 
### UNCONSTANT LOVE

Timothy J. Meyer

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2016 Timothy J. Meyer

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BAD SPACE TRILOGY

HULL DAMAGE (2012)

GALACTIC MENACE (2014)

UNCONSTANT LOVE (2016)

www.badspacebooks.blogspot.com

To Steven,

the original Captain

"How many lives had that treasure cost in the amassing, what blood and sorrow, what good ships scuttled on the deep, what brave men walking the plank blindfold, what shot of cannon, what shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive could tell."

  * Robert Louis Stevenson, _Treasure Island_

**Table of Contents**

PART I: Her Hull Shot Through

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: Rent To Ribbons Too

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: Her Poor Damned Crew

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Fifth Interlude

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Final Interlude

Chapter 30

Afterword

Acknowledgments

About the Author

### PART I:

### HER HULL SHOT THROUGH

### CHAPTER 1

Moira rolls the dice.

She knew the odds. She'd calculated the probability. Eighty-five percent of the spreads she could possibly throw would turn over in her favor; a piddly fifteen percent wouldn't. Raw numbers were strongly on Moira's side; only a small sliver of bad luck stood against her. If she could only finagle a positive roll from the utter shitshow of her previous few throws, Moira would win a fighting chance to recoup some of her grievous losses.

The dice clack three times across the board and eventually skirr to a standstill, three fateful faces pointed upward.

Three frowny faces.

"Bugger me," is Moira's immediate reaction. The more she stares at those hateful red frowns, glowering up at her from across the board, the more illogical the profanity that spills from her mouth. "Mothercunting son of a bleeder's bloody red twat. Balls."

Her opponent sours his expression. "Pottymouth."

With a careless sweep of her hand, Moira snatches all three traitorous dice in one fist and thrusts them across the board. "Go. Your turn."

"How many turns is that now?" her opponent wonders, scowling down at Moira's forlorn yellow piece, where it languishes near his bare right foot. "That you've been stuck, I mean."

In response, Moira only rattles the dice in her fist, eager to shift the attention away from her incredible ability to defy all laws of chance and probability. Her opponent, meanwhile, continues to consider her piece when an idea dawns, with painful slowness, on his face.

"Wait," he realizes too late. "You gotta zoombox, right?"

"Can you just–" Moira pleads helplessly, thrusting the dice at him again and shaking them back and forth with even more fervor.

"You do," he says, pointing to the pitiful collection of plastic pieces assembled at Moira's feet. The faded orange one he indicates is certainly meant, in some child's fancy, to resemble a starship's engine. "Trade in a zoombox, you hate being stuck so bad."

"When I require your opinion–" she starts to snarl.

"Like, am I wrong?" he seems to ask the whole mess hall. "Can you not trade in a zoombox to escape the Stickyslick?"

"When I require your opinion," repeats Moira, with gentle insistence, "I will shoot myself in the head."

"Okay, sure," her opponent agrees, obviously unaware of what he was agreeing to, "but if you trade in a zoombox, you can–"

"Because," Moira snaps, yanking back her fist to keep from punching him in his stupid face, "it's an unacceptable risk. Look at your fucking position on the board." She points that same furious fist at various areas across the board. "You're sitting there, within pissing distance of the Launchpad, and he's–" she adds, jabbing her thumb to the side, towards the figure hunkered behind the atmosphier, "–right blooming behind."

When he still somehow doesn't take her meaning, she spiderwalks her pointer and middle fingers across the board, spelling out the mental math with exaggerated slowness. "If I sacrifice my zoombox, then I gotta schlep my sorry ass one-two-three-four–," she continues counting, staring angry electroblades at him the entire time, "–seven-eight-nine spaces all the way back here and, I don't know, suck this guy's fucking dick for a pair of smiley faces."

Her opponent's eyes follow her angry pointing towards "this guy". The faded cartoon depiction of Speedy Sprog, a frilled Akishi caricature of a chipper junk dealer, beams back up at him.

"Smiley faces I've been mysteriously unable to roll for what, four turns now?" She finishes by once again jabbing the dice angrily outward, a gesture that's more than half a too-short punch thrown at his face. "Make sense?"

"Mysteriously?" A breeze of sudden offense blows through Moira's opponent and straightens his spine. "The fuck does mysteriously mean?"

"It means mysteriously, dipshit," Moira returns, with a snarl of equal strength. "It means that, statistically, it should be blooming child's play to summon two smiley faces on these dice and extricate my ass from this shithole. The math works out. But," she smiles bitterly, her eyes locking onto her opponent's enviable position near the game's goal, "for some reason, the numbers won't fucking cooperate."

"And?" he bates, an edge announcing itself in his voice.

"And how fucking convenient it is," Moira declares, unable fully to stop the rant, "that I can't budge for four whole turns, exactly enough time for somebody to get all their shit together and haul bloomhole over to the moons-forsaken Launchpad." She pauses, giving the idea adequate time to penetrate his famously thick skull. "Is what it means."

"That I'm cheating," is his blunt summary. "It means you're accusing me of cheating and we're back to square one."

"For the umpteenth time," the game's third player drones monotonously from where he squats behind the partially-disassembled atmosphier. "Game can't be cheated. Rules're too elementary. There's literally no way."

"Maybe you're not cheating, per se," Moira allows, the strength of her argument becoming more threadbare by the second, "but there's something you're fucking doing."

The rational portion of Moira's brain is all too aware how unhinged she sounds. Several times now they'd run the gauntlet on the aggravatingly simple rules that governed this game and how, from a technical standpoint, everyone playing the game was necessarily playing the game fairly.

The irrational portion of Moira's brain, however, howled from the sheer injustice of this whole farce. Try as she might to be cold and logical, she couldn't stop her rising rage at the thought that, with another good roll, this garden-variety idiot would thoroughly trounce Moira Quicksilver, master tactician, at a game of even such infantile strategy.

"I'm sitting here," that game's uncontested champion accurately proclaims, gesturing towards his crossed legs.

"You're too close," she immediately decides, sinking her teeth into the first theory, however implausible, that she can reach. "Maybe it's leaking down, your bad juju or fucking whatever, and it's fucking with my turns."

To further sell this point, Moira reaches down, snatches the edge of the board and, with one hasty spin, twists the entire game one-hundred-and-eighty degrees around. When the dust settles, most of the tokens have rolled away, the board's in general disarray but at least Moira's own token is safe from his poisonous influence.

Far from even perturbed by Moira's sudden tantrum, her cocksure opponent calmly collects his token and plants it delicately down before the Launchpad, on the cusp of another victory. "You wanna know what I think?"

"No," is Moira's only response.

"I think you're a sore loser is what," is his big theory, simply put. "I think we found a game that you can't puzzle out from every fucking angle and therefore suck at. I think that because I'm winning and you're losing, that I've gotta be cheating or have bad juju or something." He leans forward, as though to share some trade secret he doesn't want his saltbrother, still easily within earshot, to learn. "I think, truth is, Nemo rules and Moira drools."

The next sensation Moira appreciates is Righty, her cherished Lawman revolver, weighty in her right hand and aimed unerringly at his tiny green token, where it stands before the Launchpad. All her instincts urge her to pull the trigger, to atomize the wooden token and so too his chances of winning, of beating her again. Something, a nostalgic nagging, keeps her trigger finger frozen stiff.

The trigger finger of Nehel Morel, 34th Galactic Menace, however, merely points towards the board's missing corner. In its place, there's only a blackened scorch mark, Righty's handiwork from three games past, and the final resting place of his original indigo token.

Her violent impulse stunted, Moira instead pitches the dice cattily across at Nemo and, with a twist of her wrist, returns shamed Righty to its shoulder holster. She then hunkers down all the more, determined to brood over her dilemma until she devised some miracle strategy to prove Nemo humiliatingly wrong.

Four consecutive turns Moira's spent mired in the Stickyslick. To her obsessively analytical eye, the arbitrary "jail" construct, meant to represent an oil spill, served no mechanical function that Moira could divine, save to punish unlucky rollers. Here she'd been entrenched, utterly powerless to compete, her freedom contingent on a laughably easy roll. By now, the face of Oily Ozko, the Slick's buffonishly grinning Zourim mascot, looks less cartoonish and insipid and more sinister and conspiratorial.

Nemo and Odisseus, meanwhile, had run roughshod over the rest of the board. Rolling regular – or suspiciously favorable, in Nemo's case – results, they were free to gallivant across the game and assemble their miniature plastoleium spaceships with impunity.

When compared to those of her opponents, Moira's own spaceship is hardly recognizable as same. It rests unsteadily before her black leather wingtip, a barren wedge of outer hull, missing half the shiny doodads and worthless gewgaws that adorn the completed vessels of both her crewmates.

Nemo's ship, by comparison, positively bristles from all its brightly colored plastic attachments – the orange zoombox, the green steerstick, the pink electrozapper. During the first playthrough, they'd all, Odisseus the hardest, scoffed at these ludicrous names for things as pedestrian as engine, yoke and turret. Now, over a dozen games in, the whirlywheel was a vital ship's component not to be mocked or gainsaid.

Moira's outlook, therefore, is bleak. Unless she could magically transport her sorry token from captivity, pay profitable visits to Dizzy Dnara, Wacky Wooxer and Pretty Pyzema and arrive first to the Launchpad, Moira Quicksilver would lose this, her fifteenth game, of Silly, Silly Scrapyard.

One victory is all Moira truly wants. She wants, one time, to snatch the knowing smile from the Galactic Menace's face and crush it underfoot. She's desperate to prove that her superior tactical mind has bearing in all situations, even within the confines of this literal game for children.

It was Odisseus who originally unearthed the game. Apparently smuggled aboard by one of the Lover's enigmatic previous owners, the Ortok stumbled across the pasteboard box behind a wall panel in the galley, wedged between two rotary pipes he needed access to.

To judge by the date of copyright, Moira surmised it to be nothing but a mothballed relic from a bygone age of entertainment, that queer gap between the proliferations of space travel and holotechnology.

At first, perhaps from some superstitious dread of the thing, they'd roundly shunned its cheery colors and heartfelt promises of "Fun For Ages 4+". Then, as the mind-numbing tedium of their situation settled in and their individual activities lost their luster, morbid curiosity demanded they pity the poor pathetic game one ironic play. Now, fully ensorceled by its dark power, they gambled thousands of credits, brooded overlong upon its lack of strategy and even brandished weapons – all at the behest of their new god, Silly, Silly Scrapyard.

The game's infantile "narrative" would see each of its players marooned on a junkworld the back of the box straightfacedly named Trashax. To free themselves from the hellish nightmare that is actual gameplay, players wander the board in search of pretend junk dealers willing to sell them pretend ship's parts that they might fly their pretend spaceships off this pretend planet.

The undisputed overlord of this perverse universe are its custom dice. Basic mathematics deemed too dense a concept for the game's target audience, the dice were stamped with, rather than numbers, either smiley, frowny or grumpy faces.

With only seven potential outcomes, any tactical element the game might have had went straight out the window and all play was governed by the sheer luck of the dice. Luck that, in defiance of all reason and good sense, went unanimously to Nemo's victory, time after time, game after game.

How she had blasphemed against their new god of pastimes, Moira knew not but, if all her devotions couldn't conjure her one damn smiley face, she would apostate herself in the privacy of the pantry and enjoy a good long sulk.

For all the tumultuous emotions that roil just beneath Moira's surface, Nemo continues to look positively chipper. That's not to say, Moira amends, that he doesn't look like a shipwreck, as they all no doubt d0, each in their own personalized way.

The longer their marooning drags on, the more his black mane slowly saturates with filth and grease before Moira's very eyes. Time and neglect conspire to grow him a great black beard that, in his contrary way, he'd become quite taken with, thinking it only increased his resemblance to a dread pirate of old.

Unlike his cherished swashbuckling archetype, he wears baggy sweats and a novelty t-shirt. The latter is a natty, booze-stained affair that once, in an earlier epoch, read "My Captain Joined The Freebooter Fleet And All I Got Was This Lousy Shirt." To everyone's continued disgust, he now keeps his feet habitually bare, his toenails appalling.

The finishing touch of this entire ensemble is, of course, that accursed bathrobe. Weeks of continuous exposure to Nehel Morel's repulsive lifestyle had quickly worn the silken garment into beige tatters, threadbare and ragged at the edges. Moira imagines the Duuthese wise-women who wove that robe from precious xasana silk throwing themselves from their mountainous retreats to see the state of their handiwork now.

The monogramed pocket, with the initials "GM" in graceful cursive, endured, though, and therefore so did Nemo's love of the ratty thing.

It's his eyes and his demeanor that don't seem to understand the look the rest of him is going for. Unbothered by Moira's childish chucking of the dice, he calmly collects them from where they're scattered, an anticipatory smile growing on his lips.

"You gonna go," cues Moira after a moment, impatience coming to a head, "or...?"

She follows Nemo's halfhearted point to the side. "It's Odi's turn."

"A second," grumbles the Ortok, further speech impossible with the row of rivets gripped in his whiskered jaws. The machine he operates on, the remote atmosphier, is partially undressed, with several of its thermosteel plates left revealingly open and their rivets missing. Thankfully, the cumbersome device continues to churn as the Ortok makes the necessary repairs somewhere beneath its metallic skirts.

It's Moira's unvoiced opinion, however, that the atmosphier's actually in perfect condition, as evinced by its continued humming, and Odisseus was only disassembling the thing for the yuks. Normally, of course, Moira couldn't be bribed to care how the ship's mechanic whiled away his personal time. When the particular device he puttered with was the only thing keeping the three of them breathing, however, then Moira became perhaps a smidgen more concerned.

With the ship's primary power deactivated, life support – oxygen, atmospheric pressure, temperature and running water – all became the burden of Odisseus to provide and maintain. To this end, he employed a fleet of battery-powered auxiliary systems that, to Moira's eye, resembled nothing so much as speakers and subwoofers. As long as they were each kept running smoothly, however, this small corner of the Lover would remain – at least temporarily – habitable.

This, of course, made the sight of the atmosphier in pieces all the freakier.

According to Odisseus, this is unfortunately the only way to perform its routine maintenance. By shifting its internal components around and always keeping the motor running, Odisseus could replace the filters, check the wiring, reseal some loose caulking and, as long as they were all careful, nobody need turn purple and die. His first and only joke about everybody holding their breath while he worked was poorly received.

Seconds drag on. The Ortok, unperturbed, continues puttering about through the atmosphier's innards. A throat is cleared.

"This counts as a pass, right?" Nemo attempts to bargain with Moira from across the board. He raises one reasonable hand in a vote. "All in favor?"

"Aye," agrees Moira.

"Wanna asphyxiate?" proposes Odisseus instead, hooking a significant looking wire with his pointer claw and yanking far enough away from the atmosphier to stretch it taut. "No? Then, how's about we all hold onto our moons-damned jetboosters a minute and lemme finish."

The look of frenzied desperation in the Ortok's eye, the same look one would find in the wide eye of a suicide bomber, doesn't leave much room for negotiation. All Moira can do to kill the time is sit quietly and wait for Odisseus to take his turn. All the while, her resentment at the unfairness of the universe seethes within her. What's all the more galling to Moira is how little of a shit the Ortok seems to give about the game in general, when compared to her simmering ball of obsession and paranoia.

Durig most of the dozen of so games they'd played, Odisseus remained solidly in the middle of pack, performing admirably but unremarkably. With only a handful of wins under his belt, it's clear that the Ortok plays more to stave off the mounting heights of boredom than to stoke the flames of competition. Barring some divine intervention, however, Odisseus was nearly as likely to walk away the victor as Moira was, mired in the Stickyslick.

Why not simply pass the turn then, wonders Moira, as her wait grows all the more onerous with each passing second. When Odisseus is finally ready to return his attentions to the board, Moira's two seconds away from lodging one of Lefty's canisters in his beloved atmosphier and sentencing everyone aboard to a slow, gasping death.

The Ortok straightens his spine, waddles the atmosphier a few feet out of his way and receives the dice from Nemo. He then proceeds to rub his paws together and consider the board and everyone's position, squinting down like a nearsighted old man to better view the situation.

Despite his doddering posture, these days Odisseus resembles more and more the unthinking beast that most of the galaxy mistakes him for. Like Nemo's own unruly hair, the Ortok's thick pelt is shaggier by a factor of ten these days, causing him to constantly brush fur from his eyes with a swipe of his claws. His mouthful of fangs, whenever Moira does glimpse them, have all been yellowed by plaque and malaise.

At the moment, he's even unclipped his customary toolbelt and left it strewn nearby, increasing his resemblance to some naked animal all the more.

This is all undercut, Moira supposes, by the tiny set of smiley face dice he clutches in his padded paw. His paw opens, the three dice jostle against each other and then crash onto the board. Everyone's eyes follow them, eager to see what pointless result they'll turn up.

Three smiley faces.

An identical look is traded back and forth, from Nemo to Moira and Moira to Odisseus. Everyone continues to scowl in confusion as the mechanic reaches his paw towards his red figurine. Pinching it between his foreclaws, Odisseus counts each square from Dizzy Dnara and her pile of shiny steersticks to the same square Nemo's token occupies, on the threshold of the Launchpad.

This done, the Ortok then hovers his paw uncertainly above his figurine. He glances at Moira, the unofficial arbiter of the game's sparse rules. "Triples means I get to–"

Moira nods dumbly. "Yep."

A slave to these unpredictable circumstances, Odisseus scoops up the grinning dice, shakes them amid the stunned silence of the mess hall and throws his congratulatory roll.

Somehow, Moira's heightened sense of irony detects the Ortok's victory before the dice even land. She catches a brief glimpse of the smiles as they bounce past her, mocking her with their cheeriness. The sickening feeling of retribution denied washes over her as the dice skid to a stop, perfectly for the Captain's perusal.

One grumpy face, two smiley faces.

"I win," Odisseus mutters. "Huh."

A confused Nemo keeps staring downward, still attempting to squeeze some meaning from the dice cast before him, like an auger who disagrees with the innards he's just smeared through the dust.

"You cheated," he resolves at last, under his breath.

"I'll be in the pantry," Moira decides violently, rising immediately from her crouch.

Before anyone can object or demand she help disassemble the game, she stalks away, stomping across the ruinous squalor of the mess hall, and makes for the ship's pantry. What trash she encounters – dry food packaging, dishes weeks unwashed and loose articles of discarded clothing – on her unwavering way, Moira swats aside, kicks away and stomps on, anything to cover the sound of her squabbling crewmates behind her.

The mess hall of The Unconstant Lover is a sty.

Silly, Silly Scrapyard's improvised arena had been erected on a circumstantial scrap of bare floor in the mess hall's starboard corner. To reach the pantry, Moira must cross the entire breadth of the large chamber and navigate the cluttered wasteland that three weeks of marooning had inevitably created.

First, she must weave between the three fold-up couches that Nemo's colonized into another one of his nests – all blankets, booze bottles and orphaned Noxix holodiscs. In deference to the mattress he'd been provided, the Captain preferred, in his selfless way, to pollute an ostensibly public space with his filth, lounging around there like some vagabond duke.

Secondly, Moira crosses through the galley, less a functioning kitchen in these bleak times and more a forlorn monument to what meals not lukewarm might once have tasted like. To encourage honesty, Moira's arranged all their rations across the Ujad mahogany dining table, with everything plainly in the public eye. The galley's sink, the counters and everywhere else so overflow with dirty dishes that even the deactivated chiller has been stuffed and stacked with the revolting things, its door hanging slightly ajar.

Lastly, before she can reach the pantry and blessed privacy, Moira passes through the bank of chugging machinery that's keeping everyone alive. To her port, the torridity unit thrums and vibrates with barely contained fury, appearing always to be on the very verge of exploding. To her starboard, the inertial hub is substantially calmer but even Moira feels her movements become noticeably sluggish, so close to the artificial gravity generator.

In the moment before she manually slides open the pantry door, she glances over her shoulder, back towards the chiller and the great green timepiece that's magnetized there.

16.46 hours remain. Moira makes a mental note.

Inside the pantry, it's utterly dark, the automatic light meeting a similar fate to the automatic door control. Not that Moira minds. She savors each moment of darkness as another moment she doesn't have to look at her depressing-as-fuck surroundings or her aggravating-as-fuck companions. She understands the exact dimensions of the pantry – its empty shelves, its sparse furnishings – well enough to seat herself without groping blindly in the dark.

Following an early incident of thievery, all the actual food was emptied from the pantry and subjected to Moira's new rationing regime. All that remains now is the one cargo crate, jury-rigged into a makeshift toilet. Via a complex series of secondary depressurizing tubes and a funnel that vent the waste into open space, Odisseus had managed to cobble together an inelegant, if effective, lavatory for their use.

More importantly, the pantry served double duty as a de facto rage chamber. This is where Moira is forced to come whenever her fiercely introverted nature demands four solid teltriton walls between her and her confederates.

Here, Moira is resolved to sweat out what few hours remain until their forthcoming rescue.

The Unconstant Lover drifts lifelessly through deep space. For twenty-one days, seven hours and sixteen minutes, she and her desperate crew have awaited a passing ship to discover and deliver them from this waking nightmare. To better conserve the ship's power during this interval, the crew has sequestered themselves within the mess hall and kept themselves alive through remote auxiliaries – the atmosphier, the torridity unit, the inertial hub and suchlike.

Week one was cramped and messy but novel. Week two was claustrophobic and damn near macabre, the novelty now a fond memory. Week three, with a combined weight of over 500 consecutive hours quarantined inside the Lover's mess hall with only scumbag motherfuckers for company, was enough to make Moira Quicksilver think soothing thoughts of a double murder-suicide.

Planted on the edge of the crate, Moira spends a few moments to regulate her breathing, to regain her composure. She'd spent years taming this part of her personality, the bratty teenager she long ago suffocated to survive in the big, bad universe – and now it was reading its ugly head again.

Moira Quicksilver, bounty hunter, professional killer and the most dangerous woman in the galaxy, would not allow her ironshod demeanor to be fractured and compromised because she lost a board game.

The truth Moira works hard to deny is that she was compromised weeks ago. A creature of brittle habit is Moira Quicksilver, shaped to her current form by rigorous routine and slavish devotion to detail. A single grain of sand in her inner workings could dislodge Moira completely.

To share such an enclosed space with two she so despised was, to her, akin to dumping all the deserts of Waveen into Moira's mental clockwork.

She could and would rise above this, of course. She would recuperate here, recharge her batteries and enamel herself with a fresh coat of impenetrable armor she before braved the mess hall and its noxious company again. If possible, she would wile away what time remains to her, until one of their bladders demanded she give up her death grip on the shared bathroom.

To this end, Moira empties her mind, keeps her breathing steady and permits time to drip by unquestioned. In that small space, Moira carves a square of control amid a storm of circumstances far beyond her power.

Then her stomach rumbles.

To Moira's credit, she staves off her hunger for what feels like an admirable length of time. With only darkness and silence to distract her, however, she's nothing to dwell on but her own growling stomach. Try though she might, matter eventually wrestles down mind and Moira discovers herself standing and reaching for the door handle.

When she does emerge, at the absolute end of her willpower, her blinking eyes first land upon Odisseus' timepiece, to see precisely how much time she's whittled away in her exile.

16.31 hours remaining, it reads – 14 stupid minutes.

"Since when?" the voice of Nemo wonders petulantly from somewhere to Moira's right.

"Since always, Nemo," Odisseus informs him with a strangled sigh. "Since the beginning of time."

The mess hall only adds to Moira's growing ennui by looking virtually unchanged. In a quarter of an hour, her crewmates have hardly moved an inch. Nemo's relocated three feet and onto the couch, whereas Odisseus has returned to his previous work on the disemboweled atmosphier. Neither of them even turn to acknowledge her entrance; they only continue their traditional bickering apace.

"Ah, you're full of shit," Nemo decides, crunching into a ball of dry Jowna. After an eternity of spattering himself with tiny noodle fragments, Moira thanks the moons that he's now learned the trick of eating his meals over his dinted cooking pot, to better catch all the crumbs.

"I am not," Odisseus is firm. "I did too provide all the dishware and crockery. You told me to empty my entire apartment on Vollok, remember? That I wasn't ever coming back and might as well bring everything?"

Her stomach at least Moira could satisfy, if not necessarily her need for seclusion.

Ten strides takes Moira to the great wooden circle of the dining room table. In line with to her rigorous doctrine, all its wares were strictly compartmentalized, by crewmember and date, into prescribed little sections. She spends a few seconds straightening – stacking piles that have collapsed, scooching packages about – and auditing – mentally doublechecking everyone's remaining supply, to ensure no one's pilfering again. This done, she's free to peruse what's left of today's options.

She could choose from either dry Jowna noodles or canned Gitterpeaches in syrup.

Or, Moira supposes, she could risk the deep freeze.

"Okay," Nemo relents, when faced with cold, hard historical fact, "but it's my pot. Everybody knows that."

"It's your pot," explains Odisseus, "because you stole it."

Nemo scowls, taking his stand against Odisseus' superior logic. "That's not the way I remember it." He pauses, waiting for the Ortok's cue, which never comes. "The way I remember it," he continues all the same, "it was a loan."

To reach the deep freeze, Moira must first cross the wilderness of garbage that's accumulated across the mess hall's teltriton floor. Guided more by muscle memory than sight, she picks her path carefully between the heaps and hills of detritus. To circumvent around Nemo's claimed couches, she must pass within a nose's reach of Odisseus. As she does, she catches one sustained whiff of his signature musk and nearly gags. Three weeks of unwashed Ortok is about as unpleasant a smell as Moira's ever experienced and she works hard to keep her expression neutral as she passes close by.

She really can't blame Odisseus, denied access to soap and running water like the rest of them.

Truth be told, Moira's frequently thankful of the lack of mirrors within the Lover's galley, considering how horrific her own hygiene's become under these dire circumstances. Like Odisseus' unshorn pelt, Moira's hair, normally kept almost invisibly short in a harsh military buzz, is approaching dangerous levels of length as well, giving Moira actual resistance when she runs her hand across her scalp. Moons only knew how her teeth must look or how rancid she too must smell.

"Well, exactly," snorts an exasperated Odisseus. "A loan implies that you eventually return the pot."

"And sure," Nemo grants with a shrug, seeing his opening. "Someday I will."

"Who's full of shit now?"

"You don't even need it, that's the thing," complains Nemo between bites of his noodle ball. "This's become like, my primary Jowna pot. If it's suddenly your pot again, then where the fuck'm I gonna cook my Jowna?"

"A different fucking pot?" suggests Odisseus helpfully. "One that's not already mine?"

Moira moves, as quickly and as quietly as she can, past the bickering saltbrothers, for she wished no part in their ongoing quarrel over absolutely nothing. Fresh from her pacifying sojourn in the pantry, Moira Quicksilver had since risen herself above all this squalor and depravity. She refuses, not for the first time, to stoop to their level.

Before long, she arrives at her destination – the mess hall's main entrance. Resisting the impulse to reach for the automated door control, Moira instead slides back the panel to access the manual latch. With one smooth motion, she uncouples the latch, cracking the doors imperceptibly apart and sending the first wisps of arctic cold whistling through the hall.

"Name one thing," demands Nemo, turning to face his sparring partner, "you've ever even cooked with–"

Moira plants her feet and shoves the mess hall doors open wide.

No matter how much she prepared herself, the unbelievable cold of deep space always stole the breath straight from her lungs. Moira stands dumbstruck a moment, while nearly subzero temperatures wash over and around her to snake their way into the cozy mess hall. Both Odisseus and Nemo react audibly, at this sudden invasion of forces so frigid.

"Bloom me–"

"Moons alive, woman!"

Ignoring their protests, Moira buries her hands in her armpits and strides into the deep freeze.

In the case of total systems failure, The Unconstant Lover engaged all its emergency bulkheads, one after another. Spaced at strategic points throughout the vessel, the bulkheads would, in the unlikely event of a hull breach, seal tight and hope to prevent the vacuum of space from sucking any unfortunate crewmember to an icy, gasping death.

When the Lover lost power amidst the Kzelos Cloud and her crew made their last stand in the mess hall, a small section of the betweendecks corridor, a functionless square of twenty-foot hallway, became their cold storage. The freezing death of interstellar space was only kept at bay by the Briza's triple-thick hull. The crew, therefore, could take only seconds-long excursions into the deep freeze, to retrieve their frozen food items, before suffering lasting damage.

Unsafe and impractical, this method was still preferable, in Moira's mind, to eating nothing but dried goods, day in and day out, for three weeks straight.

With one shuffling stride, Moira reaches the stacked pile of goodies designated for her and retrieves the nearest one. Hustling back to the mess hall's safety, she works quickly to yank closed the doors, secure the latch and seal in the remaining heat.

When Moira turns, she's greeted by the ornery expressions of her comrades, Nemo peeking out from beneath a threadbare blanket and Odisseus seeking refuge behind the couch.

"Do you mind?" wonders Nemo significantly.

In his bestial way, Odisseus grumbles something in coherent about "the torridity unit" before rising to his hind paws and wandering over in that direction.

Moira's response involves nothing but her middle finger. She threads a path between the portside couch and the overworked torridity unit, her frozen prize wrapped tightly in her sweater sleeve.

Her back is technically turned when Odisseus, also on his way to the torridity unit, loses his balance and she therefore doesn't see exactly what got underfoot. To judge from the skirring and clattering sound of tiny pieces of plastolieum, sounds that herald the enormous whump, the Ortoki cursing and the scattering of loose garbage, she can make an educated guess.

"All the moons," he pleads to no one, clambering back onto his hind paws. Once he's upright, Moira can hear him huffing and puffing, daring anyone to comment or challenge.

Nemo, an insensitive prick as a rule, snorts.

Rather than turn and gawk at the infuriated and embarrassed Ortok, Moira swings a booted leg over her mattress, sits heavily upon the saggy springs and examines her prize.

The tiny round tin chills Moira's bare skin as she reaches to crank it open. Its emblem of a moustachioed fop greedily stuffing his face with food curls and crinkles and the smell of cured fish-eggs rises to her nose, her stomach growling insistently.

This far from the Inner Sectors, high quality caviar is impossible to come by. Bathtub quality caviar, however, could be found at affordable prices on every supermarket shelf across Bad Space. Gourmet Gorgers, an especially classless brand of grocery store garbage, made their millions by peddling Inner Sector delicacies – caviar, escargot, peki macaw – as cheap canned goods to the ignorant Outer Ring palette.

While Moira may long ago have strangled the prissy little Inner Sector rich bitch she once was, there were certain aspects of her former life – her fondness for fancy foods among them – that she couldn't exactly extinguish. Running away from home, of course, meant Moira was forced to abandon most niceties, top shelf caviar among them. Out here, in the lawless black, Gourmet Gorgers was as close as she could come to the genuine article, for an occasional skinny dip in the waters of childhood nostalgia.

Silverware is another nicety that Moira, in her current circumstances, could not afford. Pressing the freezing cold tin against her lips, she tilts her head back and allows a generous helping to roll into her mouth. All the while, she does her level best to isolate and ignore everything else – particularly the argument in full bloom behind her – and doesn't quite succeed.

When no one does comment or challenge Odisseus after his spill, the Ortok seems to feel the need to cue them. "Well?" he demands.

Someone, presumably the Captain, inserts a titanic pause in the conversation here, failing to suss out that he's being spoken to. "Well, what?" he finally relents.

This is followed by an additional pause, long enough for the Ortok to be properly flabbergasted. "Can we, if we're finished playing the game, put the fucking thing away? So people don't need to trip over it?"

Moira doubles down, fighting the instinct to make the suggestion that's brimming on the surface of her brain. She shakes the caviar tin back and forth instead, to wrest loose those persistent eggs that always stick to the bottom.

"Well," Nemo contradicts for contradiction's sake, clearly bored of the argument already, "what if I wanna play another game?"

The triumphant Odisseus snorts. "Do you?"

Moira's scooping the individual eggs from the sides of the tin with a sticky finger when her better angels call it quits. She half-turns, peering over her shoulder at both sides of the argument from where she squats on her mattress.

"I mean," she starts to volunteer, to her eventual chagrin. "I'd play another game."

CHAPTER 2

Odisseus swims in his sleep.

The open ocean wheels wide all around him, an indigo immensity that promises no corners, no seams, no restrictive walls, no matter which way he swims. To add more speed, the Ortok cracks his mighty tail back and forth, stronger than a starship's jetbooster at full throttle. To steer and twist and somersault, he extends his paws, hind and fore, with webbed digits splayed, performing unnecessary and thrilling aquabatics on every whimsical impulse.

To be somehow transported to the pristine seas of his homeworld, to be dropped back into his native element with a splash, Odisseus feels weightless, of body and of soul.

A dark streak snakes past on Odisseus' right. With a flash of instinct, both swimmers peel away from their previous trajectories to inspect one another. Both are sleek of fur, long of tail and perfectly maneuverable beneath the waves. Odisseus recognizes the blotchy pattern of white fur on his counterpart's throat as that of an ally, a trusted comrade, a hunting partner. The pair of Ortoks spin quick underwater circles around each other, nipping and playing, before both rocket onward again.

A greater purpose than horseplay brings them together in these waters.

Speeding off in opposite directions, the epicenter of their circular swimming is a vast sphere of swirling, undulating, shimmering silver. What, at a casual glance, would first appear to be one great gelatinous creature is, instead, thousands of smaller ones – a populous shoal of coastal fish, all swimming and swerving with one mind. As he races along its curvature, Odisseus can occasionally make out individual members of the school. They are dreamfish, a vague composite of a dozen different species that defy precise description.

A favorite tactic among juvenile Ortok, shoaling gave inexperienced hunters an opportunity to snag a catch equal to their small strength. More importantly, it taught the Ortoki the value of teamwork and allowed them to practice their swimming and pursuing skills. By working in concert, the young hunters coordinate and trap the fish in a smaller and smaller sphere of water, taking turns making strafing runs and diving through their dense ranks.

As adults, they'd be unchallenged, in all their homeworld's wide oceans, at this tactic. As juveniles, they need to make quick work of the shoal, less a predator larger and more voracious be attracted by all the schooling prey.

Odisseus makes a complete circuit several more times, brushing up against and weaving between his fellow Ortoks again and again. All the while, Odisseus savors what sensations he can from the rich supply of nostalgia the ocean holds for him. He savors the freezing water that slides off the slick strands of his specialized fur. He savors the salty taste of brine on his muzzle and whiskers. Most of all, he savors the company of those like him, of fellow Ortoks, of creatures of his own description, outlook and experience.

Together, the ocean's greatest hunters press the shoal tighter and tighter together, forcing them ever upward and towards the surface. With the only the lapping waves above them and a pack of hungry Ortoks below, the school of dreamfish are trapped, frenzied with panic. One by one, his fellow Ortok take their turns, diving through the sphere and bursting out the opposite side, meals clenched in their fangs.

Then his turn comes.

Odisseus swoops directly below the shoal and then blasts directly upward. The fish peel away before him, forming a bubble of empty water all around the charging Ortok. Momentarily blinded by the movement of shining scales, Odisseus snaps out once, twice, three times with savage bites. To no avail, however, as the dreamfish go darting past so swiftly he can't gain purchase on a single one. Before he realizes what's happening, the water grows instantly lighter and lighter and he's bursting through the sun-dappled surface and into the open air.

All the rules of physics change in that instant. Surrounded by droplets of shining spray, all the Ortok's momentum drains and he starts to drop, slowing to a crawl, back into the churning water below. For an instant, Odisseus is granted a vision of his homeworld, as once he'd seen the place, unspoiled, in his youth.

Of course he surfaces during that magic hour of sunset, which paints the planet's waters and skies in radiant purples and greens and oranges. Infinite ocean stretches in a panoramic view, all rising and falling waves as far as the eye can see. The only break comes from the odd landmass that dots the horizon, idyllic islands unmarred by industry or machine.

For the laughs, he spins a happy axel in the air, filled with the ecstasy of his own freedom, of this return to his primal existence.

"When evil men flee the law!"

A scowl comes appears on the Ortok's blissful face. The disembodied voice – half sung, half growled – is so fundamentally at odds with his current surroundings, Odisseus can't begin to pinpoint its source of origin.

"There's only one man that you can call!"

A supremely confused Odisseus drops heavily back into the ocean, amid the teeming chaos of a thousand terrified fish.

Sinking his proverbial teeth deep into the fantasy, Odisseus tries his damndest to sink his literal teeth into one of the hundreds of speeding fish that go tearing away from him as he smacks back into the water. Within seconds, he's free from the roiling shoal, a target acquired, and they spiral deeper and deeper into the muted blue nothing that spans away beneath them.

Behind him somewhere, his hunting partners make their own runs against what remains of the shoal but Odisseus only has eyes for this one fleeing fish. The dreamfish ducks and weaves, its tailfin flapping fiercely this way and that, swimming for its very life. All the while, Odisseus gains and gains, confident that if he can only catch this prey, he can remain here, remain in these sacred waters a little while longer.

"He's Quuilar!" insists the gravelly voice, accompanied now by a raucous underpinning of twangy rock-and-roll. "Noxix!" Even underwater, the invading melody is somehow not muffled or muted in any way; if anything, it's become all the louder, blotting out the dreamscape the more and more urgent it grows.

Desperate to stay within the dream, Odisseus extends his neck and lashes out with his fangs at the rabbiting fish. It remains elusive, tauntingly just beyond the Ortok's reach. His prey so near and yet so far, Odisseus is overtaken by the swelling theme song.

"And he wants you..." the singer sustains, stretching out that last word through a rising crescendo. As he does, the fabric of the dream's reality stretches and tears in half, the shoal and the fish and all that gorgeous ocean replaced in an instant by blinding yellow light.

Odisseus snorts awake. One by one, his senses come cascading back to him, in order of importance. He smells stale sweat, spoiled food and the stench of animosity. He feels the lumps and crumpled springs of his depressingly familiar mattress beneath his bulk. He sees a hazy vision of the mess hall's ceiling, its flickering lights unforgiving and garish.

"Dead or alive!" he hears, the completion of that theme song, much tinnier now and unforgivably loud in this enclosed space.

"Do you not," Odisseus moans towards the ceiling, throwing his body this way and that on his mattress, "have blooming earjacks?"

"I stepped on them," Nemo admits, from somewhere within his ring of couches. "They're broke now."

Unwilling or unable to contest this argument, Odisseus responds with nothing but feral snarlings that even he would be hard pressed to translate. He rolls as far away from the theme song as he can and claws desperately at the threads of dream so cruelly torn from him.

For the first time in over a decade, dreams of his homeworld visit Odisseus. Not since that aimless year of his youth, misspent wandering the galaxy in search of his truant saltbrother was the Ortok bothered by such memories. In truth, he hardly ever dreamt – if he did, they always faded to wisps of nothing upon waking. Even as he lies there, restless on his mattress, the details of this dream refuse to fade and instead remain crystal clear, if frustratingly out of reach.

Thoughts of those cool oceans, of those rocky shores, of those plentiful tidepools did not often trouble him. Ever since their imprisonment within the Lover's mess hall, however, and the return of these strange dreams, his mind would, given an idle moment, invariably wander back beneath that multicolored sky and among those cresting whitecaps.

To dwell on such a place and such a time was folly. Both were as bygone as his squandered youth. In his waking hours, Odisseus could set his mind to tasks, the many chores needed to keep all three of them alive.

His dreaming hours, however, could not be so easily tamed.

The longer he lies awake, the clearer it becomes to Odisseus that only by some moons-damned miracle would he return to peaceful sleep. The third episode of the fourth season of Quuilar Noxix Wants You Dead or Alive is now in full swing, after all, and the mess hall rings with the howling chorus of one of Jai Kai's famous windstorms. Odisseus knew, from repeated exposure, that the titular bounty hunter would, within minutes, catch first sight of his quarry and an even louder gunfight would soon ensue.

With a tortured sigh, the Ortok levers himself off his creaking mattress and makes the executive decision to be awake now, he supposes.

Taking in his surroundings again, Odisseus discover that the mess hall is, big surprise, still messy and a hall. Nemo's exactly where Odisseus left him, squirreled away on the couch, his face plastered with rapidly shifting colors from the HV he's watching within the voluminous folds of his blanket burrow. The row of machinery chugs along as always, thanklessly providing them all with fresh air, electricity and gravity, free of charge. The lambasted remains of Silly, Silly Scrapyard still lie scattered about the starboard corner, following Moira's most recent tantrum and her laying about with jackboots.

There's something different. Moira's nowhere to be found.

"She in the pantry, or...?" Odisseus wonders aloud, running claws through clumped and matted fur.

"Nah," Nemo answers, over the sounds of Dranab's narration. "Went for a walk, I think." He gestures vaguely in the direction of the sealed bulkhead.

"Ah."

"Oh, um." Nemo seems to realize who he's talking to, now waving vaguely towards the machinery in the far corner. "Something was making a weird noise. Maybe an hour ago."

Odisseus furrows his brow. "A weird noise."

"Yeah." Nemo nods sagely. "An hour ago."

With another sigh, the Ortok plants both hind paws beneath him and begins his slog across the hall to whichever device he can ascertain to be responsible.

He passes the galley and newly ingrained habit draws his eyes immediately to the chiller door. 3.69 hours remain, the clock informs him pleasantly – well within the margin of error. Their rescue is near-t0-hand, thank the moons.

The task of repairing the nine or ten machines that maintained their fragile existence here aboard the derelict Lover fell to Odisseus and all the other volunteers, namely no one. The best days, ironically, were those when something went wrong, something that required his immediate and drastic attention. Among those, any repairs or maintenance that the enormous molecular strip required were the Ortok's absolute favorite, as they necessitated his venturing out to the Lover's hold for some extreme privacy.

By contrast, the worst days were those, like today, when the whole makeshift ecosystem is running smoothly and without complaint.

Odisseus only manages to whittle about .52 of an hour, running diagnostics on the half a dozen machines, searching for Nemo's mysterious "weird noise." When he's finished and everything's back to peak efficiency, he discovers nothing troublesome or even out of the ordinary among them and still 3.17 hours remaining.

Odisseus is bored.

Instinct wanders the Ortok back towards his mattress and he catches a glimpse of his saltbrother's miniature screen as he trudges past. By now, Quuilar's rounding up his quarry's henchmen as furious winds blow all about him. Sensing his eyes over his shoulder, Nemo twists around to explain. "It's the one with the–"

"Doomsday cult," finishes Odisseus blandly, walking past without pause. "I remember."

In the moment before he flops back onto the springs, Odisseus' eye is caught by a tepid green light, blinking softly beneath his disheveled sheets. He unearths his handheld scanner, having gone to bed with the thing placed on the pillow, should its alert go off while he slept.

An uninspiring hunk of gunmetal gray, the scanner is a pretty primitive and therefore pretty reliable piece of technology. During these long weeks, the Ortok had taken to clutching the thing like a talisman. With its antennae fully extended, its colorless screen would render a low-resolution version of the ten dottibles surrounding the scanner, a respectable distance for so humble a device.

All Odisseus sees now, as he watches, are the other asteroids of the Kzelos Cloud, spinning inert circles around each other. Soon, in approximately 3.17 hours, a new dot would appear on the edges of the scanner and that unassuming green light would blink red.

That dot would represent an incoming spaceship and their salvation.

With literally nothing better to do, Odisseus makes a solemn pact. He will sit here and watch this scanner's screen until that new dot appears, whether he waits three hours or three hundred hours.

Odisseus watches the little light flash green and then green and then green.

Moira should be clomping heavily down the betweendecks corridor. In the vacuum of the deactivated Unconstant Lover, however, there's an eerie absence of the ordinary clomping sound one expects each time Moira's teltriton-soled graviton boot clangs against the deck plates. Under normal circumstances, these boots were burdensome and unpleasant to wear, a far cry from her beloved baby-stompers. Here, however, considering the ship's current weightlessness, she doesn't really notice. Moira would even go so far as to describe her gait as bouncy, despite all the extra pounds of exosuit.

To describe the betweendecks corridor as a true vacuum is somewhat inadequate. Dust is the primary occupant of this micro-atmosphere, the result of the ship sitting idle for a month and change. Every step she takes kicks up a fresh cloud and, seen through the triple beams of her HUD lights, Moira feels faintly that she's treading the undersea wreck of some sunken ship.

Excluding the pantry, the other, more extreme form of privacy Moira could seek out involves taking a spacewalk through the abandoned corridors of The Unconstant Lover. Donning and doffing the complete spacesuit may be a colossal pain in the bloomhole but, for three hours of very literal alone time, Moira considers the hassle more than worth the effort.

In her thickly-gloved hand, Moira carries one companion – a remote battery unit. Taken from the massive heap in the mess hall's port corner, these humble power packs were responsible for running everything currently working aboard the Lover, from the vitally important atmosphier to Nemo's vitally unimportant holovision.

Today's spacewalk is more than an idle stroll. Today, she went venturing into the main body of the derelict Lover with a purpose.

Along her route, Moira passes chambers she once thought pedestrian – the medbay, the crew dorms, the water closet – and peers inside them with renewed interest, after such a lengthy spell spent cloistered in the mess hall. When she reaches the corridor's main entrance, she opens the door by its manual hatch, a process made all the more cumbersome by her bulky metal suit.

Under these extreme conditions, the hold of The Unconstant Lover has become a massive undersea cavern, made murky by floating dust and so vast and voluminous that Moira, so accustomed to claustrophobic spaces, actually gasps a little. Her three spearheads of light pierce through the deep darkness as she gazes in half-awe at the comparatively huge chamber.

The hold, however, is not entirely unlit. The occasional blink from the molecular strip competes with Moira's lamp, illuminating the massive machine in the far corner.

The strip's central hub occupies easily a quarter of the Lover's expansive cargo hold, an ugly blob of corrugated machinery and mismatched piping approximately the size of a small building. It blinks sporadically from several indicator lights, bright enough to seem like beacons in the cargo hold's utter darkness. Even from where she stands, she can see the device's many leech-like tendrils of cable, snaking their way into the Lover's walls and drinking her systems dry.

There's an entire starship's worth of power, rerouted to this one machine, the one machine responsible for their current predicament.

Her errand doesn't lie with the molecular strip, however. Instead, she must climb a level higher, up to the abovedecks corridor. Normally, Moira would simply clomp her way up the companionway steps. This time, she favors a somewhat easier tactic.

As soon as she's stooped and disengaged the graviton boots, she instantly feels much lighter on her feet. In the zero gravity, a simple hop sends Moira floating straight into the air. She uses whatever's to hand to aid her ascent – unstowed cargo crates, the companionway railing, even the hold's massive riveted seams. In mere moments, she's reached the abovedecks landing, is quickly reactivating her graviton boots and muscling open the disabled doors.

The abovedecks corridor is much the same as the belowdecks one – dusty and deserted. There's no hope of the typically gorgeous view from the corridor's stretch of ceiling, the plexishield still completely obscured. Still, Moira takes the long way around to the sensor room anyway, just to re-experience this section of the ship that she'd practically forgotten about over the past few weeks.

Inside the sensor room is especially eerie. All the usually vibrant consoles and screens are dead and lifeless and devoid of all Abraham's trappings, the place looks that much more derelict. Somehow, when she cranks open the door, she expects to see the wizened old Grimalti, nursing his moonshine or his calabash pipe.

Instead, she finds the place simply empty and devoid of personality, its bones picked clean by its bygone navigator. Much as she misunderstood the fat bloke, she's surprised to discover that, on some buried and misguided level, she might miss him a little.

It takes her a few minutes to properly situate the remote battery, extend its cords into the appropriate plug-ins and run some rudimentary power into the ship's systems. It's not much juice, really; only enough to power some secondary comms and access a few of the basic feeds within reach.

This far from everything, the reception's pretty terrible and her choice of reroute points is very, very limited. Luckily for Moira, the information she's attempting to access isn't too hidden or exclusive – quite the opposite in fact. Long as one was within a few hundred zottibles of any feed-anchor, they could always tap into the Galaxy's Most Wanted feed.

Typing on one of the sensor room's lesser keypads with the exosuit's big bulky fingers is far from easy. It takes Moira several frustrating tries to input even the most basic of search terms. Soon as she has, she leans back, as though from great effort, and allows the dismal loading speed to take its sweet time in pulling up the data's she's requested.

All the ice that spins through the open space of the Kzelos Cloud makes this a laboriously slow process. Moira decides to kill the intervening time by wandering about the abovedecks corridor, exploring the Lover's nooks and crannies for a second time. She visits the warp room, the helm, her own quarters, even the gundeck, though the exosuit's a little too unwieldy for her to cram into her beloved topturret.

Ask anyone and they'll certainly tell you Moira Quicksilver's the least sentimental person in all of Bad Space. That said, should they all escape this ordeal alive, Moira vows never again to take these musty corridors and unkempt chambers for granted. Compared to the hateful mess hall, this cramped and disgusting spaceship is a veritable palace.

When she meanders her way back to the sensor room, the read-out she'd wanted is there, ready and waiting for her perusal. The reception's so poor, though, it makes even deciphering the thing an ordeal, even after she reaches up and disables her three-pronged headlight and its unhelpful glare.

Through the intermittent static, Moira comes eye-to-eye with her own image.

The mugshot's grievously out of date, taken aboard the HIN Surimiah nearly three years ago. The Moira Quicksilver in that holo – disgruntled, head recently shaved, spinning a full slow circle to exhibit her panoramic view – was about to embark on her first voluntary incarceration. Present day Moira's not really paying attention, however. She's more interested in her bounty posting.

She sighs to see all the zeroes stretching across the wavering screen. The hypothetical bounty hunter that could track down and apprehend Moira Quicksilver alive would be entitled to a bracing 1.2 million credits in hard currency from the Imperial Ministry of Interstellar Security. Should this prove too much of a nuisance or her too much of a threat to be kept alive, her corpse was still worth easily half as much to a dozen planetary governments, megacorps and even one sovereign kingdom.

The passage of time, it seems, has done nothing to dampen the galaxy's collective thirst for her blood. The reason behind this is painfully obvious, listed in accusatory red beneath her rap sheet's "Known Associates" column: Nehel "Nemo" Morel.

This she taps with a gloved finger and then stands waiting, for the sluggish computer to consider granting her feeble human request. Instead of meandering around the ship again, Moira continues to stare at her own bounty posting, caught suddenly in a brood of a very different color than her previous nostalgic one.

For nearly two years, Moira'd kept a consistent finger on this pulse, always wary for any change in their posted rewards and, by extension, the galaxy's general opinion of the Galactic Menace and his inner circle. Directly on the heels of the Trija Tragedy, The Unconstant Lover and her crew dove deep into hiding, intending to ride out this sudden wave of public animosity until the skies cleared a little. Bad Space's mercurial attention would flitter away, they were assured, and soon enough, they'd be free to resume some more discreet of business as usual.

It had turned out rather differently. Rather than fade from memory, the 34th Galactic Menace only grew in mystique, having disappeared without even a single stray thread to weave a satisfying ending to his tapestry. The Supreme Sovereignty's continued hunt told the galaxy he hadn't been slain or captured on Trija during the ill-fated kidnapping attempt. What's more, many of the scattered Freebooter Fleet could attest to his absence during the disastrous space battle that broke the piratical power.

He'd obviously escaped justice, the galaxy agreed, but to where?

For many months, the starways were choked with amateur bounty hunters and fortune-seekers, all pursuing their own crackpot theories about where the Lover might have gone to ground. The crew weathered this period blissfully unaware, safely hidden from detection around Kuzu Minor and cut off from all communications with the galaxy at large.

Occasionally, dwindling supplies or cabin fever would oblige them to very temporarily end their exile and rob some farflung Warp Junction. During these layovers, Moira always made a special point to keep tabs on the unfolding saga, eager to see whether their gamble would pay off and interest in the Galactic Menace would eventually wane.

When Nemo couldn't be even located, much less apprehended, the IMIS found themselves in a bind of their own making. Never, in the whole sordid history of the office, had a Galactic Menace eluded capture or death this long; there was no precedent to fall back on. The bounty, with nothing else to do, continued to grow and grow, while the public face of the IMIS shrank and shrank correspondingly.

Knowing their modus operandi as she did, Moira – and indeed much of the galaxy – saw the IMIS's solution for its Nemo dilemma coming a zottible away. Lo and behold, a few days after the bounty reached an astronomical new high – 13 million – a scruffy pirate flying a Briza Light Freighter, matching Nemo's and the Lover's descriptions, was suddenly arrested in a cathouse on Xhor.

The media hurricane that followed the arrest was not be fooled, however. The imposter was revealed as such in alarmingly short order, amid terrific scandal, and all the IMIS's carefully laid plans exploded spectacularly in their face. Not only was the true Nemo's fate or whereabouts unaccounted for, but by faking his capture with this lookalike, the Imperium had tacitly admitted they'd no hope of actually finding him.

In this fashion was Nemo's cult status catapulted into honest-to-moons legend. In the space of a year, his popularity swung wildly from public enemy all the way around to folk hero. To Bad Space's outlaw public, Nemo stood as the ultimate symbol of uncatchability. The Imperium, their image in tatters, had no choice but to continue offering the ever-climbing bounty, rather than suffer the shame and defeat of retracting it or appointing a new Menace.

Meanwhile, above Kuzu Minor, an oblivious Nemo lounged around in his spunky underpants, ate junk food and scratched his asscrack.

