mouth to shape a reply before continuing her tirade. "You invited Greatgullet. You invited Vobash. You invited the Xendo queen, for whatever fucking reason. You fucking _converted_ Charybdis and then, to top it all off, you invited Captain Fuckface," she points vaguely back at Nemo's huddled followers, "of The Good Ship Fuckface." She drops her fists plaintively back to her hips, mocking the same exact breed of disappointment a mother divests upon her untruthful child. "And you didn't fucking invite me."

Cornered, both by this accusation and by Gertie Gundeck's brigade of bloodthirsty toughs, Nemo makes a pleading glance towards Abraham. The Grimalti's advise consists of a humorless shake of the head. When similarly consulted, Two-Bit instead screws up his lower lip and hoists the Attaché, as though in suggestion.

Struck with a sudden bolt of inspiration at the silent offering, Nemo plasters on his most placating expression, scoots forward some in his chair and addresses his accuser.

"Say, Gertrude, how do you feel about jewelry?"

Gertie Gundeck was a shoddy engineer, a passable pilot and a glorious gunner.

To accommodate this, the first major modification _The Chick Magnet_ underwent upon its rechristening and re-captaining was to swap out her husband's previous chair of command. The gaudy, imperialistic nightmare, within which he highhandedly spouted his commands like the narcissistic prick he was, ended its life atop a Lrissi junk pile.

New Husband, its replacement and an enormous highly-customized Munitions Intergalactic Model C76 Carnage Homing Torpedo Cluster-Launcher was substantially more fun to play with.

As a forward-facing turret, New Husband served double duty as _The Magnet's_ primary teeth and Gertie's seat of power aboard. From this seat, she could easily bark orders to the horde of horny devotees she called her crew. She could, just as easily and from the same seat, explode the shield projector, main turbine drive and all four defensive turrets off a fleeing spice freighter with a little precision targeting and a simple squeeze of her trigger finger.

Today, however, the proverbial wheels of this previously flawless strategy were gradually coming unhitched as New Husband met his match, in the form of not one, but two separate graviton projector pads.

"Rigidity's dropping!" screams one mouth of Typhoon Qalhoon over his shoulder from his temporary posting at the graviton control panel. "From 21% to 18%!" screams the other.

"On which ship, Tiff," Gertie spits acrimoniously. "On which ship?"

"The _Days_ , Captain, sorry," one mouth apologizes, before the second supplies. "18% rigidity on the _Days_. The _Uncle's_ holding at 30%."

"Well, swap more power, damn you," Gertie snaps. "Even them out best you can but, the second either of 'em goes, dump everything you've got onto the other. Copy?"

"Copy," Qalhoon repeats with the eerie unison of both mouths speaking at once.

"More fighters inbound, Captain! Sixty degrees off starboard bow!" declares Yeoman, the greenhorn substituting Qalhoon's formerly held position at the sensor bank.

Gertie sighs, frankly relieved to be delivered something worth shooting at. "Much obliged, sweetheart," she passes along, sweeping her viewfinder across the loose knot of half-a-dozen starfighters and allowing New Husband to acquire quarry locks on each one.

This done, she blows off some steam by unleashing a single bloated torpedo. A tenth of a zottible past the end of the barrel, the bloated missile fragments into a hell storm of component rockets, each corkscrewing apart and swerving towards whichever starfighter Gertie thoughtfully targeted for them.

Much to her continued chagrin, however, three of the brainless things crossed into the same inescapable graviton fields that currently ensnare the _Magnet's_ fellow wing-mates, _The Dog Days_ and _The Cry Uncle_. These unlucky missiles clink harmlessly against the face of whichever projector pad happened to magnetically snag them.

Thusly, only three of the enemy starfighters Gertie'd slated for destruction actually meet their makers. The remaining three strafe the _Magnet_ unharmed, lancing laserfire into her dwindling ray shields until Gertie's other, less talented turret gunners could dispatch them.

Nemo willingly sent her into a deathtrap. Of this, she'd become pervasively certain. The only foreseeable strategy going forward, as far as Gertie could divine, was to survive said deathtrap and rub his pretty face in it and possibly the _Magnet's_ afterburner.

The planet Crander is an innocent bystander, gaping agog at the bizarre "space battle" that was unfolding in its unwitting atmosphere. She would apply the term "battle" loosely here since what she was really looking at was some strange festival of kicking, screaming and fingernails-peeling-woodgrain.

The local space station, Crandish Commercial Exports, whose main commercial exports could be rat-canaries, blow jobs and lollipops for all Gertie cares, seems likewise bemused by the whole fiasco and hangs there, proverbial jaw agape.

To either side of the looming Warp Gate linger both jaws of the aforementioned trap. The pair of graviton projectors are comparable to capital ships in size and are capable, when cranked to their maximum setting, of literally pushing small planetary bodies, namely moons, around in their orbits.

Needless to say, the trap was sprung the moment _The Dick Magnet_ , plus the two cannon fodder cruisers that Nemo'd been graciously enough lend her for the purposes of this apology sack, dropped warp. The graviton projector pads kicked on, seized both spacecraft within their respective fields of gravitational inescapability and proceeded to reel them in, her ironically-named ship unmagnetized by virtue of arriving last.

Acting on instinct, Gertie ordered Qalhoon to man their own meager graviton projectors and target her allies, instigating this hilariously one-sided tug-of-war. There was only one conceivable reason the _Magnet's_ graviton locks could even compete with these two behemoths the Imperial bushwhackers had dragged out of storage. Their intention wasn't to powderize upon contact any pirates this maneuver leashed them. It was rather to inter and interrogate those caught.

In the face of superior numbers, superior weaponry and superior underlings, this was the only advantage Gertie Gundeck could see to exploit.

A scarce ten dottibles through the viewport and surrounded by a thin curtain of its privateer escorts dawdles the bait, the _Sunrise Over Criia_. With its lavish paint job, its luxuriantly improbable design and its baroque fixtures, it appears from moment to moment to either be begging to be boarded or presiding over the entire ambush from a comfortable distance.

Scuttling the _Sunrise_ was a task easily accomplished by even the _Magnet_ alone. Puncturing her web of escorts without the clunky hulls of _Uncle_ or _Days_ to absorb the brunt of the blows would be a much taller order.

The ambient hum, the faint rattle that's afflicted her ship ever since dropping warp within sight of those pads, suddenly changes pitch. Gertie can hear her _Magnet_ straining from the renewed pressure.

"That's them cranking up the juice, Captain!" Typhoon Qalhoon needlessly frets. "We're losing rigidity on both and rapidly!" His instruments bleat insistently, as though to corroborate his story. "16% and 24%! 12% and 21%!"

"We keep this up," mutters Evileye from his disconcerting post over Gertie's right shoulder, " _Magnet's_ to be ripped stem from stern."

Gertie cannot pry her eyes from the prey, so agonizingly close and yet separated by the Breach itself for all the good it does them.

Could she somehow find a way to teleport past both projector pads, she could easily free her captured brethren with a few cluster-torpedos up the respective asses of both gravitons. From there, the three of them could joyfully smash the piddly privateer resistance and spend the rest of the afternoon rolling around in the piles of gold bullion that were undoubtedly flooding the entirety of the _Sunrise's_ decks. Simple enough, Gertie supposes bitterly; all she's gotta do is buzz those lazy bastards in the _Magnet's_ magical teleportation room belowdecks and tell them to flip the switch from "off" to "on".

Alternatively, there might be something else she could try.

"Hold rigidity," she presses to Qalhoon. "I give you the signal, though, you leave both them cunts twistin' in the wind. Peachy?" Before either of the Moraj's mouths can object or request explanation, she tosses a separate order towards the helm. "Igg, full reverse."

Both members of her bemused crew uncomprehendingly obey their orders. The two-pronged effect on _The Dick Magnet_ is, at once, profound and terrible. At the graviton controls, Qalhoon fights tooth-and-nail to retain their two-fisted hold on both _The Dog Days_ and _The Cry Uncle_. At the helm, Igg gooses the _Magnet's_ modest engine into a backwards crawl, producing an unfriendly metallic squeal of complaining shipborne girders but inspiring, of course, no budge from either captured pirate ship.

"This ain't helping rigidity any! We–"

"Swear to the moons, Tiff, I hear the word 'rigidity' outta either of those mouths one more time, I will boot your ass out the airlock myself," Gertie assures her crewman. "Don't be shy, Igg," she coos with an immediate shift in tone. "Give us some distance."

With some reluctance, Igg backpedals the engine that much further. The ambush becomes smaller and smaller through the viewport with each successive inch the _Magnet_ manages to negotiate backward. All the while, she maintains her increasingly tenuous hold on both her compatriots. The ship voices her own protest, the poor creature, with a disconcerting rattle and a piercing whine that emanates from beneath the floors and within the walls.

The gravitational tension separating the three ships from each other continues to coil and coil for several more seconds. Reenforced by his console's flashing lights and persistent bleating, Typhoon Qalhoon pleads for reprieve.

"Another ten seconds of this and, uh," stammers one mouth, doubtlessly crippled by the absence of the word "rigidity" from his vocabulary, while the second mouth illustrates the point cogently enough, merely by rattling numbers off. "6% and 11%! 3% and 9%!"

"Hope you boys remember your lunches fondly," Gertie mentions helpfully. "Tiff, drop 'em. Igg, full throttle forward."

Despite the pervasive "surrounded by idiots" vibe Gertie enjoyed cultivating among her crew, both Igg and Qalhoon operate with startling synchronicity. The graviton bank ceases its complaining and the proverbial pedal hits the proverbial metal at precisely the same moment.

_The Dick Magnet_ is a stone launched from some brat's slingshot, both graviton locks the elastic rubber band responsible. She catapults forward with a velocity comets would consider envious.

Both _The Dog Days_ and _The Cry Uncle_ almost instantaneously kiss the face of the projector pad summoning them, but _The Dick Magnet_ sails gloriously past. Either pad's gravitational influence paws greedily against either side of Gertie's ship as she passes, but both are ultimately too slow to impede Gertie's propulsive progress any.

With a convulsive shudder as though shaking off the willies, _The Dick Magnet_ clears both pads and presents itself before the privateer flotilla awaiting her on the opposite side.

All these unfired homing cluster torpedos burn a hole in her magazine. Gertie wheels New Husband to and fro, sweeping her viewfinder across the backside of both projector pads. As the wedge of privateers fire their turbines and close to engagement distance, a grateful Gertie squeezes her turret's trigger.

Her next torpedo explodes a mere dottible from the bow of Valladia's vanguard. The missile's remnants veer in every direction away from the foremost privateer, each one zeroing onto the target Gertie designated for them.

A chorus of explosions thunders off the helpless backsides of both projector pads. The atmosphere of intangible throbbing that lately filled Crander's airspace abruptly stops. The newly-liberated _Dog Days_ and _Cry Uncle_ manage to remove the thumbs from between their butt cheeks and saunter around either side of the smoking projection pads to form up on _The Dick Magnet's_ wings. Gertie Gundeck slots another cluster-torpedo into New Husband's chamber and once again finds herself unable to tear her eyes from the _Sunrise_.

Her mind distractedly wanders to the posh Imperium nobility undoubtedly watching the whole spectacle unfold from the opulent safety of the observation deck. She imagines them fretting over both their ruined Outer Ring vacations, their soon-to-be-pilfered plunder and the canisters of supercharged ditrogen that were, inevitably, about to decorate the inside of their skulls.

Moira should've guessed. She presses the side of her head heavily onto the one hand nearest Nemo, careful to cover the ear beneath, but there was no conceivable means to sit with both ears naturalistically covered. She should've guessed. Luckily for her, the chamber's occupants, to a pirate, were far too distracted by this most audacious newcomer seated directly to Nemo's right to pay much heed to sour old Moira Quicksilver. She still should've guessed, however, that the first day she'd gamble on earrings, the first pair she'd bothered to wear since charm school, Gertie would arrive bedecked in more Inner Sector regalia than Moira's mother even owned, the trollop.

Gemstones glisten on each ringed finger. A wrist-to-elbow carpet of bracelets click together across both forewarns. A veritable yoke of lockets, lavalieres and pearls dangle distractingly onto her cleavage. Entire constellations of earrings droop from each of her ears. No less than three individual tiaras can be seen, tangled amongst her doxy blonde locks.

An entire pleasure liner's worth of baubles adorn Captain Gertie Gundeck absurdly, the very visible price of her loyalty. Dressing in such a fashion was doubtlessly a less-than-subtle attempt to feed Nemo crow for the trap he'd willingly sent her to spring but, as far as Moira knew, Nemo possessed no such capacity for shame.

Despite her mother being a most vocal proponent of costume jewelry, Moira's own earrings were nothing to write home about. A humble pair of lobe studs she'd pulled from a bounty-head corpse she'd made in the halcyon days before Nemo, they'd been in Moira's possession for nearly half a decade and a stable amongst the tin cigarette carton's worth of mementos she bothered to collect.

The confluence of events which brought her to wear them today of all days was pure chance. She'd no prior knowledge the Council of Captains would convene this afternoon, nor that Nemo would tap her for muscle duty, nor that he'd also tap Gertie for precisely the same honor, ostensibly as some manner of peace offering.

"Ain't kosher with me, boss," bemoans Greatgullet, displaying his well-documented restlessness by, once again, pacing anxiously back and forth across the chamber. "Ain't at all."

"Which I'm beginning to appreciate, yes," Nemo grants with enough masked irritation to evade Greatgullet's notice. "Can we all perhaps agree about how I've acted out of turn and about how that's something I won't be doing again and about how I'm a very sorry boy?"

"We can lend agreement to your having committed a transgression," the Xendo ambassador consents from its own customary position as the spearhead of its brigade of motionless drones. "What we cannot lend agreement to is how this one has chosen to distribute the plunder."

Nemo thumbs to his right. "This one? Ask her."

Gertie lattices her glittering fingers together beneficently. "What seems to the trouble, boys?"

The unanticipated entrance of Gertie Gundeck and, to a lesser extent, all the other second-string pirates, represented the newest and most startling hurdle placed before the fledging Freebooter Fleet. Nemo's, and doubtlessly Two-Bit's, brilliant notion to pitch Gertie at the problem of the ambush unquestionably lying in wait around the _Sunrise Over Criia_ , was met with aggravation and distrust amongst the remaining four members of the Council of Captains. This distrust and aggravation was heightened when they each awoke to discover _The Dick Magnet_ , _The Cry Uncle_ and _The Dog Days_ dragging their winnings back to Talos II and Gertie Gundeck, prancing about the crash site like the pretty, pretty princess she so painfully thought she was.

Now, of course, all the other Captains needed to sit Nemo, the Disobedient Wunderkind and his slutty girlfriend down and have a disapproving chat about teamwork, cooperation and not letting bullying skirts keep all the booty for themselves.

The council chamber, the lopsided cargo bay of the colossal crashed cruiser, had undergone gradual but substantial renovations since their initial meeting beneath its shattered roof. Four sacks into ten, it now resembled some unlikely combination of banquet hall and war room. The chamber's rows upon rows of mismatched tables could comfortably seat seven hundred, including the five Captains and their entourages upon an impromptu dais of Xendo-mended scrap metal.

Tactical equipment also accrues with each successful sack. These prizes range in sophistication from a privateer-pilfered strategic imager installed in the center of the Captain's Table to a shoddily-rendered "map" of the Shipping Line displayed on the nearest wall via the cherished medium of spray-paint.

By the time all ten ports are smoldering ruins, Moira wonders if they'll be seated amid a hub of plundered technology capable of plotting an armed robbery against any target in the known galaxy.

"The trouble, Captain," Vobash enunciates the offending word with enough disdain he visibly spits, "is that you've undermined the entire economy of this alliance." Whether or not they've some history, Moira isn't certain, but the Triomman certainly appears to be unchaining some vitriol she's never observed in his typically genteel comportment. "The old philosophy of 'I stole it, it's mine' doesn't play here. We've agreed to divide all winnings equally amongst any who participate."

"Well, you've buried your own chances, then," Gertie snorts with amused derision. "Weren't any of your ships above Crander, were there, so I don't see as how anybody but myself, Captain Wenkya and Captain Lockjaw's any claim to the cash."

"Can't conjure much argument with that," Greatgullet intones. His bulbous eyes flick unsubtly toward his outspoken rival with the brushvezzer.

Vobash is notoriously unflappable. "How soon our successes at Moqu and Ohostoi both evaporate." He twists his torso to face the pacing Obax, causing his hidden familiar to scurry to a more comfortable position. "These were all well-accepted protocols when we originally established them around that first pile of cash."

" _You-skinflints,_ " chortles Charybdis in an uncomfortably musical fashion. " _Not-so-long-ago, you-were-feeding-me-her-excuse-to-keep-my-hands-from-your-Shipyards-haul._ " She buries both selfsame hands in the pockets of her commodore's jacket. " _I-say, she-stole-it, so-it's-hers_ ," she croons, an ironic musical reprise of Vobash's earlier point.

"Tell you what." Gertie reclines fully, delicately planting one boot after another onto the tabletop. "You induct me into your little sewing circle or whatever the fuck and I'll surrender the loot to be democratically split." She peers around her shapely boots to consider Vobash. "What say you?"

To no one's shock, her offer somehow isn't immediately ratified.

"Well..." Nemo is thoughtful enough to contribute, but evidently lacks any further eloquence.

"Well?"

"If we did that," Vobash explains with obvious relish, "afraid the mathematics simply wouldn't compute."

Gertie cranes forty-five degrees towards Nemo with a coruscation of tinkly jewelry. "What's he implying?"

"An odd number of Captains must be maintained," the ambassador provides humorlessly, "in order to avoid stalemate."

Greatgullet shrugs his expansive shoulders, creating a ruckus with his own hanging ornaments to rival even Gertie's own. "Five's a more convenient number than six, I s'pose."

"Sorry you feel that way, gents." Gertie's countenance betrays no disappointment or frustration. Moira's a skilled enough judge of character, though, to detect plenty behind her level expression. "Guess we'll be keeping all the proceeds, then." She smiles thinly. "Them's the breaks, I'm afraid."

Vobash's calm somehow reads as dangerous. "Are they?"

"We are not agreed," rejoins Aju Vog Xah Qaj's ambassador in a chilling monotone.

The appearance of Gertie's shotgun, balancing its shorn barrel against the table top and leveling said barrel directly toward Vobash, serves, more or less, as Gertie's reply.

For potentially the first time, an inevitable bristling of firearms explodes amongst the pirates. Mostly, they're drawn by retainers and bodyguards, while the Captains tend to remain tensely above-it-all.

Moira curses herself inwardly for a vain tart fretting over her jewelry. She sacrifices the shielding hand upon her earlobe to materialize Lefty and align its snub towards Vobash's own first mate, that eerie Baziron bloodsucker. For all Moira's poor reflexes, it's still a full second before vo Veaff can return the favor.

The ten-member Talosian standoff, its occurrence here so incredibly appropriate the irony almost staggers Moira, last another few seconds. Nemo is visibly undeterred by the sheer amount of firepower aimed directly at him and glances aside to Moira. He scowls with obvious confusion. "Something's on your ear."

Divine intervention arrives precisely on time as the nearest entrance's wire mesh curtain separates with a whoosh and, of all people, Two-Bit Switch appears. He's panting bodily and grasping that ever-present Attaché of his.

"They're here," he declares breathlessly and directly at Nemo. After collecting some small percentage of his wind, he's the good grace to glance around somewhat and notice the hordes of hoodlums pointing very dangerous firearms at each other. Not to be excluded, he tugs loose his Tigress and shops around amongst Vobash's, Charybdis' and Greatgullet's thuggery, attempting to decide who best deserves his pointed weapon.

"Finally," Nemo grouses, scooting his chair some distance away and rising completely to his feet. Heedless of the weapons trained in his general direction, he grubs about inside his duster pockets and produces an alarmingly fat bundle of currency, which he pitches sideways towards Two-Bit. "Tip Hook generously; he's been such a dear."

Scraping up the bundle from the edge of the table where it landed, Two-Bit edges toward the door, Tigress still trained. He offers Nemo a perfunctory "Aye aye, Cap'n," and disappears, with a complimentary whoosh to his previous one, through the mesh curtain.

" _Hook?_ " hums Charybdis.

"Care to enlighten us, Captain?" Vobash, his brushvezzer poking an inquisitive nose through the shadow of his sleeve, requests with gallons of false charm.

With the snubs of so many revolvers, semi-automatics and shotguns following his every move, Nemo approaches the hastily painted diagram upon the back wall behind him. His hand clasped firmly behind his back, he's a military commander in some Imperial propagandist holofilm detailing the Expansionist Conflicts. "Anybody given any thought to the next target? No?"

Greatgullet shrugs his ample shoulders. "Kezz'd surprise somebody."

"Following Crander," Vobash stipulates poisonously, "Yime would be where I'd place my money."

It's the refrain that Charybdis sings, from her position far to his immediate left, that catches Nemo's attention. " _There's-always-Valladia._ "

His thunder thusly stolen, Nemo's repetition of Charybdis' suggestion is missing some of its customary mischief. "There's always Valladia."

Moira smirks inwardly to watch the Council of Captains, all fixtures of such supposed importance, react with precisely the same shock, confusion and indignation the crew of _The Unconstant Lover_ once might have. They, Moira reflects, disparaged Nemo before it was cool.

That being said, Valladia Prime next, the artificial moon the shipping tycoons employed as their central nerve center, was perhaps looking the gift horse a little too closely in the mouth, a point Nemo's colleagues on the Council are eager to express to him.

"Boss," Greatgullet mutters, "you couldn't fucking impregnate that whore with a hundred ships, much less our, what thirty some?"

"Twenty-seven," Vobash provides precisely.

"We find this course highly inadvisable," the Xendo ambassador concurs, though devoid of any trace of judgment, censure or really any other recognizable emotion.

"Valladia Prime," the Triomman politely disillusions, "is equipped with the absolute best defensive weaponry practically infinite money can buy. I think," he continues unabated, "you will perhaps need to content yourself with the uncomfortable fact that only nine of the Shipping Line's ten ports are going to end up sacked."

"An understandable assumption," Nemo grants, parroting Vobash's calm demeanor to a tee. "It, of course, follows another understandable assumption: that Valladia Prime's supposedly godlike turret defense system will shoot us to smithereens before we've even dropped warp. But then," the Captain adds, sidestepping his previously peaceable tone to adopt the true assholery he'd become so famous for, "my being a clever bastard, I've thought of something you haven't."

Nemo stares expectantly at Vobash for an oppressively long moment. _The Loose Cannon's_ captain eventually tires of the suspense and is forced to bite. "What's that?"

The smile that sidekicks Nemo's statement, smug, smarmy and superior, could and should be the exact image depicted above his casket during his upcoming funeral. "They're going to be far too busy shooting at themselves."

Chapter 15

Two-Bit Switch couldn't possibly be claustrophobic. The vast majority of his childhood and adult life combined was spent adrift, from space station to spaceship and back to space station again. Confined steel spaces, therefore, contain no terror for Two-Bit, even those hurtling at uncomfortable speeds through open space.

That being said, four hours stuffed into a forty-foot exoejection airlock, ass-to-elbows-to-eyestalks with forty sweaty hooligans of as many unhygienic species, was threatening to tarnish his twenty-six-year-tempered record of not vomiting as a direct result of space travel.

This close to the target, dwindled conversation between the crews of both _Unconstant Lover_ and _Low-Hanging Fruit_ has rekindled. The cruising space-tube is suddenly filled, floor to ceiling, with the excited chatter of sword-swinging, gun-toting murderers, so many eager little tykes, riding the driftbus to their first day of kindergarten.

The _Lover's_ crew cluster together, brandishing their seniority in order to stake out a square of space of their own seating. As the architect behind this week's insane plan, Two-Bit was able to stake a further claim even amongst his peers. After all, he wields the mighty Attaché, the very tool by which all these aforementioned murderers and cutthroats were to gain access to those they'd murder and cut the throats of.

"To review," Two-Bit Switch announces, calling forth the relevant menu on said Attaché and soliciting silence from his fellow crowded commuters, "there's more or less three stages to this scheme. Well, two-and-a-half, I suppose. Two of them stages happen simultaneously. Sorta." He waves a hand dismissively. "I mean, you follow me and, if you don't, jog on, yeah?"

He thrusts the Attaché high above his head, twisting his arm slightly so all can see its hovering hologram. "This is the target. This is Valladia Prime."

"You mean that?" interjects some certainly well-meaning thunder thief a short distance away. The Borulban points his hoof politely, having claimed the window seat, by right of might. Forty pairs of eyes follow that hoof and stare through the teeny porthole at a gray blob against the green enormity of Valladia Minor.

Even as it gradually increases in size and detail from the shrinking distance, the second most impregnable space station in all of Bad Space appears minute, tranquil and, most incorrectly, harmless.

At the moment, therefore, the holographic representation of Valladia Prime that hovers above his Attaché screen would prove substantially more useful to them than would the view out that window.

"First things first," Two-Bit continues, determined to drill this point into as many thick skulls as necessary, "we are here to deck that statee. Hence us not jocking our own gantines. Hence us not caring what happens to these gantines we're currently decking. You follow?" There's a murmur of too-surprised agreement, especially considering how many times they'd rehearsed this plan.

"Soon as we touch down, shit's gonna turn to flaster sooner that you can jabb Jotor or any of her moons." A few more tapping fingers summons forth more images from within the Attaché's seemingly limitless memory banks. "Our chief advant is gonna be that the sods won't know where we're gonna deck from because, to be facting perfectly, we don't exactly either."

A goldfish's memory would dwarf those of these escaped _Surimiah_ mooks, to judge from all their shocked reactions. "Once we are decking, it's your job to get me, her and, well, maybe them, if they're rangu," he points to each member of the crew with a decisive thumb, decisive pointer finger and subsequent waffly wave toward the rest, "to Wing 6 of the defense ring with all our lollies or knockers still attached, savvy?"

More mumbling agrees. There's a perhaps an increase in grumpiness, at the realization they may not, confusingly, be the focal point of this mission. "That done, feel free to run amok. Loot. Sack. Pillage. Have fun." This decree is greeted by substantially more enthusiasm than the previous one, enough even to inspire a ragged cheer among their number.

"I like how you, somehow," Nemo accuses petulantly towards Moira, "became more important than me."

Moira's unfazed. "Have you ever fired a broadside quadroturret before?"

"Have you?"

"What was it, a hundred credits you pity-tossed to that hack, Jargon?" Moira baits, even earning an unpleasant growl from the Iella herself, seated six shoulders over. "A hundred credits says I smear the very first ship."

Scratching clawlessly at his orange tweedy stomach, Odisseus rumbles something that, at once, arches Moira's eyebrows and scowls Nemo's.

"A hundred credits a _ship?_ What am I, made of money?" the Captain objects.

"By now, ye should be," Abraham opines after a contemplative pause.

Nemo screws up his lower lip in evident indecisiveness. "I don't know. That's precisely the reason money doesn't interest me. It's coming out my bloomhole."

"What would interest you?" probes Moira, clearly eager to prove her superiority in all things sharp and shooting.

A flick of his eyes in the direction of Moira's armpit betrays his intentions a moment before he, half-jokingly, proposes them. "Lefty."

"Piss off," is Moira's actual response, but that wholly unprecedented sound that chases it, what the wide-eyed _Lover's_ crew eventually deduce to be Moira's laugh, is responsible for skidding the conversation to a halt. "What?" a reddening Moira spits out defensively, seconds later, "that's what it _sounds_ like!"

"Shit's starting," mentions that window-hogging Borulban, with a vague gesture through the porthole. The forty pairs of eyes all return to the window, as best they can between each other's heads, helmets and garish alien craniums. Everyone aboard watches the shape of Valladia Prime, that gunmetal gray un-moon hanging in orbit above its green gas giant, swell and swell in trouser-wetting size.

To call the station spherical would be an insult to planets and moons galaxywide. Bristling with ridges, trenches and comm towers, the main body of Valladia Prime is uneven, vaguely oblong and possessed of at least one hard corner.

Officially, Prime is considered a moon because of the planet it orbits, the massive gas giant who lovingly adopted the company name in their marriage. Unofficially, Prime's status as an artificial moon is earned by its sheer, undiluted size.

Valladia Prime is large enough to attract rocks, garbage and, in fact, smaller planetoids into its own gravitational pull. Valladia Prime boasts a population exceeding that of most colonized planets in the Midworlds. Valladia Prime is coming right towards them.

The frontrunner of the Freebooter's facsimile fleet is just visible on the periphery of the porthole. A gutted and galvanized Hesko Planetary gunboat, this particular prize was captured above Moqu and lovingly converted into _The Powder Keg_.

Following a respectful distance in the _Keg's_ wake comes a loose collection of more captured and converted ships. The TFS lighter that rumbles softly over their heads flies among them and, indeed, each spaceship in the scrappy squadron also carries a troop-filled package. Twenty Gond-class exoejection airlocks, purchased off Mannimar, are slaved across twenty spaceship undersides.

At their current distance, the station still remains remote enough to appear innocuous. There is the defense ring, brandishing its banks of quadroturret laser batteries, plus the loose halo of protective privateers, to challenge that appearance some.

To further complicate matters, the cruiser their airlock was clamped to flies entirely unmanned. All two of the relevant commands – namely "fire torpedo" and "detach airlock" were imperfectly rerouted through a certain Attaché, which Two-Bit clutches like a talisman.

Two-Bit can merely pray to all the moons that the ship's ray shields, angled double forward to protect their cargo against oncoming fire, can withstand the onslaught about to be hurled.

First things first, however, _The Powder Keg_ needs to clear the gauntlet.

The more enterprising or quarrelsome of the privateers open up with their potshots. Laserfire pings against the thickest damn ray shields Odisseus could install on their Hesko bucket. A few inquisitive torpedos are launched and, when each one is thankfully crumpled by an unflinching wall of bombard shields, the cannonade escalates tenfold.

As the true crossfire begins, _The Powder Keg_ keep on trucking dead ahead, its window of opportunity to pull up and avoid a kamikaze run shrinking and shrinking.

It's when the station's own weapon installations open up that Two-Bit starts muttering encouragements under his breath.

"Come on, you dozy twat, you, come on," he whispers, as though profanity can repel laserfire or ricochet torpedos. Dozens of batteries belch four-barreled destruction, again and again, against the _Keg's_ visibly failing defenses. Despite the best efforts of machine and man, however, despite the unholy brunt of laserfire poured onto its defenses, both _The Powder Keg's_ ray and bombard shields hold.

They hold precisely long enough for the ship to close within exploding distance of a certain shield projector, installed on the station's defensive ring.

It's, spectacularly, a torpedo that's granted the dubious honor of making first contact with the _Keg's_ brittle hull. In the millisecond following impact, Two-Bit imagines the torpedo nestling comfortably into its new home, among decks and decks stacked, floor-to-ceiling, with crates of black market doxychoraphum.

The repellent, as is repellent's wont, ignites.

The airlock's puny porthole is supplanted for several seconds with nothing but searing orange, each member of the boarding party squinting or shielding their eyes from the burning glare. When the blaze fades, _The Powder Keg_ and a sizable portion of privateers have utterly vanished, instantaneously incinerated in the blast. Another sizable portion of Prime's privateer forces career away from the explosion, telltale orange flames chewing their teltriton hulls to tinders.

More crucially, it seems Valladia Prime's defensive ring is largely untouched, thanks to its own humdinger of a ray shield. Peering back through the porthole, Two-Bit does spy one seemingly insignificant blemish. There's one blackened smear against the ring's white hull, where once, one might find a certain bombard shield projector.

"Bombard edgies're offline!" Two-Bit shouts. Through his belted comm, a score of dissimilar voices all phrase the same sentiment. A second ragged cheer erupts among the boarders, though Two-Bit doesn't participate.

He's far too busy dividing his attention as best he can between the distance tracker, dialing down on his Attaché, and the spooky sight of the surviving privateers. Those fortunate or capable enough to shrug off the repellent's effects move quickly to intercept the incoming and, unbeknownst to them, unmanned fleet.

A veritable rainbow of disparate laserfire spans the gap between the clusters of ships. The first volley is launched sporadically from the swooping privateer swarm, flitting and freewheeling between the unresponsive ranks of the pirate-ferrying freighters. The second, more effective volley, is loosed from the station's roster of broadside batteries.

Their tugger receives enough of a pummeling, seemingly from every direction, to rock and rollick everyone inside the airlock like dice in a gambler's cup. The sheer shield strain alone makes Two-Bit want to suddenly hang the whole plan and be peacefully exploded a few dottibles from their goal.

Next, both station and privateer attempt disablers to paralyzing effect. At precisely the same moment, the rangefinder on Two-Bit's Attaché blinks excitedly to announce that Valladia Prime's defense ring is finally within range.

"In gamut!" Two-Bit cries and jams his thumb through the Attaché's hologram. The weapon welded atop their ferrying cruiser launches its one ballistic torpedo and promptly dies. Disabler fire shortly fizzes out the cruiser's remaining ray shields, allowing regular laserfire to punch holes through her hull.

All the forty passengers can do is clench their teeth, grip their genitals to ensure they don't rattle off and watch out the viewport. Two-Bit's expelled torpedo streaks towards an empty patch of the defense ring's own hull.

The following three seconds are a busy three seconds. The above cruiser is torn into shrapnel by crossfire. The torpedo denotes, exposing a ragged hole in the station's thick teltriton shell. Two-Bit swaps his thumb from its previous position on his Attaché's "fire torpedo" function to the "detach airlock" option.

The magnetic clamps release with a hasty hiss and a metallic clank. Behind and above them storms twisting detritus, the only remnant of their ride here. Three more taps and a middle finger slide on the Attaché fires driftjets and the airlock chases its torpedo's exhaust toward the hole it punched in the side of the defense ring. Ahead loom Prime's batteries and all around buzz her privateers.

The few seconds spent steering are the most stressful of the entire flight but, when all is said and done, the airlock is slotted to slide snugly into the hole left agape by Two-Bit's torpedo. The sound produced – when teltriton shears against teltriton – conjures only mental images of the tube torn asunder upon arrival.

Miraculously, though, the airlock survives the scraping, shaving first contact with the station. It also succeeds in unseating each and every one of its passengers with an abrupt forward shucking.

All the contained criminals untangle themselves from each other and ready what weapons they could conceivably pack with them at such tight quarters. Two-Bit Switch checks the ammunition on his Tigress and keeps both ears peeled for the signature sound that would prove exiting the airlock into the defensive ring would actually be comparatively safe.

Fortunately, he's not kept waiting long. Airlock after airlock plugs each torpedo-blasted breach with their forward halves. The sound reverberates up and down the entire length of the space station, like a choir of complaining thunder gods. Two-Bit needs to shush the chatter of the eager cutthroats a few moments, counting ten seconds from the final deafening crash.

"Everybody decking?" he mutters into his comm's transceiver.

He's greeted by an ensemble of "In!"s – one them each demonstrably belonging to Greatgullet, Vobash and Charybdis. Two-Bit Switch gives the signal to the Borulban nearest the window. With a hoof, he slaps the airlock's release button and everyone is rewarded by the divine hiss of fresh air.

Countercharged by a wave of recycled oxygen, the column of boarders all stretch their legs in a grateful trample out the tube. Unshackled after four tedious hours, they scream and stomp wildly into the blinking red of Valladia Prime's yowling intruder alert.

Attaché gripped in one hand, Tigress in the other, Two-Bit clambers out the airlock's open door on the heels of the happy horde. The triple-reprocessed air resisters fresher than an ocean breeze to his station's waifs lungs and he drinks deeply. He then surveys the scenery all around him, standing amid the milling mob of marauders.

Whereas the main station body of Valladia Prime was doubtlessly more engendered to its visitors, tourists and citizens, the interior design of its defense ring was hard and humorless, as militaristic as anything found aboard an Endless Imperium vessel. The corridor into which they'd clumsily intruded is unpainted, unglamorous teltriton and is composed primarily of bracing beams, bulkheads and blaring alarms.

What most disagrees with this aesthetic, however, is the string of ancient airlocks, poking their heads impolitely through the ring's hull and, even more impolitely, each spewing forth a stream of buccaneers onto its deck.

Luckily, leakage is minimal, despite what the whirling "oxygen venting" alarms would have Two-Bit believe. Each tube is ringed with a flower of wreckage, blast-gnashed teltriton where each airlock jammed its protuberant end through. The tube's entry angles are topsy-turvy, occasionally requiring a large leap from the pirates disembarking through them.

This section of corridor, cordoned off by sturdy bulkheads at either ends, fills with freebooters fast. Considering all the station's ardent warnings about the dwindling oxygen, lingering here overlong would hardly be wise.

The wheezy retort of Nemo's outdated firearm blisters the ceiling and quiets the majority of the chatter to mumbles. "Greatgullet!" the Captain bellows, blasting his pistol twice more like a flare gun above the press of bodies.

"Boss!" bellows a husky voice back and the crowd shifts like a tide. A shark slicing through the surf, a Captain Greatgullet dressed entirely for warfare and gripping an honest-to-moons sword in his fishy hand shoves a path to Nemo. The intimidating presence of both Boogers and Teeth, following on either flank, helps part the press of people.

"Where's your guy?" Nemo presses. "Let's not dawdle."

No sooner as the Obax juggernaut arrived than he's twisting back around with a vicious snap of all his dangly ornaments. "Thumper! Thumper!" he hollers into the crowd. He's so bellicose and so immediately respected that Nemo's previous attempts to do same with his firearm suddenly seem somewhat precious and childlike by comparison.

" _Here's-a-question_ ," wonders a musical someone. That someone materializes moments later past Two-Bit's shoulder as Captain Charybdis. She's surrounded by a foursquare of Trijan bodyguards and balances one of her bizarre firearms across her shoulder. " _Where're-the-Xend?_ "

Weapon still held high, Nemo's face is suddenly washed over with confusion. "That is an excellent question," he acknowledges towards Charybdis, before turning his attention to an equally baffled Two-Bit. "Where _are_ the Xend?"

A quick visual census of every outlaw in sight confirms that, indeed, there's not a single Xend to be seen anywhere among the surging ocean of boarders that clogs the corridor. With a quick count, Two-Bit realizes that, in point of fact, only thirteen of an even twenty airlocks purchased on Mannimar successfully made contact with Valladia Prime.

By his reckoning, three hundred some budding buccaneers and practically all of Aju Vog Xah Qaj's mindless drones were most likely destroyed during the initial approach.

"From what I saw," the smarmy voice of Vobash, accompanied by both Baziron and brushvezzer, informs as he approaches, "they overshot their mark. I suspect they've made contact with the station proper."

"Those dritching buggers," Two-Bit curses, with all the contempt he reserved for those who willingly subverted his carefully-prepared plans. The coincidence was too high, the targeting on those airlocks too precise. At a guess, the Xendo queen must have sought some retribution for her perceived slight over the Crander business and so devised a method to install her own shock troops that much closest to the station's coffers and possibly the station's delicious residents.

Perhaps feeling somewhat ridiculous still brandishing his pistol at arm's length above his head, Nemo drops the weapon in his holster and sneers at Vobash. "Suppose you'll find out soon as you get there, won't you?"

"Found him, boss!" Greatgullet can be heard to scream over the mounting morass of voices.

Two more shots explode upward from Nemo's gun, joyfully returned to its position over his head. "Lovers!" he shouts. "On me!"

"That include me?" purrs the proximate voice of Gertie Gundeck, the latest entrant in this converging quintet of captains. Thumbing shell after shell into the chamber of her shotgun, the captain of _The Dick Magnet_ , as ever, continues to exude that aura of her, the one that both attracts a posse of male hopefuls and flummoxes Nemo's powers of speech.

"Uh, no, actually," he stammers. "Soon as we're finished with Thumper, you're taking him," he searches Two-Bit imploringly, "which way?"

"That way," Two-Bit provides, pointing down the corridor's opposite direction.

"Aw, shucks," Gertie pouts, as though surprised by the stages of this fairly well-rehearsed plan. "Guess I'll see you strangers on the other side." She leers at Nemo, nods at Two-Bit and turns her attention back toward her massing throngs of devotees. "Here that, boys?" she barks in a sudden commander's voice. "First man to the turret banks gets to _fuck me senseless!_ "

There's a stampede on the heels of Gertie's decree, thirty blue-balled brigands elbowing each other to reach the apart bulkhead all the faster. Seconds later, there's nothing but empty corridor where once Gertie's entire boarding party stood.

Nemo scowls incredulously at her. "Really?"

Gertie scoffs derisively. "No."

With that, she's gone, sashaying after her slavering crew of boy toys, to the smirking, eye-rolling and huffing reactions of those she departs from.

The combined crews of _Lover_ , _Cannon_ and _Discharge_ rack up behind him on their walk to Greatgullet at the opposite end of the hall. On the way, the Captain cranes aside to Two-Bit. "Walk me through this again?"

Recalling the station's schematics on his Attaché, he presents the device before Nemo as visual aid to his plan. "Gertie and her brunos are wending for this turret bank here, yeah? Or, will be, once Thumper clears the way for us both." With a stretch of his fingers, Two-Bit enhances the relevant section of map. "After that, Greatgullet, Vobash and Charybdis hoof it up the spaceway here." He highlights the thick arm connecting this stretch of the defensive ring to the main body of Valladia Prime. "There, I guess they mate up with them Xendo motherbloomers and everybody starts blagging the statee proper."

"While we're," Nemo supplies uncertainly, "knocking out the other turret bank?"

"Righto." Two-Bit nods, swapping the hologram's focus from spaceway to gundeck. "Here. Peachy?"

"Peachy," Nemo returns with a strangely companionable chuck to the shoulder. "What's this, five of ten?" he calculates. "Halfway there."

"Halfway there," Two-Bit repeats, an unexpected stab of pride striking his center.

The curtain of five hundred some reavers parts completely before them. Nemo and his ever-expanding entourage meet Captain Greatgullet and his own before the impassable might of the station's sealed bulkhead doors. "Brought my guy," Greatgullet offers, shoving Thumper forward like a traded skooshball card.

The _Rule's_ Eaymo grenadier is easily spotted by his namesake – the clunky, heavily-modified pseudo-bazooka he clutches in his pressurized gloves. Even at a passing glance, the weapon's tube and chamber clearly are significantly widened to accommodate the firing of his strange projectiles – soup cans.

Their labels worn away by time, they clatter and slosh about on the belt of his hermetically-sealed suit. From the waist down, Thumper resembles some manner of public park vagabond, as though he might become somewhat peckish at any moment and need to sit down for a slurp.

Greatgullet scans the faces surrounding Nemo. "Brought yours?"

"Vizzing at him." Two-Bit waves his Tigress in identification. "We ready here, or what?"

On cue from their captains, the bulk of the buccaneers, save Thumper, scatter aside. They clear a significant oval around the closed bulkhead doors, as though allowing the Eaymo space to take a penalty skooshball shot. Two-Bit, however, scampers over towards the door's control panel, located a convenient foot or two to the bulkhead's left side. While Thumper proceeds to unclip one of his aforementioned soup cans and insert it, with loving care, into the chamber of his bizarre bazooka, Two-Bit Switch moseys about the relatively humdrum business of hacking the door controls.

Fifteen seconds later, Two-Bit's firmly grasping the bulkhead's servomotor. When he receives the all-clear from Thumper, he yanks the bulb-shaped mechanism free from its prison of conduits and wiring. The bulkhead yawns begrudgingly open, gusting a fresh batch of artificial oxygen into their quarantined portion of corridor.

This refreshing breeze, one enjoyed by each pirate present, is quickly interrupted by a throaty command. Undoubtedly "Freeze" or some such, it's shouted from the squad leader of the anti-boarding marines no one's surprised to discover arrayed on the opposite side of the bulkhead. Before any marine can squeeze off a shot, however, Thumper lets fly with his kitbashed bazooka, the weapon coughing black smoke from one end and an airborne soup can from the other.

From his current vantage, Two-Bit Switch cannot see the faces and therefore the expressions of the hypothetical marines beyond the bulkhead when this dinky soup can comes clattering down at their feet. Neither is he witness to the carnage that ensues when Moira, standing amongst the corsair crowd, plants a bolt from Lefty into the can with a metallic clang and ignites the repellent within. He does see the voracious sunburst of orange and hear the half-second of terrified screaming.

Seconds later, Two-Bit Switch, amid Nemo, Moira, Greatgullet and their entire column of unscathed marauders, march uncontested down an abandoned and profoundly blackened corridor.

This next section of Valladia Prime is thoroughly uninteresting, compared to spastic alarms, interruptive airlocks and gradually dropping oxygen levels. Not designed with habitation in mind, the passage between their boarding point and spaceway has all the cosmetic and utilitarian charm of a submersible or a pipeline. The corridor's also unfit for more than five humanoids to walk abreast and Two-Bit Switch, when glancing over his shoulder, loses sight of the pirate parade behind them as its length disappears around the ring's curvature.

The first peep he's made since setting ancient foot upon the station, Abraham Bonaventure, a rank or two behind Two-Bit, begins to hum.

Two-Bit hears his bass register, the subsonic rumble of his throaty voice, hardly audible above the shuffling, stomping din created by five hundred pirates on the move. After several bars, the tune he hums is obvious and Two-Bit's lusty smile becomes inevitable.

The sound is more muttering than music. "Nail 'em to the bowsprit, _heave_ ho."

Glancing behind, Two-Bit sees Abraham's own grim, so potent it spells out that singing this little ditty was very obviously his entire motivation to volunteer for this boarding action.

"Boil 'em all in sharkshit, _heave_ ho," Two-Bit joins in. Combined, their voices are loud enough to pique Nemo's notice. Upon recognition of Abraham's spooky old shanty, the Captain snorts.

"Drown 'em in the slop pail, _heave_ ho," all three sing together. The Captain's endorsement is cause enough for the circumferential criminals to perk up their ears and attempt to puzzle through the melody.

"Mu- _til_ -ate! O- _bliter_ -ate!" the entire crew of _The Unconstant Lover_ chants. " _Dead men tell no tales!_ "

From Abraham's initial seed, the sea shanty takes root and blossoms. The chant is taken up all across the assembled masses, accompanied by an ill-timed percussion of rhythmic stomping and slamming of weapons against palms, chests and bandoliers. Those with enough salt in their blood – namely Lovers and Thumbs – to have actual familiarity with the verses carry the melody. The rest and admittedly majority – mostly Cannon _s_ , Fruits and Dishonorables – chime in on the " _heave_ hos" and choruses.

At these moments, the moments when every throat in the Freebooter Fleet is raised in imperfect, off-key unison, the very bones of Valladia Prime, her teltriton framework, can be heard to quake and rumble.

Despite the tune's viral spread, despite the massive and maniacal beam on Abraham's beak, the true testament of the shanty's successfulness amongst the pirates comes when Two-Bit catches sight of Moira, under her breath, singing along.

They're still describing, in halting, three-four time, the various grisly and unpleasant fates that await those who resist them when ninety-five percent of the buccaneer brigade veers off their previous course. Swinging a right turn, they start their march up the spaceway and towards the heart of Valladia Prime.

The conductor at the head of this murderer's choir is unmistakably Greatgullet. The vim and vigor of the verses so fills him, he's practically swinging his sword at pantomimed enemies as he vanguards his platoons up the passage to loot heaven.

Who's left are the occupants of Two-Bit's first tube; all five members of the _Lover's_ crew, plus a thirty-five member compliment of goonage. Representatives from _The Deaf Ears_ , _The Welcome Wagon_ , _The Mommy Dearest_ and the rest of Nemo's sworn swashbucklers make up the majority, with spare Fruits filling in the gaps. After six or seven seconds are wasted watching the unequalled sight of all the Fleet's manpower tromping off to raise some hell, it's to Nemo that thirty-nine sets of eyes fall expectantly onto.

"Offer still stands," he mentions sideways to Moira, ten steps toward the distant turret bank. His motion is the catalyst to the entire troop to start pacing down the corridor.

"The ship," she counteroffers too quickly.

"The ship," Nemo repeats by rote. "Which ship?"

"Your ship, numbnuts." She glances aside to him. "What I get if you shoot down more privateers than me." Nemo and all three of his male crewmates scoff as one. This only frustrates Moira further. "What? I thought money was no object?"

"The _Lover_ ," Nemo's quickly to name her, "is substantially more valuable than one of your peashooters," he denigrates, with a nod of depreciation toward both pistols riding in Moira's shoulder holsters.

"Both of my peashooters, then. I don't have to call your manhood into question, do I?"

Even Nemo, unchallenged master of the unwise wager, isn't quite stupid enough to leverage something so valuable on stakes so decidedly one-sided. "The keys to the ship, say," he stipulates, proving he's, in fact, almost exactly that stupid.

"For Righty?"

"Lefty."

"Done."

The second they've shaken hands, Two-Bit, Odisseus and Abraham start the wincing, rubbing their foreheads and shaking their heads despondently. They're even joined latently by the first few ranks of thuggery, Jargon included.

"What?" Nemo extols from his distressed audience.

With the next bulkhead approaching fast, Two-Bit increases his pace, subdivides from the main body of pirates and once again approaches the primary door control port. "Don't take this the wrong way, Cap'n," he warns, "but you'd be fuck-all as an Iniquity facer."

"I'm an incredible Iniquity player!" Nemo continues to protest obstinately.

While Two-Bit breaks the news, it's Abraham who softens the blow. "I've seen ye play, boyo," he testifies, placing a callused hand upon the Captain's shoulder consolingly, "and ye ain't."

Odisseus snarks some comment toward Moira containing the verb "to call," the pronoun "you" and the proper noun "Captain."

She replies with a polite, "I'd be flattered."

"You can all go stuff your heads up your own vaginas," a pouty Nemo requests, shoving his shoulder free from Abraham's grasp and crossing his arms like a disconsolate teenager.

The predictable mysteries offered by the bulkhead's door control – namely "find servomotor, then remove servomotor" – are immediately surrendered to Two-Bit. He dawdles a few seconds, waiting for the pirates to properly arrange themselves before what they can safely assume will be another platoon of marines. Nemo's signal given, Two-Bit completes the second half of the equation by yanking free the servomotor.

The bulkhead ponderously considers its hot-wired orders to open sesame. In the meantime, Two-Bit is granted the time he needs, devoid of Thumper and the awesome power of his repellent gumbo, to scamper to a better vantage. From here, he can, for the first time during this boarding action, actually shoot some motherbloomers.

Gazing into the sweeping turret past the bulkhead doors, Two-Bit sees plenty of motherbloomers who fit the bill.

Gunnery crews, number near fifty flush, hustle and bustle about the chamber, priming and preparing the station's legendary turrets. They load arms-length ditrogen shells from limitless racks, they relay shouted targeting information back and forth and, of course, they fire the godlike batteries, with enough sheer force to chatter Two-Bit's teeth.

The most immediate target, however, for Two-Bit's Tigress is the anticipated platoon of Imperium shock troops. This time, they crouch behind an improvised barricade of cargo crates and level a lineup of SV7 assault rifles directly at whomever appears on the other side of the open bulkhead.

A cat's cradle of laserfire, one hand kaleidoscopically colorful, the other monochromatically red, stretches between both entrenched parties. The clamor of firearms and a miasma of wafting, rainbow vapors are the inevitable after-effects.

While the pirates – nearly two to one – serve them well in the firefight, the powered plates of the marines, sculpted perfectly to their chests and allowing their wearers to absorb ditrogen unharmed, serve them better. Their regimented efficiency and precise fire arcs systematically claim freebooter life after freebooter life at such a rate as to foreshadow a bloody defeat.

Two-Bit himself squanders a full clip's worth of ammunition on misses, pockmarking the crates and fizzling his earnest attempts at murder into some trooper's invulnerable chest. When he stops to flick some fresh canisters into the Tigress' chamber, he spots perhaps a worthier target.

Tigress in hand, Two-Bit swings his arm around the cover of the bracing he cowers behind. He buries one bolt in a bracing beam past his target, another in the kneecap of a Mezzrian tech scuttling past his target and a third squarely in his intended target.

Upon contact, the ditrogen shell on the rack merely cracks open, leaking gas in a hissing scarlet geyser. The prone Mezzrian, dragging itself across the floor on its five remaining workable limbs, manages to scream a wordless warning. Too late; Two-Bit's fourth shot ignites the airborne ditrogen and successively each shell on the same rack.

Squatting a dozen feet from the cartload of ammunition, the more fortunate shock troopers are merely bowled over by the force of the explosion. The unfortunate few caught closer to the blast radius suffer far more grievous injuries. The entire choke point is suddenly mired in a haze of crimson fog. The advancing front of screaming pirates would soon prove to be the more pressing threat to the trooper's survival than Two-Bit's exploding shell game.

The stylish multe bracelet clamped to Two-Bit's wrist isn't the only souvenir the crew of _The Unconstant Lover_ carried to commemorate their time aboard the _Surimiah_. Moira Quicksilver bashes and brains marines with her expertly-wielded pair of electrobatons, cracking temples with one while pummeling windpipes with the other. Abraham's blunderbuss, the dodgy old contraption, produces enough punch to shatter cover and armor respectively, whenever the grinning Grimalti bastard can be bothered to reload the thing.

His minions surging behind him, Nemo dashes forward and bounds brazenly atop the barricade, his pistol afire and his duster flapping behind him, like the pulpy protagonist of some dimestore paperback. The only thing preventing the Captain from being instantly gunned down for his brashness is a frantic Odisseus, his barking Wreckingball and fearsome roars responsible for dissuading a handful of his saltbrother's potential murderers.

Behind them, of course, comes rushing their re-enforcements.

Their numbers dwindled from thirty-five to twenty odd, the boarders flood past the bulkhead, swinging electroweapons, lobbing the occasional apple boomer and, above all, loosing laserfire toward razorback and gunnery crew alike. Some small minority among them even attempts to, however halfheartedly, resuscitate Abraham's creepy corsair chant, a fact that seems to amuse the Grimalti sailing master to no end.

With more sense than duty, the gunnery crews choose flight over fight and go caterwauling up the turret bank with a score of slavering pirates on their heels. The holder of their proverbial leash, Nemo stands amid the chaos and carnage he's wrought, watching the murderous little tykes tucker themselves out up and down the gundeck.

"Precious, aren't they?" he remarks to a panting Odisseus who pads up on his saltbrother's side.

"Not especially, no."

"We should take holidays more often," Two-Bit opines, plopping a hand upon each of their shoulders.

Moira nudges Nemo, sheathing both electrobatons and returning them fluidly to clip onto her belt. "Ready to put your money where your mouth is?"

As one, they all turn to consider the quadroturrets, abandoned by their operating crews and pointing forlornly towards a space now devoid of any more enemies.

Two-Bit stakes his claim to his own with a pointed finger and a shouted "Bagsies!" over his shoulder. He darts towards his turret of choice and the remainder of the _Lover's_ crew separates behind him to select their own seats of destruction.

Clambering up the turret's ten-step access ladder, Two-Bit Switch shoots a glance behind to spot Moira Quicksilver as she withdraws both Righty and Lefty from their respective holsters. With a strange delicacy, she renders them, as though forfeit, atop a shared console.

In response, Nemo fishes around inside his duster pocket a few moments. He finally withdraws the familiar key ring, complete with "I Heart Takioro" keychain, before plopping it down atop both anted firearms.

With a sad smirk, Two-Bit Switch hops fully into the awaiting arms of the MI Model Z54 Broadside Heavy Quadroturret Laser Battery. He spends a moment acclimating himself to the weapon's somewhat byzantine controls. He spends another moment acclimating himself to the very thought of manhandling a capital-class weapon capable obliterating a freighter-sized spaceship with a single blast.

Over the turret bank's internalized comm, his crewmates successfully check in – Moira's cool determination, Nemo's giggly exhilaration, Odisseus' perpetual skepticism and Abraham's doddering gun-shyness. On the targeting screen, a vast array of pleasant green outlines present themselves against an expansive orange backdrop; the privateer armada left aimlessly adrift around the station with nothing to shoot at.

With a few tapped keys on a nearby control pad, the friendly green is instantaneously replaced with adversarial red. At the same instant, a convenient crosshairs blinks into view around the nearest privateer, a majestic Starlight Inc. revamp. His thumbs brush gently against the trigger buttons and Two-Bit Switch, once again, cannot refrain from smiling at the thought of providing these privateer scum with something to shoot at.

Chapter 16

Moira Quicksilver twirls the keyring obnoxiously close to the Captain's face. When she's particularly lucky, the gaudier pieces, that kitschy Takioro memorabilia in particular, will manage to clock him on the ear or the cheekbone. As hilarious as she finds this, Nemo's either too stupid or too stubborn to acknowledge her.

Reclining more completely in her chair, Moira brings her tankard, frothing to the brim with top-shelf Gitterswitch, to her lips and enjoys the spectacle of combat unfolding below her. For once, she's content; she'll continue sipping and spinning until either Nemo moves out of range or her wrist grows tired, whichever comes first.

A roar of raucous approval rumbles the ruined walls. Down below, Boogers finally stakes some solid footing and manages to heft his opponent over his head. His opponent, Teeth, is understandably displeased with this turn of events. She, however, continues her vain attempts to clamp her confusion of fangs around some exposed portion of her counterpart's hide, the very fate Moira'd once predicted would be her eventual downfall.

With Teeth gripped tightly in his claws, Boogers bellows a bellicose Gungi'noojian bellow and launches the hapless hulk against the pit's opposite wall, soliciting a sympathetic sound from the crowd. Slamming once into the teltriton and once again onto the sand hardly seems to phase the gigantic Gungi'noojian. She immediately springs back to her own clawed feet and starts to square off against her snotty doppelganger anew.

The audience hoots encouragements or insults, brandishes fists full of bunched currency and throngs about the jagged edges of the pit like carrion-eaters over a carcass. They're made all the more savage by their being, each one of them, murderous pirates.

Following their triumphant return from Valladia Prime with all the swag, loot and booty they could conceivably cram onto each prize ship captured, a massive celebratory debauch was promptly thrown. As the only location on Talos II spacious enough to accommodate such a guest list, the shipwreck's massive central chamber of course played host.

Pirates pack the palatial wreck. Nearly a thousand some individual heads are visible to Moira from her seat high atop the dais and each one is engaged in a dizzying array of vices across the armada of banquet tables. From her humble seat, Moira can spot Iniquity games, arm-wrestling, actual wrestling, marble matches, drinking contests and prostitution. In addition to the more prominent prizefighting drama on display within the pit, she's witnessed no less than nine separate murders tonight with her own two eyes.

There were, in fact, so many vices in such dense concentration that Moira shouldn't have been surprised that the ingenious minds of the Freebooter Fleet spontaneously conceived of a brand spanking new one. Though, Moira supposes, what she watched in the center ring was less an innovation and more a timeless classic all tarted up with a shiny new handle.

Pirateball, as it was colloquially referred to, involved no visible ball, nor any rules regarding the handling of any such ball. In fact, the "sport" was only tangentially related to the act piracy in that, thus far, its only players were all universally pirates. The legitimately ball-less rules of pirateball were deceptively simple; both contestants attempt to kill each other.

In short, it was pugilism, cheap and dirty, with all the sophistication or sportsmanship left at the door. An industrious team of wannabe fight promoters had troubled themselves to install a convenient arena – a gnashed and gnawed cylinder from one the crashed cruiser's former turbines – at the center of the council chamber. As a result, Moira Quicksilver has patronized the fledgling sport's first three inaugural matches, one contestant defeated by a garrote wire, one by bombard knuckles and one by flamethrower.

The fourth bout, a Boogers v. Teeth grudge match, was rapidly approaching a full ten minutes in length, with no end in sight, both participants only sporting superficial injures and the only bored head amongst the assembly Nemo's.

"Hey," he asides to Moira, almost receiving a mouthful of swung keys for his trouble. "Pop a shot down there, would you?"

Catching the keys with a clatter in her first, Moira screws up her expression. "You ever consider volunteering _yourself_ for gladiatorial combat sometime?"

"Come on, now," carps Two-Bit, seated, unusually, to Moira's immediate right, "Don't dritch me on this. I've got three thou on what's his kisser, the one with the chompers."

"Teeth," Odisseus provides from his seat adjacent to Nemo.

"Sure," Two-Bit agrees uncertainly. "Him."

"Her."

As the two Gungi'noojian gladiators lock horns for the umpteenth time, the occupants of the Captain's Table preside over the proceedings with a slurry of emotions, ranging from a Xendo implacability to an Obaxi exuberance. Nemo and his confederates are cast as the respected ringleaders. Charybdis's crew constitute bemused onlookers. Greatgullet's group holler and harrumph their support. The Xendo ambassador and its ilk offer token representation and little more

Vobash, as ever, is the most vocal detractor.

"Nemo!" The Triomman, leaning over the table, attempts conjure the Captain's notice by mere shouting, no mean feat amid all this ruckus and even more so against the depths of Nemo's obliviousness.

"Gull!" the Captain instead shouts across the tables, himself attempting to snag Greatgullet's attention via the methods of shouting louder, waving his arms and ignoring Vobash.

"Nemo!"

"Gull!"

"Huh?" grunts the Obax, peeling his pupilless eyes from the pushing-and-shoving of his matched pair of bodyguards. "Boss?" he barks towards the Captain.

"Nemo, we need–"

The line of communication thus established, Nemo screams his question with hands cupped around his mouth. "Who're you betting on, even?"

"Both," he returns with an innocent shrug. "Don't wanna hurt nobody's fucking feelings."

"Huh," Nemo grunts contemplatively. "Fair enough."

Vobash will not, it seems, be so easily denied. "We _need_ to discuss–"

A thunderous crash, echoed by the clamoring protests of a hundred voices, grinds the merriment to an unexpected halt. Not gifted with the greatest possible vantage point towards the corner in question, Moira strains to see what, precisely, seems to have caused all the trouble. Something mighty enough, it appears, to screech the chamber's chaos to an anticipatory silence.

Accidentally or intentionally, a corner table, once host to a handful of Iniquity games, has been toppled at an ungainly angle. A mixed heap of cards, currency and weaponry stands accumulated at its base. A circumference of standing, accosted players transform their stares from accusatory daggers to greedy gaping at the jumbled up winnings at their feet.

The teeming audience is captivated by this, equal parts stalemate and showdown. Suddenly, in a mad scramble of appendages, all interested parties leap upon the unclaimed cash.

The first punch, from a tattooed Chook to a goggled humanoid, is only moments away. Among an assembly this drunken and querulous to begin with, the idea spreads like a plague. Before long, Moira's watching a small army implode; the thousand-man brawl that suddenly dwarfs Boogers and Teeth's meager melee is a foregone conclusion within thirty seconds.

As with this evening's previous spectacles of violence, reaction across the Captain's Table is mixed, ranging predictably from distaste to non-reaction to enthusiasm. Unsure precisely how to measure this turn of events, Moira is more enraptured by the alarming sight of a thousand flung fists, a thousand tossed tankards, a thousand crashing chairs.

"Could you–" Nemo asks of Odisseus, placidly passing the Ortok his beverage. Bemusedly, Odisseus accepts and, this achieved, the Captain rises from his chair, giving his trousers and duster a cursory brushing off.

Before Odisseus can voice the obvious "where do you think you're going" question, Nemo clears his throat once, gazes out across the festival of fisticuffs that stretches from wall to wall, utters "if you'll excuse me" and springs up onto the table.

"Would you," Odisseus snarls, spilling Nemo's stein in his attempt to swipe at the scruff of his saltbrother's neck, "quit jumping on things!" The massive paw, of course, misses Nemo's collar by fortuitous inches. With a whoop of alleviated boredom that inspires both Trijan crewmen sitting directly in his flightpath to scatter aside, Nemo hurdles himself off the table, off the dais and into the fray.

Moira and Odisseus exchange bewildered and agog expressions. They hustle from their chairs, clamber across the Captain's Table, to more consternation from those seated across, and launch themselves into the fracas after their careless Captain.

His initial leap lands him unsteadily atop the nearest table within jumping distance, amid a circle of shocked and sprawled onlookers. His footing secure, Nemo instigates his own hostilities by kicking whichever of the table's idle flagons he spots towards whomever's in range, with hollow sounds and tumbling sprays of alcohol. Substantially more graceful than her Captain, Moira achieves the same table measly seconds before a vengeful, Gitter-drenched Zibbian wraps an angry tentacle around Nemo's ankle and yanks hard. Wrenched wickedly off the tabletop, Nemo forfeits the higher ground to spill onto the sandy floor.

At precisely the same moment, the offending Zibbian is pummeled to the earth by the protective pounce of an oddly apologetic Odisseus. Now alone atop the table, Moira finds herself fleetingly fending off the unfriendly advances of a natty Nimglo with the hobnailed heel of her favorite baby-stomper.

When push came to shove, she's probably unwilling to actually murder any of the well-meaning brawlers that, ostensibly, were under her indirect employ. Moira, then, makes the executive decision to ground both Righty and Lefty to their holsters for the time being.

She dawdles her hands on both their handles before she extends this decree to her electrobatons. Dishing out anything but cuts, scrapes and bruises were, on a purely practical level, detrimental both to Moira's long-lasting health and her long-lasting wealth.

Moira Quicksilver, let it be known, is nothing if not purely practical.

Fortunately for Moira, of course, inimitable marksmanship and increasing skill with a pair of dual-wielded shock sticks weren't her only redeemable features.

Shifting her weight into a flawless Counterbalanced Gracko stance, Moira dispatches her Nimglo assailant with a complimentary pair of savage kicks to sternum and shoulder successively. Like the gracko of her stance's namesake, Moira hops lightly to the sand to discover only a huffing Odisseus, an unconscious Zibbian and a patch of purple sand where once Nemo lay.

"Where...?" a supremely confused Moira breathes.

A pointed claw from an equally frustrated Odisseus indicates, across an adjacent table, both their courageous Captain and the telltale trail of elbow and knee gouges he'd carved when he'd soldier-crawled beneath the table. Squirming fruitlessly in the general direction of his new earringed Tracath adversary, Nemo appears both hell-bent to escape from and oblivious to the civilizing influences of his first mate and saltbrother.

Career bounty hunter Moira Quicksilver, now forced to admit that her tracking skills are perhaps somewhat rusty, shares an eye-rolling moment with Odisseus. She drops into a second stance, that of the Poised Hukia, in preparation to save Nemo's undeserving asshole one more time.

Employing what running start the space allows, Moira skids beneath the intervening table, boots spraying up sand, and slide-tackles a Venewla threatening to cosh Nemo's cranium with an uplifted stool. Moira is more than happy to obligingly fill the Venewla's open mouth, screaming her lungs bloody, with swallowed sand. Rising, she punts the prone pirate unforgivingly in the pelvis.

With a sharp exhale, Moira's gratified to turn and find herself face-to-face with a profoundly annoyed Nemo. Beyond him, Odisseus mauls the Tracath and all her piercings as politely as possible, as though only intending to do harm to her body and not to her ego.

"What gives?" Nemo exclaims with painful exasperation.

" _You_ what gives!" exclaims Moira with equal exasperation and significantly less sense. "We just, what're you, I mean," she concludes with a point to the grounded, groaning Venewla.

"You're gonna get killed," Odisseus, still manhandling his Tracath, has the presence of mind to interpret.

"I'm not gonna get killed," Nemo denies to both of his babysitters. "See?" He gestures at the pandemonium flipping tables and throwing punches in every direction. "It's a friendly dust-up. Nobody's gonna–"

A noise uniquely alien to Moira interrupts Nemo's argument as an oscillating frequently streams between the two of them. Nemo, turning to address Odisseus is precisely dumb and lucky enough to twist the bulk of his body away. A shimmering wave of displaced energy, haloed by heat and colored bright pink, streaks narrow inches past him.

His duster, flapping dramatically open with the vigor of his indignation, is not nearly as fortunate, however. With a sizzling sound, it receives the brunt of the attack.

Instinct tosses Righty and Lefty from their holsters into Moira's outstretched hands and she sweeps three-hundred and sixty degrees around. This buys a significant berth from the surrounding brawlers as she scans for any obvious signs of a triggerman or their most bizarre of weapons. To his credit, Odisseus has forgotten the Tracath, shoved Nemo securely onto the sand and stands, defiant and snarly as ever, over the prone form of his saltbrother in the same space of time that Moira spends locating the Captain's would-be-assassin.

All the bedlam and brouhaha of the previous second is promptly evaporated. Each participant is frozen mid-punch and gazes slack-jawed towards Moira, Odisseus and Nemo's revealed assailant.

With the smoking gun – a bizarre, brassy-looking rifle of fluting tubes and charge chambers – gripped in gloved mitts, the goggled humanoid, the recipient of the scuffle's first punch, is revealed to be the dastardly culprit. Apart from his targeting goggles, worn uselessly high across his brow, his attire suggests some manner of desert wayfarer. He sports a dusty burlap slicker, chest-crossing bandoliers of equally bizarre ammunition and precisely the style of cocksure swagger borne by no plebeian pirate, nor even ship's captain, but rather, by some haughty-ass amateur bounty hunter.

As a professional courtesy, from one angler to another, Moira shoots the gawky weapon from his hands hours before he can open his mouth to offer any manner of taunt, retort or curse. Overcome with generosity, Moira plants Righty's own bolt in the bounty hunter's bandoliered shoulder, inciting a freakish pink spark from the ammunition struck and toppling him onto the nearest table.

The corona of awestruck bystanders, drunk or punch-drunk enough to react audibly to the sight and sound of gunfire, continue to steer clear of Moira. She's amble room as she pads towards their downed assailant, both pistols pointed towards him. She pauses to consider his discarded weapon with a boot.

"He alright?" she questions, nodding towards the Captain.

"He's alright," repeats Nemo, climbing to his feet next to a paranoid Ortok, sniffing the crowd in every direction for any trace of further attackers.

Standing, however, gives Moira a glimpse of the extensive damage the Captain's beloved duster's sustained. Its lower third is jaggedly missing, as though the bounty hunter's inexplicable firearm had somehow taken a great cartoonish bite from it. "Oh, bloom me out!" bemoans Nemo, upon following Moira's eyes and noticing the damage for himself.

"I don't even know what to call this thing," Moira observes, nudging the castoff weapon beneath her boot.

" _It's-a-disintegrator_ ," sings Charybdis, accompanied by the vice captains in her squadron. All eyes return to the Captain's Table, where the Trijan's risen from her seat.

"That's a disintegrator?" Moira spits dismissively. "These're what the Imperium regulates halfway to Jotor?"

Like any sane person, Charybdis rounds the Captain's Table and descends the dais by the perfectly good staircase. The ex-privateer approaches, brandishing her own bizarre firearm, as dissimilar to the one at Moira's feet as it is from Righty or Lefty. " _Not-of-Trijan-make, mind. Some-third-party-imitation, I'd-wager._ "

"Frankly," Moira confesses to the prone assassin, "I'm underwhelmed."

"Look at my poor jacket!" Nemo wails, hefting the missing section of his tattered duster around as apparent evidence of the weapon's power.

Odisseus' voice is thick with suspicion. "Is no one curious who this motherbloomer is? Some hired gun of Valladia's?"

"Potentially," Moira acknowledges cooly, closing to inspection range with both pistols hovering comfortably at waist level. "He _is_ a bounty hunter."

The very words, spoken in accusation against seemingly one of their own, provokes a schoolyard "ooo" of anticipation from the hordes of witnesses. There's a commotion from the Captain's Table and Greatgullet's on his feet. "He's a _what?_ "

"You recognize him?" Odisseus growls.

"I recognize the type," she confirms, mounting a handy chair to reach the tabletop. From her towering position, she sheathes Righty, plants a jackboot on the bounty hunter's throat and performs a fast frisking of his writhing body.

"Do you have any idea how long I've fucking had this?" Nemo threatens, suddenly enraged, towards Moira's prisoner.

" _You're-lucky-to-be-alive, is-what-you-are_ ," Charybdis informs him, still harmonized by her distant choir. " _A-Trijan-model, such-as-we-have-back-home, would've-spread-out, disintegrating-the-jacket-entirely, along-with-its-wearer._ "

" _Thanks, Odi,_ " singsongs Odisseus.

The contents of his trouser and jacket pockets – spare change, a crisp holodeck worthy of further inspection, some starship keys – don't draw Moira's interest nearly so much as the scuffed, ConFed-issued ident card she uncovers does.

"Dimick Decarios," she reads, nonplussed. "Not ringing anything. Age 37, homeworld Haess, _first_ -tier bounty hunting status under the Ring ConFed," she grunts, a note of impression tinging her voice. "Explains the disintegrator, I suppose. Friends in high places, sounds like." She considers the quivering Dimick from the opposite side of her sidearm. "Well? Anything to say for yourself?"

"I..." he stammers, maintaining eye contact with Lefty's barrel rather than Moira herself. "They said, I mean, GalaxCom said..."