Gleaned through headlines and bounty postings, Moira saw the galactic underworld morph and adapt to the Menace's departure. She saw the Freebooter Fleet scattered, chased into the woods by bounty-privateers and Imperium task forces. She saw Huong Xo annihilated, their leadership slain in some unspecified gangland beef, their holdings and interests dispersed. She saw the meteoric rise of one Garrock Brondi as smuggler kingpin, his operation expanding ever outward from the Offchart Territories and his reputation as canny businessman growing to match.

Without Nehel Morel around, even Bad Space quickly fell into something almost resembling peace and quiet.

In comes that holo, the same one bounty hunters all across known space had long studied, looking for some hidden clue or insight that would point to the Menace's location. Nemo's holographic likeness is a cheerful one, favoring the Surimiah's detention crew with a toothy grin. Not much has changed since Moira last summoned this bounty posting. The damning words [GALACTIC MENACE] are still emblazoned across its top. His last known location is listed as "Trija" and his "Known Associates" column still lists her name first, next to "First Mate".

All that's changed is the actual bounty. As of six days ago, it's risen to a clean 18 million ICC, dead or alive.

There's no ignoring this now. For months and months, Moira'd procrastinated facing this inevitable fact. Here she stands now, staring at the watermark she'd set, the point of no return, with no idea how to proceed.

As of six days ago, it officially became less profitable for Moira Quicksilver, retired bounty hunter, to remain with the crew of The Unconstant Lover. The logical move, at this point in Moira's career, is to apprehend the Galactic Menace, collect the 18 million and disappear into the woodwork.

Odisseus watches the little light flash green and then green and then red.

It actually makes a noise too, an unassuming little beep, when the light flashes red for the first time. He's been staring so long and so insistently, the scanner actually repeats this a few times – red light and beep, red light and beep – before Odisseus even really registers what's happening.

When he puts two and two together, he starts to make a low, anticipatory sound, the precursor to a growl, in the back of his throat. His heart hammers in his chest and the scanner starts to tremble ever so slightly, along with the paws that hold it. He's unwilling, though, to say anything aloud or even mentally confirm what is happening until he receives the third and final confirmation.

That's when he first sees the blip, a tiny wedge that creeps onto the edge of the scanner's grid, muted red and definitely not an asteroid.

That's a ship.

"That's a ship," he announces in sotto voce. "That's a ship coming."

The room's response is underwhelming. In the three plus hours he's squatted here on his mattress, precious little has changed in the squalor all around him. Moira returned some time ago from her walkabout and now squats on a galley stool, wasting perfectly good gun oil and elbow grease on another unnecessary cleaning of her revolvers. Nemo's long since fallen asleep, his snoring and the repetitive menu music from his pirated Quuilar Noxix holodisc having both long since receded into the background.

He's almost afraid to speak any louder and warn his comrades, for fear that he might somehow spook this windfall ship and send it packing.

"Um," he starts, a little louder, peering around the room, "there's a ship here, now." For all that they've been huddled in here, praying for just such an occurrence, Odisseus finds the specific words oddly difficult to summon. "There's a ship about," he cranes his neck back to the scanner to double check, "nine dottibles away and it looks like it's closing?"

There's no response from the sprawled form of his saltbrother. The sudden cessation of that polish-on-gunmetal squeak from over his left shoulder means he's at least snagged Moira's attention. "You're serious?" she presses, rising from the stool.

"Unless, I'm like, hallucinating," Odisseus allows and hoists the scanner for her to see.

In one smooth motion, Moira's cleared the stool, padded the sizable distance between the galley and the Ortok's mattress and is stooping to squint at the scanner's screen. This she does for nearly as long as Odisseus had, not seeming to believe her own eyes either.

"That's a ship," she repeats emotionlessly, as though pointing to one of many in a crowded spaceport.

"That's what I said," Odisseus agrees.

"We're going to be rescued."

"Looks like, yeah."

"Hey! Pisspants!" Moira suddenly barks, twisting to her left, where Nemo lies, still sleeping and snoring, unaware his entire life is about to be saved from a fate worse than death. "You wanna wake up and get fucking rescued or what?"

There's nothing but a general murmur of rustling blankets and inaudible mumbling in reply. Moira counters this most eloquent of arguments by planting a bootheel against the lip of the couch and kicking savagely downward, with the intent of folding the entire sofa and all its contents back beneath the floorplates. Nemo's messily tossed out, shrouded in blankets, and Odisseus hears the cringeworthy clattering of HV sprawling across the mess hall floor.

"You festering fucking mountain of bargain-bin drongo shit," exclaims the Captain as he tumbles through garbage, his stream of profanity aimed either at Moira directly or at the universe in general.

"A ship," Odisseus informs him calmly. "Coming in. Right now."

Everything grumpy or groggy about the Captain, sitting up like an erect brushvezzer in a field of tall grass, disappears. "How far?"

"Not far now," Moira provides him, where she hunkers over the Ortok's shoulder.

All Odisseus need do to summon Nemo over is waggle the scanner once, proudly displaying its blinking red light. With a surprising nimbleness, Nemo manages to extract his person from the catastrophic ruin of blanket and partially collapsed sofa, hotfooting his way through the wreckage and to the Ortok's side.

Together, the three of them huddle around the scanner, where Odisseus has reverently placed it upon the mattress, as though now unworthy to lay paws upon the holy device. It continues to bleep and blink softly, every eye in the room locked on that tiny red triangle.

"Seven dotts," calculates Odisseus, based on the sensor screen's primitive grid.

Nemo's excitement starts to bubble out of him. "What kinda ship do you think?" he speculates. "Do you think she's a real–"

Moira subsequently shushes him, placing more stock in the sanctity of this moment than seemingly anyone else.

Their vigil continues to pass by wordlessly, save for Odisseus reporting the closing distance, steadily made every thirty seconds or so. Meanwhile, the specter of the approaching ship plods ever closer to the center of the scanner's grid and their current location amid the asteroid field it represents.

"Six dotts." The Ortok's raspy voice is thunderously loud in the pregnant silence of the mess hall. "Five dotts." Of a sudden, the tiny triangle stops moving forward. "And holding."

Three breaths are held as the marooned crew watches the mysterious newcomer stand still. After a second, each of the grayish blocks that surround the red triangle – the many asteroids of the Kzelos Cloud – start to inch closer to the ship's image. Odisseus is keenly aware of his heart, thumping insistently in his chest, as each asteroid that comes adjacent to the ship disappears, one after another.

The grayish block that represents the derelict Unconstant Lover, however, doesn't move an inch, apparently just outside the other ship's magnetic perimeter.

"It's not–" Nemo starts to observe, only to receive another, more violent, of Moira's shushes.

Nemo's assertion, however, ultimately proves the truth. The longer they watch, the clearer it becomes that they're marginally out of range. Several more asteroids disappear the moment they come into contact with the red triangle, eventually leaving a semicircular swath of dead space surrounding their potential rescuer. There's a momentary lull, when all their hopes reach a fever pitch before, without great fanfare, the triangle vanishes from the scanner.

The beeping stops. The little light flashes red and then green and then green.

"It's gone," Odisseus realizes.

"It left," Moira attempts to rationalize. "It got what it needed and left."

"It's gone."

Nemo shrugs significantly. "I mean, we knew there was a decent chance of this, right? Like–"

"It's gone."

"Yeah," allows Nemo, "but it'll be back–"

It's Moira who sums things up best. "In three weeks."

To a pirate, they're stunned, struck speechless by how narrow a margin they evaded rescue and by what that portends for the days and weeks to come.

CHAPTER 3

Moira Quicksilver praises all the moons of Jotor that she, the only woman on this crew, wasn't born an Ortok, speciesist as that may sound. Had she been, she'd be facing a fate even more gruesome than gory death by tooth and claw.

"He still there?" whispers Nemo, stuffed buhox clasped tight against his chest.

She starts to peek over the lip of the table, to confirm his fears, then stops to turn and scowl at him. "I mean, of course he is. Where the fuck else could he be?"

"Well," stammers Nemo, caught off guard, "what's he doing, then?"

Fingertips curled around the table's edge, Moira peeks as little of her face into view as she can and surveys the greater mess hall. "Ripping your mattress to shreds."

"Still?"

"Still." Very suddenly, she slides back behind cover and presses her back against the hardwood. "Fuck. I think he saw me."

Nemo's eyes somehow bug out even more. Moira twists to the side and presses an ear flat against the gin-stained tabletop. Even through the thick Ujad mahogany, she can hear that sound – long claws tearing the mattress systematically to ribbons – stop suddenly. A moment later, it's replaced by the sound of those same claws scraping and stabbing through the carpet of garbage, headed directly towards her.

A subsonic growl, more vibration than noise, comes with it.

Moira works hard to keep the panic out of her whisper. "He's coming."

Nemo does no such hard work. "Whadda we do?" he pleads.

"This."

Quick as she can, Moira reaches aside and retrieves another helping of canned fish. Cranking open the tin with a thumb, she's nearly gagged by the reek of sudden sporefin. The growl growing all the louder, she scoops the whole mess from the tin and, with a vicious pump of her elbow, tosses the wet handful of fish across the galley.

They both listen, in breathless anticipation, as the sporefin splashes quietly against the far wall. They both listen, with a simultaneous exhale of relief, as the growling monster at the door takes the bait. With a fresh snarl and more crashing through the undergrowth of trash, their antagonist stalks off in the opposite direction.

"Good thinking," congratulates Nemo, completely sycophantic to her superior wisdom during these matters of life and death.

"Sorta," Moira reminds him. "It's only gonna buy us another minute."

They've done their best to barricade themselves inside the Lover's small galley against the predations of an Ortok gone mad. They've propped the mess hall's dining table, that reliable plank of Ujad mahogany, against the entrance. A row of stools offer feeble protection against attacks from aboe, stacked atop the counter with their long legs stabbing out like a palisade's spikes. In preparation for a long siege, Moira, at least, had the foresight to toss what remains of their food in here with them, giving them plenty of Ortok lures to lob around the chamber as needed.

Moira thought she felt cramped before, confined to the Lover's mess hall for six straight weeks. Now, Moira's positively claustrophobic, jammed bloomhole-to-elbows in the kitchenette with her very favorite person in the entire galaxy.

Her options, however, were not especially legion. She could either hunker in this flimsy shelter with a smelly Nemo or go out there and get eviscerated by a horny Odisseus.

Beyond the barricade, Moira overhears the Ortok savaging the tossed sporefin. Her eyes, gluttons for punishment, fall down to the package she's ripped open, wondering how long it will take him to come sniffing around their fortress again, looking for more.

For all their achievements as a sentient species, there's a swath of Ortoki genetics that's ultimately more animalistic than humanoid. While fully sapient, they couldn't, as a culture, shake every one of their baser, more primal tendencies.

Never is this more apparent than during their mating season. A few days every year, an Ortok's wild side bubbles to the surface as they, males and females both, go into heat, seeking a willing mate. During this period, all the Ortok's pretenses to higher thinking apparently melt away, in favor of something decidedly less friendly and housebroken.

Odisseus is no exception to this universal law of his people. Once a year, the ornery Ortoki mechanic they'd all come to tolerate would be swapped with a semisentient animal, given to irritability, inarticulate growling and laying about the place with claws.

In past years, the embarrassed Odisseus simply confined himself to quarters stocked with enough canned fish to sustain him and the Lover went a few days without a mechanic. This year, their timing happened to be calamitously bad. This year, Moira and Nemo were sealed inside the mess hall with a ravenous monster, denied anyone else to kill or fuck.

To add insult to injury, he's far muskier than ever, presumably with the aim of attracting interested females. To Moira, so thankful she's not an Ortok, the mess hall now stinks of someone, infected with Xwollese tract fever, pissing on a garbage fire.

"Our only hope," bemoans Nemo, way too loudly, "lies in Operation Thunderstrike."

"Operation Thunderstrike," scoffs Moira, "is a disaster wa–"

"Hey," Nemo warns gravely, gesturing emphatically with the stuffed toy in his hand. "Respect the cow."

"Don't hog the cow, more like," Moira retorts. With a quick snatching movement, she grabs the bundle of ratty felt and polka dots clean out of his hand.

"You–" starts Nemo's objection.

"Operation Thunderstrike," Moira repeats, confident now in the righteousness of her purpose, "is a disaster waiting to hap–"

"You don't know that," whispers Nemo defensively.

As a warning, Moira threatens him once with the buhox, its tattered head lolling forward. "I do know that," she counters. "We've got three hours tops on those exosuits before the atmosfilters give out. Even if we could somehow get to them and get dressed in them without his noticing, we'd–"

"The cornerstone of Operation Thunderstrike," Nemo asserts confidently, "is a good distraction. Obviously."

"Will you–" snarls Moira, repeating her previous gesture with the cow, only more insistently this time. "And what kind of distraction, exactly?"

"I don't know," Nemo admits. "Shoot him, maybe?"

"Shoot him?" expectorates Moira. "Shooting him's not gonna do fucking squat. History has repeatedly shown that shooting an angry Ortok–"

Nemo's aghast. "Not to kill him. Moons. To distract–"

Interrupted again, Moira's patience goes off the rails. "Moira has the Neezer!" she hisses, throttling the ineffectual stuffed cow back and forth. "That means it's Moira's turn to speak!"

Week four was a near-perpetual argument, the crew unable to cope with the harsh reality that they'd be stuck together like this another three weeks. Week five was virtually silent, all three retreating into privacy and selfish brooding for days at a time. Week six saw true pandemonium take center stage, brought to a fever pitch by Odisseus, driven mad with lust, prowling around their shared space and looking to maul anyone who came too close.

Despite the chaos in bloom all around her, Moira refuses to succumb to madness and depravity. To look at Nemo now, her closest ally in this struggle against the frothing beast, she sees nothing but a raving madman. Pieces of garbage are speckled throughout his frazzled hair. The grime and grit of two unwashed months are caked and streaked across his face. His lips, eyelids and fingertips each tremble and twitch to some strange internal rhythm, a clockwork device out of alignment.

Moira Quicksilver would keep her footing. Moira Quicksilver would not relinquish her grip on civilization and society. Moira Quicksilver is holding the stuffed buhox and that means it is her turn to speak.

Nemo crosses his arms like a scolded child. "What's your big idea, then?"

"Lock him in the pantry," she reminds calmly. "'till everything blows over."

Nemo stares, disbelieving. "Operation Stupidplan? Are you kidding me?"

"That is not what it's called." Feeling her anger rise, Moira takes a calming, cooling breath. "This'll work. If you'll listen." To her surprise, Nemo does sit quietly and listen, suddenly the most respectful audience imaginable. "We lure him in there somehow, probably with these." She taps a finger twice against the lid of the nearest tin of sporefin. "While he's distracted, somebody pulls the–"

"Who?"

"Fucking somebody! I don't know! You!"

Moira doesn't immediately realize what she's done, that those words actually came from her mouth and at a volume much closer to a shriek than a whisper. Nemo's widened eyes, however, and especially the lack of sucking and eating sounds somewhere beyond the walls of their barricade make her realize her error.

"He heard you," Nemo breathes, quieter than she's ever heard him speak.

They're entirely silent for a handful of heartbeats, too frightened to move, speak or even draw breath. For many of those heartbeats, Moira starts to believe they're perhaps safe, that there's more sporefin left to devour and that her blunder wasn't so terrible.

A scraping sound, a shifting of ponderous weight and, what's more, a familiar growl proves her wrong.

"Look what you did!" Nemo snaps, as quietly as he dares. "Look what you did! This is exactly why you don't deserve the Neezer!"

"You're the one who–"

The growl swells in volume and clarifies in direction. He's approaching from the other side of the galley counter, the weakest section of their improvised stockade.

"Operation Thunderstrike," Nemo declares with sudden decisiveness. "Now or never. It's the only choice."

"What?" Moira recoils with shock. "Are you blasted? How're we gonna get the fucking exosuits–" She's interrupted this time by a wheedling sound, so shrill it makes her skin crawl. Only when it repeats does she recognize the sound of curved claws scraping the counter's thermosteel. "It's Operation Stupidplan or nothing. Gimme the fish."

"See?" Nemo cries triumphantly. "That is what it's called."

"Gimme the–"

A tremendous weight thuds atop the counter. One of the stools clatters over the side and crashes into the kitchenette, landing amid their piles of supplies. Nemo seizes the moment of confusion to reach across and yank the stuffed buhox from Moira's unsuspecting grip.

"Now I have the Neezer," he announces at full voice, "and I say it's Operation Thund–"

Moira's not paying attention. She's spun around, staring upward at the stretch of empty counter, the gap left behind by the fallen stool.

A pair of huge hairy paws, wet with fish slime, dig deep trenches in the counter's woodgrain. With the slow confidence of a predator who's successfully cornered his prey, the great Ortoki head and neck rear up and into view. Blackened lips peel fully back. Masticated sporefin pieces dangle from his clenched fangs. A snarl gains strength in his throat.

A moment later, Nemo follows Moira's gaze and his victory speech dies on his lips.

The creature that was once Odisseus roars. The dishware shakes with his sheer volume and he spews a mouthful of putrid beast breath straight in their screaming faces. In that insane moment, all of Moira's mettle is forgotten. As one, she and Nemo only scoot back against the opposite cupboards, screaming like terrified children all the while.

For a moment, the mess hall of The Unconstant Lover echoes with the roar of one monster and the screams of the galaxy's two most dangerous outlaws.

The next moment, The Unconstant Lover lurches violently to port.

Caught completely off guard, everything and everyone aboard is pitched aside. At a stroke, the entire improvised fortress is destroyed; the table rolls aside, the stools clang and scatter, a rain of dishware crashes all around them. Moira slams her shoulder into the thermosteel counter. Nemo is tossed unceremoniously and halfway into an open cupboard. Odisseus is thrown clear with a yelp and an explosion of trash somewhere out of sight.

To everyone's groaning delight, this is repeated two or three more times, first to starboard, then back to port, then back to starboard. The galley fills with a shifting tide of packaged food, sloshing back and forth. Moira calls upon her Tebi-Gali training and does her best to brace her body from impact in the kitchenette's corner. Groping on hands and knees to recover the lost Neezer, Nemo's yanked this way and that, slamming painfully into either counter with each unexpected pitch of the spaceship.

The whole scene eventually comes to a standstill, jostled by the occasional minor aftershock. A second silence gradually takes hold over the Lover's mess hall, broken by the occasional beeping sound.

A quick inspection reveals Moira's only bruised and not broken anywhere. Nemo is splayed awkwardly within the lifeless chiller and looks far worse than she does – but he does grasp the buhox triumphantly in his fist.

"We hit something?" Moira whispers, uncertain whether Odisseus is still lurking about.

Nemo shrugs as best he can. "Bloom if I know."

"It's the scanner," offers a third voice, an Ortoki voice, from the main mess hall.

They both freeze. Moira and Nemo both peek, over the counter or around the corner, to see the speaker. Amid the carpet of detritus, Odisseus is likewise sprawled on his back. He's propped himself up on his elbows, however, and is now squinting across the mess hall. Anything monstrous about his personality is suddenly gone, vanished without a trace. All his humanity's come instantantly back to him, as though the turbulence shook their old companion free.

"What about the scanner?" asks Moira tentatively, expecting some trick.

"It's beeping." He points a claw across the room. "Look."

Moira follows the point of his claw and spies it. There, indeed, amid the ripped and tattered ruins of the Ortok's designated corner, a feeble red light is blinking.

A pregnant look is exchanged between all three marooned. Moira's eyes fall next to the timepiece where it lays, smashed against the floor for uncounted days. Then, their previous peril instantly forgotten, all three crewmembers of The Unconstant Lover go galloping across the mess hall, converging on the scanner.

Odisseus gets there first and lays paws on the device with one swipe. Once again, Moira and Nemo are forced to peer over the Ortok's hairy shoulder to even get a glimpse at the thing. It's a strong testament to how desperately she craves rescue that, this close to a musky Ortok, Moira doesn't really notice how profoundly rancid he smells.

When she is granted a good look at the scanner, she can barely believe her eyes. Once again, there is a tiny red triangle, perfectly identical to the one that visited their scanner three long weeks ago. This time, however, the triangle's located smack dab in the center of the scanner's grid, precisely on their own coordinates.

"What does that mean?" Nemo's the first to wonder aloud.

"That means," the surprisingly cogent Odisseus starts to speculate, "they must've grabbed us. See how there're no other asteroids around? It pulled in everything nearby and that includes us."

"All that, then," Moira realizes, gesturing at the wreckage around her, "must have been their graviton."

"Pulling us in," Nemo finishes, nodding ever so slowly.

Odisseus matches his nod. "Which means now–"

"We're in their cargo bay? With the other asteroids?" posits Moira.

"Must be."

For no good reason, all three of them gaze upward and around, as though expecting to see anything but the hated and familiar walls and ceiling of the Lover's mess hall.

"Which," Nemo takes a moment to clarify, "is where we wanna be, yes?" At this question, Moira and Odisseus both turn scowls at their Captain, throwing up his hands defensively. "What? I'm just asking!"

"If this is the ship I think it is–" muses Moira.

"Really the only ship with any reason to be here," Odisseus adds.

"Then, yes," Moira confirms, injecting as much scorn into the following sentence as she can. "This is exactly where you want us to be."

The scanner in the Ortok's paws bleeps unexpectedly, drawing all their eyes. Out of nowhere, a snowstorm of static floods the scanner's screen, the phrase "CONNECTION LOST" wavering back and forth in bold red lettering.

Moira opens her mouth to word a confused question, but Odisseus supplies its answer first. "They've jumped warp," the Ortok informs them. "We're on our way."

"Correction." Nemo points an appallingly dirty fingernail toward Moira. "This is exactly where Two-Bit Switch wants us to be."

Odisseus feels much better now.

The shock of their unexpected rescue had worked wonders on his psyche. In truth, Odisseus still didn't quite feel one hundred percent his old self. His temper's mottible-long fuse, he could sense, is still substantially shorter. To judge from the sour expressions of his companions, his heady musk was very much still in effect.

All in all, though, he can speak and reason and no longer necessarily feels an all-consuming need to fight everyone to death and fuck his own brains out.

Besides, their rescue well underway, there were far more important things to do now.

"Franchise," mutters Nemo, flicking through holographic pages with his fingertip. "Franchise, Franchise. Ah. Okay. Bingo. The GCF Franchise."

A hologram of a sizable starship leaps into existence and hovers above the dining table, rotating seductively to display its full figure. As it hangs there, more and more specifications and infodumps pop into view, spilling out an abundance of technical data on the ship at hand.

"That's her," confirms Moira with a nod.

"The GCF Franchise." Nemo sets his mouth firm. "Okay. Was really hoping for the Requisition, but we can always improvise. I mean, specs're all here." He shrugs, waving a gesture towards the patient hologram.

Armed with fresh purpose, The Unconstant Lover's crew dive fully into this new task with a relish not seen aboard the Briza in years. To this purpose, they'd righted the dining room table and even collected its scattered chairs from the far corners of the mess hall. Odisseus and Moira both lean eagerly forward, elbows on the table, whereas Nemo stands, all the better to operate the centerpiece of their meeting.

An Attaché, timeworn and mistreated, is all that occupies the entire table. Despite its pivotal role in the caper to come, the tablet's been absent the past few weeks, buried deep amongst Nemo's nest of knicknacks. Now, as they race across the galaxy for parts unknown, the Lover's crew once again has need of Two-Bit Switch's Attaché and all it contains.

One of the things it contains are the complete holographic blueprints and technical schematics for the GCF Franchise, the starship in whose cargo bay they were currently and covertly stashed.

Officially, she's a Concord Industries Capital Freighter, G-Type 529, a design Odisseus recognizes without consulting the scrolling text. Unofficially, she's a smallish capital ship that's ostensibly meant for hauling bulk cargo. Her design, however, draws far more inspiration from luxury yachts and pleasure craft than the rest of the Outer Ring's unbecoming freighters.

She's shapely yet streamlined, classy yet cutting-edge, tasteful yet well-armed. All in all, the Franchise is a sublime space cruiser that the Gitter Corporate Fleet could be proud of.

"She's a newer model, right?" questions Odisseus, knowing the answer.

"She sure is," Nemo confirms. "By about twenty years, actually. Shouldn't change the internal blueprints too much."

Moira scowls through the transparent belly of the ship. "Where're we at?"

Nemo spends muttering seconds putzing with the Attaché, attempting to zoom or focus or adjust the viewpoint. Odisseus just jabs a claw at one section of the ship's underbelly, the same one that, moments later, expands tenfold, as soon as Nemo's successfully tamed the rebellious Attaché.

"There," Nemo declares, a little too proudly. "There. That's us." He gazes up at the Franchise's empty cargo bay, dangling a few inches before his face and then raps more fingers against the Attaché. At this, a multitude of crudely rendered asteroids pop into being, filling the barren cargo bay. "See? Jammed in there with a couple dozen other spacebergs, I imagine."

Odisseus chooses one of the asteroids – all obvious placeholders – and tries to imagine that, beneath its five-foot layer of ice, hides the lifeless husk of The Unconstant Lover and, inside her, the three of them.

While Moira and her remote battery paid a visit to the sensor room to positively identify the Franchise, Odisseus made another visit to the molecular strip in the Lover's cargo hold. The rare, experimental and gargantuan machine had been a chore to acquire and a nightmare to install. He'd needed to yank out half a mottible of the ray shielding conduit that snakes through the ship's walls and feed through the same length of molecular strip. What's more, it required constant upkeep, searching the cord's entire perimeter for snags or frays, to prevent spoiling the strip's miraculous effect.

A fully functional molecular strip sapped ninety-percent of the ship's internal power simply to stay active, reducing The Unconstant Lover to an empty teltriton shell and not much else. A fully functional molecular strip, however, could also be dialed to positively attract specific molecules of pretty much any description – nitrogen, methane, even water.

All it took, then, to perfectly disguise The Unconstant Lover as just another harmless drifting spaceberg of the Kzelos Cloud was to dial the molecular strip to H2O and stand back to watch the fireworks. Soon as it was activated, all the frozen water within a respectable distance was drawn inexorably toward the molecular strip and, thanks to the Ortok's labors, now the Lover's hull.

So disempowered, the Briza Light Freighter would appear, to anything but the most dedicated sensor sweep, to be little more than a boring hunk of space ice, a teltriton needle in an asteroid haystack.

After all, how could the Gitter Consortium reasonably suspect the humble spacebergs of the Kzelos Cloud of harboring pirates? Paranoid as the corporation might be, it was logistically impossible to safeguard against every single avenue of attack – especially the really insane ones.

This is exactly what the late Two-Bit Switch had counted on.

Three years after his untimely disintegration, the mastermind's ghost still hung heavily over The Unconstant Lover and her remaining crew. His life's work – the most ambitious single caper in all of Bad Space's sordid history of ambitious capers – would've seen Two-Bit and his accomplices pluck the holiest of holies, a Gitter sapling, from beneath the very noses of the covetous Consortium. All the mothballed schematics, blueprints and plans discovered by a mourning Nemo, the Galactic Menace had since bent his entire being the accomplishing this impossible task.

According to him, honoring Two-Bit's memory is all the reward he requires. For Moira and Odisseus, meanwhile, there was always the 68 million credit payday.

Only on the promise of 68 million would anyone risk the outrageous five phases of the caper, each more dangerous than the last. Only on the promise of 68 million would anyone intentionally draw the lifelong ire of the dauntless Gitter Consortium, unchallenged in its ability to hunt down and eradicate its enemies.

Only on the promise of 68 million would anyone voluntarily shutter themselves for three weeks – nevermind six – within that mess hall with no one but murderers for company.

According to Two-Bit's superb intel, every three weeks, a Gitter Consortium freighter is scheduled to drop warp in the exhaustively boring Kzelos Cloud. There, they supposedly collect a boatload of spacebergs and then warp away for parts unknown. From the get-go, the crew knew there was a substantial chance the disguised Lover wouldn't be among the first batch of asteroids snagged. Indeed, they'd actually budgeted for nine weeks adrift before they'd need to cut their losses and warp back to Tesseg to resupply and try again.

In hindsight, Odisseus can't possibly imagine how they had expected to survive nine straight weeks, considering that six weeks brought them right to the brink of bloodshed.

All that's behind them now, the crew seemed silently to agree. The tone of the room is hungry, everyone eager to move past this hellish period and onto the next one. Against all odds, they'd somehow succeeded with the first phase. They were now safely stowed away within the cargo bay of the GCF Franchise, en route to its mysterious destination, and could commence with the caper's second suicidal phase.

"And where'd we have to get to?" wonders Moira, her eyes two perfect reflections of the Franchise's holographic cargo bay.

"Uh, yes. Good question."

Nemo delves deeper into the Attaché's interface while Odisseus points another claw toward a particular bulkhead exiting the Franchise's hold. He keeps it there patiently, until Nemo can wrangle the hologram into the shape and configuration he wants.

Their view of the cargo bay zooms wider, to encompass most of the Franchise's betweendecks sections. The door Odisseus indicates glows bright yellow and serves as the origin point of a bright yellow arrow that snakes its way through the ship's twisting lower corridors. It climbs an elevator shaft at one point, wends its way through the Franchise's midsection and eventually comes to highlight an unassuming chamber off the port gunnery deck.

"There," Nemo breathes, seemingly relieved. "Munitions depot. That's the target."

"How many chokepoints does that make?" poses Moira.

"Should be," Nemo calculates, counting each bulkhead with successive fingers, "seven?" When Moira scoffs, he raises both hands defensively. "Chokepoints ain't gonna matter, though remember?"

"Speak for yourself."

Nemo spreads his hands a little further. "Them's all the particulars." He shuffles backward and drops onto his improvised seat, a hovering cargo crate, with a slight bob and a renewed hum of its driftmotor. "Walk me through."

Odisseus and Moira share a glance and an inward sigh. All too often during the caper's lengthy planning stage would Nemo spring these impromptu quizzes, fancying himself Two-Bit's replacement as mastermind.

"I start," Odisseus begins, not attempting to mask the weariness in his voice. "Open the airlock and carve as small a path through the ice as the cutting beam can. Large enough for somebody to squeeze through, small enough not to be noticed." As he speaks, the Ortok's very aware how his tone doesn't exactly betray utmost confidence in Two-Bit's plan. "Just gotta pray the airlock didn't end up somewhere especially noticeable." When no objection comes from the Captain, Odisseus flops backwards in his chair and passes the metaphorical baton across the table. "Then Moira's up."

"Leave the ship," continues Moira, not leaving a second of slack and equally as bored as Odisseus. "Leave the bay. Locate the nearest security termina–"

Nemo flicks up a finger, asking for momentary patience as his other hand fiddles with something on the Attaché. He's immensely satisfied with himself, moments later, when he manages to command the device to perform the simplest of functions.

Branching off from the primary yellow pathway, a new green arrow draws a secondary route through the GCF Franchise's corridors. Eventually, it comes to rest in a miniature atrium of sorts, a short distance away, and highlights what appears to be a small service kiosk – the nearest security terminal.

With a condescending gesture, Nemo permits Moira to continue.

"–and upload Mayhem." Moira finishes, none too happy at either his interruption or his attitude. She points a gloved finger towards the Attaché. "And that's on there?"

"Yup. My Evil Plan 7." Once more, he drops his attention back to Two-Bit's bequeathed Attaché. "For the sake of argument–"

Before his captive audience, Nemo rifles through the Attaché and activates a simulation he's run no less than two dozen times for their benefit. The word "SIMULATION" flashes approximately four billion times across the hologram as they watch, to calm any fears they might have.

Before their eyes, the GCF Franchise has a conniption fit. Alarms are triggered sporadically across the ship. Airlock doors all along the Franchise's broadsides open seemingly at random, venting imaginary crew unsuspectingly into space. Like one hundred sets of chattering teeth, every automatic door on each of the cruiser's ten decks chomp open and closed with erratic abandon. Odisseus even sees tiny simulated engine fires, bursting to life at various points along the Franchise's turbine bank.

In a word, Odisseus would summarize the sudden change that's overcome the holographic space cruiser as mayhem.

Unsurprisingly, Moira's less than impressed. "Then, it's back to the rendezvous."

Nemo shoots a point across the table to Odisseus. "And where's that?"

"Lower atrium," the Ortok provides without missing a beat. "That's where you and I head." As he explains, Odisseus traces a claw along the yellow route until he lands at a tall vertical chamber, jutting through the Franchise's midsection. "Soon as things go to shit."

Nemo looks suggestively at him. "You and me and..."

"And...our thumbs up our bloomholes?" Odisseus shrugs both paws. "What do you fucking–"

Moira's merciful. She beats Nemo to his patronizing gesture – tapping his heels against his improvised chair – by a second. "The crate," she reminds Odisseus before turning to Nemo with a withering look. "Quit being a prick."

"Yes, the crate. Obviously the crate," Odisseus snaps, masking his embarrassment beneath irritation. "That goes without saying."

"Apparently not," mutters Nemo with a sidelong glance. Odisseus spends a moment muscling down the instinct to claw the Captain's face off and chew on it for a while. Luckily, Nemo claps once, like he's some doofy camp counselor, and it's enough to shake Odisseus from his murderous reverie. "Now, the four of us are reunited at the rendezvous. Where to next?"

"The rest of the way," Moira answers, the most self-evident thing in the galaxy. To illustrate her point, she copies the Ortok's gesture and runs her finger along the yellow line, all the way to its terminus on the port gunnery deck. "Munitions depot. Eighth deck."

"And the chokepoints?" Nemo wonders, pointing out a few of the spasming bulkheads along the way.

"Mayhem should handle those, for the most part," acknowledges Odisseus with a nod toward the hologram. "May need to bash down a few doors here and there but we'll see."

Moira keeps her finger there, piercing the hologram at the relevant room. "Soon as we're at the depot, we swap the crates, hotfoot back and nobody'll be the wiser."

This time, it's Moira's turn to recline backward in her chair, this phase of the caper explained for the umpteenth time. They both stare at Nemo, waiting to see whether he'll deign to rubberstamp their understanding of the plan.

The Galactic Menace waggles his hand back and forth and makes a wishy-washy face.

"What'd we forget?" Odisseus asks, with zero enthusiasm for the question.

"I seem to remember," recalls Moira thoughtfully, "telling you something about pricks and quit being one."

Nemo counts each infraction on his fingers. "Uniforms. Weapons. Aliases."

"Uniforms?" snorts Odisseus. "We're wearing uniforms. There. Crushed it."

"But uniforms're all we got," Moira makes the point, looking sympathetically towards the Ortok.

Odisseus scowls at this. "Don't take his fucking side. Plus," he glances back to Nemo for confirmation, "there's those idents, too."

"Not dedicated ones, though," Nemo informs, shrugging helplessly. "Didn't know which ship we were gonna get. Took sorta a gamble on maybe getting the Requisition or the Entrepreneur but here came the Franchise instead." He glances about him, as though in search of something he doesn't find. "Ain't got time or tools to make appropriate ones now."

"So, we've got ident cards," Odisseus establishes, "but for the wrong ship?"

"They're for no ship. They're generic," Nemo explains. "To the naked eye, from a distance, at a glance, they'll maybe look alright. Anything else and we're boned ten ways from Jotor."

"Well. That's depressingly thin."

"Them's the breaks. Normally," Nemo takes the time to needlessly explain, "we'd be bloomed before we reached the first chokepoint but that's what the Mayhem's for." He counts on his next finger. "Weapons."

"None," answers Moira, the blooming teacher's pet, immediately. "Doesn't work with the uniform. Doesn't work with the alias."

"Who's a smart lady?" compliments Nemo, like one might to a well-behaved jborra.

"I will carve my initials on your scrotum."

Threats like this roll off the Captain like water. "Point is, we gotta stay outta trouble. Best case, we get lost in all the chaos. Worst case, we get spotted, jig's up and we've only got your ten claws, her two tits and my huge dick to defend ourselves with."

"I will cook your balls over an open flame."

"So," Nemo starts to chastise, planting his fists parentally on his hips. "I want everyone on their best behavior." Amid a chorus of grumbling, Nemo counts on his thumb, his final figure. "Aliases."

"This buhoxshit again," Odisseus keeps grumbling, tossing his paws against the tabletop.

The Captain thrusts an accusatory finger at Moira. "Name and rank, spacer," he commands, suddenly all authoritative.

"Jesbra Thoi," Moira rattles off in a bored monotone. "Petty Gunnery Officer. Homeworld Ujad. Six-week transfer from GCF Trademark. Germaphobe."

"State your business in the engineer–"

"Running routine interference," Moira continues to deadpan. "Load of ditrogen waste got misplaced, we think."

Nemo scrunches up his face. "Is that how you're gonna say it?"

"I will sell your dick wholesale to a Whuudi witch doctor."

Immune as always, Nemo spins his point around toward his saltbrother. "Name and rank, spacer."

"This is degrading," growls Odisseus morosely.

Nemo drops character a moment but doesn't drop his posture "This is our only option."

"This is degrading and speciesist and I refuse."

The Captain converts his point into a few placating gestures. "Trust me," he assures Odisseus, "if Two-Bit Switch could've arranged some forged Ortoki documentation, I'm sure he would've."

Odisseus snorts. "I'm sure."

"Such as it is, though, we gotta work with what we're given." His hands, palms up, become balancing scales. "That means you either pretend to be a Quarg for a few hours or you wait patiently here for Moira and I to finish."

Odisseus follows this with a great shuddering sigh. "Gwraawroogaralox," he consents. "Gunnery Tech First Class. Homeworld's obviously Tivoss. Promoted to First Class two days ago. Definitely not an Ortok or anything."

Nemo fails at looking properly sympathetic. "All goes according to plan, nobody's gonna stop and run your blooming genetics. Your ident says you're a big shaggy dude and you look like a big shaggy dude. There's some deniability there."

For the umpteenth time, the Ortok clenches his teeth and refuses to rise to the bait. "Some," is all he bothers to confirm, staring daggers at the spinning hologram.

Nemo presses both palms together and offers him the slightest bow. "Your cooperation is appreciated." Odisseus sees the next phrase coming a mottible away, his saltbrother's very favorite new saw, ever since he'd sunk his teeth deep into the matter of Two-Bit's orphaned caper.

"It's what Two-Bit would have wanted."

FIRST INTERLUDE

Twitch took an experimental swig.

This was the moment of truth. This was the moment that the whole afternoon's planning and plotting and peril had been building up to. There was still a chance, as the acrid sourness washed over Twitch, that he wouldn't actually like it. It might make him sick, like that Yellowtooth he'd bummed off Dimwit Dengo last week had. Zoot would laugh at him, Twitch knew, just like all the rest of the waifs did then too.

He could only stomach one gulp and, even then, it was a near thing. He grimaced and shook his head a few times, allowing the booze to slosh back and forth across his brain.

"Howzit tastee?" Zoot wanted to know, a little apprehensive to hear Twitch's thoughts.

"Blue," was the only answer Twitch could provide.

This was somehow still enough to convince his greenskinned accomplice. "My go!" Zoot chirped, grasping for the bottle. "My go! My go!"

Happy to put a little distance between himself and that substance, Twitch thrust the bottle into her empty hands. He watched her a moment, curious to see whether her greenskin biology or her greater experience would better handle the liquor's vicious kick.

"And?" Twitch wondered in a whisper.

Zoot stalled a moment, wrestling with her gag reflex and wiping her mouth with the meat of her hand. "Blue," she confirmed with a croak, attempting to keep her cool all the while.

At that exact moment, something rattled the grating over their heads. Twitch glanced upward, watching the passing silhouettes of Shoddy Showder's thugs and their stomping boots. He recognized Impara from her Yaveelish accent and from her love of throwing around the term "blazz", a piece of profanity Twitch was pretty sure she'd invented.

"There's a small mountain of credits," she announced from somewhere above, "for the first one of you blazzbags what lays eyes on the Boss's bottle or them brats."

This was answered by much muttering and stomping about and overturning of driftdumpsters. None have the foresight to consider the incinerator beneath their feet. Who in their right mind, after all, would hide in an active incinerator?

Obviously, neither Impara nor her goon squad had ever been a guttersnipe on Takioro Defederate Station.

Where exactly the thing's safety plate disappeared to, no one knew, but the street-access incinerator outside Horny Devil Holos was considered, among the station waif population, the Third Ring's greatest hiding place. Only a simple grate protected passing pedestrians from the sporadic gouts of flame that would leap up from beneath the street. Otherwise of interest only to the station's custodial drones, the Horny Devil's incinerator was now home to two station waifs and a boosted bottle of booze.

The two were in no immediate danger. Sooner or later, the igniters would kick on and burn anything inside the incinerator – rubbish, rugrats and all – to a crisp. Until then, there was plenty of time for Impara and her thugs to go search somewhere else and for the two of them to make their escape.

They squat, arses to elbows, in the cramped incinerator, hemmed in by teltriton walls and heaps of garbage. It occurred to Twitch, in that sudden moment, that he'd never been this close to an actual girl before and he wasn't completely sure how he should be feeling about that.

Zoot was his partner, though, and there was no bond more sacred to a station waif.

"Wheres next?" she wanted to know, ignorant of Twitch's confusion about her.

"Givee they a mite or two yet," Twitch allowed, with all a mastermind's authority. "When buggee they off, then makee we our hoof, yeah?"

"Affi," agreed Zoot, a little perturbed by how thick he was, "but wheres?"

Their options weren't legion from here, as far as hiding places were concerned. Up the street a little ways and under the grav control matrix was vent access, meaning Twitch and Zoot could escape into Takioro's bones – assuming Zoot could hotwire the door. Down the street, the pickings were slimmer – a few driftdumpsters, the burnt wreck of that driftcart that exploded yesterday. It all ultimately depended on which way Impara would continue the search.

"Coupla spots could tryee we," Twitch responded casually, cultivating that air of control as best he can. "All pends on hoofee they where and when. Howzee much tock we got?"

Zoot planted a hand against the back wall a moment, taking the incinerator's temperature and estimating how much longer before it would immolate them both.

"Thirteen, gimme or take," she reported with a shrug.

"Ain't rushee, then," Twitch shrugged back and made a beckoning gesture towards the bottle Zoot still clasped. Without argument, she passed their booty back for him to make his second attempt.

This particular bottle was, until very recently, the property of Shoddy Showder. Station lore held that Showder, owner of Shoddy Showder's Suds and Spins, respectable Obaxi businessman and famous douchebag, kept a legendary vintage of Gitterswitch Gin smuggled away in his personal strongbox.

It had proved quite an intricate affair to see that bottle liberated from Showder's clutches. It required a complex web of lies, four hours spent smuggled inside a drying unit and the legendary dime-a-dozen, the type of maneuver Twitch'd heard about but never actually performed.

The caper went far from flawlessly. The encryption lock was a caliber more sophisticated than Twitch assumed. Zoot took a nasty shock when her arm was caught momentarily inside the closing security shield. The entire operation was nearly bungled at one point by one of Showder's horny goons wandering into his employer's office, searching for a quiet place to jerk off.

Now, though, they ought to be in the free and clear. Eventually, Showder's people would grow tired of canvassing the same stretch of station street and they'd fan further out. Twelve minutes from now, Twitch and Zoot would be disappearing between the legs of the Third Street's evening crowd, half a bottle of Gitterswitch Gin sloshing around in their stomachs.

When they spoke – in hushed whisper, lest they be overheard – they spoke their own language, that very special strain of spacer's cant so garbled even other jabberheads could hardly follow. To Twitch and Zoot and all the Station's other urchins, it was the rest of the galaxy that talked all funny and used the wrong words for things.

"Where d'you suppose," Twitch wondered, soon as he'd surfaced from the bottle and gathered enough wits to speak, "it comes from?"

Zoot scowled. "Where's what come from?"

"This," Twitch replied, passing her the bottle.

"Oh." Zoot considers the offered prize at arm's length. "I think Showder's got a bloke. Somebody in Gandora Sector, what I heard."

"I mean, like, originally," Twitch clarified. "Where's it come from?"

Zoot scowled at him again, the kind that suggested he was a blazzbrained idiot. "It's Gitterswitch Gin, innit?" Still scowling at him, she took her second swig and bloom if she didn't comport herself like a true drinking professional.

"So," stammered Twitch, playing that exact idiot she pegged him for, "from Gitterswitch?"

"Gitterswitch," Zoot answered, adding a zesty "aah!" to the end of her second swig, "ain't a where. It's a what." When Twitch continued to blink stupidly at her, she raised an eyebrow questioningly. "You've heard of the spice, right?"

"'Course I have," Twitch shot back instantly, though his conception of what "spice" actually meant was limited to snatches of conversation overheard while pickpocketing in spacer's dives. "Crews is always blowing through here with spice to sell." He made a greedy gesture towards the bottle and Zoot was kind enough to oblige him. "That's what I'm drinking? Is spice?"

"No," Zoot considered a moment, concentration creasing her forehead. "You're drinking the fruit."

"The fruit," Twitch echoed into the bottle.

"The Gitterpeach?" dangled Zoot suggestively, waiting for him to pick up the slack. "The ones they mash up to make the booze?"

The third gulp doesn't really taste like how he imagined a peach would taste, potent enough to roll his eyes back into his skull for a second after swallowing. "And that ain't the tea?" he endeavored to clarify. "That slime that Vel drinks?"

"The tea," an exasperated Zoot attempts to separate. "The fruit. The booze. They make them all."

"Right," Twitch answered, nodding. He should quit now, he knew, while Zoot might still retain some modicum of respect for his intelligence in planning this whole caper. Unfortunately, the Gitterswitch Gin had a rather curious effect on his better judgment and Twitch was surprised to discover his mouth moving of its own accord. "They?"

"The Consortium," Zoot sighed, understanding now the true depths of Twitch's ignorance and taking upon herself the grim burden of educating him. "They're the ones with their bloomholes on all the galaxy's blue gold. Won't share, won't let anybody else grow or sell or even sniff the shit."

"What?" spat Twitch, the concept utterly foreign to a child reared by thievery on Takioro's tough streets. "Who's gonna stop them?

"The Consortium," Zoot repeated, reaching out to swipe the bottle from him.

That's a term that Twitch had certainly heard before – typically from the mouths of those selfsame spacers – but he'd be bloomed if he understood what it actually meant. In his mind, he attempted to conjure the phrases he might've heard, the contexts in which these spacers might've mentioned the "Consortium". Beyond a vaguely negative connotation, he drew a great big blank.

"How?" was his extremely discreet reply, precisely the kind of subtle question sure to trick Zoot into thinking he wasn't a brainless child.

"Well, they're the Consortium, ain't they?" She shrugged, like this was a sufficient answer to Twitch's question, before taking another few gulps of Gitterswitch. Only when she'd finished and the bottle sloshed somewhere around the halfway mark did she elaborate any further. "They got warships and spice rangers and moons knows what else. Filching from them ain't easy."

This brought a scowl to Twitch's face. "Showder had guards, didn't he? And alarms and encryption locks and security screens and whatnot." He wiggled forward a little, suddenly full of inebriated confidence in his new criminal credo. "There ain't nothing in the galaxy," he swore, with very little practical experience of the galaxy, "that can't be filched, long as you make a blooming effort."

Zoot rose to the challenge. "There's one thing," she countered, waggling the bottle to make its contents dance about. "One of the fucking trees this shit grows on."

This inspired another of Twitch's scowls. "It grows on trees?"

"Peaches grow on trees," Zoot informed him and Twitch was forced to admit – only inwardly – that his understanding of trees, born and raised on a space station, was pretty rudimentary.

"Why? What's so special 'bout them bloody trees?" Twitch demanded to know and also demanded the bottle back. "Motherbloomers come through here all the time with Gitter whatevers in their holds. Why can't nobody steal no trees?"

"'Cause nobody can find no trees," Zoot explained mysteriously, ignoring his gestured demand for the bottle. "There's this one planet they got and that's where they tell everybody they grows 'em but that ain't where they grows them." She nodded vigorously a few times, becoming enraptured with her own storytelling now. "I know, I heard it from a coupla Greatgullet's guys, when they took my tagalong."

Twitch crossed his arms. He'd always been dubious of this whole Greatgullet story, one she'd told multiple times before and whose details kept changing. "Where they grows them, then?"

"Nobody knows, I said," Zoot scoffed, amazed that he didn't remember. "They got someplace secret where they do all the growing. Somewhere underground, maybe, or on some space station somëplace that nobody's ever found. All that's just talk, though," she dismissed, pressing the bottle to her lips. "Only ones who know's the Consortium and they sure ain't bloody telling."

"We're wasting our blazzing time," Impara, above them both, concluded with a frustrated sigh. "You two, that way. You two, the other way." There came another clattering of boots against the grating. "Ain't never gonna find 'em standing around here, our dicks in our mouths."

Without visual, Twitch could nonetheless confirm the exodus of Showder's thuggery to the four corners, tromping away across the Third Ring in search of two station waifs and one bottle they won't find. In moments, they'd be lost to Takioro's general murmur and the coast would be plenty clear for the two accomplices to make their getaway, long before the incinerator would come back online.

Zoot was unfazed by any of this, continuing to dangle the bottle tantalizingly before Twitch. "That's what makes this," she explained, with a little slosh for emphasis, "so bleeding valuable. That's why Showder'd rather drown us in a spin cycle than give us a taste."

With a quick motion, Twitch lunged forward and snatched the bottle from Zoot's grip. He sat back hard enough to slam his back against the incinerator's wall and, holding the bottle at arm's length, considered what remained of their prize.

It was vibrantly blue, almost iridescent and toxic-looking in the way that it seems to catch the light. It was not hard to imagine, looking at the magic potion in his hand, that such a substance as this could captivate the whole galaxy. There was a promise in those indigo depths, of escape and experience, sensation and senselessness.

He may not have known where it was made, who made it or what it was made from but Twitch knew what Gitterswitch Gin was. It was the ultimate luxury of Bad Space's criminal class, the very best and the very fastest way to get drunk in all the galaxy. It was something that took Twitch, to Takioro Defederate Station born, all nine years of his life to lay hands on.

Those nine years were years of want and desperation and danger. The life led by a station waif aboard Takioro Defederate Station was far from comfortable, slinking through gutters and alleys and incinerators. There were times of plenty, when there was food and shelter and even the odd credit thrown his way, typically in the Depot-Commissioner's service. It was the lean times, though, that would not leave Twitch, even into his adult life.

As he clutched that bottle, gazing into its sapphire contents, Twitch thought on all the nights he slept huddled in trash for warmth and security, hunger the only contents of his stomach.

This was his first score, plucking this bottle from Shoddy Showder's safebox. This would not be his last.

Zoot started to climb to her feet, straining to hear through the commotion above. "Think we're safe to move."

"Somebody should steal one," Twitch decided, gaze still locked on the Gitterswitch bottle.

"Steal one what?" Zoot wondered, looking down at her partner where he was still seated.

"A tree," Twitch supplied. "I think somebody should steal one of them trees."

"Oh, yeah?" Zoot stopped her all-business act to plant hands on her jaunty hips. "And that somebody's you?"

"Yeah," confirmed Twitch, right before he drains the rest of the bottle. "I'mana be the first."

CHAPTER 4

Moira Quicksilver cannot abide these pussy-ass boots.

How anyone aboard the GCF Franchise managed to accomplish anything with these noncommittal scraps of leather on their feet, Moira would never know. They were hasty sweatshop garbage, stitched together by Raqeese grub labor on inferior equipment; all style, little substance and zero traction.

Under any other circumstances, Moira would be wearing her beloved baby-stompers right now but they were all wrong for Jesbra Thoi. Once glance at her footwear would blow Moira's cover long before her buhoxshit ident could.

Still, Moira would give an arm and a leg for a few hobnails right now; anything to gain a little purchase on all this slippery blooming ice. These shoddy boots were clearly designed to tread plush spaceship interiors and nothing else – certainly not to go scrambling around gigantic space glaciers.

Moira squats as comfortably as she can inside the cramped and icy tunnel. With crawling fingers and scooting knees, she makes the sloping descent to freedom, painstaking inch by painstaking inch. The Ortok's cutting beam left the encircling walls both jagged and slick, the many handholds difficult to maintain a grip on. She tries not to dwell on the consequences of losing her balance – the fifteen-foot slide and the fall from an unknown height onto hard teltriton below.

These standard-issue Consortium trash boots would be the death of her.

Were she to glance behind, Moira knows what she'd see. At the end of a short tunnel through the ice, she'd find Nemo, Odisseus, the Lover's airlock and the six weeks of hellish imprisonment she's leaving behind. Straight ahead, however, there's a literal light at the end of the tunnel, as close to daylight or salvation or freedom as their current circumstances allow. All Moira needs to do is wriggle her way down the chute, kick loose what little ice still bars her way and she'll be free, gloriously free.

She'll also be cold, gloriously cold. Moira doesn't imagine the Franchise's cargo bay, designed to keep its payload of spacebergs nice and frozen, will be especially comfortable. She's thankful, in that moment, for the gloves and the extra layers, even though she'll need to ditch those soon as she's heading into the cruiser proper.

They'd originally hoped to time this infiltration to coordinate with the Franchise's sleepiest shift. Much of the crew would be off duty and the ship, hanging in orbit, would be run mostly by automated systems. This plan was thwarted by simple bad luck. Odisseus had been forced to abandon his first attempt at cutting a clean tunnel, when he discovered the port airlock pointed upwards, towards the cargo bay's ceiling.

In these shoes, Moira could hardly be expected to scramble safely around the side of a slowly melting spaceberg until she could reach the floor below. Instead, the complaining Ortok and his cutting beam started work on the starboard airlock, assuming its tunnel would open into the empty hold air.

Crappy boots and all, Moira squeezes her way safely to the end of the tunnel. Once there, she squats silently for many long moments, listening for any stray sound in the cargo bay below. The earlier delay meant they were now attempting this mission during the Franchise's more active hours; the chances of bumping into idle crew were much higher.

The last way Moira wanted her solo stealth assignment to start was by leaping down from the hanging glacier and landing directly atop some dumbfounded crewman.

Soon as she's sure no one's listening, Moira puts her new footwear to the test. Odisseus thoughtfully left this task to her, choosing not to leave a conspicuous hole in the bottom of the spaceberg any longer than absolutely necessary. As she suspected, it takes Moira six or more good kicks to shatter that last flimsy sheet of ice. Her jackboots, Moira knows, could easily have busted that thing in three kicks, maybe even two.

Moira watches the shards drop to the deck. They shatter against the teltriton, approximately a dozen feet below. With the proper dangle and a Wheeling Tvorka upon impact, Moira feels confident she could blunt a fall from that height.

Some awkward repositioning allows her to dangle her whole body down from the opening, hanging pretty much by her fingertips. The grip only allows Moira a few breaths before she drops down, her stomach soars into her throat and she hits the teltriton hard. On instinct, she tucks into the somersault she'd mentally rehearsed, rolling a few yards away from where she fell and landing in a tight crouch.

From her crouch, Moira assesses her immediate surroundings. The temperature, as she predicted, is bitterly cold and her breath huffs out in tendrils. The floor is frosty teltriton, dotted with hunks of ice and marred with patches of rust. The walls and ceiling are invisible at present, either too far away or obscured by the cargo bay's many obstacles.

Far as she can tell, she's made her landing undetected.

The cargo bay of the GCF Franchise is dominated by the spoils of the Kzelos Cloud. Dozens of enormous spacebergs, fully the size of the Lover and larger, loom ten feet or so above Moira's head. Impressive metal clamps hold the asteroids firm and dangle them down, like buhox carcasses on hooks, from the cargo bay ceiling. As she wanders between the gallery of glaciers, Moira cannot shake the impression that she's essentially walking through a tremendous meat locker, where instead it's the ice that's kept on ice.

The Attaché is easily retrieved from her uniform's pouch, stitched into the small of the jacket's back. The tiny hologram Moira summons gives her exact position aboard the Franchise, a miniscule green dot creeping across the vast expanse of the cruiser's cargo bay. A few taps manage to chart her path toward the desired exit and a swipe of her thumb adjusts the route to accommodate the little detour she's got planned.

Moira doesn't encounter another living soul her entire time in the Franchise's bay. This first strikes her as odd, considering the size of both the ship and her crew. The freezing cargo hold, Moira then supposes, doesn't have much call for foot traffic when stuffed to the gills with stored spacebergs and not much else.

All the same, Moira does her best to maintain her cover – walking with purpose towards the exit, the Attaché clutched at her side. There are surveillance holos everywhere, Moira keeps reminding herself. She's seen the schematics.

The garbage chute's only a few yards away from the door the Attaché wants to lead her through. Moira yanks open the chute's door, savors the wave of heat the incinerator vomits at her and strips off all her extra layers – the fleecy jacket and the insulated gloves. With a shiver and a sigh, she pitches them inside, knowing they'll draw too much attention in the Franchise's tepid crew corridors.

So stripped, Moira doesn't want to linger in the freezing cargo bay any longer than she has to. Her composure and her alibi, however, both require a minute to gather themselves. She straightens and crisps her uniform – a denim workman's number – as best she can, even fretting a little over the wet spots she earned crawling through the icy tunnel.

As Moira polishes her ident tag with her sleeve, she runs her name, her rank and her alibi over and over in her head, until she's convinced they're unimpeachable facets of who she is.

Moira is now Jesbra Thoi. Moira is now a Gunnery Officer First Class aboard the GCF Franchise. Moira is now a recently promoted germaphobe from the fifth moon of Ujad.

Soon as she's convinced of these facts, Moira takes a steadying breath and activates the door control. Soon as she's done this, of course, Moira comes face-to-face with another crewman.

He's an Ionoi, dressed in the same pressed denim uniform jacket and chipper little hat that she wears. Mercifully for him, however, he's spared the workpants and the disgraceful leather boots, his serpentine tail pooling on the floor. In one scaly hand, he carries a holoboard, a distant cousin to Moira's Attaché, and from this, he looks up and directly at Moira as the door slides open.

Moira represses her instant instinct to lash out and kill him. Once that's quashed, she represses the instinct to blurt out "Jesbra Thoi! Gunnery Officer First Class! Germaphobe!" Gaining her composure, luckily, takes Moira only a heartbeat. In that time, her golden rule resurfaces: observation before action.

Her eyes instinctively land on the Ionoi's own ident card, where it hovers a few inches before the breast of his jacket. As a Petty Gunnery Officer, First Class, Moira actually outranks this Cargo Deck Foreman, this "Garriz, Dykar" and she can take solace in the fact that her motives are likely to go unquestioned by someone even marginally below her station.

Instead of rank violence, Moira chooses a curt nod. Instead of stepping aside to allow the Ionoi to slither past, she stands firm and waits for Garriz to make way for her. Sure enough, his slitted eyes land on her own name and rank and he slithers obsequiously aside, allowing Moira to advance into the Franchise proper.

Only when the cargo bay door sighs closed behind her and the Ionoi is gone can Moira exhale and safely examine her surroundings.

The first thing sge notices is how little justice Two-Bit's holos do the interior of the GCF Franchise. Moira can hardly believe the cold, prosaic cargo bay and the lush, opulent corridors belong on the same planet, much less the same spaceship. The one is lifeless and utilitarian, the other is tasteful, decorative and obviously designed for comfort and elegance. For a moment, Moira's reminded fleetingly of the extravagant Inner Sector lifestyle she left behind so many years ago.

It makes her want to puke.

In place of unfeeling teltriton, the Franchise boasts Casqorin hardwood walls and polished marble floors. Every nook and cranny of the corridor she walks is stylishly furnished in attractive dark wood and upholstered with flawless blue leather. Moira passes an atrium with an honest-to-moons water feature, a miniature brook that babbles endlessly through an immaculately tended garden.

Greenery is – for a spaceship – unnervingly common here. Expensive and provocative artwork adorns the walls. Muzak, offensive in its inoffensiveness, is piped softly through unseen speakers.

No matter where she looks, Moira can't find a single shred of evidence to suggest she's aboard a spaceship, rather than some ritzy six-star hotel in the Inner Sectors.

Nor is Moira exactly alone.

Evidence of their miscalculated timing is everywhere. The ship's crew fill the corridors, loiter in open doorways and go about the day-to-day business of operating one of the galaxy's most profitable commercial cruisers. Moira does her best to join the steady trickle of blue-uniformed crew, all from a variety of species, ebbing and flowing around her. She strides with purpose, keeping the Attaché's specific route in her mind as best she can.

Moira does her best to avoid large clusters of her "crewmates", hoping to flit right past without drawing too much attention. To this end, she also keeps up her urgent pace, thinking that the less mystified and surreptitious she looks, the less she'll stand out as an intruder. Whenever she can, though, Moira will duck down a side passage or avoid any tangled intersection – no reason to put her unfamiliar face and her less-than-stellar credentials before any more eyes than necessary.

When push comes to shove, Moira Quicksilver would so much rather slink through the Franchise's security in her usual black leather and chokehold any wandering guards she encounters. Almost anything would be better than all these disguises and aliases and false identities. Moira feels very confident in her ability to infiltrate a secure compound and silently dispatch any resistance she encountered. She feels somewhat less-than-confident in her ability to smile and play the part of an ordinary spacer and not look conspicuous.

This type of work she imagines Flask or Two-Bit would have excelled at. Unfortunately, neither of them were around for this stage and, of the three remaining pirates aboard The Unconstant Lover, Moira is, hands down, the least suspicious at a glance.

Before long, Moira passes a viewport on her right side, concrete proof that she's aboard a spaceship. She cannot help but dawdle a second to admire the view, something she knows that Jesbra Thoi would probably have stopped doing months ago.

When seen from space, the planet Gi doesn't seem worth all the trouble. A chalky white ball, it's almost featureless, save the occasional discoloration here or there that Moira assumes must be landscape or terrain. From where she stands, she can't see a speck of blue ocean anywhere on the planet's entire surface, which seems to confirm Two-Bit's intel about Gi's peculiar climate.

It's really the climatic field encircling the entire planet, though, bright yellow and rippling ever so softly, that convinces Moira this is the real deal.

An essential tool in the arsenal of the galaxy's agroworlds, the climatic field over Gi looks like a great teltriton spiderweb that encompasses the planet's entire orbit. The strands of that web form one massive teltriton space station, housing projectors and docking bays and generators to power the field. In between those strands stretches the actual field, a membrane of shimmering energy that can trap or vent heat at whatever rate its controllers desire.

That field can be modulated to simulate practically any conceivable climate – from subarctic to subtropical – on the planet below. It is the climatic field that allows the commercial crop industry to produce year round, on hundreds of planets throughout the Outer Ring.

What makes Gi's case so unusual is actually invisible to Moira at this distance. Superficially, this climatic field appears no different to any other. Thanks to Two-Bit's notes and the crew's exhaustive briefings, Moira knows that this particular climatic field has been dialed all the way to eleven.

In short, the Gitter Consortium is cooking the planet Gi to a crisp.

Two-Bit's research claims that conditions on Gi's surface are so harsh and unforgiving, there's zero hope of sustaining an animal, much less a sentient, population. The planet is barren because the field saps all the moisture from the soil. The planet has no oceans because they've all long evaporated under the Consortium's brutal regime. The planet is a featureless dustbowl because, under these conditions, the list of flourishing species on Gi numbers in the single digits.

First among those species, however, is the mysterious Gitter plant.

Only here, throughout all the innumerable planets of the galaxy, has Gitter ever taken root and grown. Only under these unique conditions does the Consortium maintain a sustainable harvesting operation. For whatever reason – Two-Bit and his sources believe it to be a unique condition of the planet – this is the only world in all the known galaxy where the Gitter Consortium can grow their product.

This is the truth behind all the secrecy. This is the need for the elaborate facade. While headquartered in the Gitter Hegemony's resplendent capital world of Gita, the secreted world of Gi is the true power behind all the Consortium's success and influence.

Moira cannot begin to imagine all the pains and headaches that must have gone into concealing this whole operation from the wider galaxy. On a daily basis, records must be altered, warp coordinates must be scrambled, manifests must be forged for each of the dozens of ships in orbit around the planet at any given moment. This says nothing for the titanic amount of bribes the Consortium must pad their paychecks with, to crewmen, to middle-managers, to retail executives, to every single person along the shipping line with any reason to doubt the cargo's actual origin.

Obviously, it went without saying that a conspiracy this massive couldn't be kept perfectly secret. The right questions asked to the right people could unearth the right venues where one could pay the right price to get the skinny about the scene behind the scenes. Thankfully for the crew of The Unconstant Lover, that's precisely the service Two-Bit Switch provided for them.

Considering the extreme lengths the Consortium was willing to go to protect this secret, kicking in the door, guns blazing, was right out, as far as Two-Bit's heist was concerned.

There was one chink in the operation's armor – smuggling their starship inside an asteroid and bumming a ride within the belly of a cruiser – that Two-Bit had managed to widen. It involved a molecular strip, millions of credits in bribes and ultimately six weeks of not murdering one another to accomplish. Even when performed to perfection, all this would give them is one chance – not even a particularly good chance – at making off with a Gitter plant in tow.

That happy outcome, of course, is several phases of the caper away. Moira's lingered too long, she knows, gazing down at the planet the galaxy's most powerful corporation didn't want her or anyone to know anything about.

Keeping a careful eye on her surroundings, Moira moves with purpose down the last little stretch of her route before the security terminal. She's struck with a sudden bolt of nerves as she nears her destination, afraid of passing right by the terminal without recognizing it. She gambles on double checking the Attaché's blueprint for a second, to ensure she's on the right track.

Moira had nothing to fear; she's standing not ten feet from the terminal. She glances up, to confirm what the hologram's told her, and does indeed discover her destination.

The security terminal is worked cunningly into the wall, a piece of machinery disguised beneath dark wood paneling. The only problem, far as Moira can tell, is the spice ranger that's currently using it.

Moira recognizes her as an Vhurman by the segmented plates and twitching cilia. Moira recognizes her as a spice ranger by the gleaming metal harness she wears, strapped across her chitinous torso. Thankfully, the ranger's not paying Moira any attention, too busy putzing with something on the security terminal.

Moira takes this opportunity to slink away, taking shelter in the nearest alcove she can. Once again, Moira's fighting her initial instincts, this time to flee at top speed back up the posh corridor. That's hardly how Jesbra Thoi would react, Moira reasons. To Jesbra Thoi, mild-mannered spacer with nothing interesting or suspicious about her whatsoever, this is just another friendly neighborhood spice ranger.

With no Righty or Lefty, fight's not an option. Without attracting undue attention, flight's not a viable option either. All Moira can comfortably do is sit tight and rack her brain for some other contingency plan.

The spice ranger, meanwhile, continues with her business uninterrupted. What that business is, Moira can't really tell from this angle. To judge by the sounds Moira hears, she has a strong suspicion that one of deadliest mercenaries in the galaxy is scrolling the feeds, watching stupid jborra holos.

Were she facing some average ship security, some thug with a uniform and an electrobaton, Moira would feel no compunction about kicking the obstacle in the back of the knees and head until it stopped being an obstacle. In the case of a spice ranger, however, even a Moira Quicksilver armed with Righty and Lefty would think thrice before starting any shit.

Legendary across Bad Space for their fighting prowess, their advanced firepower and their reputation as teltriton-hard motherbloomers, the Consortium's Spice Rangers Corp were the bogeyman's bogeyman. Nothing else could quite quail a corsair's heart like the mere mention of the Sunspots, the Comettails or the Shootingstars; fanciful names for deadly killers.

To preserve their unchallenged monopoly – and what's more, to guard their many corporate secrets – the Gitter Consortium spared no expense to create the greatest security operatives the galaxy over. Rangers were raised from childhood, they were equipped with bleeding edge weaponry and they were zealously devoted to the principles and ideals of the Gitter Hegemony.

As an angsty preteen on Anglia, the young Moira Quicksilver's most frequent fantasies involved running away to join the Spice Ranger Corp. Soon as she actually did run away from home, she immediately attempted to enroll and promptly washed out of the entrance trials. Ever since, she'd looked upon the Ranger Corp with a confusing mixture of contempt and awe. The bitter bite of her rejection would be forever tempered by the squealing inner fangirl that Moira never managed to fully extinguish.

It's the harness that captures the fascination and terror of the Outer Ring's criminal populace. Worn by each ranger, those exoskeletons were the number one deterrent against any act of piracy that might otherwise be committed against the Consortium's merchanters.

When fully extended, the harness transformed a spice ranger, already an expertly-trained killer, into a living war machine. In addition to enhanced strength, enhanced speed and a partial ray shield, the spice rangers were perhaps most feared for their dreaded "heatblades".

All in all, this made the unexpected Vhurman someone the unarmed Moira Quicksilver wouldn't relish nor necessarily survive tangling with.

Moira risks a glance around the corner. She confirms the insignia – an exploding star – stamped onto the back piece of the harness and sighs. Of course she's a Supernova, the ranger troop with an especially gruesome reputation of stomping out moonshining rings across the Quadrant. What're the odds, Moira wonders bitterly, that, of the Franchise's several thousand ordinary crewmen, she would have the good luck to encounter one of perhaps a hundred spice rangers aboard?

The longer Moira watches, the less sign the ranger shows of relinquishing the terminal anytime soon. Any moment now, someone else might happen down this side corridor and spot Moira where she lurks in this alcove. Who knows, by now, she may well have been spotted on a surveillance monitor somewhere.

She switches the Attaché into silent mode, summons forth the Franchise's familiar blueprint and strangles a curse against improvisation.

A quick sweep of the surrounding area reveals no additional security terminals anywhere within easy sneaking distance. In theory, all Moira really needs is an open portal, somewhere she can interface the Attaché directly into the Franchise's computer systems. A security terminal would obviously by the ideal choice but, given her dilemma, she may need to lower her standards a touch.

By widening the search, Moira instantly locates half a dozen public access terminals. Designed for use by the rank and file of the Franchise's crew, several are within easy reach of her current location. These would requires a little elbow grease, on Moira's part, to gain unfettered access to the primary ship's computer; not impossible and certainly preferable to kickboxing a spice ranger plates of hardened chitin for skin.

Moira makes her choice – the employee's console in the cargo deck's breakroom. A short walk, made a little longer by her paranoid need to circumvent the spice ranger entirely, is all that separates her from her alternate plan. She stores her Attaché, collects her breath and she's off, padding quietly back the way she came, happy to leave the spice ranger behind.

On her detour, Jesbra Thoi navigates a narrow hallway, lined with holograms of company figureheads. She sidesteps to avoid a forkdrift and its redskin driver, the bulky machine an eyesore against its swanky surroundings. She crosses an exquisite Vhaseen sand garden, following the path of glowing yellow stepstones through the meticulously tended work of art.

Her detour is a short one, however, and soon enough, Moira's standing in the doorway to the cargo deck's breakroom. Why she'd expected somewhere dank and stale-smelling, she'd no idea, considering how upscale the rest of the ship's interior is. The breakroom is more an extravagant lounge, complete with the same plush furniture, polished hardwood and stainless thermosteel – nothing but luxury for even the Franchise's meanest crewmembers.

Constructed elegantly into the wood of the central table are public access consoles before each place setting.

Taking the nearest seat, Moira works quickly to unsheath the Attaché and connect the device. While she waits for the two computers to get acquainted, she taps her fingers idly on the wood and frets a little, praying the interface isn't too challenging to navigate.

True to form, the Franchise's mainframe is streamlined and sleek, especially when compared to the dated and choppy protocols aboard The Unconstant Lover.

Once the connection's established, Moira undertakes the much more onerous task of locating a single file on an Attaché once owned by both Two-Bit Switch and Nehel Morel. When a basic file search fails to unearth the necessary item, it becomes a prolonged and aggravating hunt, scrolling through heaps of documents, files and downloads, all with infuriating names like "Stuff" and "Thing I Wanted To Save" and "Another Thing".

After much ado, she stumbles across "My Evil Paln 7" and curses that fateful spelling error. Eager to commence with the chaos, Moira doubletaps the icon with a finger and, on instinct, pull her hands away from the device, as though expecting a sudden shock.

A moment later, all she sees is a progress bar.

She reaches for her belted comm, the fancy new one purchased to compliment her costume, with the intent to buzz Nemo a quick few blips, the agreed-upon signal to stand by. Her hand doesn't touch metal, however, before the door breezes open and somebody walks into the break room.

Moira stops dead.

He's an Ondo, of the chalky white skin and the prominent forehead. He's cargo deck crew, of the workaday uniform and the slouched shoulders of defeat. With a weary sigh, he shuffles into the break room, gives the place the once over and, upon spying Moira, nods curtly from the chin. "Hey."

Moira has no possible other response. "Hey."

Conversation achieved, the Ondo heads to the chiller, inspired by long habit rather than actual hunger. He throws open the door and stands there several seconds, face aglow from the chiller's light and seeming to expect something delicious to come parading out to meet him.

It would cost Moira very little effort to rise from her chair and crush his esophagus with a Clutching Vyroshek before he could make a peep. Short of cramming the corpse in a nearby cupboard, however, this would leave her zero alibi for when the next crewmember wanders in and discovers Jesbra Thoi, sitting quietly before her Attaché, a dead Ondo at her feet.

Excluding murder, then, all Moira can really do is deactivate the hologram mode on the Attaché, pray he doesn't come close enough to examine the contents of her screen and keep her proverbial cool.

His arm propped on the open chiller door, he turns toward Moira and sloshes a definitely expired carton of lonktonk nog at her. "This yours?"

"No," answers Moira truthfully.

"Doesn't have a name." He examine the carton closely. "Bloom it. I won't tell if you won't."

He throws back a few swallows, wipes his mouth on his sleeve and peers appraisingly at the carton and its waterline of remaining nog. With a pleased shrug, he screws the cap back on and tosses it carelessly back into the chiller.

The progress bar reads 12%.

Meanwhile, the Ondo stoops to retrieve a plastolieum container filled with unappetizing brown sludge. He boots the chiller closed, tosses his meal into the nukebox and spends the intervening seconds while his lunch cooks, gazing dumbly about the room and tapping his long fingers against the counter.

It doesn't take long for his gaze to fall on Moira. His alien brow creases into a scowl.

"You new?"

"Uh," stammers Moira, her ironshod alias suddenly wispy and translucent. "Transfered. From the Trademark."

"Oh, sure," the Ondo recognizes, nodding. "You're from Gunnery. That's cool."

"Yep."

Moira could hurdle across the table and collapse his ribcage beneath a flying stomp. Moira could pitch the Attaché across the room and shatter most of the bones of his face. Moira would risk the noise, damn the whole caper and pepper him full of ditrogen craters – until she remembers she, for some reason, agreed to come here fucking unarmed.

The Ondo makes a half-hearted wave. "Frebb."

"Jesbra," Moira answers, too quickly. "Hi."

The nukebox bleats once. Frebb spins around, retrieves his steaming bowl of slimy something and chooses a spot at the table infuriatingly close to Moira's own. He doesn't bother with utensils, simply hunching heavily over his meal and blowing the steam away. Moira, meanwhile, avoids eye contact and any excuse for further small talk, staring fixedly at the Attaché's screen.

Soon as his meal's cooled to his satisfaction, the Ondo extends his worm-like black tongue and proceeds to scoop the slime into his open mouth, gazing around the room with the utter vapidity of the working class moron. A thought gradually occurs to Frebb as he eats and the scowl that comes to his face arrives with all the speed of a glacier.

"How come you're down here, then? If you're Gunnery."

She wonders how he'd react were she to answer truthfully, that she's really Moira Quicksilver and she's here to steal the galaxy's greatest secret out from under his and everybody else's noses. Part of her almost does fess up, to necessitate killing him and ending this odious and nerve-wracking conversation.

Instead, she points to the progress bar. "Had to use the console," she explains, trying to sound as mildly contemptuous as she can, to discourage him from pestering her any further. "One upstairs's busted."

"Yeah?" grunts the Ondo. "Typical." With a finger, Frebb activates the console installed in the table before his seat and begins surfing through the ship's internal channels. "Pieces of shit."

The progress bar reads 16%.

"It's such buhoxshit," Frebb starts to complain, "the ban on outgoing transmissions. Like, I get it, right," the Ondo shrugs, making a few mocking gestures, "it's a secret planet, nobody's supposed to know, the truth will out, all that crap." His tongue lashes out again, slurping up a serving of leftovers. "Pay us better, then, at least," Frebb suggests around a mouthful. "Homeworld duty blows."

Moira could shove the table, spill his lunch and, while he's distracted, be on him with a dozen different Tebi-Gali strikes – a Righteous Thazuna or a Crushing Vagobar – a heartbeat later. Moira could probably reach his feet under the table and could, with a properly placed kick, send him spinning from the chair. Moira could swipe the slop he's eating and smash that container over his head repeatedly until he stopped fucking talking to her.

"'cause two weeks is a moons-damned long time to be incommunicado from the rest of the galaxy, man," Frebb continues to complain. "You know, I gotta girlfriend, back on Psabo, and she's starting to get suspicious of all these mysterious business trips company's making me take." He shovels more nondescript brown paste into his mouth. "What'm I supposed to say? That the Franchise is on extended assignment, around some secret blooming planet nobody's ever heard of?"

The only response Moira can make that doesn't involve breaking any of his bones is a curt nod. Her eyes are locked downward, boring into that progress bar, willing the sluggish thing to move any faster.

Then, in answer to all her prayers, the lights above flicker once.

Unlike Moira, hyper-aware of her surroundings, Frebb hardly notices. It's only when the lights flicker a third and fourth time that the Ondo looks up from his meal and his monitor, to gaze curiously around.

The moons, in all their wisdom, must truly be watching over Moira. At the exact moment that Frebb glances upward, a distant alarm starts to chime. This is followed by the sound of hurried boots, tromping down the hallway. This is followed by the breakroom's door slamming open and shut erratically.

"Uh..." he stammers, completely baffled at this sudden turn of events.

Moira points a finger towards the door, the hallway and the distant alarm. "Should you go, like, see what that is?"

This brings a deeper scowl to the Ondo face. With a few tapped fingers against the screen, he summons a small hologram of a clock, contemplates the time a moment and dismisses the whole thing with a wave of his hand.

"I'm on break."

CHAPTER 5

Odisseus takes strenuous objection to that. "It was not an isolated incident."

Nemo sticks his finger too close to the Ortok's nose. "Name one other time, then."

"Qabb," Odisseus replies immediately. "After the sack. You got so drunk you practically forgot your pants back on the ship."

The finger lingers there another second, its owner considering his saltbrother's argument. "That time doesn't count. That time, Two-Bit put them in a weird place."

Odisseus spreads his paws wide. "Let me disillusion you of something. The key rack is not a 'weird place' to put the spaceship keys."

At that moment, another pedestrian – a Ionoi crewman pushing a driftpallet – wanders through the lower atrium. What he sees is a ragged-looking humanoid and a great hairy brute, engaged in a petty argument. The Ionoi scowls his scaled brow, almost opens his mouth to speak, thinks better of it and continues on his way, through another adjoining corridor.

Both saltbrothers stand in awkward silence a moment, as the slithering sound of the Ionoi's tail disappears down the hallway.

"We're made," frets Odisseus once they're safely out of earshot. "He's off to find a spice ranger. For sure."

"We're not made," dismisses Nemo with a wave of his hand and no more compelling evidence than that.

"'Gee, officer,'" imagines Odisseus in the Ionoi's mock voice, "'I don't know what an Ortok and a homeless gentlemen were doing, loitering around in the lower atrium. But I knew, the second I saw them, that I should buzz it in.'"

"Does sorta beg the question," Nemo poses, glancing around the abandoned atrium.

"Where's Moira?"

"Yeah," Nemo agrees. "Or Mayhem."

They had loitered in the lower atrium of the GCF Franchise an alarming length of time – seven minutes and counting – without the faintest trace of Moira to assuage their irrational fears. She could be caught, she could be sweating out a spice ranger interrogation in the cruiser's brig, she could simply be running a few minutes late. Each of Nemo's ill-advised comms went unanswered, giving them precisely no clue as to the fate of their advance scout.

To make matters worse, the pair of them, shooting the breeze in the cargo deck's elevator lobby, couldn't possibly look more conspicuous. They might as well have tattooed "WE'RE TRYING TO ROB YOU!" in holographic letters across their foreheads. Despite the standard-issue uniform the Captain wore, nothing could be done to make Nemo look less like he'd just spent six weeks in a hooskow of his own making – unwashed hair, slimy skin, frenzied eyes.

Odisseus looks no better. His fur remains unshorn and slick with grease. His claws are untrimmed and his fangs lacquered yellow. Plus, he's squeezed into a uniform intended for a Quarg several sizes smaller than he was. This left aside the obvious fact that he was no Quarg, with white markings on his neck, webbed digits or a huge blooming tail. All they could hope was that they encountered no xenobiologists nor other Quargs during this brief reconnaissance mission.

With a big blast of breath, Nemo plops down onto the crate, its driftmotor bobbing ever so slightly. "Well," he starts speculatively, glancing back over his shoulder, "whaddya think?"

"We stay here a minute longer," predicts Odisseus, crossing his arm, "the jig's up. A troop of spice rangers is exactly as likely to come tromping down that corridor as Moira is. And then these," he jangles his uniform's lapel, making the ident waver and distort, "are no good to us."

"Yeah," sighs Nemo, disappointment heavy in his voice. Like a child in a high chair, he dangles his feet disconsolately off the side of the floating driftcrate.

"Whereas, if we head–"

The overhead lights suddenly flicker. For a few spastic moments, the lower atrium is flooded with unfriendly red, resembling a typical battleship corridor for an instant. Both pirates stop and gaze dumbly up at the ceiling, as though they'd just experienced a flash of unseasonable weather.

"Is that–" Odisseus starts to wonder before he's interrupted by the telltale blare of an emergency alarm. From a set of nearby speakers, the klaxon drones at full volume and Odisseus clamps his paws over his ears. Highly fluent in the language of spaceship alerts and alarms, the Ortoki mechanic would recognize that sound anywhere, no matter what vessel he was aboard.

That sound meant there was an engine fire.

In the flashing red lights, the crooked smile on the Captain's face gives him a profoundly demonic appearance. "Mayhem," Nemo mouths, not bothering to cover ears already so damaged by Cosmic Vomit.

"Then we'd better," Odisseus screams in reply, "not be caught standing around here, then?"

"Agreed."

With that, the two saltbrothers hustle into the awaiting elevator, Nemo pushing the cherished crate before him. Odisseus punches the necessary button with a claw, the one that will ferry them up to the gunnery deck and their errand.

"In my defense," Nemo starts to explain, shouting to be heard over all the clamor, "the key rack was kinda an unusual place to put the keys. And Two-Bit should have known that."

"Not to speak ill of the dead," mutters Odisseus as the elevator doors slide open. "And where should he have put them instead?" he wonders, in full voice. "Starboard's fuel intake valve? A bottle of worcestershire sauce?"

Nemo waves a hand dismissively. "Those were isolated incidents."

Moira could flip the table, knock the Ondo to the ground, straddle his body and drive her thumbs into his eye sockets.

"And that's the thing," Frebb continues to grouse. "If I clock in at half-past, that doesn't give me nearly enough time to check all the manifests before I'm needed in supply at quarter to. I mean, like, if I go blooming running down the ship, sure, but the last time I tried that, I got docked for indecorous behavior aboard or whatever Lexubor is blooming calling it now."

The Ondo rant is peppered with slurping and slathering sounds as he devours his brown mush. The console's holographic display before him goes utterly ignored as it flicks through thousands of available feeds and frequencies. Moira's own console, meanwhile, remains decidedly in screen mode, lest Frebb catch a glimpse of its damning progress bar.

With slouched posture, with her noncommittal grunts and nods, with every fiber of her being, Moira is imploring this interferial moron to leave her alone.

The problem is, he won't stop asking her questions.

Moira refuses to rise to the bait of "When does Gunnery clock in?" and it hangs in the air for several seconds. "Hey. Hey, Jesbra? What time's Gunnery clock in?"

"Oh," Moira responds, as though she'd somehow not heard him. "Uh, quarter after, I think."

"Quarter after? The fuck?" Frebb is flabbergasted. Moira's immediately terrified that she's blown her cover, that it's flagrantly obvious by her answer that she's an imposter and a galaxy-renowned criminal and here to rob them all. He jabs a finger at Moira. "You're saying Gunnery gets fifteen extra minutes on the clock than we do?"

All Moira can do is shrug. "I guess so?"

Frebb slaps the table in disgust. "Un-blooming-believable. Those fucks. Those unbelievable fucks." Moira nods a few times, what she prays is sympathetically, before she returns her gaze back where it belongs, back to her progress bar.

"Gotta get me on Gunnery," Frebb adds mutteringly.

Somehow, all the cacophony and pandemonium miserably fails to matter to Frebb. Moira can hear three separate alarms, pealing through the ship. Moira can hear an argument between two crewmen about a malfunctioning airlock on the engineering deck. Moira hears a third spice ranger go roaring past the breakroom's door. That doesn't include the hazard lights, bathing the little lounge in cautionary red at regular intervals.

Frebb, it seems, could not care less about the welfare of his spaceship.

One of two things must happen to save Moira from this gruesomely pedestrian fate. Either Frebb's designated break must end or the mayhem will reach such a dire level that it'll drag the Ondo into the mess.

The progress bar reads 32%.

Odisseus refuses to budge on this point. "It's an unnecessary risk."

"An unnecessary risk? Listen to yourself. What's the worst that could possibly happen?"

"Um, a lot of things. I can think of like, ten."

"Such as?"

Odisseus decides to budge a little. Not on his point, per se, but to avoid the spray of acidic coolant that's about to spray all over him and his saltbrother.

Whenever a main coolant valve is about to rupture from excess pressure, it makes a charming little hissing sound. Years spent belowdecks and beneath hoods have taught the Ortoki mechanic to recognize this sound a zottible away. When he hears this familiar bubble and hiss from somewhere overhead, Odisseus stops in his stride, sidesteps and even has the afterthought to hoist Nemo by the waist and swing him away from the danger as well.

Exactly on schedule, a patch of the swanky hardwood ceiling disintegrates a few feet above where the pair of pirates were standing. A gushing spray of coolant, completely transparent and completely lethal, splashes onto the deck approximately six inches from the Ortok's hind paw. Within seconds, the sizzling liquid has smoked through the marble and is working its way hungrily through the teltriton beneath.

Odisseus wonders idly whether it'll eventually chew its way through the ship's outer hull and vent the whole Franchise into open space. Not really his problem, he supposes.

The pair of them stand there a second, seeming to contemplate their own mortalities. To see his death so narrowly avoided, Nemo can only whistle low in his throat.

"Such as," Odisseus elucidates as they continue on their jog down the gunnery deck's corridors, "buzzing the local locksmith and having him roll out to the scene with half a hundred bounty hunters on his tail. What locksmith where is gonna service us?"

"So we shoot him afterwards," Nemo suggests breezily. "Big whoop."

"Despite what you might assume," Odisseus finds himself growling, "a canister to the head is not the solution to every problem."

"Every problem, no," Nemo concedes. "Many problems, yes."

"I can think of one right now," remarks Odisseus, too low for Nemo to hear above all the commotion.

The GCF Franchise, stem to stern, is in a state of uproar. Blinding red warning lights and shrieking alarms compete for urgency in her corridors. Crewmen, of dozens of species and ranks, go rushing past, all wearing identical uniforms and expressions of panic, confusion and terror. Malfunctions are rampant, wherever Odisseus turns. Monitors flicker and fritz, doorways snap open and closed, a thousand holographic warnings flash against the ship's polished Casqorin hardwood.

In a word, it's mayhem.

Amid all the mayhem, it's a breeze for the Captain and the Ortok to slip past unnoticed, having adopted the uniforms, the frantic expressions and the frantic gait of everyone else aboard. To any other unsuspecting crewman, there's nothing suspicious about the pair of spacers, pushing a cargo crate hastily through the halls.

Were they paying an iota more attention, they might notice something irregular about these spacers, that all they were somehow able to predict every little catastrophe before it struck them. To the trained eye, it's clear they moved through the chaos with well-rehearsed, almost preternatural, grace.

"Quit being so overdramatic," scoffs Nemo, banking the drifting crate hard around a corner.

"Quit being so cavalier," retorts Odisseus, circling around his right side.

"How long we been flying together?" Nemo questions, flush with the unearned confidence of an imagined victory.

"Six years," Odisseus answers by rote, deeply troubled the moment after he does so.

Nemo doesn't notice the Ortok's moment of existential dread. "And in those six years, how many times have I locked the keys in the ship?"

"Four?" This Odisseus deliberates over a moment, certain he's misremembering. "No, five. I forgot that time on Yon."

"Yon?" Nemo screws up his face. "I have no memory of Yon."

Odisseus rolls his eyes. "Of course you don't. Oh, this is us."

On the corridor's port side, a varnished wooden doorway slides open without being asked. Odisseus shoves Nemo into the chamber and hustles inside, the moment before the door slides back shut. Soon as the door's sealed and latched, Odisseus plants an ear against the hardwood, listening for the exact moment when it's safe to venture back into the corridor.

The inside of the chamber appears to be a sensory bay, filled with sleek monitors set into luxuriant consoles and dashboards. At the moment, the chamber is unoccupied, most of the crew having evacuated the gunnery deck to perform vital services elsewhere.

Outside the chamber, Odisseus hears nothing but a fierce suctioning sound, so violent that it tangibly shakes the door, the door frame and the whole wall. Soon as the corridor they were walking down ceases venting oxygen into open space, they'll be free to continue on their way.

Not to be interrupted in the middle of his thesis, Nemo drums fingers impatiently against the crate's head. "Of those four times," he continues, however inaccurately, "the worst that's happened is what, Two-Bit got to practice his lock picking skills and we were a little late back to the rendezvous?"

Ear still pressed to the wood grain, Odisseus perhaps takes a little too much pleasure in explaining precisely how Nemo's wrong. "The worst time was on Kyth, six months ago, when I hadta smash the viewport to get back into the helm and you hadta fly her blind all the way to orbital anchor with a low-atmo tarp over her windshield."

"That was kinda fun, actu–"

"How about the first time, then," Odisseus continues, without missing a beat, "on Takioro, when the only guy available was Velocity's guy and she reamed us in the bloomhole because she was still sore over that mess with the engine lubricant?"

"That's hardly my–"

"Or there's always the time on Yon, when we had to track down somebody else who still flew a Briza, kill them, take their keys and cross our fingers they would even fit in the ship's lock."

"Oh, yeah," Nemo remembers in a small voice. "That one was pretty bad."

On the other side of the door, Odisseus hears the open airlock sealing shut again, the dreadful vacuuming sound falling silent. Moving quickly, Odisseus releases the catch on the crate and pulls forth a pair of oxygen masks. Tossing one to the Captain, his stuffs his own, in an extremely dignified and fetching way, over his muzzle and behind his ears. The damn thing is both uncomfortable and humiliating but it's certainly preferable to both continuing this conversation and, to a lesser extent, asphyxiation.

Nemo fights being silenced to the last breath. "I will say, in my defense–" is all he manages to utter before the Ortok literally shoves the mask over his nose and mouth. Soon as those straps are secured around his head, Odisseus steps back, the door slides open on its own and the pair of them head back out on the mission.

As they make their way further and further along the gunnery deck, Mayhem continues to oblige them – opening doors, sealing doors against potential threats, conveniently accessing coded or restricted sections of the spacecraft. For every danger it shepherds them through, there's another obstacle or impediment that Odisseus recalls a few vital seconds before it rears its head. He always manages to squeeze not only himself, but the Captain and the crate, through the danger but it's occasionally – such as with the berserk autoloader – a little too close for comfort.

It's a well-rehearsed dance, the Ortok and the virus working in concert to navigate the utter shitshow that the GCF Franchise has become.

The last leg of the obstacle course they traverse without oxygen or gravity, the ship's inertial dampeners deactivated. It's an awkward ballet between the two of them, Odisseus and Nemo passing the floatig crate back and forth like a skooshball between teammates. Considering the precious cargo it carries, Odisseus is understandably a little nervy every time the crate falls back into reckless Nemo's hands. After all, the entire caper, not to mention their very lives, hinge so crucially on the contents of that crate.

Before long, however, Mayhem guides them to their destination. Odisseus digs claws into the side of the relevant doorway and catches Nemo by the wrist. With a scrambling motion, Nemo snags the crate before it slides away down the corridor. Once they're all safely inside the chamber, the fabled munitions depot of song and story, Odisseus almost regrets pulling off the unpleasant oxygen mask, for one reason and one reason only.

"–in my defense," continues a gasping Nemo, "I'd had rather a lot to drink that day."

Moira can't believe Lexubor would say that to Frebb.

"He said that to you?"

Frebb nods enthusiastically. "He did. Right to my blooming face."

"Bloom me out," Moira breathes. "The nerve on that guy."

"I know, right?"

By now, Moira's leaned more comfortably back in her chair, to better digest the Ondo's tales of workplace woe. The Attaché, meanwhile, thrums contentedly on the table, presumably still working its way through the upload. Frebb, standing, leans back against the counter, his arms crossed and his head shaking, in disbelief at his own anecdote. The world beyond the breakroom is still muffled insanity; alarms, screams, chaos.

"And I'm like, you outrank me barely." Frebb pinches his fingers together, to illustrate the miniscule gap between their two positions. "You're not the admiral, you're not the captain. You're not even the fucking deck super. You don't have the authority to go ordering me around."

"You said that to him?"

"Well, no," Frebb admits. "I was thinking it." He glances to the side, looking down at his boots. "He does technically outrank me."

"See, that's my whole thing too," agrees Moira, pointing eagerly in his direction. "Every time the turret gets clogged, there's–"

Moira's story squeals to a stop. Without fully realizing what she was saying, she'd stumbled into a gripe about Odisseus and life aboard The Unconstant Lover. She couldn't, in good faith, dead-end her story here, however, without making Frebb unduly suspicious. Nor could she, on the other hand, continue ahead in her narrative and bitch about how the Ortok aboard her pirate freighter always turned up his whiskered nose at the personal repairs she made to her favorite Antagonist.

What Moira must do is tread carefully – something she's much better at physically than conversationally.

"There's?" cues Frebb, raising an eyebrow.

"There was," Moira clarifies, hoping to play off her momentary lapse as tense troubles, "this guy, back on the Trademark, who would always come, right, to unclog the turret–"

"From Repair Dispatch?" Frebb nods, supplying her with a deliciously necessary detail. "Yeah."

"Yeah. And he was always giving me this guff, you know, about the way I treat the thing. And you gotta understand, I was a saint with this turret. I put in twice the time and ten times the love any of the other," she stumbles over the details a little, tripped up by the past tense and lack of fellow gunnery crewmembers, "uh, people did. And still, he treated me like a child."

"Did he outrank you?"

Moira shakes her head slightly. "Nah, but he knew the Captain, actually, pretty well, so."

"Right," comments Frebb, with vague antipathy. "That sucks, man."

"Yeah."

Conversation lulls for a few moments. Moira's eyes drop naturally down to the Attaché, peacefully uploading its destructive virus into the Franchise's mainframe.

The progress bar reads 86%.

Odisseus doesn't wish to be misunderstood.

"What, then, are you proposing, exactly?"

"What I'm proposing is that we institute some sort of two-key system."

"Blech. Sounds complicated."

"It's delightfully simple. Allow me to explain."

After all that trouble, the munitions depot turns out to be little more than a glorified supply closet for explosives. Cases upon cases of canisters, ballistic shells and other intimidating gray strongboxes are stacked in the chamber's various corners, narrow pathways carving through them. Holodisplays hover an inch before each crate, case or cask, detailing their contents.

Odisseus moves between the holograms, running a claw along their subject lines, searching for the exact specifications that match the crate they've carried all this way. In his capacity of an extremely helpful layabout, Nemo lounges atop the crate near the doorway, his arms crossed and his expression skeptical.

"We get a copy of the Lover's ignition keys made," the Ortok explains in his most reasonable tone. "You carry one, I carry one."

"Hm."

"That way," Odisseus elaborates, before Nemo can categorically reject the idea, "should you accidentally lock them aboard, there's always my copy and no need for headaches or murders."

"Hm."

Odisseus waits a pregnant length of time for Nemo to expand on this answer. "Thoughts?"

"What locksmith where," poses his saltbrother thoughtfully, "makes the copy?"

To this, Odisseus can only flick his whiskers once in annoyance. Thankfully, a discovery saves him from making an immediate reply. "Found it," he announces, waving towards Nemo with a paw. "Bring it over."

With the laborious sigh that always comes when manual labor is required of him, Nemo scoots off the crate and shuffles the floating thing over. As he does, Odisseus wiggles an identical crate out from its place in the stack, places it very carefully on the floor and engages the latch with a hiss.

Odisseus peers down to confirm the contents of the crate, the sole objective of this entire ludicrous reconnaissance mission aboard the Franchise.

Packed like merchandise inside the crate are ugly blobs of beige machinery, a far cry from the chic design aboard the rest of the Franchise. From the routing wires, the capacitor couplings and the amplifier-disks, Odisseus can positively identify them as miniaturized ray shield projectors. Much smaller and single minded than the relay system the Lover employed, these models could project a very powerful barrier for a very limited time, burning through their power source a mottible a minute.

The Ortok notes the vicious hooks on each projector, all the better to anchor in solid ice.

Soon as Nemo arrives with the dummy crate, it's a simple matter to swap the holodisplays from one to the other, shove the fake into the authentic crate's place and be on their merry way. Now, whenever the gunnery crew came to plant the shield projectors on the spacebergs, they'd unknowingly be installing the doctored ones Odisseus cooked up, rather than the genuine article.

Odisseus much prefers this outcome, as the genuine article was specifically designed to explode the asteroid and all its unwitting contents a few hundred feet above Gi's surface.

Their mission accomplished, all that remains for the two saltbrothers is to strap on their masks and navigate the chaos back to their disguised ship, the authentic crate of explosive shield projectors in tow. Moira still inexplicably missing, Odisseus resolves to wait until they've returned to the lower atrium, the designated rendezvous, before he'll risk any comm transmission with her.

Nemo seems to have wholly forgotten about Moira, lost in his own private contemplations as the pair of them depart the munitions depot.

They cross the inhospitable sections of the gunnery deck in necessary silence, though Odisseus senses that Nemo is pondering something mightily the whole way. Soon as they're free to remove their oxygen masks, Nemo uses his first breath to ask, "Who carries the original?"

"Does it matter?" wonders Odisseus, the question taking the Ortok somewhat by surprise. The dark look on the Captain's face, however, inspires Odisseus to amend his answer, worried the fate of his whole "two-key system" might hang in the balance. "Well, I guess you do. You're the Captain."

"Yeah," Nemo agrees at length. "Only makes sense."

They hustle down a switchbacking corridor that runs the length of the Franchise's gunnery deck. The words [EVACUATE] flash in holographic lettering against every wall, from every monitor and blare over the ship's internal comms, in case anyone could've somehow missed the memo. As they haul bloomhole around each corner, Odisseus elects to take over crate duty, to allow Nemo to consider the Ortok's proposal with his full attention.

"So, you agree?" Odisseus dares to ask, his patience draining away by the time they reach a familiar patch of coolant scarring.

Nemo waggles his hand back and forth. "We'll see. It's under advise–"

"Excuse me?" interrupts a polite voice from down an adjoining corridor. The pair stop dead in their tracks, like children caught at mischief. Both heads snap to the side to see a figure approaching at a brisk pace, holding up a hand for them to stop.

She's an Umijo, discernible even at this distance from the eyestalks and the lanky proportions of her arms and legs, dashing any hopes this might be Moira coming to join them. She's dressed in military fatigues, the Ortok is unnerved to discover once she's closed the distance a little more. When the flashing lights glint off her harness, Odisseus wants to go bolting down the corridor in terror but cannot will his hind paws into motion.

They're caught, he knows at the bottom of his heart. What's worse, they're caught by a spice ranger.

All things considered, Nemo keeps his cool commendably – better than Odisseus does. "How can we help you, officer?" he asks sweetly.

All three of the Umijo's eyes are narrowed suspiciously as she closes to conversational distance. "Can you two not see than this deck's been evacuated? Captain's orders."

"Well, yes," Nemo replies, with a gesture towards the hundreds of literal warning signs all around them. "And we're evacuating. Lower atrium."

The spice ranger makes no immediate reply, her two eyestalks swerving between the pair of disguised pirates. Odisseus wonders whether the spacer's tales are true, whether or not an Umijo's third eye, the one in the middle of her forehead, can see through fur and skin and muscle, can see how quickly her prey's heart is beating. This one can, Odisseus is certain of that, that third eye piercing straight through them.

"Names, ranks, idents," she requests after a moment. Reluctant to submit to his own imprisonment, Odisseus slowly raises a claw to tap his own ident badge, expanding the hologram all the larger for the ranger to see.

"Gwraawroogaralox," Odisseus recites as best he can. "Gunnery Tech First Class."

A section of her harness extends, like a mechanical spider crawling across her forearm, and nestles comfortably into place around her wrist. From a contraption here, a fresh hologram appears and the Umijo, utterly bored by this marvel of modern technology, enters the data with quick fingers. "Ma'am," she acknowledges with a nod, before turning to Nemo.

Odisseus nearly opens his mouth to object but she's shifted gears too fast.

"Calman Tasq," Nemo answers with utter surety. "Gunnery Officer Second Class." For all the doom and gloom that's roiling around inside Odisseus, there's not a single hint of anxiety anywhere in the Captain's face, voice or posture. He couldn't, in that moment, be more convinced that his given name is legitimately Calman Tasq.

With utter antipathy, the spice ranger starts to enter Nemo's falsified information. The Ortok knows the data's outdated, incomplete and even contradictory; he knows anything more than a cursory examination would blow them wide open. Yet, to see the lax way the Umijo runs their particulars, he tricks himself into believing, for half a second, that they might actually be cleared to proceed.

All at once, the spice ranger's fingers quit moving.

She stares at Nemo's ident, all three eyes locking on that wavering portrait.

"Bloom me," she stares to mouth. Nemo, seeing this, just has time to sniff twice. "You're–"

Before the words "the Galactic Menace" can escape that fanged mouth, Odisseus swipes with a claw, aiming directly for the spice ranger's stunned face. Caught mid-revelation, she's far too slow to dodge, parry or counter the strike. Odisseus feels the sickening sensation of his claws sinking into the meat of the Umijo's face, feels her flesh tear, feels the claws rake across her jawbone.

The force of the blow sends the surprised ranger tumbling back, gasping agonized breaths. She slams against the nearest wall and would have screamed in pain, were it not for the four lines drawn in bloody rags across her face. A territorial snarl escapes the Ortok's lips, his muzzle peeling back to reveal a mouthful of his own fangs.

"Yeah," interrupts Nemo, taking hold of the hovering crate's handle. "I'mana go."

"Probably smart," Odisseus agrees, staring down the spice ranger. "Catch up with you."

With that, Nemo bolts down the corridor, the crate shoved ahead of him, headed toward the lower atrium. Step by step, Odisseus follows, walking backward down the hallway, growling all the while and never taking his eyes off the recovering spice ranger.

He knows he too should tuck tail and go running like his cowardly saltbrother. Something primal, however, that biological imperative in his Ortoki genetics, tells him to linger, to fight to his dying breath to prevent this vastly superior foe from killing his unarmed saltbrother.

A little way up the hallways, the Umijo spice ranger clambers shakily back to her feet. Her wound spills cerulean blood all down her neck, torso and harness. For a moment, they stand staring at each other, the distance between Ortok and Umijo growing greater and greater, by each incremental step backward Odisseus takes. Then, without warning, the ranger's harness fully activates.

Panels open. Sections of harness separate and lengthen. Cables and spring-loaded machinery go crawling and creeping across the ranger's biceps and thighs, clicking into place at each elbow, knee, wrist and ankle joint. Soon, the Umijo is wearing an exoskeleton of unattractive whirring machine parts and loose cables. To see the thing actually unfolded, it looks absurdly fragile but Odisseus knows, from long reputation, the hidden power the harness grants its wearer.

The ranger's fists close on the pair of throttles the harness provides, not unlike those found on the handlebars of a dash racer. With a rehearsed motion of her wrist, the spice ranger torques the right throttle hard. Spraying outward from her hand comes pure fire, with a white-hot core and licking blue flames.

A flamethrower sprouting from each wrist would be deadly enough. To make matters infinitely worse, the gout of jetting flames, on the Umijo's command, narrows to a keen edge, two feet long, no wider than her knuckles and nearly transparent.

The true terror of the harness, the true terror of the spice rangers, were their heatblades. A sword of concentrated heat, wielded from the wrist of the harness, a heatblade could slice through stone and metal as easily as it would shear their fur, flesh and bone. A spice ranger armed with the proper training and two heatblades could barbeque and serve practically any living being in the galaxy.

Against a wounded ranger with only one of her blades extended, the three-hundred pound Ortok, a veteran of ten dozen scraps and armed with cruel claws and tearing teeth, stood no chance.

The Umijo advances calmly, full of assured victory. All three eyes remain locked on Odisseus, heatblade shimmering the air. Odisseus momentarily stops backpedaling and plants his hind paws. He attempts to gauge the best way to approach or even retreat from this invincible and oncoming enemy.

Thankfully, the ranger's guided by wounded rage, rather than killer instinct, when she closes the distance. Her first wild swipe of the heatblade is child's play to avoid. The Ortok cranes backward, adjusts his footing and keeps searching for that vital opening. Soon as she's realized her error, however, the Umijo's changing tactics. She chops three more times, in quick succession, hoping to take advantage of Odisseus' uncertain footwork.

Odisseus shirks the next pair of swings – a downward hack and an upward slash – by shuffling to the Umijo's left but the spice ranger quickly predicts this strategy. The next swing – a stomach-level slice – draws the heatblade viciously across the Ortok's stomach.

To be cut by a heatblade is a bizarre new sensation for Odisseus. With no weight or tangibility behind the stroke, Odisseus doesn't quite realize he's actually struck until his knees give way beneath him and he's collapsing onto the floor. The spice ranger falls back a step, certain the Ortok's defeated before he's quite understood that he's been hit.