"GalaxCom?" Moira mutters. With a sudden violent jerk, she hoists Dimick harshly onto his feet with a balled fist around his shirt front, showing his frightened face to all the onlookers. "This blowbag familiar to anyone? He serving on anybody's crew?"

Mass murmuring breaks out amongst the mass murderers, each one looking to each other dumbfoundedly while Moira browses every expression for any sign of recognition. None is volunteered, however, after a significant pause and Moira's forced to hurl her captive back down onto the table.

"Speak up, you," hisses a familiar voice, some distance into the crowd.

"I recognize him," quails a second familiar voice from the same direction and approaching with immediate speed. As though disgorging a parasite, the encircling crowd spews forth a pair of figures, one following another.

The first figure is an unfamiliar Szarzaar – dressed in the nondescript pirate's attire of shiftless overcoat, broad gunbelt and faded bandana – clasped firmly by the short fur by the second figure, a few paces behind. That second figure, a buxom, blonde bombshell who could be only Gertie Gundeck, wheels the Szarzaar unforgivingly about like an abusive pet owner with a four inch leash.

Moira's barely time to frown at the arrival of her arch nemesis before Gertie's thrust the Szarzaar forward, as though in some ambiguous manner of offering. "You remember Dranab, I trust?" she sasses in the general direction of anyone present who'd spare her some eye contact.

Moira snorts in recognition. Dranab's voice clicks satisfying into place inside Moira's memory: a certain hack Szarzaar criminologist, former host of a particular holovision reality program and conspicuous absentee from Nemo's terminal encounter with said program's star amid the swirling snows of Baz's northern pole. His professional announcer voice, a sound roughly analogous to chewing gravel, is also conspicuously absent, in favor of this wretched whimpering when he's subjected to Gertie's cruel handling.

"Hey," realizes Nemo, diehard enough fan of _Quuilar Noxix Wants You Dead Or Alive_ to clean forget the woes of his tragically frayed jacket and approach Gertie's captive.

"Caught him attemptin' to squeak outta the side entrance, all unnoticed-like," Gertie alleges, nudging her forehead toward the corner where her own crew lately caroused. "Don't fret – my boys're standing 'crost all the other exits, in case these two've got anymore accomplices-in-hiding."

"How come you weren't with us on Baz?" Nemo interrogates the wincing weaselfolk, genuine hurt and curiosity in his voice. "I looked for you."

"I, er," Dranab stammers, confusion, fear and pain each interfering with his ability to form complete sentences, "record all my, er, VO, uh, remotely."

"Oh," Nemo ponders, thoughtfully. "Makes sense."

Odisseus considerately returns everyone to topic. "Do we have any idea what's actually going on here?"

"It's not obvious?" questions Moira back towards the Ortok. "I would've thought it was obvious." She addresses the squirming Szarzaar with an extended pistol. "Dranab?"

He avoids every gaze he can as he answers, in favor of admiring the purplish stains his costume's boots have recently accrued. "We were, er, shooting a new pilot."

The "we" in question, all were soon to discover, referred not only to the confederates Dranab and Dimick but also to a veritable skooshball team's worth of camera operators and production crew, cunningly smuggled in amongst the debauched rabble.

With the help of the _Magnet's_ crew, Dranab's film production team were all progressively weeded out and vomited forth. The benumbing total came to not one, not three, but five separate individuals, mostly various humanoid subraces but a token Ouban numbered amongst their cowering ranks as well.

The unpalatable notion of five undercover camera operators passing this unnoticed amidst a sea of swearing, squabbling brigands rests no easier with Moira than with anyone else among the Freebooter Fleet. That said, she's forced to commend Dranab and his squad of covert underlings on both the undeniable quality of their disguises and the advanced nature of their recording tech. Most of all, she marvels at the sheer idiot stones required to this successfully infiltrate such a bastion of anti-bounty-hunter sentiment with the expressed intention of so publicly collecting a bounty.

While two of those five uncovered merely stashed audio equipment somewhere on their persons, the remaining two humanoids and one Ouban were outfitted with some manner of high-end bionic eye implant. Named with some extrinsic technical handle even their own operators could barely mumble out under duress, these tiny corders fully capable of capturing top-quality holographic footage with merely a glance and a muttered command.

Despite all Dranab's assurances they were answerable only to GalaxComm Interstellar Media, Moira thought the entire enterprise stank of Huong Xo a little too sharply for a mere coincidence.

Before long, the captives have all been corralled, processed out before the Captain's Table and forced to their knees. By then, the cutthroat congregation is absolutely sporting for blood, none more so than Greatgullet. The burly Obax barbarian is virtually chomping the bit in twain at sight of a defenseless bounty hunter.

" _Dimick Decarios Wants You Dead Or Alive?_ " Nemo idly speculates, perusing the humanoid's ident card.

While Nemo perfects his drill sergeant's pace with license in hand, Moira is installed far to the Captain's left. Both Lefty and Righty fully extended are deemed more than enough coverage to protect Nemo from further bodily harm. Counterpoint to Moira stands Gertie, leaning as casually as she can against the Captain's Table in a vain pretext to include herself amongst their celebrated ranks and all the closer to catch the Captain's eye with an alluring eye of her own.

" _Dusty Dimick_ ," corrects Dranab shakily, the official spokesperson of the group, " _Wants You_ , er, _Dead Or Alive._ "

"Ah," Nemo grunts. "Does have more of a ring, I'll admit." With that, he cranks back his wrist and boomerangs the bounty hunting license towards an unawares Greatgullet, smacked in the beards by the sudden projectile. After the Obax sniggers his gratitude, Nemo returns, somewhat theatrically, to the matter at hand. "And I was intended to be vaporized on the first episode of your grand reboot, yeah?"

A chain reaction of tentative nods is his answer.

"I'm seriously flattered," Nemo reacts with the genuine honesty of an earnest fan. "Clear something up for me, though. You," he aims a finger toward Dimick, "were gonna do the dirty work, you," the finger flits briefly to the Ouban, "were gonna film it and you," the finger comes to rest on Dranab, "were gonna, what, sweep up my ashes and just toodle-oo the fuck outta here?"

The absence of any reply transforms Nemo's question into a rhetorical one. "A few plot holes, maybe," he suggests in a nonjudgmental tone, resuming his pacing again. "Far be it from me, though, to spoil your new show." Three steps further along the line, he halts again and half-turns, catching the same terrified Ouban with an inquisitive glance. "Are you rolling?"

The Ouban, equal parts fear and confusion, shakes his head fervently.

Frustration plays across Nemo's face. "You don't understand." With a creak of leather, Nemo's freed his bulky pistol from the confines of its holster and aimed it directly at the center of the Ouban's hyperventilating chest. The crowd falls into deathly silence. "Are you rolling?"

Arriving suddenly upon Nemo's same page, the Ouban blinks the relevant eye significantly, mutters a short phrase and, with a few indicating blips on the surface of his bionic eye, nods his head rapidly. Moira notices that the remaining pair of corder operators wink their own ocular devices into active duty, lest they somehow also earn the Captain's mercurial ire.

"Good." Nemo shifts the aim of his pistol several inches and clicks the trigger, pumping a canister through the chamber and straight into the unsuspecting heart of Dusty Dimick.

As any reasonable person would be expected to, all three cameramen, plus Dranab and his audio techs, flinch and stare, wide-eyed, at the freshly-minted corpse of their budding holoreality hopeful. This helpfully ensures that his murder receives coverage from three equally dramatic angles.

A unanimous cheer bursts from a thousand bloodthirsty throats.

This simple act, the precise sort of solution Moira'd observed her Captain enact dozens and dozens of times previously, seems to immediately electrify the crowd.

Nemo doesn't foresee this turn of events and is physically taken aback by, as though from a sonic shockwave. He spends a moment recovering and spends several more basking in the adoration these ignorant mongrels seemed so willing to force-feed him. Nemo swaggers up to the edge of the dais with a gait Moira's certain he swiped off Cosmic Vomit's frontman and extends his pistol towards Dranab, to more stamping, clapping approval.

He stops, of a sudden, when something quite different than simple slaughter seems to strike the Captain, momentarily staying the Szarzaar's execution. There's nearly a collective groan of disappointment as he sheathes the weapon, but face is saved, in fact exalted, when the following suggestion instead issues forth from his cracked smile.

"Who's up for pirateball?"

With a weary sigh and an unbroken motion, Moira holsters Righty and Lefty and stalks well-deservedly towards her empty chair at the Captain's Table. She plops down between an equally exhausted Odisseus and a blithely unmoved Two-Bit Switch.

In the chamber's main well, the teeming throngs already move to scoop up the survivors and transport them to the pit, screaming their approval of Nemo's new idea all the way. The Captain, successfully saved from assassination and still bearing his rockstar comportment, is blindsided by quite a different Captain. Her unexpected approach instills a visible dread in the ungrateful Nemo and a proportional amount of perverse amusement in Moira.

She's prepared to recline back, enjoy her Gitterswitch and rest comfortably in the knowledge that she, quite demonstrably, has still got it, when a bundle of clinking metal clocks her on the right cheek. Rotating with a venomous slowness to her side, she locks eyes with Two-Bit Switch, twirling a recognizable ring of spaceship keys on his pointer finger.

Odisseus nearly jumps out of his sweater, blubber and fur. "Moons of Jotor, you scared the bloom outta me."

"You're still wearing that thing, huh?" Nemo observes dumbly, underscored by the faint and familiar sounds of scraping hand tools against engine components. "You know, one of these days, you're gonna be forced to relinquish that fucking thing. Captain's orders and all."

"Don't get power hungry on me," Odisseus returns, undertaking the famously uncomfortable wriggle through the two-foot-tall orlop tunnel from access ladder to engine room.

"Somebody did attempt to assassinate me," the self-important voice of his saltbrother continues to point out.

"I was in attendance, actually," grunts the Ortok, negotiating his paunch past the passage's least pleasant and most restrictive section.

With an honest-to-moons popping sound, a panting Odisseus once again emerges from the sadistically short crawlspace that serves as the engine room's exclusive entrance. He's buoyed, however, by the comforting sights of both Port and Starboard, _The Unconstant Lover's_ lovable pet jetboosters, awaiting his return with the indefatigable patience one can only reliably expect from inanimate objects.

A sight somewhat less buoying for the state of the Ortok's soul, however, is that of a neticgrappler-wielding Nemo, clanging and spattering the tool about within Starboard's propulsion cavity, creating a percussion of hollow thuds and muted sparking.

"What're you _doing?_ " Odisseus spits, repressed lobes of his bestial brain suddenly enraged by this most unexpected breach of territory.

"Had a little free time," Nemo replies oddly, contorting his face with effort as he bangs and clatters about the booster's delicate interior. "Thought I'd recalibrate the upshift–"

With as fluid a mustelid movement as the environs will allow, Odisseus practically gallops on all fours around the engine's side, reaches Nemo's position within a span of six seconds and snatches the neticgrappler from his humanoid hands. "The upshifter does not require recalibrating," is his only justification.

"But I wanna go _fast_ ," whines Nemo.

The Ortoks snaps his fangs dangerously once, scampering his saltbrother a full four feet away from the open booster.

Sufficiently browbeaten, Nemo merely throws his hands up and waddles aside, to plant his meddling bloomhole casually onto the fold-down technician's seat. He crosses his legs in contentment. "Suit yourself."

Halfway through righting whatever internal damage the unsupervised Nemo might've inflicted upon his beloved Starboard, Odisseus gradually withdraws his neck and shoulders from the access hatch and considers his saltbrother down the end of his faintly twitching nose. "What exactly are you doing down here?"

"Recalibrating the upshifter, I–"

"What exactly," Odisseus repeats with increased insistence, "are you doing down here?"

Nemo seems to shrink somewhat in his seat. "Hiding."

Odisseus twitches his whiskers derisively once, "From your adoring public?"

His expression holds a degree of unreasonable terror directly at odds with the spoken description of his evident bugbear. "From Gertrude."

"Down here?" Odisseus presses incredulously. "In the engine room?"

Nemo's haunted expression doesn't falter. "She could be anywhere. She could be naked."

Odisseus rolls his eyes, shifts his weight and plunges his torso fully into the hatch's open gap. As he scooches himself left to right until he's satisfactorily jammed inside, he continues to harangue his saltbrother, despite the jointly muffled and reverberated nature of his words from inside the booster. "Forgive me if this is a stupid question," he's careful to stipulate beforehand, "but would that really be so terrible?"

"Would what," Nemo's voice is cautious, "really be so terrible?"

Odisseus ceases his puttering to select his words as best he can. "If you two were naked. Together."

The silence that follows is a profound one.

"Not to mention," Nemo finally supplies, as though his pervasive silence served as some manner of evidence actually mentioned, "you remember the last asshole who fell for that, don't you?"

The memory grants Odisseus momentary pause. "Say no more."

The transition from Good Luck Gertie Guspatch, promising young deadeye and jinx-to-end-all-jinxes, to Gertie Gundeck, Captain of _The Dick Magnet_ and uncatchable scourge of the entire Gitter Hegemony, had blossomed from a juicy piece of pirate pop culture to a cautionary tale all budding buccaneers took to heart.

Towards the end of her tenure as an unemployable floozy flouncing about Takioro's Second Ring, Gertie somehow managed to convince Rancore, Doreen scuzzbucket and then-captain of a sturdy little IV1 Belladonna-Class, to conscript her services as a lowly tail gunner.

Gertie being Gertie, however, only six months aboard were required for Captain Rancore, a celebrated hero amongst misogynist pricks, to not just succumb to the girl's brazen charms, but also consent even to marriage. Under Rancore's strictly-observed Dorenese customs, Gertie was immediately skyrocketed to the position of the _Magnet's_ first mate.

Six hours was the reputed turnover rate from wedding to execution, as Gertie tossed Rancore from the nearest available airlock, repaint the "CH" on _Chick Magnet_ with a doublewide "D" and declare herself Captain as Rancore's rightful successor.

In one swift and brutally simple move, Gertie Gundeck, Captain of _The Dick Magnet_ and uncatchable scourge of the entire Gitter Hegemony, communicated to the galaxy at large that she was cunning, ruthless and unwilling to play fair by an order of magnitude more than most pirates.

For, as effective as her coup d'etat may have been, it fell neatly into the category of mutiny, a relic from Abraham's "days of yore" and one of the few taboo transgressions among what remained of a pirate fraternity in Bad Space. As a result, everyone from cantankerous old traditionalists like Abraham and equally treacherous Spiths-in-the-grass like Vobash regarded Gertie with the same degree of distrust and alienation, as though mutiny was somehow contagious.

In Nemo's case, however, it was understandably difficult to divorce oneself from images of Captain Rancore, sexist pig or not, floating, bulged-eyed and death-bloated, through the Outer Ring, whenever Gertie's inexplicable lust for him reared its unwelcome head.

Inside Starboard, the upshifter's only been loosened a marginal amount and it's not a difficult task calibrating the setting back into more reasonable levels. Several more moments of tweaking does the trick and the Ortok's relieved to yank his upper body clean from the jetbooster's cramped interior. Switching the neticgrappler into safety mode, he glances aside and catches sight of his saltbrother, sitting listlessly on the engineer's seat and picking absently at some loose fiber from one of its dangling belts.

"How're your marbles?" he poses tentatively, waggling his paw at the level of his own temple.

"Hm?" grunts Nemo distractedly.

The spaces were few and far between where Nemo and Odisseus could comfortably converse, with his duties as unofficial leader of the Freebooter Fleet occupying nearly every one of the Captain's spare seconds. As illogical a holiday into the engine room as Nemo's might have been, it could still afford a brief discussion between the two saltsiblings, free from the posing, planning and posturing of life amongst the pirates.

"With all this, I mean," Odisseus nudges his muzzle upward, as though that would indicate the surface world, technically below them. "Hired assassins. Pirate politics. Personal armies." He huffs in realization of their situation with each one. "If we weren't ready for Boss Ott, how could we possibly be ready for this?"

Nemo emerges from his reverie at the earnest question and, true to form, his rebuttal prominently features a growing, self-satisfied smirk. "Thing is, though, Boss Ott's gone and somehow we're not."

"So, what, the intention is dash forward into something worse until we are?"

The comment is made unthinkingly by Odisseus; it's not until his words seem to bear a modicum of weight more when Nemo hears them that the Ortok wonders if there might honestly be some truth to the idea. "Who says we won't win out?" Nemo pursues woodenly, as though merely to play the role of Jotor's advocate.

"Frankly, me," Odisseus confesses with an honest shrug. "It's become a foregone fucking conclusion at this point that whatever stupid new notion becomes lodged in your brainless skull I'll go along with because I'm your saltbrother and that's apparently my blooming job now, but," his argument venting steam, Odisseus loses momentum at the sight of Nemo hollowly accepting the Ortok's anger. "I don't know. I'm far from prophetic, but limitless wealth, fame and galactic glory plus invulnerability? Somebody shuts us down somewhere along the line here." He stares a thousand zottibles into Starboard's darkened cavity. "That much I know."

Nemo's reply is unseasonably morose, his attention returned to piecing apart the strands of the safety belt with flicks of his fingernails. "Time will tell."

Fourth Interlude

"I have a theory and I'd like to–"

"What's your theory?"

"I'd like to run some statistics through your head and we'll see how sound my theory is."

"Is your theory that I'm a stone cold killer with balls bigger than Wask's two moons?"

"I have, in fact, a different theory."

"Yeah, I'm sure you do. Theorize away – I'm opening these fucking nuts."

"The Freebooter Fleet fell upon Kiesha Shipyards seven months ago. In that time, they ransacked eight of Valladia's ten ports, with only, at time of recording, Yime Orbital remaining. That's 210 days in total, nine ports attacked which, when divided, results in one port approximately every twenty-three days."

"Oh, bloom me out."

"Let's choose a random port. Adrog is the one whose numbers I've prepared. On average, the Adrogi Wet Market draws 75 billion in profits annually. An average day of business at the Wet Market sees approximately 241 ships worth of merchant traffic. The average wealth of the merchanters that patronize the Wet Market is, when all onboard assets are accounted for, is about 291 thousand per ship."

"By all the tit-sucking moons–"

"A few simple equations, therefore, determine for us that, between the daily wealth of the Market and the average wealth of a sampling of its consumer base, the Freebooter Fleet, assuming of course the sacking was fairly thorough, stole an amount of booty equal or greater than 70 million from the Adrogi Wet Market sixty-eight days ago."

"I will spunk a live torpedo up your open anus if you do not–"

"For the purposes of scale, that number's within a stone's throw of the GDPs of several minor planets. Greva. Wayside. Hivu. To name a few."

"Why the fuck would they screw this on so tight? Shit's practically pressurized. Oh. There."

"Now, I'm given to understand that every piece of plunder, from natural resources, to fenced spaceships, to honest cash, is distributed evenly between the five Captains. From there, it then trickles down into all the petty pirates and cannon fodder captains, correct? If so, the percentage of money that you personally receive is substantial, certainly, but nowhere near, I'm betting, those figures I quoted earlier."

"Behold me. I am stronger than gravity. I am sexier than napalm. I am the devourer of spicy nuts."

"Economics is the point that I'm making. Or attempting to make."

"Spicy. There is spicy in my mouth. Booze. Booze for spicy."

"You gonna survive? You might wanna slow down there, on that."

"My tastebuds are gone. My tongue is going. My organs are next."

"Spicy?"

"No, fuckmuffin, sugary. These sure are some sweet fucking nuts. Gimme those pretentious-ass chocolates."

"Economics."

"Shoot."

"Let's look at Kezz, see if we can see any broader implications. For Kezz, we're looking at net profit substantially larger. Richer port, richer rewards. With hundreds of billions worth of Kezz's merchandise and money out of Valladia's hands and into yours, the tables of the lumber trade are now entirely and, I postulate, irrevocably turned."

"Fascinating."

"About 60% of the raw materials recovered from the siege of Kezz have been fenced on the black market. With a small margin of error, the majority of the buyers haven't changed; the Freebooter's fences are reselling the product to Valladia's established customers. Easier, simpler and guaranteed to profit. What's more, the fences, either as an intentional power play or an unintentional side effect of inexperience, are reselling Kezz's loot at a significant undercut to Valladia's famously inflated prices. You understand what I'm getting at?"

"Not remotely."

"Means that the customer pays less, they buy more and, had Valladia even the merch to move in the first place, the market's flooded. Right now, lumber's so cheap on the nail that, when Valladia does replenish their stock, they'll be forced to drop prices to compete. The long term effects of this are, well–"

"Tedious as shit?"

"Possibly. Tedious, however, is not the same as trivial. These're staggering losses for Valladia Shipping, not to mention incalculable brand damage and very calculable damage to physical property. Remember, though, Kezz's merely an example. To truly understand how grievous a blow this's been to Valladia, you've gotta multiply those number by eight. You understand that we're talking about quadrillions of credits here."

"I'm fairly certain you made that number up."

"And you're aware Valladia Shipping filed for bankruptcy, right? Shortly after Prime was sacked?"

"I, uh–"

"You weren't aware."

"Tell you what, no. Being a figurehead of fear and worship for thousands of aspiring pirates everywhere tends to blanket your schedule, I've found."

"The contract they signed means the Imperium's licensed to bail their corporates asses out, which of course they did. Can't be seen to lose face so shortly after cinching the deal, especially to common rabble rousers like yourself, but the broader implications still stand."

"I'm sorry. Not to interrupt your exceedingly boring train of thought but what, in all Jotor's jiggling moons, do you suppose this thing's used for?"

"Taxes are raised, I'm saying. Higher taxes, taxes that wartime's already made all the more astronomical, have gone into effect across all the Inner Sectors, much of the Midworlds and those few Imperial bastions in the Ring, such as Baz and Nos Mantri. Some systems've have implemented food stamps, for fuck's sake."

"I mean, one presumably lies down, what, this way? And puts their legs here?"

"To wealthier systems, the strain of raised taxes is negligible. Places like Criia, Anglia, Medroteria won't feel that hurt. The majority of their citizens are either exempt from said taxation or, more accurately, so affluent they couldn't be bothered to notice. The further from the galactic center you deviate, the closer to the frontier, the harder and harder that burden, a burden which you, indirectly imposed, becomes to bear."

"Oh, wait. Which direction are you meant to be facing? The position of these, uh, stirrups seems to suggest–"

"Dubos, for example, made motions to secede, on the heels of this new taxation. This is, much to the Imperium's chagrin, not an isolated incident. Iogo, Ujad, even Prash's making similar noises. Digitwork's been filed. You understand what I mean, right, when I say sessation? This is the Imperium we're talking about. They ain't liable to, say, simply grant the wishes of those they see as deserters or claimjumpers. Means war, on each of those planets."

"Who could find this comfortable? In all seriousness and, I mean, that's with no thought given to who's pitching and who's, you know, not-pitching. So to speak."

"The point I'm making here, is what may have begun as a selfish action of personally-motivated revenge, you know, 'piracy is pointless', has spiraled out into this galaxy-spanning economic and political crisis, involving supply and demand, taxation and secession on an interstellar scale. The effects of this ripple outwards, clearly, far beyond simple robbery. My question, I suppose, is how much of these repurcussions you anticipated or, indeed, were even aware of."

"I frankly don't see how you're supposed to even maintain balance on this fucking–oh, shit!"

"That answers that, then, I suppose."

"Ow. Ow ow ow. I think I broke my assbone."

Chapter 17

Two-Bit Switch shouldn't be surprised. Organize an Iniquity game between four of the galaxy's most feared and famous picaroons, one of them an honest-to-moons Trijan ex-pat. Grant Two-Bit Switch, proud player, the unbelievable chance to claim a seat at such an acclaimed table. Ten to one, he'll be dealt absolute, mind-bogglingly useless buhoxshit, hand after hand.

Staring at the rogue's gallery of uncooperative cards in his hand, Two-Bit's forced to recognize the fact that, unless his luck begins to improve, he may have to retire the word "cardsharp" from his repertoire of impressive-sounding titles.

"My concerns persist from our last 'conversation,' Captain." Vobash clutches his own bushel of cards before him with a sterling lack of concern. "You don't happen to recall any of them, do you?"

Nemo's scowling countenance is certainly as regards his own clutched hand and not any of Vobash's concerns, recalled or otherwise. "Not as such, no," he admits, shifting about the order of his hand, as though position is proportional to value. "Somebody was busy disintegrating my jacket," is his excuse. A shrugged shoulder indicates the garment he still wears, Dimick's handiwork apparent as ever. "Oh, bloom me out," the Captain curses suddenly, slapping his hand to the table. "I'mana fold."

It was Nemo's proposal to color the next Council of Captains with a friendly card game. This was no doubt inspired by the crew's less-than-subtle aspersions about his Iniquity playing skill and Two-Bit, among others, was all too happy to take the Captain's money.

As the game seems to carry the same weight with criminals of practically every description, no Captain refused the opportunity to throw down against their peers, especially in a contest that so ostensibly acknowledged both one's brains and one's brawn as Iniquity. To Two-Bit's surprise, even Aju Vog Xah Qaj consents to a few hands, playing through her laconic-as-ever ambassador.

Cards are dealt, business is discussed and Nemo's irresponsible actions are further chided by Vobash.

Charybdis' bald lieutenant, despite his assumed skill, comes to a conclusion similar to Nemo's own. Vobash, meanwhile, doesn't shift his eyes from his own cards as he reminds Nemo of his ignored objections. "I'm concerned with the number of privateers you destroyed?"

"What?" explodes Greatgullet, always eager from an opening to repeat their routine, from across the table. "He bloom-near destroyed each one of those fucking privateer bastards! How could you possibly–"

"That's precisely my point," counters Vobash with icy remonstrance.

" _No-captured-prizes_ ," Charybdis states, its musical nature mangling her tone such that Two-Bit's uncertain whether the judgment he detects is imagined or not.

"Even Captain Guspatch–" the ambassador begins to point out before a defeated Charybdis slides her own hand onto the table.

" _Afraid-I've-gotta-fold-as-well_ ," she agrees.

"–made some effort to preserve those privateering craft within range of her commandeered turret bank," the ambassador advances, heedless of the interruption.

The original intent of the Xend's clever manipulating appendages was to shape the cud-like cement they produce by regurgitating chewed teltriton. It's therefore downright comical to see them grasping a small handful of Iniquity cards, antennae fluttering to dispatch messages back to its massive grubby queen.

"You, for one," Two-Bit finds himself snarling towards the ambassador with unexpected vitriol, "don't get to jabb shit if you aren't gonna follow the fucking scheme."

The Xend's startlingly humanoid lips don't even twitch in reaction, as Two-Bit imagines the half-second delay required before Aju Vog Xah Qaj, encased in slime and offspring, can process his words.

"Need we remind you," the ambassador monotones, "it was your Captain–"

" _Is-any-of-this-relevant-for-Adrog?_ " cuts Charybdis to the chase, her cards forgotten and annoyance crinkling her dark features. " _Can-bygones-not-be-bygones-here?_ "

"Regarding the matter of the prize ships, though," Vobash dangles with obvious significance, still considering his evidently fascinating hand.

"Yeah?" Nemo challenges, bracing his hands behind his black-maned head.

"For fuck's sake," carps Greatgullet, the burly Obax smacking both literal and figurative hands to the tabletop in frustration. "Valladia Prime was a fucking piñata full of plunder. Sure," he grants, with a massive gesture towards Nemo, "the boy coulda maybe saved some cash by–"

"We calculate," the ambassador interjects, "his wanton destruction cost the Fleet upwards of sixty to seventy million in plunder."

The frankly cowing number does seem to cow Greatgullet some, whatever comeback or insult he had prepared dying somewhere short of his mottible-wide mouth.

Two-Bit nearly takes up the duty himself, continually galled by Aju Vog Xah Qaj's willingness to flaunt orders on one antennae and dictate policy on the other. Considering Nemo'd quite specifically committed the same crime first, however, his counterarguments are rendered somewhat toothless.

He does take special exception to the vilification of their commandeering of the turret banks and its subsequent spaceship shooting spree. Two-Bit's thinking, until this moment, saw that a fittingly fun reward for successfully planning the entire blooming Valladia Prime sack more or less by himself.

"Let's say," Vobash proposes, in a vain attempt to paint himself as the pacifier, "we make some effort to spare the privateers and merchants alike over Adrog?"

Nemo would be making eye contact with the Triomman, if he'd deign to raise his eyes above the level of his grasped cards. "Why not?" Nemo consents, knife-sharp edge to his voice.

Vobash both looks up and tosses his cards ineffectually towards the middle in one motion. "Excellent. I fold."

For a few moments, the game dissolves into confusion, each Iniquity player scanning their fellows as the realization slowly dawns. Each of the five Captains, along with those scattered few among the respective retinues who'd been invited or invited themselves to play, had, to a pirate, all folded. Among all seated at the Captain's Table, no one demonstrably remains to claim the meager pot three rounds of eventually folding players could amass.

That is, no one remains beside Two-Bit and the inbred tragedy that was his own hand.

"I win?" he mutters, displaying his Third of Truncheons, Fifth of Stilettos and First of Nooses, together creating nothing that even resembles a legal incident in the entire game of Iniquity, before his patch of table for all to see.

Moira snipes mine after mine but the feeling of fruitlessness that follows each explosion is inevitable. The tripartite nozzle of her Antagonist conducts an airborne orchestra of destruction but Adrog's entire airspace is speckled with the damn things.

Hunks of metal, harmless-seeming from even a short distance, hang thickly in clouds across the moon's atmosphere. Orbital mines are laughably simple shooting, the type of target Moira could zero with two fingers, one eye and half a brain. The head honchos of the Adrogi Wet Market, those responsible for suffusing today's battleground with innumerable droves of the floating explosives, quite pointedly understood the minelayer's motto, however: quantity over quality.

Above hangs the shadow of Adrog's solitary moon. Below spans the planet's mishmash of ocean and atmosphere. _The Unconstant Lover_ and her contained crew trailblaze through the explosive thickets all around them. All the while, Moira wheels her rig about in an effort to clear all obstructions from the freighter's flightpath. For once, Jargon's effectiveness is frustratingly equivalent to Moira's own, as it's practically impossible to lob a ditrogen bolt in any direction without eventually colliding with an orbital mine.

Some decent percentage of the hired help – namely the unfortunate _Bumpy Ride_ and the unfortunately named _Fresh Meat_ – cannot conjure the necessary skill to navigate the imbroglio surrounding the moon. Each Freebooter flagship, meanwhile, manages to cope with the challenges in their own way.

_The Eyesore_ , the unofficial name attributed to Aju Vog Xah Qaj's colonyship, simply expends its expendables, plowing Xendo divebombers into whatever mines it encounters. _The Rule of Thumb_ , army of boarders straining the ship's life support capacity, dawdles some distance away, awaiting a conscientious corsair to clear the way towards the moonbase. _The Loose Cannon_ leverages its impressive gravitons to actually toss nearby orbital mines at those incoming privateers fool enough to brave the minefield.

One such privateer continues to dog the _Lover's_ progress through the obstacle course of patient space bombs. She's occasionally visible to the distracted Moira as a blockish green blur. Incontestably, though, she's got balls to rival Jotor's moons and a brain to rival Jargon's, as the privateer flies with thrusters opened wide and bombard shields doubled forward.

It requires ninety-percent of Moira's attention simply to clear a wake of passable space for both the _Lover_ and, unintentionally, its pursuer to follow. She'd love nothing more than to teach this headlong privateer about the importance of ray shields with her Antagonist and see if she couldn't, with her own version of feminine charm, also teach them something about their own mortality.

"Master Abraham," denounces the Captain through the comm, "were you not instructed to inform me as soon as they've locked weapons? Does nobody want to hear my brilliant solution?"

"I ain't bein' difficult, Cap'n." Abraham's answer is equal parts perturbation and puzzlement. "They ain't locked weapons."

"Cap'n–" Two-Bit admonishes quietly.

"Matter of fact," continues Abraham, "if what I'm readin' off these system sensors be even a stone's throw from accurate, they ain't got none." He allows the confusion to seep in a moment before summarizing. "They're unarmed."

With a tumultuous tilting motion, Nemo careens the _Lover_ into a rare patch of open space amongst the claustrophobic curtain of mines. Moira spends the sudden reprieve twisting her turret one-hundred-and-eighty degrees to consider this nameless advancing privateer.

"Cap'n, they're increasing crackle," Two-Bit states flatly as Moira squints against the sheen the worldshine casts onto the plexishield. "You might wanna take evasive–"

"Are those fucking horns?" Moira mutters bemusedly, as the privateer chasing craft comes completely into focus.

Resembling a thickly carapaced, rocket-propelled beetle, the redoubtable little tug on their trail does indeed bristle a pair of massive horns. Two asymmetrical spar of jagged metal jut forth from the craft's undercarriage. Whatever the ship's original schematics, Moira could hardly imagine Terro Fleet Systems, Concord Industries or Vbeck & Rhissol Rocketeering including either these twisted tusks, all that forward hull reenforcement or the word "BULLSEYE" that's emblazoned blatantly across her prow.

"Those're horns," Moira confirms numbly. "They fucking have horns."

"Well, they're at horning crackle, Cap'n, you–"

The inertial dampener is no stranger to Nemo's shipborne antics. It reacts with uncharacteristic poise and presence when the Captain so strains the yoke that _The Unconstant Lover_ is somersaulted upwards, her boosters bawling and her ray shields freewheeling wildly.

As always, Moira's sense of direction stubbornly refuses to adjust. She watches _The Bullseye_ , once behind her, now below her, heedlessly bulldoze ahead. Unable to cut its galloping momentum, the privateer crashes plumb into a convenient cluster of orbital mines.

Their bombard shields protect them entirely, however, gently spinning any encroaching mines aside, where they clink and clunk comically into each other.

"There's a crazy motherbloomer," Nemo remarks admiringly. "Moira?"

_The Unconstant Lover_ completes its loop de loop and Moira's once again returned to her preferred position above both spaceship and planet. She wastes no time in swinging her Antagonist around and selecting a non-lethal target on _The Bullseye's_ backside.

The craft complains and careens its way into an attempted three-point-turn, jostling orbital mines with each minute adjustment. One by one, Moira pricks an individual bolt towards an individual section of the unshielded privateer. On their own, each shot seems strangely inconsequential but, like that of an impressionist painter, Moira's artistry is only made more appreciable by time.

The righted _Bullseye_ , it sloping horns aimed with unerringly intent for the bow of the oncoming _Lover_ , dumps fuel into its engines in preparation for another breakneck charge. Thanks to Moira's careful precision, however, it gets no farther. Instead, _The Bullseye's_ thrusters uncouple and drift clumsily away from the main body of the craft, the clamps once mooring them in place now nothing but gnashed wreckage.

For all its velocity and wild abandon a moment ago, _The Bullseye_ is solemnly reduced to a sputtering cripple, spilling carbon fuel in all directions and twisting helplessly in Adrog's gravitational pull.

"You may applaud," Moira allows.

"Gonna gift-wrap this for Vobash?" Two-Bit either wonders aloud or poses to Nemo.

Nemo's voice is replete with downcast disappointment. "I should."

Despite his words, Moira notices, mere seconds later, the familiar silhouette of a zooming torpedo, arcing gracefully from a point beneath the _Lover's_ prow. The missile streaks towards the defenseless _Bullseye_ , where it rests amid the mixed, explosive company of orbital mines and venting carbon petro.

Two-Bit Switch crunches the arm off his deep-fried starfish.

"Help me out here," requests Vobash, a prelude to further chastisement. The Triomman himself doesn't partake of the fishy bounty the other pirates avail themselves of. Instead, that sleeved varmint of his, now fully emerged and revealed to be some species of brushvezzer, munches voraciously on the plate of sporefin proffered before his master. "Which part of 'spare the privateers' confused you?"

"I don't know," Nemo pops a shrimp fully into his mouth with a flick of his forefinger, chewing contemplatively. "Maybe the part where it was an order?"

Charybdis jumbles her noodles mechanically. " _No-one-ordered-you._ "

"We agreed," Vobash emphasizes.

"Did we?" Nemo wonders around his shrimp, fooling no one. "Guess I forgot."

An entirely oceanic world with a booming ecosystem and without a speck of terra firma to plant a flag onto, the planet Adrog held the dubious distinction of the Outer Ring's primary fishbasket since time immemorial. Therefore, the majority of the non-cash, non-spaceship-related booty hauled off the smoldering remains of Adrogi Wet Market consisted primarily of comestibles and, among those, seafood was the most universal.

Vobash's fence contacts across the Ring would wholesale the vast majority of the freeze-dried fish to the hungry public at heightened prices. A not-inconsiderable portion of the loot, however, was actually purchased by the growing population of street vendors and wreckage restauranteurs flocking to Talos II.

An entire miniature economy had begun to spring up on the once-abandoned moon, all to service the needs of the Freebooter Fleet. Often enough, they were reselling plunder to the very same pirates responsible for its initial plundering, the Council of Captains among them.

The sheer variety of maritime meals selected by the tables thirteen some occupants seemed to speak volumes about the Fleet's motley leadership. For his own lunch, Two-Bit'd selected a bushel of deep-fried starfish. Among all the Captains and their entourages, only Odisseus shares the same meal, savaging a whole bucket of the slimy things raw.

Whereas Greatgullet would normally come rushing to Nemo's defense, the Obax is preoccupied with his own platter, piled high with spiky mollusks. Within the unforgiving vice of his mighty jaws, he masticates the shells of crabs, clams and mussels alike.

"We urge that," states the Xendo ambassador, tiny tentacles of the still-struggling cephalopod visible in one chitinous claw, "if the Captain cannot refrain from this wasteful behavior, _The Unconstant Lover_ must abstain from the upcoming sack of Kezz."

"Better flash," Two-Bit announces before the Xend can shove this next creature into any awaiting mandibles. Wiping starfish crumbs from his lips with a hand, Two-Bit rises officiously from his chair. He passes both Nemo and Odisseus, the former rooting about for his next selected shrimp and the latter dripping starfish appendage and saltwater from his muzzle, before arriving at the strategic imager.

Installed at his request, the shiny piece of Imperium military tech was a model or two nicer than the one stolen off that TFS Chaperone all those months ago for the _Lover's_ use. Two-Bit opens a pre-programmed subroutine with a greasy fingertip. "We ain't even touching down on Kezz unless we can specc on a means to kuckle this fucker."

The image that cycles into view, somewhat distorted by the food stains and smeared fingerprints the imager's already accumulated, is that of a truly terrifying piece of technology. "Munitions Intergalactic Model A18 Liberation Anti-Orbital Heavy Torpedo Launcher" reads its label. The hologram depicts a mountain-high planetary missile tube and includes a literal adjacent mountain for scale.

"Motherbloomer's a blockade bagger," Two-Bit elucidates as each Captain considers the spinning hologram. "Installed maybe a month ago, by our toasty representatives in the Endless Imperium. Second somebody they don't like drops atmo, this blowbag'll be chaveling an anti-gantine zoomer deep up that somebody's exhaust pipe. Ball it up for me."

Both hands occupied with her quartet of strange Trijan stick utensils, Charybdis cuts to the chase. " _Can-we-assume-you've-some-way-past-this?_ "

"You can," Two-Bit awards knowingly, tapping forth the next hologram on the imager's edge. "This," Two-Bit identifies, pointing toward the ring-shaped contraption of coils and casing that now floats before the assembled Captains, "is a guidance clasp. Not much to vizz at, sure, but that dohick there is more or less what keeps the wheel's thinkbox thinkin', if you follow."

"We do not," deadpans the ambassador in a manner to make even Moira jealous.

"Point is," Two-Bit reiterates, "they're a specialty part and they gotta coop these buggers in from IntraGalaxy Commerce or someplace if they hank another and kuckling this one dohick'll bring the entire anti-orbital wheel down, won't it?"

"How do you propose," Vobash questions, retrieving the postprandial form of his brushvezzer off the table and stuffing the snoring rodent further up his sleeve, "we incapacitate this clasp, then, if landing on Kezz is such an impossibility?"

"And what's," Greatgullet manages between clamorous bites of his clams, "this to do with the Boss blooming blowing up privateers?"

"One gantine, properly scrambled as some innocent cargo hauler, ain't feez to draw much attention from this motherbloomer," he directs towards Vobash, hoping that, by the conclusion of his argument, Greatgullet's question will likely be answered. "What we're vizzing at here is an insertion team. Wankful of brunos boot their way onto the planet, gank the guidance clasp and hoovy the way for you and the rest of your buckos to touch down, torch the place."

" _Your-volunteering, then?_ " Charybdis supposes.

The Captain offers no objection, munching his next shrimp, tail and all, in one bite. Two-Bit merely shrugs. "Keeps us outta your hair for one, yeah? You sail under him long enough," he adds, gesturing absently towards Nemo, "you learn a few tricks on how best to herd him. Are we agreed, then?" he poses to the entire table. "We hink about that clasp, you bloomholes do all the hinking about them privvies?"

The required murmur of agreement, from the correct number of mouths, allows Two-Bit to nod gracefully and return to both his seat and his meal. Once arrived, a chewing Nemo chucks him solidly on the shoulder.

"Why I pay you the big bucks."

Odisseus can't help feeling at least somewhat inadequate. His Wreckingball combat shotgun, pilfered off the corpse of a _Surimiah_ prison guard, was certainly nothing to laugh off.

He's standing in the shadow of a hundred-story-tall firearm, however, one capable of shooting a ballistic missile eighteen hundred mottibles into low orbit and pulverizing a small capital ship to smithereens with a repellent payload.

Unsurprisingly, the comparison between the two's a little unfriendly towards his own poor shotgun.

The Anti-Orbital Torpedo Launcher, or "Big Boner" as Nemo'd immediately named it, resembles less an erect member and more an accusatory finger, pointed angrily at an uncaring heaven. Fully tall enough to have wisps of actual cloud playing about its pinnacle, it was remarkable to consider that, essentially, this sky-high spike operated on technology no more sophisticated than what rode about in Odisseus' humble shotgun.

"Know what gets me?" the Ortok opines conversationally over his shoulder.

"Hm?" Nemo grunts with no true curiosity in his voice.

Odisseus nudges his head towards the towering torpedo launcher. "They erected this thing in, like, a month." Like a visiting tourist before some sightseeing attraction, he cranes his neck fully back to appreciate the precise heights to which the sky-high barrel rises. "Probably airlifted the whole operation in, you know, from some offworld weapons manufacturate." He returns his gaze weightily to his saltbrother. "All to stop you. Specifically."

"Warms your heart, eh?" a proud Nemo concurs, placing his hand on his chest.

"It does something to my heart," Odisseus agrees mutteringly.

Both the torpedo-enforced embargo against any unwanted spaceship ingress and the compound encircling the anti-orbital launcher were comparatively easy to puncture. The first barrier they circumvented via the use of _The Unconstant Lover's_ growing library of innocuous scramble codifiers. The second barrier was surpassed with a scenic hike through Kezz's terraformed hills, a handful of slain sentries and a grappling tether to scale the curtain wall.

Currently, the crew lingers at various states of alert – Two-Bit and Moira – or repose – Nemo and Odisseus – near the service entrance to the launcher's control bunker. While Two-Bit, humanoid lockpick, hunkers at his post before the door control panel, Moira keeps watch, her electrobatons extended. Nemo and Odisseus loiter ten paces away, double checking their ammunition and drumming fingers against the stocks of their Wreckingballs.

"All to stop him generally," Moira corrects helpfully, stepping forward to smash a guard rounding the corner punishingly in his mandibles. "I doubt they'd bring out the big guns," she mimics Odisseus' gesture by glancing over her shoulder as the Kezzerak, his mouthparts both bruised and blackened, slumps to a squirming pile to the mossy ground, "for us and only us."

"You might be surprised," Nemo begs to differ. "Some people don't like me very much."

"That a fact?" Moira Quicksilver, reigning queen of deadpan, reminds Nemo of her title.

Nemo shrugs with resignation. "Haters gonna hate."

"Haters gonna vaporize you from orbit," Odisseus clarifies.

Nemo nods his consent. "That's pretty hateful."

"And that's access," Two-Bit exclaims, climbing to his feet and backpedaling to Odisseus' side. Moira withdraws both electrobatons and draws both pistols in a single bewildering movement. Both saltbrothers raise their Wreckingballs toward the service entrance.

Made shy by all this attention, the side entrance sphincters slowly open.

Derived from what few signs of civilization Odisseus has seen thus far on their homeworld, Kezzerak architecture is pretty bizarre. According to Two-Bit, charged with jury-rigging open one of the bulkheads, Kezzerak user-interface is also pretty bizarre.

Most likely, Odisseus realizes, it's Kezzerak psychology that's ultimately the bizarre root, given their atypical reaction to four armed strangers busting open the door to the military bunker and leveling assault weapons at them.

Namely, they react with motionlessness and unblinking bewilderment, as though the idea of pirates upon their impenetrable homeworld was a concept their brains simply refused to allow. The control chamber they seek is now filled with, in addition to incomprehensible consoles designed for insectoid limbs and a dozen six-foot-tall sentient mantids, an equal number of blank and benumbed stares from compound eyes.

"Yo ho ho, motherfuckers!" Captain Nemo, breaker of ice, announces, striding bodily into the room. He empties the first round of his Wreckingball into the ceiling, understandably expecting some manner of reaction from the petrified Kezzerak. "Hand over your booty or prepare to walk the plank. _Yarr_ , asshole!"

Thanks to Nemo's subtle wordplay and even subtler use of his combat shotgun, the first Kezzerak he approaches seems to, in a bolt of inspiration, understand the threat he poses. The mantid scuttles away from him, following the Wreckingball's instructional waving towards the center of the room.

"Shiver me timbers!" an enthusiastic Two-Bit declares, proceeding to copy Nemo's tactic of advancing on the nearest Kezzerak and spouting buccaneer clichés. To Odisseus' irritation, this actually seems to have an appreciable effect, the technician Two-Bit selects raising its forelegs in surrender and joining his comrade in the chamber's center.

"Thar she blows! Swab the poop deck!" Nemo continues gleefully, shepherding mantis-men at gunpoint. "Come on!" he beckons to both Moira and Odisseus, still standing undecidedly in the doorway. "Try one!"

"Try one?" Odisseus spits, lowering his Wreckingball. "Try one what? They can't blooming understand me!"

"Avast," Moira intones, anomaly of a smirk coloring her face. Lawmen extended, she stalks into the chamber.

Standing now alone in the doorway, Odisseus pricks his whiskers in annoyance as Nemo and Two-Bit continue to moronically yammer out their meaningless catchphrases.

"Batten down the hatches!"

"All wanks on deck!"

"Pieces of eight!"

Despite himself, the Ortok paces forward, shotgun at the ready, towards the nearest and subsequently most unfortunate Kezzerak. "They aren't even gonna speak Ortoki," he mutters. "I could say anything and they'd react exactly the same." His expectant crewmates watching him, Odisseus roars " _Sour cream and onion!_ " directly in the chitinous face of the poor mantid.

When presented with a mouthful of snarling gangs, the Kezzerak scampers its six legs away from Odisseus. To the crew's sniggering, the Ortok shrugs his shotgun. "See?"

When each member of the mantid gunnery crew is successfully corralled into the chamber's center, Nemo assumes his commanding posture. Wreckingball propped statuesquely along his shoulder, he scans the inhuman visages of his captured prisoners. "Now, who's in charge here?"

The called-upon Kezzerak, wearing the most officious looking uniform-rig, tentatively raises a crooked forelimb.

"Wonderful. Now, where do you keep the, uh..."

"Guidance clasp," Two-Bit provides.

Nemo inserts the term without missing a beat. "Where do you keep the guidance clasp?"

Two-Bit Switch admits that, among the Captain's celebrated history of stupid and humiliating hats, the guidance clasp isn't actually his worst.

The ring of jagged metal, thoughtlessly torn from amongst Big Boner's mechanical innards, resembles more or less a crown, albeit a gunmetal gray, ill-fitting and supremely uncomfortable one. Perched lopsidedly atop anyone else's head, the clasp would look inappropriate or tacky or somehow more intangibly wrong. Upon that matted black mane of his, the goofily grinning Nemo perfectly embodies some mad count, a king of fools, a master of ceremonies.

Swilling his Gitterswitch, Two-Bit enjoys the spectacle of his Captain and his carousing from afar. For once, his crew is seated somewhere far from Nemo's side, by both choice and necessity. High upon the dais, the Captain wines and dines a guest of special honor; Dvalex the Diehard, legendary Skunyen coach of the Dragnoor Dragons and registered captain of _The Breath Weapon_ , the team's official transport freighter.

Celebrities of a particular note in Bad Space, the Dragons were one of the few professional skooshball teams who, rough customers each one, maintained a robust career in interstellar piracy. Whereas such behavior would be grounds for immediate dismissal in the stricter Inner Sector sports leagues, the Outer Ring Galactic League actively encouraged these buccaneer leanings. For one, it opened their sport's merchandizers up to an entirely new demographic – the pirate demographic – that they couldn't hope to rope otherwise.

For two, they were some of the galaxy's toughest motherbloomers, to a player – what could the Galactic League do to stop them?

When the Freebooter Fleet returned from the successful sack of Kezz and all her lumber mills, they were astounded to discover the Diehard and his team of championship skooshers come intergalactic celebrities awaiting their return to Talos II. With the Skunyen's eye towards his team joining their Fleet, doubtlessly as some manner of publicity stunt, Two-Bit'd heartily encouraged not only Nemo's acceptance but also this massive celebratory bash, the likes of which were quickly becoming routine following each profitable pillage.

In order to afford the Dragons a little extra respect, Two-Bit and the rest of the _Lover's_ crew wisely decided to forgo their usual seats around the Captain's Table in favor of some more discreet table far from the action. With Two-Bit's vested interest in killing two rat-canaries with one stone, they opted to conduct another covert crew meeting in the best possible hiding place they could – plain sight.

"Will you relax?" hisses Moira, intended for Odisseus but spoken into the echoey depths of her hefted tankard.

Odisseus ceases his sniffing scan of the massive council chamber to scowl disapprovingly toward Moira. "Relax" is the only word Two-Bit catches, but the Ortok's broadcast tone is easily read as skeptical.

"You think Xo's gonna attempt the same tactic again?" Moira disparages out of hand, returning her tankard to the tabletop. "'cause the bounty hunter infiltration went so swimmingly last time." She waves a dismissive gesture towards the grumpy Ortok, propping a bicep against the back of her chair. "You can relax. They'll come from a different direction next time."

Odisseus snorts something from which Two-Bit discerns the phrase "How relaxing."

A hustle of nearby movement catches the attention of everyone at the table as Lulo Lulo, star Buja center for the Dragmoor Dragons, cranes a lengthy arm across their meeting to catch, in cupped fingers, the stray skooshball. The alien gallbladder, possessed of enough instinctual intelligence to attempt an escape, squirms and squelches an arcing gout of bile across the table. The crowd thunders their approval and the crewmembers shelter their drinks from the viscous spray with hands or shoulders. Lulo Lulo spares everyone at the table an embarrassed expression before bounding back into play, the displeased skooshball gripped implacably in her massive mitts.

Because volunteers numbered in the hundreds, because how often does one have a chance to participate in a friendly match against a professional team and because why blooming not, the center square of the crash's main chamber had been converted into a makeshift skooshball court. With hasty lines etched into the purple sand, the Dragons' suite of practice rings and throngs of jeering and cheering spectators, Talos II's home arena was a far, far cry from any professional skooshball square.

During the entire length of the crew's conversation, the pros had flawlessly trounced not one, two but three amateur teams, assembled from eager fans amongst the Freebooter Fleet. This was met with much guffawing amusement from their crewmates and much chagrin from both skooshball and surface sand. By now, the gallbladder's excited green excretions produced a slick and slippery slurry where once was tractable terrain.

The jester in chief with crown to boot, Nemo leads the revelers, hooting derision and gossiping with the Diehard from their lofty posts upon the Captain's dais.

Two-Bit wipes skooshball slime from his multe bracelet onto the sleeve of his hoodie. "Should anybody be hinked about this, do you think?"

"About skooshball?" Moira clarifies dubiously.

"About publicity," specifies Two-Bit. He huffs a few breaths onto the tarnished multe surface and begins polishing with his opposite sleeve. While he does so, he inclines his chin upward, toward the Captain, Greatgullet and their guest, a representative member of a major sports franchise, joking and jostling each other like drunken school chums. "Skooshball coaches is one thing. Who's next, is what I wonder."

In his grand calculation of Nemo's planned sightseeing tour of the Shipping Line, Two-Bit Switch had honestly become blindly embroiled in the pure logistics, in arranging this here and negotiating that there. The very concept of Bad Space's reaction, Bad Space's opinion of the Freebooter Fleet, had completely eluded him.

Certainly the Endless Imperium weren't particularly popular among the Outer Ring's citizenry. Valladian Shipping, on the other hand, even in spite of their exorbitant taxes and tariffs, was a main conduit of trade, responsible for carting the lion's share of Inner Sector valuables to regions of space unlikely to receive those commodities any other way. The general opinion of them was therefore correspondingly murkier.

This far from civilization, public outlook on even something as ostensibly negative as pirates could vary nearly as much. On some planets, they were courageous corsairs, using whatever means necessary to battle a corrupt and inflated Imperium that was content to ransack resources from worlds they long since forswore protection from. Others planets took the more traditional view and saw them as simply robbers, marauders and raiders.

If pressed, Two-Bit would probably place his chips in the later camp, as regards Bad Space's perspective on the Freebooter Fleet. To see Coach Dvalex here, however, in such open endorsement of not only Two-Bit's own handiwork, but more abstractedly the actions of the Fleet as a whole, may be enough to sway that prediction from one direction to another.

"Let the boy have his fun." It's unsurprisingly Abraham, living to spoil the Captain as of late, who first brushes the concern aside.

Watching Nemo up there, a giggly child in a dopey hat at the center of an enormous party thrown by thousands of people in honor of his sixth birthday, Two-Bit Switch can't disagree.

He extends pinky, ring and middle finger. "Three to go."

Chapter 18

Moira attempts to weigh color against design, size against craftsmanship, price against aesthetic, for a truly distressing amount of time. The perfection of one pair, which is precisely the right size, is undercut by its color – an obnoxious shade of neon pink that reminds Moira, somehow, of Gertie Gundeck. Another pair is colored a traditional white but are so comically enormous, Moira couldn't even cup one in her hand.

Some of them jangle tinny little tunes whenever something or other tripped their triggers. Others of them project outward a halo of holographic numbers, symbols or logos. A few are even corporate shills, with looping advertisements and coupons for the bored commuter.

When she sees the Jolly Roger one, a dozen white skulls and their crossbones stitched onto black felt, Moira calls off the dogs.

Moira points out her desired pair from where it softly swings, among the racks and racks of its peers, and pays the Tifranese knickknack-monger. In any other market, on any other moon, she forks over enough cash to purchase not only the item, but probably the lifelong service of the little Zugax child-laborer who stitched the damn thing together.

Here, however, to the overflowing pockets of the Freebooter Fleet, a mere hundred credits was a small price to pay for a pair of fuzzy dice.

Plus, she was purchasing the item on Nemo's dollar and, as such, Moira was careful to tip over-generously.

With fuzzy dice dangling from her fist, Moira departs the Tifranese's humble kiosk and starts her sojourn back across the purple sands of Pirateton. Her first destination, a certain clothier situated on one of the township's temporary corners, would bring Moira across turf staked out by both Vobash and Greatgullet. From there, she'd need to traverse the Trijan and Xendo ghettos before arriving back at her home and spaceship, parked at the nexus of Lover territory.

All in all, the overland trek would swallow the better part of an hour, looping around the neutral ground of the central crash site and through all five of Pirateton's wards. These were each rough neighborhoods for those without the prestige Moira Quicksilver wielded amongst the Freebooters. Here, when she chose to walk openly, the press of pirates parted a respectful berth for her passage.

Six months ago, Talos II was a desolate wasteland, boasting a single despondent landmark across its entire sand-swirled surface. With only three ports on the Valladian Shipping Line left to sack and all of Bad Space's fascinated eyes turned to their little moon, Talos II can now finally claim its own Porttown.

Pirateton was born, a pseudo-community germinated up from a windblown ruin. With a population climbing into the thousands, Talos II's one settlement consisted primarily of parked spaceships, architecture re-appropriated from the abundant wreckage and an extremely opportunistic merchant class.

In Pirateton, the pedestrians are universally pirates, gun-strapped sentients comparing tattoos, haggling over implements of maximum possible destruction and polluting the atmosphere with the mingled clouds of tobacco, smoke and exhaust. In Pirateton, the buildings are insanely ramshackle, where a crinkled tarp, loose sand and a crumbling sheet of unstable wreckage constitutes a luxurious storefront. In Pirateton, streets are sterling examples of chaos theory, rewriting themselves with irritating frequency by the palimpsest of departing and arriving spaceships.

Calling a district a "district" in Pirateton is an act of saintly generosity. More vain pretense than effective urban planning, these artificial borders were a natural outcropping of the allegiance system that'd sprung up among the amateur corsairs, each one pledging support and plunder to a particular Council-seated Captain. A constellation of spacecraft develops in every direction around their favored flagship, creating an unnatural neighborhood between landing feet, beneath ship shadows and among rusted debris.

Some subtly, some less-than-subtly, each district wears the psychology of its selected Captain and the psychologies of those who would willingly ally themselves to that Captain. Moira bears witness to a core sample of each district as she strides between Pirateton's personalities.

Greatgullet's turf is a rowdy barrio of frequent fistfights, public intoxication and a near-perpetual chorus of boozy, repetitive buccaneer chants. Here, Moira watches a jubilant Etrook, with a shouldered anti-spacecraft ballistic warhead launcher, demolish an empty turret atop the main body of the crashed cruiser to precisely no consequences beyond rubble.

Within Vobash's borders, all the Captain's subservient ships are circled protectively around his like a buhox herd before the approach of a predator. Here, Moira keenly observes a doubtlessly Vobash-appointed militia, disguised as shore-leave spacers shooting the proverbial shit. They loiter with feigned nonchalance at each point of ingress into the Triomman's territory and turn away undesirables with antagonist stares and spread shoulders.

Crossing into Charybdis' sphere of influence reveals a whole shipyard of her sovereign spacecraft, parked in regimentally neat rows. Here, Moira keeps a weather eye for signs of any single unpolished hull. To her amusement, she locates none, the meaning behind this particular scruple seemingly lost on the majority of the Captain's non-Trijan flock as their ships are made predominantly of teltriton rather than solxite.

To pass Aju Vog Xah Qaj's domain, one must weave through a winding series of streets, all swirling around the mountainous heap of compiled junk from which _The Eyesore's_ crew withdraws its component metal. Here, Moira makes note of only three types of transients. She spies the queen's true born offspring, she spies a motley assemblage of Xendo former strays Aju Vog Xah Qaj's willingly or unwillingly adopted and she spies the very occasional enterprising vendor, attempting to peddle carapace wax and raw meat.

A handful of traits, however, are universal across all of Pirateton's citizenry, a few fragile links that tie the entire tent city together.

Some ambitious jackass with a scummy forefinger has traced "WASH ME" on the viewports, fuselages and exhaust thrusters of every dusty craft they could spot. Wherever Moira goes across Pirateton, she can still hear the mistimed strums and off-key wailing of a dolefully subpar Cannonball Dogs cover band that, when located, she plans to punish with verbal or physical violence.

Every street, every boulevard, every alleyway is carpeted with peddlers, their blankets outlaid and their plunder proudly displayed. Each of these trinkets – rings, watches, pearls, comms, sunglasses, inkjetters – Moira doesn't doubt were looted from the pockets of corpses on Valladia, on Ohostoi, on Kezz. Their customers, every one, were the plunder's original pillagers, haggling down the prices of items they could've pocketed for free weeks ago. The Fleet's puzzling pillage-based economy, Moira reflects, is practically a closed loop.

Every hundred steps or so, Moira sees another strange anomaly among all of Pirateton's sprawl. Poking into view between jagged metal spurs and dorsal-mounted turrets are the glitzy, glowing corporate logos of Pickle Planet, Nanosecond Pizza and Yellowtooth Cigarettes. When held against Pirateton's junkyard aesthetic, their cheap, sputtering holoneon signs becomes beacons of rarefied society.

These intergalactic conglomerates seem to have performed whatever legal acrobatics necessary to, at once, publicly condemn the Freebooter Fleet's actions and privately profit from their well-known appetite for fast food and tobacco. Their furnishings, however, are no more grandiose or expensive than their unincorporated neighbors.

Replenishing her own supply of Cancer Sticks at the handiest Yellowtooth stand, Moira imagines the megacorps enjoy Pirateton's steep inflation as much as the local fishmongers do.

It's nauseating to think that everything her eyes behold was born out of the imagined bruising of Nemo's ego by some sidelong comment from a Valladian spokesperson.

This inadvertent act of creation, the birth of a boomtown by accident, is something Moira allows herself to marvel at. The newborn pirate port is an occurrence wholly unique across all galactic history.

Nowhere but Pirateton caters so exclusively to the buccaneering way of life. Pirateton is devoid of law and all its agents – be they bounty hunters, customs officers or spice rangers – and of order – save a solitary pecking one – in a way no other anchorage across the galaxy can match. While superficially similar to both Takioro Defederate Station, Two-Bit's alma mater, and Gallow, where the Captain first cut his teeth, Pirateton lacks the former's neutrality and the latter's corruption.

In Takioro's case, Velocity tries her damnedest, in her tenure as Depot-Commissioner, to maintain her station's reputation as a place where any scoundrel can not only find a safe port, but also conduct their illicit affairs – all at her direct profit. No matter how much Nemo might balk at the notion, the Freebooter Fleet drives home a point far more political than mere petty crime.

Anyone who represents a significant threat to the Fleet, such as Dranab and his Dusty Dimick, will swiftly be eliminated by the pistol-wielding management. On Takioro, bounty hunters are frowned upon, but tolerated, since their money flows just as easily into Velocity's pockets as anyone else's. Ostensibly, Pirateton and its proprietors could care less what one's business here is – just so long as it doesn't conflict with the Fleet's business with Valladia.

In Gallow's case, Underglow remains a relatively risky place to lead a criminal's life. Despite its deeply-ingrained corruption, the local government continues to endanger the activities of the average hoodlum on a daily basis, with speed limits, prowl cars and sting operations.

In Pirateton, however, one cannot become a citizen without committing or becoming an accessory to the act of piracy. The Freebooter Fleet's reigning kleptocracy is founded on Bad Space's fundamental principle: take what's not yours. No internal corruption among the Council of Captains could ever be more egregious than the crimes those masses gleefully commit to earn a living.

Here, amid the dregs and dross of somebody's colossal blunder, arose arguably Nemo's greatest success, a haven where, at once, a pirate can comfortably kill, commerce and cavort, all the while harming the hated enemy – Valladian Shipping – in the process.

In the same breath that she wonders at the accidental industry of the place, Moira's trusty cynicism reminds her that, no matter how remarkable their purple sand castles may have become, the tide will always change. Whether the direct retribution of their target or simple ennui between successful pirates is to blame, Pirateton may be, in the galactic sense, little more than a desert mirage.

She finds the correct clothier straddling the boundary between Xendo territory and Lover territory. Moira's exceedingly careful to patronize the ship with only the utmost caution. When push came to shove, she was far more willing to be caught at the Pistol-Whip, Takioro's only bounty hunter bar, that to be caught shopping within these gently drifting tarp walls.

Moira browses as fast as she dares, forks over the outrageous fee the Xykerin shop keep demands, stuffs her purchase into an available sack and slinks, as surreptitiously as possible, from the clothing kiosk.

Her errands complete, Moira embarks on the final leg of her crosstown journey toward her ultimate destination – her more comfortable quarters aboard _The Unconstant Lover_.

The region reserved for the _Lover_ and all her supplicants is easily the largest, the grand total of Nemo's forces equal in numbers to those of Greatgullet and Charybdis combined. Very much observed as the public face of the Fleet, Nemo's service was therefore substantially more popular than any of the other Captains serving supposedly as his peers and counterparts on the Council.

His famously lax policy regarding new recruits and their experience, aptitude or criminal record was undeniably the factor to blame, however, for his own armada so outnumbering that of any other flagship. Aju Vog Xah Qaj accepted no underlings, save the odd Xend who wanders too close to her chemical signature. Greatgullet would just as soon smash the pissant wretches Nemo ends up recruiting as enlist them. Vobash only extended his blessing towards established associates and Charybdis' strict military ethos found a potential peon wanting more often than it found them suitable.

To Nemo, then, came the tired, the hungry, the unwashed masses yearning to be pirates. A true blue megalomaniac, he conscripted every single one of them.

To find proof that Nemo's loyalists weren't quite up to snuff, all one needed to do was tour a short section of his territory. Moira stoops to pass beneath rotten overhangs and she insinuates her body between support struts stacked within mere feet of each other. She navigates the tangled mess of mangy, unimpressive spacecraft with both the growing ease of familiarity and the heightened caution of unfamiliar ground. The changeable nature of Pirateton's alleyways were a treacherous enterprise at the best of times.

The spaceships that line the streets she walks would only be thought of as capable to pillage and plunder by their individual captains and certainly no one else. They were public transit vessels, they were shipyard backloaders, they were an abundance of interplanetary tugs, not to mention the scads upon scads of bloomhole-ugly remixes. They all came with ill-fitting weapons clumsily soldered onto their sides. They were all crewed by inexperienced yahoos of every species and anatomy imaginable, each driven to delusion by the promise of booty, babes and booze. They were all crammed ever closer after each successful sack, attempting to claw their way to a cherished position within sight of their piratical patron.

For every competent corsair, Gertie and her _Dick Magnet_ regrettably among them, she encounters, Moira circuits beneath, around or between the ships of five incompetent roadies.

Moira bickers briefly with a this-time Phnuki fishmonger over an overpriced morsel of broiled jiihu tongue to surprise Odisseus with. Moira howls promised derision and a smattering of warning fire from Lefty onto the aforementioned Cannonball Dogs imitators, discovered not far from her walk home. Moira smirks knowingly at the sudden increase of novelty shops specializing in eyepatches, tricorn hats and squawking, shouldermounted pets, as she takes each step closer to _The Unconstant Lover_ and its mercurial, affectations captain.

Besides the buskers, brokers, beggars and buccaneers, Moira also spies more members of a strange subcaste emerging amongst Pirateton's populace. Much like the memorabilia merchants, they grow much concentrated with proximity to the Lover: the press.

Moira'd only confirmed their actual existence when she'd collared one, disguised with a surprising cunning as an ordinary brigand. This Gibblan, more fidgety than a fingered Flask, originally arose Moira's suspicions toward another camp; assuming the little slime was a spy for Xo, Valladia or someone worse.

According to her testimony, though, Pirateton was lousy with newshounds. Representatives from all the major publications of the Outer Ring were apparently hoping to snap a holo or bag a quote from that most elusive of quarry; Nehel Morel, widely suspected Admiral of the Freebooter Fleet.

Moira'd predictably sent the Gibblan packing. Out of some undeserved sense of preservation for the Captain's wellbeing, she'd neglected on informing His Majesty, for fear of inflating his planet-wide ego any more.

It's this same vigilance that clues Moira into the next legitimate threat to the continued existence of the Freebooter Fleet, zottibles before any of her comrades or crewmates are.

In the business of acquiring a preferable pirate ship, a decommissioned or commandeered Imperium military craft is really the ideal choice. Generally designed for broadsider tactics, they came equipped with everything a pirate could possibly want in one package. They had thicker hulls, naval-quality shields, more system space allotted for weaponry and onboard life support accommodating of larger, more boarding capable crews. Overall tougher and more dependable than your average cargo freighter, they were a common and sought-after staple of the piracy-and-privateering market.

Thusly, it's no great shock to spot a workhorse of the Endless Imperium's planetary invasion forces offloading its entire crew down a spacious boarding ramp and onto the purple sands of Talos II. The TFS 792 Onslaught-Class Heavy Troop Transport is painted, appareled and dilapidated in all the ways one expects a pirate ship to be. Fresh ditrogen scars and holoposters of scantily-clad sentients are visible on her hull and she bears the tongue-in-cheek handle _The Spitting Image_.

At first glance, Moira almost mistakes the craft for Greatgullet's _Rule of Thumb_. At second glance, Moira correctly identifies the craft as belonging to a significantly newer model, the 792 only recently having rolled off the factory floor. At third glance, Moira acknowledges that the scores upon scores of individuals that hustle down the ramp, belong to a comparatively limited number of species. Beyond the overwhelming majority of humanoids, every pirate that emerges from the _Image's_ cargo bay belongs to an Inner Sector race – Gantor, Fjoran, Karracki, even a Moza or two are visible among their ranks.

At fourth glance, Moira realizes they're all wielding identical SV7s.

Within five seconds, instinct sidles Moira aside and into the comforting shadow of an adjacent aviary. None of the comical peki macaws squawk or even ruffle a green feather at her unnoticed entrance. Within fifteen seconds, she's dialing Nemo's comm frequency.

Waiting through the white noise, Moira watches the "pirate crew" of _The Spitting Image_ hoof their way, in a loose practice march, through the fragmented forest of hull pieces and pieced-together hulls.

Their destination is child's play to deduce; the looming cruiser-shapes specter of the Council chamber.

"Wake up, you lazy cocksuckers," Moira whisperingly cajoles to nothing but static.

" _Garrok Brondi's Complimentary Cocksucking Service,_ " comes the sing-song reply. "How may I direct your buzz?"

"Are you on the ship?" hisses Moira immediately.

Today, Nemo's jovial. "Hey, it's you."

"Are you on the ship?"

"Hey, it's Moira," Nemo repeats distantly to someone, who responds in a startling combination of Jabber and Ortoki, leading Moira to conclude he rather addresses someones.

"Are you on the ship?"

"Do you have the dice?"

" _Yes are you on the ship_ ," Moira screams in stage-whisper. The macaws swinging all around her finally squawk and ruffle their feathers, noticing her now for the first time.

"We are," Nemo grants.

"Take off."

"What? Where?" Moira pictures Nemo's exact expression. "Moira says take off?" he once again questions somewhere behind.

"Take off now," Moira insists. "Buzz the other four Captains, tell them to do likewise. The most important thing is that, in the shortest amount of time possible, nobody's grounded. You understand?"

"Not even remotely."

"The fuzz," Moira savors the shock of informing, "is here. For you."

This inspires a substantial pause. "The _fuzz_ fuzz? Not Valladia?"

"Not Xo, not Valladia," Moira confirms grimly. "The other guy."

The pause inspired by this confirmation dwarfs the first and a severe change in the Captain's tone is included, free of charge. "Well, was happening sooner or later."

Moira matches his tone dour for dark. "All good things."

"You know how many?"

She squints. "I've been counting best I can. Hundred, maybe two, but there's no way to know if this's the only place they've landed." She risks a slight smirk. "You want I should lessen that number?"

Nemo's own smirk is audible over the comm. "Why not?" Moira rises from her crouch, her thumb placed to sever her comm's connection, when Nemo's stipulation catches her off guard. "And Moira?"

"Yes, Nemo?"

"Bring the dice?"

The Captain is only spared Moira's glower by distance and line of sight. In one motion, she switches the comm dead and loops it back onto her belt. Her parcels secured on her forearms, Moira prowls from cover into open light, Righty and Lefty drawn within the space of two steps.

The shuffling column of disguised infantry goes primarily ignored by the majority of the witless boobs and gormless blowbags that trouble all the space surrounding _The Unconstant Lover_. In order to best slow their progress, Moira can only devise a single strategy: to expose them.

Righty and Lefty sing their deadly duet. Three covert commandos, two humanoids and a Fivvite, billow the purple dust with their falling bodies. Everyone within a certain radius of earshot freezes, uncertain why Moira Quicksilver, _The Unconstant Lover's_ black-clad phantom, has initiated a street fight with this suspiciously well-ordered boarding party.

As the populace's own firearms make their first appearance and _The Spitting Image's_ crew finds themselves completely surrounded by unfriendly and heavily-armed hoodlums, Moira can only pray that Pirateton survives the homegrown carnage sure to follow.

Odisseus has never, in three years spent serving alongside her, been so relieved to see Moira Quicksilver alive and well. With pistols afire and shopping bags draped over her shoulders, she comes bounding, out of breath, back up the _Lover's_ boarding ramp.

The Ortok may have always carried a certain torch of suspicion concerning the ship's resident bounty hunter. Listening to the ditrogen-laced commotion outside the Briza's triple-thick walls, though, he half-expected Quicksilver to be among those fatally caught in the crossfire and is strangely relieved to realize his mistake.

She's onboard less than five seconds before Odisseus punches flush the ramp's control button and barks "she's in" into his paw-gripped communicator. The helm's reaction is similarly instantaneous, as Odisseus braces his space legs against the firing of the _Lover's_ driftjets.