In an awfully specific arc, straight across the center of his stomach, the Ortok's skin starts to itch. Looking down, he sees a blackened line, all the fur burnt tight against his blubbery skin. In the next seconds, the itch becomes irritation, the irritation becomes pain and the pain becomes agony. An honest-to-moons whimper escapes the Ortok as he writhes on the floor of the corridor.

Two more steps and the Umijo's standing over him. There's an expression of near sadness on her fanged face as she draws her arm back, heatblade briefly disappearing as she aims the point directly at his neck.

That's when Odisseus hears a charming little hissing sound.

The hardwood ceiling, immediately above the Umijo's right eyestalk, dissolves before the Ortok's eyes. Coolant trickles through the smoking hole in the ceiling and then trickles directly onto the spice ranger's eyestalk.

The inhuman sound the Umijo makes as the acid devours its eyestalk is all Odisseus needs to hear. Clamping his teeth together against the pain in his stomach, Odisseus scrambles away on all fours, harrumphing back down the corridor and towards his long-gone saltbrother.

Times like these, Odisseus reflects, are times when it's nice to have Moira Quicksilver around.

Moira pushes her chair away from the table and stands to stretch.

"Well," she comments, in that conversational way. "About that time."

"Yeah?" wonders Frebb, not looking up from his console. "Back to the grind?"

"Looks like." Moira pushes in her chair and retrieves the Attaché from where it rests on the table. "Bosses back on Gunnery'll wanna know what's up, where I'm at."

"Sure," Frebb agrees. "What with all the..." He draws a quick circle in the air next to his head, as though to indicate all the commotion outside the breakroom.

The Attaché is proud to show Moira the progress bar it's completed, glowing a brilliant and accomplished green. Frebb, meanwhile, sits scrolling through hologram after hologram, obsessively refreshing the feeds to see if they've magically changed in the past five seconds. Outside, things have reached a fever pitch, despite the breakroom's subdued vibe.

In moments, Moira would be out among the mania, her errand here accomplished.

"Good luck out there," comments Frebb idly as she passes him on her way out the door.

"Hey, you too," she offers back. "Don't let Lexubor push you around too much."

"Heh. I'll try."

The malfunctioning door only opens on Moira's fourth try. "See ya."

"Have a good one," waves Frebb behind her, his attention still fixated on the feeds.

With that, Moira Quicksilver steps into the corridor and its panicked red lighting, wondering about what manner of trouble her accomplices have gotten themselves into by now.
CHAPTER 6

Odisseus gallops down the corridor on all fours. Ortoki anatomy, unfortunately, is designed with swimming and pretty much only swimming in mind. This means he's anything but graceful. With each lope, his body flops comically back and forth. His fore and hind paws slap and scrabble against the slick marble and his great heavy tail drags behind, slowing him all the more.

What's worse, the running does his fresh wound no favors. Every time his body contracts, another dagger is thrust through the Ortok's midsection and he fights back a yelp of new pain. The primary advantage, Odisseus reflects, of being struck by a heatblade is the wound's instant cauterization. The primary disadvantage, he's all too aware, is that it smarts like all the moons of Jotor. Odisseus needs medical attention and he needs it sooner rather than later. Adrenaline is all that's keeping him from passing out from the sheer pain.

Up ahead, Nemo squats exhausted at the edge of an adrogi goldfish pond, panting heavily. He barely looks up as Odisseus approaches, his words escaping in breathless gasps.

"Oh, hey. You made it."

Odisseus stops and draws to his full height. "She called me ma'am!"

Nemo glances around his saltbrother, to peer down the corridor. "She still coming?"

"She," repeats Odisseus between clenched fangs. "Called me. Ma'am!"

"Did she?" wheezes Nemo, leaning against the bobbing crate for support. "I didn't really–"

From far down the corridor, back the way Odisseus came, something explodes. Wood panels shatter and a sudden swell of orange fire blots the view behind them.

Odisseus, his outrage momentarily forgotten, points a claw in the opposite direction. "Maybe we should–"

"Yeah," Nemo agrees.

They take off running, still so winded but unwilling to stand around and get exploded for their trouble. This time, Odisseus elects to jog a few feet behind Nemo, staying upright and sparing his poor stomach the pain.

The chaos that infects the Franchise is advanced and malignant. Everywhere the two saltbrothers go, Mayhem has worked its diabolical magic. Coolant now streams freely from the walls, in rivers of hissing acid and coiling smoke. The ship's internal sprinkler system has sprung into useless action, partially flooding one section of the gunnery deck. All along the way, the holograms they pass are inchoate, babbling nonsense warnings, their programming damaged or tampered with.

As they run, Odisseus takes a moment to pop open his ident tag. The hologram hovers before him, bobbing up and down as he hustles along.

"It does," he discovers in a disbelieving tone. "It says I'm a female."

"Make sense," Nemo supposes.

Odisseus is suddenly suspicious. "You do know that I'm male, right?"

Nemo shrugs. "Well, it depends on the day, doesn't it?"

"Depends on the day?" Odisseus is affronted. "What, in all the moons, are you talking about?"

"Well, you're a Quarg, right? Or you're supposed to be." Nemo glances at him, as though the answer's staring him in the face. "They change genders?" he suggests significantly. When Odisseus doesn't offer an immediate response, Nemo recoils. "Tell me you knew that."

"I did not," Odisseus is forced to admit.

Nemo raises both eyebrows. "Wow." He lets out a low whistle. "Speciesist much?" Before Odisseus can swipe that superior expression off his face with all claws extended, Nemo spots something up ahead. "Oh, hey. We're here."

The only way Odisseus could possibly be more relieved to see a pair of elevator doors would be if they were made from stacked anchovies. They skid to a halt before the closed marble doors and Nemo leans heavily against the call button. Odisseus, meanwhile, spins back around and scans the passage they've come down for any sight or smell of the spice ranger.

After pressing the button approximately six hundred times, Nemo shoots a glance back over his shoulder towards Odisseus. "Think we should buzz Moira, maybe? At this point?"

"Not worried about them intercepting the transmission?"

"At this point?"

"Yeah. Fair." Odisseus digs his character's comm from his character's toolbelt and dials one of the three frequencies it's programmed with. The call lasts half a ring before it's answered.

"Thought we weren't supposed to buzz each other," comes the patched voice of Moira Quicksilver, a balm to some of the Ortok's terror.

"Hey, you're alive," he remarks gratefully. "You missed the rendezvous."

"Got detoured. Blooming spice ranger in my way."

"Know the feeling," grunts Odisseus. "Where're you now?"

"At the rendezvous. Tapping my foot and hoping this virus doesn't vent me into open space." Static fills her next pause. "Want I should come up?"

"We'll come down." Odisseus makes a gesture towards the lift she certainly can't appreciate. "We're just waiting for a ride down. Hey, did you know that Quargs change–"

Nemo reaches out and grips the Ortok's sleeve. "You hear that?"

"Hear what?" wonders Moira over the comm.

Odisseus cancels the frequency to better listen. He has to strain his ears to hear, over the wailing alarms he'd long ago tuned out. It's a scream, to be sure, but not one of pain or surprise, like Odisseus might expect to hear aboard the Franchise in such a state.

This is a scream of rage and it's coming closer.

Around the corridor's far corner comes the Umijo spice ranger. Her harness blasts four jets of open flame, from two wrists and two ankles, enough to lift her off the ground and send her rocketing down the hallway. She's too far for Odisseus to do anything but imagine her expression but the one he does imagine is bent in righteous indignation, her one eyestalk a cauterized stub.

At this speed, Odisseus predicts, she'll be here in less than a minute, slicing them to smoking pieces.

"You seeing this?" the Ortok mutters to his saltbrother.

"You know, I am," Nemo is sad to confirm. "Moons, I want my gun so badly right now."

Instinct interposes Odisseus between Nemo and the incoming danger, the Ortok prepared once again to purchase with his life a chance for his saltbrother to escape. What minimal damage the Ortok can do against this flying angel of retribution and her flaming sword, Odisseus doesn't know. It's that biological imperative, however, that won't allow him cowardice, not while Nemo's life is in danger.

The Umijo keeps closing the gap, transforming her righthand flamethrower into a sheer heatblade, all the better to skewer the stupid Ortok standing in her way.

Behind them, the elevator dings and the doors sigh open.

Without thinking, Nemo shoves the crate into the open elevator and scrambles after, turning to yank Odisseus by the tail. Taken wholly by surprise, Odisseus stumbles backward. All the while, he's spewing bestial curses in Ortoki, partially from embarrassment, partially from outrage at this breach of etiquette. Nemo's not listening, however, too busy ramming the elevator's door close button.

In no particular hurry, the elevator doors slowly start to glide closed. Slumped on the ground, Odisseus watches the spice ranger arrive, precisely as both marble doors clink back together. About to breathe a sigh of relief, his breath is stolen the moment the sizzling point of the heatblade thrusts straight through the marble and stops within an inch of the Ortok's nose.

Above, the mechanism engages. The elevator starts to plummet downward. The heatblade shoots upward, gashes straight through the marble and disappears into the ceiling, leaving a smoldering scar in its wake.

The elevator drops at incredible speed, whisking the pair of them down to the lower atrium, several decks beneath. Nemo exhales deeply, as though they'd escaped all the danger and are somehow now in the clear. Odisseus, meanwhile, keeps an eye upward, through the glowing red wound the heatblade's made in the ceiling.

So high above them it seems quaint and far away, Odisseus watches a pair of heatblades, with a few horizontal slashes, make short work of the marble doors. Chunks of sliced stone come plummeting down the elevator shaft and crash into the ceiling above them. The whole elevator is jostled this way and that with each impact.

Rubble and debris, however, are far from the worst thing to come dropping down the elevator shaft after them.

Seen from below, the descending spice ranger looks only like a pair of fiery flowers, blue petals blossoming wider and wider the nearer she comes. Odisseus struggles to his feet, uncertain how best to meet this flying foe. There's another impact – a pair of boots alighting on the elevator's roof – before a pair of heatblades jab through the ceiling. A dumbfounded Odisseus watches as the shuddering blades draw a ragged and uneven circle through the thick marble.

In the process, however, something mechanical starts to whine. Nemo and Odisseus exchange glances, Nemo oblivious and Odisseus portentous, as the Ortok guesses what the careless heatblade's just severed – the elevator's servomotor.

Its main line cut, the elevator plunges into darkness, lit only by the glowing wounds the heatblades have cut into its ceiling. A moment later, the elevator literally plunges, freefalling the remaining way to the cargo deck below. The inertial dampener shot, both Nemo and Odisseus float awkwardly about the elevator for a quarter of second before impact.

By some mercy, they're only falling for a moment before they crash into the lower atrium's docking clamps. Nemo and Odisseus are tossed like dice in a cup, slamming into and bouncing off one another, reigniting the Ortok's belly wound with each slam.

The pair of marble doors fare much worse. Damaged by the ranger's initial attack, the brunt of the blow proves too much for them. They pop apart and fly away in chunks, a few marble scraps hanging by the hinges.

More than dust, smoke and rubble is tossed clear, however. Nemo is cockled comically over a hunk of shattered marble like sack of wet cement. Odisseus, meanwhile, is tumbled across the lower atrium's floor, skidding slowly to a stop on the polished marble.

The Ortok blinks dust from his eyes and discovers a pair of unfamiliar boots – actually the same that Nemo now wore – an inch from his muzzle. With great effort, he cranes his gaze upward. There stands Moira Quicksilver, looking quite the diligent Consortium employee in her pressed blue uniform, still clutching a buzzing comm in her hand.

"Hey," he manages weakly.

"Hey." She nods towards the whole sad scene of him. "How you doing?"

"Eh," Odisseus answers honestly. "Stomach hurts."

Saying this aloud sends a fresh tremor of pain through his whole body, radiating outward from his squashed belly wound. He makes an involuntary sound and writhes a little, attempting to amend his awkward sprawl. Above him, Moira's eyes follows the streak of blackened fur and puckered skin beneath.

"Oh, yeah," she remarks, stooping suddenly to better examine him. "Where'd you–"

Odisseus hears her coming long before he turns to see her. He hears the sound of rippling flames, followed by a heavy thud and the whine of servomotors. By the time the Ortok can wriggle his body around, the Umijo is standing there, perfectly framed by the utter destruction all around her. Her heatblades extended and sizzling, there's an expression of pure malevolence on her alien face.

Both of her remaining eyes fix fiercely on Moira. "Stand aside," she orders, without room for argument, assuming Moira to be simply a concerned crewman.

From where she's squatting above him, Odisseus can sense the tension in Moira's body. She lingers there a moment before she reaches a hand to go digging about in his Consortium-issue toolbelt. He feels her palm something – his neticgrappler, Odisseus thinks – and hears her rise from her crouch.

Only his neticgrappler in her hand, Odisseus watches Moira plant her feet and square off against the spice ranger.

Moira Quicksilver would never, drunk or sober or under the influence of weaponized hallucinogens, dare to engage a spice ranger in unarmed combat.

Fortunately, she's armed with a neticgrappler, so she's all good.

She spends a second to spin the tool in her grip, testing the heft and gauging the weapon's balance. From what little experience she has with neticgrapplers, Moira's unimpressed with this specimen. Like her boots, the tool's shoddy, manufactured by a factory press. The distribution's severely uneven, weighted heavily towards the grappling end.

Moira supposes, of course, that the tool's been designed for neticgrappling not hand-to-hand combat. Even a masterwork neticgrappler would make a clutzy weapon.

The entire time she's getting a feel for her weapon, Moira's gaze never once leaves the Umijo across the way.

Her disadvantages in this contest are legion. The harness grants its wearer strength and speed far superior to Moira's own. The heatblades have easily six inches of reach on her neticgrappler and even a near miss with one can leave a devastating burn. What's more, her opponent can fly, the greatest advantage of all.

In addition, Moira's weapon is poorly designed for combat, could easily be severed with one clean strike from the heatblade and she's far from proficient with its use. Not to mention, of course, the pair of helpless and wounded and comrades, strewn about the battlefield that the spice ranger's free to endanger at her leisure.

Moira's advantage in this contest is singular but strong. Moira thumbs the neticgrappler open and its head levers apart, magnetic energy crackling.

At this, there's absolutely no chance that Moira's just an innocent crewman, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. She takes too much pleasure in watching that realization dawn on the spice ranger's face. Standing on her tiptoes, the Umijo activates the flame jets on her ankles. The spice ranger soars a graceful little arc over the heaps of rubble and onto a patch of open lobby, approximately fifteen feet from where Moira now stands.

Fair is fair, Moira decides, and she advances those fifteen feet.

The spice ranger's opening combo is a killer one, designed to cut down an inexperienced or unsuspecting opponent in record time. She thrusts right, follows with an underhanded swipe from the left and ends with a second right thrust. A lesser duelist would have been eviscerated but Moira, practiced with Tebi-Gali and electrobaton, is no lesser duelist. She stays well outside the range of the heatblades, bouncing like a pugilist on her feet as the swords slice the air around her. She gives a little ground and keeps the neticgrappler loose in her hand, all the while calculating the Umijo's swing speed and reaction time: impressive, both.

When this opening gambit bears little fruit, the ranger transitions smoothly into another tactic. She twists and spins, heatblades weaving a basket of strikes and parries all around her. Moira recognizes this cunning ploy even as she escapes it. The fancy footwork and twirling blades are meant to capture the eye, to distract the target, while the ranger sneaks a fatal stab or slice into the mix.

Moira takes a knee to avoid getting fried. Eventually, she's forced to roll beneath the swinging heatblades, right past the ranger's right flank. Moira comes to her feet in a Poised Hukia stance but the Umijo's just too quick. She's spun around so fast, Moira has no time to make any riposte or counter strike. All she manages is to regain some distance and solid footing before the spice ranger works into her third routine.

The first attack pattern was about skill. The second was about showmanship. The third is about savagery. She hacks and chops, unleashing the full strength of her harness to sizzle the air inches from a backpedaling Moira. Normally, with swings that powerful, Moira can exploit the attacker's blind rage and frustration. The eerie blank expression on the Umijo's face says otherwise, however. Moira doesn't fight some angry brute; she fights another remorseless killer, the shade of a life she might once have led.

The next five or six swings drive Moira further and further back until she's forced to make her move. Moira pivots like a skooshball player, avoiding a punching stab. She swings the neticgrappler, magnetic head fizzing, in a coordinated backhand. Her target is not the right heatblade, the stabbing heatblade, but the left one, the one held in reserve.

The neticgrappler clamps hungrily onto the spice ranger's harnessed wrist. Planting her feet, Moira pivots again, yanking the neticgrappler, the heatblade and the Umijo's wrist with her. She's rewarded with the sound of snapping metal and a few droplets of machinery that cling stubbornly to the neticgrappler's end.

The spice ranger leaps backward, flamejets buying her a few extra feet of distance. Pieces of metal and hosing are scattered all about the nearby floor and Moira takes comfort in the knowledge that that heatblade's not coming back online for the foreseeable future.

Moira Quicksilver isn't about to give the spice ranger the window she needs to recuperate, however. With a burst of speed, the once cautious Moira goes charging across the atrium, spinning the neticgrappler in her hand to confuse the angle of her next attack. To her credit, the spice ranger takes the literal high road and gooses her flamejets.

The attack Moira'd planned is now pointless against an enemy hovering five feet above the ground. Instead, she shifts her footing and starts recalculating how best to confront this new problem. Unbothered by her puny attacker, the spice ranger hovers in the air and grows increasingly frustrated with her busted heatblade.

Moira is suddenly happy to oblige the spice ranger a moment to monkey with her machinery. She takes the time to asses the situation, the terrain and what her best tactic might be. Never quite turning her back on her hovering foe, she decides on the obliterated elevator, hoping it could serve as a temporary bottleneck.

Moira scoots backward, striking a balance between speed and caution. She works her way sideways, scuttling over the debris with one hand, neticgrappler ready in the other.

She's ultimately too slow. Halfway to the elevator, the spice ranger abandons her attempts to fix her broken instrument and swoops down towards Moira. As she does, she swaps the remaining heatblade from a slender sword into a ravenous flamethrower.

Moira curses inwardly. She scrambles backward, almost loses her balance on some rubble and closes a fist around a handful of dust and gravel. The spice ranger comes in hard, eager tongues of flame reaching for Moira.

On instinct, she tosses the handful of grit upwards at the looming spice ranger. Good luck and better aim guide the throw straight into the Umijo's face.

This streetfighter's tactic isn't enough to distract a seasoned spice ranger for more than a second but it's enough. The Umijo shakes her head once to banish the dust from her eyes. In that second, Moira's coiled her legs beneath her and is leaping upward. She swings the neticgrappler in a wild, overhead arc, aimed at the spice ranger's right foot.

Tendrils of magnetic energy grapple the ranger's harnessed foot and cling on for dear life. The momentum behind Moira's fall drags the spice ranger straight back to the cargo deck. Somewhere in the fall, something vital gives way on the harness and the flamejet promptly dies.

Both Moira and the spice ranger tumble awkwardly onto the floor, one after the other. While Moira lands approximately where she'd jumped from, the spice ranger's second, still functional flamejet, carries her partway across the room. Moira's satisfied to see her connect with a crunch of metal against the far wall.

One smooth motion returns Moira to her feet. She collects the neticgrappler with one hand and smirks to see the bundle of machinery still gripped in its magnetic jaws. Not wasting another second, she bolts across the room to finish her kill. Moira's not taken three steps before the spice ranger's on her feet, heatblade extended and poised to duel.

Her posture is much changed. Her harness now twice damaged by Moira's neticgrappler, the spice ranger is clearly unwilling to underestimate her opponent a third time. Instead, she adopts a defensive stance and demands that Moira, with a woefully inferior weapon, become the primary aggressor.

Here Moira confronts all her disadvantages at once; how does she launch an attack against a foe with a deadlier, longer and more agile weapon?

The strike she does eventually try won't do, she knows the moment she throws it. Moira feints right and swings left, aiming for the single remaining heatblade. It's painfully obvious, though, what she's aiming at. With a deft motion of her forearm, the heatblade cuts clean through the neticgrappler's haft.

The tool's magnetic head clatters uselessly to the floor.

Moira only has time enough to toss the headless haft aside before the spice ranger presses her advantage. It takes all Moira's skill, adroitness and good luck to squeak past another furious attack pattern. Any thought towards defense is vanished from the spice ranger's movements, as Moira's completely unarmed against each attack.

She's only ever a heartbeat ahead of a fatal strike to the heart, the temple, the carotid. All the same, Moira does start to notice a pattern in the spice ranger's movements. Each routine, she notices, is intended for two weapons. What's more, even though one of her heatblades is deactivated, the Umijo makes the same motions she would otherwise, were she attacking with two swords.

It's not much of a chink in the armor but it's enough for Moira Quicksilver.

A punch thrown a few inches too short whizzes past Moira's head and she snatches it still. Moira then starts to telegraph the beginning of a Constricting Sarsalus, a chokehold that could snap its victim's neck. The spice ranger howls in outrage and brings the working heatblade swinging across – exactly the response Moira hoped for.

Moira ducks and sidesteps, abandoning her chokehold and weaving beneath the incoming sword. Before the spice ranger can recover, Moira's pinching several of the important cables that connect the heatblade to the harness. She rips them free with a twist and a yank, sparks spraying everywhere. The heatblade, drained of power, drops to the intensity of a guttering candle.

The enraged ranger flies back on the offensive. Both heatblades offline, the spice ranger resorts back to bare hands. Considering that those bare hands are twice as strong and half again as fast, it's not much of a downgrade.

Fast as a ditrogen bolt, the Umijo throws two rights and raises her knee, the harness grinding and moaning. Moira twists to avoid each strike, unwilling to parry or intercept a punch with so much power behind it.

Suddenly, she recognizes the routine – Rampaging Hagrak. Before she can really register this, Moira is next running through the recommended counter to Kodo's Jaws. She feels the bones of her forearms nearly break in the process, the spice ranger's enhanced arms coming way too close to crushing her head like a Gitterpeach.

When Pouncing Dhimoza comes immediately next, Moira simply gets the fuck out of the way, lest she be pulverized by all the strength that harness can muster. She's unable, however, to hide her sly smile as she recognizes another Tebi-Gali practitioner.

Up against that raw strength, Moira makes an attempt at Foaming Volkine, praying that one among the flurry of rapid body blows will do some damage. She's partially successful, striking an unprotected section of the spice ranger's torso three or four times. She's forced to scoot away again in short order, not wishing to have her skull caved in by a Barreling Rekava that comes in like a wrecking ball.

They exchange Hidden Jakdar and Venom of Hokri and Wrestling Thonqo. They dance across the lower atrium, both huffing and heaving from exhaustion. It doesn't take long for Moira to ascertain that she's probably the superior fighter, in terms of raw skill. There's no way, however, she can answer the ranger's raw strength and speed. The longer this contest continues, the greater the chance she's going to break a bone or rupture an organ by a miscalculated block or parry.

What does eventually bring Moira low is a Stinging Spith, a full-body kick that Moira assumes is way out of range. What she doesn't expect is the gout of fire that leaps from the flying ankle, bursting to life from the ranger's one remaining flamejet.

Twisting partially away in panic, Moira spares her face from the worst of the blast. The whole right side of her head, however, is savaged by the fire. She collapses to the unforgiving floor, the smell of burning hair in her nostrils. No doubt Moira paints a pathetic picture, rolling around in the rubble and frantically smothering the fire that engulfs her head.

She doesn't hear the spice ranger's approach, noisy machinery creaking with every step. Moira's next aware of her opponent when her silhouette blots out the harsh red light, foot poised either to crush her skull or douse her face with more white-hot fire.

The killing blow never comes. Instead, the spice ranger jerks violently, arching her back and screaming wordless agony. Moira's eyes scan across the ground to discover Ortoki fangs sunk deep into the meat of the ranger's leg. Propped on his elbows, Odisseus shakes his head back and forth a few times, worrying the Umijo's leg with his incisors. Her balance forfeit, the ranger tumbles backward and onto the Ortok. Enemy and ally momentarily tangle amid fur and rubble and harness in a bloody, wrestling mess.

Moira's back on her feet in a flash, hurrying to where her foe's recently fallen. Before the ranger can mount any manner of counteroffensive against either her or the Ortok, Moira lands on the Umijo's neck in a Kneeling Hazrolope. Her death throes, as the life is slowly strangled from her, are blunted somewhat by the three hundred pound Ortok she's entwined with. In a few moments, the ranger shudders and lies still.

All across the GCF Franchise, the alarms continue to scream and wail. To the occupants of the lower atrium, this feels like silence, compared to the chaos and clamor of battle.

"Moira!" shouts a woozy voice somewhere behind her. Moira twists her torso to see Nemo, struggling to climb from the elevator's wreckage. "There's a spice–"

Soon as he gains his feet, Nemo nearly loses them again, clutching onto the shards of the doorway for support. "Dizzy," Nemo comments idly, by way of explanation.

Given a moment's respite, Moira runs trembling fingers along the burnt side of her head, terrified of what she'll discover there. Hair comes away caramelized, in scratchy, blackened bundles. She breathes a sigh of relief to discover that her overdue haircut may have actually saved her from third-degree burns. Had she kept it as brutally short as she usually did, Moira's whole face might be a smeared burnmark right now.

Odisseus, meanwhile, spews bloody pieces of flesh and fabric from his mouth. With an animalistic whine, he climbs into a sitting position and prods his belly wound with a paw. The Ortok sighs heavily as he considers the copious destruction all around him until his eyes eventually fall on Moira.

"You're telling me," Moira suggests significantly, "that you didn't know Quargs change genders?"

Odisseus raises his paws defensively. "Let's not all act like this's common blooming knowledge. How can I be expected to know every biological peculiarity about every spec–"

"You just, you know," Nemo explains, clinging to the doorway, his legs still wobbly beneath him, "look so much alike, I thought you, of all people, might–"

"See, now that," Odisseus points a disbelieving claw across the room, "is a genuinely speciesist remark. You call me a speciesist and then say shit like that."

Instead of rising to this arguably fair point, Nemo is a little more preoccupied in that moment with not falling on his face.

"Fucking humanoids," Odisseus grumbles under his breath.

"Whoa, buddy." Now it's Moira's turn to throw her hands up, disavowing any connection with the Ortok's words. "Yikes."

As was his wont, his reply consists less of intelligible words and more of Ortoki vagaries.

Moira plucks more smoky tufts of hair from her scalp and wonders how to proceed from here. Obviously, they'd not counted on a spice ranger, horror of horrors, catching wise to their disguises. Considering this, though, they'd handled the potential disaster reasonably well, barring Moira's burnt hair, the Ortok's belly wound and the Captain's probable concussion.

That said, they'd left considerable and telling destruction in their wake. There's spattered blood here, scattered machinery there, not to mention the exploded elevator. The last thing they needed now was some slack-jawed crewman wandering onto the scene and spoiling everything.

It's Odisseus who first gives voice to this worry, looking about at all the carnage. "How do we hide all this?" He glances back to the Umijo, less formidable-seeming, when she's sprawled dead at Moira's feet. "How do we hide her?"

Moira is, as ever, blunt. "We can't, is the answer. Mayhem could only conceivably be responsible for so much."

"Oh, that part's easy."

Nemo's somehow made his way to the crate, foot propped dramatically against its lid. Triggering the catch with his heel, the kick that sends the lid clattering to the floor is equally dramatic, undercut somewhat by Nemo's losing his balance and flapping his arms to stay upright. From the depths of the crate, he retrieves something beige and industrial-looking.

This he tosses to Odisseus, the Ortok catching it between a clap of his paws.

"You don't think," Odisseus hypothesizes, "it'll be too big? Too destructive?"

"Too big," Nemo repeats, as though trying the phrase out for the first time. "Too destructive."

The sighing mechanic turns his attention to the mechanism. "I'll see if I can't drain the power a little. Try and lessen the blast radius."

"In that case," Moira stipulates, climbing to her feet, "we've gotta take her with us." They both thank her for this brilliant idea by scowling quizzically at her. "We leave her here, even if we blow the place sky high, somebody could still scrape some genetics off a floor and make this whole blooming precaution pointless. Better that she disappears entirely and leave no trace."

Nemo only shrugs, dizziness returning with a vengeance. Moira stoops and starts to collect the limbs of the lifeless ranger. She's alarmed to discover not only how heavy the small-boned Umijo truly is but also how sore every joint in her body has become. She debates maybe asking Odisseus for help but the Ortok's busy disassembling the shield projector and is himself wounded. She'll handle the load, then, Moira decides.

She could lessen the weight somewhat by stripping the corpse of its harness but the portion of unstrangled fangirl in Moira ultimately can't resist the chance to tinker a little.

A minute later, Odisseus has finished his own tinkering and sets the device down, with delicate claws, in the center of the floor.

"We might wanna make tracks," he advises. "We're looking at about ninety seconds before this thing goes."

Nobody can take exception with that.

Leaving the bloody battlefield of the lower atrium behind them, they depart as fast as their wounded, burdened and dizzy bodies will take them. As they run back through the Franchise's cargo deck, Moira starts to see signs of order – squads of bustling crewmen, more sensible holograms, fewer screeching alarms – returning to the hallways and corridors they pass through.

The pernicious effects of Mayhem are slowly purged from the systems of the Franchise.

All the same, nobody bothers to stop and question the two humanoids and the Quarg who push their way through the crowd, an injured spice ranger slung over one shoulder. Assuming Mayhem's done its work properly, they'll leave no trace, vanishing inexplicably from the security holos.

On time, they feel the impact that rocks the ship from behind them, the contained explosion meeting its deadline. Most of the nearby crew are startled, stop and look worriedly between one another before they, with the sterling heroism that drives the commercial spacer, hurry off to see what all the trouble is.

The three imposters, meanwhile, sacrifice some credibility by pressing onward, determined not to fulfill the old adage and return to the scene of the crime. Instead, they move against the crowd, more eager than ever to return to the cargo bay, the dangling spacebergs and The Unconstant Lover.

SECOND INTERLUDE

Two-Bit Switch could tell something was not quite right.

Continuing to chew, he stabbed his fork through the heat shield, its metal prongs passing effortlessly through the shimmering yellow energy. He impaled a choice piece of zugofish omelette and, swallowing his last bite, considered this new one a moment. It was a yellowish blob on the end of his fork, supplemented by the occasional hunk of mushroom or zugofish. He took that bite, chewing thoughtfully, as he attempted to conjure what didn't quite sit right with him.

It only then occurs to him that it could be poisoned.

Looking at his host across the long table, she certainly seemed like the type. Those silver eyes watched him intently for any reaction, as Two-Bit chewed the meal she'd prepared for him, and it wasn't hard to imagine she was only waiting for him to turn purple and die. When he didn't, she merely sipped her champagne disinterestedly, every bit the bored socialite.

"Horseradish," announced Two-Bit Switch around a mouthful of omelette.

"Hm?"

"Horseradish sauce," he stated clearer, once he'd swallowed. "You got any? That's what this's hanking for." He glanced about the room, hoping he'd snag the eye of some personnel, presumably whomever arranged this whole lavish banquet for the two of them to share. "No?"

It was quite the affair to have a bottle brought him. A servant was summoned, hushed words were exchanged between his host and her hired help, a sizable pause followed and eventually a bottle of horseradish sauce – its brand some highfalutin thing Two-Bit couldn't even read – was placed on the table next to him.

He had the thing uncorked and half its contents slathered across the omelette by the time his hostess, Gella Borsk, spoke again. "Everything's to your liking, then, I trust?"

"Mmm," he responded with a grunt, shoveling a helping of horseradish-drowned omelette into his mouth. "Much better."

"The accommodations in general, I mean," she clarified. "Found the rooms comfortable? Slept well?"

"Mmm," he grunted again, taking a moment to wipe his mouth with the actual napkin, taking a clue from the sour face she'd made when he used his sleeve. "Yeah, yeah. Everything's real jig. You gotta a blooming swank operation here, you don't mind my jabbing so." He ran an appraising hand along the silk bathrobe that he too wears. "What're these, xasana silk?

"I believe so, yes," confirmed Borsk. "Sewn and embroidered by cloistered Duuthese wise-women, high in the equatorial mountains of Rith. Virtually priceless."

It took all of Two-Bit's concentration not to glance aside at the yellowish stain he's left on the right sleeve of his. "Very swank," he repeated dumbly instead.

Borsk shrugged with the least convincing pretense of humility. "We try."

The grubby little station waif inside Two-Bit Switch was still thoroughly flabbergasted that he'd come this far, this fast. Ten years ago, he was squeezing out a meager living as a barefoot orphan on the sweaty streets of the Defederate Station. Now, here he sat, nineteen years old and the honored guest of Gella Borsk, booze baroness and the only individual, in all the galaxy, that posed any real threat to the Gitter Consortium.

They had taken breakfast in one of Borsk's palatial dining rooms and Two-Bit was left with the vague impression this was one of many. The moment he was escorted inside, by some of Borsk's obviously ex-spice ranger security, his casing instincts instantly went wild.

Everything in sight could turn a tidy profit on the black market.

The Casqorin hardwood table was a marvel, the original tree genetically engineered to grow as one seamless piece, a table-shaped tree trunk. That alone is worth enough to purchase the deeds to several not insignificant planets. The holopanes across the windows, currently broadcasting the cyclonic storms of Dythoris Minor, are bleeding edge, the kind of technology holoplexes all over the galaxy would murder for. Had he a few prototypes as perfect as these, Two-Bit Switch could purchase himself a small capital ship.

Even the silverware was posh was fuck. Not made from steel or silver, they were instead rigidified ice, mined from the glittering comets of the Tinxara Nebula. A spoon or two, smuggled into the pocket, and Two-Bit Switch could retire from this life of crime and live out his days on a beach someplace.

What, in the name of all the moons of Jotor, is Two-Bit Switch, professional jailbreaker, miscreant and scumbag, doing here?

She had brought him here. Two-Bit Switch knew he'd made something of a small splash in the Bad Space criminal community, the go-to guy to break one's bloomhole out of prison. He'd not thought, however, that his piddly reputation would be enough to attract the notice of someone as influential as Gella Borsk.

For all her hauteur, she wasn't much to look at. A pinkskin, probably from Gitox or Gizarra or Gisham, in her early fifties, her hair and eyes are identical shades of silver, almost glossy and metallic in the purplish light of the synthetic Dythoris Minor. She wore a bathrobe subtly different from his, the embroidery chased with gold, the belt tighter around her hips in a more suggestive fashion.

There was the faintest trace of flirt about her, in her voice and posture and behavior, like she was toying with the idea of taking Two-Bit to bed. He was perceptive enough, however, to detect that this was misdirection and that someone hard as teltriton lay beneath this opulent facade.

He'd been brought here in the cargo hold of a nondescript tramp freighter and, while it was happening, Two-Bit had half assumed he'd been kidnapped. Instead, when he arrived here at this lavish estate, incongruously installed inside a nameless hunk of space rock, Gella Borsk had wined and dined him up and down, preparing to talk about her very big idea.

From what Two-Bit had understood, that idea involved robbing the Gitter Consortium blind. She wasn't interested in spice or gin or peaches, either. She was interested in trees.

How fortunate this was, then. Two-Bit Switch was also particularly interested in trees.

"To business, then?" she proposed, perfectly on cue. She hoists her sparkling purple champagne, no doubt chosen to match the holopane's current color scheme.

"To the quitty," Two-Bit agreed, gulping down his mouthful of omelette with a big swig of his own champagne.

"You had questions?"

"Mmm," grunted Two-Bit, still swallowing champagne. "I did have some ringers."

The next moment, Two-Bit reached into his robe's voluminous pocket, withdrew his Attaché and slid it smoothly across the Casqorin hardwood. Purchased thanks to a generous donation from Nabdres No-Cock, the device was brand spanking new and contained only a single file – all the plans and schematics Borsk had sent his way.

"Lemme just jabb," he sought to get out of the way first,"everything that I've vizzed looks peachy. Codes look peachy, timetables look peachy, blooming schematics on every gantine in the Consortium's fleet, for moon's sake–"

Borsk was not known for her patience. "But?"

"Intel gets spotty," Two-Bit informed her, clasping his ends together. "Towards the end."

Borsk's reaction was very tightly controlled. "That so?"

"What's blanking," Two-Bit started to explicate, reaching forward to activate the Attaché, "is the skinny on the actual planet and its dirtside." A hologram leapt into view above the device, a flowchart of spiderwebbing strands that connected bubbles to other bubbles to still more bubbles. "Everything up to that point, everything I hank to put a crew on planet, is here. After that," he shrugged, a little helplessly, "things kinda sketchy."

"I see," Borsk acknowledges with a stiff nod. "And you want me to fill those gaps for you?"

"Would be jig, yeah," Two-Bit agreed. He made a half-hearted gesture her direction. "I mean, you of all people, right?"

"Me of all people," Borsk muttered in a distant, dangerous voice. "A fair assumption."

A fearsome pause followed, the two parties staring at each other across their omelettes and the only sound the faint hiss of the heat shield, trapping the steam from their meals.

"So," Two-Bit ventured, unsure what's causing this reticence, "what's down there?"

Borsk spread her hands and clasped them back together. "Your guess is as good as mine."

Two-Bit blinked. "I'm sorry – what?"

It was with a great sigh that Borsk continued, massaging the space between her eyebrows. "You've misunderstood my role in the corporation," she explained to him, like the child she no doubt thought he was. "It's a common misconception, believe me."

Two-Bit didn't buy an inch of that. "You were the corp, though," he reminded her, scowling. "For blooming ever. Two decades, right?"

"Galactic Commercial Executive," Borsk corrected flatly. "For seventeen years. There is an alarmingly large gulf, however," she informed him, her tone going suddenly caustic, "between the Hegemony's ruling family and what they tell the peons they hire to run their empire."

There was a flash of true anger, of genuine emotion, in Gella Borsk for the first time. There was a bitterness there, bubbling to the surface, that wasn't part of her calm and collected facade. Only mention of the Gitter Consortium and its bizarre ruling family could seemingly provoke that kind of reaction in the booze baroness.

Everyone knew the tragic narrative of Gella Borsk. Once upon a time, she'd been the unshakeable bedrock that the Gitter Consortium constructed its galaxywide monopoly upon. Then the backstabbing and the infighting and the courtly intrigue of the inbred Gita family, the founding dynasty of the whole Hegemony, got the better of her. At the wrong end of an assassination plot, she was forced into exile, disappearing off the grid with an ample personal supply of Gitterswitch Gin.

Rebranding the stuff as Borsk Brandy, she'd been peddling what amounts to the galaxy's most expensive moonshine from her hidden asteroid base ever since.

This was the story the galaxy swallowed. This was the accepted fairy tale – loyal company woman becomes plucky insurgent, battling an evil empire with her contraband booze.

Two-Bit Switch knew better than to subscribe to that description, however. There was more to Gella Borsk than met the eye and, when he'd attracted her attention, he knew he'd best do his homework.

Details, each one juicier than the last, kept emerging the deeper he dug. He knew she rose to her position of power at the head of the company from a governorship on a minor resource world at the Hegemony's edge. He knew that she'd married into the infamous Gita clan and that she'd only ever been intended as a stopgap, a steward to run the operation until the next heir came of age. He knew that, while the corporate assassin failed to kill her, her husband was not so lucky and she was a widow when she went into hiding.

Most importantly of all, he'd heard the rumors about her stores. Her brandy supply was dwindling, they said, and, by decade's end, she'd be dry. Whether by lack of product or by the teams of spice rangers stalking the galaxy in search of her, Gella Borsk's days were officially numbered.

This, then, this one mad scheme to pull the rug out from under the Gitter Consortium, was her last best hope. If she could secure one tree for her own use, her business could continue, perhaps even thrive, and, in time, it could rob the Consortium of all its power, transforming Borsk and her brandy from a nuisance to a true competitor.

Desperate as she was, she was trusting Two-Bit Switch, nineteen year old scofflaw, to make all of this happen.

"You know zilch," Two-Bit struggled to ascertain. "You ran the place for seventeen years and you couldn't finger that tree in a blooming line-up."

During his whole premise, Borsk was nodding. "That's sadly the case."

"How is that possible?" Two-Bit breathed, at an utter loss for words.

"It's all a matter of nested percentages," Borsk responded wearily, clearly in little mood to explain the whole mess again. "Obviously, among the Consortium, it's no secret that Gita is a fraud. No way to conceal that from everyone. Moons, the galaxy at large all but assumes it at this point." She took a moment here to sip her champagne, to cool her nerves a little. "Now, the specifics of Gi's location, its basic details, the climatic field, that's known to a very small portion of the Consortium's total work force. Less than 1%."

"The ship's crews," assumed Two-Bit. "The spice rangers."

"And the ruling family."

"That's still, what, thousands of people, though," scoffed Two-Bit. "I mean, those gantines're big–"

"What you're missing," interrupted Borsk impatiently, "is that, among those thousands of people, less than 1% have any idea what's actually happening on the surface of that planet."

"The spice rangers."

"One troop, matter of fact," Borsk complimented, with a slight nod. "The Stargazers."

The very word sent a shiver of fear through Two-Bit Switch. Very rarely seen in the galaxy at large, the Stargazers were nonetheless the most revered of spice ranger troops – the very best of the very best. Those lucky rangers that excelled at the qualifying exams were reputedly whisked away to join their elite number and were never seen in the galaxy again. It came as quite a shock to Two-Bit, in scanning the files she'd sent him, to discover that the Stargazers were more than mere myth but evidently, a very deadly reality.

Borsk continued, undaunted by the rangers' fearsome rep. "Barring the ruling family, only those spice rangers specifically charged with making planetfall and retrieving the goods know diddly squat about what's down there."

Two-Bit Switch shifted his gaze from Borsk and her explanation into the Attaché's drifting hologram of assets, maps and clearance codes. This answer, surprise surprise, did not satisfy him.

"That's all the more help I can be, I'm afraid," Borsk informed him quietly, something like genuine sympathy in her voice, "on that particular matter."

"I mean," Two-Bit started a few moments later, "ain't there anything at all you can jabb me?"

"That it's hot," Gella answered immediately. "That it doesn't support animal life. That, under those extremely hostile conditions, the Consortium's able to maintain the ideal incubated ecosystem to grow the peaches." She shrugged her own robed shoulders. "As far as my business was ever concerned, that's all I was deemed worthy of knowing."

That was Two-Bit's cue to insert a lengthy pause into the conversation, one his hostess exploited by tearing into her zugofish omelette, possibly for the first time since they'd taken their seats. For his part, Two-Bit kept staring at the flowchart, hoping the various floating items would arrange themselves in some startling, revelatory way.

"You know," he mentioned a minute or more later, "that don't really solve my crunch."

"Well," Borsk supposed, shrugging her fork of rigidified ice, "that's why I'm paying you 68 million credits. To solve that crunch for me," she explained, dropping the jabberterm like it was a stinking turd.

Two-Bit sighed, considered his own omelette where it steamed beneath the heat shield and reached for more horseradish sauce.

### CHAPTER 7

Odisseus is wriggling onto his back, to gain better access to the main electrical conduit, when he feels the first tremor. Of course he's sandwiched inside the freighter's crawlspace when it hits. Of course Odisseus has zero wiggle room to either side and no avenue of escape except crawling forward or somehow backward. Wedged in amongst the very blood and bones of the ship, the Ortok's trapped in the worst possible place for this to happen.

Who knew how much damage he would inflict, to his body and to the ship's systems, were he caught here, unsecured, when The Unconstant Lover is dropped from high orbit above Gi, to crash onto the planet below?

The orlop deck that runs through the belly of the Briza is little more than a service tunnel. A cozy two feet in diameter, the walls, floor and ceiling of the crawlspace are all open machinery. Each one of the ship's major systems – electricity, water, life support, antigrav – were all piped through the orlop deck, allowing a mechanic theoretical access to any potential snags or bad wiring.

On the best of days, it's a claustrophobic nightmare to crawl through. Today, the worst of days, it may prove to be the Ortok's tomb.

It started so innocently, the first link in the chain of events that would eventually see the Ortok pulverized beneath the Lover's deckplates. Something would break, Odisseus had predicted, soon as system power was returned to the dormant Lover, a side effect of the ship sitting idle too long. A bored Odisseus had braved the cramped crawlspace to run some diagnostics, flashlight clenched in his teeth.

This awkward window they languished in, four days of inactivity while the GCF Franchise got its lonktonks in a row, seemed as good a time as any to do some preemptive maintenance.

The anxiety aboard The Unconstant Lover only continued to rise, day by day, as they awaited any sign that they'd been discovered. In the absence of spice rangers storming aboard, however, the crew was forced to assume that Mayhem did its work and did it admirably. In the meantime, while the Franchise recovered from its catastrophic damage, the Lover's crew had more or less reverted to their old habits, now much improved by access to the rest of their home and spaceship.

They couldn't risk main power for fear of alerting some suspicious sensor operator. They'd gambled on internal scrubbers, allowing them the profound luxuries of oxygen and central heating.

Odisseus spent much of his time in the medbay, with Moira making occasional visits to administer to his wound. In his entire career as a professional pirate and semioccasional murderer, the Ortok had never experienced pain like that heatblade had drawn across the stomach. At all times, he went about the Lover wearing a wide swatch of rejuv-bandage, an expensive remedy Moira thought to purchase upon hearing of Gi's extreme heat. Still, it was made clear to Odisseus that he would bear an extremely unflattering burn mark across his stomach for the rest of his days.

It certainly made shuffling his bulk through the cramped crawlspace an interesting and painful experience – particularly when the asteroid encasing the ship started to fall from the sky.

With no inertial dampeners active, there's nothing to stop The Unconstant Lover, all her crew and all her contents from pitching and yawing about. Inside the tight orlop tunnel, Odisseus is treated especially roughly, thrown about like tumbled laundry. Every few seconds, his back or neck or elbow is slammed into a hunk of machinery or becomes tangled in a mesh of cables. He yelps in sheer panic and struggles against the rising contents of his stomach. At this point, a regurgitated lunch of dubix trout is the absolute last thing he needs sloshing around in here with him.

After a few moments of flailing about, Odisseus manages to use tight confines to his advantage. By positioning his tail and his hind paws, Odisseus jams his body within the crawlspace, blunting the spinning asteroid's further attempts to toss him around. Through some more fancy maneuvering, he wrests free his comm and dials the necessary frequency. There's a pause, filled with hissing static, before the other end answers.

The person who answers is unquestionably Nemo and he's unquestionably screaming his head off.

"Hey!" barks Odisseus, unable to quite bring the comm to his mouth. The only response is more incoherent screaming, peppered with panicked attempts at half-words. "Hey! Is this it? Is it happening?"

Whether Nemo makes some intelligible reply to this, Odisseus has no idea, considering all the crashing and clanging on both sides of the transmission.

"All the moons," he mutters. With great effort, he manages to scroll to another frequency. He waits through the static, bracing against the fearsome rocking of the ship.

"You rang?" an oddly calm Moira answers.

"They dropped the spacebergs, didn't they?"

"Would be my guess," she confirms. "I mean, I don't see what else this could possibly be."

"Bloom," curses Odisseus between gritted teeth. "What I wouldn't give for sensor visual right now." Moira makes a sympathetic noise. "Where are you?"

"The topturret. All strapped in," she replies, a little too proudly.

"Yeah, see," Odisseus informs her bitterly, "I'm still in the crawlspace."

Her pause is a profound one. "...oh, shit," she mutters in a small voice.

"Yeah, I–"

A harsh electronic ringtone, too cheery considering the dire circumstances, interrupts them both. Odisseus scowls. "Hold up a second. Nemo's trying to buzz me back."

Another moment's juggling allows Odisseus to patch into the incoming call. The moment he does, though, he's only greeted with more incoherent screaming.

"Bloom me out," mutters Moira, soon as she hears this.

It takes all the Ortok's legendary restraint not to start tearing at the Lover's mechanical innards all around him in sheer frustration. He takes a calming breath, resolved to put very justified rage aside and instead make an attempt to save his and his saltbrother's life – yet again.

"Nemo! Nemo!" When this garners no response, however, his patience boils immediately over and Odisseus simply screams in bestial fury. "Nemo!"

The screaming abruptly stops, the space filled with more static. "...yeah?"

"You need to get to the helm," Odisseus explains, his voice trembling with rage. "Somewhere with safety straps." Before Nemo can make any objection, Odisseus presses the reminder hard. "The inertial dampener's offline, remember? When we make impact, the g-force'll be so strong, it'll break every bone in your body." This actually succeeds in shutting him up. "You have seconds. Go."

There's a quick pause, when the Captain clearly debates saying something else, before the interrupting frequency drops out.

"Where're you gonna go?" wonders Moira into that silence.

"Forward, I think," theorizes Odisseus, grabbing the castoff flashlight with a paw and sweeping it forward through the darkness. "Gotta find the nearest duct. Unless I miss my guess, I'm under the hold right now."

"There're those emergency impact seats," suggests Moira. Odisseus realizes he'd been imagining those seats as salvation, smuggled up against the laundry mainframe, since shortly after the tremors began.

"Exactly."

Moira's next question sounds casual but carries, Odisseus knows, a subtle significance. "Think you can make it?"

"Sure," he bluffs, as breezily as he can. None of them really had any idea how long it would take The Unconstant Lover to plummet from the Franchise's cargo bay, through Gi's atmosphere and crash onto the surface below. It could take an hour, it could take a heartbeat.

However long it takes, Odisseus refuses to be pulverized while crawling through the Lover's intestines.

It requires yet more awkward contortions to deactivate the comm. Swapping the flashlight to his teeth, the Ortok starts his slow and painful progress, wriggling forward towards the nearest access duct.

There were ducts littered all throughout the spaceship, allowing theoretical repairmen – really Odisseus – access to individual sections of the crawlspace from anywhere aboard. Some of the larger chambers – the hold, the mess, the belowdecks crew quarters – came equipped with several duct access points and all Odisseus needs is one.

All he needs is some method to escape the confines of the crawlspace, preferably with enough time to sprint to a good set of safety harnesses.

The great bundle of electrical wiring that hangs over the Ortok's head suggests that his gamble paid off and he's likely a few feet beneath the cargo hold. There oughta be, then, a number of ducts along his route, any one of which would surface him in the cargo bay and save his proverbial bacon.

The question is whether or not he's passed them all already. The very thought of wriggling blindly backwards through the crawlspace churns his stomach with nausea.

The progress is predictably slow and painful. As the spaceberg and the spaceship inside roll and tumble in freefall, Odisseus is tossed jarringly to port and starboard or vertiginously to bow or aft. More than once, Odisseus must clamp his claws against the sides of the orlop tunnel to prevent sliding forward or backward at a sickening angle.

While one paw clutches the comm, he's left with only one forepaw to drag himself along, his tail and hindpaws less than useless in the claustrophobic space. All along the way, his own words of warning to Nemo ring in his head, unable to shake thoughts of his skeleton liquifying on impact with the planet below.

He's giggling with delirium when, a few feet ahead, his flashlight bounces against a vertical shaft that shoots straight up from the crawlspace. After much effort, the Ortok manages to twist his torso and hind quarters completely around and slither partway up the duct. Pawing blindly about with his claws, he locates the back of the access panel and digs his claws around its hinges.

With all his strength and terror, Odisseus shoves and shoves against the unrelenting teltriton plate. Only by thinking of idiotically screaming Nemo and the raw pain of his recent belly wound can Odisseus find frustration enough to break free.

On the opposite side of the panel, Odisseus hears the sounds of the rivets popping free and clanging to the deck. The duct door bends sickeningly and, with a growl of triumph, the enraged Ortok peels the panel away, like the flimsy lid off a tin of some canned sporefin. He gulps a few breaths of glorious fresh air, his neck and one shoulder jutting awkwardly from the duct's opening.

To his surprise, he's not in the cargo hold. He's in the water closet.

Compared to the crawlspace, the water closet has suddenly become very spacious. Only a bathroom in the broadest sense of the word, the water closet is little more than a toilet, a sink attached to the back of the door and a fractured mirror, no doubt damaged in another of the Lover's countless crashes.

He'd somehow overshot his mark, crawled too far along the crawlspace and surfaced here, in the next chamber over. All things considered, though, Odisseus is simply happy to still be alive.

With a great heaving effort, Odisseus starts to squeeze his body through the duct's narrow opening. This is perhaps the most embarrassing and excruciating portion of the whole ordeal and he's thankful there's no one here to witness his shame. He curses wildly, flaps his limbs about and, with an anguished cry, tears the now-tattered bandage completely free in the process.

Who he wouldn't strangle for Two-Bit Switch's peerless ability to dislocate his own shoulder – a useful skill for squeezing through small spaces and for grossing people out, mostly – as he struggles his body through the duct.

Soon as he's through, Odisseus collapses to the wet floor with a sigh of immense relief, all his extremities vaguely numb and tingly. The moment he does, however, the Ortok's instantly bashed about the place. In the sudden absence of gravity, Odisseus is tossed hither and thither about the water closet – once into the opposite wall, once against the ceiling, once back to the floor. In his frantic airborne flailing, Odisseus manages to hook claws beneath the rim of the sink and cling on for dear life.

By some miracle, the ship's toilet came equipped with safety straps, now flapping about like the tentacles of some mad anemone. If he could only reach that seat and fasten those straps, he'd actually have a chance to survive the crash that's overdue any moment now.

It's at this moment that the Ortok's senses attune and Odisseus catches a fetid stench, the unmistakeable smell of humanoid urine. His eyes are drawn naturally toward the bowl and, when the lid flaps up, Odisseus is horrified by what he sees.

Profound indignation simmers within the Ortok and, soon as his comm whips past, he snatches it from the air with a paw, that he might harangue the guilty party.

"Who didn't flush?" he snarls over the comm.

"Uhh..."

"What do you mean, who?" Moira points out. "How is that even a question?"

"By all the moons, Nemo–"

Despite all the peril, the Captain becomes immediately petty and defensive in his response. "Well, I can't flush, can I? The thing doesn't work!"

"The water main's deactivated," the Ortok reminds him, for the umpteenth time. "That means you're not supposed to use the blooming water closet!"

Moira's question is full of arch confusion. "What're you doing in the water clos–"

Without warning, the Lover's center of gravity swings in the opposite direction and Odisseus sees his chance. Dropping the comm to clatter in the sink, he launches his body towards the toilet. For a moment, he's stuck, grappling with the thrashing strands of seatbelt but eventually, he manages to wrestle each one into submission. After a few painful smacks with the whipping buckles, Odisseus is successfully strapped onto the toilet.

No sooner has he done this, of course, than The Unconstant Lover crashes to the surface.

When the impact does come, it comes from a completely unexpected direction – above. Evidently, it's an upside-down Unconstant Lover that makes first contact with the planet. In response, the Ortok is throttled violently against his restraints while everything else in the water closet is dashed against the floor. The sheer shock pops the mirror clean off its hinges, shattering into glassy shrapnel and spilling the contents of the medicine cabinet everywhere.

Miserable as the experience may be, it's far from the first time Odisseus has ridden The Unconstant Lover to a bumpy landing. Despite the unpredictable direction, he was more or less braced and prepared for the force of impact when it came.

Odisseus is taken by surprise, then, when the ship bounces.

Like a stone across the surface of a pond, the whole freighter skips up and off the ground, spins a few lackadaisical circles and slams, once more, into the earth. This is accompanied by another tremendous impact, this time from the Lover's port, and another general exodus of the water closet's everything – rivets, Ortoks, glass shards – fiercely to the starboard.

To the Ortok's continued delight, this is repeated four more times, each with progressively weaker impacts and from innovative new directions. In addition, each time the ship rebounds, there's the sickening sound of something shattering beneath her. For his mental health, Odisseus is forced to assume this to be the thick coating of ice that envelops the Briza. He cannot fully banish the laundry list of potential damages that continues to rack up higher and higher with each bounce.

When The Unconstant Lover does eventually come to rest, it's after a lengthy scrape along the planet's surface. As it slows to a stop, Odisseus both hears and feels pieces – hopefully of ice – literally snapping off and ground beneath the ship's decelerating slide.

There are two more immediate blessings, however; the Lover is right side up and Odisseus is alive.

The Ortok takes a moment to ratify this last fact, to ensure that his heart still beats, all his limbs are still attached and that his bones weren't powderized in the crash. As terrible as some of the Lover's previous crashes may have been, Odisseus thinks he can safely attest that this one is – by blooming far – her worst to date.

Odisseus sits, strapped to an unflushed toilet, amid the utter ruin of the water closet. Rivets, pills and jagged triangles of glass are littered like confetti across the floor. His breath comes slow and ragged as he listens to the ship's skeleton groan from all her recent trauma.

From within the sink, the comm suddenly burbles to life.

"I'm pretty sure," begins the Captain tentatively, "I've shit my pants."

Moira stands on the rim of the airlock, blinking back tears. She's unable to really appreciate the utterly alien world that's swept panoramically out around her. Instead, she has to cower, wincing and scooting back, from the harsh glare of Gi's angry orange sun, like she's some unearthed subterranean horror exposed to naked sunlight for the first time.

For a second, her euphoria at escaping the prison The Unconstant Lover had become is overshadowed by how infernally hot the outside world actually is.

All their research, plus Gella's own testimony, should have warned them how hot Gi would be. They'd assumed a forbidding desert climate, on par with Rith or Malerba or Hivu, and came equipped for same – survival gear, cloth wrappings, the whole nine yards. Never, even at her most paranoid, could Moira have imagined a heat as fierce and punishing as this one.

At the moment, she's even standing in the shade and surrounded by thousands of tons of solid ice. It occurs to Moira that perhaps here, her usual outfit of monochromatic black wasn't necessarily the wisest wardrobe.

Moira lingers in the mouth of a glacial cave. Jagged icy slopes fall away at her feet while jagged icy cliffs climb still higher above her head. Through occasional gaps in the ice, she spots patches of wet black teltriton hull, the Lover's true colors peeking through her frosty disguise. Everywhere she looks, however, Moira sees a great miasma of steam that rises in twisting tendrils, as the spaceberg visibly evaporates all around her.

Given ten minutes in this heat, Moira predicts that all that will remain of their trusty disguise is a circle of wet mud and The Unconstant Lover, baking beneath this unnatural sun.

Gi's single sun is a hateful eye of orange flame that glowers furiously over the landscape. It dominates its acrid yellow sky, a sky unmarred by the white whiffs of cloud that would suggest any other weather but endless sunshine. Every breath that Moira takes tastes chalky and desiccated, the very air robbed of its moisture.

The countryside in every direction is barren, shrunken and shriveled into a wasteland by such a severe sun. All color has been utterly bleached from Gi's sandy surface, giving the landscape an incongruous resemblance to freshly fallen snow. Closer examination, however, reveals the ground to be cracked and spiderwebbed, all moisture sponged from the soil aeons ago.

The Lover and her frozen shell appear to have, from where Moira's standing, come down amid a stretch of flatland. The very occasional rise that Moira spots appear, at first glance, to be great boulders of glossy stone. When she spies her perfect reflection – Moira standing at the mouth of a cave in a lumpy mountain of ice and teltriton – in the nearest one, she realizes the truth.

Great mounds of glass, sand made molten and subsequently cooled, dot the surface of Gi. It would have taken temperatures unspeakably higher than these, Moira reflects, to smelt raw sand into glass, and she wonders idly how old those stones must be, dating to an earlier age in the mysterious planet's history.

The true culprit behind the planet's inhospitable conditions, however, is undeniably the Consortium. All their data should suggest that, under normal conditions, Gi ought to be a torrid, tropical planet, rife with flora and fauna. Under the oppressive climatic field, however, the planet's all dusty deserts and barren salt flats, the soil utterly hostile to anything but the most extreme forms of life. When she gazes skyward, Moira can even discern, like the strings of an unseen puppeteer, the seams of the field's many yellow hexagons. She wonders what color an untampered sky might be.

Gi might be fairly far from the ideal vacation spot but Moira, beggar among beggars, can't be choosy. She's not about to complain; all she wants is escape from the Lover and her contemptible crew.

Moira practically sprinted out the airlock the moment they made planetfall. Far as she knew, the remaining crew were still sequestered aboard, preparing themselves for their exhausting jaunt into the desert sun. Volunteering to put first boots on the ground before anyone could object, Moira could do a little recon around the crash site, not even bothering with the desert survival gear for the moment.

There's plenty of time for all that later. Right now, what Moira really needs is an afternoon constitutional, two months overdue. Here, she could enjoy actual solitude, with wide open skies, fresh air and no teltriton walls to entrap her.

To fully appreciate this newfound freedom, though, Moira must find some means down the icy slopes all around her.

With hands and hobnailed heels, Moira picks her way carefully across what remains of the spaceberg, clinging tenuously to the ship's hull. More than once does a substantial piece of ice break away beneath her feet and Moira's forced to, in a supremely dignified manner, scurry to safety, all four limbs flailing.

All around her, more and more of the ship's shape is exposed by the melting ice. Moira's relieved that every bare patch of hull she sees is only superficially scratched and dotted with rust, rather than seriously damaged. Their gamble that the spaceberg disguise would completely cushion the crash appears to have paid off, from the little Moira can glean on the way down.

Even were, moons forfend, her beloved Antagonist damaged, Moira wouldn't voice once word of complaint. All that matters, at this point, was that Odisseus could, with a little elbow grease, make her spaceworthy again. There was no friendly neighborhood fix-it shop here; the only intelligent life they could hope to encounter down here were spice rangers.

After a graceful slide across a sheet of separating ice, Moira kips off the side of The Unconstant Lover and lands in an instinctive crouch. She marvels at the sensation of solid ground beneath her boots and even stoops sentimentally to run some mud between her fingers. Standing, Moira surveys the scene with the contented sigh of a farmer, still squinting against the blinding glare from above.

She starts her perimeter around the crashed spaceberg, careful to stay always within the glacier's voluminous shade. Moira savors every sensation, no matter how stupid. The wind whistling across the sand, the sound of grit crunching beneath her boots, even the sun's harsh scrutiny. Everything that life aboard a spaceship's denied her is suddenly so idiotically fascinating.

Soon enough, she knows, her companions will be along to spoil her solitude, with their questions and their voices and their faces. For now, Moira is alone, the only living creature walking the surface of this planet.

As she walks, she unclips the scanner from where it hangs on her belt, slapping against her hip. Properly dialed, the device she'd borrowed from Odisseus would survey the surrounding area, in search of the nearest life signs – specifically those of botanical life.

Considering the empty horizon in every direction, Moira assumes it'll be a lengthy overland trek to the nearest grove of Gitter trees. A few days hike, to some watery oasis somewhere, sounds utterly divine to Moira, even in this murderous heat.

According to her scanner, however, there's something large and alive nearby – practically on her position.

Moira scowls and quickens her pace around the side of the melting spaceberg. She'd assumed this stretch of wasteland completely unfit to support plant life. Perhaps they'd crashed smack dab into a stand of the stuff, their planetwide search over before it began.

It's when she starts to hear noises that she draws her weapons.

Without line of sight, Moira can still hear, from around a bend in the spaceberg, the sounds of ice crunching and cracking. There's assuredly some boring and logical explanation for the sound – fissures in the spaceberg splitting open beneath the intense heat – but she cannot help imagining gargantuan jaws munching through solid ice. Moira is precisely paranoid enough to tread with caution around the corner, especially considering the massive lifesign supposedly nearby.

Crouching down, Moira peers around a horn of melting ice and gets first visual contact on what's making the sound – far from what she was expecting.

A great tentacled mass is slumped against the side of the spaceberg, all dark and writhing tendrils. As Moira watches, the creature wriggles its innumerable feelers deeper and deeper into the ice, breaking the glacier apart into manageable chunks that disappear within its coils. There doesn't appear to be any central hub or main body of all the tendrils. Far as Moira can tell, the entire mass moves like a thousand independent limbs, all driven by the same insatiable thirst.

So much, then, for the theory that Gi was too hot to support animal life. Looking at this creature, though, Moira would be hard-pressed to call this an animal.

She's starting to inch back into cover, planning to creep back to the airlock and report to her crewmates, when somebody shouts her name.

"Moira!" calls the distant voice of Nemo, from high atop the Lover's airlock. "Moira? You out there?"

Moira strangles a curse. A more violent reaction, however, ripples through the amorphous form of the strange blob-beast. More than a dozen of the creature's tentacles extend with an almost wooden groan and anchor themselves into spaceberg's ice, pulling the massive bulk behind it. At alarming speed, the alien monstrosity goes climbing and clambering across the asteroid's slippery surface, carried by an innumerable number of legs, appearing and disappearing into its ever-shifting body.

It's heading unerringly towards the open airlock and the unsuspecting Nemo.

More new and original curses occur to Moira as she slinks along, shadowing the massive creature's progress along the Lover's portside. Her options are dwindling. She could shout and warn Nemo but he'd certainly misunderstand and continue to shout back. She could engage the creature with Righty and Lefty but this she saves as a last resort; something about this shapeless creature seems to suggest an immunity to traditional weaponry.

She ultimately settles on warning Nemo somewhat more sophisticatedly than simply shouting at him.

"Oh, hey, Moira," the Captain answers his comm, completely oblivious to the alien horror about to devour him. "Jotor's nutsack, is it hot here or–"

"Nemo!" she hisses into the comm, careful to keep her voice low, her crouch low and her pace quick enough to stay within sight of the creature. "Shut the airlock door!"

"What? Shut the airlock? Why would I–"

"Can you not argue? Can you just shut the airlo–"

His tone becomes suddenly indignant. "Everybody's giving me fucking orders today," he starts to complain. "You all seem to be forgetting that–"

"Bloom this," Moira mutters and drops the comm to the ground.

Righty and Lefty whistle from their holsters and into Moira's hands in the same motion that she spins, stands and takes aim. Up on the spaceberg's side, the scrabbling, many-armed nightmare rounds a corner, seconds away from reaching Nemo and the airlock. Blistering yellow ditrogen explodes against the creature's two most extended pseudopods, those mere feet from the Lover's open airlock.

To Moira's surprise, traditional weaponry proves extremely effective against the creature. Yellow fire licks hungrily across its amorphous body, crackling like dried wood everywhere it burns. Both limbs are instantly severed and its entire form shifts and swells, focusing suddenly on Moira's position at the foot of the spaceberg.

Nemo completely forgotten, the creature comes careening down the side of the melting Unconstant Lover. Much to her horror, Moira watches as the two tentacles she'd just severed, still smoldering and also still mobile, also come scurrying towards her, completely independent of the creature's main body.

Moira concentrates her fire there, on the smaller tendrils, unwilling to make the same mistake twice and create even more monsters to battle. Unfortunately, this is precisely what her next salvo does. Righty wreaks havoc on one, Lefty the other, both revolvers sowing destruction amid the bundles of writhing black tendrils. When the smoke clears, however, yet smaller bundles of writhing black tendrils come crawling from the wreckage, all headed unerringly toward Moira.

All the while, the main creature keeps rambling down the spaceberg slope on scores of legs, like a gigantic prickly agwaifapede.

Her mouth falling open in wordless surprise, Moira backpedals away from the Lover and out into the open plain – anything to gain a little distance on the monster. Soon as she's outside the shadow, the sun strikes Moira and she nearly goes weak in the knees from the sheer heat. Righty and Lefty sing an angry duet, battering the massive creature as it reaches a cresting promontory in the ice. Each successive shot, however, succeeds only in spawning more smaller creatures to join the chase.

Unimpeded, the monster oozes over the ledge in a movement at once wooden and liquid. Soon, it's cleared the shadow of the Lover and, under Gi's blazing sun, Moira is granted her first good look at her freakish attacker.

In this stark light, Moira realizes that this aggressive fauna is actually aggressive flora.

The approaching creature is undeniably a plant, a tidal wave of tangling briars, perpetually flexing and twisting around one another. It extends even more pseudopods, revealed to be thorny branches, that drag its writhing and bulbous form across the sand. It's accompanied by a swarm of smaller thorns, the bits and pieces Righty and Lefty have shot off, clawing and inching their way across the dusty, cracked earth.

A wave of these reach Moira first and she works double duty. She stomps and crunches them beneath her hobnailed baby-stompers, all the while peppering the oncoming monster with Righty and Lefty. Her attention split, she's unable to keep track of her ammunition and, with the creature seconds away, both her pistols click empty.

She has a heartbeat to react and she's plumb out of escape plans. Moira's only instinct is to draw both weapons to her chest, close her eyes and meet her doom. She's absolutely no idea what this thorn monster does to the prey it's caught – impales them a billion times would be her best guess – but she imagines, no matter what, it'll be a pretty gruesome end. Moira feels the creature wholly envelop her. She feels the moment the sun is blotted out by the canopy of brambles. She hears the crunching and groaning of branches and briars as they close around her.

Moira is not, to her continued surprise, instantly or even eventually torn to shreds. After a moment, she risks opening one eye to see what's staying her execution.

She stands inside a living cage. It's dim and stifling, sunlight only permitted through tiny gaps in the always opening, always closing, always moving walls. Careful not to draw a breath or move a muscle, Moira watches the thorny creature squirm all around her, the branches knotting and entangling in an endless snarl. Always, however, they keep a respectful berth around Moira, an inch away at the widest, as though uncertain how to react to this humanoid creature.

Before Moira can react, however, the creature suddenly withdraws. The wall of thorns peels away before Moira and disappears behind her. Left utterly confused, Moira spins around, pistols raised, to see the creature regrouped and thrashing about, as though struggling with something that Moira cannot see.

Anxious about whatever's so distracted her potential killer, Moira, both pistols extended, starts to edge back towards the Lover. That's when she notices the dust cloud that hovers about the whole scene, as though a large or numerous something has arrived from across the wasteland.

In support of this theory, a shape starts to emerge, only fleetingly visible, from within the menacing mass of brambles. That shape is accompanied by the occasional bright flash, the sun glinting off something sheer and shiny and metallic. Soon enough, the dust and the whipping tendrils part perfectly, allowing Moira a moment's glimpse at the shape.

It's safe to say she couldn't possibly have been more surprised.

A towering warrior, green-skinned and many-armed, comes whirling into view. Dressed only in a barbaric raiment of thongs and medallions, the warrior swings a number of jagged weapons from its multiple arms, sunlight splayed along their scintillant edges. Each of these blades hack and slice through the thorny tendrils, severing any reaching limb before they can even approach the warrior.

An astonished Moira watches as more and more warriors emerge from the surrounding haze and give battle to the outnumbered creature. The scene that plays out before The Unconstant Lover is one of savage bloodletting, a pitched battle between beast and barbarian.

"Oh, shit," comments Moira sagely.

CHAPTER 8

Odisseus is hot.

Native to the chillier regions of a generally chilly planet, Ortok do not come equipped with sweat glands. On the contrary, they actually came equipped with a less-than-helpful layer of insulating blubber. Under Gi's tyrannical sun, Odisseus instinctively starts panting like a beast, his great black tongue lolling out of his mouth.

This, unsurprisingly, does comparatively little to cool him down. As the minutes wear on, Odisseus can feel an almost tangible pressure from above, the sun somehow strong enough to stoop his back and nearly drop him to all fours.

At this rate, Odisseus would be lucky to survive fifteen minutes on the planet, not to mention the several days it would likely take to complete this phase of the caper.

The same heat that completely staggers Odisseus only seems to vaguely irritate his companions. Moira's mono-black ensemble's not doing her any favors, the reek of sweat palpable on her. The Captain's certainly the coolest and soon to be the most sunburnt. When push came to shove, Nemo neglected all the desert gear Odisseus recommended he wear, even for this short jaunt. Instead, he favors his ratty bathrobe and ratty t-shirt combo, with the notable addition of a pair of flipflops.

The same heat that vaguely irritates the Ortok's companions has zero impact on those gigantic cactus dudes over there.

The crew of The Unconstant Lover stand in the shadow of their looming spaceship, clustered together amid what remains of the unmelted ice. Ahead, across a field strewn with brambles, stands a much larger cluster of fifteen-foot tall, ambulatory cacti.

To a plant, they're each sprouting six or seven or ten separate arms. To a plant, those arms carry a wide variety of gleaming bladed weapons. It's their faceless trunks, spiny green flesh utterly devoid of expression or emotion, that're the most unnerving.

In truth, Odisseus might find this unexpected warband somewhat comical, were there not seventy of them, each three times his height and carrying a castle's armory worth of swords.

For more than three minutes now, they'd stood at tense stalemate, neither party certain whether to make a move or, indeed, which move to make.

"Nope," sighs the Captain, slapping the Attaché fruitlessly against his hand.

"Nothing?" mutters Odisseus, unsure whether the indigenous people actually have ears to overhear him with.

"Not a thing," confirms Nemo. "That's for 'cactus' and for 'natives'. Any other suggestions?"

"Try 'indigenous'?" suggests Odisseus with a shrug.

"Aboriginals," is Moira's curt suggestion.

"Um," Nemo stammers, "can you spell either of those for me?"

Thus far, the Attaché contained no mention of sword-swinging native barbarians or fifteen-foot cactus men or really any aboriginal population on Gi, no matter how exhaustively they searched its expansive files. In fact, none of the supposed experts they'd spoken to – not Gella Borsk, the booze baroness, nor Zuraga Tuss, her ex-spice ranger head of security – made any reference that could lead them to suspect such a presence down here.

Considering how few people in the history of the galaxy have ever set foot on the planet, it's perhaps understandable that Two-Bit's notes on this particular phase of the caper were a little sketchier. Still, it's difficult for Odisseus to consider the exclusion of an entire sentient species anything but a glaring oversight.

Bloodshed looks like the only possible outcome here. The chances the two parties could or would communicate peacefully seemed microscopically low, considering the zero cultural touchstones between pirates and cacti. Moira's not wrong, Odisseus supposes, in training Righty and Lefty on the eerily still forest of savages that somehow stares them down without actual eyes to stare.

Instead of spelling out either word for Nemo, Moira simply sniffs twice and Odisseus looks up suddenly. One of the cacti, the one Odisseus subconsciously assumed to be the leader, advances a single step, bridging half the distance between its gang and theirs. On instinct, both Odisseus and Nemo draw weapons – his Wreckingball from his holster and his pistol from his robe pocket, respectively – to match Moira.

The head cactus, meanwhile, brandishes its primary weapon – a haft of green wood, nearly its own height, fitted with a notched axehead. In one smooth movement of three arms, it stabs the weapon deep into the dirt. This done, it drops to its knees with a thunderous boom, empty hands upheld.

"Um, hi and stuff," Nemo greets dumbly, to seemingly no response from the enormous plant.

Up close, Odisseus notices a few things about these weird-ass natives that dust and distance had hidden from him. He notices the dome of speckled blue flowers that sprout from the crown like a full head of floral hair. He notices the raiment, made from treated vines, and the vicious weapons hanging from every conceivable hook and loop – made of sculpted glass, he realizes now.

What Odisseus notices most, however, is the smell. The scent is overly saccharine and extremely invasive, creeping into his nostrils and seeming almost to swim around his brain.

He snuffs a moment, pawing at his nostrils and attempting to shake the sensation that something tangible has crawled into his nose and lodged there. To tell from their scrunched-up expressions, Odisseus is fairly certain his crewmates too have caught the scent. What makes these cacti so potent, the Ortok's no idea, but the scent is instantly recognizable.

"Moons," the Captain comments, making no attempt to hide his disgust, "he stinks, doesn't he? What is that?"

"You're telling me that you don't recognize it?" Odisseus marvels.

Moira blinks at him. "Should we?"

{I am Foreplanter}, announces an unwelcome voice, somehow speaking from the base of the Ortok's nasal gland, {and the auguries tell me that you must be Vesselborn and therefore venerable}.

Thoroughly unnerved, the Ortok huffs and tosses his head a few times, trying to shake loose the speaker from where it perched inside his nose.

"Did anybody else," ventures an uncertain Moira, "smell that?"

"I have no idea what that means," stipulates Nemo, "but yes. Yes, I did."

{Your confusion}, continues the speaker, {casts a shadow of doubt. Do mine roots deceive me? We stand before your vessel, do we not?}

"No, no, we do," answers Nemo, addressing his response toward the kneeling cactoid barbarian. "She's mine, alright."

{Then it is to you that we owe obeisance}, the speaker concludes, now confirmed to be the cactus by the deeper bow it makes. {We are the Gitter of the Skyscratch grove. I must be forgiven – we are come equipped for water-hunting, I am afraid, not for ceremony}.

"That's cool," forgives a confused Nemo with a wave. "No big."

On some unspoken cue, the entire raiding party, clustered behind Foreplanter drops or sheathes their naked weaponry. There's a minor seismic shock as three score cacti drop simultaneously to their knees, mimicking their tribal leader's own pose.

Only one cactus still stands tall. Towering over his kneeling comrades, the eight-armed dissenter is immediately distinguishable by the painful spread of puckered burn marks that mar a substantial portion of its trunk. Its harness clinking together, it advances angrily through the cluster of its companions. When it comes within range of the Ortok's noise, Odisseus is nearly bowled over by the fierce spike of its signature scent.

{Obeisance? Use thine roots, old fool! Never before have Vesselborn–}

{Lean thy place, Firstseed Flamescar}, Foreplanter urges, its own aroma now swelling in the Ortok's nose. {Why must you ever, in the presence of the Vessleborn, bring shame to the Skyscrat–}

{The presence of the Vesselborn?} the one called Firstseed Flamescar retorts, thrusting a spear towards the Lover's crew and nearly earning a salvo from Lefty in the process. {These infidels are no Vesselborn – that much is plain! Whither come the Vesselborn without harness? Whither come the Vesselborn as passengers upon God Beyond's tears, like some crawling parasite? Whither–}

One rooty foot after another, Foreplanter rises from his crouch and confronts the vastly shorter Flamescar. All the while, Odisseus feels the argument rage back and forth within his nasal passage, both scents fighting for dominance. Something's in there, the Ortok's convinced. Something foreign has made a new home atop his sensitive receptors and, no matter how much he sniffs or sneezes or throws his head around, he cannot seem to evict it.

Before long, the combined fourteen arms of the two cacti are filled with glassy blades. {I draw breath yet, Flamescar, and I'll suffer no upstart–}

{A mere sixarm deserves not the honor of Foreplanter–}

The report of a familiar firearm stops the scuffle immediately. Nemo stands, pistol upraised, cloud of ditrogen wafting in the yellow sky. Both Foreplanter and Flamescar stand stock still, all fight stolen from them. A heartbeat later, Odisseus nearly drops to his knees from the combined stink of the cacti's accumulated fear and awe at Nemo and his comparatively crappy firearm.

"Let's get one thing straight," the Captain announces to his captive cactoid audience. "I am the Vesselborn here and nobody dies," he declares, lowering the smoking pistol, "unless I kill them."

{I humbly beg the Vesselborn's forgiveness}, Foreplanter immediately acknowledges, as though its rival had vanished in a puff of smoke. {Were Firstseed Flamescar any wiser, many a lesson it might have learned from its namesake, the numerous past lessons given at your hand}.

"No kidding," agrees Nemo with an uncomprehending grunt.

At this insult, Odisseus detects a fresh surge of outrage from the scarred cactus. It shuffles backward into the crowd and makes no objection, however, save refusing to kneel.

"So," Odisseus murmurs, "do we have any idea what the bloom 'Vesselborn' is supposed to mean?"

At least Nemo's honest. "Sure don't."

"The spice rangers," provides Moira flatly. "They come from spaceships, they're vaguely humanoid, they wear harnesses. The only offworlders these guys would've had any contact with."

"Yeah," Nemo agrees, a moment later. "I mean, obviously."

"You see that shit they're wearing?" Moira indicates Foreplanter with the snub of her pistol. "Look familiar to you?"

"Uh," stammers Nemo. "It's grass and leaves and sticks and shit."

"Grass and leaves and sticks and shit," Moira agrees, "designed to resemble a spice ranger's harness. It's idol emulation," she explains slowly. "They worship the spice rangers."

"As gods?" Odisseus wonders.

"As something. Who blooming knows?"

"That still doesn't answer," Odisseus points out, "how in all the moons of Jotor we're understanding them."

"Well, no," Moira concedes. "Spores? Pheromones?"

"What," scoffs Nemo, "like Phnuki porn stars have? Maybe I'm in the minority here but I ain't exactly overcome with the urge to fuck any of these big spiky–"

{A thousand pardons and more, most noble Vesselborn}, begins Foreplanter, in a strangely polite manner, {the warriors of mine grove has emerged but recently from battle most victorious against the thorncloud. We would all rejoice at the chance to drink deeply of this holy water thou hast so graciously provided us, the beleaguered souls of the low–}

"Bloom me out," comments Nemo, as overwhelmed by the formal speech as Odisseus is by the contradictory smells. "Be my blooming guest." He sweeps an arm aside, towards the heaps of melting ice that've collected all around the base of the Lover.

Given this permission, the entire cacti crowd shuffles forward, eager to sink their roots into the muddy earth. They hardly make three steps before a second gunshot stops them all in their tracks. A wispy trail of yellow ditrogen snakes into the air between the two parties, a patch of bleached dirt now blasted black.

"On one condition," sneers Moira, the barest hint of a smirk on her lips. "We need a–"

Odisseus places a paw correctively on Moira's shoulder. "Favor. Say we need a favor."

Moira's face crinkles in confusion. "What're you on about? All we need is a–"

"Let's trust Odisseus this once," the Ortok recommends. "Ask them for a favor. To be collected at a later time, let's say?"

Scowling with distrust, Moira actually does as she's bid. The cactoid crowd receives the news stoically, their attention focused on the quickly melting ice. {Of course, honored Vesselborn. We grow to serve}, is Foreplanter's automatic response.

Once they're given the all-clear, the entire cacti grove come hustling forward. The Lover's crew are actually forced to scoot aside, lest they be trampled by the gargantuan plant-men. Regrouping a few feet away, at the edge of the Lover's shade, Nemo, Moira and Odisseus watch the cacti warband jostle for position, seeking the wettest patches to sink their rooty feet into. As they drink their fill, waves of aromatic pleasure assault the Ortok's nostrils.

"Care to explain to me," Moira hisses, as soon as she supposes they're out of earshot, "why we need an unspecified favor, instead of a blooming Gitter tree?"

"A Gitter sapling," Odisseus corrects.

Nemo's scowl suddenly matches Moira's. "And?"

"Have you not smelled these guys?" Odisseus wonders, nudging his muzzle in the cacti's general direction, all distracted by their delicious space water.

Nemo's description is elegant in its simplicity. "Yeah. They stink like ass."

"Why, Odi?" prompts a frustrated Moira. "What do they smell like?"

"Gitter," Odisseus supplies. "Raw and unprocessed, yeah, but it's Gitter."

Both his companions deepen their scowls at this and, much as it may disgust them, sniff a little deeper of the pungent odor. Odisseus watches the realization dawn on them both – Nemo first, Moira second – as they recognize that familiar aroma, the one found at the bottom of every bottle of Gitterswitch Gin.

"Bloom me out," murmurs Nemo.

"It's the flowers," explains Odisseus. He points a claw toward the blooming crown of the closest cactus, its host of blue speckled flowers wafting slightly in the breeze. "That's where the smell's coming from, anyway. Probably what's allowing us to communicate and, I wouldn't be surprised, is probably the base form of the spice."

"Which means?" presses Nemo, his face still scowling.

"We don't need to go looking for the trees," Moira realizes. "They came looking for us."

"I mean, that's even what they call themselves," Odisseus recalls. "The Gitter, remember, of the Such-and-Such grove?"

"No fucking wonder, then," Moira puts together, "that the Consortium is keeping all this shit under wraps. If they're harvesting, what, their organs?"

To that, Odisseus can only shrug. The volume of information still unknown about these unexpected inhabitants of Gi was too immense for him to draw any conclusion that he couldn't immediately ferret out with his trustworthy sense of smell.

In that moment, watching these gigantic cactoid savages squish and slosh about in the muddy water like Vapheads denied their paralyzing fog, Odisseus longs suddenly for the earlier stages of the caper. How much simpler did the molecular strip, the posing as a spaceberg, all the tumult aboard the Franchise, even the six week exile aboard the Lover, seem now, in contrast to this? Here, they were faced with an entire species of sentient desert plants that communicate by stinking and can swing half-a-dozen swords apiece.

"Whaddya suppose Two-Bit would say," Nemo wonders, reading his saltbrother's mind, "were he here right now?"

"Nothing intelligible, I expect," predicts a sour Moira, "since I'd be throttling the shit outta him."

"Hm. Well, there is actually one more thing we–" Nemo realizes. Drawing the Attaché from his pocket, he starts to punch some more letters into its search function. Odisseus stoops over his shoulder and watches him painstakingly type "G-I-T". Before Odisseus can warn him of the fruitlessness of such a search, the caper files immediately start to spike with thousands upon thousands of results – "Gitterpeach", "Gitterspice" and "Gitterswitch" first among them.

"Oh," realizes Nemo, a little forlorn. "Sure."

{Most noble Vesselborn}, Foreplanter's voice somehow interjects from within the Ortok's nose. He glances upward to see all the cacti have stopped moving and now stand, eerily still. {We are now watered and refreshed and wish to return to our nursery, to share this bounty with our saplings}.

This word stops all three in their tracks. "Saplings, you say," repeats Nemo, his voice piqued with interest.

{In accordance with our custom, thou hast our humble invitation to come and make great ceremony with us}, Foreplanter extends to them, gesturing discreetly with several of his six arms. {Doubtless, thou hast much divine work that begs attending but it would greatly please mine grove and me were thou to accompany us there and receive our ceremony}.

Nemo doesn't need to glance back to his allies for confirmation, this the only and most solid lead they were likely to find. "Lead on, then."

Moira feels woozy and isn't sure why.

Many times in her checkered past had Moira Quicksilver endured all manner of debilitating buhoxshit, ranging from near-fatal blood loss to heavy anesthesia. Under her current circumstances, Moira would have assumed she's suffering mild to severe heat stroke but something about this diagnosis doesn't quite feel right.

Something about her symptoms feels uncomfortably familiar to Moira.

She didn't notice anything was amiss at all until she was slogging uphill through knee-high sand for the fourth consecutive hour. Every step of their overland journey was a battle – against fierce desert squalls, against rugged terrain, against the punishing sun. Even once that sun started to sink in the sky, the planet's conditions became no less brutal, the baked sand radiating as much heat as the noonday sun ever did. Then there's the inhospitable countryside they journeyed across – mountainous foothills, part sand dune, part volcanic crag.

Heat stroke, with a side order of fatigue, seem like the obvious answers, then. Were she suffering heat stroke, however, Moira would expect more nausea, more headache and a lot more signs of dehydration. A constant fear whenever embarking into the trackless desert, Moira made a specific point to keep hydrated with her aquafier, its effects somewhat depleted in the planet's parched climate.

Instead of sluggish, Moira's movements feel more uncoordinated. She's dizzy, certainly, but Moira would categorize this sensation closer to vertigo, like she's teetering on the edge of some imagined precipe. To Moira, it feels like her limbs are moving independently, without command or permission, a substantial delay between her mind and her body.

It's her mood that seems the most bizarrely affected. Rather than feeling drained or ornery, she feels somehow more generous to the fierceness of her surroundings, more charitable to the savage climate and all its perils. Despite the toils and tribulation all around her, Moira feels very slightly giddy, the vestigial beginnings of hysteria bubbling somewhere inside her.

At a guess, Moira would say she feels a little tipsy.

"Hey." Moira reaches over and taps Nemo lightly on the forearm. "This is maybe a weird question, I guess, but do you feel, like, a little funny?"

"Funny?" considers Nemo after a considerable pause. He trudges on, step by weary step, a slurry of sand and sweat dripping off the slick strands of his beard. "Funny how?"

"I don't know," it occurs to Moira, unable to communicate all her rigorous mental analysis. "Just sorta funny."

"Funny," starts Nemo again suddenly, long enough that Moira assumed he'd forgotten the question, "how these cactus assholes live at the top of a blooming moons-damned mountain? Funny how the driftcart goes bad and there's nobody around that can fix it?" His makes an ill-aimed and half-hearted gesture towards Odisseus. "Funny how somebody managed to get his hairy ass a ride all the way there?"

Moira's eyes follow his gesture and land on the Ortok's inert form, swaying this way and that on the improvised litter.

He'd collapsed an hour earlier, the victim of actual heat stroke. It went without saying that the desert climate came down the hardest on the shaggy, blubbery Ortok, the worst equipped to handle the harsh conditions. Add to that his recent belly wound and it comes as little surprise, to Moira at least, that Odisseus couldn't withstand the overland trek.

His own aquafier empty, the Ortok's companions were hard-pressed to remedy his situation, short of sacrificing their own water reserves. Moira was gearing up to drag his three-hundred-pound carcass to the nearest shade and turn back for the Lover. All Nemo, the Ortok's lifelong saltbrother, was prepared to do was bitch about how sweaty he was.

Their cactoid escorts, however, knew precisely what to do.

As reactionlessly as they do everything, one of the Gitter, the one they called Firstseed Stalkchopper, approached the collapsed Ortok. For a long moment, there it stood, assessing the situation, before it reached into the ruffled leaves sprouting from its elbow joint. With the snapping of a fragile stem, it withdrew a small item and this, in its green thorny paw, it extended to Moira.

It held, wrapped in layers of swaddling husk, a pristine and perfect Gitterpeach.

Even to the staunchly cynical Moira Quicksilver, it was frankly something of a religious experience, to hold something at once so pure and so significant as an unprocessed peach. Tens of thousands died, whole economies rose and fell, entire empires were constructed – all for the sake of this one blue fruit in Moira's hand.

Not to mention, of course, it was the driving object behind this entire caper, everything that Two-Bit Switch schemed and planned and obsessed over.

At Stalkchopper's insistence, Moira broke the peach apart, all its internal juices gushing over her hands, and fed the parched Ortok with its sopping pieces. Unprocessed like this, the Gitterpeach is surprisingly far more liquid than solid, the only thing capable of retaining moisture on this moons-forsaken planet.

Moira wonders, feeding the dripping chunks to thirsty Odisseus, whether the peach is truly a fruit or rather some manner of external bladder, considering the way the Gitter used them.

Whatever its true nature, an unadulterated Gitterpeach works instantaneous wonders on the Ortok. Far from fully recovered, Odisseus nonetheless begins to come around and even manages rudimentary speech.

A makeshift stretcher is constructed from a pair of polearms and some ferny fronds stretched between them. Here Odisseus rests, fed the occasional peach that Stalkchopper donates, while his companions trudge and worry, some distance behind.

Nothing seems to faze the marching column of cacti – not the additional burden of carrying the Ortok nor the hellish conditions. In two long lines, the seventy or so members of the warband climb higher and higher into the mountainous terrain. They navigate the hostile landscape with the cold, robotic certainty of long-time natives, knowing every rise and dell of the countryside without thought.

Moira and Nemo, with tired limbs and shorter strides, would naturally fall behind. The Gitter stay vigilant around their Vesselborn guests, forming a protective barrier between them and the wilderness.

For most of the journey, that wilderness was a bone-dry dustbowl. For hours, they crossed featureless white plains of cracked sand, dotted very occasionally by strange and jagged glassrock formations. This stretch of the walk Moira remembers only as a dusty blur, an endless miasma that hangs around the marching caravan. All the while, she kept her gaze focused on the distant mountains, growing incrementally closer by each mottible.

An hour before Odisseus would eventually collapse, the driftcart shorted its motivator. Lightheaded even then, the Ortok did what few field repairs he could but, half a mottible later, the engine succumbed to the heat and the dust and promptly died altogether. They'd thought ahead enough to bring driftpacks, each one's miniature driftmotor helping to lighten what supplies they could carry from the cart. The derelict they were forced to abandon amid the swirling sands.

Reduced to walking the rest of the way to the nursery, Moira sure was glad she'd insisted on adverse weather gear for this phase of the caper. The one salient feature the crew knew for certain about the planet Gi was its tremendous heat. Moira, for once, wasn't about to maroon herself on some tremendously hot planet unprepared for the local clime. Thankfully, Odisseus, ever the worrywort, thought very much along the same lines and the negligent Nemo was ultimately outvoted.

Moira didn't skimp, either. She purchased the highest quality gear the planeteering adventurer could acquire. Rather than cumbersome kaftans and layers of cloth like the native Duutho of Rith wear, Moira spend the big bucks on something a little more sophisticated. Considering the length of this overland journey stretching out before them, she's extraordinarily glad she did.

DermEndure Pore Sealant is a chalky, curdled substance, the color of tapioca pudding. Packaged in stocky spray cans, the stuff is sold above and around every arid planet in the Outer Ring. Before departing the crashsite, Moira had – in inviolable privacy, of course – stripped down and doused every inch of her body with the sealant. It's undeniably foul-feeling, stiff and crusty on the surface of her skin. Properly applied, however, it should shield her pale skin from the worst Gi's winds and sun can throw at her.

Thrice now has Moira relied on the stuff, tracking runaway bountyheads on Pameer. Pameer, however, is a child's sandbox compared to the sun-blasted wastelands of Gi. Tough though the sealant may be, even Moira could feel it cracking under this unrelenting heat, the lacquer over her skin splitting with each movement.

To this ensemble, Moira added a Whuudi head scarf she'd fancied on some punk-ass bounty hunter that swung their way during the caper's planning stages. Then there were always her invincible jackboots, unimpressed by the worst Gi's surface has to offer.

In true Nemo fashion, the Captain came very close to striking out across the sands of Gi in nothing but bathrobe and flipflops. Disregarding Moira's advise to spray down too many times, it was ultimately Odisseus, with fangs bared, that actually saw the sealant applied.

The necessary weatherproofing of Odisseus proved almost unbearable for the long-suffering Ortok. Not designed for furry sentients, Odisseus was forced to massage three liberal coats of DermEndure into his shaggy pelt. When it subsequently dried in the planet's arid atmosphere, the hair clotted and turned an unbecoming beige color. Add the sand constantly bristling his coat and poor Odisseus became a mangy, albino Ortok, still accursedly hot under the sun's swelter.

As the afternoon wore on, however, the ground began steadily to rise and their road took them twistingly into the glassy foothills. Here, scintillant cliffs rose sheerly on either side of the cacti's path, glittering radiant oranges, yellows and pinks as Gi's sun sank further beneath the horizon. Here, the shade is plentiful, the winds twice as fierce and the road all the more arduous. For the past hour, they'd wound through narrow glassrock canyons that carve deeper and deeper into a looming range of glittering mountaintops. Somewhere among these gorges, Moira assumes, the nursery must be nestled.

She's proved correct when, at the head of the column, the towering silhouette of Foreplanter comes to an abrupt stop. One by one, the long chain of its followers come to slow stops as well. Following suit, Moira and Nemo scowl, exchange glances and gawp stupidly around at the surrounding Gitter.

"So," Nemo pants, throwing his hands out wide. "We there yet or...?"

{Bring forth the Vesselborn}, comes Foreplanter's decree from the head of the column, {that they might vanguard our procession into the nursery}.

"Hey," the woozy Moira notices with an uncharacteristically friendly smile. "How nice of them."

With much effort, Moira and Nemo drag their exhausted asses up to the head of the column. Standing to either side of Foreplanter, they gaze down at the fabled nursery they'd trudged across half the planet to find.

All three stand at the mouth of a box canyon. Great curving walls of crystalline glassrock swoop away and upward to a narrow opening at the top. Approximately a mottible in diameter, the canyon is hedged by towering mountain peaks that catch the last rays of the setting sun on their hyaline sides. Especially now that it's slung so low in the west, precious little sunlight leaks down into the canyon, lending the place a surprising chill, when compared to the scorching heat of an hour past.

It's a gentle slope of spilled sand to the canyon floor and Moira's thankful there's no need to scramble down the razor-sharp glassrock cliffs. At a motion from Foreplanter, Nemo starts to shuffle forward, Moira falling into step. Behind them, the gigantic cactus is careful that none of its impressive strides ever passes those of its Vesselborn guests.

The path they descend hugs the glassrock wall and, before it reaches the ground, Moira is granted a better chance to examine the canyon's contents. All across the canyon floor are littered what Moira first erroneously assumes to be more unusual glassrock formations.

It takes Moira another few steps to discover that they're bones.

In graceful arcs that could only denote spines, skulls and ribcages, the bleached bones of gargantuan beasts are scattered across the floor of the canyon. There's easily more than one hundred, most buried or embedded deep in the sand, their true shapes and sized obscured. From what Moira can see, she's lead to believe these were once true behemoths, large enough to dwarf the tallest cacti.

Something about the serpentine structure of their skeletons suggests great undersea leviathans to Moira. She wonders what once these lands might have looked like, in the primordial age before the Consortium came to Gi.

The bones are scattered across the box canyon in odd patterns that look utterly random. The closer and closer she comes to the boneyard, though, Moira becomes convinced of an alien logic behind the arrangement. Flat fronds are stretched across the space wherever two larger bones come together, creating awnings, tents and the occasional improvised roof. So too does Moira note, as she alights upon the canyon floor, nearly all the bones bear decoration, whether obscure carvings or tribal fetishes or swirling patterns of dye.

Within this graveyard of ancient monsters, the Gitter of the Skyscratch grove have constructed their nursery.

As the warband arrives, gangly shapes start to emerge from the shadows of the structures, glassrock weapons at the ready. Moira recognizes them immediately as Gitter – spines, green skin, faceless trunks – but they're a far cry from the warband that comes trooping on her heels. For one, they're far shorter, standing only a foot taller than the average humanoid. For another, they bear no barbaric garb – the thongs, trophies and medallions – the marauders bear. Though armed, these smaller cacti carry simpler weapons like knives, machetes and the odd spear or polearm.

A caste system is Moira's best guess or perhaps breeding stock. Unable to suss the cultural idiosyncrasies of plant-men, Moira's woozy brain isn't quite in the mood for xenoanthropology.

Initially, even with Foreplanter's escort, the batch of homebody Gitter stare suspiciously at the offworlders, their weapons brandished. The further into the village they venture, however, one by one, each of the smaller Gitter drop to their knees in veneration.

To actually call this place a village feels somehow wrong to Moira. The dwellings, such as they are, don't seem particularly habitable, especially by the towering cacti. Beneath the shaded awnings, all Moira can see are rows of crops, squat greenish bulbs that're squeezed a dozen and more beneath each scrap of shelter.

The smaller cacti are extremely protective of these plants, however, hovering before each with weapons at the ready. It's only when she first spots the stubby spines that bristle from the green flesh of each bulb that Moira puts the pieces together.

They'd invested two years into reaching this moment. They'd spent millions of credits to arrange this meeting. They'd endured a litany of cruel and unusual hardships, from one end of the galaxy to the other, to place the three of them here – standing on this planet, staring at this fat little plant.

A Gitter sapling sits at Moira's feet. What's more, it's surrounded by hundreds of its brothers and sisters.

### CHAPTER 9

Odisseus is pretty fucking hammered. Had he been thinking clearly, he probably would have seen this coming. All the clues were right there inside his nose.

Those spores that the Gitter use to communicate with reek of raw spice, so strong the smell was unrecognizable to his companions. It follows, then, that the spores, like the spice and the peach, were naturally intoxicating, even from only a whiff. Give them six hours of uninterrupted exposure to those spores and it was no wonder the Lover's crew, each in their own way, were drunk off their bloomholes.

Again, had Odisseus been thinking clearly, his advanced sense of smell ought to have caught this early. It should be noted, however, that the Ortok spent three of the past six hours passed out from heat exhaustion.

According to his crewmates, Odisseus had the charity of Stalkchopper and the Gitter's medicinal arts to thank for saving his life. Soon as they'd returned to the nursery, even more tinctures and poultices were brought to bear on the exhausted Ortok. His wits returned, Odisseus can't necessarily say he feels better, considering how drunk he's become, but now he's conscious, at least.

"Define slavery," Nemo demands as he passes behind the Ortok for the umpteenth time.

"This." Odisseus sweeps a claw across everything that's arrayed before him. "This is what I would define as slavery."

His back still turned, Nemo stops pacing. "You're gonna have to be more specific."

"Here," volunteers Moira. She reaches for the Attaché where it's been forgotten, amid peach rinds and empty nutshells.

"This," Odisseus tries again, repeating his previous gesture. "Is what I mean. This is the slavery part."

Nemo spins around, aghast. "We're not fucking enslaving them. Are you fucking kidding me?" He throws both hands out towards the crowd so fast, he nearly loses his balance. "Look how happy they are!"

"No, no, that's not what I mean." Odisseus shakes his head vigorously and the whole world sloshes back and forth. "I'm not explaining this great."

Three fat moons paint the scene in ghostly green. The soothsayer, a runty and deformed cactus specimen plastered in a layer of sacred soil, twists and contorts in the ecstasy of its storytelling. The entire Skyscratch grove makes a captive audience, swaying subconsciously in time with their mystic's erratic movements.

Odisseus is uncertain whether the seedlings, the spiny little spheres with their single unopened bulbs, should be counted as audience members as well. That was sorta the gist of this latest debate between the two saltbrothers.

As guests of honor, the three Vesselborn are seated on high, in a position of mastership and dominion over the entire grove and their mortal ritual below. Boulders, anointed with dyes, make for their thrones. The feast table, an expanse of unvarnished wood, has reportedly been fashioned from the "flesh of the mighty tuskwood" and Odisseus can only envision another ferocious plant-beast, slain for its meat.

The celebratory feast heaped before them is a smorgasbord of alien nuts, roots, seeds, leaves and fruit, the Gitterpeach most notable among them. It's a kingly feast indeed, particularly compared to the dry desert rations Moira packed for them.

{Every valley a sea}, describes the soothsayer with great sweeping gestures of its limbs. {Every flatland a forest}.

"The state of being a slave," reads Moira, her face lit by the Attaché's screen.

"Like, for them, I'm saying." Odisseus points a wobbly claw towards the nearest patch of seedlings. "The saplings. For them. That's the slavery part."

Nemo blinks. "They're trees."

"They're smart trees," Odisseus answers and starts to smack his lips. "They can talk. You heard them."

"They don't talk," Nemo argues, as he paces past again. "They stink."

"The practice or system of owning slaves."

"Yeah," Odisseus continues, his lips still smacking, "but that's how they talk. By stinking. And they talk, so that means they'd be slaves if we kidnap one." Odisseus scowls, somehow unable to stop his lips from smacking. "Does any of this make sense to you?"

"Not really, no," Nemo admits, as he spins back around.

{In those days}, the soothsayer starts to recall, the ceremony in full swing down below, {ever were the floodgates open and the Starsea would rain down its waters, morning and night, to wet the earth and feed the people}. To compliment this image, it tosses several handfuls of sapphire dye into the air and stands, in quivering awe, beneath the falling powder.

"Involuntary subjugation to another or others."

Odisseus snaps one claw and points vigorously at Moira. "That's the one." All this accomplishes is deepening Nemo's scowl and widening Moira's smile. "Okay, first," Odisseus elaborates, "you gotta imagine we get outta here alive. And with the tree. And sell to Gella."

"Okay, yeah, sure, yeah, okay, granted," Nemo answers in a quick rush.

Odisseus twists to follow him as he trudges past. "That's when it's slavery. The selling part. We take a tree who thinks and we sell it for money to somebody else and then it's their property forever. It's the selling part and the property part that make it slavery."

"That's what makes it slavery, he's saying," Moira confirms, looking up from the glow of the Attaché.

"But, like," argues Nemo, pointing at that same Attaché, "that's not on there." With sudden purpose, he takes three strides to Moira's side and nearly loses his balance again in the process. "Like," he snatches the Attaché from Moira and starts to thumb through its contents, "nowhere on here does it say anything about slavery or talking trees or what to do when the planet's already occupado."

"That's certainly true, yeah," Odisseus is forced to agree.

{Then came the sickness}, the soothsayer reminds the crowd somberly, the turning point in their little pageant.

"So, all I'm doing," Nemo attests, "is sticking to the plan." A little too late, he throws his hands up in a gesture of innocence. "The plan. Two-Bit's plan. The plan of Two-Bit. The plan Two-Bit died planning."

"He did die," Moira reminds Odisseus knowingly.

"And what I'm saying is," Odisseus adds, planting a paw on his chest, "is that plan involves slavery now. Because of recent events and shit that's come to light."

"But that's like," Nemo starts to whine, "fucking the worst case. It doesn't have to be, I mean, it probably isn't actual slavery, if they're like, really blooming jazzed to go, right?"

Odisseus, still smacking those lips, starts to shake his hairy head. "I don't thi–"

An idea strikes Nemo so tangily that he almost loses his balance again. He whirls around, hands wide open like a gunfighter. "Watch this shit."

Nemo thrusts his hand into his holster and comes up with his clumsy firearm, looking for all the world like he does when he's about to murder someone in cold blood and on shaky pretenses. Instead, he thrusts the pistol high into the air and fires three explosive shots, lighting the whole canyon with flashes of bright blue.

The ceremony below grinds to an immediate halt. All the cacti stand utterly motionless at this sudden display of violence from their guest of honor.

"Hear ye, hear ye, ya pricks!" The Captain's voice echoes weirdly off the curving glassrock walls and the littered bones of the Gitter nursery. "I, the immortal Vesselborn and haver of the biggest balls, decree that, from this day forth, I am to be referred to only as 'Badass Supreme'. It is my right and true name, given to me by, you know, Whomever With The Thing Up There." He is answered only by more silence, his own voice bouncing faintly off the canyon walls. "It shall be so!"

An immediate aromatic agreement comes wafting up to the tuskwood table. {As you wish}, vows the eager cactoid crowd and {We grow to serve} and {At your command, Badass Supreme}.

This seems even enough to convince Moira. "He makes a good point," she mentions offhandedly to Odisseus.

"They think we're gods, dude," explains Nemo. "Blooming gods. They're shitting themselves to do whatever I say." He gesticulates wildly with his pistol, in a manner some sober part of the Ortok's brain knows is very unsafe. "This part of the job couldn't be easier if it was sucking our dicks."

"Ew," grimaces Moira quietly.

"Easy?" Sure," Odisseus agrees, turning his attention back to the food. "Slavery? Definitely."

"The fuck, man," mutters Nemo, back on his perpetual pacing warpath. Odisseus spends the next few seconds rooting through nuts as the Captain gets his scatterbrained thoughts together. "You know what you are? You're a shit."

"I'm a what?"