"A welcoming committee?" a panting and sweat-drenched Moira Quicksilver appraises as she approaches the Ortok. "Should I be flattered?"

"I wouldn't be." Odisseus extends a paw. "He wants the dice."

With an oft-rehearsed and unanimous roll of their eyes, Moira drops the connecting string onto the Ortok's waiting pad. With a complimentary gesture, she hefts one of the parcels. "You hungry?"

"Jiihu tongue? You shouldn't have."

Moira scowls, disappointment coloring her features. "You can smell that?"

"There ain't a fish tongue on this moon I can't smell."

She passes the purchased meal into his opposite paw. "Bon appetit, then." An explosion without, the sound of something ancient, decrepit and teltriton collapsing, suddenly draws them both back into the situation at hand. "Really coming down out there," Moira observes, with breathless nonchalance.

"I heard," Odisseus returns, shifting his weight in preparation of his own departure. "You might wanna find yourself an Antagonist."

Together, they cross the cargo hold and climb up the companionway in uneasy silence. In one fell swoop, both their individual predictions regarding galactic backlash to the Freebooter Fleet came concertedly true. It was Odisseus who predicted that someone would successfully intervene before they'd sacked all ten targets and it was Moira who predicted it would be some unrevealed enemy, neither Xo nor Valladia.

If the Endless Imperium, with all of its warships and all of its men, had indeed come to pay Pirateton a visit, _The Unconstant Lover_ and her crew would be exceedingly lucky to even escape their city of make-believe alive.

"It's a short-range vessel, remember," Moira reminds at the entrance to the gundeck, giving Odisseus pause.

"What's a short-range vessel?"

"The 792," she supplies, her breath still labored from exertion. "That's the chief difference between the 773, the one Greatgullet flies, and the 792, the one they've got. The new one, the 792, is short-range."

"Which means?"

"Which means," she explains with an unmistakable degree of annoyance, "they came from somewhere, didn't they?" She nods to his package. "Enjoy the fish."

As though this constitutes an actual explanation, she's gone, the door to the gundeck sliding closed behind her. A confused Odisseus, fuzzy black dice bumping against his tool belt and mind suddenly flooded with the idiosyncrasies of Heavy Troop Transports, hurries the remainder of the distance between the abovedecks corridor and the helm door, left ajar for his return.

"Comm chatter be comparatively thick for one boatload," greets Abraham's voice, piped in from his perpetual perch in the sensor room, as Odisseus enters. "This is quite an operation, sounds like."

"Well, widen the sweep," commands the Captain, flicking the switches and adjusting the dials necessary for take-off. "See if you can't raise me a definite number."

"Aye aye, Cap'n."

"Two-Bit," Nemo's issuing orders to co-pilot's seat already, "shields spread evenly. Start with ray, but have bombard prepped. Somebody gets smart with a rocket launcher, I don't wanna be chewing repellent, savvy?"

"Aye aye, Cap'n," Two-Bit answers dutifully, punching keys and calibrating the shield station's gyroscopic rig.

"Special delivery," Odisseus announces, with a distinct sardonic lilt and a hoisting of the proffered dice.

The sound Nemo makes, upon noticing his saltbrother's presence for the first time, is the sort a nine-year-old makes when he opens his birthday present. "She chose well," he adds. "She's alive then?"

"She's alive," the comm asserts in Moira's voice, the indication light next to Port 10 (Topturret) coming alive in proclamitory red.

"You chose well," Nemo shouts towards the comm console, before turning towards Odisseus. "Would you care to do the honors?"

Approaching the rearview imager and subsequently the viewport grants Odisseus a decent view of the pandemonium that's suddenly usurped the once "peaceful" streets of Pirateton. Insulated by the _Lover's_ sturdy teltriton hull, everything Odisseus observes in the ten seconds spent draping the pair of novelty fuzzy dice over Nemo's rearview imager is conducted in eerie silence.

A multicolored fog bank of excess ditrogen floods the city below, generated by the sporadic sparking of red, green, orange and yellow laserfire. Every few seconds, Odisseus will spot a number of figures move through breaks in the miasma, only the color loosed from their ammunition capable of distinguishing friend from foe. One side fires the guilty red of the Imperium shock troops, the other the indecisive green, orange and yellow of the besieged pirate population.

While mass confusion reigns over the spontaneous slaughter that rages all around, it's the architecture and facades that receive the worst of the damage. Wreckage, rubble and ruins all contribute their own inky black smoke to the accumulating cloud that plagues Pirateton.

Shuffling away from the viewport, Odisseus is hauntingly reminded of a certain clearing in the jungles of Baz's northern continent and the similar shock-and-awe tactics employed there to exterminate the indigenous peoples.

"Now, that's a handsome sight, don't you think?" opines Nemo.

"What?" snarls an appalled Odisseus, spinning on his saltbrother.

"Oh, no." Nemo waves his hands once and cranes in his seat to glance down the viewport. "That's a shitstorm out there. I'm talking about the dice."

Odisseus is forced to follow the Captain's finger and consider the pair of skull-and-crossbone-emblazoned fuzzy dice that swing stupidly beneath the rearview imager, undercut, somewhat, by the murder and mayhem unfolding behind them.

In lieu of a reply, the Ortok stomps backward to the shielding station, to comfort-devour his portion of jiihu tongue.

"Cap'n," interjects Abraham, "I'm reading as many as five of the buggers, parked at various points 'round town." The sensor display nearest Nemo wavers once and five pinpricks of red materialize into view. "With a few hundred razorbacks each, me best guess'll put near a thousand of the blighters on the ground already."

"One in each district makes a certain degree of sense," evaluates Nemo soberly. As Odisseus tears his greasy fish from its tin prison, the Captain clasps the yoke and yanks unexpectedly upward, the buoying driftjets bouncing _The Unconstant Lover_ from a standing position to a story or so's height above the ground. "Means their escape route can be cut off."

Two-Bit's retracting the landing gear with a few furious taps of an adjacent console seconds before he bothers to reply. "Is there anybody even riding underturret?"

Her driftjets still her primary form of propulsion, the Briza banks gently starboard, the embattled district that bears her namesake spreading out before him. "Ventral?" Nemo yammers into his headset. "Ventral? Jargon, you reading?"

"Underturret's empty," Moira's too satisfied to report. "I checked."

Nemo shrugs theatrically. "Guess we'll be doing this bassackwards, then. Odi–" he begins to bark, before the addressed Ortok interrupts him.

"You can't mean–" Odisseus sputters. "Nemo, in atmo, the sheer strain to–"

Even as he voices his objections, the expression on his saltbrother's face informs Odisseus it's all for naught anyway. "You might wanna have a sit down with the inertial compensator."

The vaguest possible warning given, Nemo, with one hand, fires both jetboosters sequentially. With the other hand, he twists the steering yoke sharply enough to starboard to half-barrel roll the Briza, until up is down and down is up. The Captain, the cutpurse and the mechanic are individually staggered by this sudden reversal of perspective, with the top of the viewport now displaying the open sky and the bottom of the viewport the cluttered city.

The inertial compensator, the dodgy old specimen Nemo wouldn't spring to replace, handles the mammoth task of offsetting the moon's unrelenting gravitational pull marginally well. Everyone remains, more or less, tethered to the helm floor, but hair, clothing, ignition keys, even several items among the helm's perpetual state of slovenly mess, stand on end, drift into space or wave strangely as though underwater.

What does not survive this transition, of course, is Odisseus' jiihu tongue. His lunch falls like dead weight from its packaging and slaps the helm's ceiling with a wet splash. The Ortok sighs mournfully and crumples the empty tin wrapping in his paws.

A curse-muttering Two-Bit fumbles about with his safety straps and Nemo, his partially-disintegrated duster wafting about his chair, calms the driftjets. Meanwhile, Odisseus, all his fur dancing in some imagined wind, wanders drunkenly out the exit and towards the nearest terminal that would grant him access to the overworked compensator. Along the way, he grumbles his fair share of Ortoki curses.

"Dorsal," Odisseus hears Nemo call into his communicator, "can you get visual on this nearest sneaky bastard?"

"I haven't forgotten" Moira claims back through the comm. Gripping the helm's doorjamb with one paw and opening the adjacent terminal control box with the other, Odisseus catches sight of sterling green retribution, snaking down from a position normally reserved for _The Unconstant Lover's_ underturret. After some seconds, it inspires an explosion that, in addition to its target, cripples or craters each encircling spaceship.

"Good enough," appraises Nemo and, seconds later, the upside-down _Lover_ is blasting along in search of its next target. From his appointed post before the inertial compensator, Odisseus can see only the merest view of the gunfights, firefights and general unhappiness that're currently all the rage in Pirateton. He does manage to relegate some power from life support to the poor compensator, enough to make onboard movement mostly unhindered but not enough to allow their extremities and airborne objects to return for a landing.

"Unless you're willing to take a hit from the big three," Odisseus warns, referring to engines, weapons or shields, "this's as good as the compensator's gonna get."

His black mane more erect than a mad scientist's, Nemo doesn't seem to notice. "Perfect. Everybody keep their eyes peeled for other flagships."

Odisseus holds his position before the terminal and almost objects, reasoning that there was no way the naked eye was liable to spot a departing spaceship before Abraham and his sophisticated sensor room equipment would. Two-Bit rushes to prove him wrong, however, firing a point across what, on a righted spaceship, would be starboard bow. " _Eyesore_! There!"

Sure enough, lifting clumsily off the sands, its nimbus of dissimilar starfighters already in buzzing agitation about it, comes Aju Vog Xah Qaj's colonyship. She clears the ungainly spires and jagged shards of Pirateton by meager feet and cuts a diagonal path across _The Unconstant Lover's_ viewport, heading straight skyward.

"Where's she going?" mutters Nemo, perfectly in time with Odisseus' own mental question. "Maybe just re-establish radio contact with her, Abraham. See if she'd like to rendezvous in low orbit."

"Aye aye, Cap'n."

"Second target acquired," chimes in Moira. "Permission to reduce it to cinders?"

Another downpour of ditrogen, another troop transport destroyed and only three such targets should remain. The third, fourth and fifth such ships, craftily concealed amid the mottibles upon mottibles of parked pirates, are successively smitten, one by one, as _The Unconstant Lover_ and her supremely-skilled topturret gunner complete their three-hundred-and-sixty-degree aerial tour of historic Pirateton.

With equal frequency, the three remaining flagships of the Freebooter Fleet are seen to depart the battleground, some with more haste than others. There's one white-knuckling moment of mistaken identity when Moira nearly open fired upon Greatgullet's _Rule of Thumb_ , his ship resembling the enemy's landers so strongly.

The inertial compensator, meanwhile, grapples mightily with Talos II's implacable hold on the _Lover_ and bleeds system power generously. Requiring a constant Ortoki paw to regulate and maintain the status quo, Odisseus is forced to perform this duty yards from the nearest safety harness.

Following the destruction of the fifth and final of the Imperium's 792s, however, Nemo is thankfully wise enough not to dawdle a second longer than is absolutely necessary. With increased power to Port and Starboard, he skyrockets _The Unconstant Lover_ away from the surface and unerringly towards open space.

"Short of potshotting individual assholes," Nemo supposes regretfully as Odisseus, still lingering in the doorway, hurriedly swaps power back into the ship's life support, "that's the best we can do. We hafta hope numbers and panic prevail over those Imperium blowbags." His teeth grit harshly together. "I sure don't like running."

"What's most important now," Two-Bit is first to voice, "is that all five dapadans is fucking out of stook."

"What's most important now is findin' a new base o' operations," Abraham counterpoints. "Even just temporary-like."

"Maybe," Odisseus speculates, "what's most important now is to quit while we're ahead."

"None of those are that important," mutters Moira musically.

"Thinking anywhere in particular?" Nemo prompts, ignoring Odisseus as rote.

"Ain't sure. Lemme squeeze over into the warp room," Abraham excuses himself. As he tromps back into the helm to, once again, plant himself in the shield operating station, Odisseus sees the scarlet light next to Port 3 (Sensor Room) wink out.

"Abraham, wait–" Moira urges, milliseconds too late.

"Any other moon of Talos," Nemo conjectures idly, as whiffs of effervescent cloud scatter and dissolve against the viewport, "would be way too close. Takioro's way too obvious."

"Vel ain't ready for us yet," Two-Bit mentions offhandedly.

"How about," Odisseus puts his two cents forward, "Offchart? Like deep, deep Offchart?"

Nemo sours his expression in distaste. "Blech. Try to imagine forcing all five Captains to agree on one set of Offchart coordinates. Like herding jborra across vast distances of interstellar space."

Moira's incoming apology is as inauthentic as any the _Lover's_ forged weapon licenses. "Sorry to be a spoilsport," she interjects as atmospheric flames start tonguing faintly at the edges of the _Lover's_ projected ray shield, "but it occurs to me that we may have more pressing problems."

"Such as?" Two-Bit dangles.

"Clean jumps outta Talos include Saxon, Umij and Zbagi Major," Abraham informs helpfully. "Probably best, however, if we avoid the sector entirely. Offchart'd, I reckon, be safest. A blooming nightmare to coordinate, though." When no reply from helm or topturret is forthcoming, only the sound of rattling freighter and internal comm static answer Abraham. "Cap'n? Ye there? Do ye copy, Cap'n?"

At the moment, Nemo did not copy. He, along with Two-Bit Switch, Odisseus and likely Moira Quicksilver, high in her lofty topturret, currently stare agog, like dumbfounded bystanders before an escalating driftrain wreck, out the viewport. A bizarrely beatific sight awaits them a scarce few dottibles beyond Talos II's stratosphere.

Against the ebon backdrop of deep space, lightly dusted by distant stars, _The Rule of Thumb_ , _The Loose Cannon_ , _The Eyesore_ and _The Dishonorable Discharge_ are all visible, hanging idly in low orbit. Their own captains and crewmen, across all four of their craft, likely stand and sit as agog and dumbfounded by what they've discovered as the _Lover's_ own crew are.

For, lurking barely a broadside battery's range away, are not only four TFS 889 Chaperone-class Capital Clippers, already moving to intercept the stalling pirates. Indeed no, as two TFS 115 Overwhelm-class Mobile Fighter Gantries, already spilling Imperium Spur fighters in preparation for the bloodbath to come, accompany them. Most saliently, however, a TFS 545 Pylon-class Capital Warship, the most overexaggeratedly-sized craft in the entire Imperium Interstellar Navy, twiddles its proverbial thumbs patiently, awaiting the arrival of famed and ferocious Freebooter Fleet.

The central console that contains the main communicator burbles to life shortly following _The Unconstant Lover's_ tardy entrance. Through the accustomed static, a predictably stuffy voice, suffused with naval arrogance, resounds through helm, gundeck and hold. " _Unconstant Lover_ , this is Admiral Tynd of the Imperium Naval Cruiser _Preemptive Strike_ hereby ordering you, in the name of the Endless Imperium, to peacefully power down your engines and prepare to be boarded, detained and arrested. Do you copy?"

Chapter 19

Two-Bit Switch perfectly recalls their bygone battle with the _Exacting Counterattack_ , down to each and every last painful, excruciating detail.

He recalls a Captain so sloshed he couldn't, at any given moment, completely comprehend all of the events occurring around him. He recalls the _Lover_ flying wholly blindfolded as the only conceivable failsafe against the Pylon's legions of quadroturrets. He recalls the ceaseless swarms of Spurs, hounding and harrying them for every inch of progress they achieved. Fatefully, he recalls the orbit-to-surface crash that, thanks to some timely intervention by Nemo, was responsible only for thoroughly totaling _The Unconstant Lover_ and pulverizing its undergunner into paste.

The thought of replicating it all, the entire dreadful experience, with zero preparation, nearly plummets Two-Bit instantly into the depths of stark, irrevocable madness. All that retains Two-Bit's slipping grip on his sanity is the knowledge that, should he officially go bonkers, that'd leave Odisseus alone with two raging lunatics in the helm with him.

"This is doable," raves the first lunatic, cranking the yoke as hard to port as physically possible, to circle _The Unconstant Lover_ at the absolute edge of the Pylon's outermost range. "I know what everybody's thinking. This is totally doable, though. This was doable once, it's perfectly doable again."

"With no preparation?" moans the despairing Two-Bit.

"With less preparation!" Nemo knit-picks with nervous exuberance. "It's just a matter of retracing our steps. Blindfold the ship, punch the shield generators, fire the–" The realization strikes him solidly. "Oh, sure."

"No Wolfsbane torpedoes?" Moira assumes in her award-winning deadpan.

"Gotta remember to get my hands on a few of those," Nemo murmurs to himself.

Two-Bit doesn't even blink. "I know a guy."

"On the upside, I'm mostly sober this time around!" Nemo announces with further fidgety optimism. "Abraham, what'd be the ETA on a totally hypothetical blindfold?"

"Erm," the stymied Grimalti mutters, "I'm still in the warp room."

"Stay there," Odisseus barks sharply. "We're warping out."

"Smart," compliments Moira.

"Are we now?" Nemo snorts.

"I don't see any reason why we wouldn't be." Odisseus' resolve is unflinching. "Seeing as how we're outnumbered, outgunned and outmaneuvered."

"Oh, hello, _Captain_ ," Nemo salutes the Ortok suddenly, sarcasm thick across his entire demeanor. "Would you like to come claim your _Captain's_ seat?"

"Much as I hate to be the bearer of bad tidin's," Abraham announces, "but there ain't no way we can warp outta here–"

"See?" Nemo sneers defiantly.

"–seein' as how they've deactivated the warp gate and all," the Grimalti concludes. This revelation is followed by a healthy pause. Two-Bit's eyes even snap unconsciously towards the titanic shape of the _Preemptive Strike_ , dominating the center of the evolving fleet action.

Full interdiction of a Warp Gate was the holiest of holies, a rubber stamp reserved for only the highest Admirals of the Interstellar Navy and the paper-pushing bureaucrats of IntraGalaxy Transpo to wield. By brandishing executive privilege to reduce Talos' local Warp Gate into nothing but a massive, floating curiosity, this Admiral Tynd and his 4th Fleet cronies were spelling out an unmistakably clear message.

The head honchos of the Endless Imperium were no longer particularly amused by the Outer Ring antics of Nemo's own Freebooter Fleet.

Not to mention, Two-Bit appreciates, the point that the _Preemptive Strike_ couldn't possibly fathom any need for an escape route for themselves.

"And there's no way you can establish enough of a lock someplace else," Moira supposes, "for a dirty jump?"

"Not for a spell here, no," confesses the sailing master, his voice heavy with finality. "Warp engineering ain't no exact science, but I wager I'd need fifteen, sixteen minutes, plus for the _Lover_ to be standin' relatively still."

"So we stay and fight, then?" Nemo evaluates gracelessly. "We're agreed?"

"How?" grouses Odisseus plaintively, gesturing a bewildered paw towards the Pylon on the viewport's periphery. Before anyone can offer their professional, capital-ship-smashing opinion, a blinking alert, a standardized breach of proximity, catches the corner of Two-Bit's eye.

"Jocks!" he declares, scrambling to adjust the shielding package accordingly. "A squadron and some, 41 greez ventrie–"

Two-Bit's warning is superseded by the familiar and unpleasant sound of laserfire. A heartbeat after his re-allocation of the ray shields, a squadron and some's worth of starfighter fire buffets against the _Lover's_ protected aft. Their strafing run met with marginal success, the starfighter squadron – composed entirely of Spurs, the Imperium's trademark interceptor that favored sheer numbers over skill or sophistication – subdivides around the _Lover_. They reform into the wider squadron some distance past the freighter's famously dented prow.

Two-Bit hastens to wheel the ray shields fully about and cover the regrouping squadron's next logical point of attack. Moira's angered Antagonist bears down on the fleeing fighters with bright green chastisement. Nemo pitches the ship inches to port in preparation to yaw her goofily starboard. "Guess we're doing evasive," he sighs knowingly and pumps the clutchlever.

_The Unconstant Lover_ rollicks, full-throttle and sideways, into the outermost edges of the Pylon's maximum range. Seconds behind her swings an entire squadron of K4 Spur-class Individual Interceptors. The portrait painted through her viewport – a sprawling spacescape – is a staggering portrayal of the sort of massive, ship-to-ship combat the like of which Two-Bit Switch, having spent the majority of his criminal career attempting to avoid, has never before borne witness to.

With the churning clouds of Talos' great gas giant as an ever-present canvas against which to cast their conflict, the lesser ships of the invading 4th Fleet clash explosively against the four flagships of the defending Freebooter Fleet.

Two Chaperones, their respective batteries afire, sandwich _The Rule of Thumb_ between them. Performed on any other craft, this maneuver would be an eviscerating rake. That scrappy bastard Greatgullet, of course, somehow manages to transform into a foolish mistake. His broadside shields absorb the brunt of each blow and his own batteries give back better than they were given.

_The Eyesore_ instructs the nearest Fjoran Mobile Gantry the meaning of the phrase "swarm tactics." Flawlessly timed strafing runs by Xendo fighters overwhelm the deployment cruiser's dwindling shields. With the same motion, the thrumming buffer of sacrificial starfighters abuzz about _The Eyesore_ absolutely refuses to allow a single projectile within harming distance of their colonyship.

A Chaperone each engages _The Loose Cannon_ and _The Dishonorable Discharge_. The former's rapid-fire disabler cannons make laughable mincemeat of its opponent's systems. The latter, its solxite swollen with strength from the nearby sun, punches neat holes through its opponent's hull with its alternatech energy blasts.

The _Preemptive Strike_ , however, deigns to comment on any of the proceedings. It looms an unreachable distance beyond the chief theatre of conflict, with each and every one of the action's participants fully within the scopes of its long-range quadroturrets.

The principal threat to _The Unconstant Lover_ , however, is this swath of starfighters currently eating her exhaust and the Fjoran Mobile Gantry they call home.

Gawky, ponderous spacecraft, each Gantry was capable, when its hollow, skeleton arms were fully stocked, of carrying some hundred Spurs into battle. Her massive maneuvering thrusters engaged, the X-shaped deployment cruiser attempts her damnedest to intercept the incoming _Lover_. Along the way, she spews enough Spurs to make the freighter's current pursuers look like a Gallwegian gang of teenage toughs by way of comparison.

With each approaching enemy ship, Two-Bit's proximity sensor glows all the more red and he exchanges a uncomfortable expression with Odisseus. Having claimed the shield station chair directly behind Two-Bit, the Ortok had inherited the dire responsibility of keeping the regenerative ray shields as close to capacity as the shipborne systems would allow.

Risking to leave their aft somewhat unshielded, Two-Bit Switch focuses his full attention forward, toward the rapidly approaching Mobile Gantry and the throngs upon throngs of Spurs she belches forth with each passing second.

Starfighters supplant the viewport. Ditrogen dimples the ray shields with each successive strike. _The Unconstant Lover_ is the shield-shrouded eye at the center of a storm of Spurs. Each individual raindrop is a spray of searing laserfire that, thanks to the tireless efforts of Odisseus and the exact positioning of Two-Bit Switch, splashes uselessly against the freighter's projected protection.

After a single harrowing second amid the squall of shooting, the Briza breaks blessedly through. Her ray shields hold at a frightening 4%, but an open path to the defenseless Mobile Gantry ahead has been plowed.

There's a minute of reprieve while the hurricane of spent Spurs musters themselves for another devastating pass. During that minute, it quickly becomes Moira Quicksilver's moment to shine. While the first mate and her trusty Antagonist undoubtedly sowed their fair share of destruction among the first wave of attackers, the relish Moira derives from the sudden presentation of a worthwhile target is palpable even from the helm.

In another sterling example of a tactic she's slowly been perfecting, Moira use the minimum amount of ammunition necessary to shard and splinter off one of the cruiser's four gantries. The Fjoran fighter-dispenser lists aside sickeningly in response as one of its component X-arms, its supports shattered by exacting Antagonist fire, twists and shears away from the cruiser's main body.

Spotting her tactic out of hand, the Captain charts a complimentary course to this newest tactic of his top-mounted gunner. As _The Unconstant Lover_ weaves back and forth, Moira repeats the process with equally debilitating results to the Mobile Gantry, three of its four cumbersome limbs now amputated with surgically-precise ditrogen.

This done, Nemo negotiates the _Lover_ completely around the crippled cruiser and rockets off to rejoin their apart companions. The following storm front of starfighters are left to navigate the obstacle course of cross-hatched girders, docking créches and splintered teltriton – all that now remains of their dismembered mothership.

"Ray edgies tragged up to 55% and climbing," reports Two-Bit gratefully. Behind him, Odisseus snarks some comment in Ortoki, of which "mention" is the only discernible word.

"Boss!" crackles a familiar voice over the main comm input feed. "Lookit what I did!"

What Greatgullet did, visible mainly as blast-strewn wreckage and flailing crewmen spinning listlessly past the viewport, was quite impossible to miss. A spaceship graveyard most accurately describes the massacre outlaid panoramically before the approach of _The Unconstant Lover_. The halved and holed hulks of Chaperone, Gantry and starfighter alike are scattered liberally across Talos II's low orbit.

Each one of the four flagships is a stable among the field of chopped and chewed spacecraft. Miraculously, each still remains afloat but bears open or demonstrable wounds, the price of heavy combat with even underprepared military vessels. The press of fighters about _The Eyesore_ is substantially thinner. Something smokes incriminatingly from the _Cannon's_ port quarter. A generous spread of pockmarks and perforations discolor the _Discharge's_ once glossy surface.

The _Rule_ , in stark contrast to Greatgullet's boasting, bears the most grievous injuries. Several broadside shields are simply missing and the airlocks or batteries beneath have been reduced to blackened smudges against the transport's hull.

"Captains," Nemo addresses into an open comm channel, "how's everybody feeling?"

"Like running," confesses Vobash from his smoking _Cannon_.

" _Surprised_ ," sings Charybdis. " _These-boys-play-for-keeps_."

"RUNNING IS AN IMPOSSIBILITY," a droidvox, Aju Vog Xah Qaj's preferred method of ship-to-ship communication, chimes in. "WE HAVE ATTEMPTED AND FAILED TO MAKE CONTACT WITH THE WARP GATE. WE BELIEVE THESE IMPERIAL SWINE TO BE THE RESPONSIBLE PARTY."

"Trust me," Vobash counters. "I'm aware."

This earns a scoff from Greatgullet. "We're long outside running away."

"Agreed," Nemo unsurprisingly concurs. "Coulda, woulda, shoulda."

" _What's-the-play, then?_ " questions Charybdis calmly, as though their current circumstances – chatting over broadwave comm while they float amongst the splinterized bodies of their slain enemies – were standard operating procedure for their council meetings.

"There's always landing," Greatgullet proposes, toothless grin audible in the mere suggestion. "Bring them to even ground. Getta swipe at the cocksuckers."

Vobash's annoyance is equally tangible across a divide of greater distance. "You do realize they carry a crew compliment over forty thousand strong? Where, in your brain, does that constitute 'even ground'?"

Greatgullet's flustered from his first word. "Well–"

An impact so jarring it could nearly have tossed Two-Bit forcefully from his seat and straight through the viewport, were it not for his overcompensation of safety restraints, judders _The Unconstant Lover_ to her bones.

Each member of the _Lover's_ helm struggles to retain their composure in the face of this sudden and unexpected onslaught of overwhelming force. The screaming displays and flashing alarms grant the baffled Two-Bit the insight he needs to deduce the angle of attack, the extent of the damage to the ray shields and where to reposition said shields in order to best cushion against the raining blows.

As the Briza is continually lambasted by percussive blasts from its above assailant, Two-Bit strains with all his might to crane the gyroscopic rig in the right direction. He double-folds what remains of the ray shields against the unholy red cannonade streaming down onto the Freebooter Fleet's five flagships from the quadroturret cannons of the lofty _Preemptive Strike_.

Like a certain pair of hobnailed jackboots brought brutally to bear upon a gathering of roaches, the _Preemptive Strike_ stomps down atop the feeble freighters with righteous and seemingly unstoppable might. As effective as they may have proved against the 4th Fleet's first wave, the true terror, the powerful Pylon hanging high in reserve, promises to make playthings of the puny pirates with one swift and simple salvo.

Shield strength plummets from 59% to 38% to 21% with each escalating second of the so-called exchange. With precise positioning of the yoke, Nemo's able to intercede pieces of adjacent debris – the concussed corpses of the Pylon's departed allies – between the _Lover_ and the ammunition of its assailant. This tactic, when observed, is quickly replicated by the remainder of the Freebooter Fleet, seeking shelter wherever they can beneath and between the smote and shelled starships.

"Think maybe Greatgullet's is the right idea here?" proposes Nemo suddenly, trepidation now present beneath his tone. "Land? Get some distance?"

"DO WE THINK THEY WON'T FOLLOW?"

"Well, that or get fucking obliterated. Your choice."

The workaday bleat of the proximity alert, coming from a console near Two-Bit's elbow, distinguishes itself against the more immediate noises of the barrage from above. "Incoming, Cap'n," a perplexed Two-Bit attempts to warn, "we've a gantine, up from the moon, looks like–"

At full tilt, the spaceship that spiked _The Unconstant Lover's_ proximity alert, shrouded in flame and rising, phoenix-like, from beneath the atmosphere of the moon below, roars diagonally past the viewport. Two-Bit reads the ident flashing across his screen, though the words are mangled unrecognizably by the bellow of the passing thrusters.

"–the _Magnet_."

Heedless to the laserfire flung towards her and her cowering fellow freebooters, _The Dick Magnet_ , that distinctive IV1 Belladonna with her nose-mounted firepower, weaves an erratic path higher and higher in orbit. Her forward-bent ray shield absorbs what little of the Pylon's downward laserfire her unpredictable flying couldn't avoid. In the _Lover's_ helmsman's seat, Nemo's mouth opens in some manner of objection, before the proximity alert, like an insistent child, chirrups yet again.

"Incoming, Cap'n," Two-Bit, staring at the relevant sensor, finds himself repeating slower and more uncertainly, "we've, er, got more gantines..."

One by one, in chaotic clusters or in impromptu squadrons do they come. They climb out of the clutch of Talos II's atmosphere and they circumnavigate the floating teltriton chum to charge the unchallenged Pylon high above.

Disparate, asymmetrical and uncoordinated, they evade or deflect the plunging ditrogen bolts as successfully as their unskilled pilots or flimsy shields will allow. Even within the limited sight of the _Lover's_ viewport, dozens are destroyed outright, dashed to pieces or diverted to crumple against the nearest detritus.

More, however, among the hundreds, survive. Converted cargo haulers, Trijan junks, commandeered cruisers, Hesko tankers, rickety remixes, Saurian barges and even one repurposed school bus – all come galloping up from the slums of Pirateton. The city's citizens and indeed very buildings taking up arms in her defense, they follow _The Dick Magnet's_ suicidal example and bum rush the Pylon.

A stampede of imperfect spaceships, the architectural contents of all five ghettos, streaks successively past the _Lover's_ viewport, their shields angled, their actions evasive and their cannons afire.

"Here comes the cavalry," Gertie snarks through each allied comm.

Requiring no more motivation, Nemo guns Port and Starboard with a satisfying squeal of servomotors and carbon petro. _The Unconstant Lover_ , her shields holding steady at 28%, zooms out from beneath the shadow of cover, skids halting into an upward-pointed about-face and catapults off in pursuit of her Captain's kamikaze followers.

For good measure, Two-Bit Switch spreads the piddly remnants of the ray shield as thickly across the bow as their system power can, the silhouette of the Pylon and her blinking batteries looming large in the viewport.

Forming on Gertie's vanguard, the Freebooters, intentionally or otherwise, fan outward in a flying vee with a wingspan broad enough to rival the _Preemptive Strike_ in sheer length. Each member of _The Unconstant Lover's_ crew, once their freighter is emerged from cover and following some distance behind, are occasionally treated to an indescribable sight. Between the twisting remains of a punctured pirate or a spurt of expelled exhaust, they see an ahead coruscation of hundreds of afterburner lights.

In defiance of all their bravery and bravura, the _Preemptive Strike_ rains down an inescapable amount of hellfire upon this unexpected onrush of attackers.

Even a casual casualty assessment staggers Two-Bit. Every second, another suite of glowing blue lights, the clearest indication of a ship's presence, winks out in a burst of red radiance. What survives each destruction, mere scrap metal, whizzes dangerously close to the _Lover_. Her bombard shields are unprepared, but spinning metal is only a laughable obstruction to Nemo's natural squirreliness at the helm.

The exchange rate between dottibles gained and spaceships shot down heavily favors the Freebooters, however. With each passing second, the spearhead of pirate ships aimed unwaveringly at the heart of the _Preemptive Strike_ races ever closer to its target.

A miasma of shadows, tiny black pinpricks visible only by contrast against the tepid orange-and-white of Talos Prime, does begin to swill anxiously about the Pylon's own deployment gantries. Whatever fighters they attempt to scramble, Gertie Gundeck and her amateur armada will be booting down the _Preemptive Strike's_ airlock before enough can be properly deployed.

More complaint from the proximity sensor indicates to Two-Bit that, leveling up on the _Lover's_ port and starboard wings comes _The Loose Cannon_ , _The Rule of Thumb_ , _The Eyesore_ and _The Dishonorable Discharge_. The fellow flagships each creep from cover and fall into formation around the Briza.

Each ship is noticeably wounded. Each ship sports shields with less than half their possible strength. Each ship appears more than content to allow their legions of underlings to swallow the better part of the Pylon's barrage. This once, the Council of Captains leads from the rear of the headlong charge of the buccaneer brigade.

Two-Bit's fortunate enough, this far from the front lines, to make out the first evidence of the pirate's opening salvo. A rainbow spattering of impacts crashes uselessly against the Pylon's own ray shield, the most impregnable model on the galactic arms market today. The wedge, upon reaching firing range with the _Preemptive Strike_ , disperses, each corsair wheeling apart and assaulting some different section of their godlike target.

The tactic that so bankrupted _The Yanked Chain's_ similar such attack against the _Exacting Counterattack_ prove strangely more effective when applied a hundred times over. The roiling chaos of the fleet action is simply too whimsical for the rigid military discipline of the Pylon's crew to effectively counter.

"Abraham!" Nemo yelps unexpectedly as the _Lover_ , first among the fleet's stragglers, cruises closer and closer to the action. "Think you could drum me up Ott's Pylon plans?"

"Me Evil Plan, which was it, 4?" prompts the Grimalti.

No trace of embarrassment is visible on the Captain's countenance. "The very same."

"Aye aye, Cap'n."

Together, the ray and bombard shielding form an impenetrably thick envelope around the _Preemptive Strike_. Along with the rows upon rows of quadroturret batteries, this should be more than enough to defend the Pylon against all manner of attack. In order to ensure victory, however, the _Preemptive Strike_ typically employs starfighters, specifically Spurs, as its main point of defense against its enemies.

Today, however, for quite possibly the first time in the history of the Endless Imperium and its countless naval engagements, a Pylon's deployed starfighters are actually outnumbered by the enemy forces it chose to engage.

The pirates – slower, ganglier and less maneuverable to a ship – should still predictably fall prey to the swifter and more numerous flights of starfighters arrayed against them. Thanks to reduced numbers and the majority of their opposition sporting a mounted turret or two, something quite remarkable is happening.

Everywhere within Two-Bit's line of sight and line of scopes, Spurs are shot to pieces, their explosions speckling his vision with popping bursts of crimson. Whole squadrons are, of course, still capable to the task of swatting any corsair they encounter, particularly with a skilled squadron leader at their head. On the whole, however, the increased weaponry and haphazard flying patterns of the pirates progressively clear the skies surrounding the Pylon of its swarms of bodyguards.

Soon enough, a small wing of opportunistic pirates manage to bottleneck the _Preemptive Strike's_ own fighter gantries, circling this sweet spot and smearing any Spurs that dare emerge from the safety of the Pylon's skirts.

As _The Unconstant Lover_ nears the thickest of the fighting, some ambitious Spurs meander towards the freighter and lob a few bolts, almost experimentally, towards the _Lover_. Nemo starts some cursory evasiveness and sports around between the squabbling spaceships. Moira, meanwhile, plucks at them with bursts of fire deliberately timed to avoid as much chance of friendly fire as possible.

Chased by Spurs, the Briza banks between broadsides and curlicues around crossfire, attempting to lure said pursuers into the range of some other interested party. Fending off the starfighters with pomp and panache, it's the quadroturret batteries, the Pylon's main method of pain delivery, that presents the most tangible threat to the Freebooter Fleet and their tenuous counterattack against the _Preemptive Strike_.

The broadside batteries were designed to buckle and bend the ray shields of the Pylon's fellow capital ships or, conversely, to blacken the helpless surface of an uncooperative planet beneath concentrated volleys. Therefore, these quadroturrets are uniquely unqualified to combat the fiercely independent and headless heroism of the pirate pilot. In so doing, they squander an impressive quality of ammunition, firing impotently around at ships moving too rapidly or too erratically for their military-coded minds to track.

That said, when they scrape together a clean hit, the undiluted impact alone is often plenty to crumple their targets ray shield or even potentially plow two clumsy pirates together from sheer momentum alone.

It becomes increasingly clear to anyone observing the ongoing engagement with an objective eye, even from within its wavering battle lines, that time is decidedly against the Freebooters. The longer they dally within comfortable reach of the _Strike_ 's chief weapons, the fewer pirates will remain to plunder Qabb, Ikoril and Yime.

Retreat, at this point, was an impossibility, however. Turning and running, flashing a hundred engine washes to the Pylon's equal number of four-barreled guns, would result in a particularly lonely welcoming party back on Talos II.

Victory, though, couldn't possibly be achieved with an intact _Preemptive Strike_. To Two-Bit's knowledge, no Pylon had ever, ever, even in a post- _Exacting Counterattack_ galaxy, even considered the virtues of valor's better half.

The one thing standing between all the Freebooter Fleet's multifarious laserfire was that accursed, unflappable ray shield. What was needed was some strategy to shuck the invincible ray shield and then front-load a Fleet's worth of fresh ditrogen onto the Pylon's exposed hull. Enough fresh ditrogen and the Imperium Interstellar Navy would regret expending one of their most precious and valuable resources to go teach those Talos pirate boys a lesson.

A plan to accomplish this, the Captain seemed to have handily.

"How we coming on those plans?" he cues into the comm, his efforts to shake the ship's all-too-eager entourage bringing them deeper and deeper into quadroturret territory.

"Found 'em, Cap'n, that ain't the problem. " Abraham relates. "Problem be what ye want done with 'em."

"Could you possibly broadcast those plans to every ship in the Fleet?" Nemo requests. "I want every motherfucker wearing an eyepatch looking at that."

"Well," a buffaloed Abraham stammers, "'tis possible, Cap'n, but not without the Pylon seein' her too."

Nemo wastes barely a moment in deliberation. "Nah, let the bleeders see. Soon as you're done with that," he adds a second later, "could you do the same with an open comm channel? I got words."

Abraham busies himself with his many tasks. Nemo steers the _Lover_ onto a trajectory passingly familiar to Two-Bit, one the very same ship might have flown around a nearly identical ship a year and change ago.

Two-Bit, meanwhile, is run ragged. He endeavors his best to interpose the ray shields between each moment's newest assailant, from Spur squadrons to broadside batteries. Thankfully, the former are mainly dispatched by Moira's peerless accuracy and the latter mostly distracted by the multitudes of other available targets.

Before long, of course, the orange-and-purple Pylon plans, once borrowed from Boss Ott, blink into view on an unoccupied screen adjacent to Two-Bit's left elbow.

"She's cast, Cap'n," Abraham, somewhat breathlessly, reports. "Channel be open from yer comm."

"Shield projectors, pirates," Nemo addresses his flock without preamble. "What you should be looking at are the Pylon's four shield projectors. They're hard to find, hard to hit, hard to destroy, but," Two-Bit, from his peripheral, catches the Captain's expression harden with sudden resolve, "we knock them out, the big bitch blows." The steely aspect cracks beneath a growing grin. "Trust me. I know from experience. Savvy?"

A mangy chorus, originating from a variety of vocal chords and piped through an assortment of communicators, answers the Captain's call. In response, Two-Bit watches as each and every Freebooter vessel within eyesight shivers, shifts or adjusts their heading, like a school of fish responding to an incoming threat.

Admiral Tynd and his crew of forty-thousand odd officers, technicians and gunnery sergeantts are, despite being privy to Nemo's rather public war council, fatally unable to avert the disaster the Captain's spelled out for them and their capital ship.

The starboard-side shield projector, snuggled beneath the Pylon's massive attitude fin, is the first destroyed, its fate delivered by a precisely dispatched Xendo divebomber.

The aft-side shield projector, a blip beneath the unapproachable host of the _Preemptive Strike's_ bank of blazing engagement boosters, is the second to go, the victim of a cunningly-aimed cluster of Carnage homing torpedos.

The prow-side shield projector, whose counterpart upon the _Counterattack_ Moira first mowed down beneath an expensive wave of wasted gunfire, is neatly dispatched by a volley or two of damning disabler fire.

The port-side shield projector is consumed in a sphere of sacrificial fire as a downed pirate freighter, the valiant _Living Daylights_ , trailed a thickening smoke trail from its kaput thrusters directly into the final remaining projector.

With some spastic fluttering to signal its ultimate demise, the mottibles-long and yard-deep ray shield enshrouding the whole of the _Preemptive Strike_ summarily shorts out and disappears.

While her quadroturret batteries still discharge nobly and her Spurs still strafe where they can, Two-Bit Switch watches the crosshairs of every pirate weapon, every disabler, every torpedo launcher and every laser turret, settle upon the forlorn Pylon. Once so impregnable, the _Preemptive Strike_ appears now to be merely a target so large, the broad side of a barn would appear microscopic by comparison. Zipping around the starboard quarter on their first complete rotation, Two-Bit doesn't doubt Moira's about to gleefully join in the fun, Antagonist aimed at any exposed stretch of hull they pass.

The identity of the spaceship responsible for firing that first fateful shot would eventually come to be a matter of some prestige, debate and subsequent argument between the victorious survivors of the Freebooter Fleet. Even from his front seat, Two-Bit Switch couldn't tell who'd collectively cued the barrage of laserfire that fell upon the _Preemptive Strike_.

Following that silent cue, thousands of unanimous bolts fire from thousands of barrels. At first, they score only superficial damage against the facade of the Pylon's impressive hull. As the cannonade wears on, however, each fired canister collides with successively more and more destruction, eventually inspiring a terrific chain reaction of internal explosions within the _Strike_ itself.

Before the eyes of the astonished Freebooter Fleet, the invincible flagship of the Imperial Interstellar Navy, the _Preemptive Strike_ , gradually succumbs to the oppressive onslaught of their combined fire. Ravaged by extensive interior damage, the ship seizes once, twice, three times with wayward power surges that range up and down the Pylon's entire chassis.

With that, the _Preemptive Strike_ falls utterly lifeless, hanging dead in orbit.

Odisseus would give anything for a swim. A marine mammal so long denied access to any body of water large enough to comfortably accommodate him, the Ortok theorizes that his mood, demeanor and general outlook dampens with each passing day that he does not indulge his aquatic tendencies.

The arid landscape of Talos II, however, likely doesn't contain one thimble's worth of surface moisture and therefore cannot provide him any viable venue for an evening dip. No one currently seated among the Council of Captains, Odisseus is forced to assume, have taken a page from Boss Ott's playbook and hidden a swimming pool either aboard their spaceships or deep within their pockets.

He'd likely be considered rude or at least impertinent for asking, anyway.

Pirateton post-Pylon is a severely changed place. Very nearly two-thirds of the city's forces were scuttled before the _Preemptive Strike_ could be. While fresh meat continues to trickle in as ever, the city's outskirts have shrunk commensurably.

Those who remain, the lucky few, huddle around the sheltering shadow of the crash's main cruiser. They universally display their injuries, wounds and disfigurements, earned in battles both airborne and landside.

The _Preemptive Strike_ itself is a scar against the skyline. Trapped powerless in Talos II's high orbit and visible only as a band of black discoloration, the Pylon is a memorial hung above Pirateton for all fallen freebooters and an ever-present reminder of the Endless Imperium's naval might.

Despite the 4th Fleet's disastrous underestimating of the Freebooter Fleet, none of Pirateton's citizens celebrate a victory, necessarily. The knowledge that another such fleet cannot be more than days or weeks behind is a sticking point in every mind.

The Council of Captains convened purely out of habit. Each took a much-needed reprieve from the rigors of repairing their heavily-damaged flagships, ostensibly to discuss the next of the three remaining ports along the Valladian Shipping Line.

No discussion, as of yet, had actually occurred.

The ignored strategic imager brandishes a repeating loop of technical specs of Qabb 8, the target previously agreed-upon, and supplies the majority of the chamber's light. Silent as the fading sunset, the five Captains of the Freebooter Fleet, including an especially morose Nemo, stare into the middle distance and ponder their individual mortality.

Morale, needless to say, is low. Should one be provided him, the parched Ortok would solve this problem with a refreshing swim. Two-Bit Switch, the true power behind the throne, stumbled out only moments earlier, mumbling something about needing quiet to think properly, despite to the Council chamber's pin-dropping silence.

It comes as a shock, then, when, less than a minute after he's despondently departed, Two-Bit Switch should come hustling back into the council chamber, with a sudden and unheralded spring in his step. A tad breathless, he scans over the table's listless occupants with an expectant eye. He settles on Nemo and actually sprouts a mischievous smile as he recommends. "You oughta come vizz at this."

Mistrust and malaise are the primary motivation for the other Captains' hesitancy. Nemo, to whom trusting in Two-Bit's expertise was directly responsible for his crown, knows enough to stand, beckon Odisseus with a motion of the head and follow his mastermind outside.

Stepping into the monochrome purple of a Talos II sunset, they discover only Two-Bit Switch, standing with the city's constituent spaceships silhouetted behind him and both his arms spreadeagled in a gesture of display. It takes Odisseus an agonizingly long moment to comprehend just what in all the moons the jabberhead's referring to.

"Vizz anything you fancy?"

The Ortok's piss poor eyesight his everlasting nemesis, Odisseus is forced to stagger forward through the sand toward the prow of the nearest indicated spaceship to bring anything significant into focus.

A painting is what he eventually apprehends, after much squinting and scowling in the dim light. Freshly splattered in quick-dry fractal paint across the teltriton canvas of the boat's broad brow is a familiar image rendered in a familiar style.

With its flowery fringe and liberal use of contrasting colors, the graffiti that decorates the BB627 Mermaid's nose would blend seamlessly into the panoramic mural encasing The Heaven Spot or, for that matter, any other mural painted by Ganymede Mel, mythical ship-tagger.

The image represented, however – a Powosi skull, its three eyes grimacing outward from atop its perch of crossed firearms – is unmistakably _The Unconstant Lover's_ Jolly Roger, albeit a highly stylized interpretation thereof.

The ship in question is _The Run Amok_ , a Starlight Inc. Mermaid captained by Captain Meric Eyer, both a solid earner under Nemo's colors and a celebrated survivor of the battle above Talos. Eyer could easily and ordinarily count this marking as an inscrutable boon, inspired by whatever arcane qualifications that inspired Ganymede Mel to deface anything, for the remainder of his career, a cut that much above the galaxy's criminal dross.

To judge by the reaction Nemo wears considering the stern of a spaceship two spaces over, however, _The Run Amok_ may not have been chosen at random.

"All of them?" questions Nemo over his shoulder, his tone decidedly neutral.

"All of them I vizzed," Two-Bit confesses, not bothering to hide his excitement. "It's feez I missed a few blowbags weren't as rangu as we."

Odisseus pricks his whiskers. "We?"

Two-Bit divines Odisseus' monosyllabic question. "Shall we find out?" he proposes, with evident intent to investigate anyway.

Nemo, portraying his role as final arbiter with stark emotionlessness, nods his consent.

In the tumultuous scramble to the moon's surface following the Pylon's defeat, the boundaries between the previously stratified neighborhoods blurred significantly. On a footpath that would once have taken him through Lover territory exclusively, Odisseus spies surviving spacecraft leal to Greatgullet, Vobash, Charybdis and even Aju Vog Xah Qaj. To a ship, each one bears a skull-and-crossbones sigil that corresponds to those of the relevant Captain and correlates with Ganymede Mel's overarching theme.

Even the _Lover's_ particular Jolly Rogers that he spots, plastered onto the mismatched hulls of Nemo's sworn spacers, are all subtly divergent from each other in design, outline and especially color. Each and every pirate prow that Odisseus, his Captain and his crewmate pass bears some exquisite piece of nose art, a tribal thumbprint unique both to each allegiance and each individual, applied by the galaxy's most legendary and most mysterious artisan.

Pirateton's shortened streets, now girded by host of grinning skulls and heraldic weaponry, deliver them to the extended boarding ramp of _The Unconstant Lover_ much sooner than they might have even days before. After some loping about between her landing feet, the newly-christened helm is located and admired in stunned silence by the three pirates.

Whether the other four flagships received such ritzy treatment, Two-Bit seems uncertain, but the mural adorning the _Lover's_ famously dented nose puts all Ganymede Mel's lesser graffiti slumming across all the adjacent ships to shame.

Embellished to the extreme, the Jolly Roger and its artsy tendrils encompass the Briza's entire bow. The Powosi's three eyeholes are perfectly proportioned to accommodate the viewport and the torpedo launcher is fitted perfectly into the negative space between the hammers of both pistols. Requiring twenty paces backward to thoroughly appreciate, the ship-spanning spectacle, at turns, incorporates and rejects the _Lover's_ previous excuse for a paint coat, that stale urine hue it's held since long before Odisseus' tenure aboard.

This is, paws down, the single most welcome addition to the dumpy little freighter the Ortok's ever approved of, hypercomm projection pad, strategic imager and regenerative shield mainframe be bloomed.

With Odisseus struck speechless and Two-Bit approaching tears, it's Nemo who reserves the right to next speak. "Nobody saw anything, I assume."

Two-Bit clears his throat. "I didn't vizz nothing. Whole burg were shushed up. Somebody else maybe vizzed something," he adds with a sudden sniff and a glance around. "I don't know." His gaze falls once again on his Captain's back. "What do you hink it's s'pposed to mean?"

Rather than brooding upon an answer for a dramatically appropriate amount of time, Nemo's reply comes almost instantaneously with Two-Bit's question. "It's a stamp of approval." His weight shifts and he's suddenly facing them both again, his partially-dissolved duster snapping in the wind and his mouth as unflinching as the horizon beyond. "It's a vote of confidence." Something resembling a smile, a crooked curve to the further most corner of the Captain's mouth, appears unbidden on Nemo's face.

"It's a challenge."

Chapter 20

Moira Quicksilver admires the artistry of Ganymede Mel all the more in the semi-direct sunlight of the Qabb Cluster. She's reminded of the shiptagger's genius whenever another member of the Freebooter Fleet, rather than an asteroid or a privateer, chances to flit past the topturret. From her perch atop _The Unconstant Lover_ , Moira gazes with the aforementioned admiration at each figurehead, depicting Vobash's or Aju Vog Xah Qaj's or Greatgullet's Jolly Roger, blossoming upon the buccaneer's brow.

The outer fringes of the _Lover's_ own masterpiece Moira can only see whenever her target, be they turret or privateer, is obliging enough to point her Antagonist forward.

Once upon a time, the densely-packed cloud of spinning space rocks that constitute the Qabb Cluster was known simply as Qabb and known to be a single, remarkably solid planet. Today, scores of face-painted spaceships lay waste to everything in sight, an alliance of kindergarteners attempting to ransack the county fair's cotton candy booth.

Following Ganymede Mel's mysteriously and exhaustively accomplished vandalism, the Qabb Cluster became the next target for Nemo's undeserved scorn.

Qabb 8 is allegedly the primary target for the Freebooter Fleet's seventh such assault. In preparation for the Fleet's arrival, however, Valladian Shipping had thoughtfully installed a myriad of anti-aircraft turrets on each and every specimen among the twenty some spinning planetoids that jockey about Qabb's airspace. Equally thoughtfully, they'd pumped the system so full of their remaining privateer reserves, one couldn't fly a fifth of a dottible before rubbing shoulders with _The Snakebite_ , _The Nevermore_ , _The Tenterhooks_ or half a hundred other preposterous privateer names.

"Well," comes Nemo's moderating voice over the comm, "do you remember the last place you left it?"

"If I remembered the last place I left it," returns Odisseus' pained growl over the comm, "it would blooming be in my blooming paws by now, would it not?"

"Then," Two-Bit's voice offers, "where's the last place you ain't blanked on havin' it?"

"Gee, where was the last place I remember using my neticgrappler?" Odisseus ponders, his voice redolent with bitter sarcasm. "Could it be...the engine room?"

As a matter of course, Nemo's immune. "Maybe you should check the engine–"

" _The engine room was first fucking place I checked!_ "

"He said," Nemo begins the by rote translation for Two-Bit's benefit, "the engine room was–"

"Pretty sure I understood that," Two-Bit voices meekly.

The Captain steers his newly painted paramour around the most adjacent asteroid, Qabb 19 or 5 or 15, Moira really can't keep track. As he does, stray laserfire, the handiwork of some passing turret or some dogged privateer, pricks and pokes against _The Unconstant Lover's_ famously fluctuating ray shield. On habit, Moira pivots the topturret's gyroscopic rig about to best compliment the attacker's trajectory and achieves visual contact with the guilty party.

Some TFS corvette, the privateer displays the dubious title of _The Grasshopper_. It also displays the dubious honor of limping away from _The Rule of Thumb's_ attempted boarding action, her port side practically ripped unevenly off but evidently unbothered by the large portions of their spacecraft simply missing. Whenever the interruptive hunks of asteroid grant her a chance, _The Grasshopper_ lobs a few bolts toward the _Lover_ , the broadside equivalent of tapping the Briza obnoxiously on the shoulder.

"You know what I think?" Nemo confides to Two-Bit, perfectly audible on the comm. "I think it's the tool belt." There's a pause, long enough to indicate that Two-Bit doesn't follow the Captain's meaning. "The tool belt that he wears every-damn-where? Ten to one, he didn't wear that thing about, he wouldn't be losing his tools left and blooming right."

"'acourse," points out a pondering Abraham, "then he'd be naked."

"Wasn't he already?" Nemo's quick to counter. "There's also always my sweaters."

"As though you're any different," Moira opines bitterly, her teeth rattling from the exertion of the Antagonist unleashing hell at the occasional snatches of visible _Grasshopper_.

"I am wearing all my own clothing, thank you," Nemo states defiantly. "Today."

"You're the one," Moira reiterates, "with the nasty habit of picking up and fiddling with whatever you find lying around." She ceases her shooting and her conversation a second, while the corvette disappears from view, only to initiative hostilities and haranguing again a second later when her target rematerializes. "You'll carry the thing through three or four separate rooms–"

"I don't know what–"

"–eventually abandoning it at some completely illogical new location when you discover something more interesting–"

"Based on what–"

"–and then spend hours whinging and moaning because you've somehow lost the first thing."

His two previous attempts to interject dismal failures, Nemo awaits a period of time after Moira's made her point to disavow her opinion. "All of that's hearsay."

"Where's your bouncy ball?"

The next pause is of an impressive length.

To judge from the _Lover's_ suddenly unsure handling, the Captain no doubt attempts to juggle the yoke and a confused jacket pat-down. Somehow, his quarter-of-a-credit bouncy ball eludes him, the one purchased from the gumball machine placed outside the Talos Warp Gate Junction to ensnare children and pirate captains with more change than brains.

"You know," Odisseus pipes in, moments later, "that I'm still on comm, right?"

In addition to piloting the spaceship and searching for his missing bouncy ball, Nemo attempts to multitask still further with translation too. "He said 'you know that–'"

"I actually understood that one, too," Two-Bit opines quietly.

"Oh, yeah? Good on you," Nemo congratulates, earnestly surprised

Moira's attempts to rub supercharged salt in _The Grasshopper's_ wounds is subsequently successful. The corvette's port side bulkheads buckle and blacken in response to her contained fire bursts. With a string of interior explosions, the frantically sealed doorways serving as _The Grasshopper's_ makeshift airlocks give way and proceed to spew scrap metal and crewmen wildly into open space and onto the jagged surface of the nearby asteroid.

Fatally unbalanced, the corvette lists drunkenly aside and, like _The Arrowhead_ before her, mets her fiery end by colliding with an unrelentingly amount of ice and rock.

"Where is my bouncy ball?" wonders the Captain absently.

Rounding the corner of Qabb 2 or 11 or whichever, the full extent of the ship-to-ship shootout sprawls out, vista-like, before Moira and her Antagonist's eager iron sights. Asteroids, formerly interlocking hunks of Qabb's consummate crust, flood the majority of the view, gamboling and bouncing about. Every few seconds, a pair of them will appear, for all the galaxy, like they're about to titanically crash but they always, always are conspicuously careful never to so much as chafe against each other.

Perhaps twelve of the twenty such passing planetoids contain the landing lights and teltriton tumors that indicate internal mining operations. The most massive depot and the Freebooter Fleet's main focus appears to be Qabb 8. The monstrous chunk of moonlet stays some distance from the circumnavigating _Lover_ and is only distinguishable to Moira by the massive label stenciled onto its currently besieged cargo doors.

Here, at this typically bustling port of mercantile splendor, is where all Nemo's less distractable pirate allies have concentrated the bulk of their assault. _The Low-Hanging Fruit_ and a smattering of other craft claiming more boarders than piloting skills are the primary storm front. An evidently heartbroken _Rule of Thumb_ heads them, consoling herself after _The Grasshopper_ so spurned her advances by stomping aboard Qabb 8 via any accessible airlock and no doubt sparking enough mayhem to compel its staff and defenders to evacuate.

What they don't realize, however, is that evacuation will inevitably land them directly within Vobash's own crosshairs.

_The Loose Cannon's_ coppery hull is complimented beautifully by Ganymede Mel's rendering of Vobash's own colors. The Triomman tools his Hesko Planetary Destroyer in lopsided circles about Qabb 8, likely cackling with unconstrained supervillain glee. His disabler cannons zap and short out any ejector or evacuation vessel the station shoots out before they've cleared half a dottible.

_The Dishonorable Discharge_ , meanwhile, is stuck playing watchdog. Her squadron of suppliant Trijan runaways linger a short distance from the parked cruisers of the otherwise occupied boarding parties. Charybdis and her ilk form the only line of defense between the defenseless craft of her allies and any opportunistic privateers that escape the clutches of the Freebooter Fleet's dozens of irregulars.

This relegated turret duty to Aju Vog Xah Qaj, owner of the most expendable mooks to be literally tossed at the problem, and Nemo himself, owner of the most maneuverable spaceship. The difficulty that Moira'd encountered with assigning duties to Nemo based on his extremely maneuverable spaceship, however, was that maneuverability always came packaged with sidetrackability. Before long, they were zipping around unrelated asteroids, attracting the odd unwanted privateer and arguing about the precise location of mislaid hand tools.

"Who didn't fucking space this trash?" is Odisseus' next accusation.

Nemo is all blissful innocence. "Hm? Which trash?"

From his previous outburst, the Ortok's tone corrects into a scarcely-maintained calm. "I'm standing in the hold and I'm staring at this fucking pile of fucking trash that it's _somebody's_ responsibility to space."

Nemo's protestation is purely instinctual. "I–"

"I wasn't talking to you," Odisseus exhorts flatly. The guilty silence he hoped to inspire, the remaining three crewmembers each unwilling to volunteer their voice, arrives. "Did we not have a specific meeting about how he can't be trusted to complete even childishly simple tasks? Did I not specifically say any clambake that doesn't get eaten needs to be spaced immediately?"

"Wait, you guys have meetings?"

"Or it's gonna stink to all the moons?" Odisseus continues, ignoring him. "Well, guess what? Guess where it stinks to?"

A pirate, _The Dead Heat_ , and a privateer, _The Horsepower_ , participate in a perfect tableau of spaceship combat, exchanging cannon fire with picturesque plumes of dramatic ditrogen. Attracting the attention of an idle turret, the _Lover's_ shield dampens in response to the incoming fire before a swooping Xendo starfighter slams into the gun emplacement with a fiery bang. Brash enough to attempt a solo boarding against Qabb 2, the mostly empty hulk of _The Sucker Punch_ is reduced to scorched smithereens by an avenging torpedo.

"So?" Odisseus dangles, true irritation bubbling beneath the surface. "Is anybody gonna cop to this or am I gonna have to hang a blooming chore chart on the chiller from now on?"

The indicator light which specifies Two-Bit's comm channel wavers scarlet a millisecond before Moira's forced to speak, least the squidgy little jabberhead tattle. "I was supposed to," she admits huskily.

"Uh huh," the Ortok grunts. "And why didn't you?"

"I forgot."

"Uh huh," the Ortok grunts a second time. "If I was mean," he stipulates, with an Ortoki "oomph" of exertion, "I would make you come climb down here and space this for me yourself." The sound of clinking bottles and sloshing trash can be heard faintly over the comm. "Luckily for you, I'm not mean."

"What exactly," ponders Nemo to everyone or no one, "do these meetings entail?"

Perhaps because of its alternately gorgeous or vexatious habit of catching the sunlight across its sheer surface of reflective solxite, Moira finds her eye more and more drawn towards the blasting blockade of Trijan warships. Processed out unevenly before Qabb 8, Charybdis and her comrades return each ounce of punishment they're delivered with equal fervor.

With _The Dubious Honor_ and _The Olive Branch_ as her two wingmen, each one a junk of smaller and less impressive proportions, _The Dishonorable Discharge_ is the belle of the bottleneck. She dispels the eager advances of anything enemy that dares approach and brandishes her own figurehead proudly across her solxite plating despite the suboptimal effects it may wreak on her system power. A perverse caricature of the Radiant Armada's official colors, Captain Charybdis' Jolly Roger is perhaps the least jolly and most frightening of them all, unshackled from any dependence on skulls or crossbones.

By her own merits, the _Discharge_ is a fascinating piece of nautical engineering, disregarding the piratical additions and disfigurements their deserter of a captain may have supplemented or inflicted upon her.

_The Dishonorable Discharge_ doesn't exactly have a consistent or coherent shape. Instead, she appears as some manner of spaceworthy funhouse mirror trick. Her triangular panes of shimmering solxite each bristle an alternatech weapon from every wingtip. Like omnidirectional sunflowers, each panel is capable of pivoting in whatever direction the sun might be shinning from. The constant pivoting and rearranging to best catch the solar rays is uncomfortably hypnotic to watch, a side effect Moira wonders if the Radiant Armada ever exploits to crash their enemies' spacecraft on account of their squinting pilots.

Together the three ships dance their synchronized dance, thrusters adjusting, wings angling, painting the nearby asteroids with trapezoids of redirected light.

"There," Odisseus announces, the airlock's drone audible through his speaker. "It's spaced."

"Sorry, Odi," mumbles Moira, hoping to mask her apology beneath the all the airlock's clamant commotion.

"Don't be sorry," he spouts dismissively. "Don't let it happen again."

"He's talking about the–" Nemo helpfully provides for Two-Bit.

"The rubbish. Yeah, I ord him."

Unexpected movement, new blackness against the bottomless blackness around them, on the absolute edge of her peripheral vision draws the focus of both Moira and her loyal Antagonist. She whips the weapon ardently around at the potential of a new foe to plaster.

Instead, Moira watches the lumpy, churning and oddly delicate ballet an overfull garbage sack, jettisoned into the weightless expanse of interstellar space. The laughably graceful dance is performed to an ignoring audience of spaceships too concerned with their own death or destruction to pay much attention.

This obliviousness is key to the downfall of _The Underdog_ , a privateer gunboat content to simply bustle by and receive a viewport's worth of splattered garbage for their hubris. With black plastosealant and spoiled clambake obscuring their view, the swerving gunboat seems to lack sufficient time to consult their instruments. Instead, _The Underdog_ recruits promising pirates, privateers and even one available asteroid into a snowballing, no-holds-barred explosion extravaganza on the opposite side of the fleet action.

"Two-Bit?" poses Odisseus, the corresponding light from the engine room igniting on Moira's comm panel.

"Yes?"

"Am I blasted or can you, more or less, understand what I'm saying?"

Nemo's thickheadedness knows no limit. "He wants to know if you can–"

More's to Two-Bit's credit that he simply ignores the prick. "More or less, I hink," he agrees tentatively. "Half of the shit you jabb," he's quick to disillusion, "I still can't specc, but it's enough, at this point, that even I can pick up the bloody pieces."

"Bloom me out," Odisseus appreciates, "and color me impressed."

"How'd you manage that?" wonders a mystified Nemo.

"Keeping me ears open, wasn't I?" Two-Bit, somewhat annoyed, supplies. "Weren't habby, jabb you what, being the only bloomhole on this boat what hanked everything to be translated for him."

"And?" Moira adds suggestively.

"And that reader Moira cadged me," Two-Bit amends, moments later. "That helped some."

The primary reason the score of asteroid fragments collectively known as Qabb refrain from either drifting aimlessly away or, conversely, from knocking and rocking against each other passes some small distance beneath _The Unconstant Lover_ – Qabb 1.

Qabb 1 is the most centrally-located planetoid, sprouting a thicket of gunmetal gray outcroppings, oddments and impedimenta in every which direction. According to Two-Bit, the installation houses some fancy piece of technical wonder called a gravitational field generator. The mottible wide contraption was several million credits too expensive for the average planetary government to even consider purchasing and precisely the tool necessary to grasp the shattered remains of a planet together with redoubtable pull. Transponders, presumably installed deep within the core of the nineteen other asteroids, allow Qabb 1 to conduct and coordinate the traffic of each mining depot with maximum possible efficiency.

This, of course, was all assuming any troublemakers, armed with supercharged Antagonists, magazines of plumb torpedos and an empty afternoon, were nowhere to be found.

"Guess that completes the transformation into one big happy family," Nemo comments, devoid of any trace of actual sentimentality. "Remind me," he beseeches suddenly, "Moira, when'd you learn?"

Moira prefers not to boast. "Pretty much immediately. Purchased that book my second week aboard."

"I don't remember," ponders the Captain absently, "how long I took."

"I remember," Odisseus weighs in, "you were total crap until age eight."

"Shit's hard, though," Nemo carps. "Right?"

"Ain't eight years hard," opines Two-Bit quietly.

Abraham shares none of Moira's modesty. "Why, I'd the whole thing near mastered in close on two months."

"You came aboard fluent, though," Moira points out, "didn't you?"

"Near enough," Abraham confirms. "Knew a fine Ortoki deckhand on Cterka, way back in the day. Picked up the tongue from her, mostly. Necessity of the work environment."

"Cterka?" Nemo repeats. "Do you know anybody on–"

"Because we all know each other," Odisseus responds with genuine spite, "we all share the same sewing–" His voice suddenly breaks off, radio silence and static filling the gap left by his unfinished sentence. "Found it."

"Your neticgrappler?" Nemo returns. "Where?"

It's the Ortok's turn to mumble an embarrassed truth. "In the engine room."

Moira lacks any intimate knowledge of the field generator's inner workings or vulnerabilities, especially considering the dressing-down Vobash preemptively gave Nemo about not meddling with the device, at the cost of the prize ships in system.

Trial-and-error, then, becomes her best bet on how best, precisely, to puncture the field generator's ray shielding. She only bobs and bruises the projection with concentrated bursts from her Antagonist.

Nemo, meanwhile, encounters no such difficulties. He presses unrelenting on the torpedo button and his sporadic projectiles pass by unscathed, with a mere shiver of the shield by way of reaction, towards various sections of the asteroid-come-gravitational anchor.

They fly a perfect pair of perimeter-length flights around Qabb 1, lobbing off torpedo after torpedo at what Nemo must deem to be either structurally relevant targets or appropriately dramatic moments. This treatment appears to be precisely the correct medicine to reduce the satellite to splinters. A shower of flame, shrapnel and smoke bursts outward from each detonating point of contact the torpedos enforce.

A nebula of dust, debris and rubble is all that remains where once floated the beating heart that kept all of Qabb's disparate elements from crashing into each other. _The Unconstant Lover_ , the shamelessly guilty party, jets back into the thick of the fray, its captain and crew keeping eyes peeled for any more mischief they can conceivably spark.

Two-Bit Switch considers himself something of a pioneer in the field of pizza toppings. While quite content with the traditional schools of thought – pepperoni, olives, sausage and every other stable of the genre – Two-Bit holds a special chamber of his heart for the more outlandish and unthinkable examples, the outliers and novelties at even the most obscure pizza parlors.

He's sampled fried egg atop pizza, he's sampled peanut butter atop pizza, he's even sampled banana slices atop pizza. His objection to more anchovies, therefore, doesn't come on culinary grounds. His objections are aimed more towards the sheer monotony of ordering the very same toppings atop each pizza the crew splits, as dictated by an addicted Ortok.

"Say something in Ortoki, then," commands a chewing Nemo, either to his partial slice of anchovy-speckled pizza or to the table in general.

Odisseus' reply, "I say everything in Ortoki," is issued between chomping bites, his fangs flush with cheese, sauce and shredded fish.

"No," Nemo swallows. "You." He inches his chin towards Two-Bit in a gesture of indication. "You say something in Ortoki."

"Me?" Two-Bit scoffs and motions bewilderingly with his pinched napkin. "Bloom me out. I can't _jabb_ any. Moons," he remarks, "me gargler weren't exactly constructed for that, were it?"

"That's the trick, isn't it?" Nemo nods appraisingly. "Bloom knows I tried, you know, when we were tots. Could never quite get the hang."

Odisseus nearly expectorates a mouthful of masticated dough and dairy across all the rest of their own meals, his snort is so intense. Composing himself, he manages to chortle out "couldn't get the hang of it" and a blunt "sure" before returning to the pressing task of his next slice.

They encircle a formidable stack of telltale red-and-white boxes from Nanosecond Pizza – some open, some still shut, all visibly stained from grease, crinkled by captured steam and reeking of baked anchovies. The mess hall of _The Unconstant Lover_ is, for a few hours, mercifully devoid of corsair conscripts, queuing up to pledge allegiance to Nemo's flag.

Tonight, the ship is populated by only her original crew, each occupying their traditional seats around the scraped, scuffed and scarred veteran that's served as their primary dining table all these meals.

Odisseus, as ever, reigns supreme over the rations outlaid before him, consuming more than twice any other two crewmembers combined, not even counting Moira's proffered anchovies. Abraham abstains, eyeing the greasy smorgasbord his companions enjoy with evident suspicion and clutching his tankard close to his sternum like some manner of alcoholic security blanket. Her anchovies sacrificed to appease the bestial hunger of Odisseus, Moira is the most distracted by the holovision, her bounty hunting instincts flicking to life with each new movement originating in the general direction of the chamber's only exit. Nemo, as per his prerogative, controls the remote control, dual-wielding this awesome responsibility with a slice of pizza in his opposite hand whose cheese is seconds away from slumping to the floor.

Two-Bit, as is his own prerogative, guards the single order of breadsticks with fierce determination. In order to deny any of his supposed allies access to the armada of dipping sauces he's accrued, he mixes them all together into a sludge-colored mess which only he could possibly stomach.

At present, the holovision advertises a new line of allegedly unisex facial razors, seemingly marketed towards sentients covered head-to-toe with "shaggy, difficult to maintain pelts" and whose spokesperson is a comically masculine female Braaca. Two-Bit's not only unfamiliar with the product or its brand, but is zottibles outside its intended demographic. The intended demographic, rending fast food between his powerful jaws, isn't actually facing the proper direction to even be advertised at.

"There was one word," Nemo reminisces with sudden wistfulness, "that I could get the hang of." Clearing his throat to banish any pizza residue in preparation for the coming proclamation, Nemo proceeds to "pronounce" this Ortoki chestnut, a monosyllabic glottal sound that Two-Bit nearly mistook for more throat clearing.

Endeavoring his best to recreate the uttered sound within his own ill-equipped windpipe, Two-Bit slaps a question mark and an uplifted tone to the word's end and presents it, questioningly, to the table. "What's it mean?"

Unthinking Odisseus, too absorbed by the very vital devouring of his pizza, "translates," seemingly unaware that all he's done is repeat the word for now a third time.

"Helpful," Two-Bit appreciates with a nod and an end torn from his breadstick.

"Lemonade," provide both Moira and Abraham unanimously a second later, the former's attention still pointed towards the Braaca and her cleanly-trimmed fuzz, the latter combining the explanation with a thankful gasp after a drag of moonshine.

" _And_ I'm thirsty," Nemo realizes, shoving his chair away from the table with the stuttering squeak of wood against teltriton and rising to his feet. With a flourish of duster and a bounciness of gait, the Captain strolls away, his destination unquestionably the chiller and his aim doubtlessly lemonade that doesn't exist or, failing that, the handiest possible alcohol.

Once he's successfully rounded the corner into the galley proper, Moira, seated kitty-corner to Nemo's vacated seat, slinks into action. Her left arm snakes between the white cardboard stacks and retrieves, by the very fingerprint grooves on her longest fingers, the remote. As Nemo clatters and clangs about in the caterwauling chiller, Moira's free to scrape the remote back across the Ujad mahogany tabletop and claim supreme authority over the holovision and its billion, billion channels.

Should any of the Captain's three officers notice or object, they voice no comment nor make any complaint, feasting, swigging or between allegiances, as the case may be.

"...the hell?" Nemo sloshes a transparent pitcher filled halfway with pulpy orange liquid back and forth. "Who made mimosas?"

The remote control an utterly foreign object in her hand, Moira's reply doesn't affect her concentration any. "It's orange juice and I did."

A scowling Nemo experiments with the equally foreign beverage with a peremptory sniff. "The hell?" he repeats, scrunching up his nose with displeasure. "Who drinks just orange juice?"

"It's healthy and I do."

A peremptory sniff is upgraded to a peremptory sip. "It tastes like asscrack," he complains around an exaggerated grimace.

Moira's expression, as ever, doesn't falter or flinch. "You're not wrong and I hate you."

"A mimosa's in this shit's future," predicts Nemo, heeling the whining chiller closed and seeking out suitable glass and suitable Gitterswitch to fulfill the prophecy himself.

Armed with twenty seconds understanding of the remote's interface, Moira braves the dangers presented by interstellar feedspace and changes the channel.

To judge from the speed and disdain with which she flits between programs – a hypnotic flurry of flashing lights, bright colors and catchy slogans – Moira, for all her airs of superiority, handles the responsibility of remote-bearer little better than Nemo. She lingers scarcely long enough on any individual frequency to grok whatever it pushes or peddles before thumbing away in search of greener pastimes.

In her defense, she's confronted with a staggering slew of straight commercials. It's within a ThumbSmash spot, its moronic spokesman hoarsely commanding its pre-teen audience to "smash" their "homework," that Nemo, mimosa to hand, returns from his kitchen-bound errand.

"Hey, hey, hey," the Captain cajoles. "Who died and named you Captain?"

Moira's thumb delays momentarily over the button, giving the ThumbSmash advert a stay of execution and that much more time to attempt to browbeat the _Lover's_ crew into irreverently "smashing" both objects and people. "You captain the ship. You don't captain the remote."

"I'm the Captain. I captain everything," Nemo reminds with paternal patience. "I captain the spaceship. I captain the toilet. I captain the remote." With another swill of his mimosa, he settles himself, with as much pomp and circumstance as he can, into his oaken seat. "I am burdened with grim command and, in exchange, I am given sovereignty over the remote and all it surveys."

Moira's categorically unconcerned. "Mutiny, then."

"Don't joke, missy," a suddenly spooked Abraham warns, the way one might respond should a specter or the Skelta Installation be mentioned.

"There's always Two-Bit to sic on you," Nemo supposes. "You'll recall you held onto those keys for all of ten minutes."

"Last time was a kindie," Two-Bit reminds Nemo between breadstick bites. "I don't crime for peanuts."

Moira's totally placid. "Fool me once."

Two-Bit adjusts the positioning of his multe bracelet. "Didn't fool you, love." He smiles with a sliver of genuine wickedness. "I picked your fucking pocket."

Moira ripostes with a sub-zero smile of her own, turning the coveted remote tantalizingly over between dextrous fingers. "Do your worst."

The pair's posturing is promptly interrupted by snorting, graceless laughter. The Captain reclines as comfortably as his chair will allow, a gooey slice of pizza still steaming to one hand, impromptu mimosa, unequal parts orange juice and Gitterswitch Gin, to the other. His attention, however, is fully captivated by what the holovision broadcasts.

A cartoon – a slapstick spectacle of improbable weaponry and impermanent injury – is in the early stages of its age-old ritual. An anthropomorphic jborra drools at the prospect of an unsuspecting rat-canary, a conflict that promises to escalate into the involvement of mallets and explosives within the minute. While certainly marketed towards toddlers, Nemo is wholly absorbed, the ownership of the remote a disagreement long forgotten.

An animalistic belch, a sound so feral-seeming Two-Bit's surprised he's grown so accustomed to it, resounds from Odisseus' yawning maw. The Ortok, with a red-stained paw, pushes aside the empty and ravaged box.

Abraham shifts his weight to avoid the castoff garbage, as though its devoured contents were highly poisonous. This gives Odisseus pause, his claws already spearing the corner of a third box. His comment, "only anchovies," he makes with the ghost of a shrug.

"So they say," mutters the Grimalti, his ingrained paranoia visually enhanced by the near-perpetual squint of his whitewashed eye.

Somehow oblivious to the entire Two-Bit versus Moira pissing contest, Nemo's able to pinpoint a practically camouflaged smidgen of spilled sauce against the Ortok's borrowed sweater. He points and pouts. "All the moons, you asshole, there's pizza on my sweater now!"

Wisely ignoring the pleas of his captain, Odisseus instead screws up his muzzle and poses to Abraham some question. For all the cartoon's clamor and Nemo's nagging, Two-Bit only catches two key phrases – "reason" and "all this," accompanied by a dismissive wave towards both pizza and Grimalti.

"You could wash it," Moira offers helpfully in Nemo's direction.

Abraham cocks his head sideways, outwardly portraying reluctance but inwardly reveling at the chance to recount some picaroon yarn from his vast repertoire. "Tale goes back, iffen ye don't mind." Odisseus upgrades his previous half-shrug into a fully-fledged one, creasing the sweater's shoulders substantially.

Nemo only now notices that Moira addresses him. "Hm?"

"I were bosun for, well," considers Abraham, "aye, this woulda been _The Good Riddance,_ some years afore any of ye were born."

"You could wash it," repeats Moira, louder and more insistent.

Abraham's physicality comes more into his storytelling some, shifting his weight to better illustrate the narrative to the chewing Ortok. "And the captain at that time, he took a real shine to me, he did, always wantin' me opinion on matters of this and that."

Nemo's brow furrows. "Wash what?"

"First mate, though," Abraham stipulates, "this Hazric fella, he don't like this turn o' events at all. Needless to say, he don't take much shine to me, like our captain do."

"The sweater. You could wash the sweater." Moira indicates with a gesture towards Odisseus, growing agitated at the realization that she's perfectly audible and Nemo's simply dense. "To get rid of the pizza stains."

"Puts agwaifapede venom in me chow when I ain't lookin'," Abraham continues, earning the Ortoki equivalent of a sympathetic "ooo."

"Wash," states a somehow still confused Nemo, pinching his own shirt between his fingers as some manner of indication to Moira, "the sweater?"

Abraham extends three split-nail fingers. "Three days and three nights were I laid up. Blighter bloom near had the honorable distinction o' killin' me, before me prime."

Moira points her own supremely frustrated finger, down the betweendecks corridor, and waggles the whole hand about when Nemo still doesn't comprehend her point. "In the machine."

His chewing ceased in pure amazement, Odisseus mutters another question forward, something with "survive" rooted firmly towards the end.

"Which machine?"

"Didn't use enough venom," Abraham delights in informing, adjusting his posture and cocking an eyebrow. "We Grimalti be harder to poison than Hazrics be, turns out."

"The washing machine," mutters a Moira with her hand pressed firmly over her face in the apogee of frustration.

The Grimalti shrugs his own shoulders and scans the piles of spoils before him with a suspicious eye. "Since then, well..."

Nemo scoots more fully out of his chair, as though to telegraph that he doesn't believe what he's hearing. "We have a washing machine?"

The ignored cartoon vanishes amid a blast of hissing holovision static, grabbing everyone's attention and severing both discussions into bloody stumps. The already unreliable feed strength of Talos' eight moons suffers still further as a new hologram, with the familiar format of an Inner Sector newsplash, wavers in and out of visibility.

On instinct, Moira, queen of the remote, changes the frequency, only to discover a nearly identical situation – the same news broadcast, mauled and mangled by static, having usurped this channel's previous programming as well. Repetition of the same tactic, Moira thumbing the remote five, six, seven more times, produces no practical difference. Every frequency within range shows the same poorly-transmitted newscaster, reporting some breaking development of inescapable import.

Hoping that patience will eventually rectify the situation, the crew of _The Unconstant Lover_ each stare, enraptured, at whatever event could cause such a universal agreement across the fractious and uncooperative feedcasters of Bad Space.

"–to report this breaking news out of Medroteria," reports a Cadafreyan anchor, with a conservative news blouse, conservative news haircut and claustrophobic cloud of similar headlines, scrolling stock prices and the ever-present logo of GAC – Galactic Airwaves Corporate. "The IMIS has publicly declared a new Galactic Menace, a move some detractors of the Ministry have called long overdue." She pauses, either to allow the teleprompter time to match her heedless speed or to heighten dramatic tension. A moment later, the anchor collects her breath and continues.

"As of today, Cadafreyan Galactic News can officially report that the Imperial Ministry of Interstellar Security has named Nehel Morel as the new Galactic Menace."

The silence around the pizza-stacked table is ten zottibles this side of stunned, underpinned pleasantly by the continuing newsplash coverage.

"Following the death of Rithese terrorist leader Kashi Obwala, responsible for the Port Guwhali Hostage Crisis, this makes Morel, alleged High Admiral," which deserves the unanimous snort it earns from five of the table's six occupants, "of the infamous Freebooter Fleet massing near Talos, the thirty-fourth Menace named. Minister Baxo made the following statement at a press conference mere moments ago."

The anchor at her desk is immediately replaced by the sight of an officious looking Gantor, with an enormous IMIS holoseal behind him, a podium to place his skeletal hands upon and a press of reporters, waving recording devices, at his feet.

"On the grounds," wheezes the Gantor in thickly-accented Commercial, "that he's a roadblock on the way to potential Imperial prosperity in the Outer Ring. On the grounds that he's directly responsible for incalculable trillions in property damage to the assets of our partner corporation, Valladian Shipping. On the grounds that he's an immediate and pressing danger to the lives of our soldiers and citizens alike, Nehel Morel is hereby declared a Galactic Menace."

Shouted questions simmer to the surface among the thronging reporters and Baxo waves a calm claw to entreat more silence from them, raising his raspy voice proportionately. "Like Ott and Obwala before him, the IMIS offers a ten million credit reward to anyone, Imperium citizen or otherwise, who is verifiably responsible for his death."

The press conference abdicates to b-roll at precisely the same moment the HV's reception becomes dodgier. Rather than attempting to make out, through the juddering static, the outlines of Qabb's twenty asteroids grinding against each other like horny teenagers, the _Lover's_ crew consider each other and this new development across the table.

It doesn't take Two-Bit more than a few moments to catch Moira's eye, whereupon he delivers the quip that popped into his mind the very second the Cadafreyan made her announcement.

"Jabbed you so."

Chapter 21

Odisseus needs to snarl, snap and swipe in order to clear enough of a space for even himself to step into the sunshine. He's actually forced to cuff one individual with a punishing paw, an Aurik swinging her trunk about in exaggerated enthusiasm. Upon receiving the Ortok's warning smack, she quails and curses an annoyed reply but Odisseus, when faced with a hundred plus thronging sentients attempting to batter past him, could honestly care less about hurt feelings or hurt trunks.

Members of every species imaginable – Akishi, Buja, Corgassi, Dho – create a river of exuberant faces and waving firearms before the Ortok. His poor eyesight, exacerbated by the shrill flash of the occasional holocorder, can only render details on the circle of spectators closest him. All the ranks behind those are relegated, to Odisseus' unreliable vision, into multicolored blurs. Nonetheless, they all surge forward upon Odisseus' exit, in anticipation of what they're convinced will follow shortly after.

The tide of bodies, summoned by the successive exits of Vobash, Greatgullet and Aju Vog Xah Qaj's posses, chokes the most convenient route from council chamber back to ship. In order to arrive safely again aboard _The Unconstant Lover_ , the Ortok must somehow browbeat and lambaste a path home.

Secrecy was never a primary virtue of the Council of Captains. Any decision reached by its members would, by necessity, eventually reach Pirateton's corsair constituency, as regards when to fly, where to fly and whom to shoot at. Perhaps privacy was the more strictly enforced virtue. Who precisely could and who precisely could not attend these meetings became a matter of some pride, particularly among the retinues and entourages of the five sovereign Captains.

Looking out across the current of crowds drawn by simple news of a possible appearance from his own Captain, Odisseus wonders if a dash more secrecy could perhaps benefit the Freebooter Fleet's leadership.

One moment, the sound is a hubbub of hushed but eager yammering in an encyclopedic array of languages. The next, it balloons exponentially into full-throated screaming, all arms and weapons extended fully. Without looking or smelling, Odisseus knows that, three steps behind him, Nehel Morel, Galactic Menace, has made his entrance.

On the same breath as their hysterical hollering does the crowd, pressed furry shoulder to feathered shoulder, come pushing-and-shoving all the closer. To a being, they all hope to claim a favorable look, a clasp of the hand or even, should they be lucky enough, an autograph for the newly named Menace.

To describe Nemo's popularity as "skyrocketing" in the wake of the IMIS's supposedly damning proclamation would be an understatement akin to describing space as "Bad" or Moira as "mean." He'd become the absolute toast of Pirateton, this far from the first time the adoring public trampled each other to gain that many inches closer to him. He could hardly set foot upon sand without spontaneously germinating a crowd. Each crowd, Odisseus observes, seems bigger than the last – more and more enthused pirates to sing his praises and practically mob him, as though hoping to suck some portion of his pure criminality by the force of sheer osmosis.

Odisseus unleashes a roar of his own, allowing his baser instincts as the territorial beast he is to take over. Spittle flecks onto the faces of the forward ranks of advancing fanboys. This purchases a patch of empty sand for both Two-Bit Switch and, eventually, his saltbrother, to level up on either of the Ortok's flanks. This done, Odisseus commits his primary focus toward taking a sniffing stock of the swarms all about him. He attempts to assess, from a few broad whiffs, whether any harmful intentions are smuggled in amongst the hordes of happy freebooters.

On the other hand, Two-Bit is unable to wholly banish that wide-toothed grin he's worn since the "good news" was announced two days previously. He chooses to usher and shoo aside onlookers with all the efficacy of a jaywalker attempting to verbally dissuade oncoming traffic. Watching this, Odisseus cannot help but wonder why, somewhat frustrated and forlornly, Captain Charybdis required Moira Quicksilver's, Nemo's second de facto bodyguard, presence so immediately.

For some reason, the Trijan privateer had beckoned aside the _Lover's_ first mate following the adjournment of the Council. Moira'd then neglected to accompany them on their crosstown sojourn in favor of fulfilling Charybdis' cryptic request. In so doing, she denied Nemo's bodyguard detail the use of one widely-respected and universally-feared ex-bounty hunter and all her crowd-parting gifts.

With Two-Bit a Nemo groupie in all but name, the responsibility fell to Odisseus alone, then, to keep the unwashed masses from stampeding over his unrealistically popular saltbrother and smothering him with misspent affection.

Even more foregone than the conclusion of his idolization is undoubtedly Nemo's response, lapping greedily at the bowl of his own stardom without any attempts at humility.

He wholeheartedly waves to the fawning piratical plebs with both hands over his head, like some Inner Sector fascist en route to his awaiting motorcade. Unlike said fascist, however, all the downtrodden and disenfranchised citizens of Pirateton's unabashedly adore him. A ragged, uneven chant of "Menace! Menace!" grinds into general use within fifteen seconds of his arrival. The Captain claps shoulders, shakes hands and signs a baffling number of autographs, thanks to a Two-Bit-provided inkjetter, even within the confined radius of three steps outside the council chamber.

Apart from wrists, shirts and a surprising number of naked breasts, the object the chanting crowd most overwhelmingly wishes vandalized by Nemo's laughable squiggle of a signature are their guns. Most alarming to Odisseus, each weapon is thrust forward toward the Ortok's saltbrother and brandished back and forth with dubiously discernible intent. Never, in all their years of boarding actions, broadsides and bushwhacks, has Odisseus been made more anxious by this many firearms pointed unarguably toward Nemo, him armed only with a meager inkjetter.

These concerns seemingly occur to neither Nemo nor Two-Bit, the former basking shamelessly in the attention and defacing any weapon presented before him, the latter facilitating these spontaneous bursts of PR far more than preventing them.

Questions, in addition to pistols, are hurled with equal frequency and less discrimination towards the Galactic Menace. The majority of said hurled questions blend into a buzzing backdrop of noise Odisseus must needs, in order to make any sense of the swirling sounds, mentally drown out. Nevertheless, occasional and semi-audible snatches occasionally pierce through the cacophony.

Among shouted requests for signatures and the occasional simple scream for attention, variants of "Where we headed?" and "Who's next?" and "Yime or Ikoril?" are the most common. This slice of evidence, plus the overwhelming presence of holocorders, first tips Odisseus to the inescapable fact that there may, in fact, be some sizable percentage of press, squeezed unobtrusively in between the legitimate pirates.

In all honesty, however, the Ortok mechanic would vastly prefer the presence of hidden reporters, obvious security snafu that might represent and all, to the lurking presence of more bounty hunters. He couldn't imagine what absurd feats of suicide the IMIS's generous, new, galactically-menacing hike to Nemo's previous reward might tempt Bad Space's headhunter population into attempting.

The remainder of their trek through Pirateton is unsurprisingly nightmarish. Any detour Odisseus could possibly speculate rapidly clogs with pushing pedestrians before the thought to deviate that direction even occurs to him. Anyone among the shapeless mass of spectators could be a humble hoodlum, a vexatious reporter hungry to squeeze some scoop from the mere act of the Menace walking past or a bevy of ambushing bounty hunters, lying in wait to kill or capture Nemo. Two-Bit's obviously useless at driving the droves any further back, unironically signing his fair share of autographs with his own inkjetter produced from nowhere.

Their progress through the ocean of Nemo-worship is agonizingly slow. They've barely reached the halfway point between _Lover_ and council chamber before the least shy and least disguised reporter elbows his way brashly forward.

The dreadlocked Duutho thrusts the muffle of his microphone scant inches from Nemo's mouth. His eye socket, Odisseus notes, happens to sport another example of that fashionable holocorder augment Dusty Dimick's pet camera crew employed.

"Carak Sotak," introduces the Duutho with gravitas, as though his nonsense name is meant to evoke any response from the Menace or his pair of wing mates, "Galaxy Gossi–"

Five hundred pounds of orange-clad Ortoki bulk insinuates itself between extended microphone and Menace's mouth. A throaty growl offers a veiled promise of unveiled violence soon to follow should the Duutho decline Odisseus' generous offer to stop pointing unknown objects at his saltbrother.

Unable to adequately argue with this kindest of requests, Carak Sotak shifts his footing, dreadlocks dangling with each step and poses the question again, from a considerably more respectful distance.

"Carak Sotak, Galaxy Gossip. What're you thoughts, Nehel, on being named Galactic Menace? Anger? Rage? Wrath?"

For once in his wretched existence, that weasel Two-Bit Switch sidesteps to the rescue, motivated certainly by ego, greed and the typical glory-hogging behavior that turned the tiny tyvorka wheel he utilized for a brain.

"Well, he's chuffed, isn't he?" Two-Bit answers, Sotak swinging the microphone before the jabberhead's own statement, in want of even the slightest reaction from an autograph-occupied Nemo. "Chuffed the galaxy at large's taking a notice, yeah, and chuffed everybody seems so blooming excited about it all."

"Would you say," the Duutho addresses towards Nemo, keeping pace for all Odisseus' efforts to hustle the Menace along, "that there're political undertones to these attacks? Why is Valladia the target? Have they–"

"Sure, sure," extemporizes Two-Bit, pulling a concerned face as though he has many learned opinions regarding interstellar politics or the galactic economy. "Valladia's makin' inroads, as they jabbed, and if the buck don't stop here, you know, where's it gonna stop and all that."

Whether these answers serve to satisfy Sotak or his audience, starving for some manner of dialogue with the newly-minted Menace, the Duutho doesn't stop the questioning. He simply yanks the microphone back to his own mouth to ask his next question and thrusts it vaingloriously back towards Nemo's uncaring face the second he's done.

"And where's the Freebooter Fleet headed next? With only Ikoril and Yime remaining as potential targets, clearly the Captains must have decided by now?"

Two-Bit chuckles as coyly as he may, as though he's toying with telling, as though there were not very real consequences that would land his all their heads should the powers-that-be learn where the Council of Captains had next set their sights. "Ah, but that would be jabbin', eh? Specc we'll all just have to diddle and vizz, won't we?"

As though summoned, Nemo quite abruptly completes his most recent signature, blindly hands the relevant firearm to an irrelevant crowd member and meanders closer to the Duutho, seemingly noticing the newshound for the very first time.

Odisseus stops walking immediately and tenses, should Sotak try anything. Beyond stammering some at the sudden approach of the galaxy's most wanted asshole, the Duutho does little more threatening than pose his next question.

"Talk about–" Carak Sotak commands moments before he's shot. Nemo's cagey pistol creaks out of his leather holster and lets loose a solitary canister with plenty of time for a more prescient sentient to notice or perhaps even relocate. With an expression somewhere between surprise and agony, the Duutho tumbles to the sand with a purplish billow, his microphone landing with a soft thud inches from Two-Bit's feet.

Before Nemo's even returned the still-smoking murder weapon to his sheath, every outlaw on every street in the nearby vicinity explodes into cheering. The sight of their beloved Menace committing a flagrant and unjustified homicide seems to instill, rather than horror, some strange mixture of further glorification and further devotion.

Moments later, Nemo's returned to his previous activity of blowing the crowd kisses, Two-Bit seconds on his heels. Only Odisseus is left to ponder Carak Sotak's smoldering corpse, unceremoniously trod upon by the following footsteps of Nemo's fanbase.

Moira Quicksilver parries high, ripostes low and converts the upward parry into a downward chop forceful enough to bend the baton from sheer velocity. Her opponent, though, is surely too skillful to be so easily swatted. The swing therefore misses by a mottible and all Moira buys with her overextension is distance.

Distance, however, is no impediment to a halfway competent whipsaber wielder. In the face of several snapping strikes, Moira backpedals seconds ahead of punishment.

Socorro Charybdis, unfurled whipsaber to right, glistening feziko to left, makes her play. She windmills the whipsaber in an six-foot-wide arc over her head, compelling Moira into a duck. Short of being skewered by the ready blade of the feziko, she rolls into a Wheeling Tvorka somersault, the bounty hunter hoping to tumble somewhere within the Trijan's guard. A miscalculation admittedly but Moira, realizing this instantaneously, doesn't quite anticipate the price her blunder will cost her.

Lunging fruitlessly with both batons at Charybdis' fastly-repositioning knees, Moira's rewarded for her hubris with an embarrassing smart across the lower back from the flaccid whipsaber, brought easily from its wild spin into a harmless and humiliating tap on her unguarded torso.

The referee – or Trijan equivalent thereof – melodically awards Charybdis one point.

Both fighters return to their respective corners to collect weapons and wits, dropping their tensed combat stances with the mechanical nonchalance of career martial artists. For her part, Moira retracts both electrobatons and re-establishes her breathing regimen. Charybdis, meanwhile, rigidifies then slackens, rigidifies then slackens her whipsaber by humming a specific sequence of notes, another example of the Trijan's growing cool-down tic.

Moira is exactly ignorant enough of Trijan culture to be patently surprised at discovering a spacious dueling ring installed betweendecks aboard _The Dishonorable Discharge._ The sanctimonious little chamber at the junk's exact center even comes with its own food court, surrounded by its barroom-height table and its crewmen chowing down.

Obviously, certain assumptions were made when Captain Charybdis invited Moira Quicksilver and both her batons to a few friendly sparring bouts, citing her growing malaise towards squaring off against the same roster of swordsmen over and over. Among them, Moira's erroneously imagined the scrimmages would take place in the _Discharge's_ hold and one as grimy, galvanized and inglorious as the _Lover's_.

She didn't anticipate the miniature opera house of warfare, situated at the stained-glass heart of _The Dishonorable Discharge._

Talos II's ordinary sunlight is made masterpiece by the triangular panes of semi-permeable solxite that all the spacecraft's hull and walls are comprised of. Wedges of full-spectrum rainbows paint incredible geometric patterns across the floor, the table and even the diners. Those diners, a score of disinterested Trijans parsing and parting their noodles, are each full naval careers beyond even noticing.

Unaccustomed to the radiant phenomenon, Moira finds the environs to be somewhat distracting, a handicap not to be undervalued when dueling a whipsaber master for the first time in her life.

" _Tell-me-where-you-come-from_ ," requests or demands Charybdis, incorporating the unconscious humming that straightens or loosens her whipsaber into her choral command.

Watching her opponent's fluid weapon transform from stick to snake to stick again, Moira perks one shoulder higher in the laziest example of a shrug. "Anglia."

" _Long-way-from-home_ ," observes the Captain with a thoughtful tune.

"Speak for yourself."

" _Where-I-come-from_ ," she clichés, " _isn't-more-than-three-jumps-away_."

Moira shrugs one shoulder. "Maybe physically."

The referee belts his soprano starting pistol and this, the sixth consecutive round, begins anew. With a piddly pair of points against Charybdis' champion four, Moira's presented with both tailspinning momentum and home field advantage to overcome. To accomplish this, she's armed with two sheathed batons and only what minimal element of surprise staring with them both sheathed affords her.

Nevertheless, Moira shifts into her practiced Poised Hukia pose and invites the Trijan to come try her luck.

Charybdis responds in kind, solidifying her whipsaber into a stiff truncheon of approximately baton length with the corresponding three-note key tone. Hefting the now hafted weapon high, she advances a handful of cautious paces forward, feziko held frontwise to best defend.

Once again, Moira's Tebi-Gali plus electrobatons proves an ill-suited match for the tradition Trijan school of fencing with whipsaber and feziko. A specialized stabber's sword, the feziko is superior to a baton in strength and sharpness, while the whipsaber is superior in range and obviously whiplash.

This truth is thwacked achingly into Moira for a fourth time. She attempts to circumvent this pattern by borrowing a page from Nemo's honored book. As soon as Charybdis scoots into leapable reach, Moira bounds brashly forward with a mad banzai jump and both batons snapping open. As she sails toward a momentarily bewildered Charybdis, she ardently hopes she'd somehow correctly extrapolated the distance between them and also hopes, with equal ardor, that Charybdis misextrapolated that same distance.

Of course she lands three steps short. Of course her first baton's overextended swing is slapped away by the feziko's flat. Of course her second baton's downward chop is parried perfectly by a punctual whipsaber and of course three notes uttered from Charybdis' lips coils her weapon completely about Moira's baton. Her right weapon thusly entangled by the sword-come-snare, Moira slices vainly wide towards Charybdis' midsection with her left baton, to create a bubble of empty air between their bodies and to complicate the Captain's footing.

"Mother wanted," Moira relates throatily with the first stymied swing, "me to be a trained bird," she continues with the second, "and I wanted to be," she jabs the baton's non-electrified tip straight towards the Trijan's pelvis, "anything else."

In response, Charybdis emits the merest grunt of acknowledgment. With a flick of the wrist so jarring only repeated cultural tradition could have hammered the motion so hard, the Captain plucks the trapped baton from Moira's grip. Humming her three notes, Charybdis straightens her own weapon again to send the baton skittering across the floor.

Twisting into a standard fencer's posture as quickly as her reflexes will allow, Moira's still seconds too late to outpace the forward-thrust feziko. Its cold solxite blade bonks Moira bloodlessly on the chin and lingers, for a nanosecond, over her available neck.

"Tell me where you come from," returns a panting and partially-insulted Moira Quicksilver when she, point awarded and round called, stalks moodily back to her own corner.

Not remotely perspiry, Socorro Charybdis resumes her humming ritual, unchallenged by Moira's mood or moxie. " _Well, Trija_ ," the Captain supplies. " _Tovoqqa-Province_."

"Nice place?" poses Moira companionably.

" _Was-nicer_ ," Charybdis is forced to admit through a shimmer of perverse pride, the caliber of which Moira's only observed on the face of a very different Captain. " _Decided-to-scorch-the-place-off-the-face-of-the-planet, turns-out."_

Moira only has time to grunt "understand the impulse, I guess" before the referee sings the song that starts the seventh round.

Aboard a decommissioned Trijan war vessel, about to engage a disgraced Trijan naval officer, wielding time-honored Trijan weaponry, in a supposedly sacrosanct rite of Trijan ceremonial combat, Moira's level of casual knowledge toward Charybdis' foresworn culture is called that much into question. The sum total of information Moira could levy concerning or against the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija, its three-thousand year history or its billions of black-skinned citizens was less than impressive.

She knows about solxite and their solar-based technology. She knows about their societal obsession toward husbandry and heritage. She knows about their fierce isolationism in stalwart defiance of all the Imperium's attempts to annex their star system.

In addition, Moira now knows that they, as befits the monopolistic manufacturers of the whipsaber, make excellent whipsaber fighters.

" _Queen-wanted_ ," Charybdis copies and modifies Moira's phrasing, stomping implacably forward and snapping her unrolled weapon about with vicious intimidating cracks, " _me-to-be-a-trained-dog,_ " she continues, inverting her grip on the feziko to better facilitate a stabbing motion, " _and-I-wanted-to-be_ ," she lashes forward, extending her body and saber to their ultimate reach and quite nearly welting the cheek of dodging Moira, " _anything-else_."

"A privateer?" Moira finds herself muttering as the whipsaber's absolute tip whistles past her face and she, with a quick click, extends her right electrobaton.

" _A-free-woman_ ," returns Charybdis instead, stepping boldly forward and attempting to paddle Moira punishingly with her sidearm.

Even with only one electrobaton unsheathed, Moira's still able to stake out some standing space. In one motion, she forces Charybdis to reconsider her footwork and pivots position to within arm's reach of the Trijan's unprotected backside. Unable to spend more than a heartbeat aligning her aim, Moira points the still-retracted righthand baton towards the back of Charybdis' neck, a minute chink in her defenses. With her thumb hammered down, Moira ratchets out the second baton.

Some clairvoyance, some inexplicable combat intuition, whispers in Charybdis' ear to cant her head aside. By a fraction of an inch, she avoids the blow.

The whipsaber next comes screaming around to drive Moira away. It's all her Tebi-Gali reflexes and training can accomplish to scoot her, remaining as much as she can on the balls of her feet, out of harm's elastic way.

As she's turning about with her weapon, Moira and Charybdis pass eye contact for a second. The ex-privateer nods an acknowledgement and the ex-bounty hunter simply glowers with disappointment that she can't seem to land a blow on the cocky bleeder.

Sweat slimes the grips on both her batons and her breath comes all the more raggedly. Moira reasons now might be an appropriate time to begin cheating.

" _I-wore-the-uniform-for-sixteen-years_ ," Charybdis chants, swapping her whipsaber back into a shillelagh and motioning to her outfit, in all its tattered and moth-eaten glory, with her chin. " _I-wore-the-wig-for-nine_ ," she continues, eyes glinting strangely and eyebrows peaked upwards to indicate the ratty tangle of muddied brown hair that adorns her pate. " _I-display-nothing-but-devotion-and-decorum-for-half-my-lifetime-and-none-of-that–_ "

Moira's not content to allow the diatribe much more breathing room and takes three assertive steps forward. " _–factored-into-their-decision–_ " sings Socorro, unwilling to relinquish her remembrance on account of some electrobaton-wielding murderer striding towards her with obvious ill-intent. Moira lobs one laughably timed feint right and prods cruelly left, earning a parry and a shuffle from her opponent in addition to several more bars of musical complaint, " _–to-fucking-exile-me_."

Moira repeats her tactic with opposite hands, feinting left and prodding right. This time, when Charybdis executes a textbook parry of the low-swung left, Moira taps the electricity on, a sudden violation of their previously-agreed upon terms of engagement.

The second of hesitation she earns is enough, the Trijan suddenly shocked to see this unexpected wellspring of sparks springing from Moira's weapon. Moira corkscrews her wrist and twirls the feziko from Charybdis' grasp.

A whipsaber reprisal is only moments behind, accompanied by the Captain's continued humming. Moira can only just bring her unignited baton to bear on a parry before the Trijan's ropey and primary weapon encircles and returns the favor to Moira's upraised baton, clattering it across the cleared space with a few dramatic thuds.

Reduced to a single implement each, gripped in one right hand and one left hand, the two combatants regard each other with a certain steel. Moira's pleased to spot the first indication of a sweat trail, beading on Charybdis' face.

" _Which_ ," she continues, branching out with her whipsaber's far superior reach, " _considering-these-were-the-same-immovable-motherbloomers-who–_ "

Moira bobs and weaves between outreaches of the whipsaber's unfriendly lash, sparking her second electrobaton alive as she does so.

" _–when-they-discovered-their-white-dwarf-was-dying, constructed-an-elaborate-system-of-mirrors-to-focus-the-sun's-rays–_ "

A millisecond slower than she should have been, Moira feels the dreaded twinge of the whipsaber wrapping about her ankle.

" _–rather-than-simply-relocate, I'm-not-sure why I was so–_ "

Thus entangled, an eye blink away from being swept off her feet and losing round seven, Moira parodies Charybdis' oft-overheard mantra of three hummed notes. Like a charm, the whipsaber transforms from whip into saber.

The weapon twangs away, suddenly quite incapable of wrapping around anyone's ankles and Charybdis dropping the thing like a live snake from the sheer surprise. Before she's any time to react, Moira's presented the sparking and hissing end of the electrobaton a few heated inches from the tip of the Trijan's nose.

" _–fucking-surprised,_ " completes a confounded Charybdis.

The referee, meanwhile, calls a foul.

Two-Bit Switch kicks off the adjacent wall and dawdles three steps into the center of the street. The smoking cigarette he clutches between pointer and middle finger scorches the scent of imported Psabese tobacco and latent lung cancer into his nostrils. "You know," he preambles, affecting his most convincing casual air, "whenever I'm hanking for a quitty bifter that's right peachy for a tragged-out bruno like meself is, there ain't no brand of bifter I'd rather get me wanks on than–"

He stops speaking suddenly in favor of squinting obliquely forward, expression of abject disgust crinkling his features. The disembodied voice waits an unusually long time before addressing him.

"Do we have a problem?"

"I'll jabb you what the crunch is, shall I?" Two-Bit gestures forward agitatedly, at the scrolling text he's been instructed to read as convincingly as he can. "The fucking vannaphant in the room. I mean, mate, I don't who you scored to scribble that shit for you, but no one, 'specially no jabberhead, would ever jabb anything like that."

"And that's cut. Back to one."

The director is an unreasonably frustrated Powosi who volcanos out of his pretentious driftchair, presumably to pace frustratedly about until somebody improves his mood with chocochino and flattery. The remainder of his crew, given license to move, bustle about the set, adjusting lighting, fiddling with the holocorders and pointing importantly in various directions.

The handful of Yellowtooth executives, meanwhile – a pack of runty Ruuvians clustered together like feeding lonktonk – chirp and chitter at each other. To judge from their gestures, their topic of conversation seems to range between Two-Bit and the tantrumed director, stomping about the catering table. Standing amid a small crowd of extras, each one plodding back toward their starting places, Two-Bit shrugs massively a second time. "What? Am I wrong here?"

The amount of corporate strong-arming needed to close down this particularly windy street in Pirateton's Lover district could easily triple Two-Bit's initial fee. The advertising head honchos at Yellowtooth Cigarettes accomplished this feat mainly with both generous bribes and empty promises of interstellar holovision fame to the captains whose spaceships lined either side of the street. These same bribes and promises were offered to the suite of well-paid thuggery standing sentry at each available entrance, preventing the ingress of exuberant or gawking yahoos.

Couple onto these expenses an uncooperative celebrity shiller, a temperamental director and the undeniable fact that, for non-natives, Pirateton is a notoriously dangerous place to spend a morning, even at the behest and protection of a major corporation.

This, Two-Bit realizes, may be what's putting Yellowtooth's commercial crew and their flock of supervising bigwigs so on edge.

Contrasting them against the decrepit, low-tech sprawl of the constituent crappy spaceships of Nemo's district, they certainly appear out of place – even those costumed to resemble passing freebooters.

A palisade of recording equipment that half-encircles Two-Bit all brandishes the prefix "holo" like some badge of technological honor – holocorders, holoprompters, holoplayback. Floating microphones, given driftmotors by lazy boom operators, hover and bob just beyond the corder's sightline, eager to catch every sniff, scratch and shuffling step Two-Bit makes with incredible diligence.

Beyond the barricade of lenses, cables and white balance screens, Two-Bit can spot, like a distant promise land, the catering table. Tragically, Two-Bit's separated from the outlaid bounty of wholly unhealthy junk food until this tedious ordeal of ego-massage and product pimping is concluded to everyone's satisfaction.

The makeup artist, this long-suffering Corgassi strapped with bottles of foundation, blush and an infinite supply of tiny sponges, pads out towards Two-Bit, her accoutrements and headfins jangling.

As she wordlessly and painstaking reapplies another coat of foundation that ten seconds of blown Talosian sand has evidently ruined, Two-Bit glances to the cigarette, smoldering unsmoked between his fingers. "You wanna puff, love?"

The Corgassi's brain, visible through the transparent cartilage of her head, pulses once in response. "You've heard their slogan, right?"

Some years previously, Yellowtooth Cigarettes was slapped with a vicious, high-profile lawsuit. One concerned Inner Sector parent's organization or another supposedly lobbied to force the corporation into adopting a new slogan, particularly if they were to continue advertising to children and continue leading the galaxy in the field of terminal lung cancer. Reasonable as that may sound, the cigarettes in question were so obscenely poisonous to their customers, so loaded with toxins, nicotine and undiluted garbage, that no warning label short of "Don't smoke them. You'll die" could adequately satisfy the plaintiffs.

Despite a legal department more fearsome than most of the freebooter captains within Two-Bit's line of sight, the packet of Yellowtooth Blacks he holds bears a legally-mandated advertising slogan, emblazoned across the bottom of the package in broad unabashed letters.

"Don't smoke them. You'll die."

"Fair enough," Two-Bit grunts, returning the carton to his pocket.

Nowhere near the chain smoker that bad-mood Moira was, Two-Bit Switch had, at best, a tenuous relationship with Yellowtooth and their virulent merchandise. Recently, however, this relationship had been made rather less tenuous.

Following the declaration of a new Galactic Menace, a veritable flood of sponsorship options materialized for each of five members of _The Unconstant Lover's_ crew. Yellowtooth's tobacconist barons offered Two-Bit a uniquely staggering amount of cash to become the official centerpiece of their latest advertising campaign – Outlaw Slims, a cigarette marketed exclusively to the Bad Space criminal element and the Freebooter Fleet's growing fandom.

None of this, of course, is meant to imply that Two-Bit Switch turned down the complimentary offers from Bubble, Pickle Planet, CryoChew Extinct Jerky or the Happy Yum-Yum Conglomerate. He gladly accepted their money too, all the more grist for the mill of his eventual caper-to-end-all-capers.

Yellowtooth were simply the fastest to shuttle out a commercial crew.

With one notable exception, Two-Bit was quite frankly the only member of the crew to accept any of these offers of sponsorship. Odisseus balked at the very notion. Abraham's old school anarchic impulses prohibited him from signing any deals with anyone that could be remotely classified as "the man."

Alone among all offers from various arms merchants, the Accuracy Company signed a small contract, allowing them to market the 665 Lawman as "the official firearm of Moira Quicksilver."

To a company, all the advertisers seemed to universally comprehend that the _Lover's_ lieutenants, in terms of celebrity endorsement, represent piddly peanuts. The true cash, the true paydirt, would, of course, come from securing a certain Galactic Menace to spout platitudes about their product.

Shortly after his self-appointment to the positions of the Captain's de facto agent, manager and publicist, Two-Bit Switch quickly saw the mistake in pestering Nemo with these requests. Freshly flushed with fame and victory, asking this Galactic Menace to appear on interstellar holovision, on behalf of some monolithic corporate entity, was literally asking for disaster.

Besides, was it not Two-Bit Switch, the crew's official frontman, with all the charm, panache and devilish good looks?

He hadn't predicted mucking about with makeup artists, holoprompters spewing pseudo-Jabber buhoxshit or the sheer number of monotonous takes. If he had, Two-Bit Switch may not, considering the six more commercials he was slotted to shoot for as many companies, have elected to hog all the limelight for his lonesome.

Even the degree toward which they'd fabricated this particular Pirateton thoroughfare discovers new and exciting ways to irk Two-Bit. This alleyway, formed by the afterburners and fuselages of such parked pirate notables as _The Bare Bones_ , _The Kid Gloves_ and _The Shell Shock_ , was a laughably whitewashed version of its former self. Crowding about the commercial set like stink on a wet Ortok, these Ruuvian execs bleached the street into what they reckoned was a galactically-accepted version of Pirateton its pablum-brained demographics could more easily digest.

Gone here is the ratty, upended and discarded furniture that once crenellated the sidewalks, a byproduct of all the looting and remodeling that came with the acquisition of newer and nicer things. Gone here is the undergrowth of trash – ragged wrappers, rotten food, rotten corpses – produced by a thousand polluters and no civil services, swept conveniently aside for the holocorders to better catch the color of Talos II's trademark purple sand. Gone here is the sprinkling of drunken derelicts, replaced by imported and underpaid semi-professional actors, cleverly costumed to lie disconsolate in gutters and nurse gunky bottles of artificially-colored soda.

"Switch," quips the too-familiar director, squirming between elaborate equipment to approach Two-Bit all the faster. "Gimme your ear a second."

At ten paces, Two-Bit clocked this Gvish as a spineless egotist, with all the buccaneer's bravado and none of his backbone. A pornographer come corporate lapdog in three-eyed sunglasses, an acid-washed lounge singer's jacket and a sweat-sodden mustache, this Gvish was accustomed to manhandling naked Phnuki prima donnas and six-tentacled starlets with promises they'll never work again in this quadrant.

This tactic, he doesn't seem to appreciate, is somewhat less effective against the sentient with the firmest grip, however shaky, on the Galactic Menace's leash.

Two-Bit doesn't dignify the director's command with a reply, only shifts his feet in response to the oncoming Powosi, watching his own stymied reflection grow in each of the approaching sunglasses three lenses.

"The words aren't mine," is his primary argument. "You understand? They aren't yours, they aren't mine, they're," he points a dirty fingernail across the set to isolate the bevvy of sore thumb Ruuvians, chatting ever so conspiratorially, "theirs."

He brackets a heart-sized box before his own sternum, as though to encapsulate the entire situation and its simplicity between his two hands. "Nobody's here to tell you how you talk. Nobody except them. So, how's about," he proposes in a compromising air, "we start again and we just muscle through the buhoxshit. You say their words, this asshole," he indicates an individual extra, a tarted-up greenskin, among the collection of cookie-cutthroats they've assembled to populate the background, "bums a smoke offa you, you say the catchphrase. You dig?"

By way of response, Two-Bit Switch brushes past the Powosi and locks eyes with his hated foe – the holoprompter. "How's about this, eh?" he discovers himself muttering thinly. "How's about this?"

With a violent jerking motion upon one of the seemingly relevant cables, Two-Bit Switch banishes the accursed holographic text roll into nothing and turns about, daring Gvish to comment further. "We start again, right," he explains when nothing but shifty glances from production assistants follow his rash action, "but without the fucking wordbox, yeah?"

"Switch," Gvish repeats, as though the usage of his sobriquet's last syllable somehow endears them, "you gotta understand, my hands're tied here–"

"Gimme one, then, eh? Gimme one where I jabb what I want."

When the Ruuvians only bristle and bluster at the mere suggestion, the put-upon Powosi sighs and extends a single lonely finger. "One," he repeats and stalks away, issuing orders to camera operators and lightning techs.

An additional five minutes, including a collective executive conniption and subsequent open-palmed pacification by Gvish, is required before the crew's quite ready to grind out another, this their however manyth consecutive, take. While being assaulted by successive waves of the Corgassi's sponge, Two-Bit's careful not to psyche his words out too much and keep his conscious mind as clear as he can.

"Oi!" Two-Bit barks towards the running holocorders once the take's begun. As he wings it, anxiety is painfully evident on the score some faces beyond the set's unofficial line of demarkation. "You berks know me. I'm Two-Bit Switch, ain't I? It's me in that holo you wank off to every night before your mum snugs you in."

In accordance with his blocking, he shoves off, sauntering forward to land on his mark. "And I'm here to jabb you that Yellowtooth Cigarettes, this fucker here," he raises the obvious prop pinched between his knuckles, "is the best blooming bifter in the Ring."

He pauses an appropriate number of seconds. "Why? Good ringer." He points weightily past camera towards the huddle of enraptured Ruuvians. "'cause these shitstains here scored me the big rhino to jabb you so."

"Hey there, Switch," refrains the greenskin dayplayer, sidling seductively up on his left side, entirely unfazed by this off-the-books-take, "any chance of you bumming me one of them Yellowtooths?"

In a burst of sudden improvisational instinct, Two-Bit's cigarette makes a short journey straight into the emerald dimple of the extra's big phony smile.

Howling in shock and obvious agony, the dayplayer crumbles into a costumed heap on the ground, cussing up a sandstorm. Panicking crewmen leap from behind the invisible barricade encircling the holocorder to scramble to her assistance.

Two-Bit Switch considers the thrashing lump on the ground, the stub of his somewhat flattened cigarette still idly issuing smoke. "Bloom no!" he balks towards her, as though she still listens, before placing the cigarette cooly between his lips and making eye contact, once again, with the holocorder. "These're mine."

No sooner has he taken a drag than he's pulled his face away in disgust. "These're fucking awful," he announces.

Once cut is called, once the the remainder of the crew hampered by the more cumbersome instruments come rushing to the greenskin's aid, Two-Bit Switch's able to enjoy his brisk jaunt through the depopulated commercial set. With an unsatisfied grimace, he flicks the crooked cigarette in the general direction of the shellshocked executives.

The sounds of chaos and outrage behind him, Two-Bit arrives, with hand-rubbing anticipation, before the outspread bounty of the craft services table.

Chapter 22

Odisseus doesn't understand what, exactly, is so complicated about all this.

In layman's terms, he could not be expected to re-route a stabilizing conduit completely around both coolant control and the arrhythmic flucuator without experiencing even a marginal decline in output strength. Neither his current inventory of supplies or his proscribed time frame took into account how much internal space the driftmotor complex _somebody'd_ insisted he install actually occupied. Of course, this said nothing about the outright number of other conduits – projection, energy maintenance, that accursed locator beacon – that needed to be negotiated. This also all assumed the interlocking nozzle on the stabilizing conduit in question remained clasped to its mated port with the necessary amount of vacuum to prevent any leakage.

Which part of this, Odisseus wonders, is Two-Bit having trouble understanding?

"I ord ya, mate," he sympathizes halfheartedly, box of junk clanging and jangling with each step. He's only taken three steps off the boarding ramp and onto the hold floor before he's fumbled something. A morsel of metal, whose indicator lights betray its function as a console component, tumbles and thuds to the teltriton, with the telltale crunch of broken glass.

Two-Bit peers over the brim of his box and cringes over the corpse at his feet. Without sacrificing his hold on the box's four corners, he cannot reach to retrieve it. "Whoops," he offers instead, hardly an apology, before he pads forward all the same.

Barring the spread of Odisseus' workstation, _The Unconstant Lover's_ cargo hold was comparatively empty. On sound and smell alone, however, one could easily be forgiven for imagining the place packed past capacity by a bazaar's worth of barbecue buhox, disharmonious buskers and impassioned argument between shopper and shopkeeper. All this hustle and bustle was thanks to the Briza's boarding ramp opening onto a sprightly Pirateton evening.

At the center of the impromptu workstation, atop three substitute struts Odisseus fashioned from the handiest three steerage crates, proudly stands the crowbar. All its innards are arranged in a slaughterous spread about its in-progress husk.

After hours spent hunkered, rearing to his full Ortoki height allows Odisseus to stretch his sore spine and receive the approaching Two-Bit's gift of mechanical goodies. From this position he also can more fully appreciate the mechanism he's been laboring at. The progressive product of a weekend's worth of work, the crowbar is practically, counting the steerage crate's boost, high enough to meet his eye level and easily four time his weight.

A forkdrift, he suddenly acknowledges, may be in eventual order.

Two-Bit jiggles the box to more metallic rustling. "Brought what you hanked. Plus," he adds, in answer to the Ortok's scowling about the obvious surplus he presents him, "some other flaster I bumped."

Rather than taking the proffered package for himself, Odisseus makes a few perfunctory sniffs towards its contents, preparing to rifle about inside. "And the audioceiver's in here?"

The proper noun is clearly what gives him the most visible trouble but the context can evidently clue him in enough to make an "Er, should be, yeah," come out of him instead.

Odisseus dips an oily paw experimentally into the bin of broken and abused absurdities that Two-Bit's collected across the face of Pirateton. He spies hydrosensors, glow gauges, even one booster belt and half its requisite housing. Meanwhile, the jabberhead's eyes settle on the curmudgeonly crowbar and her persistent refusal to be assembled from scrambled parts and castoff trash.

"Bloom me sideways," he mutters, almost reverentially. "I never actually vizzed one before, in the meat."

"Me either," grunts Odisseus.

Misunderstanding isn't the cause of Two-Bit's hesitation. "You've never prod one before?" His attention riveted to the open box, the Ortok shrugs sweatered shoulders. "Is it supposed to vizz like that?" predicates Two-Bit further on these grounds. Shuffling through shock absorbers, Odisseus sequels his previous shrug and discovers, crammed forlornly in the box's far corner, the object of his search and Two-Bit's not-yet-completed errand. "Oh, er, I guess I specced it would be more–"

"This is a condensed audioceiver," appraises Odisseus after wrestling the device free and suspending it in a displeased pinch between two claws.

"Er, yes," stammers Two-Bit.

"I need a dynamic audioceiver," states Odisseus without judgment.

From his expression, both "condensed" and "dynamic" are words far outside Two-Bit's adolescent Ortoki vocabulary. In response, he considers the box's contents, as though it could offer up the translation at any moment. "'fraid I don't follow you, mate."

Typically found within an average ship's speaker or subwoofer, a dynamic audioceiver was among several centerpieces to the overall success of Odisseus' constructing of the crowbar.

An esoteric piece of outlaw tech considered vaguely legendary to most, Odisseus had been commissioned, by the magnanimous management of the Freebooter Fleet, to construct one toward the upcoming sack of Ikoril Federate Station. His first such sack since being named to the position of Galactic Menace, Odisseus' saltbrother was understandably eager to ensure the feat was sufficiently breathtaking and imagined then that a crowbar would be precisely what the doctor ordered to do so.

A scrappy coalition of ace mechanics were promised him by each of the five reigning Captains. Instead, Odisseus opted to endeavor the task alone, his palette lately fatigued from the "pirate" flavoring each mechanic the Fleet offered stank of.

The adopted orphan to Takioro's wicked stepsister, Ikoril Federate Station is capped with the same crown of Docking Ports the Defederate Station is. Capital-class airlocks that enclose fully around any docking spacecraft, the once singular system was partially responsible for keeping Takioro so impregnable all these years. Her virtuous cousin, then, could potentially prove equally as effective at repelling all the Freebooter's advances against her, unless these Docking Ports were somehow cracked.

The linchpin in the pirate's plan, then, hinges solely on the effectiveness of Odisseus' home-cooked crowbar, a device designed specifically to pop airlocks.

Odisseus wouldn't feign any expertise in resonant harmonics, not to the Council of Captains, not even to himself. Rumors about the crowbar sloshed back and forth across Bad Space like trapped seawater. Apparently, with the proper parts, the proper configuration and the proper amount of elbow grease, a crowbar could, when activated, unlatch, uncouple or even crumple particular species of airlocks.

A fetishistic fantasy of Greatgullet's, the perennial boarder that he was, the crowbar appeared to be less the golden ticket the Freebooters hoped and more a diving bell of remotely-operated wiring, speaker systems and internalized power generation.

Odisseus only hoped all his efforts wouldn't ultimately result in a doleful pile of soldered-together buhoxshit.

"Tell you what," is the slack Odisseus cuts for his accommodating ally, so willing, if somewhat belatedly, to broaden his horizons with some bilingualism. "You hear that?" His conversational pause creates the ideal opening to hear a scratchy busker solo from outside, vocal chords voluminous enough to identify a Sayashan at three hundred paces. "Break her nose, swipe her microphone, do her a favor."

These instructions more easily understood, Two-Bit Switch, consummate scumbag, betrays his corrupt colors at the prospect of a peaceful evening's mugging. Entrusting the treasure trove of dysfunctional detritus he holds to the Ortok's capable paws, Two-Bit swaggers back from whence he came with newfound purpose and perdition.

No sooner has Two-Bit decamped down the ramp than Odisseus has screeched the _Lover's_ trash duct open, shoved the cardboard box into the ovular chute and dumped the entire sampling of salvage onto the sand below.

Moira Quicksilver could smell an ambush with her nose cut off.

She was a professional bushwhacker, once on bounty-heads, now on merchant vessels, and her predatory intuitions were whetted to such an acute point, they practically were sharp enough to perform the metaphorical rhinectomy themselves. Plummeting through Ikoril Federate Station's central spire, amid the anodyne muzak and impeccable whiteness within one of its roomy lift chambers, Moira's sixth sense, her stalker's sense, goes berserk.

Its vestigial tinglings first came days ago. Two-Bit's preliminary intelligence seemed to indicate that, with eerily efficient synchronicity, all Valladia-associated ship traffic to, from and within a staggering vicinity of Ikoril Federate Station had abruptly stopped. When one considers how few points along the Shipping Line remain unpillaged, it wasn't an altogether unforeseeable turn of events. The anxious mystery of where next the frivolous Freebooter Fleet would attack was becoming a smaller and smaller inhibiter to Valladia's thus far fruitless attempts to defend its holdings.

Her suspicions were further confirmed when they dropped warp within spitting distance of Ikoril's faintly familiar frame. _The Unconstant Lover_ and all her pirate host were confronted with an airspace starkly abandoned – no mobile merchants, no privateer protection, no operative spacecraft within zottibles. Without delay, weekend warrior Odisseus' crowbar was deployed, its function flawlessly successful. The first wave of boarders – _Eyesore_ , _Rule_ and _Lover_ – came to berth through Docking Ports with yawning portals where their hermetically-sealed airlocks once belonged.

Moira's misgivings were all the more amplified upon the discovery of an equally-abandoned First Ring.

Architecturally Takioro's twin, philosophically Takioro's evil twin, Ikoril could be presumed to possess some measure more decorum and some measure less depravity. Whereas Takioro's First Ring is comparatively the most civilized – a sweaty chopshop where spaceships come to be cannibalized, commandeered and complimented with all manner of illegal weaponry and systems – Ikoril's counterpart thereof shouldn't simply be an empty parking garage.

Not only do no shock troopers descend to prevent the pirate's initial invasion of Ikoril, no souls of any stripe – pedestrian, technician or administration – are in evidence. Their whole hairy horde hustled down unused arteries and abdicated Docking Ports.

Now, they were four skeptical sentients, riding the lift down the central spire's main chute, slotted for immediate delivery on Ikoril's Second Ring. All the time, Moira's internalized ambush-o-meter commences its wild wavering.

A limited number of usable lift chambers meant an unfortunate fracturing of their forces. Curiosity queuing up as her eventual cause of death, Moira had volunteered the primary crew of _The Unconstant Lover_ as one of several spearheads who would complete the initial descent and clear a comfortable landing space to shepherd all their thuggery through.

The newly-named Galactic Menace, eager to strut, agreed readily enough.

Her other two companions also represent the same uneasiness as Moira. Odisseus, subconsciously or not, rumbles, a bellyful of bile percolating somewhere beneath his blubber, the primordial ancestor to a territorial growl. Two-Bit taps an elaborate tarantella on the stock of his unholstered Tigress, his body otherwise replete with faux-relaxation and a reasonable impression of gunfighter's calm.

Only Nemo, constitutionally incapable of concern, can't tap into the undercurrent of tension that plagues the chamber. Instead, he pops spit bubbles against his cheek with a flicked forefinger.

Moira simply squints, narrowing her vision as though to also narrow the number of options that await them beyond the airtight lift doors.

The central spire, everyone but Two-Bit admits, is an astonishing improvement over Takioro's current and tortuous method of inter-level transit. All engineering and elevators, the spire could shuttle commuters between Rings with approximate speed, higher frequency, greater efficiency and zero risk of catapulting a capsule full of them into the wild black yonder.

The same central spire, of course, had famously been forsaken by Takioro's original corsair conquerors, the same so championed in Bad Space's folklore, in favor of a massive mooring planetoid and massive elevator guns.

The humble holoscroll shifts both its color and composition, forewarning their imminent arrival. If memory served, the Second Ring's relevant lift platform could quickly become a brutal bottleneck. A suite of skilled marksmen installed there could conceivably stack the corpses of every cutthroat in Bad Space, assuming they were all fluted down this elevator shaft first.

A shrill whistle and a tip of the temple from Moira flattens the four of them, oblivious Nemo only with some Ortoki strong-arming, against the chamber's walls. They squeeze as much conceivable cover against awaiting assailants as the lift's lipped entrance would allow.

Soundless air brakes activate. The elevator creeps to an eventual sync with the Second Ring clasps. Moira Quicksilver, appointed to command by Nemo's current mood of cluelessness, gives orders through gritted teeth. "Long as they open with gunfire, hold until reload," she instructs, repurposing a popular naval mnemonic. "Somebody shoots something besides ditrogen our way, that I'll handle." A primed and polished Lefty prepares for its close-up, should the squad of razorbacks they encounter favor grenades. "Otherwise–"

A gout of depressurized air makes its interruptive opinion known, spraying Moira squarely in the face. Upon reopening her eyes, Moira's further startled by the revelation that her jackboot's once unflappable position, firmly rooted to the floor by the station's artificial gravity, is also under challenge.

Moira, and her companions, to spare them a glance, all seem to sever their earthly ties and drift languidly into the elevator's open air, wreaking instantaneous chaos with their attempted counter-ambush.

The doors ping pleasantly apart. The corridor beyond, a whitewashed spaceway that ferries passengers from Ring to spire and vice versa, is thankfully as unoccupied as the entire First Ring and every Docking Port it sprouts.

"Huh," grunts a newly floating Two-Bit seconds before making the most obvious observation within reach. "Grav's out."

"Life's support's online." With a few hearty sniffs and his hind claws imbedded into convenient cracks between the lift's floor plates, a still somewhat stationary Odisseus is able to employ his superlative sense of smell to make this secondary deduction. "Odd."

His hair a black tendrilled anemone growing off his scalp, Nemo mentally checks into the conversation. "Which means...?"

A throaty shush from Moira, as well as an upraised pistol, garners them all a few seconds of silence. Sure enough, patience and reticence is rewarded with a bleak and distant bleat, a repeating tone piped through a chorus of speakers and originating somewhere down the connecting corridor. "An alarm."

Listening rather than jabbering grants Two-Bit new insight as well. "Takioro's the same one," he realizes, favoring each of his companions in turn with an expression of glassy-eyed remembrance. "Remember that year when all them Xwollese killer shrooms starting rooting in the Third Ring works? No? Nobody?" he spits futilely towards uncomprehending faces. "Well, it means the grav's out," he summarizes dejectedly.

"Helpful," Moira deadpans, ambulating through the air and into the corridor.

Bounding steps are quickly converted into swimming strokes. The four freebooter figureheads crawl and cavort their way towards their next hurdle. An identical white bulkhead down the hallway protects the Second Ring, all its wealth and all its defenders, behind doors latched shut.

Moira, the first to depart, the nimblest and possibly the least comfortable in weightlessness, makes the doorway first. Lefty and Righty clatter awkwardly against the plastolieum-plated teltriton as she presses herself prone along the entrance and touches her nearest ear to its cool surface.

"Hear anything?" prompts Odisseus upon his arrival.

"The alarm," Moira confesses in totality and knees herself into a more advantageous position.

With no theories to express, no opinions to spread between them, the four crewmen have no choice but to agree to Two-Bit's offer. "On three?" he proposes, clinging by the hand to the door control panel and as overflowing with further suggestions as anyone else.

The remaining three hoodlums clamber into whatever suitable cover they can scrape together. Moira can only speculate what manner of scrambling, shooting, zero-gee gunfight will erupt should Ikoril and their Valladian masters have legitimately prepared some manner of welcoming.

Two-Bit taps three buttons, the bulkhead bisects and they're all afforded the first view of what Ikoril welcomes them with.

Clutter – holozines flapping open like birds in sluggish flight, a ceramic cephalopod figurine beckoning the pirates to enter with its motorized tentacle and an armada of tiny toy spaceships enacting an adorable little fleet action – clogs the Ring's airspace.

Carnage – multifarious scorch marks marring the bleached plastolieum plating, an abundance of twisted metallic wreckage slicing the still air and, tellingly, physical and aromatic evidence of ditrogen hanging in psychedelic orbs where their original firearms fired them – suggests some great preemptive conflict.

Corpses – their wounds gruesome and obvious, their blood congealed into floating pinpricks, their species indiscriminately spread – comprise the most salient component of the Second Ring's airborne contents. The nearest such corpse, a male Zourim, is wearing both a holographic Hivu Hiveminds tee and a splattered hole through his throat. He tumbles through the newly opened doorway and up the corridor, his long arms slapping the floor sickeningly.

To the casual and indeed studied eye, the stores, shops and streets of Ikoril Federate Station have already been plundered by the Freebooter Fleet except, of course, for the indelible fact that they'd only just arrived.

"Come on my tits and call me your mother," an astonished Nemo suggests.

"Ditto," Moira agrees.

Wearing as nauseated an expression as the permanent Ortoki cast to his facial features allows, Odisseus pleads, with a certain degree of helpless confusion. "Have we any idea who could've–"

"Sure vizzes like," Two-Bit provides, fiddling nervously with his multe bracelet, "we did."

"It certainly would seem so," mutters Moira.

"But, what really, then?" a baffled Odisseus begins to balk. "Copycats?"

"I mean..." proposes Nemo, allowing for a pause wide enough to steer the _Preemptive Strike_ through, "... _time travel?_ "

Three of the galaxy's most withering expressions are Nemo's immediate reward for the voicing of his hypothesis. To which, Nemo can only shrug the self-evincing shrug of the unheeded conspiracy theorist.

Wearing her scowl at Nemo's absurdity as a mask, Moira, with hands and hobnails, gains traction on whatever surface her limbs can reach. She front strokes forward, off in quest of some comparative quiet with which to better prove her emerging theory.

The level to which Ikoril copies Takioro, especially internally, continues to astound Moira. Transparently constructed from the exact same blueprints, the chief difference between the two Federate Stations, beyond Ikoril's central spire and omnipresent pearly plating, is the actual content of the outlets and storefronts whose facades she finds so familiar.

To her right, Moira recognizes The Admiralty and The Hole in the Hull, now transformed into the Lucky Stars Community Playhouse and Quality Crandish Ceramics. To her left, the disgusting Niktur's Chiligrubs and the equally disgusting Knockers are metamorphosed, rather harmlessly, into a driftstroller rental and a public boomerang ball court, respectively.

A trespasser's habits arise in Moira, very meticulous in her movements, lest she somehow contaminate the investigation of all the conspicuous destruction and unmistakeable violence that so improve Ikoril's unintentional impersonation of Takioro. Skirting circumspectly between exhibits of gut-wrenching violence and mind-boggling beauty, Moira feels herself a burglar in a modern museum of zero-gee artwork.

Golden gaming chips and their dead gamblers, constellated across a corner casino, evacuate the premises with incredible reluctance, the frictionless drift expelling out their glittering or gunshot forms almost experimentally. An episode of Brock Rocket, Star Patriot is broadcast ad infinitum through the plexisheild window of an HV shoppe, ensuring an audience lifeless with laser holes that the Endless Imperium has not forsaken nor forgotten its Outer Ring citizens. A carton of Microwave Drongo Poop, its casing cracked and possessed of the faintest spin, disgorges its contents, a chocolatey stream of fecal concentrate, in a geometrically perfect cyclone.

Clues, despite the chaos and confusion, appear individually with each inch Moira scrutinizes past the point of their entry.

Signs of looting are both many and exhaustive. All registers are smashed, all pockets are picked, all shelves are swept clean and, Moira is certain, all the storerooms, Ikoril's real prize, are empty. Less popular to the Outer Ring's outlaw populace, perhaps, but Ikoril Federate Station remained a pivotal point on Valladia's Line and a sizable shipping depot for the whole Quadrant. Whomever the guilty party may be, they could no doubt assuage said guilt by languishing in the precipitous mountain of booty they'd just stolen.

All the telltale and obvious watermarks of a Freebooter Fleet sack are readily, even repetitively, apparent: the half-eaten food, the haphazard dispersal of corpses, even the habitual urine stains against the pristine plating. Graffiti grows like expected moss against walls, floors and, in the depleted gravity, even ceilings, brandishing all the familiar images and slogans – five of six Jolly Rogers, _The Eyesore's_ excluded, as well as the litany of popular slags against both Imperium and Valladia.

None of the fractal paint derision, Moira notes with some bemused interest, is original. Every vandalism she sees is a recognizably dimwitted reproduction of a similar phrase splattered against the walls of the GalaxGas Refinery Complex, Valladia Prime and the Adrogi Wet Market.

The carcasses, from customer to vendor to station staff, are demonstrably the work of an unleashed Freebooter force. Studied observation reveals provable points – the multicolored ditrogen scoring each individual wound, the increased frequency of canisters pumped into each target and so on, the encyclopedic array of pistol, rifle, carbine and machine gun fire responsible.

A more casual observation reveals a more telling trend: no dead pirates. Indeed, as indistinguishable as an ordinary spacer and a true-blue pirate can occasionally be, Moira recognizes none of the requisite tattooing, scarification nor many-belted apparel that categorizes a career corsair among the floating dead.

Nor, she realizes, does she spot among the slaughter any demonstrable member of an Imperium resistance. An absence of any razorback bodies, hanging in dead space, suggests that Ikoril went undefended at the time of its supposed sacking by the Freebooter Fleet.

The journey to rejoin with her companions is hardly an arduous or lengthy one. The weight of the burning revelation in Moira's chest hastens her all the more.

A fresh foursome of Freebooters, Greatgullet among them, have joined the initial four, each one gaping slack-jawed at the very spectacle that's initially enraptured the _Lover's_ own crew. As Moira approaches, Nemo, Odisseus and Two-Bit bounce and rebound themselves, as best they can, closer to their returned companion.

"Find anything?" Odisseus prompts eagerly, his Wreckingball clutched in all ten claws.

"Found something," grants Moira, her expression steeling over. "Somebody clearly beat us to the punch."

An unimpressed Two-Bit scowls. "And?"

"And I know who."

Nemo's scowl crinkles to better match Two-Bit's. "Xo?"

"The Imperium."

Two-Bit Switch would rather die an agonizing death – dissolved by eight stomach's worth of scalding acid within the rollicking gullet of an Eparese trashcow, say –than make such an admission. Credit where credit's due, though, the Imperium may actually have outfoxed him this once, criminal mastermind and all.

This means someone, on either the Ministry's Menace desk or the Risk Prevention Board at Valladian Shipping, may, when push comes ultimately to shove, possess more than a tumbler's worth of brains. Considering the PR bungle that originally brought Nemo's irrational wrath down upon them and their laughably sluggish attempts to retaliate, Two-Bit previously neglected this possibility as too far outside to prepare a contingency for.

Forced to watch and re-watch the moment of his adversary's triumphant cleverness on the strategic imager, a punishment already contrived for the hellish and specifically-tailored ring of his afterlife, a begrudging Two-Bit eventually admits, if only inwardly, that this was cannily done.

Dead bodies in motion remain in motion. Beads of liquid – tears, blood or alcohol – threaten to transform the hologram into a piece of pointillism. The view rendered in negative red by the strategic imager's underperforming projector and the audio reduced lower than low by interstellar distance, the footage GAC's reporters grabbed is infuriatingly well-filmed artwork, practically festival-quality fare.

Despite the high pixelation of the images he's presented with, Two-Bit Switch occasionally can distinguish specific scenes, snapshots he only remembers he encountered sometime after.

A floating accordion, perhaps once the property of some busker or specialty shop, caterpillars past camera, its songs silenced by a stray ditrogen bolt to the bellows. Its motor removed, its radio removed, its steering levers removed and its four Eussi passengers murdered, a driftcart's once singular ability of levitation is plagiarized by everything aboard Ikoril not nailed down.

All this heart-rending sensationalism, however, quickly fades into unfocused scenery against which a series of statistics, at once startling and somewhat meaningless, are tabulated.

The stern yet sympathetic voice of the anchor, the friendly neighborhood Cadafreyan whose channel the local feedcasters must most prefer to outsource across Talos' sector, indexes the incident numerically, citing casualties, property damage and so forth, accrued on Ikoril's attack.

While her current audience proves somewhat less than receptive to her claims, the anchor's eyeless expression somehow conveys all the necessary remonstrance to a grieving galaxy. "At this time, the Menace and his followers are presumed to have fled toward their hidden fortress somewhere on the moons of Talos."

Her expression softens suddenly, as though struck by a passing pang of guilt. "As the authorities continue to pursue decisive action against the Freebooter Fleet, tonight our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims caught in the wake of this monstrous tragedy. No stolen property was worth their sacrifice."

"Oh, get bent, you sopping bleeder!" roars an outraged Greatgullet. "That's buhoxshit on its face and even _she_ knows it!"

Seemingly shamed by the Obax's sudden outburst, the newsplash footage, with a hiccuping quaver of picture, re-loops to the segment's beginning. For quite possibly the third time, Two-Bit's lost count, it starts its glitzy, overpriced "Breaking News" coverage.

Simply the most vocal, Greatgullet is far from the only other observer. Everyone and their entourage's here, everyone who would normally attend a convergence of the Captain's Council, from Vobash, to Aju Vog Xah Qaj, to Charybdis. Even a chary Nemo, the Galactic Menace, sits as a sullen and somber shadow somewhere to Two-Bit's right.

For a venue known to host a variety of entertainments and distractions, from banquets, to Iniquity, to pirateball, little of any significance had occurred since the meeting convened. Any discussion of actual tactics, response or retaliation had yet to commence. The score of those present were preoccupied with watching the captured media clip, attempting to sore-assedly process how hard the Endless Imperium had just fucked them.

How Valladia squared themselves with the notion of their militaristic patrons slaughtering an entire station-load of loyal customers, Two-Bit couldn't guess. All he knew was that one fell swoop from the Imperium had robbed the Freebooter Fleet of their prize of Ikoril, condemned them for their thoughtless butchery across all of interstellar feedspace and secured an opportunity to make vast amounts of cash and cargo vanish without a trace.

Two-Bit could conjure half a hundred theories to explain how they could've accomplished such an extensive feat under the galaxy's and his own nose, with repurposed commercial vessels first and foremost.

Their actual methods, however, were not of as much consequence. What was most consequential was the havoc this granted the Imperium the opportunity to wreak in the press.

It went without saying that, even prior to the declaration of the Menace, the entire Imperial political and publicity machine devoted a substantial portion of their energy to painting Nemo as both scheming terrorist and senseless barbarian. This Ikoril business, though, represented their first masterstroke, the ability to create and control the actions they decried as deplorable rather than simply exaggerate and hyperbolize them. Where their attempts to combat the Freebooter fiasco with physical power had failed them, here had the morally bankrupt Imperium, demonizing Nemo for the crimes they themselves committed, shown that they too would refuse to play by any civilized rules.

The Cadafreyan, an expression of urgency and duty worn so hackneyed on her eyeless face, reappears behind her news desk. At once, she rattles, full tilt, into her prepared remarks. "Shocking developments in the–"

It's Vobash who mercifully spares everyone present another unnecessary rehashing of the Imperium's flawless victory, with a spindly finger pressed decidedly on the imager's mute button. He takes command of the conversation even before speaking, adjusting his weight and sending his secreted brushvezzer scurrying about to avoid being crushed. "I would hope that you all consider attacking Yime, at this point, to be out of the question?"

"Out of the question? Bloom me, out of the question," protests Greatgullet with a majestic showing of bluster and bellicosity. He points stridently towards the silent red hologram, continuing her silent story to a now inattentive audience. "Last thing I'mana do is allow–"

"Best case–" Vobash attempts to interject.