"A shit." There's a new edge to Nemo's voice, something more sinister than the teasing tone they usually throw at one another during boarding actions and gunfights. "You're one of those big, nasty, ass-splattering shits that always seem to follow the Dysentery Basket, you know, the one from Tapeworm King on the Second Ring."

"Moons," remarks Moira longingly. "That sounds so good."

"Because why?" objects Odisseus. "Because this is obviously slavery and that's too blooming, what, inconvenient for you?"

{Sealed were the floodgates. Sickly and jaundiced grew the sky}, the soothsayer continues, a sorrowful note creeping into her scent. All the cacti turn downward, in a pantomime of wilting. {Much that was green and growing browned and fell dead}.

"Because everything, man," continues Nemo, spinning on his heel. "Because your blooming attitude, every moons-damned stage of this thing."

"My attitude?" scoffs Odisseus wetly. "Are you drunk?"

"Yes," Nemo answers instantly.

"Me too," Moira chimes in.

"It's all the whining, man," whines Nemo. "It's the fucking whining." He starts to count on each finger, starting with his pointer. "First, it's the molecular strip and how blooming difficult that's gonna be to acquire and then install–"

"It was blooming difficult!" barks Odisseus. "I don't recall you digging throu–"

"Then," Nemo continues, counting on his pointer finger again, "it's the remote batteries and the atmosphier and the internal damage to the Lover–"

The Ortok crosses his forearms pertly. "That's a completely justifi–"

"Next," Nemo continues, counting on his pointer finger a third time, "it's the blooming idents and how I'm suddenly a speciesist and how come Two-Bit couldn't magically pull ironshod Ortoki idents outta his bloo–"

Odisseus clenches his teeth. "I will admit–"

Nemo couldn't be further from caring. "Now, we're actually fucking here, we're past all the tough shit and these people," he thrusts a pointer finger across the crowd, "are jumping outta their green skin to trip over themselves to beat each to obeying my every fart. And guess what?" He throws his arms wide, his thesis achieved. "You're still. Blooming. Complaining."

"Well, technically," Moira makes the point to Nemo, "right now, you're complaining."

"How quickly we forget," Odisseus exclaims, tossing his paws in the air, "that I nearly died out there." He sweps a paw toward the canyon and the wasteland beyond. "Less than like, fucking an hour ago?"

"How the fuck could I?" snorts Nemo. "You won't shut your bleeding mouth about it."

Odisseus shrugs. "Well, it's kinda a big deal to me. My own death, I mean."

{So changed our planet}. This ceremony commences without a hint of movement, the cacti's stiff bodies intended to represent the planet's barrenness or their deity's suffering or something. {Bitter tears of crystal did God Beyond weep, so grieved and afflicted, that rained in brilliant showers onto the earth below}.

"You're like, addicted to missing the point." Nemo staggers through his rhythmic pacing routine. "Imagine for a second these guys are just regular, dumb-ass trees. What happens, then, when we crash and then, boom, we're here and we're wandering around in the desert and the driftcart's busted and you're like, 'I have heat stroke! Feel bad for me!' and then fall the fuck over?" He stares wide-eyed at the Ortok like the answer's staring him in the face. "You die, dude. You fucking die." He waves an indistinct hand towards the congregation below. "Stalkchopper and those assholes, they saved your life."

"I'm not the one who wants to enslave them!"

"Okay, yes, fine, whatever, moons, you caught me," snaps Nemo. "I confess – I wanna enslave one of them. Like, a baby one. The littlest, dumbest, babiest one." He pants a few haggard breaths into the following silence. "And get paid sixty-eight million credits to do so!"

"There," burps Odisseus, tasting all the innumerable Gitterpeaches a second time. "See? That's all I was ever saying, man. It'd be slavery, if we did it."

To no one's surprise, this still doesn't sit well with Nemo. "No, you know what?" he decides, stopping his pacing and lunging back towards the table. "Let me be clearer. I don't want that. Two-Bit Switch wants that. Two-Bit Switch died wanting that."

"He did die," comments Moira, seeming to realize this for the first time.

Odisseus is skeptical. "You don't know what Two-Bit Switch would've wanted to do."

"Oh, yes," Nemo nods viciously, "I do." With quick fingers, the Captain reaches out and snatches the Attaché again. "Two-Bit Switch," Nemo announces, clutching the device to his chest, "wanted us to pretend to be an asteroid, sneak down here, steal one of those fuckers," he thrusts the tablet in the vague direction of the ceremony, "escape and sell the thing to Gella Borsk. For, lemme repeat, sixty-blooming-eight-blooming-million-blooming-credits."

In a sudden explosion of violence, Nemo throttles the Attaché back and forth with murderous enthusiasm. "Two-Bit was pretty fucking specific about what he wanted!"

{In place of lifegiving water}, explains the mournful soothsayer, {all God Beyond had strength to send were messengers}. With a creaking gesture, the soothsayer stretches a limb towards the tuskwood table, dust and dye falling from its limbs. {The noble Vesselborn, sailors upon the Starsea, who revealed onto our parched people a truth dire and terrible}.

Odisseus looks away from Nemo's mounting madness and returns his attention to the spread of fruit and nuts all across the table. He shuffles his paw listlessly through them, their hard shells clacking against the tuskwood. "Can you not see that circumstances have changed? Not even, like, a little?"

"Can you hear yourself?" Nemo spits back, tossing the Attaché dismissively onto the table, to crash amid the fruits and figs. He stands there, staring and fuming at his saltbrother, until an idea occurs to him. "Do you know who you fucking sound like?"

"Don't."

"You do," Nemo swears, nodding fiercely. "You know exactly who you sound like."

"Who?" Moira is curious to know.

"Don't you dare," Odisseus growls between gritted fangs.

Nemo throws his hands wide in a gesture of helpless exasperation. "You sound like fucking Abraham, man."

"Oh," Moira realizes.

Before he quite understands what he's doing, Odisseus is on his feet, catapulted off the boulder he was sitting on. He's vaguely aware, as he swaggers up to Nemo, that the spores and the heat exhaustion and the intoxication are bringing on this unusually aggressive behavior. Try as he might to rationalize this, however, thinking back on all the hardships he's endured at Nemo's behest doesn't exactly calm him down much.

Odisseus towers over his saltbrother, swaying drunkenly on his feet. "Do I now?"

{The sickness}, whispers the soothsayer, {is of our own making}. All the Gitter arranged behind the soothsayer begin a bloody pantomime, playing at violence and destruction in great mocking strokes. {By our vice and rapine and bloodletting was God Beyond, a witness through the floodgates, made so ill}.

Nemo shows a glimmer of sense here and shrinks a step from the looming Ortok. "You heard me."

"Actually," considers Odisseus flatly, "I must not have because I think I just heard you compare me to that Grimalti shitheap."

"I'm pretty sure you did," Moira regrets to inform Nemo.

"Why," snarls the Galactic Menace, "is there some appreciable difference between the two of you that I'm missing?" He's all too aware how much his tone and his expression will rile Odisseus up.

Much as he knows his tail's being yanked, the Ortok cannot help the righteous rage that swells and surges within him. It's entirely possible that these emotions have been conjured by the intoxicating Gitter spores he's been huffing all evening, but he intends to act on them anyway.

"Gee," ponders the Ortok, "lemme think of some. Have I spent the past two years as a drunken sot, so far gone on booze and fucking melancholy I can't hardly puke straight?"

"I mean," interrupts a quiet Moira, "besides, like, right now?"

By now, both Nemo and Odisseus are experts at ignoring drunken Moira. "What about singing my incessant sea shanties, day in and day out, all doom this and gloom that?"

"So, obviously–" Nemo starts to pontificate, with big, dramatic gestures but Odisseus doesn't give him the space to continue.

"Have I so derelicted my duty," Odisseus asks the heavens, unintentionally mimicking the Captain's gestures, "that, in the midst of yet another alcoholic stupor, I actually tried to sa–"

{Only by our sacrifice can God Beyond be cured of this malady}. With as elegant a gesture as a seven-armed cactus can make, the soothsayer reaches a limb around to pluck something that hangs from an elbow joint. {In these scorched lands, water is now our treasure most cherished}.

"Okay," Nemo consents, in a rare display of understanding. "Fair enough." Before Odisseus can react to this unprecedented turn of events, however, the Captain thrusts a new finger in the Ortok's face. "Can I tell you what you have done, then?"

Odisseus makes a beckoning gesture. "Can I stop you?"

"Second guessed my ass," Nemo spits, barely waiting for the Ortok's answer. "All day blooming long. I can't show my face on Ostara or Chandani or wherever because that'll make the bounty hunters come leaping outta passing ships to get me. I can't smoke one single cigar in the mess hall because, guess what, that'll short the atmosphier's filtration matrix and then we'll all die gagging. I can't take five steps outside my own spaceship without lathering up ten coats of DermEndure–"

"Because I almost died out there and I–"

"You don't seem to understand that it ain't me calling the shots here." He jabs his finger back toward the tuskwood table and the tablet that's resting there. "You gotta problem with the plan, there's a pile of ashes in some Trijan gutter you can go take it up with."

"Bloom me out," growls Odisseus, resisting the urge to strangle with all his might. Instead, he follows Nemo's gesture, pointing a paw towards the deactivated Attaché. "It's not some holy text, Nemo, for fuck's sake. Just because–"

"It is too!" Nemo suddenly screams. That something, that ravenous intensity flares to life behind the haze of drunkenness. All the features of his face are twitching, his whole body trembles with outrage and those eyes go dangerously wide. Confronted with this changed Captain, Odisseus flinches, shuffles back a step and, thanks to his boozy equilibrium, nearly loses his balance.

All across the nursery, Skyscratch cacti snap free their own Gitterpeaches and thrust them up toward the tuskwood table, toward the uncaring Vesselborn. {To you, venerable Vesselborn}, addresses the soothsayer, {do we commend our cherished water. By our hardship, may God Beyond be nurtured back to health and know of our sorrow, our shame}.

"I don't know," Nemo adds huskily, looking around at their surroundings and somehow the entire caper along with them. "Maybe Abraham was right," he concludes with mock defeat, only irking Odisseus all the more. "Maybe you oughta just fuck off to someplace lame, with your moonshine and your shanties and shit, like he fucking did."

"I will never fuck off." The words come roaring out of Odisseus before he can restrain them. "Are you too thick the fuck to understand that? We made a bond in salt, you ungrateful motherbloomer, in case you've somehow forgotten. That's a bond that actually means something to me, one I will die before I break."

The next thing he knows, Odisseus is staggering forward, uncertain how much is drunkenness, how much is vulnerability. "You're the one who fucked off, thirteen fucking years ago, and I'm the one who came sniffing after you! That's the way this works! If anyone can reasonably be expected to do the fucking off, between the two of us, it's gonna be–"

{A spy! A spy! A spy in our midst!}

A great and silent uproar arises from the nursery. A cocktail of alarmed, outraged and frightened pheromones reaches the noses of the Lover's crew and shocks them completely out of their argument. The pageant below is also interrupted, the soothsayer and all its fellow performers shoved from the center of the canyon. The incomers, a squad of the shorter Gitter, come parading into view. At their head marches Stalkchopper, dropping immediately to its knees before the Vesselborn.

{Foreplanter, most honored Vesselborn, we have apprehended a Splitspine scout, skulking around our outer pickets}. Another wave of shocked spores rolls across the canyon. {It is my belief this one may not have acted alone and may have collaborators, absconding even now into the countryside}.

{Vile Splitspine weeds!} comes Foreplanter's scent. {Too long have they coveted our wealth and our might}.

{It is my fear}, continues Stalkchopper, {that some foul treachery may be afoot, perhaps even now. I humbly beg the wisdom of my betters on how best to proceed}.

{What says Badass Supreme?} wonders Foreplanter.

There's a sizable pause here, the length of time it takes Nemo to realize that he's being addressed. He spins suddenly to look down at the gathering, like he's been caught at mischief. "Hm? Oh, well, yeah, sure, okay. Bring forth that motherfucker!"

{It stands before you}, Stalkchopper answers after a moment and, after another moment, nudges one of the random adjacent cacti, one Odisseus mistook for a simple Secondseed.

In the dim light, it's nearly impossible not to make that mistake. With no facial features, one Gitter cactus is pretty much indistinguishable from another, with only height, harness and number of arms to separate them. This intruder stands a "head and shoulders" shorter than Stalkchopper, wears a simplistic harness and carries no weapons. Otherwise, it's perfectly identical to the hundred other cactus-men encircling them.

Nemo recovers from his blunder with divine grace. "Oh. Sure. Right." He shuffles back towards his seat, all fight stolen from him, and waves dismissively at Foreplanter. "Do your thing, man."

Still scowling at Nemo, Odisseus also returns to his seat, as Foreplanter approaches the captive. {What brings a lowly scrub of the Splitspine to the sovereign territory of the Skyscratch?}

The captive doesn't seem to acknowledge Foreplanter at all. Instead, it drops to its spiny knees and makes a grandiose gesture towards the great tuskwood table. {May Badass Supreme, most lordly of Vesselborn, know–}

With a blur of motion, one of Stalkchopper's many blades severs one of the kneeling captive's unsuspecting limbs. With a wet crunching sound, it lands in the sand, a whitish liquid gushing from the open wound. The olfactory equivalent of a scream – pins-and-needles inside the Ortok's nose – fills the canyon.

{Thou shall not spore at the Vesselborn, infidel!} roars Stalkchopper. {They shall not bear thine scent–}

{Would the Skyscratch, in their arrogance, claim sole mastership over God Beyond's messengers?} spews back the captive, with a surprising amount of grit for one so recently dismembered. {More groves than one wander the wastes. Do they too not deserve heavenly favor? I am come bearing a message from the Foreplanter of our gro–}

{What message}, scoffs the distant spores of Firstseed Flamescar, {could the honorless chaff of the Splitspine have for the mighty Skyscratch?}

{The message is not for thee nor thy tyrannical ilk}, hisses the captive. It makes another gesture upward and toward the tuskwood. {I bear a message for the Vesselborn}.

At that moment, Nemo's pointer finger is halfway up his nose.

{Thou were warned}, threatens Stalkchopper, raising its weapon, {about sporing nonsense to thine betters}.

{Speak thy message, then}, commands Foreplanter, {and have done. Do not trouble the Vesselborn overlong with thine mitherings}.

After a moment of hesitation, the captive capitulates. {When rumor reached our grove that the Vesselborn had heaped another blessing upon the Skyscratch, our Foreplanter sent me to ascertain the truth. Were I to discover the presence of God Beyond's messengers, I was bid to ask, ever so humbly, why they have forsaken those of the Splitspine grove? Many moons have come and gone with no word or sign from above. Our fruits grow atrophied and overripe. I beg you, enlightened Badass Supreme}, the desperate captive implores, {have we displeased God Beyond somehow?}

There is silence in the grove a moment, a stray breeze wiping the scene clear and allowing Firstseed Flamescar the space to ask its question.

{What says the Vesselborn?}

This time, Nemo's actually paying attention. His thumb removed from his nose, he plants both hands on the table top and turns his head ever so slightly, just enough to smile nefariously at both Moira and Odisseus to his either side.

That's all the warning Nemo gives before he leaps to his feet. Like a mad prophet, he spreads his hands wide, the sleeves of his desert-stained bathrobe flapping open. "Displeased?" he howls, his voice filling the canyon. "Why, yes! The Skidstain grove has displeased the all-powerful Whoever Up There!" He follows this declaration with a twisting point up towards the darkened sky and its three luminous moons.

Anxiety and apprehension disperses through the assembled cacti. Overcome with passion, the Galactic Menace scrambles clumsily atop the tuskwood table and, once he's mounted, he's able to scream down at his congregation from an even higher vantage.

"Too long have they spurned the grace and majesty of we, the handsome Vesselborn!" He prowls back and forth before the cactoid host, in much the same manner that he might have before a Pirateton crowd years earlier. "Too long have they been, like, way shorter than you taller guys!" he accuses, throwing a finger toward Foreplanter and nearly losing his balance in the process, a hardshelled nut rolling away beneath his foot.

Somehow, this laughable rhetoric seems to work wonders on the watching Skyscratch. The cacti below are visibly thrumming with fervor. Their wordless spores, reeking of genocidal rage, come pouring into the Ortok's nose. In his signature way, Nemo's stumbled into a deep-seeded and ethnically-charged schism between these otherwise indistinguishable cactus tribes.

"This," Nemo barks, tossing his hands wide in a glorious spreadeagle, "is the divine mission of the Vesselborn." He throws back his head and stares straight into the inky black sky, made starless by the climatic field that encircles the planet. "That Dude Upstairs has sent us to punish these blasphemers for their unspeakable crimes and, what's more," the Captain lurches suddenly forward, sweeping a finger across the horde, "to capture from them the ultimate sacrifice."

He holds up that single finger and, though his back is turned, Odisseus knows precisely which smile his saltbrother's wearing. "One sapling. The price they must pay for all the gnarly shit they've been up to."

Demented as his methods may be, Odisseus sees the cunning in Nemo's plan. How much easier will the Skyscratch find capturing the child of an enemy than to surrendering one of their own offspring?

However, it's confusion, rather than bloodthirsty enthusiasm, that follows Nemo's declaration. Something about Badass Supreme's decree doesn't quite translate for the Gitter. The Captain, sensing this, chooses not to linger on this point.

"In exchange for our sacred water," Badass Supreme offers, making his final play, "who among you giant cactus assholes will join the invincible Vessleborn in glorious battle against these infidels?"

The reaction of the crowd is a feast for the senses both frightening and bizarre. The cheering cactus crowd explodes into motion – throwing weapons high into the air, clanging blades against blades, stamping spear hafts against the ground. At the same time, they themselves are eerily silent, not a single voice raised in agreement or anger. It's the tide of spores that most concerns Odisseus, washing over him with bloodlust and bravura and crusading fire.

{To arms!} Foreplanter cries, ordering his warriors about. {To arms! We march this very hour!} The applause comes from Moira, also wrapped up in the crowd's enthusiasm.

The makings of zealous tribal war as a tableau behind him, Nemo spins around, considers his companions and brushes both imaginary and actual dust from his hands. "Problem solved, then," he announces and, in the process of hopping down from atop the tuskwood table, nearly loses his balance.

Moira rounds the corner of the environtent and discovers him puking his guts out.

He even pukes like an idiot, she's unsurprised to find. He's not standing, doubled over, and allowing the vomit to fall away from his body. Instead, he simply squats and leans, hands clutching his stomach and blue slime drippling down his chin. To make matters still worse, it gets caught in his beard, dying the strip of scraggly hair between his mouth and his chin a shade of sickening sapphire.

All he's eaten today – trail rations and succulent fruits – makes this an especially unpleasant sight. What's so bizarre is that, even without any actual alcohol in his system, the spores still inspire the same climax that a drunken bender might have – an unbecoming barf in the bushes.

To look at him, Moira realizes that, sooner or later, the same fate awaits her too.

For a moment, she forgets the entire reason she sought him out in the first place. As she watches him heave and retch, his back partially turned, Moira discovers that Lefty has somehow appeared in her hand – pointed at the back of Nemo's unsuspecting head.

There were no witnesses. One pistol shot would never be heard over the clamor of the crowd. She can feel the weight of the vial she'd use in her pocket. An instantly sober Moira realizes how painlessly she could end the reign of the Galactic Menace and claim his bounty.

Three-quarters of an hour ago, the Captain sought refuge behind the three environtents they'd pitched on the nursery's outskirts, citing a sudden bout of nausea. Three identical domes of inflated nyloplast, the environtents were the pirates' intended shelter, purchased at Moira's insistence, for their trek across Gi's inhospitable terrain. After a long night of simulated drinking, Moira would normally have retired long ago to the climate-controlled haven of her private environtent.

Instead, Nemo sought to lead the Skyscratch on some ginned-up genocide against their mortal enemies, the Splitspine, this very night. Rather than laying her head down to rest, Moira would soon be marching off to war.

The preparations for war continue at a dull roar behind her, among the nursery's bones and awnings. Moira hears the sharpening of blades of glass, the creak and rattle of leather harnesses and the muted thunder of war drums.

Above all, Moira smells them; the rage, the anxiety, every wordless emotion a pack of armed plants might experience before they march off to kill another pack of armed plants. All this, Moira senses dimly, like the smells of someone cooking an aromatic meal several rooms away.

For an hour, the Skyscratch made ready their war party and, for three-quarters of that hour, Badass Supreme's been absent, disappeared behind the envirotents. It fell to Moira to undertake the sacred duty of fetching forth the Skyscratch's divine avenger, that he might lead his glorious host to victory, from where he squats puking.

Here, in the shadow of the environtents, no one would possibly chance upon them. Here, she could commit her quiet mutiny unmolested.

Her pistol unerringly steady in her hand, Moira flashes on the litany of indignities and offenses she's suffered at Nemo's hand. She recalls another shipwreck, years earlier, when his lunacy saw the Lover's underturret – and undergunner along with – crushed to a pulp beneath the freighter's weight. She recalls another vomiting of his, years earlier, when he'd ruined her only skirt and her only moment of vulnerability to barf all over her lap.

She recalls another Menace she's stolen upon, years earlier, with pistol outstretched and no witnesses to be found. A different pistol, she acknowledges, and a different Menace.

Pure vengeance nearly clenches her fist and pulls the trigger.

Soon as Moira thinks on the fall of the house of Ott, however, reality comes slamming back to her. Of course she can't kill and claim Nemo's bounty; it dawns on her sober mind how phenomenally stupid a moment this would be to strike.

The evidence would stack hilariously high against her. Were Nemo found dead, shot through the brain, what other culprit could possibly be named – here, in this barbaric wasteland?

Of the four firearms on the planet, two were in her possession. There is nowhere she could secret a vial of blood that the Ortok's questing nose wouldn't eventually sniff out. Chief among the impossibilities, of course, is that Moira is currently trapped on this remote and hostile world, with Nemo the only pilot of sufficient skill who could free her.

Not to mention the Ortok, insane with grief and murderous rage, nor the entire tribe's worth of fanatical barbarians, that she, killer of god and saltbrother, would have to face.

At the end of the day, this is a suicidally stupid window, however opportune, for Moira to make her show-stopping ploy. Other, less dangerous opportunities would arise, she assures the calculating part of her brain. She should bide her time, as always, and not reveal her position or her intentions so hastily.

With a certain subconscious reluctance, Lefty returns to its sheath.

Meanwhile, Nemo's nearly at the end of his puking, now simply groaning and spitting onto the sand. The moment ruined, Moira fills with a sudden, unreasonable impatience for all his posturing and his buhoxshit. She shifts her weight and clears her throat significantly – anything to get his attention and end this errand, that she might go brood somewhere in peace.

"Everybody's," she ends up announcing flatly, "pretty much ready." To this, all the Galactic Menace does is groan a little more. "You might wanna get out there or else Foreplanter's liable to leave you behind."

"Yeah," is all Nemo manages. "Yeah. Okay. Gimme–"

Moira slaps both thighs with empty palms. "Just so you know."

Her message delivered, Moira stalks away and back into the nursery, the sand crunching beneath her boots and a thousand unuttered curses dying on her lips.

CHAPTER 10

Odisseus is worried this might be the one, the big kahuna, the granddaddy of them all.

For the past six distressing years, Odisseus has borne witness to a menagerie of Nemo's bad ideas. He went plunging into the bloodthirsty jungles of Baz, tangling with aboriginal tribes, native predators and Insurgent Company. He launched a pointless attack against the Supreme Sovereignty of Trija that saw his pirate fleet destroyed, his ambitions shattered and his friend disintegrated.

This one, though – inciting a race war between two unsuspecting factions of humongous cactoids – might be the most problematic, irresponsible and downright stupid of Nemo's sordid history of terrible, in every sense of the word, ideas.

After an entire journey's worth of worrying, Odisseus was honestly expecting the Splitspine nursery to be much more formidable than this. Granted, this is only the second Gitter nursery that Odisseus has ever seen and he's hardly a qualified expert on the matter. Somehow, in his mind, he'd imagined a redoubtable stronghold, something the Skyscratch would throw themselves against in droves, like waves crashing against the rocks.

He hadn't imagined a gigantic hole in the ground, covered by a big leafy tarp.

There's no shaded mountain canyon for the Splitspine. Exiled to the featureless wasteland, the beleaguered grove was forced to convert the only landmark for mottibles around into a very makeshift shelter for their saplings.

A great sinkhole interrupts the sun-scorched landscape with its jagged, toothy rim. The Ortok's best guess would say this was maybe once a geyser, long ago dried and desiccated. High atop this, the Splitspine have stretched a canopy of plant matter, to offer more permanent shade to whatever's kept below. Only at dawn does any sunlight creep beneath that canopy, to color the nursery walls the royal purple of Gi's strange sunrise.

As soon as the warband's arrived at a safe distance to the enemy camp, Odisseus sends Moira on a scouting mission around the nursery's perimeter. She doesn't even bother attempting to sneak, as she departs on her reconnoiter of the sinkhole, what with zero cover in the unbroken landscape. The wasteland in every direction is painstakingly flat, not even a shard of glassrock here or there to provide a sliver of protection from sun or sentries.

Odisseus stands a healthy distance from both the nursery and the Skyscratch raiding party, the latter still stinking with violence and holy terror from Nemo's stirring speech. The entire warband, some hundred in number, has come in full force for this raid, armed with glassrock sword and spear and poleaxe.

The distant silhouette of Badass Supreme stands at the head of the host, limned in hazy purple sunrise against the utterly flat horizon. He cuts the perfect picture of the mad prophet – scraggly beard, tattered robe, liberal spattering of desert dust. From this distance, he looks even more manic, conducting a full-voiced and one-sided argument with a gargantuan cactus, albeit one dressed like a barbarian chief.

The whole while Moira is scouting Odisseus is fidgeting, pawing idly at the Attaché and fretting idly. The entire ride across the benighted plains of Gi, atop the litter Nemo demanded they construct for his use, Odisseus was quite vocal about his objections to this particular plan. Here, presented with an actual tribe of thinking, breathing sentients, about to be slaughtered on such a dodgy pretext, his anxiety's at a fever pitch. Sobered much quicker than his companions by all this worry, he's constantly gazing about the surrounding area, like he expects to find a convenient escape route.

He'll know the full scale of the calamity soon as Moira returns but, from where he stands, Odisseus is able to determine the only most basic data about the nursery, its fortifications and its defenders.

Stationed along the sinkhole's perimeter are cactoid figures, inarguably sentries, that, even from this distance, stand much shorter than the towering Skyscratch marauders. These, Odisseus must assume, are Splitspine Secondseeds, only ten feet tall to the Firstseed's fifteen.

More noteworthy to the invading Skyscratch are the small crowd of Splitspine Firstseeds, armed and harnessed, standing arrayed around the northeast edge of the nursery. Standing at a remove, Odisseus can't quite get an exact figure but he knows they're drastically fewer than the number of marauders the Skyscratch brought. All the same, he expects the Splitspine warriors to fight tooth and nail to defend their homes against an incursion on such shaky moral ground.

The sheer numbers, however, tell Odisseus this is liable to be a Skyscratch victory and, what's more, a Splitspine bloodbath, a fact that makes him all the more uncomfortable with this plan.

Her intelligence gathered, Moira comes trooping back his direction. She's striding as straight as she can, attempting to keep her cool, but Odisseus can tell by her uneven gait that all she wants to do right now is fall down and puke everywhere.

"Looks pretty standard," she calls, her voice carrying perfectly over the flat terrain. "One of Two-Bit's, um, hell-and-horseshoes."

"Yeah?" Odisseus grunts, still glancing anxiously past her at the nursery and its defenses.

Moira scowls the moment the words leave her mouth. "That doesn't sound right. Hell-and-horseshoes."

"How many?" presses Odisseus, not overly concerned with the specific nomenclature Two-Bit Switch, were he here, would have used to describe the situation.

"Pretty sure," Moira reflects, "there was a 'horseshoes' in there somewhere."

"Moira. Moira." Odisseus starts snapping his claws – a harsh, clicking sound – an inch from Moira's contemplative face. "How many guards?" he asks again, very deliberately.

"Some. Many." Moira answers automatically and scrunches up her face, attempting to make math behave in her head. "A number." When this somehow fails to mollify Odisseus, she starts waving frustrated gestures in summarization. "There's dudes spaced out like, all around the sides and there's a buncha dudes," she flaps her hand towards the Firstseeds, "all up there in the front. The dudes around the side are smaller dudes, the dudes in the front are bigger dudes." Her report complete, she makes a small bowing gesture, offering up all the information one could reasonably gather from the situation.

"Mission accomplished," congratulates Odisseus flatly. "Good work, Moira."

Taking the compliment genuinely, Moira plants her hands on her hips and gazes backward at the crater behind her, like an optimistic contractor surveying a construction site. "Can totally sneak around the side, though, while all the hullabaloo's going on up here."

"You think?"

"Pssh. Cake."

"Okay," Odisseus tentatively agrees, recalling Moira's drunken competency in the past. "So, Nemo fires up the Gitter, they go charging in, make a big-ass distraction–"

"A hell-and-horseshoes," offers Moira, looking immediately displeased the moment she says this.

"What're you doing during all this?" quizzes Odisseus.

"Keep my distance," recites Moira robotically, "find an opening, climb down there, grab the goods, go." She snaps her finger as something strikes her. "You got the thing?"

"How hilarious would that be?" he ventures, fetching the item from where it's looped on his toolbelt. "If I forgot it in my tent? Or worse, back on the ship?"

In his paw, Odisseus clutches an uninspiring gray disc. Taking it from his grip, Moira spends a moment examining the disc, running her fingers along its three concentric grooves, each one smaller than the last, that shrink towards its center. "What're you doing during all this?" she asks suddenly.

Odisseus shrugs. "Keeping Nemo alive, I thought. You know he's gonna try his damndest to thrust himself into the thick of things."

"Good ol' Nemo," remarks Moira fondly, earning her the strangest of looks from Odisseus.

"So," he continues after a moment, "you now have the thing, you and the thing climb back out, meet up with us somehow and then what?" He raises his paws in a mock shrug. "Wait to see who wins?" he proposes, his pitch rising with his uncertainty.

"I mean, at that point," Moira starts to theorize, full of sage wisdom, "we've already got the thing, right?" She thumbs over her shoulder, away from the nursery and into the open desert. "Head back to the ship."

Odisseus is skeptical when he follows her point. "Ship's that way?" As one, they both twist to gaze in that direction, as though they expect to see The Unconstant Lover parked patiently there.

What they see instead is an unflinching expanse of blank white sand, like an artist's untouched canvas, without a spec of terrain in sight. The mountains dim shadows back the way they'd come, Odisseus hadn't the foggiest where they, the ship or really anything else was. He did know they didn't have the time, the supplies or the sheer remaining sanity to go wandering off in some random direction across a hostile alien planet.

"Is this a terrible idea?" Moira proposes suddenly, as she spins back towards him. "Is this a terrible idea that's gonna get us all killed?"

"Oh, I think it is," Odisseus confirms with a few vigorous nods. "I think we might be looking at the worst one."

"Really?" Moira blows out an exasperated breath. "Did I actually endorse the worst of Nemo's terrible ideas that're gonna get us all killed?" Something in the Ortok's expression must convince her that she has. "I'm normally so good at spotting those."

"If you'll recall," Odisseus feels the need to remind her, "I spotted this coming fuc–"

There's quite suddenly a terrible commotion from somewhere behind the Ortok. Among the chaos, he hears rattling weapons, creaking leather and the stampeding of many, many rooty feet. When the wind changes, Odisseus catches a new wave of spores – rage, terror and bloodlust, all the ingredients for full-blown battle frenzy.

With his back still turned, Odisseus just closes his eyes in frustration. "Are they–"

"Oh, yeah," Moira, facing the right way, can confirm. "They're totally attacking."

"Nemo too?"

"Looks like." Moira scowls and cranes forward. "I can't see him too good. Kinda short, really, compared to everyone else over there."

The more Odisseus listens, the more he can hear the one humanoid amid all the clamor back there, hurling about imprecations and ditrogen bolts.

It is with a great reluctant sigh that Odisseus spins slowly around and lays eyes on the disaster unfurling behind him. Nemo's easy to find among the chaos, the Skyscratch berserkers long outpacing him on their mad dash towards the Splitspine nursery. At an incredible pace do the Gitter of the Skyscratch grove go racing across the sheer white sand. In response, the Splitspine forces move to receive them. More than a hundred naked glassrock blades are unsheathed to glisten in the morning light and soon, all souls upon that dry wasteland will be imperiled.

"I really should let him go fuck himself," Odisseus realizes heavily.

"Except...?" dangles Moira, a little uncertainly.

"Except he's my saltbrother and he's definitely gonna get chopped into very tiny pieces if he's allowed inside that thing." He points a claw towards the empty stretch of sand between both parties of cacti, soon to be their battlefield. "And he's our only ride."

"Yeah," Moira appreciates. "I was thinking about that earlier."

Odisseus yanks free his Wreckingball from his hip holster with another reluctant sigh. "Well," is the only farewell he gives Moira before he starts shuffling off towards the soon-to-be battleground and his likely evisceration.

Odisseus hustles towards the dust cloud and the cactoid hordes and the spot where they're most likely to meet in pitched battle. Up ahead, the Splitspine defenders decamp down the sinkhole's slope a few yards, extending a long row of bristling glassrock spears to better welcome the charging invaders with. The Skyscratch, meanwhile, show no sign of slowing or stopping and instead increase speed with a suicidal abandon that the Captain, Odisseus imagines, would heartily approve of.

The two sides clash when Odisseus is still approximately a hundred yard away. The lines of taller cacti smash violently into the thicket of glassrock spearheads arrayed for them. To the Ortok's amazement, this hardly seems to blunt the Skyscratch charge at all. Their front ranks fight on, unimpeded, with half a dozen spears thrust straight through their trunks and midsections.

The very next moment, everything in the Ortok's line of sight is swallowed in a cloud of white dust. Despite the stifling heat, Odisseus cannot help but imagine a blizzard has descended from nowhere to engulf the battle. Within moments, the Ortok's submerged fully into the dust cloud, forced to navigate the towering, twisting shadows and silhouettes that give bloody battle in every direction.

As stiff and cumbersome as they might appear, the Gitter are nothing but graceful in battle. They whirl like dervishes, simultaneously attacking and parrying with half-a-dozen weapons each. In the haze, though, Odisseus can only catch occasional glimpses, gargantuan blurs that wheel past, blades shimmering, with barely enough notice for the Ortok to shirk a trampling and duck beneath a stabbed weapon.

Determined to carve a path to Nemo, Odisseus simply blasts anything or anyone that comes too close with his Wreckingball's explosive shells. At that range, the Imperium-minuted shotgun is a devastating conclusion to anyone's life span. Against the Gitter, creatures composed of dry, flammable wood, its use practically constitutes a war crime. With great bellowing blasts, the Ortok blows away any potential opponents, cactoids one can only assume were Splitspine, their broad bodies bursting into vibrant red flames the moment they're struck.

What's weirdest about the battle is certainly the silence. The swords and spears and savagery, plus the occasional gunshot, are all present but there're no screams or shouts or gasps of agony. Instead, the whole place reeks, overpoweringly so, every individual's spores boiled together into a heady soup of fear and anger and panic.

That means that, among all the battle and butchery, Nemo's extremely easy to locate. The occasional bark of his firearm helps but it's really his shouting – curse-riddled strings of laughter and screams that could only originate in a truly psychotic mind – that gives him away.

He's trapped beneath the collapsed and writhing corpse of a mostly limbless cactus when Odisseus comes upon him. His firearm he fires sporadically and with great relish, a few shots coming dangerously close to the approaching Odisseus. The Ortok's Wreckingball makes short work of the carcass, exploding it into flaming smithereens and freeing his saltbrother from beneath.

"–in the mouth of a dead Qhemish hooker!" he concludes, the centerpiece to his latest improbable curse, and clambers to his feet.

"Can I ask," Odisseus posits, screaming at full voice amid all the noise of the battle, "what in the ever-fucking moons you were thinking? Starting all this?" He waves his paw and his shotgun about emphatically.

"I dunno," Nemo screams back, with a shrug, as he levels a pistol into the dust storm. "Got bored." He fires and something, hopefully a Splitspine cactus, bursts into a column of striking blue fire some distance into the dust cloud.

"And it would have killed you," Odisseus continues, turning to obliterate the flaming cactus as it lumbers towards Nemo, threatening death at the end of six or more sharp instruments, "to, I don't know, ask me first?"

Nemo's expression is almost hurt. "You were all the way over there."

"Coulda buzzed us," Moira offers helpfully.

At her comment, Odisseus nearly leaps out of his pelt. He spins indignantly around and discovers Moira standing there. She's a little dustier, perhaps, but otherwise, she's standing exactly where she had been when Odisseus left her, looking innocently up at him. "The bloom are you doing here?"

"I came with you," she mutters, scowling a little.

"Do you not remember? This is the big-ass distraction?" They're forced to part a moment as the flame-riddled, shotgun-blasted cactus comes to a crashing heap between them, splattering further apart as it hits the ground. "The hell-and-handbasket?"

"Bloom me out!" Moira exclaims with sudden remembrance. "The hell-and-handbasket! That's absolutely what he called it." She pauses for a moment to consider. "Dunno where I got 'horseshoes' from. Thank you!"

"Anytime," growls Odisseus. "Now, if you don't blooming mind–"

Moira nods, backing cheerfully up a few steps. "Oh, sure. Okay. Be right back!"

The next moment, she's spun completely around and gone skipping back into the skirmish, Righty and Lefty suddenly in her hands. A moment after that, she's disappeared completely in the dust and the destruction.

"Question," Nemo inquires once she's gone, pointing a finger down at the remains of the Gitter warrior smoldering between them. "Does that look at all like Foreplanter to you?"

Moira Quicksilver is on a secret mission.

Given a concrete task – retrieve the thing from the bottom of the place – she's finally able to quiet the drunken nonsense some. In her current state, Moira's spore-addled conscious mind is more liability than asset. To see the mission accomplished, she must turn off her thoughts and operate entirely on instinct. As long as she keeps her goal – retrieve the thing from the bottom of the place – foremost in her mind, Moira's training and her muscle memory would see the deed done.

Righty and Lefty cut a careful path through the battlefield, relying heavily on Moira's innate autopilot to steer a course between the gamboling shapes of fighting cacti. Unlike Odisseus and his Wreckingball, Moira may be a little more discerning in her shooting but she's no less effective. Her instincts at the wheel, she shoots swords from grips, blasts spiny kneecaps and plants streaking yellow bolts where hearts, eyes or vitals might be on a normal humanoid.

Even a graze from one of her ditrogen weapons is more than enough to completely incapacitate a Gitter, sometimes to destroy them utterly. More than once, Moira assumes she'd missed her target amid the swirling sand, only to see, moments later, the cactus collapse to the ground, their trunk lined with blistering yellow flame.

Leaving her two companions behind to continue their argument, Moira trots the remainder of the way through the battle, ducking to avoid sword swings and spiraling out of the way of thrown spears. Soon, Righty and Lefty are enough to buy her plenty of berth, the occasional warning shot all she needs to scare enemies and allies alike. None of the Gitter are foolish enough to provoke the divine wrath of such weapons of heavenly might.

That's how she escapes the main fray so easily, hustling past the last few stragglers engaged in private duels, on the combat's western side. She jogs a little ways away, to gain some distance on the slaughter and the commotion.

From this distance, it's clear how drastically the battle is swinging towards a Skyscratch victory. The taller cactoid forces press the defenders further and further back, eventually up the nursery's slight slope. Moments from now, the Splitspine defenders will be caught between a rampaging horde and a steep drop into the sinkhole below. This desperation shows; the remaining Splitspines are the fiercer in their fighting.

For the moment, a stalemate seems like a safe bet. In the meantime, then, Moira will turn her attention towards the nursery, its defenses and the galactic treasure that awaits Moira at the bottom.

The outcome she'd hoped for – the circle of Secondseed sentries rushing to the aid of their embattled tribesmen – pans out before Moira's eyes. As the Skyscratch gain ground on their rivals, Splitspine re-enforcements come to the rescue, threatening to box the attackers in between three walls of swinging glassrock weapons. Disastrous as this may prove to the Skyscratch and potentially her crew, it creates the perfect window for Moira to make her play.

None of the Secondseeds pay Moira, squatting in the sand a hundred yards from the nursery's perimeter, any mind. As the dust clears, the way before her is obvious, unguarded and dead ahead.

At an unhurried pace, Moira advances to the edge of the sinkhole. She climbs the small rise and leans forward, peering down into the nursery's depths. Deeper than she'd anticipated, the sinkhole descends into blackness, not helped by the feeble light of Gi's violet dawn. Whistling a little tune, Moira unloops a sparker from her belt, ignites its fizzing end and drops the torch an arm's length from the rocky walls of the sinkhole.

The sparker lands with a thud and a spray of harmless sparks. The ground below is muddy, the sparker nearly extinguished by the pool of shallow water it lands in. A small voice in Moira's conscious mind remarks on how odd this is, to see standing water, collected in muddy puddles all across the sinkhole's floor, on the surface of Gi.

Moira's subconscious mind only has eyes for the saplings.

Dozens of squat little bulbs are planted in a chaotic spread all across the sinkhole's bottom. Not nearly as numerous nor well-tended as the Skyscratch young, the Splitspine saplings look, from Moira's overhead vantage, runty and unwholesome.

She swallows a sudden aversion to scrambling down that wet hole. That is her task – retrieve the thing from the bottom of the place – and she reflects a moment that those sickly weeds are the most valuable commodities in the entire galaxy.

As far as unsecured free-climbs go, Moira's done more dangerous. She'd scaled the rocky foothills of Mand, three days straight, with nothing but sturdy gloves and sturdier boots. Climbing up's the easy part, of course. It's climbing down, particularly on the moist walls of the sinkhole, that'll get her killed.

More than once, she almost loses her balance, when her rational brain claws its way to the foreground and she thinks too hard about what she's doing. Falling into her breathing routine, Moira can eventually quiet her mind and reach the sinkhole's bottom without serious injury to body or dignity.

She comes to ground within arm's reach of the sparker and she stoops to retrieve the almost guttered thing. Igniting the device again fills the nursery with artificial light and, what's more, reveals the circle of aggressors shambling towards Moira.

They emerge from shadowed crevices in the sinkhole's outer walls, advancing toward Moira and her sparker with obvious ill intent. At a glance, she'd assumed they were Secondseeds but there's something different, profoundly wrong, about them.

They wear no harness and they bear no weapon save their many spined arms. Their trunks are twisted – withered in places, malformed in others – as though they were shrunken or grown incorrectly. They slog through the mud between the saplings, hobbling and lurching, their limbs ill-formed to bear their weight.

They hardly seem sentient, without even the most barbaric of clothing. Reaching towards Moira with their too-many arms, she's not exactly overflowing with sympathy or compassion for their crippled plight.

The sparker drops back to the muddy ground. Righty and Lefty are back in her hands now, hunting targets among all those that converge on her. The shriek of laserfire echoes strangely off the surrounding walls as Moira opens up on the approaching cacti. Each shot strikes true with a blinding yellow flash, blowing away a limb or smoldering a hole straight through a trunk or dropping an entire Secondseed to its thorny knees.

Despite her terrible barrage, the cacti keep coming, unfazed by the ditrogen she blasts through their bodies. To buy more space, Moira starts to pace backward, pistols afire, and attempts to navigate the circuitous maze of spiky Gitter saplings as best she can.

Invariably, of course, she's not halfway across the nursery before she feels something sharp puncture the back of her calf. Moira wobbles a second, her pant leg impaled by the sapling and she goes toppling to the ground. In the fall, Lefty, her favorite, goes soaring from her hand to splash somewhere out of reach. With a splash of her own, Moira crashes her ass to the marshy ground.

Dazed, she lies there too long, considering the plump Gitter sapling she tripped over. Meanwhile, the few remaining cactoid savages close the gap – burnt, broken and still advancing. Moira hardly has time to swing Righty, her only remaining and second favorite pistol, to bear on the Secondseeds before they're upon her.

Her finger fires irresponsibly fast, throwing away valuable ammunition to sizzle against the sinkhole's far wall or into the green flesh of defeated foes. The cactoids smolder, reel and stagger away, menaced by hungry yellow fire. Only one remains, its fellows blasted and burnt. Before Moira can squirm away, something strong and spined has wrapped around her ankle. After a short drag through the slime, she's hoisted clean off the ground.

Dangling upside down, Moira has only a moment before the remaining limbs of this deformed Gitter monster tear her to pieces. It's Righty who comes to her rescue. On instinct she shoves the weapon forward until its snub slams into the cactoid's trunk. Throttling the trigger, she blasts a hole straight through the creature's body.

Seconds later, ditrogen is burning through its innards like a fever. The cactoid drops Moira painfully back to the ground and lurches away. It flails its limbs wildly a moment before it too drops to the ground, to die amongst the blackened bodies of its ilk.

There Moira lies, crumpled awkwardly on the nursery floor like a discarded toy. Her leg is pierced and bleeding from a dozen thorns, her favorite pistol lost somewhere amid this swampy shithole. That's the moment, when her dignity's at its lowest, that her stomach decides to finally give up the goods. She vomits noisily into the mud, thankful there's no one around to watch.

Somewhere distantly above, Moira can hear the sounds of the battle raging onward. Somewhere nearby, a deformed Secondseed goes blundering about the nursery, somehow blinded and still burning. In no immediate danger, Moira takes her sweet time regaining her feet, wiping her mouth of vomit and surveying the scene.

Blasted bodies lie strewn all about, some still squirming, most lying still. Save the one straggler still staggering about, Moira's more or less vanquished the horde of malformed Secondseeds that descended on her. Who or what these creatures were, why they descended on her with none of the reverence most Gitter have shown offworlders, Moira doesn't know or care. All she wants, at this particular moment, is out of this sinkhole.

She locates Lefty in a wet puddle, tossed completely clear of the melee. Retrieving her discarded darling, Moira spends a few minutes polishing the poor thing, eyes still scanning the nursery for a promising specimen.

Neither botanist nor gardener, all these damn plants look the same to Moira Quicksilver. She ultimately chooses the one nearest her as the plant that will shake the foundations of the galactic economy.

It's a fat shrub, ugly and bulbous, ridged from top to bottom and sunken deep in the moist loam. The spikes are superficially different, grouped in little clusters, from those of the Skyscratch and this, Moira supposes, is what gives the Splitspine their name. At the tip of the bulb, perhaps a foot off the ground, is a closed bud, a flower that will one day open to provide both spores and spice.

Moira plants a bootheel into the center of the gray disc Odisseus gave her. With a series of clicks, the disc pops into its true shape. It's a beveled pot, approximately a foot and change deep, the sort of pot ideal for transporting a sapling from place to place.

Neither botanist nor gardener, it's a messy, imprecise job for Moira, to extract a living plant and install it inside her waiting pot. With much grunting and cursing, she makes do, marvelling at the strength of the sapling's deeply seeded ball of tangled roots.

Moira spends a moment prodding and adjusting the sapling, expecting some obvious sign of life. When no such sign comes, Moira packs in an additional layer of soil, for good measure, and climbs to her feet. She stoops to retrieve the pot and stalls a moment, surprised by the sheer weight of the thing.

Another grunting, cursing effort is needed to hoist the pot off the ground and balance the thing against her hip. She stands there, panting a second, debating how exactly she was expected to escape this sinkhole with the baby cactus in tow.

Odisseus breathes a little easier to see The Unconstant Lover still in one piece. He'd entertained any number of fatalistic nightmare scenarios – the ship destroyed, the ship disappeared, the ship discovered – about what they would find when they returned to this particular patch of wasteland. He gives a long relieved exhale when that glint of teltriton on the horizon eventually materializes into their unharmed spaceship.

There stands the freighter, for the first time in her life looking almost regal against the stark, primordial landscape. Her hull gleaming in the sunlight, their beloved Briza stands defiantly against all around her, her metallic shell immune to all the sun's wrath. Soon enough, the Ortok would be sequestered inside, the coolant units on full blast, this wretched desert hellscape behind them forever.

Even beneath the shade of the palanquin, high noon on Gi is enough to make Odisseus want to crumple to the earth and die. The Ortok cannot imagine the ordeal of walking back to their distant vessel – the wasteland would surely have claimed all three of them. Fortunately, the Captain was able to leverage his divine favor to convince four strapping young cactoids to bear their godlings across the desert in shade. The palanquin is a makeshift thing – wooden slats and ferny canopy – and it's a bumpy, uncomfortable ride but it's zottibles better than slogging on foot.

For once, Odisseus is strangely thankful for Nemo's laziness, sparing them a death-march across the desert.

Squeezed together atop the jostling palanquin's platform, Odisseus and his two companions share space with a fourth passenger, the newly arrived sapling. The most precious plant in the entire galaxy is nothing much to look at – squat, heavy and spiny – and Odisseus has to hope this is what Gella needs to start her new boom crop. There is no way, no matter what she says, that he's ever coming back to this blooming fireball of a planet.

The four escorts carrying the palanquin make no comment or complaint as they trudge across the blasted landscape. Hardly an expert, Odisseus nonetheless detects that things among the Skyscratch grove are a little up in the air at the moment.

The grove's victory over the hated Splitspine was all but assumed. It was a simple enough matter for the taller, mightier and more numerous Skyscratch to mete out a swift and bloody extinction on the supposed infidels and blasphemers of the Splitspine.

The victorious grove did, however, suffer one grievous casualty and that was Foreplanter.

Slain under rather "mysterious" circumstances in the midst of the battle, the succession games, a contest of strength and skill among all the eligible Firstseeds, commenced immediately. The Vesselborn, in their infinite wisdom, decided it was best to make tracks from the scene, before anyone considered too closely what had actually felled the mighty Foreplanter.

Nemo's interest in the cactus-men vanishing the moment Moira laid the sapling at his feet, the last the Lover's crew saw of the Skyscratch grove, they were embroiled in their own intrigues, attempting to determine who would replace Foreplanter as the new Foreplanter.

For his part, Odisseus was only too happy to meddle no further in the cultural affairs of the hapless Gitter. Moira, meanwhile, spent most of the morning groaning, puking and bellyaching about how she didn't feel so good.

As soon as they've arrived a respectful distance from the freighter, Nemo tut-tuts to be set down and freed from the wobbly palanquin. His paws on the ground again, their spaceship a few hundred feet away, Odisseus thinks they can finally be rid of these cactus bastards once and for all.

The Captain, meanwhile, cannot turn down an opportunity to grandstand.

"We return now," he shouts to his small audience, his voice booming across the flatland, "onto the bosom of the heavenly Place Above, never to return!" The cacti make no immediate move or response to his proclamation, standing stock still. "Your sacrifice," he announces, attempting to heft high the sapling and grunting under the failed effort, "will we bear unto the Grand Pooba Guy and he shall decide whether or not your offering is found wanting. I warn you," he hisses suddenly, a finger swept across the four of them, "should that prove the case, it shall go ill with the Skyscratch. Big Daddie's wrath," he warns, "shall be both terrible and immediate. His Great Resplendent Member will piss down streams of avenging heavenfire like–"

"Okay," interrupts Odisseus, cuffing his saltbrother on the shoulder and striding towards the spaceship. "We're done here."

"And He shall pull down His High Holy Trousers," continues shouting Nemo, as he's hauled away from his bemused worshippers, "and shit upon you an endless meteor shower of flaming tur–"

Odisseus nods his snout towards the sapling. "Moira, can you–"

"Ooga booga booga, you fucks!" adds Nemo, waggling his fingers above his head for good measure. His faithful so chastised, the Captain spins back around and marches a few feet proudly forward, towards his awaiting spaceship.

It's this – "Ooga booga booga, you fucks" – that actually seems to convince the Gitter to depart. Leaving the palanquin where it lies in the dirt, all four spin on their own heels and march away, headed eastward and back toward the gray smudge of the distant mountains.

Odisseus watches them leave a moment, so robotic and unquestioning in their movements, and he spares a thought towards the sapling and who that tree will grow to be, considering the circumstances that await its future.

"Guys," ventures the Captain from somewhere behind him, his voice laced with uncertainty. Odisseus turns back towards his two companions and their spaceship to discover one bent double in the dirt and the other patting down his bathrobe for spaceship keys. A look of bottled anxiety, threatening to burst into true panic at any moment, is plastered all over Nemo's face as he locks eyes with Odisseus.

"I think–" he ventures trepidatiously.

"No," snarls the Ortok, refusing to acknowledge the depths of his stupidity.

"I'm pretty sure–"

"You're pretty sure fucking what?" growls Moira, the hangover coming fast and hard now.

"I locked the keys in the ship," Nemo blurts out, throwing his hands up immediately, as though to excuse himself from any potential blame. His two companions, the priceless sapling between them, stand there, blinking at him, as he offers no further explanation except one half-hearted, half-apology.

"Whoops."

### PART II:

### RENT TO RIBBONS TOO
CHAPTER 11

Moira's skull is about to go supernova.

Make no mistake, Moira Quicksilver has had her fair share of killer hangovers. The worst in her long history were potent enough to drive lesser beings before them, howling in pain from every bright light and every loud noise. Her current hangover, however, is unlike anything she's ever suffered; this one is special.