"–these pompous motherblooming _liars_ –"

"Best case," Vobash repeats, revealing a dash of his own outrage towards the tempestuous Obaxi buccaneer, "there's an entire armada of privateers, possibly even Imperium warships, in orbit around Yime Orbital." With nowhere left to attack, with Yime's lonely anchorage the single point remaining unsacked on all the Shipping Line, the mystery of the Freebooter Fleet's next target was simply solved. "Worst case, they raid the station themselves, pocket all the profit and blame us for the bloodshed." One Triomman shoulder creeps upward in half a traditional shrug. "It's either a slaughterhouse or a waste of fuel."

" _You-propose-what, then_?" Charybdis bottom-lines, ever the chase-cutter.

Vobash is painstakingly diplomatic in the following suggestion. "I propose that we've made tens of millions of credits each. I propose that we've indelibly altered the course of galactic history. I propose," he suggests innocently, "that we cut our losses and call the thing complete."

No reaction of universal disapproval explodes from the Council. Even Greatgullet, clearly stewing in displeasure, does not muster an actual objection. The passage of time, devoid of objection or censure, nearly ratifies the better part of valor into law.

Nemo, staunchest opponent of the wiser option, offers no alternative. He remains sunk shoulder deep in his new melancholy, chipping away flicks of veneer off the Captain's Table with a fingernail. Much as his Captain relied upon him for planning, advise and logistics, so now does the Galactic Menace rely upon Two-Bit to defend his indefensible ideals.

"And, what, be thought of as yellow?" Forty odd eyes swerve aside from Vobash, Nemo or the hologram to settle on Two-Bit, this unlikely champion of imprudence. "You jabb," he aligns towards Vobash, "about galactic history and all that. You think galactic history's gonna vizz toasty on them what blagged nine of Valladia's ten?" With his words sinking into so many thick skulls, Two-Bit reclines backward, the conclusion he outlines foregone. "They jabbed us as monsters. If I'm gonna be thought of that, might as well be the actual gritty, eh?"

This seems to land with better reception that Vobash's oddly more optimistic plan of action. Charybdis nods resignedly, the Xend quiver their antennae and Greatgullet even enjoys a jocular chuckle. The grumpiest considering the Imperium's swift and sure denial of any potential profits in the Ikoril or Yime enterprises, Vobash has positively and predictably gone sour, especially in light of no one agreeing with his assuredly safer solution.

Wood scrapes and skids against teltriton. Two-Bit turns at the sound to see Nemo abruptly on his feet. Before anyone can open their mouth to even word a question or objection, he's strode the ten steps to the mesh curtain and, with a temperamental swish, the Galactic Menace has officially stormed out of the meeting.

Confounded expressions travel from the clinking curtain across the chamber to settle on Two-Bit Switch. In his capacity as the Menace's primary minder, the responsibility falls to him to follow Nemo out into Pirateton's inky night.

His silhouette stalks some distance ahead of Two-Bit. On a night such as this one, following a handy defeat at the hands of a preemptive Endless Imperium, no crowds of clamoring sycophants cloud the Galactic Menace's progress. With no bountiful booty to satiate them, the corsair citizenry could care less how menacing this Captain Nemo was to the galaxy at large.

To them, he was merely another hoodlum, circuiting the desolate streets of the city he founded.

Pirateton mends. Weeks following the surprise violence the 4th Fleet wrought upon the town, the damage is patched, plated over or, most frequently, ignored, the ditrogen-scarring quickly becoming familiar pieces of demarkation in everyone's minds, landmarks by which to orienteer by. This is defeated somewhat by the influx of new ships, however, and Pirateton is, if anything, so changeable that it remains an absolute nightmare to navigate.

What Two-Bit is most thankful for, however, is that the shelf life of the trophies, the Imperium commandos captured or killed during the ground skirmish and strung up on gibbets or pikes across the city, has more or less expired. Most of the reeking corpses have rotted away enough than their owners either destroyed them or possibly they just no longer smell, reduced wholly to skeletons and helmets.

At full hustle, Two-Bit's reduced practically to panting by the time he's circled about the Captain, plunging headlong into the teltriton tangle surrounding his own spaceship. To both keep ahead of Nemo and speak sense to him, Two-Bit's forced to scuttle backwards through Pirateton, an enterprise fraught with stumbles and potential pratfalls. "You ain't vizzing at this the right fucking way."

"That right?" a despondent Nemo returns with each sloughing step through sand and garbage. "Is there another way?" He waves one hand dismissively, Two-Bit's opinion a vexatious fly. "It's nothing to do with the loot. I've more money than I know how to throw fucking away. It's the..." he trails off, hand grasping at what intangibly bothers him.

"The press, mate," Two-Bit supplies. "I understand."

"You remember any of this with Ott?" he presses with an ambush of conviction, his gaze leaping up from the ground to bore into Two-Bit with crystalline clarity. "Ott threatened them. Ott, they respected. They had to."

"Don't know," Two-Bit begins to counter, nearly losing his balance over the carcass of a gutted dash left lifelessly in the lurch, "if you've blanked or what, Cap'n, but ain't there hundreds of millions of their rhino lining our pockets?" He thrusts a finger skyward to pinpoint the shadow of the pulverized Pylon, visible against the illuminated orb of Talos Prime. "Ain't that the blooming capital gantine they cast off to kuckle us? Ain't there," the finger remains extended to wave inches back and forth from Two-Bit's own face, "only one port on the Shipping Line we ain't tossed?"

"Two," Nemo grunts petulantly.

Two-Bit's arms fly wide and only careful footing rescues him from a nasty backwards spill when confronted with an abandoned pair of sneakers, lying unseen beneath the topsoil of trash. "Not as far as the galaxy knows. That they made certain."

" _I_ know." With eye contact re-established, some buried spark of the bold and brash Nehel Morel is visible beneath this bone-deep veneer of gloom, a spark Two-Bit intends to rekindle if they'd any hope of completing this ridiculous escapade at all. "If this is gonna be me now, if this is what they'll know me for, I won't have them," he spits with obvious disdain, "tell it."

With a cautious shrug and a creeping smile, Two-Bit spots his opening. "They jabbed the galaxy one thing," he reasons. "Maybe it's time you jabbed them something else."

"And what would that be?" Nemo wonders with dejected skepticism.

"That piracy ain't pointless."

Chapter 23

Odisseus votes against Ulic Traffo of the _Anglia Daily_. With his upscale fashions, his immaculately-trimmed goatee and, worst of all, that smile as thin and forced as one Moira Quicksilver might wear, the Anglian positively reeks of Inner Sector pomposity. At even a passing glance, Odisseus pinpoints Traffo as precisely the type of uncaring elitist who most likely drives a Glide9 around the suburbs and thinks he's driving a Glide11 or a Glide12.

The Ortok does lately suppose that this may or may not reflect that poorly on his journalistic credentials.

In the interest of full disclosure, Odisseus also voted against Pluwu Plaxon of Galaxy Gossip. Xaddixoro of Alien Monthly also failed to earn his vote. In fact, none of the half a dozen candidates Two-Bit thought to parade before the disapproving eyes of both saltbrothers and one Grimalti this morning were quite up to the Ortok's snuff.

Chances were good he would therefore vote against whichever secret seventh candidate Two-Bit was doubtlessly keeping safely sleeved. Odisseus did not, in point of fact, think this whole scheme was necessarily the wisest course of action they could conceivably take, anyway.

To make matters worse, the Ulic Traffo that Odisseus didn't approve of was little more than a hologram. The stiff-backed Anglian – snooty dress sense, suspicious goatee, feigned smile and all – wavers occasionally, when the hypercomm projection pad his likeness stands upon cannot maintain a consistent feed. A mere recording, he doesn't physically nor verbally react to the small bevy of buccaneers who hem and haw over him, like choosy shoppers poking and prodding a prospective side of buhox.

While this method may come with certain advantages, Odisseus laments the lack of olfactory evidence he can bring to bear against the reporter. Seven some sectors divided is no way to judge a sentient's character, in Odisseus' esteemed yet ignored opinion. A cocktail of damning and distrustful aromas undoubtedly swirl about the smarmy Anglian.

Luckily for Odisseus, however, none of his companions seem especially awestruck by Traffo's candidacy. To fully portray his role as unbiased presenter, Two-Bit makes the token pitch all the same, despite the utter lack of enthusiasm in his voice.

"He's hooked deep into the Inner Sector scene, is the main razz I'm propoing him." Two-Bit paces a partial path along the pad's starboard side, his contemplative stroll hindered, somewhat, by how little free space the sensor room contains. "He's fluffy as all Jotor, sure he is, but he scribbles somethin' 'bout you, everybody posh's gonna read it."

In duster and sweatpants of equal rattiness, a severely underdressed Nemo was rousted from both bed and hangover a mere hour previously. As he speaks, he brandishes his most inappropriate breakfast to date – a pink-sprinkled chiller cream cone – delivered by an supremely displeased Moira. "Anything to watch of his?" he requests between licks, his expression the absolute epitome of abject boredom.

"Should be," mutters Two-Bit, tapping the projection pad with his sneaker to conjure the prepared clip.

The four of them, Ortok, Grimalti, jabberhead and Menace, crowd the comparatively cramped sensor room with their mere presence. Odisseus, therefore, opts to linger in the doorway and, even there, cannot escape the sense of claustrophobia the chamber instills. With a litany of separate machines running to assist Two-Bit with his presentations, the room's temperature approaches an unbearable level. As preposterous as it may seem, the panting Odisseus eventually comes to envy Nemo his melty breakfast.

An hour of their morning was wasted by all six reporters, correspondents and newshounds from as many separate press organizations. To a being, each was proposed and subsequently vetoed for a dizzying array of reasons, from under-qualified to overqualified, from "weird" to "funny-looking" to "unsettling nose."

By number six, Odisseus officially begins to wonder whether or not his saltbrother is, perhaps, too capricious. That being said, Odisseus hasn't placed the merest smidgen of confidence in a single of Two-Bit's nominees either and, summarily, people who fly glass spaceships and all that.

This entire notion of a tell-all, a publicity stunt to counteract some of the Imperium's propaganda with propaganda of their own, seems, to the ever-skeptical Ortok, something of a fool's errand.

Granted, Nemo was actually innocent in the matter of the massacre at Ikoril Federate Station. Granted, the Imperium forces truly responsible advanced the degree of slaughter a caliber or two higher than any plundering pirate would have. The fact remained, though, that had the Freebooter Fleet been granted the opportunity to lay Ikoril to waste, they wouldn't have been there to hand out linked flower leis and good advise. Murder and mayhem were always going to be their modus operandi.

No matter how skilled a reporter they found to sugarcoat Nemo's public perception, he remained the Galactic Menace for a very justifiable reason. Horrifying as Ikoril was, Nemo's day job remained burning, sacking and despoiling otherwise innocent ports.

In response to the instructions of Two-Bit's tapped toe, the sensor room's four screens spring simultaneously to life. Their once-darkened faces are instantly replaced by the same sunny and idyllic scene.

The kitchen they see is appointed so tastefully it strains feasibility. Joojberries glisten in their perfectly arranged bowl. Manufactured sunlight dapples the room through homespun-seeming drapery. Sterling cooking utensils are arranged in an encyclopedic array, an arsenal becoming of any master chef.

Beginning in media res, the recording snaps into action amid a previous conversation between the kitchen's two occupants – a humanoid and an Oodani. Traffo is quite demonstrably the humanoid, with spotless apron and pleasant attitude. The equally-aproned female Oodani to his left is actually of some passing pop familiarity to Odisseus.

"With my bare hands?" laughs Traffo woodenly, squiggling anxious fingers over a smooth steel bowl. As the four hoodlums and studio audience listen, the bowl emits a faint squiggling sound all its own.

"With your bare hands," repeats the Oodani reassuringly, her meaty orange paws occupied in chopping some purple vegetable with blinding speed. "They don't bite – trust me."

Hamming up his apprehension for the benefit of both his studio audience and the folks at home, Ulic Traffo lowers both hands beneath the bowl's rim. His cartoonish apprehension intensifies as he starts to slowly knead the bowl's contents, to further squishing noises.

"No bites yet," Traffo appreciates, a viscous and beige substance increasingly visible on his forearms with their every motion.

"The key," the Oodani expounds, flapping her prehensile snout as she speaks, "to preparing the perfect batch of zeeki maggots is to ensure that they're each thoroughly massaged and gingered."

"If you're just joining us on _Good Morning Anglia_ ," a suddenly brightening Traffo likewise addresses to the audience, "we're here with Chef Toruta Theng, author of the new book _Gourmet Grubs for Common Kitchens_ , and she's teaching us how to make down-home style Oodani–"

A second and succinct tapping of Two-Bit's toe freezes the holographic scene in stilted silence. "So, he's out, then," he immediately determines. With some four finger percussion against the screen of his Attaché, all trace of Ulic Traffo is banished from the sensor room's monitors and projection pads.

"That's six, then?" Abraham confirms evenly.

Two-Bit gaze is fixated within the hovering displays of his Attaché. "He was number six, yeah."

"Well," Nemo begins, creaking suddenly to his feet with the undeserved effort of a job well done, "if we're about finished here–"

"Who's number seven?" advances Odisseus from the doorway.

Abraham peaks an eyebrow. Nemo stops short. Two-Bit's eyes flick upward to meet Odisseus' across the room. "Ah, you delly me too fucking well."

He presses three more fingerprints against the screen. Another life-sized hologram springs into existence from the depths of the projection pad. The bedimmed sensor room is flooded with replacement light.

The room's newest occupant is about as far a cry from an Anglian puff piece correspondent as one could conceivably imagine. The hairless skin, the feline face and the pointed pair of ears repeated in triplicate identify him, first and foremost, as a Helker. The agonizing array of piercing across practically every available lobe or skein of loose skin identify him, even before Two-Bit does, as a face more familiar to Odisseus than even Toruta Theng's own.

"Wezz," Two-Bit supplies seconds after activating the hologram. "The boy wonder of _Space Times_."

"Boy wonder?" Abraham's expression crinkles. "He were fired from _Space Times_ , were he not?"

"He may, yes," Two-Bit allows as politely as possible, "have been axed on the heels of the whole Valladian Shipping, 'piracy is pointless' snafu. That don't mean, however," he stipulates, "that he ain't the right choice."

"So," Nemo poses, his chiller cream dribbling down between his fingers, "who's he write for, then?"

"Nobody," is Two-Bit's manipulative answer. "He's, er, what's the word, freelance?"

Chosen very deliberately by Two-Bit, this word seems to enkindle the glint necessary in Nemo's eye, a glint Odisseus hastens to stomp upon.

"Freelance means no audience," the Ortok points out, hoping instead to capitalize on his saltbrother's budding megalomania.

"Freelance means no editors," Two-Bit trumps, wielding a startlingly superior knowledge of the Captain's temperaments. "You sit down with another scribbler, a scribbler on somebody else's jangle, he's gotta to nix anything the aggers upstairs don't fancy."

Nemo aligns his eyes, their light suddenly reasonable and pleading, towards Odisseus. "Censorship's gotta be priority number one."

"And credentials?" Abraham tosses to Two-Bit before Odisseus can muster a proper counter to Nemo's new argument. "What's he actually scribbled?"

"To be facting, almost zilch since _Space Times_ axed him. Scanty of this, scanty of that, nothing too meaty." Two-Bit Switch looks into the Helker's holographic face as he elaborates. "Means he's gonna hank the work, is the takeaway there. There ain't no intergalactic feedzine tragging his play no more. Story like this," he cracks the briefest of smiles, "and he'll be having the bees."

Odisseus isn't dissuaded. "The question stands. What's he written?"

"Before that axe came down," Two-Bit continues without a beat missed and another samba beaten against the Attaché's touchscreen, "he was _Space Times'_ boy wonder and, what most people blanked on by now, is that the Captain here wouldn't be the first Menace he finangled a jabber at."

A process he's repeated for each of the five previous candidates proves once again successful and the still image of Wezz, _Space Times'_ lost sheep, is summarily swapped for one in motion. For the Helker's part, his appearance is measurably altered, mainly separated by a shift in wardrobe and a decrease in piercings across face, ears and appendages.

"How do you see this ending? Realistically?" he questions openly.

"Realistically?" repeats Boss Ott. "Heh. Clever. You include realistically and suddenly I'm either an idealist or a pessimist. But I'm unfortunately neither. I'm, as you say, a realist."

Wezz's expression remains decidedly neutral. "How so?"

They stand amid a stretch of tundra, familiar coral formations rearing up all round them. From the pace at which they ambulate, they've likely been wandering for some time, conversing for some time. While Wezz is a Helker greatly changed, the then-Galactic Menace is a perfect replica of the Doreen they once worked for. His deckhand's threads are the same, his many headtails are contained within a simple ponytail and he pockets two hands while gesticulating with the other two.

"I harbor no illusions that our squabble here is going to be the upset that eventually throws the Endless Imperium to its knees. Of course I don't."

As he speaks, Ott suddenly stops, drops to his haunches and scoops up a handful of the marshy ground, running the faintly orange muck through his great blue fingers with extreme care, bordering reverence. "The illusion I do harbor, however, is that doxychoraphum is an unessential resource for them. It'll grease the wheels of their war machine, that's certainly true, but it's a luxury, not a necessity."

Sensing his cue, Wezz hunkers down next to the Menace as he continues his explanation. "If the cost, in lives, ammunition and military commitment, of each drop of repellent is great enough, they wouldn't and won't continue their occupation. Simple business sense says they'll attempt a different tactic, presumably somewhere else, somewhere less contested. A destroyed Imperium is not the goal. Simply a defeated one."

Wezz grunts, almost a scoff, almost a snort. "Is there a difference?"

Ott hefts his hand as the remaining repellent out from between his fingers. "Cheers."

The hologram clicks harshly into place, freezing the scene and both its participants dead in their sodden tracks. The scene's audience, save Two-Bit and the tip of his sneaker, are nearly as still, nostalgia, instead of a pause button, arresting all their movements.

To no one's surprise, it's Nemo who shatters the reverie, complimenting his terse command by chomping into his chiller cream cone. Chewing casually, he shrugs the shoulders of his duster. "Make the call, then."

Wezz flits indecisively between the pod's various seating options, uncertain which one carried the worst connotation. After initially plopping down atop the lushly appointed bed, he reconsidered the message this would perhaps telegraph. Fifteen minutes spent sitting sidesaddle on the red upholstered fainting couch and the reporter's unease was only increasing. After curiosity demanded he, at the very least, inspect the damn thing, he resolved to roundly avoid approaching the inexplicable device ever again, whose straps and stirrups downright dominated the pod's far left corner.

He eventually ends up propped against the minibar in the chamber's corner. Here, he calibrates his audio equipment, he counts down the seconds and he wonders, like many other occupants of many other such pods, whether his appointed date is actually going to stand him up.

Wezz is willing to concede that he'd entertained an absurd fantasy about a powwow with this most popular and public Menace kickstarting his desperately stalled career. Wezz would also like the record to show that he hadn't fantasized conducting said interview within a privately-rented lovepod, completing an hour long orbit of Fwelk.

In fact, he's rather going to avoid incorporating the word "fantasize" anywhere near this lovepod.

He does have to square his stomach and self-esteem with the fact that he's actually anxious, an emotion he hasn't experienced before an interview in years uncounted. A veteran of the intergalactic news media practically since his whelping, it wasn't the ten million death-mark on Morel's head that gave him pause. Moons knew, he'd shaken hands with much higher bounty-heads than the Captain's introductory ten.

Nor, he appreciates, is he much intimidated by the seemingly infinite murder charges this Galactic Menace has confirmedly accrued during his short tenure on IMIS' shit-list. Moons know war criminals were nothing new on Wezz's dance card.

His nerves, simmering at the edges of his fabricated calm, are inspired mainly by his relative rustiness. The last piece of significant reporting he delivered, after all, led directly to this current state of unemployment.

Normally, an unemployed investigative reporter trailing a career as lengthy and prolific as Wezz's could find safe harborage at practically any feedzine, news outlet or talk radio with feedspace access and anyone halfway competent at its controls. When the corporate boot planted Wezz's tuchus onto the proverbial sidewalk following the now-famous "piracy is pointless" sound bite, slumming at some planetary variety hour as some feature correspondent sounded to the Helker more like a death sentence than a steady income.

Instead, he'd hang up his shingle as some manner of ultra-gonzo, mercenary freecaster, peddling his printed word wholesale to whomever could tap into his begged, borrowed or stolen frequencies. The very notion was so liberating, so inspiringly brilliant, he couldn't believe the thought hadn't occurred to him a decade and more ago. Unshackled from even _Space Times'_ reasonably permissive editors, censors and assorted butters-in, Wezz also discovered himself unshackled from _Space Times'_ comfortably consistent payroll.

A year without a substantive story, a year without a substantive paycheck to accompany same, freelance journalism was not quite the total freedom Wezz imagined it would be.

His stationary equipment all calibrated, Wezz scoops up a smattering of ball-bearing-sized driftcorders. With a thumb pressed against the activation button of each, he wanders the lovepod, sprinkling the air with the occasional floating recording device. Normally an expensive acquisition for any journalist, Wezz's current supply were officially the property of _Space Times_. Their inexplicable disappearance following his termination went unnoticed or, Wezz supposed, at least uncommented on.

As he tours the room, careful to maintain a respectful distance from the love machine in the corner, Wezz passes within ogling view of the heavily-curtained viewport. He stops to gawk, given the breathtaking astral vista sweeping out across Fwelk's gentle worldshine and the stars twinkling beyond. Found on a regular hotel wall, this kind of spacescape would be simply a painting, rather than an actual window.

For all its tawdry decor, the Starcrossed Orbital Hotel & Suites made, to Wezz's hindsight, practically as much sense to host a journalistic interlude as it did a romantic one. Reserved by the Menace's criminal liaison, the advertisement-plastered Two-Bit Switch, this particular suite and lovepod was slotted for the popular "Quickie" package. The pod would take them both on an hour-long lap, three hundred and sixty degrees around Fwelk's equator, devoid of pitstops, comm service or interruptions of any other nature.

Switch cited security reasons as the primary motivator behind this choice. He claimed, reasonably to Wezz, that the interview could easily prove to be nothing more than a pretense to isolate and bushwhack Morel. Should Wezz indeed be planning such an ambush, an hour would see him returning to the Starcrossed lobby, with Morel's freshly-minted corpse to answer for and his legendarily murderous crew to answer to.

On either side of the thong-draped airlock door, indicator lights blink suddenly red, forewarning approved access. Wezz only has time to turn and watch not Nehel Morel, Galactic Menace, part the drapes and stride into the lovepod, but rather a creature of a very different variety.

Huge, hirsute and harrumphing his bulk inside, the Ortok in the orange fisherman's jumper makes no word of greeting to Wezz. The Helker, uncertain precisely what he expected, grants the surly otterfolk complete run of the joint simply by silence.

The Ortok proceeds to pacify the suite with all the speed and thoroughness of a long-practiced bodyguard. He tromps an exhaustive path into the pod's every nook and cranny, scratching some place, sniffing others, scowling everywhere.

Wezz keeps his calm and his peace, inured to all the protocol one needs to cleave through before they're cleared to dish with interstellar celebrity. He opens his mouth only once, when a driftcorder is nearly inhaled into the Ortok's overzealous nostril.

"Those're harmless," Wezz makes the mistake to clarify, as civilly as possible. He earns nothing but a flash of fangs and a grumbly growl from the Menace's shaggy chaperone.

Following this, the star-shaped bed is rifled, the drawers are each opened and Wezz himself is subjected to a complete and somewhat demeaning sniff search by the Ortok's insistent muzzle. Nothing untoward discovered, the bodyguard yips once, almost with an air of reluctance, no doubt some "all clear" in his guttural tongue.

The lacy curtains barricading the entrance snap dramatically apart. Without any further pomp or ado, Nehel Morel, Galactic Menace, makes his appearance.

He bothers with no disguise, attired almost precisely as his wanted poster depicts him. His beaten leather duster bears a gaping disintegrator hole. His outmoded flintlock laser pistol rides in his hip holster. His oil black hair sits atop his head in an unrestrained mop.

The most dangerous sentient in the galaxy shuffles five steps into the lovepod. He exchanges a quiet word or two with the decamping Ortok, takes visual stock of his surroundings and, with obvious urgency, asks the all important question.

"Is there a minibar and where?"

Moira Quicksilver does not actually notice the child until far too late.

Forty-five minutes of inactivity had passed since the initial burst of violence they'd been greeted with. As a rule, Moira's hair-raised hackles begin to slacken at a rate proportionate to her desire for another cigarette. Before the child's arrival, the only thing preventing her from purchasing a fresh pack of Yellowtooths was the winking face of Two-Bit Switch on the carton and the inescapable knowledge that some percentage of her cash spent would eventually find a home in his pocket.

This indecision meant she lingered too long before the corner cigarette machine and the child, padding with practically silent footfalls, snuck surreptitiously up along Moira's left flank.

"Excuse me, miss?"

Humanoid, female, approximately seven or eight, Moira estimates, as the top of the child's glowing head stands only as high as her ammo-strapped belt. Her wide, upturned eyes look bleak blue or ghostly gray, the distinction between them uncertain in the parlor's dim lighting. She kneads the ratty fringes of her voluminous pullover with partially-painted nails.

The treatment she's undergone to bestow that radioactive neon sheen to her pixie haircut is, according to the fashion magazines splayed across the lobby's coffee table, normally quite expensive. Her's is outdated and badly in need of reapplication. She squirms something back and forth inside her mouth – a wad of chewing paste, a pen cap, some other piece of flotsam or jetsam that might occupy a seven-year-old's pocket.

"Could I, um, have your autograph?"

The lobby of the Starcrossed Orbital Hotel & Suites is, at the current hour, depopulated. Like clockwork, Abraham minds the ship. Two-Bit Switch reclines in an ergonomic nightmare of a lounger, asleep within ten seconds of seating himself. Odisseus stands persistent vigil over the nearest viewport, awaiting the imminent arrival of the lovepod and, in accordance with the Ortok's darkest fears, the corpse of his saltbrother.

The carcasses Lefty'd lately made are nearly dissolved by now. The lone custodial drone tasked with the insurmountable task of disposing of both bodies is only now finally beginning to lag beneath battery loss. The triggerwoman herself, meanwhile, loiters before the cigarette machine and is surprised by sneaky children.

The child's presence comes, then, as a justifiable shock. Moira considered her initial sweep of the main lobby's various nooks and crannies fairly exhaustive. Yet more shocking to any member of civilized society would be the question of why a hapless minor goes seemingly unaccompanied in, of all places, the waiting room of an orbital love hotel.

Despite her instincts not to plumb further, Moira conjures images of a divorcé, here to ride a lovepod around the planet in the company of some illicit companion, yet saddled with their phosphorescent offspring for the weekend. She imagines instructions to "sit quietly" and "keep out of trouble." She imagines the tedium of however long her parent's sojourn takes. She also imagines the quivering terror inspired by the witnessed murder of two sentients by the Galactic Menace's figurative left hand.

Tapping keys into the keypad, Moira's precise with her tone. "You know me?"

The girl's nod is instant. "Yes."

The cigarette machine responds to Moira's selection with mechanical compliance. "And you still want my autograph? And not his?" She gestures her left temple over the child's head and towards the window Odisseus guards, though in clear indication of someone besides the Ortok.

The girl's second nod comes still faster. "Yes. I decided you are my favorite. Greatgullet is my brother's favorite but that is because he does not like girls or bounty hunters. It's not his fault. He's six and dumb."

Within the cigarette machine, Two-Bit's cheeky countenance crinkles as the automated arm cinches Moira's selection between its servopincers. Moira scopes up and down the child's physique. "What would you have me signing?"

This simple question flummoxes the girl. She proceeds to conduct a hasty personal inventory, in frantic search of some object worthy of Moira's signature and cursing herself inwardly. Unable to render anything, she, with eventual reluctance, extends her puny palm upward in offering. "My hand?"

"That'll wash out, though, won't it?"

With resignation in place of realization, the girl nods her neon haircut, apparently content to savor the memento earned from meeting her alleged "favorite" until only minutes before the next mealtime. That, Moira finds herself deciding, won't do.

Moira nudges open the access tray with the hooked barbs of her jackboot. Reaching down, she snatches free the purchased cigarette packet with two fingers and a corresponding crunch. A moment of crass work with her teeth and she's torn the plastosealant away. A few seconds of manual dexterity scoots loose a solitary Outlaw Slim. This done, she grunts a hasty "Here" to the patient little girl and her patiently upraised palm before stalking away across the lobby.

A casual glance toward the massive timer ticking off seconds over the airlock Nemo disappeared through would confirm that the crew of _The Unconstant Lover_ were nearing the absolute end of their hour-long idleness in the Starcrossed Lobby. As she bisects the chamber from cigarette machine to settee, Moira spares an indifferent glance past Odisseus' shoulder and into Fwelk's low orbit anyway.

Her instinctual efforts are rewarded. Evidently nearing and nearing with each passing second, Moira spots the approach of Nemo and Wezz's castoff lovepod, as the smattering of remaining minutes dwindle and die.

The relief radiating off the stewing Ortok is as palpable as his homemade gumbo.

Sixty minutes may sound like an inoffensive length for an interlude. For the _Lover's_ thumb-twiddling crew, though, each unoccupied second that passed seem to drag its proverbial feet both coming and going. The lobby's swanky pornographic soundtrack clashes constitutionally with the mood of the room and its occupants – Two-Bit so somnolent, Odisseus so tense, Moira somewhere between both extremes.

With dressings at once lavish and tawdry, from drapes of thick burgundy to verdant swatches of shag carpeting, Moira knew full-fledged brothels far subtler than the Orbital Hotels & Suites.

The lobby's decor, a seamless match for the interior of the lovepods, also contrasts quite strikingly against Moira's matte black outfit and Odisseus homey orange sweater. Only Two-Bit Switch, sprawled comfortably on the sofa, seems at home amid the scummy surroundings. It wasn't difficult to imagine him patronizing a venue like Starcrossed with motives far less ulterior than those that brought them here today.

Prudence demands she step gingerly between the caramelizing remains of the two corpses she minted. She steps circumspectly from toe-to-toe and is careful to avoid staining the recently-polished leather of her jackboots with the brown amalgamated sludge of orange blood, purple blood and cleaning chemicals.

Whether the Triomman and his Fivvite paramour were amateur bounty hunters or muggers made mad by approximate celebrity, Moira hadn't known until sometime after she'd planted steaming hot ditrogen into their chest and mouth, respectively. No licenses found certainly suggested the latter, though, in the presence of the Menace, Moira supposed a fair number of ordinary citizens could instantly be converted into career headhunters.

Whatever their intentions, the pair's enthusiasm with their own pistols went roundly unappreciated by Nemo and his entourage upon their arrival. The task of diffusing that enthusiasm fell, as always, to Righty and Lefty.

The hotel's management reacted none-too-pleased with two homicides committed in one of their atriums. Upon realizing precisely who was patronizing their establishment this evening, however, they instantaneously abandoned any and all complaints about the cleanup.

The beleaguered custodial drone voices its own mechanical misgivings at every turn. Typically tasked with scrubbing up spilt semen, its innards do their best to digest the gristly remains of both Triomman and Fivvite.

Two-Bit's hooded denim jacket contains the sought-after prize, secreted away within his inside coat pocket. Her sleight of hand, perhaps, would never precisely be up to Two-Bit or certainly Flask's respective snuffs. Her gunfighter's fingers are nimble enough, however, to navigate around the unbuttoned edge of a sleeping Two-Bit's jacket without awakening him.

The object of her search, his trusty autograph-signing inkjetter, retrieved, Moira ghosts several steps away. Two-Bit doesn't even indulge her a stereotypical sniff and shuffle to indicate that he remains quite firmly asleep.

"To whom?" cues Moira once within conversational distance to the girl.

"Um, Téon."

Inkjetter in hand, Moira hunkers herself down to an approximate eye level with Téon. Activating the device with a thumb against its pad, she sets to scribbling out a signature across her cigarette carton, specifically across Two-Bit's less-than-photogenic face. Incredibly out of practice, the resulting signature resembles less the words "Moira Quicksilver" and more a string of incongruous squiggles the girl could've easily recreated herself.

Téon, however, is enraptured by the act and reaches prematurely for the packet of Outlaw Slims seconds after the inkjetter's switched off. With a single smooth motion, Moira plucks free the cigarette clinging between her own lips and yanks the carton deftly from Téon's reach.

"Now, you don't smoke a one of these, understand?" she instructs seriously. "Next time we meet, I expect to find nineteen cigarettes inside."

Téon is astonished. "Next time?"

A clank and a hiss, one clamant and the other prolonged, is heard unexpectedly behind the airlock. This sound the exact cue required to inspire urgency in the indolent crew, each of Nemo's three present lieutenants come sharply to attention.

Moira stands and strides, leaving Téon to contemplate the gift of her commemorative cigarettes. Odisseus, surprise to no one, reaches the safest firing distance from the still-sealed airlock first, clambering to pull his Wreckingball from its klutzy tool belt holster. Even Two-Bit Switch, either by the sound or by the approach of actual responsibility, is awake, startled and snorting. A moment later, he's fumbling with both his footing and his firearm.

It's here – each with weapons extended, each prepared to mow Wezz down at first sign of any murderous trouble through the yawning airlock – that _The Unconstant Lover's_ crew is reunited with _The Unconstant Lover's_ captain.

An onrush of fresh air flaps Nemo's coat aside. Without missing a beat, he stomps through the airlock's separating doorway and, with a brusque brush of the shoulder, storms past his awaiting companions. Moira's granted the briefest glimpse of Wezz, the hairless Helker wearing an equally bewildered expression, amid the room's plushy appointments.

"Cap'n?" a groggy Two-Bit attempts gingerly. "Everything–"

Making his grand exit, Nemo barks his final words over his shoulder, as much an afterthought as a command. "Fuck that asshole. I wanna blow something up."

Fifth Interlude

"Tell me about blowback, then."

"Blowback? What do you mean?

"Retaliation. Reprisal. Blowback. You cannot be serious in your thinking that the Endless Imperium will simply defend their remaining outpost, shrug their Imperial shoulders and cut their losses."

"There've been reprisals."

"Such as?"

"Such as? Get bent, such as. What do you call the 4th fucking Fleet? Does that not constitute your blowback?"

"That constitutes, in my opinion, a preamble to blowback."

"I don't even know what that means."

"A preamble to blowback. The 4th Fleet's failed attempt to squash superior numbers with inferior numbers taught them a few valuable lessons. Among which is that a military victory, while the Freebooters is still assembled, will be a shallow one and secondary among which, that the Freebooters cannot always be assembled."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning, sooner or later, the pirates will disband. I mean, you know this, you must – what happens when Yime Orbital is sacked and everything you aspired to is accomplished and you're swimming in gold bullion? You don't imagine you'll forever possess a halo of suicidally loyal underlings to catch your ditrogen bolts for you, do you?"

"So, wait. They send starfighters, shock troops, moons-damned capital ships after my ass, shoot down a fair percentage of my friends and followers in the process and that don't count as blowback to you? Where the farting fuck were you when the Imperium shot up my city?"

"Your city? You mean Pirateton? The tent city of spaceships and garbage you've constructed on Talos II, that's ten times more a nomad's camp than a legitimate community? What you're not realizing here, I don't think, is how transitional this all is. Three weeks, Pirateton's gonna be a fond memory. Tell me you understand that."

"I understand that, when Xo dispatched their reality show reboot to kill me, we killed them first. I understand that, when the Imperium sent the 4th Fleet to blow up my ship, we blew theirs up first. I understand that, for the time being, I'm the meanest thing with a dick and balls in the Outer Ring. Xo can't tangle, Valladia can't tangle, Imperium can't tangle with me."

"For the time being."

"Moons, you're a jizz-nosed prick. If not the invasion fleet they dropped on us, then, what do you call Ikoril Federate Station? Blowback's kindly compared to that shit. Truth be told, biggest fear I've currently got is that we'll roll up on Yime Orbital and discover the same mess."

"Let's talk about Ikoril. I'm fascinated."

"You remember what I said earlier, right? That Ikoril was them and not us?"

"I do."

"Ikoril was them and not us. Ikoril was them gambling on which station we'd sack next, sacking it first and smearing us across the press with it."

"When you say 'sacking it first', you mean...?"

"Yes. Side benefit of framing me; they needed to make an awful lot of wealth disappear. Does that, uh, affect any of your fucking economics?"

"You know, it might. Surely, though, that's not a secret they could possibly hope to keep for long, is it? I mean, security cameras, warp records, eyewitnesses?"

"Faked. Forged. Murdered."

"But the Freebooters aren't about to corroborate that story. I mean, ask anyone among the Fleet–"

"You'd believe us, right? A buncha wanted criminals set out to sack a place, get there, place's already sacked, then claim innocence? Sounds sorta fishy, don't it? Fuck, we practically framed ourselves."

"Hm. Sure."

"You bought it and you're an investigative fucking journalist."

"I did. I mean, I simply assumed–"

"Exactly."

"They sure fucked you, didn't they?"

"Gee, that must be the reason my bloomhole is so sore. Hence, my sitting here. To set the record straight."

"To set the record straight."

"As I said, my biggest fear going forward is that they'll pull the same shit at Yime and we'll be strolling onto another station already sacked."

"That's the smart play, yeah, were I them."

"How's that, you think, for blowback? Kill their own citizens, pocket the plunder I need to feed my troops and chip away at both my public face and my face among the Fleet at the same time?"

"That's, well, that's going to be how they disassemble and destroy you, I imagine. I imagine this's a first step. The Freebooter Fleet's bound to disband anyway, I've said as much, whether from infighting or malaise. The possibility hadn't occurred to me that they'd starve to death."

"Disassemble and destroy me? Listen, you hairless jagoff, the Endless Imperium's been trying to 'disassemble and destroy' me for, what, going on three years? Think, if they were gonna do either, they'd've managed something by now."

"You wanna walkthrough, then? You're the Galactic Menace now, a position notable only for its no-win track record. Never, in the history of the Endless Imperium, has a Galactic Menace evaded assassination. Vepane, poisoned. Eraser, executed. Ott, betrayed. Obwala, suicide. You think you beat those odds?"

"I have so far."

"You've been Menace forty one days. Lemme tell you how wrong you are. With this new step, the Imperium clears out Yime, foists the blame onto you, you're painted all the more provably a butcher in the eyes of galaxy and your legions go hungry. With Freebooter morale tanked, the Fleet splinters, certainly along lines you're already aware exist, and, without your buffer of bodyguards to protect you, the bounty hunters arrive."

"It's not as though there are any historical examples of galaxy-famous bounty hunters fucking profoundly up in their attempts to take me."

"Can we be honest here? Noxix was a fluke. That's abundantly clear from the circumstances of the alleged encounter. The difference between Ott, Obwala and you is that the former two constructed elaborate infrastructures around themselves, similar to your Freebooter Fleet but significantly more stable. That stability, an economy, a pecking order, that's what provided each of the previous two Menaces the fortitude to endure, for as long as they did, the Imperium's unrelenting attempts to make them a corpse."

"For as long as they did, though. Isn't that the real pisser here? Ott and Obwala are dandy examples, 'cept they're both dead. I'm so different, how're the rules not equally different?"

"Smart money says, within a month, an enterprising sniper inserts a canister into your frontal lobe from three hundred yards through one of your unsecured saloons. They collect the 10 million bounty or they don't, assuming they're the Imperium-hired hatchetman they certainly will be, and the IMIS finds themselves a new puppy to slaughter that week."

"A month's not especially charitable."

"'It is realistic."

"Let's assume, for a fucking laugh, you're right. Assume somebody slugs me thirty days from now. What kinda fucking article you gonna be writing then, smartass?"

"An obituary."

"Hm. And further assuming I've a personal interest in keeping my head pieces together, what sorta advise, you being such the blooming expert on the subject, would you give an aspiring young Galactic Menace, hoping to win big and shake the fuzz? Any way to prevent this inevitable fucking assassination?"

"The truth?"

"No, some buhoxshit, please."

"The truth is, you should fucking quit this place. Today. Following this interview. If you were truly, honestly interested in your heart's continued beating, you'd disembark this station, dump your freighter onto a trash heap and find work as an Offchart beet farmer. You think I'm joking. Shave your head, smelt your pistol to slag and sever your ties. Few months of you off the scene, with their supposed Galactic Menace vanished, they'll drum up some phony, shoot him and elect some newer, stupider bastard to your position. You unwilling to do that? Then they're going to shoot you in the head."

"Go fuck yourself."

Chapter 24

Odisseus watches the torpedo's tiny jetbooster flare to life and carry the missile away. A glossy arrowhead of polished metal whenever headlights or sunlight happen to play across its surface, the torpedo rapidly gains momentum and breaks away from the Freebooter's front lines.

None of the other ships-of-the-line, all arrayed expansively to either side of _The Unconstant Lover_ and advancing in a mad mob, voice a single other weapon, cannon or torpedo. For potentially sentimental reasons, the Briza is allowed "bagsies," as Two-Bit would call it, on the very first shot.

Only very rarely would the opening shot of a fleet action see Odisseus at the helm. Most often, his assuaging skills were required elsewhere aboard, usually to regulate Port and Starboard's engagement speed or to pour system power into their perpetually diminished ray shields or, most frequently, preventing things from sparking, smoking or exploding.

Today was an unusually historic day, however. Today, the last of the Valladian Shipping Line's Outer Ring ports was prophesied, all those months ago, to fall. His decision directly informed by Two-Bit's recent intel, this one time Odisseus opted to claim a seat with the bridge crew and watch the fireworks.

Yime Orbital, the galaxy's one-stop-shop for buhoxmeat of any variety or description, looks as lonesome and spindly as once it did when viewed on Two-Bit's pilfered Attaché. Posted placidly over the pasteurized green farmland of Yime below, the sensors confirm that there's nothing even resembling a civilian spaceship within many zottibles of the station.

The only sign of any occupation onboard Yime Orbital is the ring of blinking distress lights. One after another, they ignite in an eerie, circular fashion, their pleas ignored by the converging crowd of graffiti-spattered pirates.

A week prior to their planned assault on Yime Orbital, Two-Bit Switch made the frustrating report that, as with Ikoril before it, the typical hustle and bustle of ship traffic that surrounds the station succinctly dried up. The majority of the Freebooter Fleet were understandably dismayed about this and, when the news rippled out, a fresh wave of boredom-provoked desertions followed.

Personally, Odisseus found the revelation refreshing. As with Ikoril, the _Lover_ was unlikely to sustain any integral damage and no one was likely to be shooting with hateful intent at himself, his saltbrother or his crewmates. In fact, it was this revelation that permitted him to join his confederates in the helm and even to partake of a celebratory tankard of Gitterswitch Gin, an indulgence the Ortok allowed himself infrequently enough.

His habitually cautious nature still instills him at his traditional seat. Beside the shielding mainframe, he could most easily boost the signal of ray or bombard shields, should some ambush or disaster rear an ugly head. Two-Bit Switch occupied his own traditional seat directly ahead, with orders to angle double forward for the impending "attack," could such a term be used.

Nemo steers _The Unconstant Lover_ with subconscious ease, only a mere sliver of his attention devoted to the task. The majority of his attention remains devoted to maintaining his stony silence, the same one he'd maintained since the interview with Wezz and, in truth, their arrival at Ikoril.

In the sensor room, it was Abraham who confirmed, shortly after dropping out of warp, that the station's life signs were nil, in accordance with Two-Bit's hypothesis. No boarding party was bothered with, subsequently, and Moira, high above them all, only powered up her Antagonist as a precaution. Upon hearing this news, the Captain fired the first torpedo, an opening gambit, a polite consideration.

The torpedo zooms away from its host of haggard pursuers, rocketing across the expanse between Yime Orbital and the _Lover's_ dented nose. Its shape is noticeably imperfect, its craftsmanship a degree shoddier than most anything even a poor black marketeer could dredge up for a potential buyer.

Odisseus, the torpedo's last-minute architect, isn't too harsh on his handiwork, however. Considering the hasty time frame he was given and the rousing success of his previous work – the crowbar that popped Ikoril wide – no one was in a position to criticize.

Almost two years separated Odisseus from his last attempt at replicating a Wolfsbane torpedo. With the collapse of Ott's empire, repellent was that much more scarce on the "streets" of Bad Space. For the frontrunners of the Freebooter Fleet, however, far more than enough raw materials were available to craft a sizable supply of the doxychoraphum-flooded explosives. Each Captain came equipped with a magazine of the things, to fulfill Nemo's singular strategy for Yime Orbital.

"Came equipped," in this sense, meant that Odisseus was commissioned to construct them, this time assisted and abetted with a team of pirate mechanics from across the Fleet.

Nemo's torpedo, selected to perform the first honors, scoots the remaining distance towards the station. It narrowly skirts the broad mercantile disc and instead slams into what could easily be observed, at even a casual glance, as the station's thinnest and least stable point. Good aim Odisseus immediately dismisses; it was Nemo, not Moira, with their finger on the trigger after all. The torpedo that destroyed Yime Orbital was guided, with unerringly precision, only by Nemo's pervasive sense of stupid luck.

A grove of narrow columns that moors the lower, industrial sections to the higher, commercialized sections, the Wolfsbane torpedo demolishes them all. A rapidly blooming flower of orange expands outward in graceful spirals, twisted wreckage beading its fiery pedals like a morning dew.

A creator rather than a destroyer, Odisseus can actually admit, watching that initial blast, that there might be a certain impracticable beauty to the simple visual of an explosion. Thoughts of the blast's inevitable victims universally sullied these frequent spectacles for him. Here, though, in this one quite specific instance, against an unoccupied and derelict space station, the Ortok can simply sip his Gitterswitch and enjoy the show.

What Odisseus nor any other Freebooter in the Fleet anticipated, however, was that Yime Orbital was already rigged to explode.

The explosion that rocked the station's midsection peters out into wispy trails of conflagration. Seconds later, a chain reaction of similar explosions rebound up and down Yime Orbital. Viewports are blown out and airlocks are burst open by the vibrantly high-octane orange of doxychoraphum.

Within the space of a gasped breath, a once fully-functional, if abandoned space station is transformed into an all-encompassing cloud of hungry flame. Fragments and oddments of Yime Orbital's exoskeleton are visible only briefly between gouts of igniting repellent.

A stunned silence, a realization and then a subsequent gratitude passes between the comms of the quickly diverting pirate ships. It's made abundantly clear to the majority of the Freebooter Fleet that Nemo's introductory torpedo spared more than simply their boarding parties from a death by booby trap. They each peel away like a retreating tide, away from the tongues of searching fire, lapping in every direction for something teltriton to chew.

A unanimous cheer, moments later, overthrows their silence. Skeins of exultant expletives burst forth from every open comm channel aboard every ship present.

With one tremendously fortunate shot, the tenth and final port on the Valladian Shipping Line is perhaps not sacked, but certainly destroyed.

Despite the sudden pang his mechanic's heart feels at each and every one of the _Lover's_ comm speakers blowing out simultaneously, Odisseus reaches across the helm and plants a paw significantly upon his saltbrother's shoulder.

"Feel better?"

Two-Bit Switch slap palms over both his ears, lest he go instantaneously deaf.

In all his sixteen years of plying Takioro Defederate Station as man and boy, he has never witnessed this many sentients of this many species crammed, tighter than a tin of sporefin, into The Bloody Afterburn.

They are all universally cheering his entrance.

Despite the irreversible damage his eardrums may sustain, Two-Bit Switch could probably get used to this.

Once the applause has abated somewhat, Two-Bit, grinning like a buffoon, pries one hand free to wave endorsingly at the hundreds of revelers, a politician en route to his stump speech. Despite the press of tattooed and tentacled bodies all about him, his presence and prestige does clear something of a space for Two-Bit, enough to, at the very least, clear the way through the Afterburn's actual doorway.

Enough happy hands and proud appendages, originating from the surrounding spacers, clap, clasp and collide with Two-Bit that he feels he's being nudged and prodded towards his inevitable destination – the bar. A dozen requests for the pleasure of his company, indicated by emphatic gestures towards quickly vacated chairs, go unanswered or declined, the current of the crowd sluicing Two-Bit too quickly across the tavern to linger even a moment.

An unimaginative and therefore viral chant of " _Two_ -Bit! _Two_ -Bit! _Two_ -Bit!" is born somewhere deeper within the tavern's crowd. Within seconds, all the faces adjacent to Two-Bit's own are hooting his name with equal, if not greater, enthusiasm.

Yarba New Year, perhaps, is the only occasion during which the Takioro native could recall seeing his home satellite anywhere near as crowded as this. Even from a pedestrian's passing headcount, Two-Bit estimates that, floor to ceiling, the Second Ring contains somewhere near twice, even three times more party-goers than the New Year's busiest night can boast.

By Menacing decree, The Bloody Afterburn was awarded the dubious honor of hosting the bash's main event. Two-Bit's progress down the broad boulevard toward the Afterburn was impeded at practically every step by, beyond simple congested traffic, honest-to-moons admirers. His adoring public are always eager to slap shoulders, sing his praises or, disturbingly, offer gifts and favors, whose natures ran the gamut from alcoholic to monetary to sexual.

From Shellshucker to Afterburn, Two-Bit Switch has received more comm frequencies, scribbled onto scraps of paper or even across his exposed flesh, from potential mates than he's ever received in his entire career as a professional poon hound.

He also could not wipe the idiotic smile off his aching face.

The Bloody Afterburn is scarcely recognizable as Nemo's favorite drinkery tonight, a slattern smearing new makeup across her face to better please the triumphant, returning Freebooters. Beside the sheer anomaly of crowds in an otherwise unpopular joint, the Afterburn's makeover extends in practically all directions.

A surplus of tables, all of them fully occupied, are repositioned to accommodate a wide central mingling area. A fresh coating of dripping wet graffiti decorates the walls, booths and floor of the entire taproom. This was hasty, amateur shiptagger work, of course – nowhere approaching the craft and artistry of Ganymede Mel. Two-Bit does notice, however, obvious representations of each major Jolly Roger, plastered across different corners of the Afterburn, to demarcate the seating into distinct neighborhoods and districts – a miniaturized, replicated Pirateton.

Only through gaps in the crowd of heads, hairdos and horns is the other, more major renovation faintly visible – a performing stage. An unoccupied performing stage, Two-Bit cranes to discover, but the instruments arranged theatrically across it and the completely illegible drumhead scrawl confirm his hopes and deepens his smile simultaneously.

Swept downstream, through the cavorting course the crowd passes him along, Two-Bit's eyes flick now between the corner booths, the seats of honor. There sit, enthroned, the most honored and prestigious guests of this impromptu hullabaloo, each seated beneath their sloppily-painted sigils.

Under the watchful eyes of Boogers and Teeth, Greatgullet and a rowdy group of his goonage engage in a tabletop-slapping, multiple-contestant drinking contest. As each buccaneer bangs the table, the drained tankards, trophies of their previous such contests, rattle against the wood and occasionally clatter to the floor.

Everything about the occupants of Vobash's table telegraph, subtly and unsubtly, how constitutionally opposed the Triomman and his circumspect crew are to attending anything resembling a rave of these proportions. Tension, unease and eye-darting paranoia are commonplace from their quarter.

Beneath Aju Vog Xah Qaj's coat-of-arms, a Xendo squadron ingests, with ten times the efficiency and zero times the jocularity of Greatgullet's crew, an ocean's load of alcohol. Whether or not their efforts would pass along some semblance of intoxication to their absentee queen aboard _The Eyesore_ , Two-Bit couldn't imagine.

It's Charybdis and her blackskin brood that next draw Two-Bit's attention, never quite having observed such a gathering of traditional Trijans. Each one carries an individual conversation and creates, quite by accident, an eerie chorus of unintentionally harmonic melodies that, seemingly without aforementioned agreement, all fall within the same sung key.

One table, not sporting any insignia overhead to indicate its allegiance, still earns a considerable berth from the partying passerby, an isolated island among the shuffling, stomping, bipedal sea. Those fortunate enough to have claimed the table's seats, well-muscled and well-armed thuggery each one, are as protective as a bombard shield. They deflect the drunken rabble from approaching the table, with narrowed glares and a siege mentality, and from accosting its chief occupant, a peer of a different variety to the other Captains.

Velocity, Takioro's Depot-Commissioner, sits unamused at the table's head.

Of course the invitation extended to her was obligatory. Of course not attending would upset some delicate balance within the station's internal politics, particularly considering how popular the Freebooter Fleet'd evidently become in the past eight months. Despite or perhaps because of all these expectations, the Vollocki queenpin couldn't look less thrilled to occupy any one chair in the galaxy than were it spontaneously airlifted into the caldera of an active volcano.

From the overly deliberate way she's averted her gaze, Two-Bit can tell she's even less interest in chatting idle chat with a conquering hero. Far be it from Two-Bit, however, to deny Velocity the chance to bask in his victorious presence.

Against the wishes of the crowding current, Two-Bit lingers before her table an obnoxious length of time, far longer than she can comfortably spend considering the table, her hooves, her thuggery. Her eye contact is a chance outside this galaxy and her verbal acknowledgment, when it comes, is sodden with distaste. "Nice work, Switch."

"Have fun, Vel," he, the prodigal son come home to a begrudging mother, responds immediately, striding easily onward along his bar-pointed trajectory.

This close to the Afterburn's beating heart, Two-Bit doesn't pass a face he doesn't recognize, even if only passingly. A lifetime residence aboard Takioro Defederate Station certainly helps that, not to mention his encyclopedic knowledge of the Freebooters of the Fleet.

The local crowd, far cries from the touring troublemakers Two-Bit's brought with him, buzzes about the main source of the booze like pestilential barflies. Two-Bit tousles the indignant hair of Threesies, slaps suckers with Sifer and even exchanges a knowing nod with Gozzer, stout Ruuvian asswipe and manager of the Astrobounce Gentlemen's Club, of all asswipes.

As homegrown talent returned to roost, everybody from the old neighborhood arrives to pay their respects, begrudging or otherwise, to Two-Bit, the interstellar celebrity they used to flip cards, down shots and knock over liquor stores with.

The Bloody Afterburn's bar is packed past capacity, with an ass on every stool. When Two-Bit approaches, he somehow has little difficulty locating a seat. An uncommonly generous Raqeese abdicates his stool for Two-Bit's use and is even courteous enough to wipe off, with a washcloth pilfered beneath Roger's notice, the slime trail he invariably leaves on the black leather.

Two-Bit plops into his seat, with the Nokko bosun of The Saving Grace to his left and the Mantrian pawnbroker of Tigg's Speedy Deels to his right. No sooner has he done this, than he discovers a garden of proffered tankards blooming before him. Each one comes sliding across the scummy bar top from a dizzying number of directions and each one sloshes its blue contents into a spilled, sticky slurry.

The bartender, the infamously ill-humored Unhappy Roger, creases his weathered Trijan brow and extends to Two-Bit the merest of smirks, a historical event in its own right.

Before Two-Bit can even smirk back, Roger's grumpiness returns, directed at either his tavern's surplus traffic, the incompetence of his undermanned waitstaff or, seemingly, at the very effort of drawing each individual breath.

Gingerly selecting a random Gitterswitch from those assembled around his seat, Two-Bit Switch spends all of approximately thirty seconds shaking a few tentacles, posing for a few holos and sipping down somewhere near a tenth of his first complimentary drink.

His next distraction arrives promptly. A shaggy shadow, a swift-moving orange and brown blur, shoulders and snarls its way through the thicket of bodies thronging the Afterburn's bar and claims a space adjacent to Two-Bit's own.

In stark contrast to the joyous and carefree carousing in every direction, Odisseus appears almost a wreck. His breathing ragged, his eyes half-crazed, his claws carve subconscious furrows into the bar's woodgrain. "Seen Nemo?" he muscles out, both volume and language barrier preventing anything more elaborate to be said.

"Ain't vizzed nobody," Two-Bit screams back, shrugging. With an inclination of his head, he indicates the host of tankards, condensation glistening invitingly off their steel sides. "A tumble or ten?"

Famously something of a teetotaler, Odisseus shocks Two-Bit Switch when, without a second's hesitation, the Ortok scoops up a Gitterswitch and vanishes the entire beverage with three fearsome quaffs. Clanging the tankard back onto the hardwood, he remains erect a moment, the perfect pose to unleash a tremendous belch but, instead, captures another drink with a swipe of his claw.

Applauding lightly despite himself, Two-Bit chuckles with implied congratulations. "See? There's somethin' worth celebrating."

Another drink destroyed, the hulking Ortok slumps morosely to the bar top. He's equally oblivious to the pirouetting tankard he's just finished, the whooping of the nearby patrons as they recognize him and even the friendly pats that he, the least popular of the _Lover's_ lieutenants, receives on the back. "I'll celebrate when I'm dead."

"That's the wrong–" Two-Bit begins to chastise.

Another explosion of madcap cheering forces him to plunk his alcohol down and smother both ears, each passing second inflicting more hearing damage.

Someone from Shellshucker's obviously entered.

Their brief meal at the oyster bar was transformed into a bizarre sport of spectator eating, the crowds cheering with each shell shucked, each joke made. On their way to the Afterburn, the crowds that dogged their step had sliced and diverted _The Unconstant Lover's_ crew into splinter groups, each arriving at the celebration's central hub intermittently.

To judge from both the cheering's general enthusiasm and its sheer volume, Two-Bit rules out Moira handily, much more the type to inspire a hush of reverent, fearful silence than a rousing hip-hip-hooray.

All this excitement at the front entrance perks Odisseus suddenly upright again. For a moment, he's a perfect replica of the primordial mustelid, scanning the horizon for descending birds of prey. He sniffs once or twice on instinct but, of course, the barroom's a minefield of contradictory scents and the range of his species' shoddy eyesight seems to fall unsurprisingly short.

It's Abraham who clears the Afterburn's entrance and steps into the shade of the celebratory saloon, swaggering with the utmost confidence of the profoundly intoxicated. Whereas the populace were eager to cluster around Two-Bit, a criminal of the people, there's some respectful berth paid to Abraham Bonaventure, his reputation hundreds of years old and twice as nasty. Consciously or unconsciously, he does leverage this fact as he swaggers about. He greets the onlookers, he laughs uproariously but he also seems to be clearing a wide open space, as though for an entrance on his coattails.

The Bloody Afterburn and, by all the moons, Takioro Defederate Station with it, goes berserk when the Galactic Menace shuffles inside.

Between all the hopping, hollering hoodlums, stomping their feet and spraying their booze in every conceivable direction, Nemo, oddly, looks only like Nemo. Nothing about him, not his attire, not his carriage, not his attitude, suggests the triumphant corsair king all his rioting court commends him to be.

He wears his battered duster, his threadbare gray thermal and his expression of astounding indifference. He wears them even as Abraham Bonaventure ushers him high onto the most immediate tabletop either can find, his swaying gut and slurred curses sufficient to evacuate all its occupants. The sight of the massive Grimalti harrumphing up after Nemo earns some nearby laughter as he attempts to negotiate his prodigious bulk that far off the taproom floor.

"There ain't a dry eye in Valladia's house tonight," opens Abraham, another chuckle rumbling through the crowd. "We've just come from our vittles, haven't we, and I've just come from hearing," he points this next comment straight at the unresponsive Nemo, "and I ain't told ye this, boyo, so pay close attention now," the crowd receives his attention again, "but word's reached me ears that Pazer Jasso were just found dead in his swank penthouse on Enbon. Two shots in the back of his head, so."

The Grimalti's relish in announcing this is completely lost on his audience, a few faint smirks and sniggers fringing their silence. "Ye fucking dullards," Abraham mutters, not nearly enough to himself, "ye don't remember Pazer Jasso, do ye? Piracy's pointless and all that?"

Now that Abraham's done them the kindness of branding a name to their nebulous hatred of "the man," a grim chuckle shudders through the crowd. In truth, however, so few among the assembled even grasp Nemo's original motive that the reference is somewhat lost on both pirate and drunkard.

"Looks like Valladia's gone'n given him the axe," Abraham wallops a congratulatory mitt onto Nemo's shoulder. Normally, the blow would be more than sufficient to buckle the unsuspecting Captain's knees and send him collapsing to the floor, were it not for the Grimalti's implacable grip on his shoulder. "Then, congrats, boyo. Guess ye can call that a job well done."

It's Abraham's guffawing, really, that's responsible for the crowd's own eventual fit of laughter. The sight of the jolly fat Grimalti, sloshed beyond belief and yukking himself sick, becomes too much for their own sloshed brains to handle. Even Two-Bit Switch, not nearly as inebriated as he planned to be, discovers a growing laugh escaping him, seeing the _Lover's_ sailing master this beside himself with both alcohol and good cheer.

Characteristically, of course, Nemo abstains from all the fun. In response to the sea of smiling faces, he offers a weak smile of his own – teeth visible, but the corners of his mouth lagging. His eyes, meanwhile, whip about the chamber, as though he's embarrassed or ashamed to share in this moment of foolishness.

This provokes an unexpected anger somewhere in Two-Bit's surprised belly. Here, at the end of all their labors, did Nemo not deserve any merriment? Did Two-Bit therefore not either?

"I 'spect," Abraham continues with sudden soberness, "it weren't no lie to claim that I'm a spell older than anyone present."

Only respectful silence contests his claim.

"Lemme say then, speakin' as an expert, that what we've accomplished here, the rumblings 'a which I'm assured will be felt underfoot not merely across the galaxy, but across the decades to come, could easily go down in me memory as the single greatest achievement anyone flying a flag or singin' a shanty's ever, well, achieved."

Amid a new burble of applause, shouts and whoops, Abraham continues. "And that, is thanks to all of ye present and its especially thanks to the five Captains ye see here." He gestures correspondingly across the Captain's tables, earning more and more positive reactions from the crowd for each Captain. "And," he adds, "it's specifically thanks to this bloomhole and his crew. Which I happen to be a part of," he adds with a cheesy wink.

Abraham shakes Nemo with paternal pride to the room's thunderous approval. "Lookit him – he's blushing like an airlock hooker. Take a wave, matey, for moon's sake."

Nemo's wave is a simple tweak of the wrist, more an ironic parody of a wave. The Captain's seemingly immune to all the honor and acclaim Abraham and his admirers heap on him. This provokes yet another surging of bile in Two-Bit's stomach.

"Enough speechifyin', wouldn't ye say?" Abraham's suggestion is met with general approval and a smattering of hoisted tankards. "Let's get drunk and break things!" he exclaims, his two wildly upraised arms in near-perfect concert with the saloon's unanimous, full-throated cheer.

The Captain's own trajectory, Two-Bit confirms, aims him in a generally bar-pointed direction as well. Soon as he can snag the Trijan's sleeve, Two-Bit busies himself purchasing four specialty drinks from the bartender. Incredulous as ever, Unhappy Roger's too preoccupied with the overflow of paying customers to offer much scowling or censure. When he grabs a free minute, he mixes Two-Bit's requested drinks readily enough.

Two-Bit questions Odisseus in the meantime. "You jabbed you ain't vizzed Moira anywhere, right?"

"I've seen you and now them," he responds dryly.

Two-Bit sets his jaw firm. Last thing anyone wished to do, in this scenario, was risk offending Moira by excluding her. From the state of the Captain's melancholy, however, rapid action was needed to prevent the utter and undeserved spoiling of Two-Bit's entire evening. Having spent close on a year looking forward to this evening, Two-Bit wasn't anywhere near ready to relinquish tonight's celebration to one of Nemo's frustratingly mistimed moods.

Soon, the press of patrons between them tires of congratulating, praising and toasting a demonstrably morose Menace and vomits him forth onto the bar. Soon as he's within smiling distance, Two-Bit plasters on the most cheerful grin he's capable of, hefts both tankards high in greeting and strides the three steps to reach him."I like your fucking speech, mate."

Nemo's response is equal parts despondency and surprise. "I didn't 'speech' anything."

All Two-Bit's pretense vanishes in an instant. "Moons, mate. Who's chomping on your lollies?"

"I got like, a headache," Nemo lies, rubbing his temple with the meat of his palm.

Two-Bit gestures with a slosh from one tankard. "Your maggie been all bumbled up since you sat down with that Helker. You ain't blanked on what you done, has you? All ten of 'em's got blagged! That stupid fucking flasher you had's come to gritty and vizz at you. You're mopier than Moira."

"What's tomorrow look like," Nemo reasons with a fatalistic glance about, "is my point."

"Worry about the hangover tomorrow, savvy? Tonight, we get sloshed. Vizz at what I scored ya." He jiggles the Backwash enticingly, spilling an excusable amount of alcohol over his fingers. "Eh?"

A resigned Nemo accepts the offered alcoholic nightmare. Tromping past Two-Bit, he claims a seat beside Odisseus at the rapidly-vacating bar. Two-Bit follows behind, ruling a shallow victory better than no victory at all.

Seven drinks into eight, Odisseus' reaction to Nemo's approach is the exact opposite of the crowd's – little more than a grunt and a nod. With their celebrity and Nemo's penchant for unrepentantly murdering a bastard, the three of them earn half's a bar's worth of a wide and respectful berth.

Two-Bit plants himself beside Nemo. "Vel give you any guff?"

"Nah." Nemo plays idly with the condensation formed on the mug in deference to elaborating any further.

There's a somehow sizable silence between them, surrounded by all this noise. Two-Bit scrambles for conversation, Odisseus downs whatever drinks are donated him, Nemo negates any and all of Two-Bit's attempts.

"You seen Moira?" Odisseus muzzles toward the single untouched Bile Backwash left steaming on the counter.

"Nah," repeats Nemo. "Not since we left lunch."

Once again, the silence returns unbidden. Nemo's melancholy appears only strong enough to weather a sentence or three before dropping off completely.

To everyone's surprise, it's Nemo who actually speaks next. "Vobash's guy caught me on the way over. Guess he's organizing a wrap-up meeting tomorrow sometime, after the hangover's lifted. That place, what's it called, across from Barrel's Bottom?"

"Hamburger Teriyaki Milkshake?"

"That one." He opens both palms. "Can I assume you'd both wanna ride as muscle to that tomorrow?"

Odisseus' animalistic grunt and Two-Bit's rushed "'Course I would" overlap.

"A formality, you know, bleeder wants to bicker about Yime's salvage rights, but should probably make an appearance." His attention to his drink and his bad humor simultaneously return, the matter resolved. "Appreciated."

"Don't much care for HamTeriMilk," Two-Bit opines, by way of fresh conversation.

"Too much salt?" supposes Odisseus.

"Cook's a douchebag," Two-Bit corrects. "Messes ain't half bad, actually."

A jarring spray of sound, more electronic feedback than music, blares from the stage's primary speakers. An outburst of complaint from the crowd jogs Two-Bit's memory. "Oh, fuck," he blurts suddenly. "Come vizz at what else I scored ya."

Before they can object, he's scooping up his own and Moira's Backwashes and urging his two companions to follow with encouraging gestures. Their own untouched Backwashes in their uncertain hands, Nemo and Odisseus round the bar's corner and come to settle onto fresh stools, also emptied by the aura of Two-Bit's celebrity.

Reseated to better accommodate a view of the stage, Two-Bit points an eager finger over Nemo's shoulder. "You vizz that?"

Following Two-Bit's point, the Captain's eyes play across the holographic name emblazoned on the drumhead. Two-Bit can't swear to this, but he's convinced, at the sight, a smile crosses Nemo's unjustifiably grumpy lips.

At the moment, the stage's occupants are still predominantly technicians. They arrange instruments, grapple with amps or arrangements of colored lights, argue into headsets. At least one musician, however, has taken the stage, the author of the clarion feedback loop that summoned them over.

Cosmic Vomit's bassist, triple-pronged axe in her grip, is a teensy little Treffel. Her blood red mohawk, somehow sprouting up from her hairless head, defies both science and nature. An instrument like the one she wears, a droidbass, is capable of laying down and switching interchangeably between three simultaneous basslines.

The drummer is both the next to appear and universally agreed-upon as the worst musician in the trio. This savage Walkeen is known as a destroyer of holodrums galaxywide and, less notably, wanted on seven planets for assault and battery.

Only when both of his bandmates have entered, been applauded and taken their ceremonial places before their instruments can Cosmic Vomit's lead singer, Teqoka Zigzag the Thunder-Monger, appear.

Perhaps the only creature in the entire Outer Ring capable of producing Cosmic Vomit's incomprehensible, screaming vocals, the Thunder-Monger turns out to be a Trijan. Rock legends uphold that, while on stage, he maintained the High Trijan tradition honored by Charybdis and her crew only in private. According one passing reference from Socorro herself, Zigzag's barbaric singing constituted some minor blasphemy on their distant homeworld. This tickled Nemo immensely.

When he does finally emerge, he's so gaunt and dreadlocked that he appears to be little more than a skeleton with hair. The guitar he's reputedly rubbish with slaps against his stomach as he walks from the stage's side entrance and grips the provided microphone in two spindly hands.

The announcement he proceeds to make is unintelligible to audience, bandmates and even Charybdis' cluster of Trijans. At turns mumbled, at turns raspy, at turns squealed, its only decipherable content, sprinkled throughout, are his gestures. He motions once towards himself and his backers He motions once around to encompass the entire Afterburn. The third motion, the one Two-Bit paid Vomit's scuzzy manager hand-over-fist for, he makes toward Nemo, where he stands before the bar.

Without actually comprehending his words, the crowd's aware enough to cheer at the deliberate shout-out. Amid much stomping, hooting and pounding of tankards on tabletops, an honest smile does pierce the miasma of bad mood that hung about Nemo like a vapor.

Three smacks of the drummer's sticks – the traditional kickoff – and Cosmic Vomit's off to the races. Three seconds into the song, Two-Bit immediately recalls that he's not actually an especially big fan of Cosmic Vomit to begin with. A combined caterwauling of instruments is all his ear can make out, rather than any recognizable music or melody – all played at a decibel level that shames all the efforts of the cheering crowd.

At this volume, the three conflicting basslines shake and shudder everything within the Afterburn – tables, chairs, bottles, patrons – and likely the station street outside as well. The holodrums explode images forth with each concussive blast. Skulls, flames, extended middle fingers, all rendered in kaleidoscopic color, are visible for a fraction of a heartbeat, at a corresponding rate to the Walkeen's drumming.

It's the Thunder-Monger's efforts that provoke the most response from the assembled. While his hands abuse the strings of his guitar, he ululates arcane verses to a glam god in the microphone, in a language only he seemingly has the privilege to speak. As he sings, Two-Bit legitimately spies concert-goers fleeing the direct radius of their speakers, clutching their bleeding ears in horror.

Much as they may not be his cup of spacer's tea, Two-Bit's forced to admit that Cosmic Vomit's pretty incredible live, even just to watch.

"You know this one?" he literally screams to Nemo and is pleased to discover him bobbing his head to the beat.

"Yeah," he shouts back seconds later, yelling an inch from Two-Bit's own ear. " _Ass Full of Goldfish_. Off their third album."

Two-Bit scrunches up his features. "We like the third album?"

"We very much like the third album," Nemo confirms. The song, not standing on ceremony, abruptly ends. "Short, though."

The next song and the next song pass, each roughly analogous to the first in length, tone and lyrics. Three of _The Unconstant Lover's_ crewmen stand, their backs to their Captain's favorite bar, watching a surprise performance from their Captain's favorite band and clutching, in their hands, a sampling of everyone's least favorite drink.

Cosmic Vomit spits and sputters, rages and rocks, and the three pirates are content to stand, watch and let their disgusting drink ripen with age.

It's, surprisingly, Odisseus who breaks the reverie between _Skullfuck Your Darlings_ and _I Traded My Feelings For More Guns_ , with the tacit congratulations. "You done good."

"We done good," Nemo corrects without missing a beat.

"Whadda we specc, huh? Snag a table, jack the show, pound these back?"

"And Moira?" Odisseus mentions, not without some grimness.

"You know what I've always jabbed."

"What's that?" Nemo bites, scanning the joint for any sign of his absent first mate.

"Fuck Moira," Two-Bit provides.

Wherever they walk, a pathway opens for them. The crowd is caught between raptures, one towards the Galactic Menace, another towards Cosmic Vomit, and is more than willing to let one half of their idols pass. As per his strict instructions, the crew's classic corner booth was kept undividedly reserved and even the stage was positioned to best accommodate viewing from that angle.

Orientation within an Afterburn this crowded and re-arranged would normally be a nightmare. With the dripping rendition of the _Lover's_ Jolly Roger as a guiding star, however, Two-Bit's easily able to lead his fellows to their preferred table, before the current Cosmic Vomit tune's even concluded.

The curtain of bodies parts pleasingly before them and passage to quite deliberately the best seats in the house becomes unimpeded. Upon spying their booth, however, Two-Bit's scandalized to discover their table is actually occupied.

Garrock Brondi waves pleasantly to them.