Huffing alcoholic spores for sixteen hours straight is enough to create a hangover undreamt of in any philosophy. What's happening in her skull right now would easily lay low any creature, even the alcohol-breathing amothsquall from Xego Minor, for a good long while.

All the same, she's still forced to squat here, in this intolerable heat, and thumb through whatever technical data the Attaché's got on, of all things, The Unconstant Lover. The more she does, however, the more Moira's discovering thing she never knew about the spaceship she'd called home the past half-decade.

For instance, she never knew that the crusty old Briza Light Freighter still uses outmoded fuel-conversion nozzles, the kind outlawed on every civilized planet because of how tremendously pollutant they are. Moira never knew that each of the Lover's gun batteries were individually powered and could, with a fresh breaker, accept twice the system power they currently do.

Most gallingly, Moira never knew that the Captain was hiding a private bathroom from the rest of the crew, sequestered behind a wall panel inside his quarters. This revelation is chased by the horrifying image of that bathroom, used only by Nemo and therefore uncleaned for six years and running.

Nowhere among all these fascinating discoveries, however, does Moira find a way to short, decouple or somehow disrupt the manual lock on the ship's external boarding ramp. How in all the blessed moons of Jotor they were going to remedy this, Moira has no idea. All she wants is a gallon of chococino, a hundred cigarettes and for someone to shoot her in the head with a dozen ballistic torpedoes.

Instead, she has this Attaché, this hangover and the screaming match unfolding behind her.

"Because where," Nemo wonders, windmilling his arms about in exasperated panic, "in this uninhabited wasteland were we gonna find a locksmith in the first place?"

An equally exasperated Odisseus nonetheless maintains his calm. "You're deliberately misconstruing what I'm saying."

"Of course I am!" exclaims Nemo. "You're shouting at me!"

"I am decidedly," clarifies Odisseus, as calmly as he can, "not shouting at you."

"Yes! You are! Listen to yourself!"

They'd carried on in this fashion for hours. During that time, Gi's malevolent sun had swung across the sky and tossed some helpful shade across the starboard side of the parked Lover. That's where Moira huddles, attempting to keep the glare off her screen and out of her eyes. Odisseus eventually followed suit, slumped against an inappropriately protruding foot of the Lover's mistimed landing gear.

Nemo, meanwhile, paces and prowls beneath the open sun, too engrossed in his diatribe to notice something as trivial as the brain-melting heat. He'd been carping and caterwauling like this ever since the keys were discovered missing, flush with the supremely defensive air of someone entirely at fault.

In a stroke of injustice, the task of ascertaining some method out of here fell solely to Moira, definitely the most hungover of the three. It was the Ortok's idea to run through the Attaché's auxiliary files, searching for any weakness in the Lover's security panel. Of the three of them, it was really Odisseus – by far – who was the most qualified to discover the miracle solution. By now, however, Odisseus was embroiled too deep in the customary pointless and circuitous argument with Nemo. In lieu of her head exploding from the combined forces of heat, boredom and hangover, Moira took on the grim task herself.

Really, this whole mess could conceivably be blamed on Two-Bit Switch. It was his bloody dying wish that even saw them on this sun-scorched bloomhole of a planet. What's more, as a professional jailbreaker, Two-Bit had been appalled by the Lover's lack of security and made improving all her locks his little pet project. All three of the Lover's entrances – boarding ramp and both airlocks – had been exhaustively Two-Bit-proofed.

For all intents and purposes, they were then impossible to crack. For all intents and purposes, the three pirates were forever locked out of own their spaceship.

Every time Nemo'd locked them out of the ship, it was a profoundly irritating waste of everyone's time and patience but it could hardly be described as the end of the universe. This time, with the Lover the only functional spaceship on the entire planet, a planet so hostile it couldn't sustain long-term animal life, it was pretty much the end of the universe.

The sun overhead is passing its zenith, starting to slant away towards the late afternoon. This is when the heat's the most merciless, punishment radiating up from the sand as much as from the sky. Crouched here in the shade, enameled in DermEndure, sweat has nonetheless crusted Moira's clothing to her skin. Nemo, directly under the sun, sweats oceans, his face a swampy expanse of sunburnt skin and matted beard. Odisseus too is slumped in the shade, his tongue lolling, his consciousness threatening to flee at the slightest provocation.

At paw's reach sits the treasure, the booty for which they'd weathered all this hardship, toil and eventually ignominious death. An ugly plant sits in its ugly pot, unconcerned about either heat or plight.

"I think," the Ortok ventures weakly, "I understand the core of the problem."

"Oh yeah?" scoffs Nemo. "And what's that?"

"The key rack's," he explains, wandering a woozy claw up towards his standing saltbrother, "not nailed to your fucking skull."

"Makes no difference," Nemo admits, his arms akimbo. "I categorically refuse to hang my keys on that blooming thing. Especially now."

Odisseus' paw drops back to the dry dirt. "Well, that seems like a good hill to die on."

"Oh, fucking please." Nemo dismisses his saltbrother with a wave and staggers a few feet away. "Everything's blooming dehydration and death to you."

"Do not go down this road with me," warns Odisseus, a little growl underneath his words. "I am about ten minutes from a fresh batch of heat stroke and you are full of nice, refreshing blood."

"Them's fighting–"

A sudden unexpected smell brings Moira's head up. "Oh, whoa." Before she can make any warning to her crewmates, a quartet of fifteen-foot tall, green skinned figures round The Unconstant Lover's corner. "What's up, guys?" is the amazingly stupid thing that comes from her mouth, the moment she sees the four cacti emerge from where she least expected them.

Moira doesn't know how four enormous, stink-ass cactus dudes could sneak up her but she's very ready to blame her hangover. It's immediately apparent, from one whiff and one glance, these are the same four Skyscratch that bore their palanquin across the desert and indeed, they march immediately towards the conveyance where it stands in the sand, collecting dust.

The moment they appear, even Nemo and Odisseus are forced to stop arguing, both turning to regard the unexpected arrivals. Watching them pass, Nemo apparently has the same thought Moira had. "You guys forgot your–"

{Foreplanter greatly desires to spore with you again}, one of the Gitter announces, the first intelligible thing any of the entourage has said to them the entire trip across the desert.

Nemo is the picture of skepticism. "...hurray?"

{We have been dispatched to summon you}, the Gitter continues, apparently finding Nemo's response unsatisfactory.

"Yeah," Nemo starts to remark. "Turns out we're kinda in the middle of–"

"Is anybody else," suggests the Ortok suddenly, safe in the knowledge the Gitter can't understand Ortoki, "getting a kinda weird vibe from these guys?"

Moira scowls. "Weirder than normal?"

"I'm getting," Odisseus confirms, sniffing peremptorily in their direction once or twice, "a very weird funk offa them. There's something different about the way they smell."

"I don't really give a bloom what they smell like." Nemo's crossed his arms and looks disapprovingly at their hosts. "Unless there's some way they can help us with our no-spaceship problem," Nemo adds in a stage-whisper.

"Supplies," Moira bluntly points out. "We've got water for today, food for tomorrow but then we're boned." She considers the four cacti, arriving at their four stations at the palanquin's four quarters. "They won't be getting us offworld but they're our best chance at staying the fuck alive."

This sets Nemo's jaw firm. The heat, he can argue with. The wisdom of his objectively unwise plans, he can argue with. The grumbling of his stomach, however, is something even Nemo can't endure forever. The reluctance in his face, his voice and his posture is tangible but eventually, the Captain's forced to consent.

"Yeah. Sure," he relents, slapping his thighs fruitlessly. "Back to Bumfuck Mountain."

{Then we must away, should we wish to arrive ere moonrise}.

With that, the inflexible cacti stoop, retrieve the palanquin and stand stock still, waiting for their honored guests to climb aboard.

For many long moments, the crew simply exchange looks, each one held by back from boarding by the thought of another interminable trek across the sands. Nemo, so close to their goal and deflected by such a petty obstacle, throws a minor nonverbal temper tantrum, stomping his feet and flapping his arms about. Odisseus keeps sniffing, attempting to ascertain what's changed in the Gitter's scent.

It's Moira, thinking of their dwindling supplies, that clambers to her feet, fixes an expectant look on her crewmates and crosses the short distance to board the palanquin.

Odisseus knows who to blame.

They'd come so close to escaping this planet. They'd stood before the very doors of their spaceship, invaluable treasure in their hands. It was only Nemo's stupidity that prevented them from making off with the goods intact and in tow.

By this logic, every further complication that follows on the heels of Nemo locking the keys in the ship is also the Captain's fault. It was Nemo who dragged them back across that unforgiving desert landscape. It was Nemo who plunged them back into this heady cloud of nauseating Gitter spores. It was Nemo who surrounded them with a grove of suspiciously hostile Gitter.

This theory could be extrapolated further, with evidence littered across the galaxy and the past six years. To put it mildly, Nemo is really the source of all the Ortok's problems.

Sickened from the heat, the exhaustion and the bumpy palanquin ride through the hills, Odisseus staggers eagerly to the canyon's floor, dragging the potted plant with him. He fights the instinct to smash the thing, a cumbersome burden, against the stones and bones at his feet. Instead, the pot simply slides from his claws and thuds against the soft sand.

"We're fucking here, okay?" snarls Nemo, likewise descending off the palanquin to address the audience. "Moons of Jotor, we're fucking here, already! What could you possibly want?"

They're returned to the familiar sight of the box canyon, its nursery saplings, its scattered skeletons, its imposing inhabitants. Wounded and scarred from their recent battle, the entire Skyscratch grove is convened, giving the returned Vesselborn a wide berth.

In the moonlight, the Gitter are more inanimate trees than sentient beings, despite their weapons and attire. Now that they're all assembled, Odisseus detects that same strangeness in their spores, here writ large. Gone is the reverence and awe that the Gitter once held for their divine messengers. There's something new, something he stretches to describe as antipathy, in the way these cacti smell.

{The noble Vesselborn are returned to us}, greets a familiar scent and it takes Odisseus a moment to put a claw on who's actually speaking. It's Firstseed Flamescar who emerges, instantly recognizable from the chalky white scarification all across its body.

Nemo is confused. "You? No, where's the other guy? The taller one, with the boring name?"

"Foreplanter," Moira provides.

"Um–" suggests Odisseus heavily.

"That guy," agrees Nemo, his expression sour. "Foreplanter. Blech. I tell you what, I was a barbarian king, gimme ten seconds and I could think of ten cooler–"

{Foreplanter of the Skyscratch grove}, interrupts Flamescar, {stands now before thee}.

"Uh," Nemo stammers a moment. "Don't think so. Pretty sure you're Weird, Got-All-Burned-Up-For-Being-A-Dumbass Guy. Foreplanter's–"

As always, it is the grim task of Odisseus to translate the painfully obvious for Nemo. "Foreplanter's dead, remember?"

"Remember?" Moira repeats, scowl obvious even in her voice.

{Fallen in righteous battle with the infidel}, Flamescar is delighted to inform them. {Did thee not stay to witness the games of succession?}

"Nah, you know." Nemo shrugs. "We had another thing."

"Odi," Moira beckons, a mother chastising her child. "What does remember mean?"

{I am emerged the victor of the sacred games of succession}, announces Flamescar with grandeur, raising all eight of its bulky limbs in celebration. {The title of Foreplanter has been bestowed upon my deserving personage}.

"Bully for you," grunts Nemo.

"Times," insists Odisseus to Moira, "and places."

"Is there something," Nemo begins, rubbing his eyes with his palms, "you actually need from us or did you drag our asses all the way fucking up here so you could gloat?"

There's a subtle change in Flamescar's spores as it elaborates. {My scouts tell me, O honorable Vesselborn, that it was thine intention to once again leave our world, to return onto the bosom of God Beyond and the Starsea above."

"Yeah? And?"

"Did you," Moira hisses, making a slicing motion across her throat, "Foreplanter?"

{Something, I have been told, has delayed thee}, Flamescar continues, seemingly for the crowd's benefit. {Prevented thine departure}.

At this, Nemo suddenly swells and attempts a new tactic. The aspect of the mad prophet returns, as best he can in his exhausted state, to his voice and posture. "The affairs of the Vesselborn–"

"We maybe both did a little," Odisseus admits, sheepishly. "On accident."

{Why dost thou not}, Flamescar continues, heedless of all Nemo's posturing, {simply call God Beyond's very attention to thee? Why not simply summon another Vessel, as thou hast done in the past, to swoop down and carry thee away?}

"You tread," warns Nemo, the soothsayer aspect cracking the moment it appeared, "upon dangerous ground, mortal. I shall not tolerate–"

"Moons," remarks Moira with an upward glance, as though asking the literal moons for guidance.

{Pray tell us, Badass Supreme – where is thine harness?}

There's a sudden recoil from the crowd at this, the Skyscratch astounded at their new leader's temerity, to speak to the Vesselborn this way. There's shock, anxiety and, what's more, curiosity rapidly taking root among the cactus crowd.

"Mine what now?" Nemo, ever clueless, shoots back.

Moira, never clueless, sniffs twice. The unspoken cue for battle stations, this produces an instantaneous effect on the pirate crew. On instinct, four open hands come to rest on four gun holsters.

{Thine harness}, elaborates a gracious Flamescar, explaining the concept to a very young child. {The divine raiment given thee by God Beyond. Conjure a blade of fire – if thou art truly Vesselborn, as is thine claim – here and now, that all the faithful might bear witness to God Beyond's power}.

Nemo's pistol comes flying from its holster. "You wanna demonstration?" Odisseus and Moira follow suit, Right, Lefty and Wreckingball aimed at various members of the grove. The three Vesselborn earn a still wider berth now from the circle of cacti. "A demonstration," warns Nemo, addressing the crowd more than to Flamescar alone, "is very doable."

Flamescar doesn't budge an inch. {Look thee all}, it broadcasts to its followers, {how they abandon the whole façade, the moment their unquestionable sovereignty becomes questioned}.

"How many?" mutters Odisseus, scanning the Skyscratch.

"Too many," supplies Moira. "Especially when you consider they've each got four fucking arms and four fucking swords."

"Point taken."

Flamescar continues to pontificate to its audience. {Did I not say that when their testimony failed them, out would come the weapons and the threats? No Vesselborn are these, but rank parasites, cast from above to dwell here amongst we scum}.

Nemo wildly swings his pistol across the tumultuous throng, the theological ground given way beneath his feet. "What heresy is this? Only those–"

{They are outcasts! Exiles! Pariahs!} At each word, the crowd seems to mutter and shift, absorbing Flamescar's rhetoric. {And what do the mighty Skyscratch do to those found unworthy, those who would profane the name of God Beyond and the sacred messengers of the Starsea?}

{Fernhollow!}

It starts humbly, with only a few cacti daring to pipe up in defiance of their godlings. As the scent proliferates through the Gitter, however, it only grows in strength and fervor.

{Fernhollow! Fernhollow! Fernhollow!}

A scowling Moira leans towards Odisseus for translation. "What're they saying?"

"Fernhollow?" Odisseus repeats, the phrase sounding extra bizarre when spoken aloud.

{We shall plunge these blasphemers}, Flamescar declares, to the roaring approval of its fanatic followers, {into the depths of Fernhollow, with the offal and the refuse!}

Savage satisfaction rolls off the Skyscratch grove, enough to stagger Odisseus backward. Nemo, however, spins a few slow circles, his face a mask of incredulity. "So, what? A fucking luxury resort? A housing development? A nature preserve?"

{Fernhollow! Fernhollow!}

Nemo calmly holds up a hand, suing for silence among the jeering hordes. "As nice and totally non-threatening as that sounds," he stipulates politely, "I'm pretty sure we're gonna pass, actually."

{Seize the charlatans}, orders Flamescar menacingly. {We depart at dawn}.

"Hey, whoa," is all Nemo has time to remark before the Skyscratch burst into action.

As one creature, the entire warband surges forward. There's a blur of motion, impossible to follow, as hundred of glassrock swords, axes and spears are brandished from as many great spiny arms. For a moment, the Skyscratch grove resembles the slain thorncloud – an autonomous mass of jagged points and muscular branches.

On their long legs, they instantly close the gap between themselves and the outnumbered offworlders. The moonlight glints off dozens of outstretched weapons as they push past their new Foreplanter to fall upon this new batch of heathens.

Moira's predictably the first to fire, Right and Lefty lighting up the night with blasts of vibrant yellow. She's smart enough, Odisseus notes, to spreadeagle both pistols and keep the horde at bay on either side. A number of scattered cacti are instantaneously wreathed in crackling yellow flame.

The first to come within range of Odisseus is promptly blown to cinders by his Wreckingball. Blackened chunks of cactoid flesh litter the ground, but the Ortok hardly has the time to cock and fire another round before they're all around him. He sweeps about frantically and looses another shot, fortunate enough to blast a pair of Gitter through the midsection. Even this, however, only buys him a second of reprieve.

Nemo's strategy is drastically less effective. Throwing as much profanity and shouted nonsense as he does ammunition, the Captain lays about randomly with his Carbon Industrial piece. Several of his shots, his aim mangled by panic and chaos, whizz dangerously close to Odisseus. In a heartbeat, however, he's overwhelmed, swallowed among all the pressing cactoid bodies.

Odisseus makes a feeble attempt to come to Nemo's aid, to force his way through the chaos towards his surrounded saltbrother. Blasting away uselessly, the Ortok starts to clear a path to Nemo before the precise slice of a glassrock sword wrenches the Wreckingball from his paws. Spun halfway around, Odisseus manages to dodge a stabbing spear and, on instinct, he almost lashes out with claws and teeth, to rend his attacker with his natural weapons.

What stops him is an impenetrable wall of spikes. A weak defense against ditrogen, the Gitter's thorny green skin proves unassailable against unarmed attack. Fangs bared, claws extended, Odisseus hesitates a moment, unsure precisely how or where to strike.

Something sudden and bludgeoning – a spear haft, he imagines – jabs Odisseus at the base of the spine, forcing the Ortok to the ground. His snout slammed against the sand, he growls and writhes a moment in fury, before he feels a delicate line of pressure – a glassrock axeblade, he imagines – pressed against the nape of his neck. It would take very little effort from his unseen executioner to drive that blade home and the Ortok's accordingly still as stone.

From his limited vantage on the ground, Odisseus watches the scuffle go south just as fast for his embattled comrades. A thicket of spears hover an inch around Moira Quicksilver, Righty and Lefty dangling from the trigger fingers of hands held up in surrender. It boils the Ortok's blood, snuffling and snarling in the dirt, to see Nemo, his saltbrother, with a savage glassrock sword pressed beneath his neck, his pistol nowhere to be seen.

The Captain, for all that, sounds perfectly reasonable. "So, Fernhollow it is, then?"

Moira Quicksilver is actually an old hand at escaping magnetic cuffs.

The secret is alarmingly simple, truth be told. It's exactly the sort of parlor trick that looks like magic when performed properly but completely loses its luster the moment its pedestrian method is explained. Had she been bound with conventional magnetic cuffs, Moira would have shirked them hours ago and, by now, be much further along on her escape than square one.

Unsurprisingly, the Skyscratch had instead bound the three of them – together, hilariously – by a length of strange, spongy vine. Thus far, it's enthusiastically resisted all Moira's escape attempts. This may, she acknowledges, be verging on paranoia, but she can almost feel her restraints tightening whenever she wriggles her hands.

That's ultimately not what's important. What's important is that, with her hands so devilishly bound, they're not free to strangle the ever-shitting life from that ugly cactus motherfucker who's wearing her pistols like a pair of discount sunglasses.

Dawn broke hours ago, when the warband departed the nursery, heading this time further into the mountains rather than out across the wasteland. This high into the range, the sun's only occasionally visible, more a reflection against this glassrock crag or another. Every vista they pass would, under any other circumstances, be strikingly beautiful, sunrise splayed out against jagged cliffs in scintillant patterns. Wonder of wonders, there's even a faint breeze that whistles through the peaks, a breeze one might describe as refreshing, were one not currently marching to their own execution.

The three of them – Ortok, lunatic and Moira – stand back-to-back-to-back upon the lip of the precipice, each one bound at the wrist and then bound to one another in an outward facing circle. On the surrounding slopes and promontories, wherever their roots can find footing, are arrayed the Gitter of the Skyscratch grove. To a plant, they're all dolled up, decked in ceremonial dyes and dress for the big execution today.

An honor guard of the stoutest warriors encircle the prisoners, each armed with a twenty-foot glassrock glaive. Even could Moira escape the restraints, any one of their captors would happily impale her the moment she lunged for Foreplanter.

To such a death, however, would Moira eagerly go, knowing she'd given her life attempting to wrest her beloved Lawmen from the unworthy grasp of some mutinous backwater savage.

Foreplanter, formerly known as Firstseed Flamescar, is very clearly enjoying its newfound office a little too much. Standing atop the highest peak it could reach, it strikes as regal a pose as an eight-armed cactus-man wearing a grass skirt possibly could. To complete its ridiculous ensemble, it dangles all four of their firearms – Righty, Lefty, Wreckingball and Nemo's flintlock – around a hempen cord that it wears over the shoulders, like tribal fetishes or trophies of war.

The sheer insult of this burns Moira Quicksilver straight to her core. From where they hang, the weapons're too inaccessible and far too delicate anyway for the Gitter's thorny fingers to even hope to aim or fire. What's worse, someone's gone and smeared that ceremonial dye all over them, clogging the internal machinery of Moira's precious revolvers with bright blue, yellow and red gunk.

Moira Quicksilver, on trial for willingly impersonating a god, cannot conceive of such a blasphemy as this.

A weak voice inside her head insists she not despair. Dilemmas ten times worse than this one – captured, armed and sentenced to sacrificial death on an uncharted alien world – have they escaped before. They were typically, Moira is forced to admit, two members stronger than they were now. There was no Abraham to swoop the Lover in on a rescue mission; there was especially no Two-Bit Switch to scheme some way from the Skyscratch clutches.

This is zottibles outside what he'd predicted for them on the surface of Gi; they'd come prepared for no natives, no theocracies, no public executions.

All about them, the Gitter drummers tremble the very mountains with their thudding war-song. While this works wonders for Moira's hangover, it also provides a convenient conversational smokescreen, enough for the three captives to whisper out the details of their ingenious escape plan.

"How's that," Moira questions in Nemo's ear, "ingenious escape plan coming?"

"All we gotta do," Nemo whispers back conspiratorially, "is get our hands free, get our weapons back, not get stabbed, run back to the Lover, get aboard somehow, run the blockade, not get shot down and warp away."

"Helpful."

"Don't worry," Odisseus assures her. "I'm currently in the process of freeing my right paw."

"And?"

He pauses significantly. "Get back to me in forty-five minutes." This is followed by a few more seconds of scratching and struggling. "These vines're thick as fuck."

"Take your time," Moira allows. "No rush or anything."

Meanwhile, the Ceremony of Incessant Fucking Drumming slowly rises to a thudding crescendo. At a dramatic motion from Foreplanter, it suddenly ceases.

{God Beyond}, Foreplanter addresses to the heavens, {may Thou tear any shred of mercy from the fates of these three blasphemers, brazen enough to pose as Thine holy messengers. May a thousand gruesome ends be visited upon them as punishment for their temerity}.

"You know," Nemo admits, "far as eulogies go, you could really do much worse. Colorful imagery, at least."

{May they know unending torment in the dankest bowels of the Fernhollow}.

"Okay, it's kinda starting to sound like there's maybe just poop down there."

{We pray, God Beyond, that Thou might deem our sacrifice worthy of your august and invinc–}

"Little long, maybe," opines Nemo. "Hey! Firstseed Fuckfart!" he shouts, piercing the reverent silence with his irreverence. "Can we skip the exposition and cut straight to the murders?"

"Are you in some rush to fucking die?" hisses Odisseus.

{Silence thine ungodly speech}, threatens Foreplanter calmly, {or I shall have that vile red worm torn from between thy teeth}.

"I'd be flattered," commends Nemo. "I'm just saying, any chance we could fast-forward through all the boring ceremony stuff? I gotta sit here, sniffing your spory assholes another second, I think I'mana ralph."

"And the play here is?" mutters Moira. "Antagonize them so I can–"

"Oh, there's no play here," Nemo confesses. "I really might ralph."

Foreplanter, bleached and blackened, stands stock still a moment, as though in contemplation. {Very well}, it relents. {This one, the one called Badass Supreme, shall have its wish granted}. It waves a dismissive gesture, Righty and Lefty clacking together, towards the soldiers that encircle them. {Feed the hirsute one to Fernhollow}.

"Oh, lovely," remarks Odisseus. Moira feels all the Ortok's escape efforts, tugging frantically at their entangled wrists, stop suddenly. "Well, I was thinking the last few moments of my pitiful life were getting a little tedious."

"Lemme know if it is poop down there," Nemo asks of his saltbrother before he's hauled off to die.

Once slice of a glassrock blade is enough to sever Odisseus from this three comrades. A small curtain of Gitter guide the Ortok toward the edge of the chasm. All the while, he's kept at a safe distance, surrounded by spear tips, and Odisseus plays the uncaged monster the whole way, snarling and snapping at anyone who comes too close.

Once he arrives, another whole production commences. The soothsayer recites some mumbo-jumbo and Odisseus is anointed with assorted dyes and oils, nearly biting off the arm of an inattentive guard in the process. The entire time, Nemo, replete with impatience, makes loud snoring noises.

"You know something?" Odisseus spins suddenly, to better regard his impudent saltbrother, the light of true honesty in his eyes. "All you've ever been is a selfish little–"

In a sudden anticlimax, Odisseus is smacked across the back of the head with a wooden haft. His whole frame goes rigid, he yelps something incoherent, drops heavily over the ledge and is swallowed by blackness.

"Me next! Me next!" hoots the Captain excitedly.

Once again, Foreplanter has no immediate reaction, confounded by the obnoxious enigma that is the Galactic Menace. {Take the other one instead}.

"Figures," Moira sighs, her escape plan half-baked. Nemo, like a thwarted teenager, throws another mini-tantrum, stomping his feet in impatience.

Like Odisseus before her, Moira is treated to the whole dreary ritual again. She's loosed from Nemo, dragged to the precipice, chanted over and doused in dye. She takes little notice of either this or all Nemo's shouting, choosing instead to peer down into the void where they tossed Odisseus.

She's not rewarded with much; to the naked eye, this "Fernhollow" appears to be nothing more than a massive black opening in the rock. The rocky promontory they stand on abruptly gives way, a few feet from where Moira stands, to open air, an impressive drop into nothing but inky darkness below. It's a great open wound in the earth, its depth or contents unknowable, and Moira can easily understand how the Gitter came to fear and loathe the place.

The longer she stares, the more Moira notices a rank smell, carried on a hot draft, that wafts up from the pit below. She cannot help but imagine she's about to be thrown into the open stomach of some gigantic subterranean creature. If so, for all Nemo's idiocy, there may well be poop down there.

The drumming once again comes to a sudden stop. Moira grits her teeth and prepares to make her last ditch attempt. When she hears the creak of leather behind her, the guard winding back his weapon to strike, Moira launches into action.

All she does is duck. At precisely the right moment, Moira bends forward and the polearm haft goes whizzing over her head. The alarmed Gitter, from what she can see, completely loses its balance, flailing its many arms and struggling to keep footing. Moira leaps upright and launches out a savage Stinging Spith straight into the center of the cactoid's torso.

Her baby-stomper rings true and gives the gigantic Gitter all the extra push it needs. With a sudden burst of terrified spores, the cactoid tumbles off the edge and down into its dreaded Fernhollow.

Before she can assess her next move, the falling cactus snatches Moira by the leg and sinks its spines deep into her flesh. Arms bound and off-balance, the equally alarmed Moira has no choice, in that moment, but to tumble off the side of the promontory. Moments later, she and the Gitter drop away from the world and into pure blackness.

CHAPTER 12

Odisseus swims in his sleep.

He has to dive deeper. This one coastal shelf, he's convinced, with its barren splay of rocks and algae, is far from his only option. The deeper he manages to dive, the more satisfying the prey that will await him, hidden down in that dark expanse of water.

A few slight flicks of the tail are all his streamlined Ortoki body needs to motor through the frigid waters. His limbs flush against his torso, Odisseus is a slick brown torpedo, his tail the engine that rockets him around the shelf and down into the deeper water. All he's after now is speed; no tricky maneuvering, no aquatic dogfighting, just sheer momentum.

Beneath him, the mossy rocks and waving seaweed gives way suddenly to plunging depths, a blue darker and truer than the shallow cerulean of the coastal waters. Down there is the real cape, where the true treasures lay. In his imagination, they're perfectly arrayed, waiting patiently for an enterprising enough Ortok to dive all the way down and retrieve them.

He brakes a moment, flapping open his hind paws and extending their webbing. Momentarily slowed, he bends his slender body forward and his tail bursts back to life. With a flutter of bubbles, Odisseus is speeding away downward and into that impenetrable well of indigo beneath him.

Some faint understanding comes to the young Ortok that he's breaking the rules. Some part of him is aware that larger predators occasionally cruise the cape's outer reefs, searching for easy prey. A juvenile Ortok, he's been told countless times, would make an excellent meal for a great taakti or an iluuki ridgeback. The denmothers, one part of his brain attempts to remind him, would be furious if they discover he's broken their edicts and went hunting where he wasn't allowed. He is young, the rest of his brain insists, and full of youth's swaggering invincibility and thus, downward he swims.

The Ortok dives for a full minute and more before those lower reefs do appear, spread out like a descending staircase before him, and his lungs are starting to strain from the effort. With a speed tinged with desperation, he chooses the nearest one, a crosshatch of intersecting coral, and quickly goes about his hunting.

Paddling his hind paws to stay submerged, the upside-down Ortok starts to scour every nook and cranny in the coral. He flips stones and paws into crevices, searching for anything edible among the rocks, the fuzzy green algae and the jagged stands of coral that litter the bottom of the bay. Tiny kuyapi crabs and schools of scattering ularuk are driven before him, the coastline's apex predator, but these are literally little fish and not worth all this effort.

The prize Odisseus really seeks, the one he nearly drowns to obtain, is discovered another half-minute later, cunningly disguised as just another moss-spotted stone. The Ortok wraps paws around the scuttling shellfish, pries it from the muck and, with powerful kicks of his hind paws and frantic flailing of his tail, blasts back toward the surface.

It's his closest call to date. He breaches the briny surface of the cape with lungs afire and his vision growing a little hazy. Despite all that, despite the danger and the risk and the threat of potential punishment, the euphoria of success, of discovery, or the reward he clutches to his chest, repays Odisseus tenfold. He swam to the bottom of the cape with impunity and is that much closer to full Ortoki adulthood.

Soon as he surfaces, instinct rolls Odisseus onto his back, the shellfish coming to rest naturally on his stomach. He gazes upward at a pristine sky, sucking in relieved breath after relieved breath, the sheltered water of the cape lapping gently against his fur.

The sky above is crystal clear, blue as the vibrant water of the cape. A few clouds, like wave-tossed seafoam, ride sluggishly past and the occasional dreambird, some rough approximation of a dozen various species, wheels and squawks overhead. The arms of the cape reach around either side, bristling with rocky outcropping and towering trees, to hold Odisseus and his fellow Ortoks in its protective embrace.

This cape, this landmass, these gentle waters have been an Ortoki habitat for uncounted generations, stretching back to the otterfolk's primordial past. Here, among the tidepools and sheltered inlets, they construct their lodges, the shoreline protected from both seaborne storms and from the ravenous predators of the mainland. Here, the fishing is plentiful, the weather temperate and the seas placid.

Dangers would occasionally rear their heads, predators of land and sea, swirl currents, the odd heat-crazed bull Ortok. Day by day, though, the first few years of an Ortok's life, frolicking and romping amid the tranquil waters and sandy beaches, were lazy, uneventful and occasionally mind-numbingly boring.

Today was different. Today, the intrepid young Ortoki diver braved the deeper seabeds and returned with an invaluable prize in paw – a padlock crab.

The name originally came from offworld fishermen, sporadically plying the planet's liberal oceans. Fully retracted, a padlock crab was nothing but an impenetrable ball of pink carapace. Impossible to crack with claws or brute strength, only by twisting the interlocking plates of each padlock crab in very particular way could one access the flesh inside.

The cape's expert fishers and clam-catchers claimed there was a fine art to cracking a padlock. If this art involved anything but repetitive trial and error, however, Odisseus had never discerned it. Now, here he floats, his very own padlock crab resting on his chest and all the time in the universe to crack its specific combination.

It's here, riding the mild surf that rolls into the cape, his belly to the sky and his concentration on the crustacean at hand, that young Odisseus is literally torn from his dream. In this case, a serpentine tentacle reaches up from dark waters far below the Ortok and encircles his unsuspecting ankle.

Before Odisseus can cry out or struggle free, the tendril entwines bone-crunchingly tight around his hind paw and tugs him downward. The Ortok pup makes one squeak of distress, muffled by seawater, before he's pulled beneath the surface. Yanked towards the bottom with irresistible force, Odisseus has one fleeting view of the surface of the water, dappled and interlaced by a spiderweb of sunlight. Then the dream fabric gives way, a theatrical backdrop torn violently from its hooks.

The true Odisseus, the Odisseus of here and now – an Odisseus two decades older, two hundred pounds heavier and innumerable worlds wearier – snaps back to his senses.

He's immediately assailed by a flurry of new strange and unpleasant sensations. There's utter darkness and a putrid smell. There's many somethings wet and frondy slapping him repeatedly and there's a great sense of motion and speed. Something, it quickly becomes clear to him, is legitimately dragging him by the ankle through an endless morass of slime, darkness and foul stench.

Possibly through poop, it belatedly occurs to Odisseus.

Twisting about, the Ortok lashes out in all directions, attempting to sink his claws into something hard and stable – the ground, ideally – to somehow impede this fisher of Ortoks. His claws only rake through more pliable material, something wet and fibrous, shearing away like paper beneath his paws.

His surroundings so surrealistic, Odisseus is forced to wonder whether he's actually still dreaming and whether that dream simply transformed into the blackest of nightmares.

For what feels like many minutes, he's tugged along like this, all his flailing useless to resist whatever's dragging him along. His eyesight slowly starts to adjust to his dim surroundings, providing Odisseus the faintest suggestion of shapes and outlines, as they whip past him on his way to wherever.

By craning his neck, Odisseus can catch a glimpse at the thing that's ensnared his ankle. A glistening cord of inhuman muscle is cinched tightly around his poor hind paw. All of a sudden, the tentacle cranks suddenly upward, hoisting Odisseus off the spongy ground and dangling him precariously in the air.

Below him, Odisseus sees a circular pattern of faint light, tiny bulbs of glowing orange, that helpfully illuminate the ghastly scene. What Odisseus sees is a gargantuan alien mouth, a void full of bizarrely-shaped teeth, fleshy flaps and a deeper darkness somewhere inside. From the angle that the tentacle dangles him, it's an easy assumption that he's about to be fed to said yawning mouth.

He's surprisingly calm, Odisseus discovers, seconds away from falling into a gigantic alien vagina-mouth-thing. There's none of the shrieking, frenzied-clawing panic one might assume would accompany so gruesome a fate. It's an inarguably bizarre fate that he's found, down this black abyss at the outer edge of the known galaxy. At the same time, there's a certain unique, almost pioneering quality to such an end. He'll certainly be the first Ortok this unimaginable subterranean horror has ever eaten.

That's when the whole creature convulses, shuddering with shock or pain and Odisseus is thrown clear. He sails through the muggy darkness, the orange lights vanishing from sight somewhere behind him. He comes to a violent landing amid some shrubbery that, for all its effectiveness as a cushion, reeks to all the moons of Jotor.

Aching and disoriented, the confused Odisseus eventually crawls up onto his elbows and squints around, attempting to gauge exactly what happened and how much danger he's somehow still in.

The darkness, some distance away, is pierced by a flickering flame. Little more than a burning torch, this humble light is a beacon in this pure black night, spelling out the Ortok's surroundings all the more.

As predicted, the prone Odisseus is up to his neck in vegetation. Slick black leaves and waving fronds form an endless undergrowth in every direction. His theory about a gargantuan monstrous mouth is partially right, he discovers. In the halo of torchlight, the creature's revealed to be a behemothic flower, its great leathery petals a dozen feet long and tipped with glowing orange bulbs. At its center yawns open a toothy maw, fangs dripping a yellowish ichor.

An athletic humanoid figure stands in defiance of the drooling beast. Brown as mud, she hefts the blazing torch in one hand, a glittering sword in the other.

As Odisseus watches, phosphorescent tendrils spring to life from the surrounding vegetation and snap like whips at the lone figure. With feline grace, she dodges aside, swiping with sword and torch, fending off every twining tentacle. Transfixed by this heroic spectacle, Odisseus climbs to his feet to get a better look.

Following the light of the torch, Odisseus watches the figure dance back and forth around the central bulb, sword slashing with deadly effect. He watches the monstrous flower writhe in pain from each blow. He watches lithe humanoid deal a few savage and conclusive blows to the flowery behemoth. The scent of yellow pus reaching his nostrils, Odisseus makes a small, disgusted noise and that makes the figure spin, a coiled spring, ready for another attacker or three.

Moira Quicksilver is drastically changed by her primal environment. Grime and soil are streaked across her clothing, her face and her hair. The weapon in her hand is undeniably of Gitter make – wooden hilt, glassrock blade, wicker weaving keeping the whole thing together. The crackling light of her torch catches in Moira's eyes, revealing something utterly cold and primordial. In that moment, she's the original hunter, with sharp objects and open flame for her weapons.

"Good," she croaks, when she recognizes Odisseus. "You're awake."

Moira has become pretty good at distinguishing the ones that shoot darts from the ones that don't shoot darts and this one definitely shoots darts.

The flower is displaying all the telltale signs. Like a miscreant about to hawk a loogie, the plant arches its stem backward ever so slightly. It even appears to purse its petals into a pout before it lunges forward, launching a featureless black dart to impale its prey. Its prey, Moira Quicksilver, isn't about to stand idly by and get impaled by some garden variety poison-dart-shooting death plant.

Instead, she spins easily aside, extrapolating the flower's angle and trajectory. At the exact right moment, she swats downward with her glassrock blade. The tiny javelin falls neatly into two pieces at her feet.

The flower does not appear disappointed or embarrassed by its failure. Instead, it falls eerily still, fading in amongst the rest of its inanimate brethren. An instant later, it's perfectly concealed among its fellows, looking completely harmless to the untrained eye.

A painful fate averted, Moira swings the torch back and forth along the cavern's wall, searching for any more surprises. Recognizable only by the indigo – not blue – spots spread on its petals, Moira quickly learned the knack for distinguishing between them, after the first few darts fired her way came a little too close for comfort.

Uncommonly clever for a plant, this particular species was fond of smuggling itself among a patch of its harmless, non-artillery-firing cousins. From this disguised perch, it could easily catch its prey unawares and stick them with a thorny projectile as they passed. To what end, Moira has no idea but she's certain, from the smell of the ill-aimed barbs, she's better off avoiding their nasty toxin.

As far as ambush predators go, this one earned Moira's grudging respect. She called them blue devils; as their unofficial discoverer, Moira reckons that's their name now.

Moira Quicksilver is surprised to discover she's actually kinda enjoying Fernhollow.

The Skyscratch thought this a fate worse than death, banishment to a den of monsters. Something instinctual inside Moira Quicksilver, however, rose eagerly to this impossible challenge. This was undeniably a garden of death, a dozen painful ends around every corner. To Moira's hardwired survival instincts, that's kinda what made the whole ordeal so exhilarating. Here, Moira is reduced to her simplest weapons – her wit, her instincts and her physique.

There's no sense in denying the inevitable. These are unquestionably the last hours and days of their three miserable lives. Those lives, Moira knows, will end with their corpses thrown as fertilizer to some abominable man-eating plant.

That taken for granted, then, Moira Quicksilver is determined to put all her survival skills and physical conditioning to the ultimate test. She will stave off that gruesome fate as long as she possibly can, with bonus points for each member of her crew she also keeps alive.

They'd assumed they were being tossed into the gullet of some unfathomable god-monster. This was true in a certain sense and too imaginative in another. In accordance with their quite literal naming convention, Fernhollow turned out to be just that – an underground hollow, filled with ferns. When she and her unfortunate Gitter falling partner hit the ground, they landed atop a soft bed of vegetation, courteous enough to break what otherwise would have been a lethal fall.

This came as a quite a relief to Moira but the Skyscratch soldier was of an entirely different mind. Overcome with quivering religious terror of the place, it was a simple matter for Moira to swipe one of its weapons – a dirk in its hands that becomes a saber in Moira's – and slice her former executioner to pieces.

Her weapons were few but vital. She was armed with the Skyscratch sword, really a knife that she could wield like a scimitar. She constructed a torch from piece of broken poleaxe haft and a few sparks off the glassrock blade. Most important, Moira came equipped with decades of mental and physical preparation for exactly this type of nightmare scenario.

So armed, Moira Quicksilver, the one woman in the galaxy most likely to survive this deathtrap, set about exploring this outlandish underworld she'd been dropped into. It wasn't long before she discovered it was chock full of monsters.

The cavern's exact dimensions are still a mystery. From her rangings, Moira could extrapolate that it was much larger than the opening they were tossed down would suggest. She'd estimate several mottibles in diameter, at its widest points. The cavern's ceiling varies drastically in height. In some places, it soars far above the reach of her torch's feeble light. In others, it stoops so low that Moira must crouch and wriggle to pass beneath.

It's also unbearably stuffy, devoid of breeze or passing drafts. Add to that the unbearable humidity, the air so thick with moisture missing from the surface, and Moira occasionally feels like she's swimming rather than walking. There's also the unbearable smell, the rancid stench of rotting vegetation that oozes from every nook and cranny.

Plants carpet the cavern's floors, walls and ceilings. Ten jungle's worth of slippery black shrugs, ferns, fronds and other undergrowth rises to Moira's waist. Curtains of ivy plaster the walls, hanging down in strips so thick that Moira could disappear completely into their tapestries of colorless leaves. Vines swing down from the lower patches of ceiling like strands of terrestrial seaweed, these sections resembling a forest inverted, its canopy scratching the ground.

The vast majority of the vegetation appears completely benign, no different from the harmless flora of a million other habitable planets. The occasional exceptions, however, are deadly enough to make Moira fondly recall the bloodthirsty jungles of Baz.

Blue devils are hidden snipers, requiring Moira's constant vigilance wherever she ranges. Individually, these're best dispatched with a sword strike to the stem. In large groves, they're best avoided altogether.

Vinemaws send seeking tentatcles through the underbrush in search of unconscious Ortoks to feed on. Most vulnerable at their epicenter, the fight is best taken straight to the flower's monstrous maw, as insane as that sounds, since the tentacles range far across the cavern and are exceptionally well-camouflaged. Three such vinemaws has Moira slain so far, slowly perfecting her technique for the inevitable fourth.

Thornclouds were another matter entirely. In broad daylight and against ditrogen weapons, the thorncloud proved a near invincible foe. Down here, by guttering torchlight and against glassrock blades, it became a carnivorous god, more akin to a hurricane or a black hole than a viable combatant. Only once had she encountered the creature down here, little more than a passing shudder through the underbrush, and she gave it the widest berth possible.

All these and more does Moira encounter on her perimeter of the cavern. She'd briefly entertained the thought of inviting her two companions to accompany her on this scouting mission. Then Nemo opened his mouth and complained about leaves in his ass and Moira instantly knew she'd be better off on her own.

They'd only slow her down anyway.

Nemo, screaming obscenities all the way to the bottom, was the easiest to locate among Fernhollow's wilderness. It was Odisseus, thrown down first and knocked over the head, that Moira nearly didn't find before it was too late. Only when an nearby vinemaw took an interest in something that wasn't her did Moira get a bead on the Ortok's position

She'd left them both huddled around the campfire at her temporary bivouac. As far as Moira would range, she's careful to always keep the distant glow of that fire on the edge of her awareness, lest her torch unexpectedly die and she be plunged into impenetrable blackness.

Once she's shirked the blue devil, Moira sweeps the torch back and forth along the cavern wall. With each swing, the grasping shapes of leaves cast queer shadows on the surround. Her sword she points outward, toward the greater jungle, ready for a vinemaw's lurking tentacle or, moons forbid, a thorncloud to come calling.

Nothing hungry and botanical does comes calling, much to Moira's relief. What does come, however, something quite unexpected, is a draft.

A breeze brushes the flames of her torch ever so slightly from Moira's left. She almost doesn't notice, too busy scanning the greenery for danger, when something caresses the hanging vines on the cavern's western wall.

Moira stands there a moment, squinting at the vines as they sway almost imperceptibly back and forth in the flickering torchlight. It's not imaginary, she decides, after a long moment. There is a gentle current of air, jangling the vines against one another and batting playfully at her torchlight.

What would otherwise be an utterly banal observation is transformed, under these dire straits, into a blessing on high, a godsend that pessimistic Moira wouldn't possibly have prayed for.

She inches towards the swaying vines, a little unwilling to investigate and disprove this faint ray of hope. The tip of her sword parts the leafy curtain and reveals an even stronger breeze, whistling past Moira and into the main cavern.

Her suspicions confirmed, Moira flicks her wrist and the glassrock blade slices clean, spongy black vines falling to a wet heap at her feet.

Moira stands before the entrance to a small tunnel – narrow, utterly dark but with a current of fresh air wafting through – and her best chance of escape from Fernhollow.

Odisseus sits up suddenly straight. "Moons."

"Hm?" grunts Nemo, his attention far, far away.

"Gimme a second," the Ortok implores, shutting his eyes and attempting to summon that spectral set of the Lover's blueprints he'd memorized. Both paws held in midair, Odisseus scans through his memory, attempting to recall or imagine a particular patch of the Briza Light Freighter's outer hull, a landscape he knows better than the capes and coastlines of his birth.

"The crawlspace," he mutters tentatively, testing the sound of the words together before he makes any promises.

"Whazzat?" Nemo grunts again, his speech mangled by the heel of his hand, pressed into his right cheek.

"The crawlspace," Odisseus repeats with a fresh burst of confidence. "It's accessible from the lower ventilation duct."

Across the flickering fire, Nemo's expression betrays neither understanding nor interest. "Come again?" he requests, devoid of enthusiasm.

The Ortok is far too invested in his revelation to give a toss about Nemo's lack of enthusiasm. "I may be overestimating the size of the openings," he stipulates, more to further his own calculations than to explain anything to his saltbrother, "and we'd need to remove about half a dozen stoppage grates but–"

Here, he pauses – not for effect, but rather to run one last diagnostic on his theory – before he dares give voice to his sudden epiphany. "I think," he announces slowly, "I know a way back onto the ship."

"Okay." Nemo accepts the news with surprising solemnity. He cranes his head upward, to consider Fernhollow's distant and invisible ceiling. "The ship's up there. We're," he drops his gaze back down, to consider the fire, his smoldering Gitterpeach and the sinister shrubbery that encircles them, "down here. Forever."

He gives that final word – "forever" – ample to time to marinate in Odisseus' mind. The longer it does, the more the Ortok's heart sinks, falling from the euphoric heights of potential to wallow back in hopelessness. "Yeah, right," he mutters, his words slurred together into one noncommittal sound. "I forgot."

There's nowhere else for Odisseus to look but back into the orange coals of the bonfire. Like shipwrecked survivors, Nemo and Odisseus squat around the fire, the dark jungle looming ominously around them.

They'd scavenged their seats – a rare stone for Nemo, a mildewed log for Odisseus – from the surrounding area, never daring to go more than an arm or tail's length from the fire's radius. The Skyscratch warrior provided the only viable firewood, everything else down here so sodden with moisture and mildew. Odisseus pretends the thought of burning a sentient's corpse for kindling didn't make him feel queasy.

Their remaining supplies consisted of what little fruit they could scavenge from the cactoid's body, what wasn't pulped in the precipitous fall – four whole peaches in total. One of those four Nemo halfheartedly attempts to cook at the end of a length of stick.

This is the state Moira left them, an unknown number of hours ago, when she'd stalked off into the surrounding wilderness. For all they knew, she could be hours dead, throttled or devoured or eviscerated by one of the numerous killer plants that made Fernhollow its home.

Now and again, something will move somewhere in that morbid black jungle. Odisseus will hear the rustle of leaves, the snap of fragile stems, the shuffling of enormous somethings through the undergrowth. It takes every ounce of his willpower not to imagine what mindless monstrosity is lurking beyond the fire's meager light.

Their inevitable death so close at hand, it's impossible for Odisseus not to fantasize about escape – from this hollow, from this planet, from this deranged way of life.

Through the wavering flames, Odisseus notices a new scowl on Nemo's face. A spark of interest, perhaps aroused by the Ortok's aborted attempt at conversation, appears to have awoken something, a question, in Nemo. "What were you saying before?"

Now it's the Ortok's turn to feign misunderstanding. "When?"

"Before. Right before they pitched you in."

Before he answers, Odisseus takes a moment to study his saltbrother's face, his posture, his tone of voice. He's fully aware, Odisseus decides, what he's asking, the nest of agwaifapedes he's about to kick. Nemo is picking at another argument, the way one might pick at a scab.

"That you're a selfish little pissant," Odisseus confirms, rising to the challenge, "throwing a twenty-eight year tantrum."

"Oh." This statement stews in the deafening silence, broken by the crackling fire, the sizzling Gitterpeach and the odd jungle noise from somewhere far and away. "A tantrum?"

"Yeah." The Ortok is suddenly weary, forced to explain the punchline of a joke he wasn't that particularly proud of anyway. "All you wanna do is make people notice you. You've convinced yourself that if you do enough terrible things, the galaxy's gonna hafta stop and notice you."

"I mean," Nemo recoils, shrugging with self-evidence, "they did, though. The galaxy noticed me."

"Oh, they most certainly did," Odisseus agrees readily enough. "Everyone agrees you're very good at being terrible. Far as I can tell, though, there's no real reason behind it." He starts to wave his paws around, getting a little caught up in the rant, despite himself. "You make all this noise, you cause all this damage, you burn half the galaxy to the ground. Why?" Both paws slap down against his blubbery thighs. "To say you did. To see the look on people's faces." The Ortok stares into the fire, his point made, his hand played. "To get attention."

To his credit, Nemo takes longer to digest this information than Odisseus assumed he would, the defensive bastard that he is. "I think that's unfair."

"I'm shocked and astounded."

"Not really sure," Nemo ventures, "where you, of all people, get off saying that."

"You may not realize or acknowledge this," Odisseus leans forward to inform him, "but I'm the universe's foremost authority on you and why you do the insane things you do. I feel like, out of anyon–"

"That's not what I mean."

There's a rare edge to Nemo's voice – not the flinty note that comes into his speech when he's threatening someone, not the half-suppressed snort when he's mocking someone. This is something brittle, something vulnerable, that Odisseus has not heard in a long, long time.

"It kinda amazes me," the Captain admits, "that you can't read between the lines. That you don't see what all this," he gestures at the surrounding vegetation, apparently meant to represent his career of murder and mayhem, "has actually been about."

"And what's that?" Odisseus begs the question, keeping his tone neutral.

Nemo allows a pregnant pause. "You have to ask?"

This perks Odisseus up, his dreams of tranquil waters and picturesque coastlines undimmed in his memory. "You're kidding," he blurts. "Now, you wanna talk about this?"

Nemo shrugs. "Sounds like you could use a reminder."

"A reminder?" Odisseus discovers himself snarling through gritted teeth. "You think I don't remember? Where we came from, what's behind us?" He stares daggers through the licking flames at his saltbrother.

"What was taken from us," Nemo asserts, as patronizingly as possible. "By them."

"They didn't take buhoxshit from you," counters Odisseus, claws dug into his knees, his whole body and posture committed to finally, finally airing this grievance. "They didn't burn down your village, they didn't slaughter your family while you–"

"They did burn my village!" explodes Nemo, that fragility shattered. An anger that might quail the hearts of the civilized galaxy, the righteous rage of a homicidal Galactic Menace, sounds petty and childish in this uncaring cave, to ears well-worn to his petulant fits. "That's exactly what they did!"

"It was my village too," Odisseus mutters, through teeth still gritted.

"Then why the fuck," Nemo snaps, his hair flapping from the sheer force of his frustration, "are you taking blooming exception with me? How do you sit there and grumble about engine parts and fuel intake when the people who destroyed our home are out there fine and dandy?" He stares, wild-eyed and panting from his tirade. "I'm everyday boiling with anger – still. Still."

"You think you are."

"Excuse me?"

"Or rather," Odisseus amends calmly, "you want everyone else to think you are." Odisseus feels his heart pound and his chest tighten. "That whole thing, what happened back then, can't possibly be about you and you're not so stupid as to think so." His paws tremble, his fur stands on end and his tail carves anxious furrows in the mud behind him. "It's too big. You understand what I'm saying? You say they took everything from you. They took everything from everybody. There's an entire planet – two whole species – scattered across the galaxy now, because of what they did." He points a claw across the fire. "Don't you dare sit here and pretend that your hard-knock life was the worst fucking disaster to come outta Pequod."

Smoke stings the Ortok's eyes as he continues, smearing his vision. "They made you feel small," he summarizes, his anger cooling, his breathing regulating. "They made you feel small and you hate feeling small."