Before Two-Bit can recover from his bodily shock or Odisseus surge forward in an outburst of violence, however, Nemo, quite numbly, retrieves Moira's intended drink from Two-Bit's grasp and strides definitively over to accompany him.

Chapter 25

Garrock Brondi's had a rough year. Since flying the coop with Abraham's _Beggarman_ , Garrock'd run the gamut on unsuccessful capers of every size, shape and description. Word quickly circulated around the galactic campfire that Nemo and his ilk were thirsty for what they'd describe as retribution and Brondi would more accurately describe as bloodshed. Despite this and Moira Quicksilver on payroll, being professional pirates, they weren't particularly suited to the rigors of an interstellar manhunt.

Garrock Brondi was grateful. This made the task of slipping between the cracks that much easier. All of this provided, of course, that he clung to the Offchart Territories like stink on a horny Ortok.

During his tenure as a fugitive on the absolute edge of settled space, Garrock Brondi would come to foster mixed feelings about the Offchart. On paper, the region was rife with opportunity – pristine planets, thorny navigation, lawlessness to make Bad Space look lily white and civilized. It was any smuggler's paradise, with an appalling absence of a single organized smuggling ring.

This, Garrock Opportunity Brondi, knew was a lacuna he could comfortably occupy.

The coin's flipside, for Garrock, came with the inevitable lack of competent accomplices to be unearthed this far from Bad Space's well-established criminal channels. Ever since the capture, detainment and disappearance of Rooster at the hands of Insurgent Company, Garrock had yet to replace his right hand position with any continuity. A solo smuggler wasn't unheard of, but it thinned most aliases and made boarding actions a guaranteed game-over scenario.

He'd sampled a broad sample of the Offchart's offered outlaws with little and pitiable success. To him, the Offchart outlawry were all slack-jawed yokels, backwoods bumpkins hijacking driftsleds, guzzling moonshine and torching the evidence. To them, he was some posh Inner Sector gentlemen criminal, made effete by an improperly healed gunshot wound, waistcoats and a constitutional unwillingness to carry a firearm.

That final point came after some personal reflection, something a true blue mercenary like Garrock wasn't overly keen on. After the ugliness with Nemo and the _Lover's_ crew, he came to a hardline conclusion about the confluence of violence and crime.

Their type of criminal, the kind required to make decisions that resulted in a captive Rooster and a wounded leg, was precisely the opposite type of criminal that he wished to be. The type he someday wished to employ, certainly, but conducting business unarmed, while dangerous, sent a clear message to all his associates.

An equally clear message sent from his associates to Garrock pointed out the necessity of an armed bodyguard or seven.

Once a serviceable ship was acquired, once one of a handful of interchangeable partners were acquired, Garrock Brondi embarked on a series of hilarious and harrowing misadventures, smuggling the treasures of the untamed Offchart back into the known galaxy.

His first job consisted of hauling high texture gravel from the unregulated mining world of Mand to the regulated mining world of Quvid for practically pocket change.

His second job, some honest-to-moons gunrunning, was an unmitigated disaster. Featured highlights include betrayal at the hands of his buyer, search, seizure and two solid months behind the bars of a frontier town lockup on Jai Kai.

His third job, a laughable affair shuttling free-range lonktonk onto and off of the many moons of Yon, will go down in Garrock's personal history as the single most bizarre sequence of events he's ever born witness to. The whole confounding affair concluded with bills in a few hands, canisters in a few heads and one drowned parakeet.

In this fashion did Garrock Brondi continue to try the trade of contraband for the better part of a year, with about as consistently bad luck as one person could be cursed with.

Occasional forays into the Outer Ring were, of course, necessary. On these occasions was Garrock gifted with the faintest and most fragile glimpse of what, precisely, doing business with professional criminals actually entailed.

It was on one of these aforementioned forays – dodging tariffs on nothing more glamorous than fractal paint – that Garrock Brondi was inexplicably approached by an inexplicable agent. This agent, now of conveniently fuzzy dimensions and description, claimed to, quite inexplicably, work for an organization that called itself Huong Xo.

It seemed the lofty heads of Huong Xo were interested in hiring Garrock to perform them a very special service. It also seemed the Yheum crime syndicate weren't remotely interested in his superlative skills as a smuggler, nor were they interested in the legendary depths of his discretion. It seemed that what most interested Huong Xo about Garrock Brondi, washed-up Offchart has-been, was his relationship to a certain Galactic Menace.

Of course Brondi'd heard of Nemo's meteoric rise to power, stardom and Menacehood. Of course the Freebooter Fleet and their antics were galactic news, Nemo tee shirts and Two-Bit advertisements inescapable, even in the Offchart. Of course he understood, primarily through his Bad Space contacts, how damaging to both the short and long-term enterprise of interstellar smuggling Nemo's actions were.

A surplus of Valladia's goods, some of the priciest and most monopolized commodities in the galaxy, now flooded the free market. This neatly eliminated the need for a skilled individual with a skilled spaceship to provide those amenities, tax free, at bargain prices.

The sheer quantity of hard cash Huong Xo proposed to pay him was considerable enough for Garrock Brondi to purchase a sizable swath of the Offchart for his own personal use. More appropriately, it was more than enough to bankroll that expansive smuggling ring Garrock believed the Offchart so richly deserved.

The task itself, why Xo sought his specific services, was both absurdly simple and absurdly dangerous. He'd been paid such an extravagant wage to merely hold a conversation.

Of course, this conversation was being held with a man who'd previously shot him, was extraordinarily likely to shoot him again and also, somewhat unrelatedly, was now the Galactic Menace.

The one thing Garrock would admit, as Nemo and his Bile Backwashes approached him blankly from across The Bloody Afterburn, was how lavish the festivities were. Graffiti decorations, Cosmic Vomit, everybody in the known galaxy but him invited – Two-Bit Switch evidently knew how to throw a party.

"Two-Bit Switch evidently knows how to throw a party," he extends by way of greeting.

"You better not let Abraham see you back here," Nemo warns, with sudden jocularity. "You think _I_ wanna tie your hands and feet to Starboard's flanging fins? Sheesh."

"Think I'll take my chances. He couldn't be drunker if he was drowning." The ridiculous Grimalti is no longer visible, hidden amongst the thronging crowd, but his signature combination of sea shanty and vomiting can be heard even over the astrogrunge.

"That's sorta my point." Standing there, Nemo appears somewhat undecided about whether or not to grace Garrock with his presence by actually sitting. "Where'd the _Beggarman_ end up, anyhow?"

"Scrapped," Garrock takes a certain pleasure in informing him. "Hell, he wants it back, he'd best head out to Mox. Tell him to pack a magnet and a magnifying glass."

"You're a bad, bad man, Garrock Brondi."

"Present company excluded?"

"Naturally."

"Tell me, Nemo, how you been?" He gazes about at all the spectacle and boozy splendor. "Anything exciting to report?"

"Funny you should ask." Seeming to resolve behind the idea of conversation, Nemo seats himself and Garrock scores a point, the first of many he'll need to score to make good on Xo's money. "All I've gotta do is frown at you funny and Odisseus'll be racing everybody else to get the first crack at you." As he speaks, Nemo laces his idleness with potent threat. "Wanna test that theory?"

"You like being the Menace, I expect? Target that big suits you."

"You know, I do like it. Ott, bless his blue heart, made such a stink about all the burden, that 'heavy crown' buhoxshit, I sorta assumed the same rules would apply. Ott wasn't playing by my rules, however."

"He wasn't into the wanton destruction game?"

"No, he wasn't. Only person, 'sides you, in this whole galaxy considers what we did as wanton would be Valladia. Obviously." He sidles one steaming Backwash across the mug-ringed tabletop. "Enough about me. How's life treating you, Garrock? Your leg holding up?"

Garrock brandishes the head of his mostly unnecessary cane. "I get by."

Nemo frowns approvingly. "Swank."

"The ladies love it."

"Do they," Nemo returns immediately. "Kudos, though, on meeting us here. Two-Bit's security must be pretty lacking, crippled guy like you slips past."

"I get by, as I said."

"You always was a nimble fella," Nemo acknowledges mockingly.

The Bile Backwash stews and sweats between them, Garrock making nothing resembling a move toward the offered drink. Garrock instead cooks Nemo's annoyance like an artisanal tea, averting eye contact at key strategic points to perfectly simulate conversational awkwardness.

"You come looking for a hand-out here, or...?" Garrock's delighted to hear so early. In order for this task to succeed with Brondi unmurdered, Nemo's early anger is paramount.

"I'm just here to pay my respects, pal." Garrock confesses, palm and cane innocently raised. "Nothing sinister."

"My resplendent cock-and-balls, you are. You don't claw your way outta whatever boondock bloomhole you'd stuffed yourself down, weasel your way into my shindig and steal my spot to pay any respect to me."

Garrock scoots with surprise. "Is this your spot? I had no idea."

"I'm thinking you got somewhere near ten fucking seconds to tell me what you came to tell me before Odisseus separates your spine from the rest of you." Nemo raises his hand languidly and Odisseus, far out of earshot, visibly bares his teeth in an unheard growl.

"What happened to your coat?" Garrock gambles.

Nemo's deadpan question comes out a statement. "That's what you came to tell me."

"Moons, look like you set the thing on fire."

"Disintegrator, actually," Nemo bites, unable to refrain from boasting. "Bounty hunter with a distengrator. You shoulda seen the prick." He smirks, hoisting the tattered coat in one hand. "You'da liked him."

"Suppose _that's_ a real concern now. Bloom me out. All those bounty hunters from before were moons-damned games for kids. You thought Quuilar Noxix was bad?"

"You'd be surprised, actually, how little they'd been bothering me. More a nuisance, than anything else." His next gesture includes the rambunctious rabble all around them. "They sorta helped with that."

"Helped, though, huh? The party's gotta end at some point here, doesn't it?"

Disgust flashes across Nemo's face. "Don't tell me you've gone angler. I really will hafta call Odi over."

"No, no, just talking, just talking," Garrock denies casually. "Point is, now that Valladia's gone bankrupt, Jasso's got holes in his head and all ten ports're sacked, not much reason for them," his cane mimics Nemo's last gesture, "to stick around."

"Them meaning the Freebooter Fleet?"

"Them meaning all of them. The groupies, the hangers-on, the unintentional bodyguards. Fuck, think of these assholes," the head of his cane next indicates the rabble on stage. "Soon as Zigzag loses his voice, gets whacked or throws in the towel, rest of the band ain't likely to be far behind. Soon as the band dissolves, nothing left for the faithful to worship."

"Yeah, but you hate Cosmic Vomit," Nemo reasons.

"I wouldn't hate them if they didn't suck."

The evasion is cheap, but Garrock still sees the chord struck in Nemo's face.

This whole endeavor could sink completely contingent on whether or not Nemo, Two-Bit and the Freebooter Fleet were planning any epilogues or, moons forbid, any second acts to their award-winning performances of this past year.

Thankfully, the answer's plain as moons all over Nemo's expression. The nerve's so exposed in the Menace that a mere mention of the dilemma he now faced induced from him a half-hid wince.

"I suppose you were vamoosed by the time Noxix hit us, weren't you?" Nemo recalls, bravado returning at once. "Never got to hear the whole story."

"The story I did hear, yeah," Garrock confirms. "Me and half the galaxy who walked past a holovision set." He waggles his hand back and forth some. "Meh."

"Meh?" Nemo spits, sitting abruptly forward. "The fuck you mean, 'meh'?"

"I mean meh," Garrock clarifies, delighted to have unwittingly stumbled into a sensitive area. "Smells a little like buhoxshit to me."

"You seen the footage?"

"I have. Looked a little staged, tell you the truth."

Could Garrock have bottled the look of astounded anger Nemo currently wore on his face, he could've sold samples of the expression on any space station street corner at ten credits a pop. "You're the second dumbass baby-rapist to tell me that practically this fucking month."

"That so?" Garrock grunts contemplatively. "We two can't be alone in that."

"Don't be coy with me, you faffy motherfucker." Nemo peels the tankard off the tabletop with zero intention of drinking the brew. "You wanna threaten me by proxy, threaten me by proxy."

Garrock can't refrain from a smile. "Them's fightin' words."

"You're unarmed, ain'tcha?"

"You noticed."

"Moons, you got balls."

"You noticed."

Nemo scoffs and pushes partially away with the faintest suggestion of standing to leave. He focuses his attention on Cosmic Vomit for a long moment and his words are almost lost to the straining ears of Garrock. "Tell you the truth, I think that canister I put in you's done a galaxy of good. You ain't such a namby-pamby anymore."

The anger, his own unexpected anger that threatens to surface unbidden, isn't easily swallowed by the best of men and the one thing his dealings with Nemo showed Garrock, without a doubt, was that he wasn't the best of men.

"Point I'm making is that, once the party breaks up, the Freebooters go their ways, there ain't nothing anymore between those bounty hunters and that 10 million on your head. Some of whom," he adds, as an afterthought, "may also be skeptical about that footage."

"And this is, what, then?" Nemo shows his own skepticism. "A friendly warning?"

"Consider me charitable," Garrock brushes off, the whole success of the venture hinging on him selling this.

Miraculously, Nemo eats the story up. The whole nonsensical nature of Garrock's bizarre and unheralded appearance working in his favor, there's simply something about how backasswards Xo's assignment is that Nemo can't grok.

Frankly, were their positions reversed, Garrock's not certain he could follow that twisted Yheum train of logic either. Thankfully, he wouldn't have to.

"What really burns me about the Noxix thing," Nemo confesses, "about the footage being faked, I mean, is where the bloom they think Noxix fucking went. You understand?"

"I understand."

"Let's assume, even for a second, that we faked the footage and I'm not a space-cold badass, which we didn't and I totally am. Wouldn't Noxix come forward? Wouldn't Xo or GalaxCom or whoever the fuck held his leash trot Noxix out and go 'uh, no, assholes, he's still alive. Here's season twenty-one.'" He shakes his head with inconsolable bewilderment. "Nuh uh. Never happened. That show's fucking cancelled."

Overconfidence in the success of his scheme makes Brondi risks a sidelong comment he probably shouldn't and he instantly regrets that decision. "Did I hear," he poses, his intrigued expression too much by half, "that they tried to mount, what, a reboot? With some young turk starring?"

True to form, though, Nemo's completely clueless. "Shit, yeah, son! _Dusty Dimick Wants You Dead or Alive_ , you believe that? This jagoff, actually, that you asked about," he realizes, flapping the disintegrated corner of his duster upward again, on cue. "Put him in his place too, the cocky fuck. You should see the footage – that shit ain't faked."

"I trust not," Garrock assures him. "Your Freebooter friends handle that one for you too?"

He spends a moment in honest deliberation. "No, I think that one was Moira."

"Where is the old lady?" Garrock wonders sincerely.

"Off drunk some fucking place, who knows."

"You listen to my advise," Brondi stipulates, with sudden gravity, "you keep her close. Especially once the Fleet ain't."

"Yeah," Nemo mutters again and is lost further in sudden pensiveness.

With Nemo in this suggestible state, Garrock's fully prepared to stoke the fires of phenomenally bad decisions all the more. The Galactic Menace, though, bless his stupid heart, always goes the extra mottible to be stupid. "The real trick'd be," Nemo ponders, more pensive still, "keeping the Fleet together somehow."

Amazed at Nemo's willingness to play directly into Xo's hands, Garrock struggles to keep his face straight. "Stay together for the kids?"

"Stay together to attack more fucking places, steal more fucking shit."

"Right. I guess I thought," Garrock supposes, suddenly on the defensive, "Valladia was the original hook, though, wasn't it? Valladia's all but sunk now."

"Plentya pockets in the crowd," invokes Nemo, the old cutpurse's maxim. "It ain't like there's a dearth of rich ports in the Outer Ring, or fuck, the Midworlds, to knock over.

"Midworlds?" Garrock spits. "You think this Fleet of yours would back a play against the Imperium? After all that 4th Fleet nonsense?"

The ever-predictable Nemo, of course, can't be bothered to even notice Garrock's surprise. "Depends on where," he murmurs, before adding calculatingly first, then with a smirk. "Greatgullet would. Gertrude would."

With Nemo lost in thought, Garrock Brondi's eyes flick unconsciously about, seeking any trace of a hidden Quicksilver and an ensuing ambush, he cannot believe his luck so much.

Where bounty hunters, broadside batteries and bad press had all failed to shatter Nemo and his Freebooter Fleet, Xo's outside chance, their last great hope, instead appealed heavily to the Galactic Menace's bravado, to his intrinsic nature as a natural born showoff.

As far as Garrock could understand Xo's conniving thought process, the original conceit was to provoke the Freebooters into attacking a target they couldn't possibly best and watch them bash themselves and their Fleet to smithereens in the process. Brondi's task, then, came down to a simple enough matter of pointing Nemo onto the correct warpath and allowing him the freedom to self-sabotage into destruction.

At its core, the plan preyed upon a pirate's profound sense of disproportion between eyes and stomach. Frankly, to Brondi's estimation, this was half-likely to occur anyway, with or without any extra prompting from Huong Xo.

It was this point, that his role as instigator and catalyst may be merely more fait accompli, that initially attracted Garrock to the position. The enormous paycheck, the opportunity to work more directly with Xo and the chance to participate, however insignificantly, in the obliteration of all things Nehel Morel certainly didn't hurt much either.

As a rule, Brondi's opportunist's eye was always on the hunt for a job practically complete which, for a nominal fee, he could nudge over that all-important edge. When push came to shove, however, Garrock simply hadn't anticipated that the whole thing would be so blooming easy.

"Big talk," the smuggler offers, at last, "but there's no way you keep that rabble from masturbating over their money long enough to even–"

"What about Trija?" Nemo suggests all of a sudden.

"Well," Garrock discovers himself saying, "it certainly would be unexpected."

"Yeah. It would. Yeah." Nemo sits and simmers in his own budding self-satisfaction. It takes all of Garrock's concentration to keep his jaw from literally dropping.

His instructions suggested that, in accordance with Nemo's previous patterns of behavior, nudging the Menace towards an industrial Imperium target, one Huong Xo could conceivably tip off, bore the greatest chance of success. They'd mentioned precisely nothing about strikes against mighty yet unrelated fourth parties, such as the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija.

Their own defensive fleet of starships was undefeated across all of galactic history. Their solar power was legendarily limitless. Their military complex was so rigidly xenophobic, it prohibited any diplomatic or mercantile relations with non-Trijans.

Garrock Brondi, open to improvisation, imagines Trija would do just fine.

"I call buhoxshit," Garrock scoffs. "Pissant privateers are one thing. The 4th Fleet is one thing. The Radiant Armada? Something fucking else."

"I mean," scoffs Nemo back, "fucking how? They're one system, with one navy, with one commander. There's no blooming way systematically sacking ten predictable ports is easier than a surprise attack against one."

Garrock allows a sliver of honest anger to shine through. "Before, you were talking about an underfunded defense budget spread comically thin across ten, largely indefensible points. Now, you're talking about an unchallenged dictatorship singlemindedly devoted to the defense of one planet." He reclines fully backwards, beside himself with the task's supposed impossibility. "Imperium's been trying for centuries to frag Trija outta pure spite. An Imperium richer, smarter and better armed than you."

During Garrock's entire monologue, a grin, the lascivious smile of a career iconoclast presented with something sacred to smash, grows across the Galactic Menace's face. As the smuggler nears the end of his speech, it becomes increasingly clear that Nemo's got his response all picked out.

"You saying I can't do it?"

Garrock chooses the specific words of his riposte very carefully. "I'm betting you can't."

"How much?

"How much?" Garrock's heart skips a beat. "An actual bet? You're blasted."

"I'm the Galactic Menace and I get what I blooming want." Now it's Nemo who reclines comfortably back, drunk on his alleged ability in all things impossible. "How much will you bet me the Freebooter Fleet can't put even Trija to the torch?"

"What're we, moons-damned teenagers again?"

Nemo's smile becomes that much more condescending and abrasive. "If we were teenagers again, you'd remember betting anything against me's a pretty bad idea."

"A million," Garrock spits.

"A million?" Nemo chuckles with earnest surprise and adjusts his posture again. "Bloom me out, but you've got stones these days, Brondi. Have you the money, though, is the question."

He didn't and wouldn't until Xo signed on the dotted. This arrogant cocksucker wasn't going to survive long enough to find that out, though, so bloom him. "Have you not?"

The Menace extends a suitably menacing hand. "A million on me sacking Trija."

Garrock strains halfway across the table to take his hand in the shake. "A million on you not."

With that, the compact is made and Garrock's work here is done. That hell-bent gleam to Nemo's eye promises that he'll, in some short order, hurl himself and all his freebooting resources against the Supreme Sovereignty until either their homeworld is sacked or he's reduced to ash.

Whether the Fleet meets with success or defeat, however, makes zero difference to Garrock, particularly since he had no intention of honoring his word to Nemo, noted ignoble and all-around asshole.

Reclaiming Garrock's untouched Backwash, Nemo rises to crick out his back. "Soon as the thing's done," he predicates, "meet me on Thuwo Minor. And bring my money."

"See you when I see you," Garrock salutes grimly with the head of his cane.

Nemo chews the cryptic sendoff a few seconds. One hand occupied with a full tankard of booze, he draws his firearm.

The shot he scores is a minor injury, barely a flesh wound. The sheer shock and pain of a canister so startlingly delivered causes Garrock to convulse from impact and flop backward against the booth like a flummoxed fish.

His shoulder smokes. The concert squeals to a halt at the sound. His pride suffers a wound ten times more grievous than his shoulder does. The crowd screams approval of their Galactic Menace and his murderous actions as he retires back to the bar.

The second canister Nehel Morel ever surprised Garrock Brondi with he vows to make his last.

Moira Quicksilver's off drunk some fucking place, who knows.

The sensations she was actively aware of were numbered fewer than the fingers on her left hand and they amounted, quite simply, to these.

She was drunk, possibly drunker than she'd ever been in her entire life.

Skirts made the simple act of sitting down an art form far too extrinsic and zen for someone as intoxicated as Moira was to master.

No one – man, monster or machine – could force her to enter The Bloody Afterburn if she damn well didn't want to.

The drunkenness had come somewhat swiftly following the drinking of a bottle and a half of Gitterswitch Gin. When precisely she'd consumed this much alcohol, she wasn't sure. It was certainly at some point, however nebulous, between their well-publicized lunch at Shellshucker and her sudden appearance in this roach-populated alleyway.

Seemingly in imitation of its owner, her memory remained a mutinous little bitch. The rest of her brain seemed only capable of leap-frogging from individual second to individual second.

Tonight, she could surmise, alcohol came in no short supply. It was pushed into her palms with great regularity, doubtlessly the origin of this partially-full bottle and its empty cousin somewhere round about her booted feet.

The skirt she'd actually purchased while sober – a black denim affair that'd caught her eye during a particularly whimsical mood one afternoon in Pirateton. Frankly, she'd assumed wearing something this unabashedly feminine would inspire more uproar or confusion in her companions. Somewhat to her chagrin, they seemed hardly to notice.

Sure, the skirt was worn over black leggings. Sure, they were precisely no less revealing than the sheer black slacks she normally wore. Nevertheless, a more sober Moira would be lying had she claimed she hadn't worn the skirt mostly to provoke a reaction of some kind from her mates or the masses, neither of whom seemed to give much of a shit.

Her drinking venue she considers the evening's greatest masterstroke. The slime-stained back alley only adjoins The Bloody Afterburn by its perpetually ajar back door. Its abundance of piss-smelling garbage cans, spilled bottles of steak sauce and nations of virulent Akuddi roaches, appear as pleasant décor in Moira's current mood.

The mental philosophy behind the decision to relocate back here remained unflappable, even amid her drunken stupor. Without fail, whenever the tip of Moira's jackboot inched over the threshold of The Bloody Afterburn, she caught a nonlethal canister at some point in the immediate future. Best way to ensure she avoids this karmic comeuppance, therefore, was simply to refuse to enter the accursed Afterburn, even should the majority of the festivities be hosted there.

Certainly, the seating arrangements back here were universally and unaccountably wet. The company, occasional vagrants and frequent vomiters, was less than the desirable. The not-getting-shot factor, though, was, thus far, incredible.

Apart from Gitterswitch dregs and scuttling roaches, the only company she currently keeps consists of a chatty orangeskin. Perhaps rightly, he deigns conversation with Moira to instead converse mutteringly with a slice of pizza clinging to the Afterburn's back wall by the combined force of inertia and cheese. Also in attendance, though somewhat less attentive, is the Ikaardi carcass. The most recent arrival, Moira watched the corpse, freshly-minted within the Afterburn's walls, hurled into the shallow non-grave of the alley.

Combined with applause, firearms and Cosmic Vomit, the irrepressible din and disorder one comes to expect from a typical Takioro carousal is multiplied by a magnitude of ten. The only other activities within the The Bloody Afterburn she was even dimly aware of were from what few glimpses she caught through the open doorway.

Frequently, a silhouette or a stage light would darken or illuminate said doorway, both blinding Moira for a split second to what's transpiring within. The one sight she does catch regular sight of, the one that raises her inebriated ire the most, is undoubtably that of Gertie Guspatch and her blatant lack of pants.

The unscrupulous captain of _The Dick Magnet_ evidently borrowed someone's overlarge shirt which she, in her inimitable way, wore exclusively, like an exceedingly short dress. How, precisely, among so many horny drunkards, she managed to dissuade all the boozy or violent advances thrown her way, Moira didn't know.

What she did know was, were Nemo to stumble shirtless up _The Unconstant Lover's_ ramp tomorrow morning, Moira may be required to choke a bitch.

As Moira begins to entertain this notion, Nemo actually appears quite unexpectedly, his shirt disheveled, but in place. Limned by the kaleidoscope of Cosmic Vomit's colored lights, he blunders through the Afterburn's side entrance and into the alley with no more grace than she would expect from her own severely sauced self.

"I brought you a drink," he declares, eyes unfocused, speech slurred to an extent she's never seen in even him, celebrated inebriate.

His clothing cling to his body via sweat and sheer stubbornness, all the traditional methods unfastened, as though someone attempted to undress him vehemently and at speed. Even standing still, he wavers this way and that, the effects of Gitterswitch playing very similar tricks on both of their equilibriums.

As advertised, he clutches one tankard precariously in each hand. The left tankard is definitively empty while the right tankard, seemingly Moira's, is definitively overflowing. The organgish swill within betrays the concoction as none other than the station-famous Bile Backwash of song and story.

She adjusts her posture to address him. "You bought me a drink?" she stammers, surprised at her own slurring and the sudden uncorking of the world around her.

"Two-Bit bought you a drink," he struggles to string together. "I brought you a drink." His scowl conveys mighty and profound concentration. "That is the distinction."

"Need a place to sit?" proposes Moira, with as steady and consistent a gesture as she can manage toward an adjacent trashcan lid. The brown stain across the lid's surface Moira, an eyewitness to the act, remembers too late is the now-congealed beer shit of an unspeaking Lriss who joined her atop the garbage pails only long enough to void his bowels.

Without any suitable objection, Nemo crosses the distance between doorway and dustbin and squishes into the Lriss's vacated seat to Moira's immediate right. Once there, he settles wetly into the sodden throne appointed him and hands off the still-steaming mug to Moira. "Enjoy."

An intoxication this thorough is all that's required to drive Moira to actually drink a Bile Backwash. She accepts the gift greedily and gulps away with gusto.

Her face promptly goes numb. For a moment, she's blissfully and bewilderingly underwater, the outlines of the trash, the alleyway and her drinking buddy swirling together like chocochino froth.

When clarity comes back to her in a sudden stab, Moira, a momentary clairvoyant, notices something about her Captain that three years serving aboard his spaceship somehow hid from her.

"That a tattoo?"

His posture, doubled-over and considering the dry depths of his own tankard, is all that makes the marking visible. Two inky black strands snake their way down the Captain's neck and disappear past the rim of his duster jacket. Not a trick of the light, the marks are certainly dyed on the skin and also certainly rendered invisible ninety percent of the time by their location at the well-shrouded intersection of Nemo's raised collar and shaggy black hair.

"There. That," Moira extends a shaky point. "On your neck. That really a tattoo?"

In reaction, Nemo barely glances aside, neither of his ashen eyes visible beneath strands of his sweaty hair, and declines to comment further.

"Since when've," Moira continues, undiscouraged, "you had a tattoo? Looks fucking fresh."

In contrast to the wispy, teenaged indulgences that adorn all the muscle, thuggery and goonage of Bad Space, the indecipherable markings that're only scarcely visible on Nemo's neck are vibrantly black. Not only do they lack all the age and fade that inevitably afflict any tattoo with enough time, Moira also notices a strange lack of the reddened, inflamed flesh that frames all tattoos recently inked.

Nemo's reply comes couched in a burp. "Since I was born."

"Don't buhoxshit me," giggles Moira, a sound that surprises even Moira as it escapes her lips. Before blushing, she covers as much of her face as the upturned tankard will allow. In the process, she ends up quaffing long and deep from her Backwash.

As the same cycle of sensations washes over her, Nemo offers no more explanation. Instead, he lolls his head back and forth as though some mechanism in his neck suddenly malfunctioned.

With each motion of his head, however, Moira's afforded more and more glimpses of this mysterious emblem that inexplicably marked the Captain since he "was born." With each successive glimpse, she's more and more convinced of the greater design the tattoo bears, extending an unknown distance down his back and torso.

She has not, the blushing Moira appreciates, ever seen him shirtless.

She discovers her proposal seconds after speaking it. "Well? Let's see the thing, for Jotor's sake."

Nemo's brusque answer is chopped into sections by the wagging of his head. "Maybe when I'm older."

Once again, Moira's giggling, through the magic of alcohol. To better cover her tomato red face, she's forced into the third swig of her Backwash. Soon as she emerges, all the woozier, her hands become the next subject of her fascination.

"I gotta fucking tattoo, man." As she confesses this in mutterings, she fiddles with the straps of the gunfighter's gloves she habitually wore. "Shit, I got two." Before any better angels can descend and warn her off, both her gloves are unstrapped and the flesh beneath is exposed. "Wanna see?"

With a titanic effort, Nemo holds his pendulous neck steady. Moira peels both her sweaty hands from their black leather confines and displays to him the symbols etched onto their backs almost exactly a decade earlier. Each hand bears a rectangle of lusterless green – an ace of spades, an icon meaningless to anyone past the Midworlds.

"I suppose you never played royals. May not have trickled down to Underglow." An expression of deep incomprehension continues to color Nemo's face. "The thing's a card game rich Inner Sector cunts play. A game played exclusively on white linen tables with white linen gloves."

She rotates her wrists, to better appreciate the contrast between the tattooed skin and the blank skin of her palm. "Fuck me," she grunts a second later, observing both her youthful indiscretions within the brazen light of a Takioro back alley for the first time ever. "I was maybe fifteen and I was certainly stupid as shit. To me, then, this was the best idea I had on how to get my mother's goat."

The next confession scrambles free of her mouth before she's a chance to grok what she's saying. "And to impress a certain tattoo artist."

Nemo remains strangely disaffected through the whole confession, maintaining both eye contact and radio silence.

"Ran away," Moira continues, "shortly thereafter. Keep them covered these days." At no further comment from Nemo, she traces a thumb haltingly along the rectangular border of one, recounting the familiar shape with a skidding fingertip. "Pretty sure you're the only person in Bad Space I've told about them."

This, at long last, causes Nemo to straighten his posture, turn towards her and adopt a surprisingly grave expression. In the face of this sudden, unexpected reaction from her Captain, more liquid courage is immediately required and Moira swigs all that remains of her Bile Backwash.

With one drunken confession made, Moira's sense of decency or discretion falls asleep at the switch and she barrels forward, confessing more of her closely-guarded thoughts. "On the way back from Hazro, the second time, with _The Low-Hanging Fruit_ , Abraham asked me a question that I couldn't answer, about why I first–"

A pale-faced Nemo vomits directly on her lap.

Moira's unbridled shock, her mouth hanging stereotypically open, converts her previous confession into a stilted gasp. The physical act – the convulsion of his torso, the horrific retching sound he makes, the sodden splashing on her hands and upper thighs – is quickly catalogued in Moira's memory as the single most revolting and infuriating action he's ever visited upon her. Were both her hands not casualties to the projectile vomiting, she would have obeyed every ingrained instinct to deliver an Aji Axeblade straight into Nemo's mandible.

At a stroke, her skirt, her story and the merest scraps of her remaining dignity are destroyed in the most disgusting method possible.

This done, Nemo cranes back to a more upright position, wipes the forearm of his duster against his dripping lips and suddenly makes a second retching sound, a nauseated burp, seconds later. "I bet Garrock Brondi a million credits that we'd sack Trija," he comments nonsensically. He clambers, with a great clashing of thermosteel, off the shit-stained garbage can upon which he took his ease.

With that, he saunters, as soberly as he can, from the scene. He staggers into the enveloping darkness of the tavern with his empty tankard dangling at his side and his first mate, soggy and humiliated, abandoned in the alleyway behind The Bloody Afterburn.

Chapter 26

Odisseus cannot put a claw onto what must have inspired this most murderous of Moira's moods. At the rate she devours Yellowtooth Cigarette after Yellowtooth Cigarette, the Ortok's left only to speculate that last night's rowdiness must not have been overly kind to her.

Attired again in her normal costume – monochrome black boots, breeches, sweater and gloves – she counterpoints Odisseus on Nemo's lefthand side. She pollutes Takioro's toxic atmosphere further with her cigarette and she peels the paint off Hamburger Teriyaki Milkshake's daily specials sign with the force of her glower.

"The course of action remains both unprovoked and unwarranted." The Xendo ambassador somehow shows no sign of the station's collective lethargy.

To a tee, each member of this final meeting of the Council of Captains, from the libertine Greatgullet to the puritanical Vobash, are bent to the table under the weight of their hangovers. As one, everyone engages in temple-massaging and hateful squinting toward Takioro's overhead lighting.

The Xendo congregation are the exception that proves the rule. Nothing so meager as fermented peach juice was liable to incapacitate a single one of them. Odisseus does wonder precisely how their queen, sequestered aboard her colonyship, feels about loud noises this morning.

"Yes and no," is Nemo's languorous answer, attempting to both rally his excitement and stave off his own lethal hangover at once. "Unprovoked is good. Unwarranted is untrue."

"And what injustices, pray tell," moans a similarly suffering Vobash, "have the Trijans committed to warrant such an attack? Has one of their spokespeople mispronounced anything lately?"

"They have money," Nemo points out, "and they exist, so."

" _Hear, hear_ ," concurs Charybdis almost immediately.

By rote, Odisseus vehemently opposed this plan of action, this profoundly needless attack against truly invincible Trija. It was practically policy to oppose ninety-percent of Nemo's propositions at this point, though, as they all derived from his saltbrother's same sense of suicidal lunacy.

Unbeknownst to their peers around the table, this particular plan was somehow even worse advised than usual. Instead of arising sheerly from Nemo's own overconfidence, it was proposed at the perverse and supremely untrustworthy behest of Garrock Brondi – known cad, ne'er-do-well and recipient of now two hot canisters from Nemo's firearm.

All that said, Odisseus was surprised to discover how complacent he'd become concerning Nemo's newest bad idea. Perhaps the Captain's grim and forlorn mood following that ill-fated interview was to blame. Perhaps because the prospect of this Trijan caper, this final hurrah for the Freebooter Fleet, rekindled Nemo's high spirits, Odisseus is almost swayed begrudgingly to his saltbrother's side.

It came as an intense relief to discover, then, that the Council of Captains – Socorro Charybdis the notable exception – shared all the Ortok's misgivings and then some.

The five Captains of the Freebooter Fleet enjoy a late, late breakfast at Hamburger Teriyaki Milkshake. Their respective posses ensconce them, to serve as protection against the more enthusiastic of the passerby. Their venue, this open-air grille, is flattered by the very term "restaurant" and is operated by some of the most ornery waitstaff credits can buy.

The eatery's name could easily be mistaken for a highlighted sampling of the menu's specialty items. Instead, it refers to a bona fide dish the Hanquo cook whipped up on occasion, for especially masochistic patrons.

Two-Bit's absence, despite his hard feelings towards the aproned Hanquo, is truly a waste of his guttersnipe's palette. Among all those assembled, only Boogers and Teeth, sucking on separate straws like teenage lovers, share one of the eponymous milkshakes – a chiller cream concoction ordinary brown enough to pass as chocochino.

Vobash rubs weariness from his eyes. "Anyone interested in commencing the voting of this down? Shall we sack Trija, for nothing but old time's sake? I'm clearly against."

"We are Aju Vog Xah Qaj and we are against this motion."

" _For_ ," Charybdis swears, before the Xend's even finished its statement.

Odisseus or anyone present knew little of Charybdis' sordid history with the Supreme Sovereignty. The palpable torch she carried for inflicting damage upon her former masters, however, reminded the Ortok pointedly of another certain psychopath, with his own torch carried against the totalitarian authority of his choice.

As unpredictable as she was, it seemed Captain Charybdis could always be depended on to approve this notion more passionately even than Nemo would.

"I mean, for," Nemo supplies.

Everyone's eyes cross to meet with the glassy eyes of the single uncast vote – Captain Greatgullet.

In simpler times, the Obaxi buccaneer's opinion was a carbon copy of Nemo's own. As a rule of thumb, _The Rule of Thumb_ was always in favor of bolder, brasher strategies, of biting off more than she could chew, of any chance to cross swords and pocket booty. Here again, his allegiance would have been obvious and the decision to attack Trija ratified by a narrow majority.

Indecision, however, is undoubtably present on the Obax's bearded and beaded face.

"Against," the marauder admits, after some considerable hemming and hawing. "Me boys're happy, me belly's full. No hard feelings, boss," he's quick to assuage directly to Nemo, "but quittin' while we're ahead seems the best strategy."

"No hard feelings, Gull," Nemo waves away with a listless hand. Only Odisseus recognizes his demeanor return to that same slack-postured, high-tensile pose he adopted watching the press conference above Qel Qatar last year.

Vobash slaps his hands together like some patronizing choral instructor. "Shall we call the matter settled? May we proceed to something less asinine?" he concludes, supremely satisfied.

A murmur of agreement issues from the mouths of three of the four Captains.

Nemo's expression, inspired by stymied ambition rather than Jotor knows what, hardens enough to match Moira's own.

Two-Bit Switch trumped Taardia Imperial Penitentiary. He nullified all Nemen Uil's lauded defenses. To coin a phrase, he slipped not only himself, but nine hundred some fellow prisoners, straight through the closing fingers of the HIN _Surimiah_. Bribing guards, jimmying locks, cutting alarms, greasing bulkheads – all of these came as naturally to Two-Bit Switch as slithering came to a Saurian or fucking came to a Phnuki.

Nonetheless, try though he might, there was simply no cracking the impenetrable net the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija cast about their homeworld.

Admittedly, he was an expert on infiltration and escape, substantially less of one on fleet tactics. Even an amateur jailbreaker, though, could glance at the Trijan dilemma and discern with relative ease that naval strength simply wasn't an option available to anyone.

Their shipcraft, cultivated over centuries, was peerless. Their technology was specifically designed to monopolize their home field advantage to the extreme. To all appearances, the Radiant Armada could not be defeated on any field of battle, much less their own. All the Imperium's august naval majesty couldn't crack their shell and whatever rapscallion rabble the Freebooter Fleet would muster that day certainly wouldn't either.

The planet wasn't unsackable; Two-Bit firmly believed that much. His criminal creed demanded that with time, trickery and the proper application of brute force, any stronghold could be made thoroughly sackable. The difficulty lay simply in selecting the precise victory condition. Thus far, valor-in-arms clearly wasn't the answer.

With seventy-two hours, hardly four meals between them and six lines of snoted Spicion in their place, Two-Bit couldn't divine the correct answer.

At this point, a correct answer meant simply an answer Nemo would accept.

"Take me through again," he orders with all the casual authority that only commanding the Freebooter Fleet could have installed in his voice. "I'm not seeing the problem here."

"From the top?" Two-Bit assumes.

Putzing about with two pair of Trijan feeding sticks, Nemo negotiates his noodles entirely unsuccessfully between his four implements. After several attempts, he fails utterly to bring even a single sopping strand to his mouth. "From the top."

The other Captain's hands are perfectly sculpted around her own pair of Trijan utensils. Socorro Charybdis pays Nemo's laughable attempts no heed, all her attention focused solely on Two-Bit. " _If-you-wouldn't-mind_."

Seventy-two hours of "research and development" into the Trija caper had devolved the _Lover's_ gundeck into a nest of squalor and iniquity, the handiwork of a hoodlum concerned only with crime and nothing with cleanliness.

A topography of trash, a census-like sampling of all Two-Bit's favorite fast food, has accumulated across every one of the room's even surfaces. A host of equipment encircles the pair of them, each borrowed screen from the sensor devoted to the task of displaying as many bootlegged schematics as Charybdis could offer him.

Most embarrassing to a thoroughly Spicious Two-Bit, however, were the sock scraps. Morsels of ratty cloth, the remnants of his final pair of socks, are distributed liberally across the gundeck floor. Even now, their surrendered upper halves remain attached to Two-Bit's ankles from sheer loyalty.

In the thumb-streaked reflection of his Attaché, Two-Bit Switch resembles his temporary abode as much as Nemo doesn't. He's wild-haired, red-eyed, sweat-stained, more a decade's recluse rather than simply a weekend's. The reflection staring back at him is a shifty, furtive, untrustworthy motherfucker, but that, Two-Bit allows, is likely the Spicion talking.

By contrast, Nemo looks as presentable as the perennially scruffy outlaw ever could. His hangover half a day past, his monthly shower this morning, all his attention is whetted toward accomplishing this newest and least logical scheme.

Captain Socorro Charybdis shows solidarity with Two-Bit and his dishevelment. She's left her ornate jacket behind, untucked the tails of her uniform's undershirt and even foregone the wig, revealing her black pate to be as bald as a Buja's.

Her attending the meeting was mandatory. That much she'd stipulated to Two-Bit when she'd surrendered the sum total of intel she had about Trija's planetary defenses. Rather than offending or scandalizing her, the prospect of hordes of uncouth pirates swarming over her forgotten homeworld seemed instead to fill the ex-privateer with a chipper energy.

She'd even provided lunch.

Two-Bit straightens his spine with a series of rewarding cracks. Rubbing his palms together, he reels the strategic imager's slideshow of prepared holograms back to the start. "From the top, then," he resolves, the catalog of ships, maps and schematics flipping effortlessly past his eyes. He activates the first hologram.

When he was first presented with the challenge of somehow impregnating impregnable Trija, Two-Bit confesses that perhaps he should've asked a few more questions that began with "why" and not quite as many that began with "how." He was too enamored with the insurmountability of the task assigned him. Rather, he was too enamored with the corresponding trust Nemo placed in Two-Bit's masterminding skills and, as such, he never necessarily questioned the origin of the challenge – namely, one Garrock Asshat Brondi.

Two-Bit has palpable difficulty recalling his mental state on Gallow, around Flask and during the bank caper the Captain couldn't rely on him to plan. With Valladia sacked and burnt behind him, his credentials were ten ports thus improved.

With a positive bleep, the strategic imager tosses a particular solar map into view. After these three "days" of research, Two-Bit could recognize that constellation of planets and orbitals as Trijan Space at six hundred paces. "First crunch," he begins, "is gonna be warp drift."

"Uh huh," grunts Nemo, wrestling mightily with his lunch.

"Because coords within Trijan Space're scantier than Brondi's lollies, there's no chance, that I can vizz, of us dropping into anything but a random cluster. Vizzing at the mathematicals I got offa Charybdis," the two exchange a polite nod, "Abraham's pretty certain he can drop everybody within cobbing distances of each other, but that's all he's promising."

Two-Bit leans away from the imager and adjusts the hang of his trousers mechanically, a habit he'd picked up since abandoning his belt two nights previously. "No ambush, no element of surprise, nothing but right into the chompers."

"There any reason," Nemo proposes, Two-Bit assured that he'll need to shoot this proposal down as well, "we couldn't drop out someplace nearby? Powwow a few zottibles away, regroup, fly in together?"

"These're the only coords you can pony up, right?" Two-Bit dangles towards Charybdis.

" _I'm-afraid-so_ ," she sings quietly. " _After-all, what-reason-would-a-loyal-soldier-of-the-Sovereignty-have-for-warping-anywhere-besides-the-main-harbor?_ "

"What, another system, then?" Nemo proposes. "Drop in somewhere nearby, hike over on foot?"

" _Nearest-would-be-Yarba._ "

Two-Bit raps a few more keys on the imager's input pad. The image of the map widens considerably, showing adjacent sector and highlighting one planet in particular. "At standard cruising crackle, it'll take us nine months to fly from Yarba to Trija."

"Uh, granted," Nemo allows.

"So," Two-Bit continues with more fingers rapped against more keys. The hologram, in response, zooms much, much closer in. "Accounting for coords and warp drift, squeaks are good we're gonna appear somewhere around here." On cue, a rendering of Trija's main harbor appears, complete with holographic docking embankments, holographic shipyard gantries and, most saliently of all, a holographic pair of orbital reflectors.

" _The-killbox_ ," Charybdis recounts.

As his mouth chews cartoonishly on his latest bundle of spiced noodles, Nemo's eyes sweep the projected orange harbor that dangles several inches from his face. Upon spotting the reflectors, he inclines his noodle-draped chin towards them. "These are those mirrors."

"These are them glassies," Two-Bit confirms.

Represented now only by fist-sized holograms of acrid orange, the two orbital reflectors that hang pendulously in Trija's airspace were the ever-present thorn in Two-Bit's mastermind side. Sworn up and down by Charybdis, they were the pair of trump cards up Trija's sleeve that would render bootless any attempt to broadside within sight of the system's red dwarf sun.

" _Those-reflectors-are-capable, with-the-correct-angle-to-the-dwarf, of-reducing-an-entire-craft-to-ashes-in-seven-seconds-flat_ ," Charybdis relates, faintest hint of pride in her cadence.

Nemo flattens his mouth into a frown. "I assume they're shielded and everything?"

Off Charybdis' nod, Two-Bit elaborates, hoping to curtail any further stupid questions Nemo should've answered by paying initial attention the first time around. "Tricky thing about Trijans is, they don't share tech, but bloom do they steal it. Ray and bombard, both of 'em, beyond the fucking wazoo."

Nemo's mouth being full doesn't impede his speech any. "You're saying there's no way to bust 'em?"

Two-Bit spins the manacle once around his wrist in gentle twists. "Scanty."

" _Well_ ," Charybdis starts to disagree, piercing Trija's hologram with her pointed stick, " _that's-not-entirely-true. There're-the-hubs_."

"Hubs?" Nemo repeats, noncomprehending.

Two-Bit waves a few dismissive gestures this way and that. "Dohick planetside what controls 'em. I hinked at first that'd be our chink in, but planetfall there's gonna be too fucking gashouse for too few results."

" _You-think?_ " Charybdis seems disappointed, almost crestfallen. " _I've-kept-a-tactic-in-my-back-pocket, case-I-ever-needed-to-touch-down-on-the-surface-ever-again._ "

"That," Two-Bit points back, "we may still hank." He smirks an aside to Nemo. "As you could probably specc, hinky fuckers like these don't take toasty to offworlders touching down."

"Thoughts, then?"

"Only thing I'm flashing, and this's hooked pretty much offa hunch I had about something you jabbed me," he aims towards Charybdis, "is zappers." This provokes a visible reaction from Nemo, who ceases chewing to make actual eye contact with Two-Bit.

" _They-don't-have-any_ ," she provides. " _They've-no-research, no-interest, not-a-word-about-them-back-home._ "

"Could mean whatever jumbo they got's immune," Two-Bit allows. "Could be, though, it's an oversight." He shrugs. "Maybe they'll do bloom all. Maybe they'll blow the shit wide open."

" _Guess-we'll-find-out._ "

"Disablers, though," Nemo, now visibly agitated, presses. "Means you need Vobash."

Charybdis grates her teeth together. " _Right._ "

Two-Bit scowls at both of these reactions, his paranoia resurfacing. "Is Vobash a crunch now?"

Nemo's next smile is all the answer Two-Bit requires. "This I was gonna talk to you about."

"Peachy."

Nemo shuffles his noodles aside for a second and engages full weaseling mode. "How feasible is, say," he pitches, "pulling this off sans Vobash entirely?"

" _Well–_ "

"And sans all his ships."

"Well–"

Nemo's grimace bears grim tidings. "That bad?"

Two-Bit sugar-coats nothing. "That gashouse. Zoomers'll maybe do in a pinch, but–"

" _Plus_ ," Charybdis confesses, " _I'm-not-even-certain-my-weaponry-and-the-weaponry-of-my-ships-will-even-harm-solxite. There's-a-decent-chance-it-won't_."

"You ask me," Two-Bit continues, "zappers is where our best squeak lies and Vobash's boys is got all the good zappers." He stands now, arms akimbo. "Care to jabb me what this rumpus is with Vobash?"

" _He-refuses-to–_ "

Nemo shakes his head thrice and rapidly. "That isn't what I want you worrying about. I want you worrying about Trija," he gestures a pair of sticks towards the holographic airspace dangling before him, "and killing all its dudes. What's the next big hurdle?"

Two-Bit doesn't stop scowling, sensing the ever-present phantom of Nemo's withholding, intentional or otherwise, of imperative information. Charybdis, unwilling to intervene, is suddenly shuffling her noodles with sublime grace and coordination.

"The next big hurdle," Two-Bit proceeds warily, "apart from the honking glassies of death," he beats a fresh percussion on the keypad to summon forth their latest challenge, "is, of course, the Radiant Armada."

A host of one hundred holograms, each one minute and nonthreatening at this resolution, appear suddenly in orbit around Trija. Without examining them, Two-Bit can identify specific ships, their call signs and their capabilities, their traditional positions memorized after extensive hours of study and some specific tutoring from Charybdis.

In his peripheral, he spies massive dreadnoughts, the cornerstones of the Armada's aerial defense. He's certain, corroborated by the testimony of both schematic and Charybdis, each of these capital ships boast enough individual starfighters to rival even _The Eyesore's_ own prodigious reserves. He spots well-armed junks, the capabilities of which he's that much more comfortable with, _The Dishonorable Discharge_ once counted among their number.

"Ah. Yes. Right," Nemo appraises, his face suddenly cast that much more green by the unexpected entrance of the Radiant Armada.

"At any given moment, Her Royal Bloomhole vizzes fit to cast approximately a hundred fifty gantines in the skies over Trija."

" _A-third-of-the-Armada's-full-strength._ "

"Should–" Two-Bit's fingers reach for the keypad but Nemo's follow-up catches him first.

"And we have?"

"At this given moment?" Two-Bit dangles, mostly for dramatic effect. His fingers hit the pad typing. A smattering of purple, a mere fraction of the green forces arrayed against them, is added to the hologram. Each individual pixel modeled after a particular craft within the Freebooter Fleet, _The Unconstant Lover_ serves as the spearhead's absolute point. "Thirty-six."

" _Thirty-six?_ " repeats Charybdis numbly.

"The fuck?" Nemo spits, as though stabbed. "How'd we get so–"

"It's been three days, mate," Two-Bit reminds pointedly. "No more jangle to toss 'em, mercs tend to get fidgety. Now, I'm sure," he placates immediately, "we snuff around some, make the noises needed, sprinkle the word you're massing marauders again, we can easily double that. Long as too many don't care or catch wise where we're headed." Two-Bit pauses at sight of Nemo's conflicted expression. "I've gotta scrogger on wank, ready to raise some jazz, soon as you gimme the blinker."

Charybdis' face is impassive as she complicates things. " _Vobash, of-course, will-notice._ "

"Sure. Vobash."

Nemo chews the dilemma fiercer than his noodles. "He puts two and two together, hears through the grapevine we're gearing back up again, he'll take his toys, disablers and all, and go the fuck home."

" _More-than-disablers, though_ ," Charybdis is quick to add, " _we-need-the-ships._ "

"She's right." Two-Bit nods. "Even assuming we can dreg up another forty to fifty, and that's if we're rangu, but assuming we can, we're still vizzing at two-to-blooming-one tosses here."

"Hold off on Threesies, then," Nemo insists, correctly guessing Two-Bit's station waif without batting an eye, "until this Vobash mess sorts out. Soon as that's straightened, we'll hit the recruiting drive all the harder."

" _Every-day-we-delay_ ," Charybdis warns, " _means-fewer-and-fewer-Freebooters-delay-with-us_."

"I know. I know."

Never before has Two-Bit observed reality's harsh weight, the strain of innumerable odds stacked against him, tax a physical toll on the indefatigable Nehel Morel. Here, with every human and fallible factor laid before him, Nemo's entire bearing seems to shrink, to buckle somewhat beneath the burden he's shouldered.

Two-Bit almost reaches a hand instinctively out, to warn Charybdis off continuing to stack the odds higher against his crestfallen Captain. " _Even-assuming-we-get-Vobash-and-his-ships, they-hardly-improve-the-odds-any_."

Two-Bit gives the Freebooter Fleet and their chances a condoning shrug. "We've bumped worse, sure – we've just usually bumped much better."

Charybdis doesn't waver, only points a finger towards the Armada where it's projected. " _These-are-no-pushover-privateers-either_. _These're-military-ships, captained-by-military-officers, with-technology-you've-never-faced, en-masse_."

"Yeah," Nemo responds by rote. By now, he's clearly in the stage where he only hears more objections, more common sense to fly in the face of his understandably stupid plan. His attention, then, stays firmly planted amid the unctuous mess of his noodles. "You want any of this?" he offers to Two-Bit. "I'm done, I think."

"Oh, fuck me, sure." Two-Bit reaches instantly for the proffered bowl.

When Charybdis arrived, the starving Two-Bit devoured the lunch she'd prepared for him in three wolfish bites. Now, offered a second helping, the Spicion-addled jabberhead is suddenly overcome with a fresh wave of hunger. With his unwashed hands, he scoops up mouthfuls of the spicy Trijan meal and crams it directly into his hungry craw. Charybdis, a trueborn natural with the food's proper utensils, deigns to comment on his act of barbarism.

"All that being jabbed," Two-Bit attempts to assuage after his first swallow, "I do have a scheme up me sleeve."

"Does it rely," Nemo poses, now watching his noodles disappear with regretful and covetous eyes, "principally on disablers?"

"It does not." He chews several seconds, on noodles and how best to phrase his proposal. "That's the rub there, ain't it? Zappers or no, best case we match these blowbags ship-to-ship."

" _Worst-case_ ," Charybdis assumes, " _they-incinerate-us-seconds-after-with-those-accursed-reflectors_."

Nemo's eyeline doesn't move, but his expression crinkles about it. "So far, this sounds less like a scheme and more like depressing shit I already knew."

"We gotta dritch to win, I'm jabbing," Two-Bit bottom-lines with a quick glare to Charybdis, unaccustomed to the fine art of Nemo-handling. "We play fair, they chavel us apart. Instead, we do what we do best."

Nemo's vague gesture is meant to signify his ears, seemingly. "I'm all fucking ears or whatever."

Swallowing his current mouthful, Two-Bit narrows his focus back toward the task at hand. He rattles off a sequence of commands into the imager's handy keypad. The previous hologram, depicting Trija and all its orbital defenses, makes itself suddenly scarce. In its place, Two-Bit installs a new graphic.

A representational tree of genealogies descends down a staggering number of generations. Hardly an expert in the field, even Two-Bit's untrained eye noticed how remarkably straight forward Trija's history of royal succession was. Where he imagined a zig-zagging enterprise of intermarriages and inbreeding, here instead was an unbroken line from monarch to monarch to monarch.

Charybdis' face is cast in a scowl, one she doesn't break for a lengthy chunk of the coming conversation.

"What's the other fucking thing they do so bloody seriously, Trijans?"

"Sing," Nemo deadpans.

"The other other thing," Two-Bit allows patiently. He points to the relevant hologram. "This thing."

"I don't know, beget each other?"

"Spot on," awards Two-Bit. "They been begetting each other for fucking hundreds of fucking years. For whatever razz," Two-Bit attempts to rationalize, "they've gone and convinced themselves, over these hundreds of years, that their, what you jabb it, their 'royal lineage' – you know, king to queen to queen to king – is bloom near sacred or something. Way more," he clarifies, "that that tripe what passes with the Emperor. These blokes ain't fuckin' around." He shoots a glance at Charybdis. "Correct me if I'm wrong here."

Another percussion of fingertips on keys narrows the hologram's focus past generations and generations of Trijan royals. When it stops, it highlights the very furthest tip of the furthest branch, from which no other branches yet germinate.

"This one," he points out, "this Queen Anorra–"

" _Anyorra_ ," Charybdis corrects, still scowling at his hologram.

"Sure. Anyorra the However Many the Fuckth is the most recent in a direct lineage of Trijan queens longer than yours and mine plonkers put together." The metaphor causes Nemo to involuntarily wince and miss the point. Charybdis just keeps scowling.

"We're jabbing maybe sixty, seventy generations here, unbroken through the centuries, leading directly to this little scrogger." He mimics honest confusion. "Did I jabb you that she was only nine years old?"

Nemo doesn't bite. "Um, no."

" _How's-that-relevant?_ "

"Shit's relevant because, far as I know, a nine year old scrogger ain't begetting anybody anytime soon, is she?"

He scrawls the hologram several units wider, to reveal parents, grandparents and great grandparents to the Queen in question. "Progens died too young, I don't know, something happened. Whatever the case, this Anyorra," he indicates with a point, "is the only good-juiced member of their precious royal family's what's gotta pulse left."

Seconds after making the following suggestion, he semi-successfully tosses a pinch of noodles into his agape mouth. "So, we kill her."

Charybdis opens her mouth once but says nothing.

Nemo repeats the words without any inflection. "We kill her."

"Sure. Or, well, we try. Trying is the important part."

Nemo allows a scowl to cross his features. "Somehow, miraculously, I don't follow. How's this sack Trija?"

"Not to belabor the point," Two-Bit caveats with a wearied sigh, "but we ain't–"

" _He's-right_ ," Charybdis suddenly blurts.

Two-Bit stops dead in his tracks. Nemo now points his scowl toward Charybdis. "He's right about what?"

" _He's-correct. This-plan-will-see-Trija-sacked. That-is, assuming-I'm–_ " she stops herself suddenly, almost self-conscious and steps half a step away from the imager. " _Excuse-me. Please, finish_."

Two-Bit's unable to completely hide the smile that Charybdis' endorsement, the endorsement of a bona fide former member of the Trijan war machine, inspires. "I was jabbing," he begins again, slower this time, "we ain't winning the space battle, is we? I mean, it's equally important we don't _lose_ the space battle, but shove comes to push, they've every advant and we've practically none. The trick then," he proceeds, egged on by Nemo's persistent lack of understanding, "becomes changing the win condition. We're only there to pocket their jangle, right, not bloom their gantines or ice their crushers."

"Or kill their queen."

"Right. Specc on this, though." Two-Bit's hands spread wide, as though attempting to paint Nemo a mental picture he hadn't prepared any holograms for. "You take a small team, jabb, four or five berks stupid enough to agree, and you touch 'em down on the surface of the planet–"

"How do you accomplish that?"

Two-Bit points. "She's got her way, don't blank."

Across the strategic imager, Captain Socorro Charybdis is all smiles.

From sweeping gesture to swiftly typing fingers, Two-Bit swaps holograms to an aerial view of an expansive, earthbound city, constructed amid the rocky heart of a mountain surrounded massif. "Capital city's," Two-Bit informs, "called Zaraskevi and the capital city, sure enough, is where one bumps the royal palace." Another rapping of keys illuminates a centralized building, easily a tenth of the city in size, in isolating and identifying purple.

"From there," he conjectures, stepping a few feet away from the imager to better address his incredulous Captain, "whole shebang's a simple slambreak." Two-Bit summarizes his theory thusly. "Sure as fuck I can't scheme you a victory in space, but I'll be thrice bloomed before there's four walls and a roof I can't specc you a way into."

"I'm certainly dense," stipulates Nemo, "but I'm failing to see a connection between pillaging all the Supreme Sovereignty's cash and assassinating their queen."

"Assassinatin' is maybe too strong," supposes Two-Bit. "It ain't, as I jabbed, really about icing her."

Two-Bit doesn't miss the look of disappointment that briefly colors Charybdis' face.

"All we really hank is to instill the fear of Jotor in the bastards; bump her, take her hostage, force the Armada to lay down wheels and empty their wallets, else we put a canister in her maggie and conclude the whole centuries long business quick as can be."

"So, a hostage situation?"

"Sorta, sure. And the sweets'd be all the jangle on Trija and all its colony planets."

His uncharacteristic attempts to drum up an objection fail him. Nemo then flaps a finger from his pocket and points at the palace, spinning slowly below him. "Place looks pretty fucking huge. You gotta–"

A specially-prepared sequence of keys drastically zooms the hologram inward. Almost instantaneously, the entire interior of the royal palace – floor plan and all – is transparently visible. The several areas Two-Bit'd specifically outlined as either vulnerabilities or snags are flagged green and a purple arrow whizzes back and forth across the complex in a repeating loop, highlighting the quickest, safest and most feasible route through.

"Oh," is Nemo's response.

"Turns out, we know somebody what used to work there," Two-Bit reminds with a nod across the imager. Charybdis takes a short, mocking bow.

"Nobody," he goes on to clarify, "is jabbing this's gonna be habby. Bloom, nobody's jabbing it's even gonna be feez but, end of the day, it's our best hazard, bar none."

" _May-I-ask_ ," Charybdis poses, " _what-the-Fleet-and-I'll-be-up-to-during-all-this?"_

"Fleet's gotta be doing as much damage as possible in low orbit, to enforce the threat and provide us cover to make planetfall. That ain't a job I'm envious of, so much so that I'm fucking volunteering for landward duty, but shit's gotta be done, unfortunately." He sighs and returns his hands to his hips. "This would be why," he adds, "them zappers is so damn essential."

"Much as I'd like to promise those," Nemo confesses, "I really haven't grokked any method to manhandle that Triomman bleeder as of yet."

"Take your time, I suppose," Two-Bit advises, politely as possible.

"Can't, really," is the Captain's honest answer. "Tick tock and everything."

Two-Bit Switch finds himself unusually unarmed to combat another of the Captain's melancholies. Instead, he occupies himself with devouring another droopy morsel of noodles.

"And we're certain," Nemo endeavors again after a substantial pause spent staring into the juddering hologram as though into the waving flames of an introspective campfire, "this is possible? We're certain I shouldn't just pay Brondi his million and have done?"

" _All-I-know-is_ ," Charybdis stipulates, " _you-put-that-planet-in-my-sights-and-an-armada-at-my-back-and-I'll-be-happy._ "

"Sound like two entirely different ringers, you ring me." Two-Bit slurps a pendant noodle into his mouth. "Is this possible? Yes, I'd be inclined to jabb so. Me at the helm, it's possible and not much more." He pauses long enough for the point to penetrate Nemo's famously thick skull before continuing to his counterpoint.

"Should you just score Brondi his mil? Yes, I'd be equally inclined to jabb so. Safe jangle says Brondi's right, you're a fucking dunce who oughta just score the bleeder his mil and have done." The Menace swallows this point with an equal amount of silence, but Two-Bit imagines he detects Nemo's shoulder tense at the mere suggestion. "Consequence of that, though, would be admitting Brondi's right."

"Right," Nemo resolves, glancing suddenly up from his boots with ironshod resolve. "Long as we're all on the same page then."

Moira Quicksilver couldn't care fucking less about Trija.

Nemo and Garrock Brondi could've centered their wager around pillaging Medroteria, all ten of the Talos moons or the inside of Gertie Gundeck's vagina. As long as Moira Quicksilver was afforded the opportunity to employ Righty and Lefty toward the business of killing moronic men with guns, who cares where or what they plundered?

Until such time as this opportunity was presented her, Moira would smoke Yellowtooth Cigarettes, say nothing and generally play the hard case better than anyone else around.

Had the slimy smuggler stuck around more than a millisecond after the handshake and the gunshot wound, Garrock Brondi would've made an ideal target for Moira's homicidal therapy. Whatever the motives for his sudden reappearance, a smarmy, dark-haired humanoid with pilot's calluses and a god complex was near enough to the genuine article for Moira's tastes.

She's certain she could've derived even some small amount of vicarious pleasure from throttling the uppity life from Garrock Brondi's uppity little throat.

Instead, she must continue to endure the prattling, obliviousness and suicidally ambitious tendencies of her birdbrained employer and erstwhile ruiner of her one and only skirt. At present, he busied himself with the choking down of one of Hamburger Teriyaki Milkshake's eponymous hamburger teriyaki milkshakes. From repeated exposure, she knew his straw was mere seconds away from making that obnoxious slurping noise that he'd abuse for something nearing the next fifteen minutes.

"Frankly, I'm uncertain what, precisely, you're hoping to accomplish by all this," Captain Vobash bemoans. All the staples of his entourage, Baziron, jarhead and brushvezzer, were in attendance around him, the latter of which he feeds atomically small portions of ground buhoxbeef.

All the other staples of a classic Council of Captains meeting – Greatgullet, the Xendo ambassador, Charybdis – were also in attendance. Each one, save the Trijan, appears vaguely peeved at Nemo's insistence they not only remain aboard the station another three days but also his insistence at convening yet another council, for the expressed purpose of pitching them a second time. Some portion, Moira imagines, of this frustration originates from the fact that he chose to set Hamburger Teriyaki Milkshake, once again, as the meeting's backdrop.

"My vote hasn't changed," denies Vobash categorically.

Nemo ceases slurping a moment, sniffs once, drops his hand tellingly to his lap and sniffs again. "Yes, it has."

She's never credited the Captain as anything resembling a quick draw. Even in her present mood of extreme prejudice, however, she's forced to award Nemo the point.

Within the space of the Triomman's confused squint, Nemo's fully extended his shooting arm and motored a single canister through his antique pistol, the bolt streaking across the café's tables with an unexpected blue light. The squinting Vobash is caught in the meat of the neck and topples backward from his chair.

Before he hits the floor, Moira's granted the briefest vision of the clean hole Nemo's ditrogen burnt through his throat.

Trick shooting immediately becomes necessary. The Baziron and the jarhead, only stunned momentarily, are instantly on their feet with weapons to bear. A pair of pretty shots from Righty and Lefty leave similarly smoking craters in place of the firing chambers of both their SV7s.

This action, supported by Odisseus' sudden bellow even more than Nemo's out-and-out murder of Vobash, throws each Captain and their entourage from their own seats and sparks the second such Talosian standoff the Council's ever exploded into.

The Xendo ambassador's no longer visible behind a thick curtain of its interposing soldiers, but it voices its concern all the same. "Highly irregular. Highly irregular."

"You better spew out what it is you've got in your head, boss," Greatgullet warns, sword in hand, Boogers and Teeth each staring blank-eyed at Moira and Odisseus respectively, "else things're liable to turn real ugly."

Nemo is nonchalant, hauling off and murdering one's peers in cold blood the most normal thing in the universe. "I nominate," he nominates calmly, blue smoke still eddying from the barrel of his pistol, "Gertrude Gundeck to replace Ciff Vobash."

A stilted moment passes. Each Captain eyes each other with suspicion and waits, without purchase, for the second shoe to proverbially drop.

Nemo frowns and shoots a glance back over his left shoulder towards Hamburger Teriyaki Milkshake's pair of forlorn restrooms. His expression, as he repeats with insistence, suggests he's suddenly lost nerve and might lock himself in a toilet stall. "I nominate _Gertrude Gundeck_ to replace Ciff Vobash."

A second or two past the appropriate cue, the stained door to the women's bathroom squeals open. As summoned, Captain Gertie Gundeck sashays into the main well of the restaurant. Over her shoulder, she thumbs apologetically towards the sealed bathroom door. "Couldn't hear nothing in there, gents. Somebody's taking a huge dump."

The Council's consternation arrives somewhat late. Upon realizing that the odds just tipped quite severely in favor of the Galactic Menace, the assembled marauders start in with the muttering between themselves. Few, even the famously vociferous Greatgullet, dare theirs to reach an audible level, as long as Moira has weapons in her hands.

Nemo wastes little time. "I propose we sack the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija. All opposed?" As expected, the Xend flutter their antennae in accord while the Obaxi buccaneer, clearly conflicted, suspicious and confused, slowly raises a tentative, many-ringed hand. "All in favor?" Charybdis and Gertie race each other's hands to show the most support for the Menace's foolhardy venture. Nemo raises his hand last, determined to be tiebreaker.

The math painfully evident even to a dullard like Nemo, the Captain sheathes his firearm with finality. "That's settled, then."

Gertie smiles her crusty, floozy's smile. "Flattered to be aboard, fellas."

The Point of Piracy

A Candid Conversation with the 34th Galactic Menace

By Wezz

"You're all a bunch of fartmouthed cunts I'd rather kill than shake hands with."

This is what Nehel Morel, Galactic Menace, would say when given an open microphone to the galaxy. He would like to call you all cunts and threaten your lives.

A previous Galactic Menace might use the platform of this column to plug their causes, to proclaim their agenda or their innocence, to rail against the forces that've labeled them as terrorists, as murderers of men, as a menace to the entire galactic way of life. Not Nemo – he chooses instead to cuss everyone out, fans and detractors alike.

He took immense pleasure in this description of you, dear reader – he was visibly tickled at the prospect of naming a good portion of the galaxy's literate as cunts.

That's the major takeaway from my interview with our newest Galactic Menace. Much as he claims he could care less, to Nemo, it's exceptionally important what you think about him.

INITIAL MEETINGS

My interview with the 34th Galactic Menace was conducted with an alarming amount of clandestineness. When I'd initially been contacted, I'd briefly imagined flying out to Talos II, talking shop beneath the eaves of their alleged pirate fortress and at the Freebooter Fleet's very heart.

Instead, the Menace's management opted for a discrete orbital hotel, for a proscribed length of time, with a squad of celebrity bodyguards awaiting our return back in the lobby.

It was Two-Bit Switch – no other alias known – who initially made contact, wishing to arrange an interview. Born and raised on Takioro Defederate Station, Two-Bit Switch speaks Jabber, specializes in jailbreaking and is, in every other way, an ordinary and accomplished career criminal. Since his employer's declaration of Menacehood, however, he now styles himself as Nemo's business manager and handled the majority of the logistics surrounding our interview.

In the intervening time since the interview was conducted, Two-Bit has become nearly as recognizable as the Menace himself, thanks to a series of pestilential advertisement campaigns from CryoChew, Bubble, Happy Yum-Yum and Yellowtooth that have been circulated across every corner of the Outer Ring.

There's another first in the history of the office – there's never been a Galactic Menace whose so embraced the limelight, who marketed themselves as a people's Menace more than Nemo and his crew has. During his tenure, Ott couldn't have cared less for the public's perception of him, a popular trend among those who've held the ignoble title of Galactic Menace over the decades.

Nemo operates on an entirely different set of principles. Surrounded by his bodyguards and his buccaneers, today's Galactic Menace waves to his fans, signs autographs, soaks in the public's adoration – as anyone can see on any modern holo that's taken of him. He drinks his fame the same as he drinks his alcohol – with great and regular relish.

His primary bodyguard is the least publicized member of his immediate posse; a hulking Ortoki shadow that follows him about, as though leashed. I hadn't the pleasure to exchange many words with Odisseus – no other alias known – but all the normal reticence and distrust one expects of a lifelong partner and canister-catcher were present in him.

It's his other bodyguard, the ex-bounty hunter, that I found more intriguing. Evidently, the persistent rumors of Nemo converting fledgling bounty hunter Moira Quicksilver – no other alias known – to his cause purely on the strength of his buhoxshit are, straight from the arlaxi's mouth, one-hundred-percent true.

I also wasn't able to pull her aside for either a statement or a quote, but I was fortunate enough to watch her heartlessly murder a pair of pedestrians that approached the Menace a touch too enthusiastically. She does wield the pair of advertised 665 Lawmen and she can draw them both faster than I can describe how fast she draws them.

I can also confirm that she sleeps with a nightlight.

PORTRAIT OF A PSYCHOPATH

Nemo, as he's insisted I refer to him, wouldn't argue that descriptor, by the way.

His holos do depict the Menace's appearance accurately. He is taller than you'd expect, particularly when every holo you can find depicts him in the company of either his fellow Captains – all of them giants – or his Ortoki bodyguard, who looms over anyone. His hair is that shade of black, his eyes are that shade of gray and he does still wear the very same trench coat he was nearly disintegrated in.

He's loose, effusive and uncouth in his speech. He's quick to curse, easy to sidetrack and impossible to herd back onto the topic at hand. He drank like a sailor during our entire interview and pillaged the suite's minibar as savagely as he'd pillaged Ohostoi, Adrog or Valladia Prime.

Having never actually witnessed the act, it's easy to imagine him murdering with the same compunctionless manner that he eats salted nuts.

His exact date of birth I couldn't confirm, nor, I think, he does actually know. At twenty-five years of age, he's the second youngest Galactic Menace in history, Obwala unlikely to be unseated from his position anytime soon. Like the Eraser before him, Nemo's natively Gallwegian and, unlike the Eraser, he trails an impressive list of crimes, offenses and misdemeanors from an active youth. From an early age, it seems Nehel Morel harbored no respect for authority or other's property – theft, carjacking and vandalism are frequent repeats on that list.

He acquired his famed piloting skills as a mercenary jockey, flying for a now-disbanded quadron calling themselves simply the "Raptors." Under the call sign "Osprey," Nemo logged countless cockpit hours on the payroll of about everyone wealthy and corrupt across Bad Space.

Curiously, no members of the Raptors remain alive enough to make a statement.

He doesn't appear on any galactic records for piracy until just three short years ago. He next appears zigzagging a path across Myxo Quadrant, from Vollok to Vhase to No'tiukki, acquiring his crew. He seems to favor a wide variety of flavors, from childhood friends – Odisseus – to industry professionals – Two-Bit Switch – to talented novices – Moira Quicksilver.

Something about this fledgling crew attracted the attention of piratical notable Abraham Bonaventure to Nemo's roster. Rumor, one I couldn't corner the legendary old Grimalti to confirm, persists Bonaventure's actually responsible for naming their ship, the name that's now become lionized across both wanted and teenage bedroom posters galaxywide: _The Unconstant Lover_.

The ship's records, unlike its Captain's, were much easier to track down. The famous IZ36 Briza Light Freighter is, matter-of-fact, a remix, containing equal parts Yeltain jetbooster and experimental steering platform to offset its original elements. According to its original seller – an Ufaki salvagier from the Mannimar Scrapyards – _The Poetic License_ once ferried lonktonks to and from the surface of Yon, deep in the Offchart Territories.

These days, she's credited by experts as the most maneuverable spaceship of her weight class. She's certainly the most famous, the price of the few remaining Brizas skyrocketing galaxywide in the wake of the _Lover's_ fame.

Devoted Nemo fans familiar with his earlier work will remember, two years previously, when the Captain's first real breakthrough came under the employ of Boss Ott, Nemo's indirect precursor to the office of the Galactic Menace. His first fifteen minutes, for the uninitiated, involved his destroying an Imperial Pylon-class warship, the _Exacting Counterattack_ , on Ott's orders, a feat he'd eventually replicate with the Freebooter Fleet and the _Preemptive Strike_.

Except, that first time, Nemo and his crew flew alone against the Pylon and all her starfighters.

His name wouldn't become public knowledge, of course, until Valladia Shipping accepted their fateful contract and subsequently drew the Captain's eye, all those months later.

IS PIRACY POINTLESS?

"Saw the broadcast, made me angry," explains the Menace, sipping on his champagne. To him, it wasn't enough that the Imperium was, by hoyle, creeping its claws into Bad Space. It was their attitude while they did so.

He cites the oft-repeated sound bite "piracy is pointless" as his constant inspiration.

"Piracy broke Takioro. Piracy founded Bad Space," he says. "Piracy is what drove the Imperium outta the Ring with the tails up their bloomholes."

For Nemo, the Imperium is the blackened heart of practically all he does. He also describes them as pirates, as "strapping on assault rifles" and heading "off to shoot the natives and steal their stuff." He cities Nos Mantri, Jhiron and especially Baz, where, under Boss Ott's power, he no doubt witnessed first hand the savagery and slaughter Insurgent Company wrought upon the native population.

"Long as they've the biggest cock in the galaxy," he rants, "long as nobody's the stones to challenge them, the Imperium'll rape and ravage every round planet in the Ring and what, we're supposed to wipe our chins and say 'thanks very much?'"

The life of a Gallwegian miscreant would've taught Nehel Morel at a ripe age the heartless nature of an uncaring government. On the streets of Underglow, the bellies of urchins bloat from starvation while the coffers of the casinos a short distance above overflow with all the Inner Sector's squandered wealth.

Valladia, he describes, as the "tool the Imperium's decided to use today." When it comes to their resources, Nemo doesn't seem to draw a line between Valladia or Imperium, implying their complete collusion as such. "[The Imperium's] tired of watching buhox, carbon petro, lumber, bloom know what else profitably change hands in the Ring, zottibles beyond the reach of their meddling."

To Nemo, the cargo contract, the Imperium's allegedly earnest attempt to expand trade and grow its economy, is nothing but cynical profiteering. "They dangle a juicy contract over the heads of every legitimate cargo corp in Bad Space and watch the fuckers jump. Valladia wins out because of course it does and now, Imperium's got hooks, taxes and flags down on ten of the richest independent ports in all the Outer Ring."

When asked whether forming the Freebooter Fleet was an attempt to bring justice to the Imperium, he scoffed and described justice as "for Brock Rocket and His Patriotic Twats. [The Freebooter Fleet,] for him, was about "delivering fucking punishment."

He even recalls exactly where he was when he first heard the phrase "piracy is pointless." Fresh from a jailbreak, Nemo and his crew caught the initial press conference over pizza above Qel Qatar. "I wanted to take the point of piracy," he recalls, "and stab someone through the eyeball with it."

"Is piracy pointless?" I asked him.

"No, is the short answer," he replied. "Fuck you, is the long answer."

FORMING THE FLEET

"Didn't all come to me instantly, that'd be lying," he admits. "My first idea involved going solo, for lack of anything smarter."

From the very beginning, Nemo knew he couldn't inflict enough damage to Valladia and their Imperial sponsors on his own or even simply with the help of his "capable but shortsighted" crew. "No, it was help I was gonna most need and, in my experience, help in this business don't come without a flat and juicy fee."

Five years as a mercenary fighter jockey, five years flying as part of a quadron, would've hammered the importance of wing mates into young Nemo's head. No one spaceship, no five individual pirates, would ever be able to orchestrate the collapse of Valladia Shipping, the Menace was clearly aware from the onset.

Unfortunately, his time as a mercenary jockey would also have taught him that help doesn't come cheap.

During our conversation, the Galactic Menace pleads guilty to a lucrative bank heist staged on his homeworld of Gallow in the closing months of the previous year – all to fund the initial stages of the Freebooter Fleet.

By posing as an armored driftvault, four robbers were able to make off with approximately six million in untraceable cash during a Worldshine bank transfer. Their ruse was uncovered mid-heist and, in a bid to escape from the pursuing police forces, the disguised driftvault displayed a jamming code, packaged with a certain famous Jolly Roger, that positively confirmed Nemo's involvement.

After fleeing back into his beloved Bad Space, Nemo was forced to break the news to his unawares crewmates that they wouldn't be pocketing this latest score.

"Practically skinned me alive," he recounts, "soon as they learned something was up." Unbeknownst to them, the six million they'd rightfully stolen from under IIC's nose was bound for the pockets of four other freebooters, some of the most respected names in the business, to purchase their initial interest and allegiance to Nemo's cause.

Nemo talks briefly about his peers among the Freebooter Fleet, why he selected each for leadership positions and the challenges of collaborating with some of the biggest personalities in the business.

He respects and is intimidated by Greatgullet, but hopes to leverage the Obax's fearful reputation to his advantage. He justifies his decision to approach Greatgullet first by claiming that "you sway somebody like that to your cause, a real skullcracker, it'll make the other psychopaths consider your offer twice."

There's little love, however, between Nemo and the rest of his comrades. He's critical of the methods of Ciff Vobash, Triomman captain of _The Loose Cannon_ and the greatest pirate you've never heard of. Of Vobash's spotless record, Nemo says "Thing is, that's great, we're all impressed and stuff, but might as well be a blooming actuary, right, at that point?"

As previously stated, this Menace is all about appearance over profit, very concerned with image and appeal. The notion of a successful but unknown pirate, like Vobash, seems almost to offend him. He cannot wrap his brain around the concept of committing crimes without an audience, without the chance of accruing more infamy to his name.

He even went so far as to use this article as a soapbox to out more information about the obsessively private Vobash. According to his testimony, Vobash wears a red coat, keeps a live brushvezzer up his sleeve and was supposedly responsible for seeing Artelse's fourth moon pushed from orbit four years ago.

How Vobash will react to this news remains to be seen.

Like most, he's uncertain what to think of the Xendo members of his fleet. After correcting my pronunciation (ah-zhoo-vawg-shaw-codge), he describes the Xendo queen in less than flattering terms. "Blech, blech and a side order of blech."

Confused by Vobash and grossed out by Aju Vog Xah Qaj, Nemo's profoundly disturbed by Captain Socorro Charybdis, the company turncoat. It's not the Trijan's traitorous tendencies that unnerve him so, however – it's her past as a privateer. He describes the sensation as "Dad pinching cigarettes and spray-painting school buses again with his teenaged sons."

Childish metaphors seem to hover around this Menace. It's perhaps the most apt descriptor of the Freebooter Fleet yet – a circle of highly-qualified adults, all working to achieve the improbable dreams of a hyperactive seven-year-old.

QUUILAR NOXIX IS OVERRATED

His words, not mine. Address your angry letters to Nehel Morel, Galactic Menace, Pirateton, Talos II, Outer Ring.

Aside from his actions with the Freebooter Fleet, Nemo's nearly as famous for the alleged slaying of his bounty-hunting counterpart – Quuilar Noxix, star of the cancelled holoreality program _Quuilar Noxix Wants You Dead or Alive_.

By now, you've all seen the footage – grainy reception, arctic landscape, two figures struggling in the waist-high snow, a third figure emerges, pistol extended, slays the first.

To this day, GalaxCom Interstellar Media refuses to issue a statement about the footage, sparking many to wonder whether the allegations are true or not – whether Nemo is, in fact, the Yheum's killer.

Nemo reacts violently to any insinuation that the footage might be faked. "This's the gun responsible," he informs me, his firearm drawn. "This is the very gun that buried a canister in Quuilar's cranium." He adds after a beat, "Allegedly."

Certainly in the intervening time between Noxix's disappearance and the leak of Nemo's footage, there've been no shortage of claimants, amateur criminals telling fish tales about their fatal clash with the celebrity headhunter. The question is whether Nemo is among these braggarts or whether his claim is actually true, whether Noxix's blood is truly on his hands.

The very idea of this question seems to infuriate him.

According to Nemo, the footage was no more than a happy accident, stolen from one of the rolling holocorders the show runners kept pointed at Noxix all day and all night. Nemo and his crew kept the footage under wraps for so long professedly to avoid the wrath of Huong Xo, long rumored to be the true power signing Noxix's checks.

The decision to leak that footage, months later, was also seemingly Nemo's. At the time, he was attempting to win the favor of Captain Greatgullet, noted hunter of bounty hunters and subject of season one, episode eighteen. Nemo had hoped proof positive that he was the party responsible would not only convince _The Rule of Thumb's_ Captain, but also the galaxy at large, that Nehel Morel was one rough customer.

He asked me to tell the truth, to verify that he shot Quuilar Noxix and the footage wasn't staged. I answered I would, so long as that was, in fact, true.

Over a hundred eye witnesses can attest that Dimick Decarios, first-tier bounty hunter with the Ring Confederacy, was killed on Talos II by Nemo whilst attempting to film a reboot, _Dusty Dimick Wants You Dead or Alive_ , on GalaxCom's dime.

GalaxCom mounting a reboot, however, is only circumstantial evidence.

In the wake of the Imperial occupation of Baz, Boss Ott's forces are scattered, defeated and slain. None of his raiders, pillagers and pirates remain alive to testify as to whether Nehel Morel brought back a bona fide corpse from the tundra.

The lack of eye-witnesses, of course, is also circumstantial evidence.

He showed me the license, where it hangs from his keychain. Much like the footage, this could easily have been faked. GalaxCom's refusal to release a statement that denies any of Nemo's claims is tantamount to an admission of his guilt; tantamount, but not identical.

The truth is, there's no way to know for certain. I, however, who've met the Menace, choose to believe it is true.

I say this because, when I broached the possibility that it might be fake, Nemo was positively wrathful. He pressed his pistol to my temple, threatened to color the carpet with my brains. The mere suggestion that he'd put on a front, that arguably his greatest accomplishment was mere show, sent him more into a tizzy than anything else I could say to him.

Nemo is a man so concerned with his image, he'll murder thousands of people to protect his rep. Nemo thought Valladia was slagging off his profession and he reduced the entire corporation and all its assets to cinders. In Nemo's mind, making up stories about himself would be an admission of weakness and, in Nemo's mind, he's anything but weak.

Ironically, he's too arrogant to exaggerate.

ROOT OF ALL EVIL

What I found the most curious about the Menace was his ignorance.

As far-reaching as his celebrity is, as tragic and high-profile as his crimes are, I think the true enduring legacy of Nehel Morel, _The Unconstant Lover_ and indeed, the Freebooter Fleet as a whole will be his political ramifications that ripple through the next century of galactic civilization.

Ramifications a thousand zottibles over Nemo's head.

At the time of this writing, the Midworlds are in upheaval. The Independent Front of Prashi Citizens has officially declared the planet's secession from the Endless Imperium only hours previously. Imperium barracks and administrative offices on Ujad have already been seized by the planetarian forces. Riots rock Iogo, the disenfranchised colonists torching the homes and businesses of those they suspect to be imperialists. As I type, a ticker runs across the bottom of my screen, regularly updating Aerio's growing death toll.

The taxes imposed unilaterally across the member worlds of the Endless Imperium threaten to tear the galaxy apart. In theory, this equalized taxation increase should prevent any one planet from bearing too much of the burden. The borderline planets of the Midworlds, little more than economically struggling Imperial colonies, however, simply cannot afford the cost of repairing and restoring the Valladian Shipping Line. They've begun to crack under the pressure.

One by one, the Midworlds are succumbing to civil war and secession. Soon, the Imperium will begin restricting warp traffic to particularly troublesome worlds, similar to what we're seeing on Aerio. Once traffic is diminished, trade will suffer and fail, only increasing the taxes all the more. Before anything can be done to prevent this coming calamity, the Endless Imperium will face one full-scale war abroad in the Haliquant Quadrant and ten score scattered wars at home across the Midworlds.

An Imperium so divided and contested cannot stand – not much longer, at any rate.

All this bloodshed, all this political upheaval, owes its very origins to the Freebooter Fleet and the destruction of Valladian Shipping at Nemo's hands. Were they not compelled to bail out their recently acquired partners, these dreaded tax hikes that've inspired such violent outrage in the Midworlds would never need be imposed.

When I attempted to address these topics, the Menace couldn't possibly have been more bored. Statistics, cause-and-effect, even the sheer idea that the consequences of his actions could negatively affect not only the galaxy at large, but even simply other people – all rendered useless against the impressive depths of his ignorance.

His Freebooter Fleet ignited a fuse that, when it reaches the powder keg, could quite possibly spell the destruction of a governmental body thousands of years old. The longterm effects of his rampaging tour of revenge will ultimately kill millions more than his pistol ever could, from war, civil unrest and starvation. In the end, economics will be Nemo's greatest weapon to wound the Imperium he hates so dearly.

"Tedious," he calls this and "exceedingly boring." He chose, when presented with the cold, hard statistical reality of what his Freebooter Fleet had wrought, to complain about how spicy his nuts were.

Is he necessarily even wrong? Of course not – corner any well-meaning, moons-fearing galactic citizen on the street, quote them the figures I quoted Nemo and watch their eyes glaze over. Economics are tedious. The widespread political ramifications certainly aren't the most outwardly fascinating aspect of a horde of vengeful buccaneers, swinging cutlasses and torching all of civilization.

What so intrigues me about Nemo's particular dilemma is the accidental nature of it all. Boss Ott spent the majority of his much, much lengthier career as Galactic Menace, desperately warring over the resources of one measly planet, and he ultimately failed.

Completely without trying, completely motivated by some imagined personal vendetta, our current Galactic Menace has started the tremors that will, in the decades to come, rip the entire Endless Imperium apart.

But, because he personally won't be there to see it, it's too boring to talk about.

THE IKORIL INCIDENT

Word of warning.

What I'm about to publish is entirely unverified, speculative theory. In order to preserve my journalistic integrity, I'm simply going to recount, to the best of my ability, what the Galactic Menace believes to be the truth, what he told me about the Freebooter's attack on Ikoril Federate Station. At this time, I cannot positively confirm or deny these claims.

They simply exist and I'm going to inform you about them.

It should be noted that I've made every attempt available to me to actually ascertain whether or not there are any truths to these claims. I've interviewed as many of the relevant parties as I could unearth. I've devoured the official Imperial press release issued about the Ikoril incident, though my inquires for further information have all been ignored. I've even, in the intervening time, ventured to the ruined station myself, though I'd readily admit that I'm neither a forensic scientist nor examining an untampered-with crime scene.

All these caveats made, Nemo actually surprised me early in the interview by proclaiming his innocence.

Anyone who's changed an HV channel in the past few weeks has doubtlessly heard of the massacre at Ikoril Federate Station. The Imperium's coverage of the disaster has been extensive, more so than their coverage of any other of the Freebooter's attacks. In this case, a small team of investigative reporters were allowed unfettered access to the scene of the crime, allegedly only hours after the Freebooters had vacated the station.

I can personally vouch for the ideals and credentials of several of the reporters thus featured, though all refused my attempts to contact them about the story.

Exhaustive coverage of the slaughter isn't hard to locate. Much of the interstellar press at the time leapt at the chance to further demonize the Freebooters and their coverage ran from the cold recounting of casualties and property damage to the heartstring-tugging emotional angle.

Both versions agree, however, that the entire visiting population of Ikoril Federate Station was put to the torch, all its wealth and wares stolen.

"Ikoril was them and not us," claims Nemo. "Ikoril was [the Imperium] gambling on which station we'd sack next, sacking it first and smearing us across the press with it."

The Galactic Menace confessed to me that, upon arriving at Ikoril Federate Station all those weeks ago, the Freebooter forces boarded to discover the mercantile hub already sacked. Nemo described coming upon a scene almost identical to that shown in the well-publicized footage – corpses, adrift through Ikoril's hallways, its valuables rifled and ransacked, damning pirate graffiti sprayed everywhere.

He claims not a single Freebooter participated one iota in the Ikoril attack. That every canister was fired by an Imperium soldier, that every murder was committed by a party not them, that every credit was pocketed by a government so corrupt, it was willing to exploit the crimes of its enemies to make valuable wealth disappear.

"Faked. Forged. Murdered," is how he accounts for the staggering mountain of evidence – security footage, warp records, eyewitnesses – complied against his ludicrous claim. He proposes an enormous government conspiracy, featuring disguised military craft and personnel, a galaxywide smear campaign to serve as a smokescreen to uncovering any concrete evidence and a degree of moral bankruptcy far deeper and far darker than we expect.

"You'd believe us, right?" he scoffs. "A buncha wanted criminals set out to sack a place, get there, place's already sacked, then claim innocence? Sounds sorta fishy, don't it? Fuck, we practically framed ourselves."

Conspiracy theories don't exactly behoove me into action; the notion that the game's rigged so perfectly that you'd never known you're being deceived tends to create a tiny whirlpool of logic. That said, what small amount of digging I was able to do does raise a few questions.

Nemo's not alone in his theory. A vast majority of the lower-level Freebooters I've spoken to claim never to have even disembarked at Ikoril and can, all by hearsay, corroborate the Menace's basic premise. The office of the Imperium's Ministry of Press has staunchly refused to elaborate beyond their initial information and has classified practically all other documents that even rhyme with Ikoril. Visiting the derelict station and reviewing the footage, I can confirm several of the factors Nemo'd pointed out to me – a lack of Imperium casualties, an absence of original graffiti, the preparedness of the footage within a window too short – all circumstantial, of course.

As with the fate of Quuilar Noxix, it's practically impossible for someone of my limited means and resources to exhume the truth but, I implore those of you reading this more qualified than I, to investigate this further. Within the scope of this article, I can only speculate on Nemo's motives.

Professedly, it was the Ikoril incident that inspired the Menace to reach out to me. It was so important for Nemo to combat the shellacking the Imperium press was giving him over the slaughter he stood accused of committing, he contacted me – an exile member of the Bad Space press corp – to ensure his version of the truth was circulated.

"Hence my sitting here," he declares, in reference to the Ikoril scandal. "To set the record straight."

To our Galactic Menace, the more heinous crime is not, in his view, the murder and massacre of thousands of innocent customers. It's not giving credit where credit's due.

FUTURE OF THE FLEET

I've attempted to point out, across the breadth of this article, just how singular of a species this particular Galactic Menace is, especially when compared to his predecessors.

It's my contention that Nemo's an utter fluke, a recessive gene and that, in all likelihood, we won't see another Menace of his stripe ever again.

Enjoy him while he lasts, I recommend, because I'm afraid won't be much longer.

At the time of my writing, new of Yime Orbital's fate is making galactic headlines. The station's been reduced to a cloud of doxychoraphum, neatly avoiding Nemo's previous fears about the Imperium repeating their supposed tactic with Ikoril.

Against all the odds, it would seem, Nemo's emerged victorious and Valladian Shipping is a smoking ruin. Having filed for bankruptcy sometime shortly after the plundering of Valladia Prime, what few assets it retains have transferred into the possession of the Endless Imperium and, more important, the Freebooters now have nowhere to target their aggression.

What all the galaxy is wondering, at this juncture, is where will the Menace point his legions next?

When last I spoke to Nemo, Yime Orbital remained in one piece, his goal remained unrealized and there was a considerable degree of anxiety in the Galactic Menace that everything would fail within such short sight of victory. We were, however, briefly able to discuss his future, more specifically in the survivability of the Freebooter Fleet.

"Talk to me about blowback," I asked him. For hardly the first time during our hour-long interview, Nemo was confused.

"Blowback? What do you mean?"

I asked him for this thoughts on the coming reprisals, on how the Imperium would ultimately respond to the Freebooter Fleet. Again, he appeared still further confused.

"So, wait. They send starfighters, shock troops, moons-damned capital ships after my ass, shoot down a fair percentage of my friends and followers in the process and that don't count as blowback to you?"

The point I couldn't seem to impress upon the Galactic Menace was the time limit he'd imposed upon himself.

There's a strange fatalism that's accompanied each of the previous Menaces, from Vepane to Ott to Obwala. As effective as he was, the Eraser could never have killed everyone he named – even if he'd died of old age. Wealthy as he was, Boss Ott would never claim a sustained military superiority over the Imperium. Elegant as he was, Obwala would never convince the Imperium to treat diplomatically with a non-citizen, much less an eight-year-old.

Despite his inflated egotism, Nemo actually succeeded at his aim and, as such, is now doomed to bleed momentum.

Without Valladia to pillage, where next with the Freebooter Fleet turn? How will Pirateton maintain its loot-based economy? Who will put plunder in the holds of Nemo's underlings, gin in their tankards, credits in their pocket?

Will they elect some new foe, turn their hatred and their greed towards the Ring Confederation, the Gitter Hegemony, the hated Imperium themselves? Or, more likely, will they splinter and break apart?

Whenever a new pirate swears fealty to a member of the Council of Captains, they promise to remain loyal only as long as the "winds remain favorable." With Yime Orbital destroyed, the sails of the Freebooter Fleet have no wind remaining.

The notion was a wholly new one to Nemo.

Once this notion occurs to the Freebooter Fleet, however, Nemo's curtain of bodyguards, his shield of invulnerability, will promptly dry up and vanish. Thus exposed, he'll be easy pickings for bounty hunters or Imperium, whomever's faster.

I gave him a month from our initial interview. Twenty days and counting.

TEXTBOOK MEGALOMANIAC

With Nehel Morel, everything points back toward ego.

"Behold me," he exhorts, after finally opening his resistant package of minibar nuts. "I am stronger than gravity. I am sexier than napalm. I am the devourer of spicy nuts."

In his mind, he's painted this very particular picture of the sort of pirate captain that he imagines himself as. There's a certain ethos he cultivates, a combination of devil-may-care, gleeful ignorance and wanton brutality, that he works very hard to maintain, in deference to everything and everyone else.

It burns Nemo to the point of mass murder to see the galaxy's perception of him out of sync with his own internalized image.

Valladian Shipping claims piracy is pointless; Nemo burns Valladia to the ground.

The press mercilessly demonizes Nemo for actions he believes himself innocent of; he contacts his own unaffiliated reporter, circulates his own view of the events.

I accuse him of faking the Quuilar Noxix death footage; he puts a gun to my temple.

Whenever an opinion, a person or an organization arises that threatens Nemo's personal image, he will kill everyone and everything in between himself and correcting that mistake.

Psychotic, narcissistic, yes, but most accurately – megalomaniacal.

The true irony behind Nehel Morel is that events have conspired to play directly into his delusions. Much as we may cringe to admit this, he's likely to become one of the most important figures in this era of galactic history.

We can only hope he won't end up reading this, though. We wouldn't want him to get a big head or anything.

– **W**

Chapter 27

Odisseus is thankful that disguises were roundly vetoed.

No doubt his three companions could, with appropriate attire and affectation, be made to resemble Trijans, even passingly. At the same time, there was precisely no way the bulky, three-hundred pound Ortok could pass as anything but a bulky, three-hundred pound Ortok, even to the most passing observation possible.

Added to this dilemma was the fact that an Ortok of any build or weight would come immediately as both a horrific and blasphemous shock on the xenophobic streets of Zaraskevi. The executive decision to simply murder anyone perceptive or unfortunate enough to catch sight of them quickly became a foregone conclusion.

The feasibility of disguise had been discussed at some great length, however, before this conclusion was eventually agreed upon. These discussions came to a growly conclusion following one of Two-Bit's suggestions about a potential disguise for the Ortok that involved a jeweled collar and some species of Trijan wildlife known as a "timberland troxotto."

There were certain allowable depths that Odisseus, in his capacity as Nemo's saltbrother, would sink his dignity down to. Slinking around Trijan sewer systems was within those depths. Trotting about on all fours like someone's trained pet was not.

For someone of Odisseus' physique, finding shadows amble enough to comfortably lurk within also proves that much more difficult. Even were he a perfectly fit specimen of his species, remaining unseen among the nooks and crannies of the Trijan capital would be a tall order. He lags some considerable distance behind his companions, Moira the most of all, and spends much more time plotting his way forward than those both smaller and nimbler than he.

Soon as he discovers a corner capacious enough to allow both him and his entire paunch to squeeze within, Odisseus splurges several seconds to catch his breath. Panting windedly, he rests comfortably in the knowledge that, come the aqueduct, his confederates will eat his spray.

The streets of Zaraskevi appear displaced from a fairy tale. Greatly dwarfed by the postmodern urban sprawls of places like Gallow or Bennevikos, Zaraskevi shares one singular similarity with Pirateton – its small size. Small enough to be comfortably nestled within a massif of encroaching mountain peaks, Odisseus marveled at the sight of the capital city from atmosphere descending. To him, Zaraskevi resembled more a model drifttrain set, albeit a distinctly medieval one, than the capital of the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija.

Preserved for thousands of years, architecture of this type could scarcely be found anywhere else across the entire galaxy, even in the most august halls of the Inner Sectors' nobility. Had the Freebooter Fleet their way, of course, this entire baroque city, in all its undisturbed grandeur, would be picked clean to the bone.

Zaraskevi's only artificial light after sunset comes from its dimmed solxite panels, ornately framed mirrors that nightly lend the city's spires, minarets and obelisks a ghostly glow. Cobblestones form the streets they walk, each one laid individually by the industrious hand of a honest-to-moons stonemason. The parked vehicles Odisseus is astonished to discover are spoked and wheeled, a technology as antithetical to a drift-dependent culture as canvas sails might be aboard a spaceship. Gargoyles and grotesques peer precipitously over practically every rooftop Odisseus passes beneath, their solxite-tinged eyes afire with eerie light of their own.

Gazing up at their grim visages, Odisseus idly wonders if any of them depict the hated timberland troxotto.

Stealth, secrecy and, above all else, speed are their primary objectives here on the planet's surface. For all that, the Ortok cannot help but gawk at whatever sights the city's poor lighting and his poorer eyesight can grant him, wondering what Zaraskevi must look like under the midday sun.

From his hiding place, Odisseus watches Moira Quicksilver, blacker than sin and practically an entire city block further ahead, stop abruptly. She seeks shelter within the looming shadow of some Trijan dignitary or another, petrified in unrealistically glorious pose and unmoving stone. She beckons forward with a succinct hand gesture.

Giving his surroundings a perfunctory sniff to ensure he's truly unobserved, Odisseus dares crossing the open cobbles. He shuffles as fast as his hind paws will carry him. At varying intervals, he's joined by Nemo and Two-Bit, both appearing from cover to either side and striding across the stones with the same destination in mind.

Fifteen seconds reunites a panting Odisseus with all three of his crewmates at the base of the imperious statue. Without incident, they'd somehow managed to traverse the seven block span of Zaraskevi between their point of touchdown and the foundation of the royal palace.

Everyone here was painstakingly aware how their planetfall was only made possible by the thinnest of aliases. Were it not for Charybdis' fearsome reputation among her own estranged people, this entire plan would very well have exploded on the runway.

Sinbad was the name of the most self-sacrificing member of Socorro's underlings. Captain of the appropriately named Trijan junk _The Olive Branch_ and the very man they met on Xathik Major all those months ago, he was now faintly visible from their place of hiding, marching directly into the honor guard arrayed before the palace's steps.

Under the auspices of a surrender, the traitorous Captain Sinbad and his _Olive Branch_ recently appeared in Trijan airspace, hailing anyone who might listen and expressing a willing desire to betray all Charybdis' particulars to any military brass hungry for details. After a harrowing encounter with the Radiant Armada in orbit, the _Branch_ was granted subsequent permission to land and its crew a subsequent order to goosestep straight towards the palace for questioning.

This accomplished, the four stowaways stashed cunningly aboard the _Branch_ were free, then, to steal through the streets of Zaraskevi under the cover of darkness, contact with the surface achieved.

The Freebooter Fleet, meanwhile, was due to arrive in the night sky at any moment.

Sinbad and his squad of scapegoats would provide the much needed distraction while the real landing party, currently crouching in the shade of some illustrious Trijan personage, infiltrated the palace proper.

"Think they'll question him first?" Nemo muses, peeking over Moira's shoulder and deigning to speak in anything quieter than a stage whisper. "Or jail him first?"

"I hink either way," opines Two-Bit, "it'll chomp up a bunch of crushers." Through some sleight of hand Odisseus can't follow, the jabberhead's Tigress is suddenly in his grip and a mischievous smile's painted across his face. "So much the better."

"Here's hoping they don't execute him first," murmurs Odisseus to no one.

"So, what're we thinking?" Nemo proposes, oddly calm and drumming fingers against his opposite knuckles. "We still feeling up to the task?"

"Little late," Odisseus points out, "to be asking questions like that."

Moira cares nothing for joshing or jibing. "Ten seconds and the last straggler'll lose line of sight," she informs, cold as deep space asphyxiation. "Make for that alcove there, second from the left, on the nearest embankment."

The legerdemain that summons her firearms, Righty and Lefty gleaming faintly in the dim light, is an order of magnitude more mysterious than Two-Bit's. Both holsters are empty in the space it takes Odisseus to glance towards Moira's indicated target. "How many we expecting?"

"No more'n four," Two-Bit supplies, matter-of-factly.

This, of all things, earns a withering gaze from the ex-bounty hunter. "Impossible to keep four quiet. Half that, maybe."

Two-Bit nods his head towards the gaggle of departing Trijans. "Hence the distraction, then, eh?"

Somehow, Moira fails to be instantly convinced. "On three."

When three comes, it's nothing but a mad dash across the open avenue, all clandestine pretense gone as the four interlopers bolt into plain sight. Abandoning the meandering alleys and switchbacking boulevards of the city proper, the crew of _The Unconstant Lover_ now seeks refuge beneath the commanding eaves of the Palace Immortal.

Encompassing a square footage fully a fourth of the entire city's space, the Palace Immortal is a redoubtable bastion of Trijan design, engineering and architecture, bristling with gargoyles, twisted turrets and medieval flourish. Solxite panels ring the outer walls of the Palace, reflecting spotlights upward to create silhouettes of its many steeples and spires. Pale blue ivy of some Trijan breed waves and undulates in the wind, like the hands of an immense audience that greets anyone who approaches the six-story curtain wall.

The alcove they scoot toward, hopefully unseen, is presumably a tight fit, even for four humanoids. Odisseus once again feels the inconvenience of his species and his size in matters of infiltration as each of the would-be burglars elbows each other for the most comfortable position possible. Depending on the size of the guard compliment they were fixing to ambush, they could be looking at nearly an hour spent squeezed so commodiously together, a prospective they were all personally delighted about.

After a ten second jaunt around the corner, Moira reports back on the strength of the opposition. "All four." Her expression refuses to betray any emotion or opinion; simply raw fact.

"Yeah?" Two-Bit grunts. "Bollocks. Playing the game safe, then, ain't they."

"What," Nemo presses, in his worst attempt at keeping his voice down, "maybe I don't understand – is four too many?"

Odisseus takes the task of explaining basic division to his twenty-five-year old saltbrother in stride. "Four's one a piece. You miss your shot, suddenly he's screaming for help."

The calculation gives him momentary pause. "Element of surprise, though."

"Is about the only thing in our favor here," Moira confirms. "Assuming we kill with each shot, four discharges will alert someone on the battlements and the alarm'll be sounded."

"Antwacky old alarm, though, don't blank," Two-Bit reminds. "Might as well be a fucking dinner bell."

"An alarm's an alarm and this alarm," Moira holds fast, shooting a second glance around the corner, "will be sounding."

"Leaving the guns holstered," observes Odisseus, "would eliminate the problem, wouldn't it?"

Moira's eyes flick to the frayed remains of the Captain's duster. "Against disintegrators?"

This pleasant conversation is unexpectedly interrupted by a harsh, electronic buzz – an incoming comm transmission. Without a drop of embarrassment, Nemo unloops the device from his belt and raises the mouthpiece to his lips.

"Nemo here."

"Why, we've just arrived, haven't we, lads?" cues the familiar voice of Abraham, for once, not besieged by a background of comm static.

"Guess we better get moving, then," Nemo remarks. "Good shooting up there."

"Aye aye, Cap'n. Good shootin' down there too, eh?"

The switch snapped, the transmission killed, it's Moira who hisses her remonstrance first. "For the moons fucking sake, you dickmuncher, can you set that fucking thing on vibrate?"

"I have never," Nemo announces, complying with Moira's wishes all the same, "munched a dick." The comm returned to his belt, he thumbs a gesture straight upward. "Fleet's here."

"We heard," Odisseus snorts, briefly forgetting their need for silence himself.

Two-Bit cranks his Tigress' slide back. "Now or never."

With Moira in her cherished role as spearhead, the four outlaws file rapidly from hiding. As one, they rush around the corner to, unless their brethren in orbit are significantly quicker on the draw, engage the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija in an overt declaration of war.

A humble culvert is the only point of weakness in the outermost wall of the Palace Immortal. It flutes a shallow channel of fresh water from mountain springs, along a stone aqueduct and beneath the curtain wall. To bolster its weakness, it sports a black-wrought iron gate and, currently, a quartet of Trijan palace guards, with ebony skin, brocaded doublets and bizarre personal weaponry.

Assigned the most prosaic of all the palace duties, these four guards understandably react with slack-jawed astonishment when an equal number of offworlders come charging around the corner, brandishing offworlder weaponry with deadly intent.

Moira makes her quota and then some immediately. Two streaking bolts of bright citrine stake claims to the skulls of two bewildered guards, slamming them simultaneously to the cobblestones.

Whereas Nemo's attempts – the loudest, the most frequent and the least accurate – fly four shots wide, Two-Bit manages to scrape together a kill with his Tigress, popping a kneecap and sending his Trijan tumbling fatally into the culvert.

Ignoring Moira's advise about disintegrators, Odisseus opts to close the distance on the remaining guard rather than risk the echoing retort of his Wreckingball. As a consequence, the Trijan squeezes a shot off from his unslung disintegrator.

Flashbacks to Nemo's attempted assassination aside, a shimmering cone of displaced pink comes within inches of singing the Ortok's fur before he achieves swiping distance and clobbers the clumsy weapon from the Trijan's fingers. Thus unarmed, the Trijan opens his mouth to sing for re-enforcements. An open Ortoki paw around his larynx dissuades him.

Another series of flashbacks, throttling a guilty redskin against a bracing beam in the _Lover's_ hold, causes him to pitch the Trijan and his crumpled throat aside.

Nemo's element of surprise proves a good deal more effective than either of the career pessimists had anticipated. It's a whole ten seconds before shouting or, rather, a musical variation of shouting, resounds from off the battlements. Before they can duck and cover, a fresh volley of disintegrator fire spears downward toward the briefly victorious pirates.

With no time to congratulate themselves or rifle pockets, the strike team scurries aside to gain as much shelter from the sloping outer wall as they possibly can, crashing down into the waist-high water within the culvert.

"Oh, bugger all," bemoans Two-Bit as Odisseus brushes past him. With a paw, he retrieves the only hand tool he'd bothered to bring on this attempted kidnapping – his cutting beam.

"I thought that went rather well, actually," Nemo assesses cheerfully. He stands within full view of the parapet's gunners and, like a true blue buffoon, returns fire half-blindly up towards the fortified sentries with brilliant blasts of his pistol.

"Will you," barks Moira again, snatching his wrist and yanking him out of sight of his attackers, "fucking pay attention? The absolute last thing we need are more red flags to our moons-damned position."

Whatever witticism he offers to that, Odisseus cannot hear as his cutting beam activates. Wielding such an implement without proper safety equipment, especially while standing in a stream of waist high water, is precisely the sort of behavior that claims the lives and limbs of many of Odisseus' profession. Possessor of all his fingers and eyes, Odisseus isn't thrilled about starting that behavior now.

That said, it's a relatively simple task to smote each connecting spar of the grate that bars them entry into aqueduct proper, slicing through the wrought iron with the yellow-hot dagger of the cutting beam.

Accessing the Palace Immortal via its plumbing was predictably Two-Bit's idea. According to his exhaustive research and Charybdis' testimony, the only conceivable chink in the otherwise impenetrable mail of Trija's planetary defense was their traditionalism.

Constructed some thousands of years ago, the Palace Immortal was designed, mortared and maintained centuries before the more modern techniques of hydro-pumping or moisture collection. Instead, its architects relied heavily on an ancient series of aqueducts to ferry fresh water over the mountains, across the city and into the palace.

Through millennia of technological advances, the traditionalist Trijans at once refused to modernize and unlocked a postern door that would allow a clearly inferior enemy, the Freebooter Fleet, to squeeze out a victory on technicality.

Once severed from its masonry, the grate whines piteously before it twists and tumbles backward into the darkness of the culvert. Split seconds later, Odisseus hears a terrific splash below, echoing off the aqueduct's rounded walls.

Odisseus calmly deactivates the cutting beam and glances behind at his companions. Once he's received Nemo's condoning nod, he lurches into motion, hurling his entire shaggy body into the culvert, as though to rescue the grate from drowning.

A fall through pitch darkness, complete with the uncomfortable flipping of his stomach, lasts precisely long enough for Odisseus to wonder if he'd somehow miscalculated.

Then the water, the blessed fresh water, rushes up to embrace him.

Odisseus labored through the majority of his adult life as an uncomfortable, cumbersome and ponderous creature. He padded about space stations, spaceships and terrestrial planets on his stubby, underperforming hind legs. Along the way, he always dragged this markedly useless baggage, this two-foot-long tail, behind him.

Now, when immersed entirely within the flowing water, even of this cramped aqueduct, Odisseus is once more lithe, limber and lissome, as his species was always intended to be.

His companions are presumably going to clamber down the culvert's either side by some other means – frankly, the Ortok doesn't really care. His mind, for the moment, is completely absorbed with an Ortok's only intended purpose – the sheer sensation of swimming.

His tail kicks experimentally once, twice, as though awakening from an eternal sleep and propels him momentously forward. His spine starts to mimic this motion, sluicing his entire form, from tip of snout to tip of tail, through the black water. His paws, their webbing fully extending, further assist this consensus of body, steering and tilting his alignment, pointing his back, his belly, his back upward at any particular moment. His fur, perennially dusty, matted and unkempt, instantaneously sleeks him into an arrow-straight missile, a hydrodynamic needle perfect for piercing through the water.

Even his face acclimates. His nostrils seal impenetrably shut and his forgotten third eyelid slides into place, affording him a much clearer view of the thoroughly uninteresting aqueduct.

He has a task, he now remembers – to locate a particular pipe that will guide them into the interior of the Palace Immortal. Upon further reflection, Odisseus is two decades removed from the planet of his birth and he is going to splash around in the water like a buffoon until somebody yells at him to stop.

He breaches the surface occasionally, to re-experience that initial moment of plunge. When above the water, his matted down Ortoki ears detect the rumble of hushed conversation, assuring that his companions do indeed follow some distance behind along the walkway. He careens and cavorts the length of the aqueduct, shooting great distances ahead of his landlubber fellows with powerful snaps of his tail and returning to their sides with equal ease and speed scarce moments later.

He plumbs the depths of the culvert, attempting to determine exactly how shallow the water actually is. He abrades his belly against the floor's flagstones and catches fleeting sight of the necessary pipe he'd been tasked to locate, some distance ahead. He churns against the current as he returns to the side of the _Lover's_ crew and ribbons along the surface of the channel long enough to catch the word "Odi" spoken by either Nemo or Moira.

In response, he pops his sleekend head, neck and torso from the water to glower at his companions, his tail treading beneath him.

"Are you fuckers talking about me?"

Caught in the headlights by his question and his sudden appearance, all three pirates appear at a loss for words, but it's Odisseus' saltbrother, oblivious to a fault, who confesses. "Nothing, like, bad."

"Tell me, then," he challenges.

There's another uncertain silence between them. "Two-Bit was saying–" tattles Nemo.

"You fucking narmer," hisses Two-Bit, slapping his Captain harshly on the sleeve.

"–was saying that you look better without that sweater, _my_ sweater, on. That you looked fat before–"

"And now you don't," a reddening Two-Bit attempts to clarify.

"I didn't say a fucking thing," Moira also attempts to clarify.

Odisseus glowers at each offender in turn and frumps up his whiskers somewhat. "I found the adjoining pipe. If any of you gossips care." That said, the Ortok swishes his tail once viciously across the surface of the water and douses all three entirely too dry pirates where they stand.

His crewmates screaming in protest or alarm behind him, Odisseus is granted his first real appreciation of the workmanship of the Trijan aqueduct. Feeding water to various fountains and spas within the palace compound, the aqueducts were a marvel of ancient engineering that could conduct a fairly convincing illusion of indoor plumbing with only brick, mortar and elevation. A tunnel large enough to drive a drifttram through, complete with narrow walkways on opposite sides of the main water conduit, an aqueduct could also conduct four interlopers along an ideal highway beneath all Palace Immortal's main defenses.

Illuminated solely by the feeble light of Two-Bit's Attaché, the aqueduct is a spooky tunnel to nowhere, the pale white light catching and highlighting the wet stones like the scales of a glistening reptile. Once again, were their errand not so drastic, their away allies pitching furious battle in the skies, Odisseus would adore the chance to, at his leisure, explore the Trijan underground aqueduct complex more fully.

Odisseus derives a certain degree of cruel pleasure in watching his companions shuffle into the stream of freezing mountain water. Without tails, webbed feet or third eyelids, they bumble awkwardly into the flowing stream, floundering about with their inefficient limbs to keep the current from dragging them away. Odisseus doesn't bother to refrain his chuckle as they fumble with their oxygen masks, borrowed from the _Lover's_ store of vacuum equipment, and flap comically against the current.

"Everyone ready?" Odisseus prompts in his best childish pander.

"You needn't," Nemo denigrates, his voice muffled by the clear plastolieum mask cinched over his face, "sound so fucking self-satisfied."

"He's ain't nagged, though," Two-Bit appreciates, his voice similarly dampened, as he, waterproofed Attaché in one hand, drawn Tigress in the other, keeps himself afloat as best he can. "Won't have another squeak to tragg up. Best do so now."

At his word, the three humanoids withdraw, check the ammunition windows and prime the hammers of their individual firearms. Their own hands useless for the purposes of swimming, they might as well not bother paddling and simply allow the current to catapult them to their ultimate destination.

Their previously appointed rearguard, Odisseus reasons that attempting to haul his Wreckingball through the pipe anywhere but snugly in its holster would impede not only his ability to swim but also his enjoyment of the ride. Each of his companions suitably masked and armed, Odisseus twitches his whiskers once and plunges back beneath the churning surf.

Safely underwater again, the Ortok guides his three terrestrial followers, like a mother lonktonk and its newborn tonklings, down the aqueduct. His third eyelid engaged, for once, he relies more heavily on his sense of sight rather than his sense of smell. After a short swim, Odisseus comes up short on the opposite side of the pipe's jutting entrance and holds position with cunning motions of tail and hind paws.

Like a paratrooper general safely seeing his troops through the open bay door of their dropcraft, Odisseus gives a confirming nod to each crewmember as they swim by and are subsequently sucked into the adjoining pipe. Moira's first, to frontload as much pacification of their eventual landing site as possible. Nemo comes second, to issue his orders and hopefully earn some facial recognition, even from the isolationist Trijans. Two-Bit follows third, his Attaché and its attached droidvox the key not only to translate Nemo's demands but, perhaps more importantly, to navigate the twisting halls of the Palace Immortal. Odisseus brings up the rear, with one final shudder of the tail and one final contortion of the spine, launching himself into the pipe and the new rushing current.

The pressure within is immense. At as sharp a right angle as they can manage, Odisseus and the three confederates before him are catapulted directly upward, born swiftly upon a current of pressurized water toward the destination high above. As hydrodynamic as Odisseus is, he's concerned that his speed will increase too rapidly and he'll over take Two-Bit, whose his clothing and gawky frame provides that much more drag.

Like spaceships midwarp, the crew of _The Unconstant Lover_ imitate their beloved vessel, rocketing upward through the underground layers of the Palace Immortal to, within mere seconds, arrive amid their central courtyard.

A blinding light accosts Odisseus the further upward he swims. He watches Nemo, Moira and Two-Bit as each are sucked through the final feet of the pipe. He watches them disgorged into a much larger body of water, the reflected light painting its classical scale patterns across the surface.

Before long, Odisseus too pops free from the narrow tunnel and surfaces within the main body of the fountain. By the time he comes to stand amid the shallow pool, his three dripping companions have already found their feet and seemingly their firearms. While not personally witness to the instigation of hostilities, Odisseus would place a sizable bet on Nemo shooting first, by now all four weapons wielded by the soaking pirates aflame with ignited ditrogen.

The fountain they surface from shames the word "baroque" with its ostentation, scarcely two feet deep but easily forty feet in diameter. Its centerpiece is a strange and ill-fitting hunk of contorted, twisted black metal, more at home amid a modern art gallery than such a classical tableau as the Palace Immortal's sacred courtyard. Whether a gift, a grant or a bribe from the galaxy at large, Odisseus isn't certain how exactly this eyesore came to be here, clashing so stridently against the Trijan's well-established motif of antiquity.

Floating another forty feet over the fountain's centerpiece is a whirling, amorphous mass of sliding solxite mirrors. Resembling one of Charybdis' three junks in principle, with all its moving, reflective parts, the globe of rotating panels sweeps distant battlements with many of its mirrors. Others, angled oddly, capture each pirate as they burst from the water in bright beams reminiscent, more or less, of spotlights.

Blinking, it requires all of Odisseus' limited eyesight to yank his shotgun free from its casing, shuffle through the paunch-high water and locate the nearest available ally. "Have we any idea," he poses screamingly, over the clamant sounds of gunfire, "what the bloom that thing is?" he indicates, tossing his head violently upward toward the unknown aerial object.

"You know," Nemo supposes, lobbing shot after unsuccessful shot towards the line of approaching Trijans, "I think it might be some kinda like, floating, like, ball of mirrors, you know? Like, reflecting light down–"

"Yeah, I'll ask Two-Bit," resolves Odisseus. He racks his Wreckingball and tromps off in search of the jabberhead.

The harsh overhead light from the mysterious "ball of mirrors" blinds the Ortok enough that he can't really discern much about the surrounding courtyard. The one characteristic he does notice, however, are the Palace Immortal's enclosing defenses.

From every conceivable vantage point, Odisseus can spy Trijans moving swiftly to intercept them. As before, they're garbed, in uniforms both florid and ceremonial. They sing their harmonious orders back and forth amongst themselves. In response to the pirate's pistols and Odisseus' shotgun, the Trijans ready weapons of their own – disintegrators of a stripe to make even the high standards of Socorro Charybdis proud.

The nearest such Trijan to Odisseus reaches disintegrator range in three steps and, being the dutiful palace guard she is, lets loose with a sustained blast. Dropping into a crouch, Odisseus is simultaneously able to avoid the warbling rays of the disintegrator and slug a shell straight into her stomach. She's bowled headlong to the ground and slams her neck conclusively into the fountain's marble lip.

His allies thankfully meet with similar successes. Nemo's wild shots in the literal dark seem to elicit actual screams of pain from actual Trijans, somewhere beyond the range of anyone's vision. Moira's, expectedly, the most murderous. Righty and Lefty don't deign themselves to plug anything but a brain, a throat or a heart. Distracted by reviewing his Attaché, Two-Bit peppers at several separate enemies as they approach, though his preoccupation muddies his aim a considerable amount.

"Your Attaché," Odisseus wonders, once within earshot of Two-Bit, "got anything to say about that hunk of junk?"

His Tigress not shy about discharging bolts while they talk, Two-Bit peers upward towards the hanging device. "Pretty sure it's–"

Without warning, something unforeseen reels Two-Bit fifteen feet backward. Dropping both Attaché and Tigress in surprise, he's dragged by the wrist like an insistent parent and slams his body against the sheer black stone of the fountain's centerpiece with a hollow thud.

The slab of strange stone now glows internally with some orchestrated sequence of inset lights, no doubt meant to be purely decorative. The sight of his comrade, pinned helplessly against the centerpiece by the wrist, inspires a horrific revelation within Odisseus upon spying Two-Bit's bracelet, immovably magnetized to the stone surface.

Should one send an electric current through a substantial amount of micne, they would find that any amount of multe, no matter how trace, would be immediately drawn to its sister metal by an irresistibly potent magnetic force. While wearing his braggart's bracelet of multe, Two-Bit Switch is permanently fastened to the massive slab of micne that somehow forms the fountain's main attraction.

A sitting lonktonk against the disintegrator-wielding palace guards making haste towards him, Two-Bit Switch writhes helplessly against the wet stone, attempting, by hook or crook, to pry his captured wrist from the micne's unrelenting grip. "Oi! Oi!" he hollers, attempting to divide his attention between the advancing Trijans and his present predicament.

Odisseus wracks his Wreckingball again and backpedals as quickly as the water around his ankles will allow. The shotgun barrels out fruitless canister after fruitless canister to hinder any assailant that would dare threaten his pinned crewmate. Nemo and Moira, likewise, scramble to Two-Bit's defense but, from their previous positions across the fountain, have that much more ground to cover before they can truly threaten the closest and most dangerous attackers.

With a Trijan-made disintegrator, however, all that's needed is one scrape.

One lucky crackshot scores one lucky graze. The emitted pink energy of the disintegrator is immediately hard at work on dissolving the jabberhead's clothes a heartbeat after contact with his jacket.

Still squirming, still barking "Oi! Oi!", he thrashes against what Odisseus quickly understands to be an unshirkable fate, for all Two-Bit's wiliness. The disintegrator's ill effects devour cloth, skin and flesh.

Within three full seconds of its first brushing his jacket, Two-Bit Switch, criminal mastermind, is reduced absolutely to a blackened stain against the micne and an empty multe bracelet, clinging defiantly to the fountain's centerpiece.

Chapter 28

vo Veaff strongly disapproves of her new koj. She disapproves of his swagger. She disapproves of the way he strains her former koj's chair with his sheer volume. She disapproves of his gaudy calabash pipe, choking _The Loose Cannon's_ bridge with clouds of pungent tobacco.

She especially disapproves of his confusing and unhelpful manner of speaking.

Admittedly, vo Veaff's overall grasp of Commercial was to be considered tenuous, at best. Something either in the accent or the vernacular of her new koj's dialect, however, she found not only unintelligible but also irritating.

The only thing about this newfound koj worthy of vo Veaff's approval was potentially his build. Much more than the slight koj Vobash had, this new koj deserves the title's literal meaning – Glutted One.

From her post to the koj's immediate right, she watches the remainder of the crew, more simple pirates than adopted pariahs, scramble about their duties with an even higher degree of efficiency than normal. To hear Sarge, her translator and confidant, tell it, this new koj went very highly respected among the cutthroats and corsairs of the galaxy at large. To serve under his direct command appeared to be a honor of some not insignificant amount, a honor entirely wasted on the unimpressed and bereaved Baziron.

From his throne, the koj turns his one working eye over the crewmen below, twisting their dials, yanking their chains and otherwise hard at work over their instruments. "Tell ye the truth," he comments, "I'm always forgettin' how backwards these Hesko boats can be."

In all respects was koj Bonaventure the exact opposite of koj Vobash. Whereas the latter had been a Triomman of slim build and calm demeanor, the former is a bulbous, warty and callused Grimalti, prone to tangential rants and excitable outbursts.

koj Vobash once wore a simple bandana over his brow. koj Bonaventure compliments his own bandana with a tattered, ostentatious and feather-studded hat. koj Vobash once stroked Cluu, the semi-tame brushvezzer, while contemplating in his chair. koj Bonaventure chuffs on his pipe, nurses a tankard of unknowable slime and fans smoke from his face with that accursed hat, all the while screaming his orders down at the embattled crew.

"Full steam ahead, ye sorry slugabeds, or yer guts'll be polish on me new ship!"

With no idea what he actually commanded, vo Veaff expresses pure confusion to Sarge with a rapid sequence of gestures. The obliging humanoid, from her own customary position before the comm bank, barks out the orders to the rest of the crew – increase speed.

Thankfully, the koj appears as baffled by vo Veaff's own method of communication, evidently believing his orders are successfully passed down the chain of command.

He leers as _The Loose Cannon_ surges forward, her pistons pumping all the more strenuously and her engines burning all the more vigorously. Through the Destroyer's bifurcated viewport, the bulk of the battle tilts and starts to slide aside as the bridge adjusts the craft's bearing towards her true intended target.

The sight of even the humblest space skirmish enraptures vo Veaff. Given how breathtakingly beautiful is the Radiant Armada, the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija's answer to the Freebooter Fleet, vo Veaff briefly wonders, despite all her misgivings, if the late koj Vobash was perhaps mistaken in wishing to avoid this spectacle.

Their dreadnoughts are formless clusters of reflective panels, catching and feeding off the rays of their red sun. As each sheet shifts aside, it reveals banks upon banks of alien weaponry. When powered by solar energy, these rain bursts of dreadful destruction upon any unlucky Freebooter in range.

Comprising the main body of the Radiant Armada, their junks rotate their own solar plating at a much more rapid pace. They launch salvo after baffling salvo from tips of their perpetually re-arranging wings. At once, they can pound an enemy's shields and hull from every conceivable angle and they can create a starkly impossible shape to consistently target.

Their starfighters take this tactic all the way to its logical extreme. To the naked eye, each one appears as nothing more than a whizzing blur of contorting mirrors and flashing sunlight. To vo Veaff's astonishment, she watches as a small squadron of the fighters willingly throw themselves into the crossfire of a dreadnought's cannons, seeming to absorb and receive system power where a teltriton ship would be incinerated.

For all they're outnumbered and outgunned, the Freebooter Fleet continues to acquit themselves admirably.

The inestimable Captain Greatgullet, loutish buffoon though he is, holds the center of the engagement. _The Rule of Thumb_ suffers and doles out great losses, her broadside batteries hammering hard against the fragile shielding and frail plating of any Trijan spacecraft they can reach. Across the battlefield, vo Veaff spots those telltale streaks of smoke and sparks that pinpoint the usurper, that Gertie Gundeck, and the specialty missiles of her irreverent flagship, _The Dick Magnet_.

koj Vobash's greatest ally, however, was conspicuously absent.

The disappearance of Aju Vog Xah Qaj and her _Eyesore_ were initially blamed, by koj Bonaventure and the three remaining Captains, on something innocently called "warp drift." This excuse held for many long minutes as the fleet action lingered on, without sight or sound of the Xend and their very necessary divebombers.

Before long, it became clear to vo Veaff and every other Freebooter present that pragmatism and cowardice were truly to blame for the colonyship's failure to show, for its willingness to abandon its brethren to destruction.

At the moment, however, _The Loose Cannon_ had professedly bigger fish to fry. As the Destroyer detours somewhat away from the primary battlefield, that proverbial fish aligns itself directly ahead through the viewport, in all its gorgeous, destructive glory.

The Council of Captains and their strategists referred to it as an orbital reflector. To vo Veaff, the object toward which the _Cannon_ chugs with all speed resembles nothing but a massive mirror. Ovular in shape, many dottibles across and fringed with knobby pieces of Trijan technology, this mirror was capable of catching much of the outspread carnage within its mighty reflection.

With minute adjustments toward the system's distant sun, the reflector manages to snag a sunbeam. Once caught, the sunbeam is bounced toward the battle by more subtle repositionings of the reflector's angle.

Whetted into a brutal blade of sunlight, the beam slices ignorantly through the shields and hull of _The Low-Hanging Fruit_ , the nearest Freebooter vessel, for a scarce two seconds. vo Veaff watches, with horror and amazement, as teltriton walls bubble and roil, the viewport caves and the _Fruit's_ crewmembers are thrown from the terror of open space to the instant incineration of the sweeping beam.

"Port! Starboard!" bellows koj Bonaventure. He cranes his prodigious belly forward so fast, the Captain's seat nearly has a screaming fit of its own. "Quit her grab-assin' down there onna gundeck and give 'em a volley!"

Once this order reaches the appropriate ears, _The Loose Cannon's_ customized pair of DF498 ConcInd Cascade Heavy Rapidfire turrets unleash white rain, her disablers activated at full capacity. With help from the Tegoonish helmsman, the swatch the disablers cut across the reflector ranges from the mirror's lower base straight up against its center.

Much to the koj's chagrin, this appears to have little practical effect, though it's a marked success in one particular respect.

The orbital reflector reasons the oncoming _Cannon_ and all her disablers are enough of a threat to adjust the mirror's angle and aim their next ray of annihilation straight at them.

"Evasive action, ye shitnosed louts, evasive action!"

At the last possible second, the koj's order clicks through and _The Loose Cannon_ careers away starboard to avoid the swinging about of the reflector's high density beam. She doesn't escape entirely unscathed, however. At the sound of the competing alarms and alerts from the bridge's consoles, vo Veaff rushes forward to the command railing, inquiring after Sarge, with her thrumming throatsac, about the damage sustained.

The ex-commando pushes away from her suddenly sparking panel and stares back at the Baziron, but addresses her report to the koj. "Comms're fried, Captain. They must've nicked our sensor array!"

All the excitement's enough to propel the koj onto his own stubby feet. "Now ain't the time, missy!" he decries, pointing next towards the Tegoon. "Helmsman, ye keep this bird evasive, else these scabrous dogs'll make tinders of the lot of us!"

On these orders, _The Loose Cannon_ continues to tumble sideways to starboard. She plunges forward at such an obtuse angle, vo Veaff wonders if the mad Grimalti, now pacing back and forth along the command railing, will roll the whole craft over. His strategy does appear to be passingly successful, the reflector not quite fast enough to match its quarry's speed. Before long, through the pilot's superior maneuvering, they finally achieve their favorable position – directly behind the reflector.

Like a pageant made sham by peeking past that all-important curtain, the reflector's backside is substantially less impressive that its smooth, streamlined public face. It bristles with machinery, the reflector's working guts hopefully more vulnerable than its sheer and impregnable mirror. Toward this aim does the koj point a bloated finger, guffawing out more commands. "There's yer blooming target, Port and Starboard! Open fire, ye witless jackanapes!"

No brilliant barrage of disabler fire accompanies the koj's stirring order. "Comm's down, Captain!" Sarge screams in reminder. "Gundeck ain't responding."

"Mate!" koj Bonaventure snaps immediately. With two long strides, vo Veaff's at his starboard side, straightening at attention. "Hustle yer own bloomhole down to the gundeck, then, and tell 'em it's now or never, ye understand?" The Baziron nods as grimly as her deflated throatsac allows. As fast as her lanky legs can carry her, she's off toward the bridge door. "I said hustle, ye bloodsucking bleeder, or we're all flotsam!"

It's at this moment that vo Veaff seizes her opportunity.

Rather than heading towards the _Cannon's_ gundeck as ordered, vo Veaff veers wildly off course, scuttling through the ship's super-structure. Several moments later, she's arrived at her private quarters on the dwelling deck and is retrieving one item from its cherished rack above her bunk. From there, she follows her orders as commanded, hustling with all speed back toward the gundeck and relaying the koj's instructions to the baffled gunnery crews.

Mere moments later, she's clambering, step-by-step, onto _The Loose Cannon's_ bridge once again.

Through the viewport, she catches a glimpse of the koj's ordered barrage, wreaking havoc against the backside of the reflector. Amid the applause and acclimation of the bridge crew, the koj is crucially distracted for a moment, cheering along with his new crewmen.

With two strides, she's within reach of him. She replaces her third stride with a wild banzai leap, hosting high the item she'd retrieved from her quarters – her ceremonial zylkco stick – with the murderous intent to drive its hollowed-out tip directly through the imposter's fat neck.

She doesn't anticipate how fast her replacement koj can spin the chair's servomotor, bringing himself and his ponderous bulk one hundred and eighty degrees around a heartbeat after vo Veaff takes to the air.

She's enough time to register both the blunderbuss he grips and the shit-eating grin he wears before her zylkco stick connects wetly with his opposite shoulder. vo Veaff savors the sound of the Grimalti's delicious and agonized scream.

She plants one bare foot against his chest for shaky balance and another on the lip of his chair for superior balance. With the eyes of the entire bridge crew riveted on her, vo Veaff comprehends she has spare seconds to drain koj Bonaventure's entire of body of blood before something – blunderbuss or crewmember – can intervene.

To her credit, she manages to swallow two deep throatsacs full before the Grimalti summons the wherewithal to click the trigger and blow her away.

They're thrown completely clear of each other, vo Veaff missing a substantial section of her side and crumbled into a quivering heap on the teltriton a distance away. Having underestimated the kicking power of that decrepit blunderbuss of his, vo Veaff watches helplessly as the suddenly pallid koj Bonaventure staggers to his feet.

He lurches ungainly towards the doorway, smoking weapon at his side. As he passes vo Veaff, he mouths a single word that, even across the language barrier, the Baziron understands perfectly.

"Mutineer."

Gertie Gundeck is, contrary to popular belief, not made of cluster-torpedos. Each one of the expensive little darlings costs her a small fortune and an immense hassle to acquire.

Each one she fires crashes helplessly against the unpierceable bombard shield that enshrouds her assigned orbital reflector.

Shouting out fresh orders to her largely greenhorn crew, she attempts to reposition the _Magnet_ in search of the reflector's theoretically vulnerable backside for anything resembling a shield gap. Much as she enjoyed commanding the Freebooter Fleet from a Council seat, the fun-and-games above Trija had more than run its course.

While she definitely wasn't made of cluster-torpedos, Gertie Gundeck was even less made of willing Freebooter vessels, if such a thing was possible.

"Moons damn you to hang by your balls from hooks," she snarls, "if that thought ever enters your vacant skull again. Much less," she adds for good measure, "comes creeping outta those gross ass lips of yours within my earshot, you hear?"

The clarity of Greatgullet's reply is diminished so greatly by the sheer number of competing comm frequencies clashing for airwave space as to be practically inaudible. "I ain't accustomed to language that threatening pointed in my direction, swabbie."

"Fly your cowardly ass over here, then, and accustom yourself with a torpedo or two, you don't like hearing my threatening language so damn much," Gertie berates, attempting to juggle attention between haranguing Greatgullet and averting total disaster.

"You come out here in the open, maybe, draw a bead from a few of these dreadnoughts and maybe I'll permit you to threaten me in that fashion," the Obax retorts, the _Rule's_ systems failure evident even through their comm transmission. "There ain't a chance in Jotor we're surviving another two minutes, we don't make tracks and now. Catches in the throat to say so, it does, but maybe that Xendo bitch were right in the first place."

"The mighty Greatgullet? Pussing out?"

"The mighty Greatgullet keepin' his heart beatin'," is his irrefutable argument. "There ain't nothing to board here, nowhere to put my sword but my own stomach. You won't warp out with me, your choice, but thought I'd do you the courtesy of keeping you abreast."

"You won't warp out without coordinates," she taunts, with sudden, childish desperation.

There's a certain resignation, detectable even through the static and feedback, replete in Greatgullet's voice. "Techs've been running those coordinates since we hit the system. Like I said, only buzzing you now outta courtesy." There's a passing beat which, with Gertie too fuming to furnish a reply, Greatgullet fills. "You see the boss again, pass on my apologies."

"Clear us of this shit," she hisses at her scurrying crewmen. "Put the Thumb in my crosshairs."

In response, Ugly Ubol, the pilot to replace Igg at the helm, cranks _The Dick Magnet_ cruelly to port and her boosters realign. She's propelled all the faster around the near side of the orbital deflector. Within seconds, a panorama of their incipient and crushing defeat over Trija opens up across the _Magnet's_ narrow viewport.

The glass palaces of the Trijan dreadnoughts – many cracked, blackened and smote – plow forward all the same. Their batteries continue to find consistent purchase against the ray shields of whichever Freebooter makes themselves most handy in the melee. Against the more numerous, less defensible junks do the pirates gain the most traction. Their missiles, turrets and kamikaze crashes shatter solxite panels with suicidal abandon. The starfighters, however, those dastardly Trijan snubs, prove the true nuisance to anyone unequipped with a homing torpedo cluster-launcher, capable and practically encouraged to swoop between crossfires to supercharge their own weapons and shields.

Devoid of that traitorous Xend's own starfighter backup, the day was rapidly being won on the basis of whose craft were the more maneuverable.

With another kick of her engines, _The Dick Magnet_ quickly comes within sight of _The Rule of Thumb_. In a wild flight of fancy, Gertie imagines rushing to the Greatgullet's rescue, only to remember herself and her purpose here.

Outflanked by a pair of limping but functional dreadnoughts and consistently raked by their complimentary banks of batteries, _The Rule of Thumb_ holds remarkably to its own. As evinced by the smoldering sores all along its hull, however, the Onslaught-Class cruiser would be fortunate to escape even should the ship activate its warp protocols the moment Gertie laid eyes upon it.

Unfortunately for Gertie and her perhaps overdeveloped sense of retribution, that's precisely what the _Rule_ does. Her main engines unexpectedly flash that telltale flash and the ship temporarily defies all laws of gravitational pull to be yanked somewhere far across the galaxy, as though a cartoon hound dragged by its inescapable cartoon leash.

One moment, the _Rule_ shores up the Freebooter's final hopes of victory. The next, the tide turns drastically in the other direction.

From there, it's a relatively simple task for the besmirched but still shining Radiant Armada to rally themselves for a devastating counteroffensive against the remaining pirates.

Gertie watches _The Humble Pie_ lose frontal integrity and stall completely out, twisting lifeless in the astral wind. Gertie watches two additional Freebooters make an explosive grave from the derelict _Pie_ , freewheeling too fast to halt their imminent crash. Gertie watches _The Blown Fuse_ follow Greatgullet's less-than-sterling example and simply turn the other cheek to warp unapologetically away when confronted by a starfighter squadron, a performance that threatens to become a trendsetter.

Gertie's reverie is shattered when that second orbital reflector, the one so damnably resistant to all her attempts to smash it, tilts its dreadful gaze directly toward the aft end of _The Dick Magnet_.

Babs, the shield operator and the token askew female Gertie kept around to confuse her all-male crew, breaks the news. "Captain!" comes the blueskin's shaky scream, "the hull's heating up! Shield's holding at 41%, but–"

"Look out the window, love," coos a suddenly fatalistic Gertie.

Angelic light paints the dashboards, consoles and controls all about the _Magnet's_ helm in soft springtime yellow. Not to be fooled, Gertie hisses a course correction to Ubol and the _Magnet_ subsequently rollicks away from that blistering ray. At her Captain's command, _The Dick Magnet_ spins into a skidding about-face.

With no idea more solid than to simply fly towards the thing, launching torpedo after torpedo until the magazine's run dry, Captain Gertie Gundeck resolves to either outdo that slimy Grimalti sexist, responsible for deactivating that first reflector, or die trying.

Thankfully, the orbital deflector's far too cumbersome to counter a ship of the _Magnet's_ size and maneuverability. With all Ubol's talent dedicated toward shirking that concentrated spear of sunlight, it's a surprisingly simple task to avoid the ever-shifting sheet of solxite.

The other task – how, precisely, does one damage the damn thing – remains elusive.

Thumbing open her magazine window, Gertie counts a grand total of nine remaining torpedos, an unpromising number to neutralize a target as grand and guarded as this orbital deflector is. When she opens her comm channel, she prays to all the moons that the cavalry she intends to call is either unoccupied or undestroyed.

"Charybdis, honey," she charms at full strength into her audioceiver, "I don't suppose you're anywhere nearby slash willing to help a sister out?"

The radio silence that greets her open hail nearly confirms her fears. Piercing through the static, however, comes about the weakest comm transmission Gertie's ever received. " _Copy-that, Magnet_ ," the privateer-turned-pirate's voice sibilates wildly through the comm, " _moving-to-intercept_."

Gertie's smile is true truculence. " _Much appreciated._ " The smile quickly quits and hangs open when she catches actual visual confirmation of _The Dishonorable Discharge's_ approach.

Her solxite is cracked, smeared and spiderwebbed in half a hundred places. Her boosters sputter spasmodically. She paints the planet's orbit with excessive streaks of smoke trailing off the burnt and severed stubs of whole wings.

Demonstrably amid her death throes, _The Dishonorable Discharge_ limps onward all the same, hiccuping into view at the corner of the viewport. Her alternatech engine runs at such dangerous levels of radiation that the _Magnet's_ warning bells actually start triggering once the junk drops within the ship's proximity sensors.

" _We'll-be-granted-one-chance, here_." Charybdis' voice betrays neither concern nor uncertainty. " _Can-I-assume-you've-already-expended-too-many-torpedoes-attempting-to-cave-their-bombard-shield?_ "

"You'd be right there, yeah," Gertie mutters. " _Discharge_ , are you trim for this run? I can call in somebody–"

" _We-are-perfect-for-this-run_ ," she disagrees, her particular brand of calm spelling only one potential course of action for the doomed warship. " _Do-you-agree?_ "

With Charybdis crossed out, Greatgullet fled, Aju Vog Xah Qaj absent and Abraham incommunicado across the battlefield, Captain Gundeck and her _Magnet_ would be all that remains to champion these fragmented Freebooter remnants into either victory or retreat. Gertie chews her lower lip.

However unqualified Gertie Gundeck might be to marshal a flotilla of disorganized and panicked pirates, half of whom wouldn't respect her authority for one reason or another, that wouldn't repair _The Dishonorable Discharge_. Nor, Gertie keenly observes, would it stop its Captain from doing what she was hell-bent on doing.

"I'll cover you," Gertie mutters into the comm. One hand readies a fresh batch of torpedos and she holds the other high. Ugly Ubol, in response, puts on the brakes. Once the _Discharge_ has passed, the _Magnet_ falls into extremely ragged formation behind Charybdis' flagging flagship. They're both careful to maintain enough aerial maneuverability to evade the sluggish swings of the orbital reflector's blazing beam.

On her unswerving trajectory towards the orbital deflector's center mass, _The Dishonorable Discharge_ doesn't bother wasting weapons against either ray or bombard shield. For her own part, Gertie holds no such honorable compunctions.

She gambles three cluster-torpedos, hoping to preempt as much bombard damage as possible, to ensure that Charybdis' efforts aren't entirely in vain. The chance absolutely exists that this could all end with a destroyed _Discharge_ , an unarmed _Magnet_ and a fully-functional orbital reflector. Beyond lobbing a trio of introductory torpedos, though, there were few other measures Gertie could take to hedge her bets against such a nightmare scenario.

Each cluster-torpedo New Husband fires continues its streak of disappointments. The reflector's bombard shield wobbles and distorts with each impact, but stubbornly refuses to be punched through so easily.

The more lasting effect of Gertie's having wasted three cluster torpedos, however, is that they manage to draw the reflector's undivided attention. With a swipe of startling speed, the massive mirror cuts a line of destruction across the path of both vessels. The _Magnet_ is plucked into safety by Ubol's lightning reflexes but the far more ponderous _Discharge_ is not nearly so fortunate.

When the entire starboard half of her junk is replaced with a charred husk, Charybdis' craft only increases the speed and freneticism of her divebomb. She plunges in drunken circles towards her own reflection in the mirror's face.

Gertie's trigger fingers are suddenly sweaty as the impact between unstoppable force and the immovable object draws closer and closer. Through the comm channel that connects the two spaceships, she overhears the distant and patched refrain of many voices raised in synchronized song. Much as she can't make out specific lyrics, Gertie understands only too well what's being sung aboard _The Dishonorable Discharge_ during her final moments.

The reflector's bombard shield absorbs the collision poorly, flickering and, ultimately, under the pressure of the suicidal spaceship, winking cleanly out of existence. Gertie doesn't need any cues from Babs at the shield station to cue her, her fingers having fired the torpedos seconds earlier.

What remains of _The Dishonorable Discharge_ , like a glass ornament, shatters pitifully against the unmoving vastness of the reflector's main mirror. In turn, the crash inspires only a minor crack that dances across reflector's hyaline surface.

The six cluster-torpedos that come racing forward in reply promise to pack considerably more punch.

One after another, they crack, splinter and shatter the defenseless reflector. Seconds before impact, each torpedo spawns their half a dozen smaller projectiles, swarming over every corner of the device and punching clean holes straight through the paper thin solxite.

_The Dick Magnet_ , advancing heedless of the danger, whizzes straight through one of these holes. She raises her own bombard shield to maximum to fend off the twisting hunks of razor-sharp solxite that part before her nose.

Both reflectors neutralized, Gertie commands the _Magnet_ to swoop back and return unto the main bosom of the battle where she can asses her options.

On one hand, she could stay the course, attempt to rally what Freebooters remain behind her banner and inevitably sacrifice her crew, her ship and her own life to this fruitless endeavor. On the opposite hand, she could cop to Greatgullet's assertion and flee, preserving her own skin but sentencing these fledgling Freebooters to an assured death, greenhorn grist for the Radiant Armada's invincible mill.

None of these options accounted for the Galactic Menace and his landing party, stranded in the event of an utter defeat, on the planet's surface.

Captain Gertie Gundeck chews her bottom lip and debates her options.

vo Veaff survives.

Whether fortune or misfortune shines on her at present, she's no idea. All she knows is that she's been given another opportunity to avenge the murder of her dearly departed koj and she has every intention of seizing this opportunity as well.

Every step she staggers down _The Loose Cannon's_ main passageway spreads agony across her entire body.

The usurper's blunderbuss scored only a glancing blow and still destroyed a gruesome portion of the Baziron's left side. The blood, black and thickening, stains her left hand, left leg and every inch of the floor she walks. As a native born Baziron, vo Veaff's precisely aware of how much blood her body stores. In her expert opinion, she's exactly enough life remaining to locate and skewer that Grimalti usurper, no matter where he hides.

As fast as her injury allows, vo Veaff stalks across the catwalk that suspends over the Destroyer Medium's inner workings. The allegedly abnormal Heskite machinery churns and grinds contentedly away below her feet.

She's completely ignorant of how the _Cannon_ currently fares in the larger battle or, indeed, which direction the larger battle's overall tide is currently turned. Somewhere, in her conscious mind, she trusts Sarge and the remainder of the bridge crew to acquit themselves well, perhaps even follow Aju Vog Xah Qaj's estimable example. The adrenaline that keeps her standing could care less whether, at any coming moment, _The Loose Cannon_ is obliterated in a blaze of glory and fire.

All that concerns the dying Baziron is the bloodletting of koj Bonaventure before he could engineer some manner of escape.

Gripping a handy railing for further support, she examines the gristly scene arrayed before her. At a four point crossroads between the two catwalks, the bodies of two separate comrades, both Heskite and both members of the engineering crew, met koj Bonaventure's blunderbuss point blank. They offered more than token resistance, however, to judge from the neticgrappler and the fusioner gripped in their lifeless hands.

vo Veaff's momentarily glad they both died valiant deaths and is more glad to spot the stumpy, four-toed footprints, stomping through the gore and away from the site of the slaughter.

It doesn't take long for vo Veaff to understand his course of action. His trail leads away, toward the starboard ejector deck. Whatever hope or quarter he hoped to discover on the hostile planet below would wait long for his coming. By the conflagrant gods of her abandoned homeworld, he would not survive to make such an escape.

Consciously or not, the hollow wood of vo Veaff's zylkco stick smacks repeatedly against each strut of the railing she passes en route to the ejector deck. At this stage, stealth was a luxury the bleeding-out Baziron could ill afford.

With the limping, bloodied prints as her guide, it was clear to vo Veaff that koj Bonaventure wasn't fairing especially well either. With any luck, the combined wounds vo Veaff and hopefully her comrades slain upon the catwalk inflicted on his person might be enough to delay his retreat – at least long enough to grant her pursuit the thinnest of chances.

Her shaking fingers are spared the impossible task of punching in the correct keycode to enter the ejector deck. The door she discovers at the top of the stairs has been left open. The Grimalti's smeared blood across those keys is enough to goad vo Veaff further on, not to mention his silhouette in the next room.

The row of ejector units, a dozen strong, will stand as silent witnesses to koj Bonaventure's slaying. To his dying action, koj Vobash believed wholeheartedly in discretion as the better part of valor and, subsequently, the ejectors installed aboard _The Loose Cannon_ were absolutely top-notch, should the need ever arise. Even the most sophisticated ejector, however, wasn't warp capable. This left koj Bonaventure three piddly options following his escape – marooned, adrift in orbit or caught in the battle's crossfire.

Pale and panting, koj Bonaventure is far too busy punching coordinates into his ejector's ignition keypad to notice vo Veaff's entrance or the viciously sharpened zylkco stick clutched in her grip.

She doesn't bother with another step and instead vo Veaff hurls her weapon overhand, straight toward the Grimalti's blubbery back. Ill luck continues to curse her when the speartip slams sparkingly into the ignition keypad instead.

Only the merest god, the god of outlanders, must have blessed her throw, as the stick's blade does manages to sever two of the koj's fat fingers at the knuckle.

She curses calmly within her throatsac as the Grimalti howls an unnatural cry of agony. The unarmed vo Veaff leans piteously against the doorway and accepts her fate, the one inherent in the Grimalti's agonized movements. He staggers around, deep indigo blood oozing down his hand, and appraises her with his one wide eye.

She stares back, throatsac flaring and abject murder in her eyes as the Grimalti struggles to even level the blunderbuss straight at her. He braces himself with his bloodied hand against the open ejector door and growls out a single sentence.

"Every step I take," are the last words vo Veaff ever hears, "I'm surrounded by bloody mutineers."

The trigger is squeezed and vo Veaff feels another percentage of her midsection torn free from her body by the weapon's fearsome kickback. She slumps to the teltriton floor, life leaking out of her.

She watches koj Bonaventure, the once and former captain of _The Loose Cannon_ , collapse into his ejector. He wouldn't survive planetfall, vo Veaff is assured, content in the knowledge that, given enough time, the unjust murder of her true and original koj would be avenged.

Chapter 29

Moira Quicksilver can squeeze four shots from Righty and Lefty combined in the time it takes one Trijan palace guard to sing the song that fires his disintegrator. She spends two shots on each of the two Trijans who actually broke her mental perimeter. When struck in the torsos, they both stumble over the fountain's lip, one falling backward onto the parade ground, the other falling forward, to drown face first in the pool.

Under normal circumstances, she wouldn't allow any enemy to drop within disintegrator distance of her. In this specific instance, however, Moira suppose that watching her friend, fellow crewmate and the mastermind behind this entire scheme be atomized may have distracted her somewhat.

As shocking, as dumbfounding, as despair-inducing as the current moment may seem, what is required to see the next moment through is not sentimentality – it requires quick thinking, quicker reflexes and buckets and buckets of murder.

This assessment, however, is not shared by both of her remaining companions.

Nemo, for example, has been screaming incoherently, ceaselessly, since Two-Bit Switch was reduced to his component molecules. The Captain lunges across the fountain, spraying white water about his ankles and blue ditrogen across the courtyard, in his efforts to plug the Trijan responsible.

The Trijan responsible is evidently so proud of his previous handiwork, smeared against the fountain's centerpiece, that he figures he'll go after a matching set. With a playful, jaunty tune, he charges his disintegrator and advances towards the inconsolable Nemo.

An also screaming Odisseus moves to prevent their eventual meeting, contributing to the general mayhem with a roar at full volume, all teeth exposed. He snaps his rudder-like tail back and forth to propel his steps faster across the fountain and, possibly unintentionally, rouse a great cloud of spray in his wake.

Before she does anything else, Moira plows another advancing Trijan to the lawn with a plug in the shoulder that twirls him into a ballerina's series of pirouettes. This done, she hustles, as best as her jackboots through knee high water can, to throw her own ditrogen-powered dice into the ring.

For, advancing in all directions around her clueless companions, are practically a full platoon of more Trijan palace guards, each one packing disintegrators capable of the feats that eradicated Two-Bit Switch moments earlier. Mounting the fountain's slippery marble, Moira takes a familiar defensive position – rigid on high ground, Righty and Lefty extended, sniping as accurately as she can towards the onrushing enemies.

Nemo's adversary, meanwhile, is substantially closer. By means of the good fortune that haunts him at propitious moments, the Menace manages to claim an enviable shot directly on his kneecap. With a stilted scream of agony, Two-Bit's murderer is sent flopping and flailing to the ground.

Contorted with rage a split second ago, Nemo's face lights up like a child in a toy shop to see the Trijan, sprawled on the grass and clutching his ruined knee. His pace immediately slackens – from the tripping, headlong charge of the completely berserk to the executioner's self-assured swagger – and Moira immediately understands the depth of the problem.

"You bastardly motherfucking bastard." He takes an immense amount of pleasure from placing his boot onto and subsequently kicking the Trijan's offending disintegrator away. "You insane sack of shit. You meaningless redneck jizzstain, I'mana–"

Lashing forward, he snatches the Trijan's collar. Despite the grievous injury to his knee, the palace guard instantly sets about to thrashing when Nemo presses the sweltering hot metal of his gun barrel against the Trijan's temple. Visibly delighting in the action, the overbearing Nemo presses the guard's face into the earth with the heel of his boot.

"Were I anybody else," he makes the point, "you'd have ditrogen coming out your pores, I'd shoot you so much and we'd be done here, but I ain't anybody else." The grin that follows is all ill intent, the dictionary definition of sadism. "I'm me and today's a bad day to be you."

This is the very first time Moira debates inserting a canister into the guard's fearful brain. On one level, she'd no doubt enjoy the simple catharsis behind such an action. On another, more practical level, dawdling here would absolutely spell each of their individual deaths.

On the third, deciding level, however, were she to pull that trigger and rob Nemo of this meager window for vengeance, she had, somewhat frighteningly, no idea how he'd react and even less intention to discover how.

For now, she resolved to focus Righty and Lefty's attentions on the approaching army of armed Trijans, Trijans who currently required a swift death to the skull much more than Nemo's pet project seemingly did.

Ever the troubleshooter, Moira is woefully out of practice at providing covering fire. She makes due, trading her clean killing shots for glances, disarmings and superficial wounds. This is a job, Moira appreciates, for machine guns, not revolvers.

Unsurprisingly, then, some enemies manage to slip into disintegrator range and shimmering pink waves follow shortly. One oscillates inches past an oblivious Nemo, crouching over the whimpering victim.

Where Moira fails to be Nemo's rescuer, of course Odisseus provides.

With one mighty paw swipe, the Ortok scoops his saltbrother up by the collar, snarls something straight into his ear intelligible enough for Moira to detect "not the time" and shuffles back towards Moira.

The dragging resistance he encounters, two steps away from the decumbent body of the Trijan, Odisseus bodily does expect. Nemo's own fist is locked firmly around the guard's collar, as firmly as Odisseus locked his own paw around Nemo's collar.

A surreal chain of arm-linked, gun-toting monkeys, they seesaw back and forth a few moments. Predictably, it's Odisseus' fragile patience that snaps first and he bellows, inches from Nemo's face, "There are better times for this!"

"When?" comes the reply, tinged with desperation.

"Movement, here, is key," Moira chastises. At that moment, she gains visual on a fresh batch of Trijan regimentals – more numerous, better armed and more orderly than the humble palace guard – emerging at full march from a gatehouse on the edge of the courtyard.

Odisseus now bares his teeth over his shoulder, towards Moira. "We're aware!"

"But still not moving," Moira grouses quietly.

It's Nemo who, paradoxically, solves the problem. By means of some twisting, weaselly maneuver no doubt employed by Gallweigan street urchins to escape those whose pockets they've picked, he frees himself from Odisseus' implacable claws. "You move or I shoot," Nemo proposes, planting the snub of his pistol uncomfortably, Moira imagines, on the Trijan's testicles.

Progress across the courtyard suddenly moves much swifter.

The three surviving members of the landing party and their hostage clear the fountain, heading towards nowhere in particular, except away from the battalion of Trijan re-enforcements. Spotlights pursue them just as doggedly as guards do, Moira's distressed to discover. The tangle of solxite panels hovering above the fountain refuses to let them from its sights.

Had they any chance of accomplishing what they'd originally infiltrated both planet and palace to accompany, it would land solidly in the realm of stealth, not shooting.

To this end, Moira ushers Odisseus, Nemo and their hobbling captive past, before she spins completely about. Pistols upraised, she proceeds to pepper yellow hell onto the accursed solxite spotlight-maker.

Her aim is less than stellar, blinking against the blinding glare. It's several squandered shots before she hears the first sound of glass splintering. She persists, though, until her wrists ache from the pistol's repeated recoil. With each successful hit, she sees better and better, the device stuttering and its glare lessening.

Before she's finished, she's expended practically a full clip of ammunition on either Lawman and she's allowed the nearest of the charging palace guards to comfortably reach disintegrator territory. Her final shot makes the whirling mass of broken mirrors lose whatever aerial integrity was keeping it afloat. It plummets to the fountain below, impales several of its panels on the centerpiece and otherwise shatters into thousands of jagged pieces.

As a towering pillar of steam rises from the cooling shards of solxite, Moira is sentenced to approximately one billion years of bad luck.

She's purchased a valuable few seconds of head start as her pursuers attempt to navigate the smoking, scalding minefield of broken solxite plopped down before them. To discourage the faster runners amongst the palace guard, Moira empties both magazines and bolts off to reunite with her companions.

She discovers them a meager ten feet ahead, squatting amid a stand of the garden's topiary and gazing about them like turned-around tourists.

Diving down beside them, Moira makes good both on her head start and their idiocy by swiftly emptying and reloading the chambers of both pistols. "What the fuck're we–"

"Which one's the queen in?" Nemo asks dumbly.

Moira opens her mouth to remonstrate him, only to gaze about at the encircling domes, minarets and spires on every adjacent building within the immediate palace complex. She makes an educated guess, spies another building, amends her guess, spies a third building and is suddenly reminded how little she knew about Trijan culture, architecture or internal logic.

He would know, though – this quailing cripple at their feet.

"The palace," she demands, pressing the hobnails of her right baby-stomper onto the captive's fractured knee. This generates both a wheeze of pain and a confused stream of musical gibberish, doubtlessly High Trijan, that're both equally useless to Moira. "Balls," she exhales, easing off the guard's wound.

"The Attaché," breathes Odisseus in realization.

As one, each of the three heads spin back towards the smoldering fountain, where Two-Bit certainly dropped his Attaché in the moments before his death. Like its owner, that Attaché had been the cornerstone to their success today – it contained a complete holographic map of the entire Palace Immortal's grounds.

It was also currently buried beneath a prodigious amount of sharp, superheated solxite.

Gripping his prisoner by the scruff of his uniform like he's a disobedient hound, Nemo poses the necessary question. "Well, anyone?"

A wavering beam of disintegrator distortion comes entirely too close to all three of them and they all instinctively separate. Odisseus, Nemo and their unwilling captive duck deeper into cover. Meanwhile, Moira, like a moron, goes galloping back across the lawn in the direction she lately came from, muttering "Balls, balls, balls," harshly under her breath.

The copious steam the fountain still oozes upward provides a smokescreen both useful and dangerous to Moira. It irritates her eyes, it stings her skin and reduces obstacles and enemies to only the vaguest of outlines and silhouettes. Several of the thinner, more ambulatory shapes she guns down for Trijans. One blockish shape, seemingly centered and immobile, she assumes to be the centerpiece and her destination.

Stepping between solxite as gingerly as she can, she thanks Jotor and all its million moons for her jackboots now, her feet immune to the carpet of caltrops that would rip and rend the souls of a lesser shoe.

Skating down one massive solxite sheet like a driftboarder and sheathing Righty, Moira dunks one hand to the shoulder within the lukewarm water to retrieve the dropped Attaché. Discovering the device inches from his dropped Tigress, Moira retrieves her prize and rises once again to discover company – a Trijan and his trusty disintegrator, sneaking through the wreckage.

With one wide swing of her boot, she ensures her escape by kicking both water and shattered solxite, in a spinning spray, directly into his face.

As she decamps back across fountain and lawn, Moira spends a moment attempting to thumb the Attaché on. Soon as she manages this, a few measly feet from Nemo and Odisseus' unchanged hiding spot behind the hedgerow, a fresh obstacle pops into view above the screen.

"PASSCODE REQUIRED," demurs the device and dangles five empty rectangles, each ready to receive one digit from Two-Bit's five digit passcode. Moira strangles a curse and slides into cover like a champion fistball player.

"Passcode required," she relays, brandishing the obstinate Attaché in their direction. "Anybody happen to peek over his shoulder sometime?"

From his seat literally on the chest of his proned captive, Nemo gestures insistently towards the device. "Gimme." One hand he devotes to the noble cause of firing blindly over the hedge at the enemy and the other to tapping viciously on the touchscreen. "T-W-O-B-I–" He stops tapping abruptly. "Oh, fuck, that's five letters."

"Pretty sure," growls Odisseus between Wreckingball blasts, "I had some evocative things to say about this time not being _the time_."

As though to prove his point, their leafy cover is demolished straight through the middle, courtesy of the disintegrator wielded by the nearest Trijan crackshot. Odisseus thunders off an answering shot from his Wreckingball, bowling the assailant over with a shout, before clambering to his feet. "Whaddya think about the biggest one? Wanna do the biggest one?"

The Ortok indicates, with the smoking snout of his weapon, the building that had been the strongest contender in Moira's playbook for "most likely to contain a virgin queen."

A swooping mosque, surrounded by twelve twisted marble minarets, each of the building's six separate side wings are easily large enough to park the entire Freebooter Fleet within. Were Moira, at gunpoint, forced to make a rash decision about which direction to head, that building's ornately-carved double doors would she be kicking down.

Mother Moira paints a spray of covering fire in their wake while Father Odisseus shepherds both their children to safety. Nemo, their eldest, debates as he moves how best to simultaneously wield a firearm, an Attaché and the Trijan's sagging form, before arriving at the obvious solution. With another threat to the genitals, he compels Two-Bit's murderer to carry his late victim's Attaché.

This decided, the happy little family falls back, making for the massive portico outlaid before what everyone's reasonably certain is the Palace Immortal.

They've, none of them, time or patience to stop and appreciate the exquisite splendor of the cultivated courtyard they flee through. It's a sight fewer than ten non-Trijans would ever lay eyes on in all of galactic civilization's hundred thousand year history and it's also a site currently being ditrogened and disintegrated beyond all recognition.

The indistinct sense of pretty trees, pretty shrubs and pretty paths is all Moira would later describe, when asked to share her experiences within the sacred Palace Immortal. Frankly, she won't consider the location much more remarkable than the hanging gardens or conservatories of her native Anglia, much to anthropologist's distress and alarm galaxywide.

She will recall laboring up the massive marble steps of the Palace Immortal while, behind her, disintegrator rays eradicated steps she'd stood on mere moments before.

Soon as they reach the top of the final flight, Moira spins to avalanche a fresh supply of canisters down on their climbing pursuers. She savors the sight of the gunshot Trijans tumbling and spilling down the austere steps of their precious palace.

Once a somewhat more comfortable berth between them is bought, Moira jogs backward to her crewmates. While one torments his new pet Trijan, the other unsuccessfully attempts to bash down the Palace Immortal's immovable doors.

"No luck?" she wheezes to Odisseus, popping free the chambers on both Righty and Lefty to discover she's all but burnt through even her second pair of moonclips.

Slamming all his considerable weight against these doors that dwarf even the Ortok gains nothing but more grunting and panting. "You tell me," he bemoans breathlessly. "I mean, it's possible there's an automated lockdown but, looking around, I'm inclined to think just a big iron bar's responsible here."

Odisseus absorbs another shoulder check that would throw Moira four full feet, but this stubborn door still refuses to budge an inch for all his gentle Ortoki reasoning. Alarms, in the form of bells and bull horns, resound within the compound's walls. The song of battle across the courtyard is taken up by more and more voices with every passing second. Moira pops both her cylinders back into her pistols, shuffles back several steps and takes aim.

"Fuck this."

With her last pair of canisters, Moira shatters a doubtlessly priceless stained glass window. From a casual glance through the massive hole she made, it fortunately appears to open into the palace's main atrium. Ushering Odisseus, Nemo and their tagalog with a sharp motion of the head, Moira sneers "Stupid medieval assholes" towards the unbreachable double doors.

An understandably annoyed Odisseus hoists the Trijan's practically limp form and hurls him, with complete disregard for his safety, through the window's jagged opening. "What is your," he challenges to Nemo, huffing with exertion, "end game with this cocksucker?"

"Soon as I get a minute," Nemo retorts, that lunatic edge obvious in his voice.

"When do you really think that's gonna happen?" Odisseus retorts back, anger and anxiety both bubbling over. "In the throne room? You're just gonna haul off and torture a guy?"

"He. Disintegrated. Two-Bit."

These three words no one can counter. The shortened little company of Odisseus, Nemo and Moira, then, vault themselves over the toothy lip of the destroyed window without further discussion of the matter.

After so much trial, tribulation and ultimately tragedy, they set foot onto the hallowed floors of the revered Palace Immortal, dwelling place of the undiminished Trijan Royal Family, they assume.

Solxite fixtures on every other pillar bathe the atrium in very dim light. Even in the semi-darkness, however, the entryway appears both grand and unoccupied.

In sheer size, the chamber would dwarf an entire cathedral. The dozens of doorways that jut off to other parts of the Palace are made from wood polished so black they appear as empty arches until actually approached.

More important to Moira, seeking to stretch the distance between themselves and the small army of pursuers, are staircases. She finds four of them without looking – grandiose jobs, branching upward in elegant spirals and leading in four entirely different directions.

While she pops Lefty open for the reload, Moira swings Righty about in a casual point. "Up seems good, right? I were the ten-year-old queen of a timeless galactic power, I'd want my throne room high as my immortal palace would possibly allow, wouldn't I?"

"Joy," remarks Odisseus upon spying the stairs. He takes a moment to indulge his shaggy hide in a full body convulsion, to shake loose as much of the fountain's excess water as he can and spatter it indiscriminately upon the palace's flawlessly mosaic floor. "Would milord prefer his baggage to be carried?"

"You know, milord would," Nemo agrees, brightening a beat and savagely kicking the moaning Trijan an inch towards the Ortok.

Halfway across the atrium already, Moira spins to upbraid the three stragglers. "They're not not coming, you know." Spinning back forward, she slams today's fourth moonclip into Righty and mutters, "If anything, they're coming faster."

Duly instructed, the three-and-a-half companions rush, as much as they can, across the strangely and suspiciously silent atrium. Her paranoia finally justified, Moira's bounty hunter instincts flick her eyes between shuttered doorways, awaiting the inevitable ambush.

Outside, she can hear the muted and continued sounds of pursuit. Moira holds out some small hope that the unspeakable blasphemy of offworlders even entering the Palace Immortal might give their pursuers pause. Their pace was just as likely to quicken, rather than slacken, however, upon the crew's committing this most heinous of transgressions.

Moons forfend anything should happen to their prepubescent queen, after all.

"No one's had an epiphany on this passcode, right," wonders Nemo aloud, jabbing idly at the appliance, "and just hasn't mentioned it?"

"He strikes me," Moira theorizes, entirely unprepared for past tense, "as smart enough to choose some random sequence of numbers, right, rather then some significant word or phrase."

"Sure," Nemo noncommittally grunts. "Oh, wait." A flurry of blunt finger-tapping follows his new idea and an electronic note of denial follows that. "Nope," he comments, crestfallen again. "Wasn't N-E-M-O-1."

"Company's here," Odisseus informs. With a snapping bite, he chomps down on the collar of their weeping Trijan captive, to free his paws for the use of his shotgun.

Moira confirms Odisseus' warning without turning her head. The sound of reverent chanting, in a three-part round no less, emanates from somewhere behind her. Moira speeds up, her accomplices on either side doing likewise, until they're partway up the first flight of their selected staircase.

Seven steps higher, the flight switches back on itself, climbs another thirteen steps and then opens onto an expansive balcony story, which gazes down onto the lobby's main floor. Moira has brief but vivid fantasies of sniping the entire Trijan battalion from such a secure position. Before they can reach these lofty heights, however, the disintegrators open fire and Moira's forced to retaliate from her current, unsecured position.

Righty and Lefty compliment and contradict the Trijan's chorus with their own song, streaking down the stairs to impress its lethal melody onto the hearts and minds of the people below. Odisseus' Wreckingball works overtime and he makes some motion with the ineffectually flailing palace guard dangling from his teeth.

Between the coughing fits of his pistol, Nemo stares at him confusedly. "What?"

Moira scoots several stairs higher, at the sight of precisely how many Trijans are pouring through the fractured window and, soon, the palace's front door. "How's about," she recommends, "we fall back some?"

"I cannot understand you," Nemo over-enunciates to Odisseus, gesturing rather than shooting with his pistol. "Take the–" he suggests, drawing blue circles in expelled ditrogen around the chest of the man drooping from the Ortok's teeth.

A small sound behind her raises Moira's hackles all at once; the three-note hymn that activates a Trijan disintegrator.

Instinct is all that saves her from Two-Bit's fate. She lurches, in an extremely undignified manner, as far left as she can. In her mad scramble aside, Moira catches sight of and is narrowly missed by four Trijans and their disintegrators. Arranged in a shooting square on the landing atop the staircase's first flight, this new quartet of enemies absolutely were not arranged there thirty some seconds earlier.

With an eerie synchronicity, they each ready their weapons for another volley.

"There's, there's more," is as clear and concise a warning as Moira can furnish to Nemo and Odisseus. Her attention, at present, is instead focused on breaking apart the vital bones and organs of her newfound attackers with pistol-whips and Tebi-Gali.

As her allies scuttle up the stairs to her rescue, Moira tears into her unprepared ambushers. She put Lefty's butt to one kneecap, an elbow to a temple, a kneecap to a groin and Righty's snub beneath a chin. Squeezing the trigger concludes the fourth and final guard. The entire squad, in two steps and several scrambled seconds, are down, though not all dead.

The Trijan host below, however, is increasingly hot on their heels.

Nemo throws himself onto the landing beside Moira with a woof of sheer exhaustion. Tired of carrying the extra baggage, Odisseus spews his own Trijan dead weight onto the marble floor with obvious disgust.

Little more than a useless corpse the entire chase, the palace guard, momentarily liberated, seizes what frail opportunity he can grasp. He scurries down the staircase, scarcely above hands-and-knees, toward the advancing front of his allies. Sprawled on his back and propped up on his elbows, a breathless Nemo voices some wordless protest and fires again.

Dumb luck guides the searing blue bolt to connect fortuitously with the guard's one undamaged kneecap.

Once scrambling desperately down the stairs, the agonized Trijan's flailing hands are now helpless to regain his balance or stop his downward spiral to the floor. With one final shriek, he collapses into a twisted heap at the bottom of the staircase and lays motionless.

Nemo makes some piddling motion after his bygone vengeance but says nothing.

Both her companions are thoroughly winded and she's little more than a light jog from same. The password encoded Attaché refuses to surrender a floor plan. Enemies abound, those on her right climbing stairs to disintegrate them and, unless her ears deceive her, those on her left soon to be descending stairs to disintegrate them.

Moira's will breaks.

She scans hectically about, searching for any possible means of egress, anything to prevent the three of them from becoming surrounded here on this stairwell.

Fortunately for all three of their hides, the answer lies an arm's reach behind her.

"Worked once," Moira murmurs. For the second time that day, she fires a barrage of ammunition at a harmless stained glass window.

This one once depicted some forgotten monarch of this or that dynasty. It now depicts a gaping hole and, through that, the trunk of a massive, yellow-barked tree, such as those scattered decoratively across the breadth of the palace's courtyard.

Judging the distance as jumpable, if difficult, Moira crunches a boot onto the spread of broken and colorful glass strewn about the window's marble sill. With one pistol, she murders the eagerest Trijan on the righthand staircase. With the other, she signals Nemo and Odisseus. "Time to call it quits."

Nemo's aghast. "The Fleet–"

"Bloom the Fleet. Raise 'em on the comm, you care so bad." She hammers the newly-arrived forces, popping from doorways and alcoves along the balcony level, with fresh vigor from Righty. "Wanna join Two-Bit?"

To observe his face, panic so cleanly visible thereon, Moira's honestly not certain how he'd answer that question. Odisseus, however, doesn't give him a ghost of a chance.

Hoisting his saltbrother off his decumbent ass with another vicious bite around the collar, Odisseus blasts farewell into one wave of Trijans. With a surprising velocity and momentum, he then pitches Nemo headfirst out the window.

Based on the scream, snapping foliage and relieved, depraved laughter that follows, Moira judged the distance correctly. With a knowing snort, Odisseus curls his own mustelid body and launches toward the waiting boughs of the yellow-barked tree. Moira is the last of the boarding party to remain within the palace and is reduced, both chambers empty again, to booting the fastest few guards as they come bolting to the windowsill.

Only escape or broken bones are her two outcomes. Moira bounds from the second story of the Palace Immortal to crash awkwardly among the branches of a fortuitously planted orchid tree. Rustling about among the yellow leaves, she gives her regards to Nemo and Odisseus, each suspended with equal awkwardness from nearby branches. As fast as her unpracticed limbs will carry her, Moira brachiates across the tree and attempts to judge the distance to the curtain wall.

Two more leaps of faith, two jackboots to two unsuspecting skulls and some disintegrated vegetation later, the three remaining members of _The Unconstant Lover's_ landing party are stealing across the steep and shingled rooftops of Zaraskevi.

Alarms continue to sound. Patrols of uniformed Trijans are a common sight in the streets below. Extreme caution still needs to be exercised. Their means of escape from the royal compound, however, was reduced to a pile of sawdust and the palace guards have no immediate means to give chase. With some clever urban orienteering and a perceptive eye, as successful an escape from Zaraskevi as could be managed, given the circumstances, was well within Moira's means.

The destination is unspoken and agreed-upon. Sinbad's parked ship, _The Olive Branch_ , stood unchallenged as literally their only option. There was nowhere else to seek shelter in this openly hostile alien metropolis. There was also no sign or indication as to how Sinbad or the rest of his traitors fared once within the Palace Immortal. Escape and eventually regrouping with the Freebooter Fleet was their only hope.

The route between here and there Moira could chart with considerably less difficulty than one of blind guesswork within the Palace Immortal. She estimated, assuming they remained as stealthy as they could while continuing to leap across Zaraskevi's rooftops after dark, that they could arrive at the _Branch's_ landing site within minutes, an hour at maximum.

The mood, between the thwarted pirates, is understandably forlorn. Little is spoken, save taciturn instructions on where best to cross between rooftops and the occasional shushed warning from Moira as a patrol passes in the street below.

The night sky overhead is worrisome in its stillness. Sparking with distant cannon fire very occasionally, it hangs as a looming reminder of the imminent defeat the headless Freebooter Fleet certainly faces before the superior might of the Radiant Armada.

What weighs heaviest on the minds and hearts of the Galactic Menace and his two minders, however, is indisputably the loss of Two-Bit.

Moira's heightened sense of danger staunchly refuses to process anything in this department until she's safe and secure. Odisseus' efforts are largely spent assisting Nemo in the crossing of alleyways and avenues.

The Captain, meanwhile, has little regard for anyone, his saltbrother included, since being denied his vengeance upon that hapless palace guard. Where he should be beaten, bruised and bewildered, Nehel Morel burns with an icy flame, swollen with the menace of his namesake.

Many alleys are jumped, many chimneys are negotiated, many drainpipes are scaled. Before long, _The Olive Branch_ is spotted ahead, along with a sight to make Moira's blood run glacially cold – a plume of inky black smoke.

It costs her one unflattering scamper across a rooftop to locate the source of the cloud. She's relieved to discover its source and more relieved to discover the smoke wasn't emanating from their last ride off this rock.

A cylindrical tube of teltriton, approximately humanoid height and width, is the source of the smoke, jammed unceremoniously into the landing tower's fourth story window. Crouching at the crux of the adjacent roof, Moira cannot ascertain what in all the moons of Jotor the thing is or, more appropriately, what it's doing here.

This was the Ortok's job, after all.

"An ejector," points out Odisseus kindly, upon arriving on her right flank. "Nice one, too."

While Nemo's too fuming to voice any opinion on the matter, his Ortok is curious enough to peer occasionally back toward the site of the ejector's crash. This doesn't stop either of them from advancing onward to make ready the ship neither of them were qualified to fly.

As the one responsible for saving three of their four asses from the slaughterhouse the Palace Immortal turned out to be, Moira decides to momentarily indulge her own curiosity.

Failure would result in both an ugly tumble into the alley and an uglier splat on the cobblestones below, but Moira's equal to the task. It requires all her acrobatics and all her nimbleness to lower her boots gingerly to rest atop the slanted ejector without either losing her balance or, conversely, overbalancing the entire tube.

The ejector's plexishield viewport is largely fogged over, though the words "YOUR EJECTOR HAS LANDED" continue to flash courteously against the inside of the glass. Wiping away the condensation with the cloth of her sleeve, Moira's astonished to see a familiar face beneath the colorless glass.

Abraham Bonaventure, asleep or dead, overwhelms the tube with his sheer bulk.

Once her confederates are informed, it's a laborious effort for all three to even extricate the Grimalti from the cramped confines of his ejector, much less shift him onto the landing tower's roof. Moira immediately checks his vitals and discovers his heart rate dismal and, what's worse, the massive clotted wound on his shoulder, which suggests he's been savaged by some animal.

She doesn't notice his shortened fingers until he, alive and miraculously this side of conscious, gestures weakly at her.

"Had..." he stutters, his beak blue and quivering from extreme blood loss, "yer, yer...coordinates..."

"The Fleet, Abraham, the Fleet, did–," ever-impatient Nemo presses him.

"...where..." the sailing master wonders aloud, conducting a shaky survey of the three faces that peer over him. "...where's..."

Exhausted from the haul up the landing tower, the Grimalti surrenders his frail grip on consciousness. Moira's hand upon his heartbeat confirms he only passes out.

Their mastermind is disintegrated and their navigator is hours from death. They're stranded on a strange rooftop in the city of Zaraskevi. Their only means of escape from the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija, currently closing on their position from all directions, is a borrowed starship none of them has any earthly idea how to open, much less ignite, much, much less fly.

The end of _The Unconstant Lover_ and her crew becomes that much more ignominious by the moment.

The phase of frenetic pacing about, attempting to crack the riddle of _The Olive Branch's_ user-interface, progressively passes. Each member of the landing party eventually succumbs to the malaise that originates with Nemo. Spreading from Moira to Odisseus, they each sit upon the shingled surface of the landing tower and watch the few flashes of light in the Trijan skyline, the only evidence of the raging space battle doubtlessly going south across the orbit.

"You know what I realized?" Nemo states, less a question and more a flat, emotionless comment. Neither of his awake and alive lieutenants offer any indication that they've heard or understood. "I owe Garrock Brondi a million credits."

"Ship coming in," Moira blurts with sudden abruptness. Her finger jets upward and she pinpoints a prick of light, growing redder and redder by the instant. They all glance up to see the unmistakeable sight of an object making atmospheric re-entry at the unmistakeable speed of an incoming spaceship.

"Ship crashing in," corrects Odisseus glumly, melancholy striking him hardest of all. "Ejector or debris from the battle."

Nemo squints. "Nah, I think she's right. Angle's only right for a ship."

Raising his hung head to examine the claim for himself, Odisseus joins Nemo and Moira in their squinting and makes the all-important observation. "I think," he suggests, uncertain, "I think it's headed this..."

At once, all three pirates are standing, their weapons are drawn and scrambling for cover behind the bent and braced landing fins of _The Olive Branch_. Seconds later, the thought to scramble back out into the open and drag Abraham's inert and pretty much immobile body into some semblance of cover occurs guiltily to all three of them.

The muzzles of their upraised pistols and shotgun are aimed uselessly at the descending spaceship. It's Odisseus who keenly notes that this incoming vessel swoops down on a trajectory too perfect for any sort of coincidence, particularly today, particularly towards the fateful end of this most accursed day.

It's not until the ship dawdles shamelessly, dependent on its driftjets, above the Trijan households, smokestacks and steeples that they recognize the anachronistic eyesore of teltriton, thermosteel and fractal paint. Each member of _The Unconstant Lover's_ crew shuffles into the swath of its headlights to greet the floating craft.

"Had your coordinates," quotes the voice of Captain Gertie Gundeck, over _The Dick Magnet's_ primary loudspeaker. "You need a lift, skip?"

Chapter 30

Odisseus raps a hairy knuckle against each teltriton plate, searching for that telltale hollow thunk. From Velocity's rough description and his passing knowledge of these harborage doors, the servomotor ought to be installed somewhere around where he was crouching down here. All his fruitless searching was beginning to aggravate his companions. Though they dared utter no complaint Odisseus could still smell the agitation in their sweat.

Finally, after nearly two minutes of banging around the exterior of Docking Port #0100, Odisseus finds the panel he's looking for. Without further delay, he busies himself, torquing free each of the plate's four rivets.

Docking Port #0100 was arguably the most remote of Takioro Defederate Station's thousand some Docking Ports, tucked around a blind corner of the First Ring. Because of its off-the-beaten-path locale, it was chosen as the rendezvous of choice for _The Unconstant Lover_ and her crew.

Anyone who presently attempted to access Docking Port #0100 would be greeted by an unpleasant hologram, informing them the Port was closed for maintenance, due to a pressure leak. Anyone who attempted to force the door open would find its servomotor deactivated. Anyone with more mechanical skill than Odisseus at locating and re-activating servomotors was welcome to whatever they found within, the Ortok supposed.

The brisk jaunt from Docking Port #7307, where _The Dick Magnet_ was parked, to Docking Port #0100, where _The Unconstant Lover_ was parked, was somehow even more frightening than their doomed attack on the Supreme Sovereignty had been. With the Freebooter Fleet completely unraveled, with no impenetrable wall of loyal buccaneers to shield them from bounty hunter attack, Nemo was simply some asshole with a ten million credit death mark on his head.

Walking carelessly through Takioro Defederate Station, then, was suddenly a death sentence.

Moira Quicksilver stood as the solitary precaution against such a sentence. She stood, legs planted firmly apart, at the top of the Docking Port's access stairs. With Righty and Lefty resting, unclipped in their holsters, they were as good as drawn. Should anyone passing peer up and recognize the four fugitives, furtively attempting to break into Docking Point #0100, they'd fall dead to the teltriton before the two thoughts connected in their brain.

An unnaturally pale Abraham Bonaventure, both wounds swaddled with expansive bandages, leans against the opposite wall, nursing his calabash and another dark humor. Odisseus can't be certain, but he's fairly sure he's overheard the Grimalti mutter the solitary word "mutineer" under his breath more than once since arriving at Takioro.

As though they needed another method to entice potential bushwhackers, Nemo sits the top of the short staircase and counts cash. He doles out a massive wad, probably tens of thousands of credits worth, into a separate pile and stashes the remainder, in a crumpled mess, back inside his jacket pocket.

Odisseus is caught by the realization that, were Two-Bit Switch here, he'd most likely be squatting in front of the panel instead of Odisseus, imminently more qualified at B&E than he was.

"Are we about finished here?" hisses Moira indiscreetly behind her.

Odisseus readies a snarl over his shoulder. "I've only just–"

"Him, not you," Moira corrects, nudging her chin towards the Captain where he sits near her.

"Near enough," Nemo answers curtly, running his thumb along the lesser stack of cash; still a small fortune, but only a percentage of his walking-around total.

On cue, the harsh metallic buzz of an incoming comm transmission makes all three of them, save Nemo, almost leap out of their skin. The most in danger of practically anyone in the galaxy, Nemo's somehow the calmest, unlooping the blinking communicator off his belt.

"Vel?" poses Moira anxiously. It was thanks to Velocity that the entire arrangement with Docking Port #0100 was even possible. Of course, it was thanks to a exceptionally generous bribe that the entire arrangement with Velocity was even possible. To Odisseus' knowledge, she'd already been paid her dues, but how could Nemo possibly have had the foresight to line her pockets a second time for a little extra discretion?

"Nemo here."

The response that crackles through his comm's tinny speakers is pretty much pure gobbledygook, but Nemo seems to understand well enough. He rises, stretches his back and begins to mosey down the access stairs to the First Ring's main floor.

Moira's practically aghast. "The fuck're you–"

She advances a few steps down the staircase, spies something or someone at the bottom and immediately draws both Righty and Lefty. In an instant, Odisseus has abandoned his work before the Docking Port's harborage door and stands at the top of the stairs, his own Wreckingball drawn.

At the bottom of the stairs, Nemo squats to reach eye level with a scabby, green-skinned station waif. The boy's face is wholly obscured beneath a mob of unshorn brown and his bare feet, callused beyond belief, seem immune to the scuff and grime of the First Ring floor.

From the top of the staircase, their conversation is inaudible, brief and seems mainly to consist of Nemo handing the child the massive wad of cash. In response, the child looks vaguely confused, even perhaps a little offended, as Nemo rises again to his feet.

With the bewildered station waif and his small fortune behind him, Nemo marches back up the staircase. He exhumes both hands from his pockets to hold them up in a defensive posture, at the sight of Moira and Odisseus' three guns.

"I surrender."

A grinding metallic sound behind all three of them causes both the Captain's bodyguards to spin. The harborage doors, thanks to the reactivated servomotor, unlatch and wheel apart, revealing the massive hexagonal airlock of Docking Port #0100.

Striped by the malfunctioning overhead lights within stands _The Unconstant Lover_ , precisely where her crew left her. At a glance, the most wanted spaceship in the galaxy is unmolested. Odisseus thanks all the moons for this blessing, particularly considering the amount of money that would change hands should anyone among the powers that be locate her.

Too long removed from her engine room, too long spent crawling through Trijan sewers and bunking with the _Magnet's_ horny crew, moves Odisseus unconsciously forward, toward the _Lover_. He sheathes his shotgun and immediately complies a list of repairs the ship will require, repairs to keep his mind occupied and away from unwelcome thoughts of Two-Bit Switch.

Moira Quicksilver doubted Kuzu Minor would ever come in handy again.

Once Heeko met his sanguinary end, she wrongfully assumed her days of squeezing some absurd advantage of out the worthless little world were over. Who knew Kuzu Minor, boondock of boondocks, would turn out to the galaxy's greatest hiding place?

The planetary deed Heeko wagered may have been forged, but there was technically nothing preventing Moira, arguably the planet's rightful owner, from warping there all the same. More accurately, the only thing that could technically prevent Abraham Bonaventure from warping there was its broken warp gate.

By no means is Kuzu Minor's warp gate the only one to malfunction across all of known space, of course. Unlike Bohor's tendency to warp ships in upside down or Vollock's tendency to warp ships directly into the shattered remains of its moon, nowhere else can be found a warp gate that's broken, abandoned and utterly derelict.

Nowhere except Kuzu Minor.

Among the Endless Imperium's obviously sinister machinations, they'd long kept the vital secrets of warp technology, everything one would require to construct their own such gate, very seriously under wraps. As the primary choke point through which all galactic civilization is advanced, the warp gate is a staggeringly useful piece of technology for a totalitarian state to abuse.

When a gate does fatally crash beyond all hope of repair, one can reliably count the hours until an Endless Imperium warship drops warp in the system and proceeds to clean up the mess. Moons forfend some nosy outsider's granted the opportunity to lift the gate's proverbial hood and see how its motor runs.

Part and parcel with their utter abdication of the Outer Ring, however, came the precise bureaucratic oversight that saw Kuzu Minor, a certifiably worthless gas giant, slip between the cracks.

For reasons now lost to time, some well-meaning switch operator must have attempted to warp a small planetoid into Kuzu's orbit, possibly in an effort to furnish the pointless planet with some manner of satellite. The ensuing mishap both littered Kuzu's atmosphere with the planetoid's debris and shattered an entire arm of the warp gate's spaceship-encompassing loop.

More importantly, the specific damage inflicted to the gate blipped the entire stop – Junction, planet, everything – straight off all the standard navigation grids.

To any other warp navigator, these disastrous effects would make warping to Kuzu Minor impossible. To Abraham Bonaventure, it was simply made very, very difficult.

By bouncing off another, fully functional gate, the Grimalti sailing master was still technically able to reach the unreachable Kuzu Minor. What's more, with his passing knowledge of the machinery involved, Abraham claimed, given a few hours and unfettered access to the warp gate's controls, that he could prevent even the most skilled navigators from warping in themselves.

In short, Kuzu Minor was the single greatest hideout in the entire galaxy.

Its Warp Gate Junction, abandoned for decades, could maybe use a little sprucing up, though.

In search of the traffic control office, Moira pads between freezers full of spoiled food, beneath partially collapsed bracing beams and across the occasional skeleton of maintenance crew or trapped commuter, she isn't sure which. The fact she doesn't float, freeze or asphyxiate, however, means the oxygen filters are re-engaged, the life support's chugging along and even the artificial gravity's been restored.

Once she crosses the carpeted lobby and descends the stairs to the traffic control office, Moira discovers who's responsible.

"Moons," she remarks, leaning against the office's doorjamb. "When Odi mentioned you'd still be over here, I didn't think he was being serious."

Hunkered beneath some control console or another, Abraham keeps at his work, doesn't turn to answer or acknowledge her. "Weren't no secret."

There's a moment of silence, filled only by the clanking of tools and the soft hum of the Junction's many machinery, as the conversation stalls on the runway. "Are we having fun yet?"

"Won't be having the real fun 'till I coagulate the coolant chamber." He nudges his chin, his wattle waving in response, over the consoles and towards the office's great bay viewport. "Out there."

The distant sun glows feebly blue, a somewhat brighter speck against the blackness than the innumerable other specks that comprise Kuzu Minor's night sky. The sunshine is interrupted by the occasional piece of tumbling space rock, the fragmented remnants of that very same planetoid which smashed its way through the gate's further arm.

The warp gate's arching red arm yawns above and beyond the span of the traffic control office's viewport. From where she stands in the doorway, Moira can spot the hole that the incoming asteroid made – a toothy bite taken from a gigantic teltriton donut, complete with cloud of metallic crumbs hovering about the missing area.

At odd intervals, one of the larger chunks of intervening asteroid spins at the right angle to expose _The Unconstant Lover_ where she clings like a beetle. All but her most vital lights activated, she's a yellowish stain against the earth brown stone.

Abraham cranes a glance over his bandaged shoulder. "Care to join me?"

"That would be how I die," Moira predicts.

With a "suit yourself" shrug, the Grimalti returns to his apparently fascinating work in the shadow of the control console. As he turns, Moira's afforded a brief look at the bandage that still swaddles his shoulder and, even briefer, the one that still swaddles his left hand.

According to the Uvhog sawbones aboard _The Dick Magnet_ , Abraham wandered exceptionally close to bleeding out from the combination of the two disfiguring wounds he'd earned during his time as Captain of _The Loose Cannon_. While some peculiarity of his Grimalti immune system seems to have been his savior more than any medical arts of the Uvhog, he continues, days recovered, to look thinner, paler, and more haggard.

He's been the ghost of Abraham Bonaventure ever since, as though he truly did die inside that ejector.

She hasn't the heart or stomach to question whether he's still capable of his duties with six of eight fingers. Considering he still warped them to Kuzu Minor successfully, arguably the most difficult dirty jump in the galaxy, she's inclined to say yes.

Instead she asks, "You're not interested in Odi's help?"

"Bless his heart," Abraham stipulates, as a precursor to future disparagement, "but Odi don't know squat about astral physics. Did ye drive the maintenance drone over here?"

Moira bristles some. "I did."

"And it's still in one piece?" he poses archly.

"It is."

"Wow," he grunts. "Guess I'm meant to be impressed, eh?"

Moira chooses not to dignify the comment with a response. Much as her "skills" as a pilot were favorite fodder for the crew to poke fun at her, the day she couldn't fly a guided maintenance drone a quarter of a dottible would be the day she checked herself into a nursing home.

She paces a few steps away from the doorjamb, into the substantially cozier traffic control office. When he'd initially offered to temporary cut off their escape route, Abraham described his work as requiring "a few hours." To judge by the exhaustive state of the office's rehabilitation and repair, he'd doubtlessly spent the majority of his four days over here, as opposed to sequestered in his quarters, like everyone else.

"You know," she admits, "I'll be honest. Spooky as this place may be, you've definitely wasted a lot of time unspooking it."

"Aye," Abraham comments dispassionately. "Make yourself at home." He adds a belated second before Moira discover this herself. "Choco's on."

There, percolating contentedly atop one of the office's various industrial counters, is the _Lover's_ absentee chococino maker, the one Two-Bit pilfered from the break room at Kiesha Shipyards. Moira'd noticed its disappearance but, not much of a choco drinker herself, wasn't especially heartbroken.

She still reaches for a polystyrene cup all the same.

"Now," she forewarns, "I've had the misfortune of having tasted your moonshine. Should I once again be concerned for my health?"

"Was there some reason ye came to visit me?"

Abraham's cutting to the chase stops Moira's hand in its tracks, reaching for the chocopot's handle. She sighs, plants a palm onto the countertop and stares into the bottom of her empty cup.

"I don't know," she confesses. "Ship's been pretty gloomy, past few days, you know. I–" Abraham doesn't respond or react to her buhoxshit, however, and Moira gambles on getting to the truth faster. "Sometime ago now, you asked me this question, you asked me–"

"Why ye ain't a bounty hunter no more," Abraham supplies. "Why ye joined up with us pirates."

"That. Yes." Moira collects the remainder of her thoughts as she unlatches the chocopot, fills her cup and clambers up onto the counter, neglecting many perfectly serviceable chairs, in favor of the room's highest impromptu seat.

"The answer, I think," she begins, before sidetracking herself immediately, "and I think that when you asked me, everything with the Fleet was just starting and where we were headed was incredibly difficult to see or predict, but I think now, I think removed from that, the answer is that I'd no other options left to me."

Abraham furnishes no judgment, opinion or answer.

"I was low," is Moira's justification. "As you said, I was breaking my back on these chump change bounty-heads. I couldn't accumulate any kinda savings and freelance work, especially in that profession? It can be very," she hunts for the proper word, "let's say, isolating."

She gestures aside, subconsciously towards the viewport and the _Lover_ , with her chococino cup. "And here's Nemo, you know, and he's offering me this position and I know he's buying time, right, squirming to get free of me but, at the same time, I'm out there in the woods, at this point and, I don't know," she stops to consider the chocolatey depths of her untasted beverage, "he's like a life preserver."

She scowls a second later, her metaphor less elegant than she intended. "That doesn't make any sense, I realize–"

Abraham's first response is a quiet scoff. He follows this with a sidelong comment. "He ain't a life preserver, missy. He's an anchor."

Moira scowls, her drifttrain of thought derailed. "How do you mean?"

"I mean," Abraham repeats insistently, "he's headed for the bottom and we're all of us – you, me, the ship – going too."

Moira's scowl only deepens. "Weren't we always, though? How's this different from, you know, every other day?"

Abraham shakes his head slowly, fatefully. "Ain't no coming back from this. Boy's sunk us sure as he's tying that anchor 'round our legs."

"What the fuck're you talking about?" Moira challenges flatly.

"Two-Bit went first. Captain might as well've tossed him overboard hisself." As he predicts doom and gloom, Abraham continues his work all the same, as though discussing astral weather or everyday warp drift. "Come to speak on it, Two-Bit's lucky in a way. Don't have to see the water rising all around us. Gotta meet his end thinking we'd weather the storm."

Moira's the textbook definition of incredulous, finger quotes and all. "So, what, you're saying there's a 'storm' coming now?"

"Storm's already here, lass," sing-songs Abraham. "Storm be sitting right over there, locked in his room and wearing the Cap'n's coat." He points the circular grip of his neticgrappler through the viewport, towards the asteroid the _Lover's_ clamped onto.

"Don't mistake incompetence for malevolence. He's a moron, not some force of nature."

"He sure used to be," remarks Abraham wistfully. As he begins his yarn, the Grimalti adjusts his posture, to better turn and acknowledge Moira where she sits on the countertop. "Seems so long ago now, the skies were clear and the Fleet were whole. He'd done it, ye understand. He'd pointed us, all the scattered bastards of Bad Space, back in the right direction. Towards the real enemy."

He gestures with his left hand, the bandage a useful visual aid. "He were hacking off all ten of the Imperium's fingers what were trying to choke us out. He were smashing down every spineless privateer in' motherbloomer what swore loyalty to the man and there weren't one bigwig in this whole galactic underworld could touch him."

The Grimalti shrugs his wounded shoulder, still somehow amazed. "He'd done it. He truly had. I'd finally put me shoulder to the right wheel."

"Until?" Moira supplies, her voice quieter now.

"Until he weren't no more," Abraham finishes, with a sudden disappointment. "Dunno what happened. Maybe he just ran outta ports to plunder. Maybe it were that damned interview. Who's to say?"

His expression, once cast in fond remembrance, has hardened teltriton hard. "Point is, he led us astray. He set freebooter against freebooter. He put that... _mutineer_ on the Council and, truth to tell, he made mutineers of us all."

He gestures vaguely with his good hand, an attempt to rationalize. "By then, I'd plumb stopped believin' he could do wrong. I thought he were the days of yore, come again. Besides, he gave me a ship and a command and a big blooming hat."

There's a lengthy pause, his face drooping every second he doesn't speak. "I were wrong, though," he admits quietly. "I were wrong about the whole damn thing."

With several arduous adjustments of his bulk, Abraham returns progressively to his workstation. His voice, when next he speaks, echos eerily off the inside of the console. "Two-Bit were first, aye, but mark ye my words, he won't be the last."

Odisseus thinks they might as well deposit a baggie of flaming buhoxshit on the doorstep of noted mafioso Smerdyakov "the Scar" Svetlova, ring the doorbell and run like hell because, at this point, why the bloom not?

At the current moment, the Endless Imperium, Valladian Shipping, the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija, Huong Xo, GalaxCom Interstellar Media and now, seemingly, Garrock Brondi, would each shell out a Galactic Menace's ransom for the crew's four heads, neatly arranged on a platter. Come to mention it, they'd likely shell out half that much even for information that would result in their four heads, neatly arranged on that platter.

Why not, Odisseus reasons, incur the irrational wrath of every one of Bad Space's powers-that-be? Ding-dong-ditch the Scar, teepee the Zibbian Federation, give whomever ran the Ring ConFed a swirly – why not bring all possible heat down upon their heads at once?

This, Odisseus imagines, is as close to a nightmare scenario as he'd ever assumed his saltbrother could possibly drag him into. Everyone and their uncle was sniffing out every dark bloomhole in search of Nemo, his spaceship and his crew. According to Moira's matrix-diving, the bounty, when all complied, approached fifteen million ICC. That much raw cash could easily purchase a middling-size planet or, failing that, three Imperium-class capital warships.

The fortunate bounty hunter who inevitably manages to trace their steps to this moons-forsaken nowhere could, with one visit to a collection agency, transform themselves from itinerant headhunter to planetary governor overnight.

Kudos, though, belonged to Moira for her recommendation of Kuzu Minor as _The Unconstant Lover's_ likely permanent hideout. As soon as Abraham's labors clambering about atop the warp gate were complete, the drawstrings would be fully cinched and they'd officially be unreachable. Realistically, they could remain sealed in hermetic isolation for some months, until either the ship's supplies dwindled or, more likely, Nemo went unquestionably cabin-fever-bonkers and murdered everyone aboard for good sport and fine amusement.

This second option was the one Odisseus was holding out for. He's content to kill the intervening time eating anchovies.

A prodigious, almost embarrassing, amount of canned seafood remained. After Flask's drug smuggling ploy on Gallow, the pantries and cupboards of _The Unconstant Lover's_ mess were stacked to the ceiling with them. While they garnished practically every meal he'd eaten since, the Ortok was only marginally closer to diminishing the stock pile they'd accidentally accrued.

An unapologetic binge was called for, by no one besides the Ortok's stomach. Moira Quicksilver, with nothing more engaging to do, elected to watch, with grim fascination, the disgusting smorgasbord.

They share the crew's primary table within the mess hall. Moira's attention wafts between the Ortok, his spoils, one of her two identical pistols that she twirls listlessly on the tabletop and the yammering holovision overhead.

Odisseus, on the other paw, hardly wavers his attention from this sudden orgy of comfort eating. Employing both paws to savage effect, Odisseus shells each tin apart with one set of curved claws, scoops, chomps and ladles out the salty contents with tongue and teeth and shoves the empty containers aside with his other paw.

Upon the odd occasion, one paw, his discarding paw, will wander aside in search of the handy bottle of Gitterswitch Gin he swigs from to cleanse his palette and dull his senses. This particular bottle Odisseus recovered from one of Nemo's supposedly "secret" stashes, one of those he doesn't imagine the Ortok onboard can smell from seventy paces and two decks away.

Assuming the Captain discovered this fact, he'd no doubt visit his galactically menacing wrath upon the Ortok's head. No one, Odisseus included, has laid eyes on Nemo in nearly two days and the Ortok figures he'll take his chances.

Besides isolation and inaccessibility, the one criticism Odisseus can comfortably level at Kuzu Minor as a future port of call was its abysmal feed reception. Despite how expensive and top-shelf their pilfered holovision might be, the only honest programming choice they could access, this far removed, came down to an endless loop of infomercials.

For the past eight packages of sporefin, Moira and Odisseus were treated to an exhaustive treatise on the wonders of the "Grasshopper," a specialty exercise apparatus marketed exclusively towards Kezzerax. With that now concluded, they both endure a particularly piercing advertisement for Yellowtooth Cigarettes.

"Hey there, Switch," rejoins the HV set. A fuzzy, poorly-discernible greenskin approaches a familiar-seeming spokesperson on the staged streets of Pirateton. "Any chance of you bumming me one of them Yellowtooths?"

In true Two-Bit fashion, the spokesperson promptly extinguishes his cigarette scaldingly against the dayplayer's cheek. The actress' agonized scream suddenly summons a film crew from beyond the fourth wall to rush to her aid.

"Bloom no!" cries the spokesperson in disgust, before savoring an especially disingenuous drag on the cigarette's end and sneering, "These're mine."

No sooner has he made this utterance than Yellowtooth's logo and disarmingly honest slogan materialize across his face. As more and more camera crew go rushing past on either side, the reception immediately worsens. Nothing but pure static, complete with a harsh and irritating wheedling sound, fills the HV's screen.

Unable to be bothered, Odisseus just continues, confident in the knowledge that, high atop the warp gate, Abraham has severed the final strings that connect Kuzu Minor to the remainder of the galaxy.

The final advert, in its dying breath, proves successful. Odisseus glances up to spot Moira Quicksilver tapping out a fresh cigarette from a packet she produces from nowhere.

She dallies several moments striking a match, inhaling a few puffs and reclining further back in her wooden seat before she poses the innocent question. "You remember his birthday party, don't you?"

Odisseus ceases chewing. Some sliver of the sentient beneath the beast bubbles to the surface and he swallows to reply, the scales, fish and oil clinging to his whiskers. "The one Nemo threw?"

"The one Nemo threw," Moira confirms, dragging deeply on her Yellowtooth. She doesn't make eye contact, seated across from him. Instead she's pointed her body ninety degrees away, towards the doorway and the now-spastic holovision.

"I remember," Odisseus squints, as though he could spot the memory, out of focus, across the mess, "a birthday cake frosted with laxatives."

"You don't remember party hats?" Moira questions in stride.

"Oh, I remember party hats. What I remember mostly, though, were laxatives on birthday cakes."

Moira hovers the cigarette's filter an inch from her lips. "He suspected something, as I recall."

"Of course he blooming suspected _something_ ," agrees Odisseus heartily, swiping aside another ravaged tin to accumulate on the growing pile. "Nemo was being unsubtle as fuck. The question was just what."

"Well, and no one else was eating any cake, too," Moira makes the admirable point.

"I suppose, yeah."

Both first mate and mechanic relish their respective vices a few long moments. Moira sucks tiny inhalations on her cigarette, as though attempting not to frighten or injure it. Odisseus, meanwhile, engages in precisely the opposite behavior, gnashing fish with tooth and shearing metal with claw.

"Moons," marvels Moira moments later. "He moved _into_ the water closet that night, didn't he? That became his house."

"And there's Nemo, of course," Odisseus remembers, with equal fondness. "Cackling and clapping and wearing that party hat like some kinda berserk thirty-year-old toddler."

Lolling her head three inches to her right, Moira makes eye contact for the first time in the conversation. "Comeuppances came the next morning, though, you remember?"

Odisseus meets her gaze, gripping a fresh tin in one paw. "When he was too hungover to remember the cake was frosted in laxatives?"

"Yeah." Moira waves her hand ever so slightly to encourage some smoke away from her face. "Yeah," she repeats and another question crosses and creases her face several seconds before she wonders aloud. "I don't think that was his real birthday, though, was it?"

Odisseus shakes his shaggy head. "That was the whole thing. He's an orphan – nobody knew, Two-Bit included, when his actual birthday was. Nemo just went off the handle one morning and thought 'let's throw him a party.' And, of course," he adds, with a short, secondary shake, "he asked me to actually bake the fucking cake." When no reply comes, Odisseus hangs his head once more, as though focusing on his current tin of jiihu, before mentioning quietly. "He asked to borrow your book."

"Hm?"

"Your phrasebook. He asked to borrow your phrasebook." Odisseus locks his gaze straight downward, at the pilfered pressurized fish, floating in its saline solution. "And he built that stupid droidvox. All to try and understand me." His chest tightens suddenly and he clamps his jaw hard, in some vain attempt to prevent the next statement from escaping his mouth. "I coulda run faster."

"I know how to escape those handcuffs," returns Moira a heartbeat later. "He asked me how. Last year, on Qel Qatar, he asked me and I didn't tell him how." She allows a silence of her own to pass, cigarette smoke and holovision static the only objects in motion throughout the entire mess hall. "I was being smart."

Odisseus plants a slimy paw on the slimy neck of the Gitterswitch bottle at the exact same instant that the mess hall doors clatter open.

In swaggers none other than Nemo, the Menace gone missing in action these past few days. His hair is a mangy-pelted animal, dead atop his scalp. His clothing is sweated completely through and only partially buttoned. His gait is uneven and unstable. He resembles, more than anything, the wreck of a humanoid Odisseus discovered in the _Surimiah's_ galley, purloining Liwwo's eggrolls and endeavoring to see Moira's naked ass.

In his stained and besmirched hands, he clasps something, a reflective metal rectangle, across his heart as he marches unsteadily inside.

"I have a surprise for you," he announces to the room, the melancholy in his voice, attitude and expression evaporated.

Moira's nonplussed. "You have a surprise for who?"

Nemo seems dumbfounded by such a puzzling question. "Whomever wants one, I guess," he admits. "You. All of you. And Abraham." He glances, with further puzzlement, about the chamber and seems to expect Abraham, like some boggart, to leap from hiding at mention of his name. "Is he still fucked off to someplace else?"

"That is my understanding," Moira provides.

"Huh," he grunts. "Well, here." With a callous attitude, Nemo chucks the reflective hunk of metal into the center of the table, narrowly avoiding the monument to fallen fishes Odisseus has unwittingly constructed from his stacked-up tins. In one smooth motion, the Captain levels up on the Ortok's right flank, snatches the Gitterswitch bottle with preternatural quickness and throws back one long chug.

"Hey–" Odisseus starts to snarl.

In response, Nemo pries free his lips from the bottle's mouth, sloshes the remaining contents and gasps, "Oh, get fucked, Fishballs. Has my name right there."

There, indisputably inked onto the bottom of the bottle is the word "NEMO", complete with comically backwards "E," hopefully written while drunk. Swallowing another mighty gulp, the inexplicably good-spirited Menace scowls suddenly at the holovision screen, continuing to buzz and hum with static. "The bloom're you watching?"

"I'm so surprised," comments Moira, drawing everyone's attention once again to the table and the object Nemo so neglectfully tossed amid the sardines. Two-Bit's Attaché is unmistakable, seen from this angle and aided by the familiar hologram suspended some inches over its screen. The hologram in question, "PASSCODE REQUIRED" and its five attendant blank boxes, Odisseus remembers only too well.

"Oh, sure," remembers Nemo. Depositing the bottle within Odisseus' reach once more, he cranes over the Attaché to speedily fill in the five damnably empty boxes with "3–S–I–E–S." The hated "PASSCODE REQUIRED" screen quickly vanishes, swapped instead for some manner of electronic paperwork. "There," Nemo proclaims with satisfaction.

Several seconds of staring at the document, hovering there at the center of the table, brings no surprise or epiphany to Odisseus. "What is this we're looking at, exactly?"

"This," Nemo illustrates, stepping aside and beginning an obnoxious pacing route that swings him around and around the mess hall table, "is a weekly statement for a savings account at Wytex Savings & Loans, a prestigious bank on Tysu, a planet for prestigious banks." He pauses, clearly to ramp up some imagined drama. "This is also Two-Bit Switch's ghost account."

Odisseus and Moira, the former still chewing, the latter still smoking, exchange confused glances. "Turns out," Nemo elaborates, rounding about past Moira's left shoulder, "Two-Bit has been–"

"Embezzling?" guesses Moira.

"Squaring away," corrects Nemo, "a percentage of his winnings from every job he's pulled since he was, what, nine years old?" He makes a gracious gesture of allowance. "Not a large percentage, mind you, but considering a few very profitable scores, and fifteen years interest, he's accrued almost four million ICC in this covert account." He makes a condoning gesture towards Moira. "I first saw the thing, I assumed embezzlement too, you know. He certainly was the type."

"Not to," Odisseus interrupts, "speak ill of the dead."

Nemo doesn't seem to take offense at his saltbrother's sidelong comment. "Now, that may not sound like terribly much money, considering all our current affluence, but four million is about thirty-thousand credits shy of the budget for this bad bitch."

Nemo cranes once again over the Ujad mahogany and drums his fingertips against the Attaché's touchscreen. The weekly statement instantly swallowed, what the Attaché projects forth next couldn't be more anticlimactic.

A flowchart floats above Two-Bit's Attaché. The series of either boxes or bubbles are interconnected by either solid or dotted strands and all labeled with boring bureaucratic names like "assets" and "expenses" and "liabilities." At first blush, the whole thing looks like an escapee from a tedious board meeting between stuffed shirt investors.

It falls on the Ortok to press the necessary point. "Okay," he establishes, provoking no immediate elaboration from Nemo. Sighing, he spells out further, "What is _this_ we're looking at, exactly?"

"A caper," Nemo couldn't possibly be more pleased to announce. "The caper-to-end-all-capers."

With that, his fingers spasm into more typing. As he speaks, each specific item, typically an aforemetioned box or bubble will enlarge, peel open and highlight vital passages, images, sequences of numbers, before its swiftly replaced by the next summoned visual.

"Floor plans, schematics, schedules, key codes, a comprehensive amount of all the normal stuff, you know. Plus," he adds, fascinated, "there're a half dozen completely three-dimensional aliases, with references, biographies, all that."

Six personality profiles motor past his view, easily as detailed as Nemo's passing description, followed by a globular map of an unknown planet. "There's these maps of planets I've never even heard of."

Two taps and the mystery world is gone, usurped this time by a number of organizing units splaying out clandestine images of some nature. "There's leverage on three high-ranking government officials. There's even," Nemo giggles, smearing his fingerprints against the screen to activate one of the still images into motion, "a series of faked security recordings in here."

As the short video, featuring alarms and running security officers, fills the mess hall with tinny, poorly recorded audio, Nemo scoots several feet away from the table, too excited to continue handling the device. "Are you beginning to understand?" he poses, refusing to pause long enough to allow any answer.

"Apparently," he summarizes, resuming his pacing anew, "in complete and utter secrecy, Two-Bit was in the planning process for what, after only a few hours of perusal, I can safely call the greatest, most ambitious heist in galactic history." He smirks, awash with newfound pride. "Riding around in his pocket."

"For the record?" Odisseus raises a dripping claw. "'Greatest' and most 'ambitious?' Not the same thing."

Whether he's ignoring or countering Odisseus' point, the Ortok's not certain, but Nemo steeples both hands before his mouth and makes his offer through almost clenched teeth. "You wanna hear the take?"

"Not especially," deadpans Moira.

"Assuming the whole thing goes off relatively hitchless," he stipulates first, the direct cause of Moira and Odisseus' knowing snort and rolled eyes. "68 million. And then some."

The sound of the holovision's white noise goes uncontested, by word, breath or even heartbeat, in _The Unconstant Lover's_ mess hall for half a minute.

"And then some," Moira repeats, even more deadpan.

"Yes," Nemo answers glibly. "It's complicated, but yes. And then some."

Odisseus throws both paws off the table. "Who was he robbing?"

"The Gitter Consortium," drops Nemo without irony.

Such flippant terms have never, Odisseus imagines, been used to describe robbing this most peerless of Outer Ring corporations. For hundreds of years, the Consortium's maintained a the monopolistic stranglehold over the galaxy's entire alcohol trade.

The center of Moira's brow dips into a tiny black concave. "What was he robbing?"

This time, Nemo's momentarily stymied on wording. "A tree?"

Buzzing holovision static enjoys another sizable moment of stunned silence over which to reign supreme.

"I know," assuages Nemo with appropriate hand gestures. He points a finger towards the Attaché and its splayed, holographic contents. "The earliest entries on this thing, you can check the time stamps, date fifteen years back." He makes eye contact with Odisseus, the buffaloed Ortok rising to meet his gaze after an awkward handful of seconds, and answers his belated question. "What we're looking at here is the life's work of Two-Bit Switch."

Nemo shuffles two steps backward, opening both arms emphatically. "Everything's here. All it needs is a crew."

"Correct me if I'm wrong," requests Moira, her tone tart and her point petulant. "Are we not hiding out here in the galaxy's bleeder, is Two-Bit not disintegrated, because of the last stupid idea you had?"

"You're missing the point." The trap thus baited, Nemo cracks a smile. His expression is one part sinister satisfaction at the knowledge that he's, however reluctantly, already convinced the pair of them and one part earnest excitement at the prospect of avenging his friend's death through the best means possible – highly profitable crime.

"This stupid idea doesn't belong to me. It belonged to Two-Bit Switch."

Acknowledgments

To my loyal band of fans and followers, for enjoying my nonsense enough to queue up for a second helping.

To Chris Allio of The Hydrilla, for his stellar cover design.

To my family, for still understanding when I drag manuscript pages and red pens to my sister's law school graduation.

To Charles Matthew Smit, for the continued use of _The Poetic License, The Poetic Justice_ and the very concept of _Quuilar Noxix Wants You Dead Or Alive_.

To Dan Glaser, Steven Molony and Maddisyn Carter, for their selflessness in helping to promote the dumb book in the first place.

To Hallie Clawson, for literally everything.

About the Author

TIMOTHY J. MEYER is wanted on seven counts of piracy, three counts of interstellar smuggling, four counts of brigandage and one count of enthusiastic corruption of the galactic good. He is to be considered armed, intoxicated and exceptionally dangerous. If you have any information regarding his whereabouts, please contact the local planetary branch of the IMIS (Imperial Ministry of Interstellar Security).

OTHER WORKS BY TIMOTHY J. MEYER

Bad Space Trilogy

HULL DAMAGE (Bad Space, #1)

GALACTIC MENACE (Bad Space, #2)

www.badspacebooks.com

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Year of the Horse (2014)

BATTERY LOW (January)

SHARE EVERYTHING (February)

THE COLOSSUS IN CLAY (March)

BAD SPACE: DELINQUENTS (April)

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