Nemo answers with silence. His vision obscured, Odisseus can't tell what expression his saltbrother might be wearing right now. The galaxy's foremost expert on Nehel Morel, he can't even make an educated guess.

"The point is," Odisseus starts to assuage, once the silence has become painful, "I thought I was gonna die. Is the reason I started to say all that stuff."

The foliage past Nemo's right shoulder snaps and sways, something emerging at speed through the underbrush. Odisseus doesn't have the time or the wherewithal to cry out, reach for a weapon, even clamber to his feet before there's a third figure among them, standing and panting on the edge of the campsite.

"This way," beckons Moira Quicksilver, clearly having sprinted halfway across the cavern to reach them. "I think there might be a way out."

CHAPTER 13

Moira hacks left and right. The glassrock blade hews through the undergrowth like it was born to it, severing and scattering greenery with each swing. By inches and degrees, Moira is carving a semi-navigable path, straight down the center of the tunnel.

It's a small miracle that any draft reached Moira at all, down a passage this crooked and clogged with vegetation. The tunnel wends its erratic way beneath the earth, shaped by countless centuries of erosion. Down this tributary trickles, the underbrush of Fernhollow, all dangling vines and thick ferns. It's up to Moira and her trusty glassrock sword to blaze a trail, following both the curve of the tunnel and her hunch.

She's filled with new energy whenever the occasional breeze brushes past her, sometimes strong enough to jostle the hanging growth. No aid or encouragement, after all, is likely to come from either of her companions, both lagging along behind.

In the case of Odisseus, it could be argued that his weapon – the business end of the Skyscratch's spear – isn't well suited to a machete's work. Nemo's weapon, however – a Gitter hatchet, swollen to a battleaxe in anyone else's hand – would be ideal for such work. When, early on this expedition, Moira suggested as much, he'd mumbled something about "torch duty" and would not be baited further.

It was hardly unusual for Nemo to shirk actual work or responsibility. It's extremely unusual for Nemo to keep quiet. Since Moira'd arrived back at the campsite, he'd not volunteered a single syllable – not a complaint, not a comment, not an asinine remark – this whole time. Since Odisseus too had lapsed into a very similar silence around the same time, it didn't take much for Moira to suss out they were having a spat.

Of course she'd overheard their raised voices as she approached the campsite. Something in their tone, however, was different, discernible even at a considerable distance. Those two couldn't exchange six words without coming to blows; Moira's not especially surprised they'd fight the second she left them alone. This time, though, there was something particularly portentous in the words she'd overheard and the way those words were used that told Moira she was better off ignorant.

Let them have their lover's quarrel. Long as they don't obstruct this longshot escape plan of hers, Moira could care less how they spend their last few hours alive.

Seemingly sick of sitting around and staring at each other, Nemo and Odisseus were pretty pliable, even marginally enthusiastic, about Moira's discovery. They'd both seen the wisdom, without too much prompting, in marching to one's death with weapons in hand, rather than twiddling one's thumbs and waiting for the hunger pangs to start.

Should worse come to worst, Moira knows she could scrounge enough supplies from Fernhollow's wilderness to keep one mouth fed – just not three.

It need never come that, though. At the moment, survival-mode Moira Quicksilver is committing all her resources, physical and mental, to following this tunnel to where it might lead and determining whether it might lead back onto the surface.

Never mind that it might dead end. Never mind that they might become irreparably lost down here. All that matters now is seeing this passageway through to its conclusion.

Moira ignores the soreness in her shoulder as she swats through each curtain of hanging vines. She ignores the ache in her knees and feet as she trudges through the muddy undergrowth. She ignores the pain in her lower back as she stoops beneath every low ceiling of rock.

All her toil is soon rewarded. A little ways ahead, the tunnel flares suddenly wider, opening into an actual chamber. With a succinct military hand gesture that's utterly lost on Nemo, Moira beckons him and the torch he carries forward to investigate further.

At the tunnel's mouth, the vegetation drops suddenly away, leaving only moss and mud to coat the cavern floor. The torchlight creeps down what Moira is dismayed to discover are forking passages. She sighs inwardly, standing at a literal crossroads.

Nemo's torch proves ultimately unnecessary when Moira steps into the chamber. Her gaze is drawn upward, toward the feeble rays of light that stream angelically down from above. Far overhead, Moira spots cracks in the ceiling, slivers of magnificent sunshine sneaking down into the darkness of the underworld.

This glimpse – tantalizing and unreachable – only hardens Moira's resolve to escape, to break free, not to die in this dank hole.

"It's daytime," Nemo utters, that same longing clear in his voice.

"Which way?" wonders Odisseus, sweeping his speartip past each branching passage.

Moira has no answer for this. "Take five," she suggests instead and heads towards the nearest side tunnel to investigate their options.

This suggestion is met with universal relief. Over her shoulder, Moira hears the sounds of Nemo's axehead and, more crucially, his torch hitting the mud. "That goes out," she reminds him, "you're getting left."

Moira doesn't turn to catch Nemo's reaction. She does hear, in a mocking falsetto, his very convincing Moira impression. "You're getting left."

She wanders a few steps down the first tunnel, her elongated shadow reaching away into darkness. She stands there a few moments, uncertain what she's really looking for – a change in elevation, a stronger breeze, any indication of where she should lead them next. On a lark, she even sniffs once, to test the air, but everything in this subterranean jungle reeks.

It isn't until she's investigating the third otherwise identical passage that something quite literally jumps out at her.

The smell down the third tunnel nearly gags Moira. There's something utterly putrid down there, a stench both new and familiar. She opens her mouth, to make a wordless sound of disgust, when she suddenly remembers that smell.

Moira stops dead. She brandishes the glassrock blade, once a machete, now a saber. She peers down the dark corridor, wondering whether hunger and sleeplessness are playing tricks on her.

Then she catches a flash of movement. Something among the inert vegetation shifts.

"Torch," Moira barks, edging backward into the main chamber.

"What for?"

"Torch!" she barks again, taking the saber in two hands as a lopsided figure staggers into view from down the tunnel.

Its trunk is twisted partially around, the spiny ridges all along its body cruelly corkscrewed. Several of its limbs are withered and hang uselessly from their joints. The left leg is cockled gruesomely to the side, its gait hobbled and almost comical.

"Uh," Odisseus stammers, spear at the ready.

"Moons," remarks Nemo, sitting on his ass in the mud, "these fucking guys again."

A second cactoid comes limping down another passage. A third, all armless and wobbling, follows the first. Soon, they're shambling from every opening in the chamber, their putrid stench only growing in strength as more emerge from the darkness.

Moira keeps scooting backward, the deformed Gitter thronging around the three beleaguered pirates. Weapons out, the torch flickering at their feet, they press together, back-to-back-to-back.

"Ideas?" proposes Odisseus.

"Don't die," is all the advice Moira can give.

They come unarmed, their limbs outstretched and grasping desperately. They come in the dozens, streaming from the tunnels and shuffling towards the sunlight and the intruders. There is no alternative, with every escape route choked with enemies – they must fight.

Moira makes the first move. She lunges forward, chopping hard with the glassrock sword. She doesn't bother thrusting into that resilient trunk. Instead, she throws as much strength as she can into her chop, aiming for the highest shoulder joint. The glassrock cuts deeper than she predicts, slicing the Gitter nearly in half and stopping it dead in its tracks.

It's unconcerned, apparently, with the three-foot blade lodged through its torso. Reaching what working arms it can, it attempts to embrace or throttle Moira, she's really not sure which.

A few strong tugs make no progress on the stuck sword. Cactoid hands tugging at her clothing, Moira throws up a baby-stomper, plants it firmly against the trunk and kicks with desperation. The sword comes free at an askance enough angle to rip the cactus fully in two.

The Gitter topples into a messy heap of twitching limbs, green flesh and milky liquid. The kill buys Moira zero time, more and more cacti crunching their brother's corpse to mulch.

Moira shifts a little backward and immediately bumps into a great wall of shaggy Ortok. With no more wiggle room, all she can do is heft the sword and slice forward. Here, her electrobaton and Tebi-Gali have no bearing. This is broadsword work, the saber far too heavy for anything but hacking and slashing. Definitely the strongest swordsman of the three, Moira knows there's no way even she could cut a pathway through this forest of attackers.

Odisseus is rather thankful for the length of his spear. Originally, he'd assumed he'd drawn the short straw in the choice of weapons, considering both the sword and the axe. Against a horde of attackers, however, that extra few feet of distance has saved his life thrice in the past minute of fighting.

He currently keeps three at bay, swapping the spearhead between any that come too close. A spear through the midsection has little effect on a Gitter, however, much to the Ortok's chagrin. Odisseus needs to throw his whole weight behind the stab to impede them any and that runs the risk of losing the weapon inside the cactoid's body.

All the while, his nose burns, the plangent cries of the abominable crowd overwhelming his senses.

{Bless us, Vesselborn}, Odisseus hears them pleading. {We are unworthy...}

Surrounded, pierced by a dozen spines, blinded by spores, Odisseus snarls like a beast, matching their desperation with ferocity.

"Who the fuck," he growls, swatting away one outstretched limb with the spear's haft, "are these guys?"

"Who the fuck," pants Nemo, his axe flying wildly, "gives a shit?"

While Odisseus is occupied fending off the cactoid to his right, one comes stumbling forward from the left. Odisseus wheels his spear around, unable to fully raise the weapon at speed. The spearhead, then, plunges into the bulb of flesh that passes for the Gitter's kneecap. In a burst of milk, the knee gives way, coming completely free when Odisseus wrenches the spear away.

{Forgive us, Vesselborn...}

Down comes the Gitter, its shattered leg giving way beneath it. A moment later, it's trampled by the press of cacti behind, disappearing under thorny feet.

Fast as he can, Odisseus whips the spear back, to discourage either of his other two attackers from catching him off-guard. It's immediately clear, however, that against the surging tide of cactoids, that no matter how hard he fights, how savagely he snarls, all they could do is lose ground and be overrun.

{Take us from this darkness. Have mercy on thine unworthy, Vesselborn...}

To either side, Odisseus feels the same conclusion dawn on Moira and Nemo as their fighting becomes all the more desperate.

To his left, Moira's glassrock sword is ever in motion, the meager sunlight dancing off the swinging blade. She's become an artist of dismemberment, cactoid limbs littering the ground at her feet. This may buy her a moment or two but, if combat against the Gitter has taught them anything, it's that these foes have limbs to spare.

She still handles her weapon with a grace neither he nor especially Nemo can hope to match. From the corner of his eye, Odisseus watches her duck and weave, avoiding any grasping cactoid hand that comes near and punishing each with a clean cut through an elbow or wrist.

If anyone stands a chance of cutting a path through this horde, it's Moira Quicksilver.

Nemo, however, is hopeless. He's surprisingly effective in his hopelessness but is nonetheless destined to get torn to pieces.

To the Ortok's right, Nemo's battleaxe freewheels about, swung with no balance or discipline. In a method that would appall disciplined Moira, Nemo throws his whole weight behind each tremendous haymaker, forgetting his footing with each swipe. He'd – of course – had the good fortune to choose the glassrock hatchet, a weapon specifically designed to fell trees. Whenever he chances to actually land one of his wild blows, it utterly annihilates his intended target, pulping cactoid flesh like a squashed melon.

Neither Odisseus nor the incoming Gitter quite know what to make of his erratic and unpredictable fighting stance. Staggering drunkenly around his corner of the carnage, his footwork is always a dodgy thing, a stiff breeze all it would take to topple him to the ground.

This is how he's going to die, it occurs to Odisseus then, catching occasional glimpses of his floundering saltbrother. He'll overcommit to an attack, surrender his balance and go tumbling forward, where he'll be swallowed by the sea of spiny flesh that breaks before them. The 34th Galactic Menace will die down here, the ultimate ignominy, swarmed by mutant cactus monsters on a planet only a hundred offworlders have ever touched down on.

Indeed, Odisseus watches it happen, watches Nemo flap his arms to regain his balance, watches him plant a foot backward on something unstable. With a strangled curse, the Captain flips over like a cartoon character and splats his ass down in the muck.

He's completely vulnerable, his weapon thrown from his grip, his belly up like an overturned crab. The malformed Gitter seize their opportunity, lumbering forward, reaching green and twisted hands out to apprehend him.

{Bless us, Vesselborn}, they're hissing in Odisseus' nostrils. {Make us whole again...}

Odisseus freezes. His saltbrother in peril, he has a second's window to act, to leap into violence on Nemo's behalf and rescue him from these monsters. Yet, he hesitates. Something interrupts the biological imperative, hardwired into his Ortoki brain, that demands he give his life to save his saltbrother's. There he stands, spear in hand, watching slack-jawed as a kicking and cursing Nemo is seized by half-a-dozen cactoid hands, sinking their needles into his trousers and robe.

Then Odisseus, too late, snaps back to his senses.

With a bestial roar, the Ortok lunges. He leads heavily with the spear, burying the weapon up to its broken haft through not one, not two but three adjacent Gitter trunks. Impaled on his spear like an unappetizing appetizer, the cacti hesitate, comically attempting to extricate themselves by pushing this way or pulling that way, Nemo forgotten at their feet. His weapon disappeared, Odisseus scrambles backward to escape their groping limbs, nearly bumping into Moira and throwing her off her routine.

This distraction, however, proves to be precisely what Nemo needs.

Rising with recovered axe in hand, he goes hewing through each of the pinioned Gitter. He slices and dices any trunks or limbs he can reach, as easily as though he were simply trimming the verge. What he makes is a horrific amalgam of stumbling legs and severed limbs, all held together by the Ortok's spear. This serves as an adequate barricade to stem the tide of cacti, for a moment and no more.

There's a look exchanged between Nemo and Odisseus. Shamed and uneasy over his hesitation, Odisseus can't quite meet the Captain's gaze. The most attention he's paid Odisseus since the argument, Nemo's reaction – gratitude, suspicion and apology, all rolled into one – remains inscrutable as ever.

"What'd you trip on?" wonders Odisseus aloud, like there wasn't a horde of depraved Gitter an arm's reach away.

"Oh," remarks Nemo, stooping to retrieve something. He comes back to his feet with the torch, a little guttered now from lying in the grime all this time. He sours his expression, considering the open flame. "Stupid thing," he resolves petulantly and, heedless as a toddler, tosses the thing away – straight into the mass of Gitter.

The reaction is instant. The first cactus struck hardly reacts, the length of wood clacking off its unrelenting flesh. The flame, however, finds an eager host in that flesh. A second later, the Gitter's whole head-and-shoulders go up like a candle.

A column of fire, staggering about in agony, inspires a sudden panic among the Gitter ranks. The fire spreads like an infection among the close-packed cacti, the blaze growing brighter and hotter with each passing second. Soon, one whole half of the cavern is raging inferno, a dozen cactoids flailing uselessly as the hungry fire chews through their bodies like kindling.

White smoke threatens to clog and overtake the close chamber, escaping only through the cracks in the ceiling high above. Cactus by cactus, the blaze overtakes the entire horde as Nemo and Odisseus stand, transfixed by the spectacle. Now and then, the Captain swats away a conflagrant cactus that staggers too close. Odisseus, meanwhile, nearly wretches from the combined stink of smoldering flesh and panicked, rapturous spores.

{Cleanse us, Vesselborn! We are unclean! Free our unworthy souls for God Beyond!}

Eventually, Moira's fighting slows and stops, coming to gape at Nemo's handiwork. The three of them stand there, watching the fireworks, a few score lives going up in smoke. Then Odisseus hears something, growing louder and more insistent over the crackling flames and general pandemonium.

Nemo is laughing.

It starts as a low chortle, somewhere in the back of his throat. It gains strength and mirth, however, the longer the fire burns. Soon, he's cackling, clapping his hands delightedly, like a child playing peekaboo. He points, giggling, at a pair of Gitter that, blinded by smoke and flame, slam into one another and collapse to the mud.

At its guffawing heights, it's the sort of laugh a younger Nemo might have laughed. Odisseus could imagine it perfectly, echoing down an airlock during a boarding action or peaking the comm's audioceiver during a dogfight or while watching the Valladian Shipping Line burn.

Before long, all the swarming Gitter are reduced to heaped charcoal on the cavern floor or have gone shambling down the side passageways. Of those that escape, their flaming bodies light the passages as they stagger away, become giant waddling torches of their own.

The three pirates are left bewildered at the center of a smoking circle of charred Gitter corpses, Nemo still twittering a little.

"Where'd the, uh," Odisseus ventures, his voice deafeningly loud in the sudden silence, "torch get to?"

Moira sweeps an arm across the field of burning cactoids, a dozen open flames licking hungrily among them.

Nemo takes this suggestion to heart. He wades into the ashes, looking for a likely candidate and wrapping his robe's sleeve around his bare hand. The one he chooses, the grisliest choice possible, is visibly a Gitter's hand, its withered fingers wreathed in flame.

"So!" Nemo, bearing aloft his new torch, turns back to his comrades. "Which way're we headed?"

Moira can read the signs. With every step, she's more and more certain she chose the right path.

For one thing, the ground's substantially muddier down this passage. The moss has given way to a slurry of free-standing water, occasionally trickling past them in little streams. For another, the vegetation's begun to fall away, exposing more blank wet stone. This doesn't, as Odisseus makes the point, lessen the stench of offal and fertilizer that comes wafting down the tunnel. Even this, though, Moira knows is another good sign.

Lastly, the breeze grows still stronger. Beneath all the stink, that breeze ferries something else, something dusty and arid, to their noses, something that reminds Moira of the desert world above. By now, that breeze has become Moira's guiding light, the beacon that will lead her from this dark underworld, no matter the path's twists and turns. As long as Moira places her faith in that breeze, she and her train of followers will win through to the outside world.

She keeps silent, however, even as her certainty grows. Should she be proven wrong, should this whole tremendous gamble explode in her face, she'll not give certain members of the Lover's crew the slightest chance to mock or disparage her.

On the other hand, should she be proven right, Moira is prepared to endure zero buhoxshit about her adverse weather gear, her trail rations, her Tebi-Gali routines. Without Moira's "survivalist whack-job shit", they'd all be fertilizer by now.

The group's morale – by which she means Nemo's morale – had actually been on the mend. Paradoxically, that life-and-death struggle with the deformed Gitter had only hardened their resolve to survive, rather than plunging them further into hopelessness. Moira's not certain what a second such attack might do to their spirits, particularly with Odisseus down a weapon. She does know that, this time, she'd lead with the torch.

The Captain seems to have overcome whatever his querulous bad mood was about. Apparently, the death and destruction he'd accidentally sown amongst the Gitter came as quite a boost to Nemo's downcast mood. Now, he was skipping along quite happily. He was helpful with the torch when Moira requested it and he could even be heard, every now and again, to whistle a bar or two of Cosmic Vomit's Plagues For Sale.

Nothing like immolating a few people to put the spring back in Nemo's step.

Odisseus, meanwhile, continues his sulking unabated. For the moment, Moira chooses to assume he's taking his rearguard duties very seriously and leave things at that.

There's not much conversation on this last leg. Odisseus nurses his funk, Moira concentrates on trailblazing and Nemo hums idly.

The final nail in the "Moira's right, everyone else's an idiot" coffin comes when they round the next bend. Sunshine peeks into view around a jut of jagged rock, catching Moira fully in the face and practically blinding her. So long spent squinting in Fernhollow's darkness, she cowers before the purple blaze, throwing an arm up to shield the glare.

The feel of sun on her face, the smell of ashen wasteland on the breeze, the blistering heat from somewhere beyond and above; Moira knows for a certainty that she's made it. She lowers her arm and takes a few triumphant steps from the tunnel and into the Splitspine nursery.

Walls of familiar stone – dry and jagged towards the top, slick and muddy towards the bottom – yawn out to either side, describing the depth and diameter of an impressive sinkhole. Before thoughts of climbing those bare rock walls can even occur to her, Moira's eyes fall upon the length of Skyscratch-woven cord, dangling down from the sinkhole's edge, the very one Moira used to escape the nursery yesterday morning.

Floors of familiar mud – littered with pools of standing water and Gitter saplings – spread out before her, a strangely well-tended swamp of squat, ugly vegetables. Moira blinks once and realizes that all the seedlings in sight have been smashed. Every single Gitter plant, across the entire spread of the nursery, has been squashed or uprooted. The work of stomping feet as much as weaponry, it's not difficult to imagine the victorious Skyscratch rampaging down here, ensuring their hated enemy might never spawn again.

Moira spares a glance at the catalyst of this tribal cleansing, where he stands whistling his astrogrunge chestnut.

Last and most captivating of the nursery's sights are the sun and the sky. Moira wanders a few feet towards the nursery's center, eyes locked upward. Only a fraction of Gi's amplified sun is visible from down the sinkhole, hanging low in the western sky. Together, the sun and sky are a rich shade of royal purple, a planetary oddity that a Moira two days and one execution younger thought benign and boring. Now, freed from her subterranean prison, there's nothing more beautiful than the violet sky that hangs over the planet Gi, even crosshatched by its climatic field.

She stands there, drinking in this magnificent sight, as her companions mill around the sinkhole behind her.

"Hey," realizes Nemo, that famous wit, "this is that place from earlier. The, uh–"

"Splitspine nursery," supplies Odisseus. "That puts us somewhere way southwest of Fernhollow."

The true realization hits Nemo before it does Odisseus, though he certainly appreciate it less. "And the ship," he adds, matter-of-factly.

"And the fucking ship!" it strikes Odisseus profoundly, spinning to gauge his crewmate's reactions. "It's, what, six some hours north?"

"Thanks, Moira," she mutters under her breath, unheard, unappreciated.

"We could be there tonight!" continues Odisseus, almost yipping with the euphoria of cheating death. Five minutes ago, they were wandering endlessly through twisting tunnels, as good as corpses. Then, without warning, there was food and shelter and his beloved compression nozzles and attitude thrusters no more than a few hours away, across the cool desert sands. Moira too is captured a little by his excitement.

"Would be nice, get something to eat," Nemo allows, tossing the dismembered torch away in a sudden fit of disgust for the thing. "I'm so hungry, I could eat my dick."

"Maybe a shower," grunts Moira, her entire person slick with mud.

"Or, you know," Odisseus suggests significantly, "fucking escape?"

Nemo doesn't follow. "Escape?" He jabs a finger up and out of the sinkhole. "We did."

"The planet?" Odisseus tosses both paws out wide. "The blooming blockade?"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Nemo distances himself from this suggestion with both palms open. "The fuck're you talking about? We ain't remotely done here."

Odisseus, however, is adamant. "We absolutely are done here."

The Captain screws up his face, profoundly confused. "How do you figure? We're down here, with no weapons, no Attaché and, most importantly, no Gitter sapling."

"Okay," allows the Ortok, flustered at the very idea that anyone would question him on this. "I think we can all agree," he stipulates, throwing a glance toward Moira, "that we're nowhere near the plan or anything even resembling the plan." He waggles a paw back toward Nemo. "What'd you say, we're down here, we got no weapons, no Attaché, no–"

"Gitter sapling!" cries Nemo, like those two words solves the whole debate. "You wanna, what, abandon the whole caper? Abandon two years of work and planning and buhoxshit? Because things got a little wonky for a bit? I mean, what's Gella gonna say? Fuck, what would Two–"

Odisseus is already shaking his head. "Not a whole fuck of a lot, I'd wager, on account of his being dead." The incontestable fact hangs in the air a moment. "And," Odisseus continues, eager to hurry away from that particular point, "zottibles off his plan."

"Two-Bit's plan," Nemo enunciates insultingly for the Ortok's benefit, "is to steal one of those little trees. There's nothing further off the plan than not stealing one of those trees."

"Well," Odisseus barks in response, spinning savagely around in search of something, "take one of fucking these, then. They're all the–"

Nemo makes a grimacing face, like he finds this whole line of inquiry distasteful. Moira beats him to the punch with the straight fact. "They're all smashed."

"Yeah!" agrees Nemo, snapping and pointing at Moira. "These're all smashed!"

"There's gotta be one," Odisseus resolves, bent double and stalking away to scan the sinkhole for the evidence he needs to cinch his argument.

"Can we not ignore," calls Nemo after them, "the larger issue that you're trying to pussy out again?"

"The larger issue!" The Ortok's paws come up defensively. "I'm reacting to the situation at–"

"You're pussying out." Nemo, with a heavy sigh, buries both hands in the pockets of his filthy robe and cranes backward, seeming to beseech answers from the very God Beyond. "What a fucking coincidence that, soon as another minor snag comes up–"

"Having very nearly died," the Ortok reasons, stopping dead in his search to level a claw at Nemo, "I take extreme exception to the description of all that shit," he throws the claw back towards the tunnel they emerged from, "as a minor snag."

"A kinda major snag," Nemo grants begrudgingly, if only to sate his saltbrother's semantics, "and it's this whole sermon again, about what Two-Bit's plan actually entails and risk versus reward and all the other lectures you've exhausted by now."

"Your unquestioning faith in Two-Bit's all-knowing plan is–" The Ortok stops both his search and his exclamation short, spinning around again to sweep the entire nursery with sight and sniffing. "For Jotor's sake, there's gotta be one–"

"There isn't," Moira assures him. "They're all smashed."

Nemo throws up his hands. "So, we'll improvise! Don't forget." He points two very serious fingers at his two companions. "It was only 'cause I improvised last time that we got the tree we got, remember?"

"How, then?" Odisseus abandons his search and begs the question. "Explain to me – to us, rather – exactly how you'd improvise."

Nemo stammers in the spotlight a second. "Uh–"

"Bearing in mind," the Ortok's quick to remind him, "that all our weapons, plus the Attaché, plus the sapling, are a day's march up and into the mountains, in a tiny little valley we're never gonna find–"

"I can find it," attests Moira quietly.

Odisseus ignores her. "Bearing also in mind, all that shit's guarded by an army of very militant barbarians that're pretty much convinced that we're evil incarnate–"

"That's," Nemo disavows, holding up his hands to show innocence of the claim, "maybe a bit of an overstatement."

"–and," the Ortok finishes, a conclusive thought occurring to him then, "the fact that there's no reason to assume, if they smashed all these saplings, they wouldn't have smashed the one we potted too?"

Nemo is silent for a long moment, absorbing all this. "These're all," he eventually concedes, "persuasive points."

"Why thank you. Can we admit that–"

"But," interrupts Nemo, his upraised finger a clear indication he enjoyed interrupting Odisseus a little too much, "you're forgetting the cardinal rule of this whole enterprise."

"Am I?" Odisseus makes a gracious gesture. "Enlighten us."

Nemo's swelling to make his grandiose point but, once again, Moira beats him to the punch.

"It's what Two-Bit would have wanted."

Odisseus stares at Nemo a long moment. "Really? Two-Bit would've wanted us to march up there with zero plan?"

Nemo sees his opportunity and snatches it. "Two-Bit would've wanted us to play things by ear."

"Yeah," agrees Odisseus brusquely. "That does sound like Two-Bit, the one who painstakingly devised this extremely complex plan in nineteen-and-a-half phases." The Ortok laughs bitterly. "To play things by ear."

"You know," Nemo starts to propose, that flinty edge to his voice, "you wanna stay home, you can stay home. Nobody's got a gun they could even put to your head."

"Splitting up's," returns the Ortok, "about the worst thing we could do at this point." His eyes land on Moira, a spark of inspiration striking him. "Which begs the question. What's Moira wanna do?"

One by one, they both turn to regard her, standing in the center of the nursery. Having spoken very sparingly through the entire argument, Moira takes even more time replying. She sniffs and glances upward again. Above, the sunset's nearly past and the green tinge that heralds full night is coloring the edges of the sky.

"There's one thing you're both forgetting," she states gravely, before bringing her gaze back down to consider them both. "They've got Righty and Lefty up there."

THIRD INTERLUDE

Two-Bit Switch was wounded by that. "I'm wounded by that."

"Switch-you'll be more than wounded," Sifer made the point, clacking his beak threateningly, "if, by the count of number-three, Switch-you're not making foot-tracks away from place-here."

Two-Bit was staggered a little backward, planting a hand in the center of his chest in mock affront. "I wend to you as a mate, mate–"

"Switch-you come to Sifer-me as an ouch-pain in my cloaca-hole."

"–with a, how'd you jabb, a 'profitable business opportunity–'"

"Use that doughy humanoid meat-brain of Switch-yours," Sifer suggested, gazing upwards into the bundles of wiring over his head, "and try to remember the last time-place one of your 'business opportunities' was profitable for anyone-else but Switch-you."

"Well," Two-Bit thought back, a little daunted by the task, "what about last time? That thing with Ormont?"

"Last time-place?" scoffed the Zibbian, a strange sound that involved his siphon deflating. "Last time-place, Sifer-I spent six days-weeks laying low on Balaria-where. Last time-place, there was a nine thou bounty-price on my head-sac. Last time-place, there was–"

"To be level," Two-Bit felt the need to stipulate, "that sweets was technically for 'Unidentified Zibbian Malefactor', so." He shrugged a little, hoping that would clear things up.

"Sifer-I was the only Zibbian-person," Sifer enunciated with three pinched feelers at the end of his tentacle, "on the planet-rock. Which is a desert planet-rock. Which doesn't have an ocean-splash deep enough for Switch-you to get your fuck-dick wet in."

"Did you," Two-Bit attempted to rationalize, "or did you not get scored?"

"Sifer-I did not get paid!" the Zibbian shrieks, so shrill he manages to draw the attempt of the passing derelicts. "That-there was the worst aspect-part! Half-money upfront, like all-we agreed, and then Ormont-douche disappeared into the fucking wood-work with my fucking other half-money."

"Yeah," reflected Two-Bit, "he was kinda a cuntstain."

Two of his tentacles still working, two more cross below Sifer's beak in a very humanoid gesture of disappointment. "Ormont-he wasn't the one-person that tried to pay Sifer-me in bakebugs-yum."

Two-Bit screwed up his face. "I thought you liked bakebugs-yum."

"Sifer-I do," Sifer sighed, "but bakebugs-yum are no substitute-thing for actual fucking money-cash."

"Are you sure?" Two-Bit proposed, sliding a package seductively across the counter toward Sifer.

The Zibbian extended one tentacle, its suckers cracking open the package to peer inside. Those goopy Zibbian eyes craned upward from the box's contents to stare at Two-Bit. "Switch-you shifty bastard-beak."

Two-Bit Switch did not often come to the Third Ring's understreet. In his misspent youth, Takioro's dingiest and most deplorable neighborhood was the closest thing Two-Bit could call home. Unpleasant memories – of the filth, the people, the cold nights spent shivering in slime – kept him away, years later, like an unlucky charm.

One of the few things that could compel Two-Bit down here, however, was the need for a top-notch feedcaster. As far as top-notch feedcasters went, Sifer was the absolute best in Two-Bit's budget.

The Zibbian paranoid and propagandist had hung up his shingle in an abandoned kiosk in the understreet's cleanest corner. Sludge of myriad and unnatural colors pools on the ground, steaming and sizzling and best avoided. Derelicts and degenerates are commonplace here, shambling about like zombies, dangerous to approach, dangerous to ignore.

The nearest business to Sifer's little kiosk was Cleaver Cheevo's EZ Organ Extraction, down at the end of the street, where customers enter with corpses and leave with wads of cash.

The current calamity that afflicts the understreet was a sudden rash of flooding. Some water main somewhere must have ruptured recently, sending a coursing river down all the main sewer lines. Here, at the twisted end of the understreet, there's only a babbling green brook that runs down the middle of the pipe, ferrying garbage and occasionally worse to clog the drains.

The Depot-Commissioner had made encouraging noises about "teams of repairmen" and "top priorities" but no one was fooled. The Third Ring's understreet was nobody's top priority.

It made very little difference to Two-Bit Switch. He wasn't sticking around.

Fresh from an invigorating weekend at the palatial estates of Gella Borsk, Two-Bit Switch was hard at work on his new passion project. There were many, many hands to shake, favors to call in, arrangements to arrange. Borsk's information was invaluable, precisely what Two-Bit needed to turn this vain fantasy into an actionable plan, but the sheer legwork involved would be staggering.

He would need to take work in the interim, Two-Bit knew, particularly now that things with Nabdres had dissolved. A few months out of the business, he'd probably return to freelance jailbreaking and take a contract or two. Once he'd earned a comfortable amount of scratch, he could return to his true love – planning this impossible caper.

Sifer was an essential cog in that caper. Perhaps there was some bad blood in their recent history, a few scores left unsettled, but Two-Bit Switch was confident that, with the right application of charm and greed, he could convince the Zibbian to partner up.

Originally designed to be a ticket booth for the aborted driftrail the understreet had been designed for, Sifer's hacknest would have been completely unrecognizable to its original designers.

It was covered, floor to ceiling, in a thick foliage of cords, cables and conduits, hanging like vines and coiling like brambles. A dozen consoles and more monitors are littered about the place, allowing the six-tentacled ambidextrous Zibbian to work multiple jobs simultaneously. The kiosk is cluttered with kitsch; geeky memorabilia appearing as toys, figurines, stickers and keychains, hanging, dangling, posed and posted on every flat surface available.

Two-Bit Switch made a gesture towards one of the stools. "Mind if I has a squat?"

"The second-minute these're gone," Sifer informed him, popping a bakebug into his open beak, "Switch-you are too."

"I'll jabb quick, then," Two-Bit decided, sliding onto the stool. Steepling his fingers, he opened his mouth, prepared to make his pitch, when something – the sound of swanky music and the shape of bodies writhing on one of Sifer's screens – stopped him dead. "Are you vizzing porn?"

"Watching? Bloom no." Sifer seemed genuinely disgusted by the very thought. "Contract job-work from some Qhemite porno nobody-who. Trying to boost watch-traffic for a coupla her watch-videos in the Horong Sector-space. Switch-you ever seen Two Girls, Eight Arms?"

"Can't say as I have."

"Couse Switch-you haven't. Switch-you're not some stink-Ruuvian perv-bucket." Tentacles typing, eyes scrolling through spreadsheets, he cued Two-Bit with a few fingers. "Sifer-I'm listening."

"Gotta another mish job for you," Two-Bit explained, unable to completely take his eyes from the smut on the screen. "Hank some custom coding done."

Sifer made some sound out of his siphon, something Two-Bit Switch must interpret as a whistle. "Ain't done coding in a comet's age-time. Practically retired from that blowhole-shit."

"Practically snoozed," Two-Bit argued, "ain't the same as snoozed snoozed, though, innit?"

"Depends," stipulated Sifer, crunching another bakebug in his beak with a sickening sound, "on thing-what Switch-you'd have Sifer-me coding."

"Real jig job, ball it up for me," Two-Bit assured him. "I hank a virus cooked up."

Sifer's laugh was a wet squelching sound that originated in some unseen bladder somewhere. "Course Switch-you fucking do."

"What?" Two-Bit objected, honestly a little irritated.

"Switch-you couldn't afford a virus-bug, first thing-problem." Brushing sugar-coated and segmented legs off the tips of his suckers, Sifer returns one tentacle to a keyboard while another goes digging around in the bakebug package for more goodies. "Virus-bugs cost triple."

"Triple?" Two-Bit was aghast. "Where'd you prod that from?"

"First," the Zibbian explained, gesturing emphatically with a gripped bakebug, "a virus-bug's gotta be tailored, very specifically, to the mainframe-system you-rhetoric're trying to infect. That means study-research and study-research means time-hours and, from Sifer-me, time-hours cost double." He concluded this thought by snapping the bakebug in half with a clack of his beak.

"Okay–"

"Second," Sifer continued, repeating his gesture and dusting Two-Bit with sugar flakes and insect bits, "virus-bugs are very dangerous to cook. Sifer-I gotta take extra chance-precautions to ensure virus-it doesn't linger on any of my network-systems and that takes time-hours and, from Sifer-me–"

"Time scores triple, yeah, yeah," Two-Bit rushed him along with a circular gesture. "We understand, you're very shrewd, blah blah."

"So, unless Switch-you're prepared to pay–"

"Not on the spot," Two-Bit Switch was forced to admit, keeping his cool as best he can. "Not upfront. I should make the point," he made the point with small shrug, "that this's for a very good cause."

"Sifer-I'm sure," Sifer agreed bitterly. "Switch-you're known for your charitable deed-works." He tossed the rest of the bakebug into his beak and spun partially about, to better concentrate on some new task on some new machine. "What're Switch-you trying to infect?"

Two-Bit Switch took his time to withdraw his Attaché, place it on the counter and summon up the hologram, knowing that this reveal would be very important. Still clacking away on keys, it took Sifer a double take to notice the hologram and register what that hologram actually showed.

The skeletal outline of a capital cruiser spun a slow circle above Two-Bit's Attaché. Indicational branches sprouted from various points along its body, containing little bursts of technical data. Its designation appeared in a small text box in the hologram's lower corner, revealing the ship for what it was.

"That's a Consortium cruiser-ship," realized Sifer as he studied the hologram.

"It is," Two-Bit Switch affirmed. "That's the GCF Acquisition. Consider this an example of the gantine I'd like to infect."

"Why," Sifer questioned him, keeping his tone neutral, "would Switch-you like to infect a Consortium cruiser-ship?"

"'Cause I'm fixing," Two-Bit explained, a mischievous smirk playing on the corner of his face, "to fuck with the Gitter Consortium."

As inhuman as those eyes were – their pupils a straight black bar through a speckled iris – Two-Bit swore he could see straight through them, could picture Sifer's thoughts as clearly as the Zibbian felt them. All the cephalopoid's hacktivist hackles were standing fully erect, Two-Bit knew, at mention of tangling with the imperious Gitter Consortium.

In the freecaster community, there was no greater boogeyman than the Gitter Hegemony. They ruled their small corner of space with even more impunity than the Endless Imperium, stretched too thin across too many worlds. They wielded information like a weapon, controlling the flow of facts and the narrative behind their every action. This was pure anathema to the radical freecaster collectives, who practically deified the free exchange of ideas and information.

There was no mystery greater, no injustice more vile, than the poorly-kept secret of Gitter's true source. All in the galaxy, save the true rubes, knew the planet Gita to be a front, none more so than the freecasters. Try though they might, they could never uncover any other solid explanation for the spice's source. There were as many theories as there were freecasters, scattered through the galaxy, but they all acknowledged that the truth was still out there.

In the same way that a potted Gitter sapling was the holiest of all booty for a buccaneer, so too was the Consortium's dirty secret the holiest of leaks for the freecaster community.

Sifer attempted to look skeptical but his inner excitement still shone through. "Are Switch-you after the–"

"I think I might be," Two-Bit confirmed, nodding.

Retrieving another bakebug from the package, the Zibbian make a casual gesture towards the hologram. "Whaddya need?"

"What I hank," Two-Bit started to elaborate, considering the hologram that spun between them, "is basically mayhem."

It took ten minutes or more to explain all the precise specifications to Sifer and for the pair of them to argue, back and forth, about cost and feasibility and who was being a jackass. Two-Bit wanted to first lay out everything he was after before the Zibbian objected but he knew, three seconds in, that was never gonna happen. At every turn, the freecaster would tither or snort or just plain interrupt Two-Bit, to explain why that was a stupid suggestion and how stupid was Two-Bit for suggesting that and here was Sifer's idea, much smarter and much more expensive.

The first thing Two-Bit wanted was for every alarm aboard the ship to go haywire, screaming and screeching all at once. This was a major mantle-ache for Sifer, considering all the separate subsystems he would need to trigger but he supposed it was technically possible.

The second thing Two-Bit wanted was the ship's airlocks to open and close at random intervals. Sifer took great joy in complaining about this one, bemoaning the intense security protocols that ensconced airlock controls and how arduous they could be to circumvent.

The third thing Two-Bit wanted involved overloading the various coolant pipes aboard the ship, causing them to vent caustic coolant everywhere. This was actually pretty doable, Sifer said, and shouldn't be a problem.

Next came the real tricky shit.

When Two-Bit explained that, in the midst of all this chaos, he required all the ship's security holos to be voided and swapped with a series of dummy recordings, Sifer was more bemused than annoyed. When Two-Bit also explained that, in the midst of all this chaos, he needed one straight shot from the ship's cargo bay to the munitions depot, he was more annoyed than bemused.

In the end, it wound up costing Two-Bit Switch quadruple, considering how blooming unusual the commission was, something even the jabberhead couldn't really contest.

There were a number of stipulations. It would need to be back-burnered, considering Sifer's current schedule. The actual virus would need to be uploaded manually, rather than remotely. Lastly, Two-Bit was required, by the binding legal agreement of spit-into-the-hand-handshake, to compensate the Zibbian for any damages his equipment may sustain as a result of cooking him this virus.

Arduous as this process might have seemed, Two-Bit Switch took it as a small victory that they were still dithering, long after the box of bakebugs was empty.

"Chagged we agree, then," Two-Bit sighed, as the negotiations were winding down.

"It is a distinctly strange pleasure-joy doing business-deal with Switch-you," Sifer acknowledged, the closest thing to a compliment the anti-social Zibbian ever made.

"Now, for the other thing."

The Zibbian stopped typing with all six of his tentacles. "What other thing-now?"

Two-Bit steepled his hands and braved the pitch, anticipating the worst possible reaction. "That's the first virus I hank."

"The first virus-code," Sifer speculated slowly, "implies there are multiple virus-codes Switch-you need Sifer-me to make." The Zibbian shifts his entire posture, turning all tentacles to better face Two-Bit, like he intended to use each to strangle him individually. "Are there multiple virus-codes Switch-you need Sifer-me to make?"

Two-Bit was suddenly a little squeamish. "Two counts as multiple, yeah?"

"Bastard-you could have lead with that," Sifer suggested, "maybe?"

"If I had," Two-Bit made the point, "I wouldn't still be squatting here, would I?"

Blowing a bunch of blustery air through his siphon, the Zibbian facepalmed, a very strange gesture when made with six tentacles. "What do asshole-you wanna infect with the second virus-code?"

Two-Bit grit his teeth. "Bloom near everything."
CHAPTER 14

Jag lands hard enough to break both his femurs. The coils in his harness, however, completely absorb the impact, leaving both the ranger's legs unharmed and intact Dust billows away from his point of landing, the earth scorched black by the heatblades beneath his booted feet. As he rises, the servos and components in the exoskeleton grind and whir. Once upright, Jag scans his surroundings.

The flying vee formation is coming to ground all around him, maintaining their rank perfectly. A chevron of soot marks the spot where the spice ranger troop, in unison, made landfall. For everyone but Jag, this is a routine op, a milk run without any special significance. For Jag, this excursion signifies his very first touchdown – in his entire career as a Stargazer – on the arid surface of Gi.

Plus, it had been at his word. Jag thought he'd seen something.

The harness automatically unholsters his chambered weapon; the same KZ647 Domino Heavy-Auto every other ranger carries. The rifle is swung, guided by whining servos, over his shoulder to drop, primed and ready to fire, into his open hands. His ray shield simultaneously kicks to life, ballooning outward from the projector in the center of his chest.

His rigorous training drops Jag to a knee and he assumes a ready position, covering the flight's southwestern flank. His rookie status places Jag at vee's outer edge but inside, he's roiling with anxiety.

He isn't sure what he's spotted. He prays to all the moons he hasn't halted the whole flight for nothing.

One look at this horizon and he's suddenly worried it was all a mirage, that he'd imagined the entire thing. There's not a thing in sight, nothing to break the perfectly flat horizon from southeast to southwest. It's all the same snow white expanse of desolate dirt.

The actual heat on the planet Gi is something no lecture or simulation could possibly prepare one for. Even through the protective membrane of his shield, Jag can feel the sun's oppressive rays, threatening to bake anyone alive who lingers too long on this hell-scorched plain.

This only makes him pray all the harder that he'll turn around see something, something worth all the trouble, but Jag waits on the word of his commander.

"Crex, Jag," the Commander drawls in their head-comms, "visual report."

"Not a thing, Commander," Crex, the goody-two-shoes, instantly reports.

"Dry as a bone, clean as a whistle," Jag adds, a moment later. "All clear."

"Stand down, then, rangers," comes the order and Jag relaxes, his harness depressurizing in response. He rises from his crouch and, trying not to look eager, spins to regard the rest of the flight. The press of their bodies, however, is such that he can't get visual confirmation there's even anything there, not until Maw next speaks.

"The moons...?" he remarks, the flight's gatecrasher, over the comm.

"Bogey of some kind," relays Wad, the Commander's wingman. He stalks forward a few steps, Domino trained dead ahead. "Scanners're still processing. Doesn't appear organic."

Coz, further back in the formation, is skeptical. "So, it's a blooming rock, or what?" Under his heads-up-display, Jag flushes a little, his fear realized.

"If it is," the Commander replies, revealing nothing from her tone, "it's a recent arrival. I've flown these flatlands a few hundred times – there ain't no rock supposed to be here."

At ease, Jag is technically at liberty to break rank and come closer. The pistons in his harness hissing, he jogs a little closer, straining to see past his clustered comrades. Indeed, Jag can see the bulky shape, the same one he spotted from the air, somewhere ahead of his comrades, glistening faintly in the noontide sun.

"Scanner's," reports Wad slowly, "reading metallic? A thermosteel composite, this says."

"Gotta be an equipment malfunction," Spar is certain. "Thermosteel? On surface?"

"Could be wreckage," opines the Commander. "Off the climatic field. That's the case, oughta take the time and tag it for incineration. Wouldn't want nobody–"

"Commander," Wad informs her, data streaming across his visor. "It's a driftcart."

A sudden thrill shivers through Jag. There's a moment of silence here, as bewildered rangers exchange glances. Without another word, the Commander orders an enveloping advance with three succinct motions of her wrist. On her mark, the spice rangers drop back into formation and sweep a wide perimeter around the lump of metal, rifles ready. Given a better look, Jag is forced to agree with Wad's analysis – that's inarguably a driftcart.

Patinaed in a thin layer of desert dust, Jad can still recognize the boxy frame, the steering levers and the vehicle's front grill. At first glance, it appears long derelict, slumped awkwardly on the sand. Its paint is chipped and faded, worn away by the planet's hostile conditions. The grill's catch is actually propped open, spilling out a small hillock of loose sand.

"One of ours?" Coz theorizes tentatively.

"Negative," Ox supplies a second later, from his vantage near the driftcart's fuselage. "It's some off-brand, Ring ConFed thing. Ours are made in-house."

This revelation, the unthinkable, takes more than a moment to sweep through the gathered spice rangers. One by one, expression to expression, the full implication sinks into the flight's members. Some gasp, a few mutter curses of amazement and most exchange more significant glances.

There's only one conceivable origin for this driftcart, one that the Gitter Consortium certainly didn't manufacture.

"Offworlders," Commander Hego utters, the word no one wanted to give voice too. "This is a Code Trespass."

The bogeyman of all the regiment's emergency protocols, a Code Trespass was the holiest of holies – unauthorized boots on company soil. The vast majority of the troop's regular responsibilities pertained to asset collection, peppered with the occasional interaction with the native Gitter. The vast majority of their training, however, was in preparation for precisely this nightmare scenario.

Far as Jag knew, there'd been no honest Code Trespass in living memory. It wasn't beyond upper management, however, to throw them the occasional drill – shockingly elaborate – to test the response of their crack ranger squad.

Today, though; Jag is flabbergasted at the timing. His first day dirtside and he stumbles into, at best, a surprise drill and, at worst, a violation of everything the Consortium holds sacred.

This, Jag can read on the faces of his flightmates, is what they're all assuming. This is no real emergency; they've simply stumbled onto a drill in progress.

"Cut the chatter," the Commander's quick to reprimand, not sharing this diagnosis. "We assume the worst until Upstairs gets us a nullify. Follow protocol."

"Affirmative," Ox barks back, that ironshod training reading its head.

"Orders?" Maw, his spine suddenly rod-straight, prompts.

Commander Hego doesn't give an immediate reply. Instead, she only paces a few feet ahead and seems to consider how best to proceed. There's no trace of panic in the Darthen's gait, her harness whistling softly with each calm step. She stoops, her attention focused on the driftcart's discombobulated grill, and leans back on her hooved haunches, to better examine something he finds there.

"See something, Commander?" wonders Wad, activating a function of his visor.

"Footprint," the Darthen answers matter-of-factly. The word has barely escaped Hego's beak before the rest of the rangers come trooping around, to confirm what the Commander sees. When he arrives, Jag too spots the great spread of foot traffic that's passed through this area. There's the telltale markings of the natives, moving in great enough numbers to signify a water-hunting on the prowl.

What's drawn the Commander's notice, however, is a smattering of smaller prints. Jag squints in their direction but knows, without really looking, these are definitely the work of boots and what's more, boots minus the pronged tracks a harnessed ranger would make.

"How many?"

The Commander sniffs. "No more than two."

"A scouting party?" Jag ventures.

"In league with the natives?" Crex counters.

"Could be the natives were in pursuit," Maw offers.

"Cut the chatter," repeats the Commander, rising fiercely from her crouch. She rounds on her flight, all the rangers snapping to attention. "Orders. Alpha Wing," she points toward Maw, nodding slightly. "You're on recon. Follow the prints, gather intel, question the natives. Omega Wing." She twists to better address Tav. "You circle back. This driftcart didn't drop outta the sky. Head west, scanners up, and find me the ride they took in."

"Affirmative," Maw and Tav bark in unison.

"Channel's open, eyes peeled, rangers," Commander Hego reminds her troop. "Get sloppy and everything here could be compromised. The weight's on your shoulders now. Understood?"

"Affirmative," the entire flight chants back before bursting into action.

"Jag," summons Commander Hego moments later, as he and his comrades of Omega Wing, under Tav's leadership, are preparing to depart. Clamping down his nerves, Jag goes hustling over and reports at the Darthen's side. "Good eyes, soldier," is all she pulled him aside to say. "Shoulda seen the thing myself. No excuse for complacency."

"Command–" Jag starts to excuse but she'll hear none of it.

The Darthen goes so far as chucking Jag on the shoulder. "Bloom of a first day, eh?"

"Omega Wing!" Tav's voice rings over the scene. "Airborne in two!"

In two, Omega Wing is indeed airborne, Jag among them. They roar west, the driftcart disappearing behind them. The greenest of the flight, Jag works hard to keep his heatblades steady, his flying even, despite the trembling excitement burning inside him.

Any offworlder they might encounter would have a dozen flying war machines to contend with. Armed with ray shields, assault weaponry and blades of pure fire, Jag was one member of the most elite corps of killers the galaxy can field.

The Stargazers are come.

Moira hears something.

She stops to listen, her feet falling silent in the crunchy gravel. As the seconds wear on, Moira knows more and more about this mystery sound. It's unnatural, she knows first, a faint whining or droning. It's coming from the west, she knows next, somewhere extremely distant, but echoed and rebounded by the glassrock formations. What Moira knows last and most profoundly is that the sound's coming towards them.

Moira Quicksilver spins to peer west and back down the ravine. She rather doubts she'll see anything, considering how far away she predicts the sound's source to be. Moira's surprised, then, when she sees a dull orange glow against the western horizon, like a sunrise both the wrong color, the wrong time and the wrong direction.

More immediately, of course, Moira sees her two bickering companions.

"See, that's where you lose me," Odisseus argues, grateful for this unexpected respite and taking the moment to stop and pant. "Get their attention? Fine. Get captured? No."

Nemo starts to explain but Odisseus gives him no window. "What you're–"

"That's how we lost the plant and the Attaché and everybody's guns," he adds with a significant glance up at Moira, "in the first place."

"What I'm saying," Nemo corrects, soon as he's given the space to speak, "is that there's no need for all three of us to get captured." Nemo places a pregnant pause here. "Just the one."

The pair of them – Odisseus bent double, Nemo leaning against the rocky wall – stare at each other a moment, an understanding quickly established. As one, they turn to glance at the third member of their company, where she stands, stock still, atop the rise, listening for the sound neither of them have noticed.

"I will stitch your dick to his mouth," Moira threatens automatically.

Nemo is confused by pronouns. "Whose–"

"Quiet," snaps Moira, with sudden authority. To their credit, they do quiet somewhat, the argument continuing in hushed tones and nasty looks. The droning sound's only grown louder now, loud enough for Moira to definitely distinguish the telltale whine of an engine.

"Cover," she hisses. They turn to consider her again, confusion on both their faces; Moira has no time for this. With a sudden lunge, she grabs Nemo by the shoulder and shoves him, face first, down the side of the dune she's standing on. The Captain can't quite muster an objection before he's rolling down the hill like a nursery rhyme, arms and legs finding no purchase on the slippery sand.

Odisseus is about to be affronted, to growl some threat at the perceived attack on his saltbrother, when his ears perk up and his expression grows sober.

Together, Moira and Odisseus go sliding down the side of the dune, with considerably more grace than their Captain. They come to a landing on either side of Nemo, where he lays in a sprawled heap among his splayed bathrobe and what remains of his dignity. His mouth too stuffed with sand to complain, Nemo's immediately grabbed by the scruff of his robe and thrown against the ravine's overhang.

All the while, the droning overhead has become a roar, the unmistakeable sound of an engine but different – fluted or distorted, somehow. The glow becomes a flash, flooding the ravine with a second's orange light, before instantly fading away to the east. Deafened by the roar and blinded by the flash, it takes Moira too long to process what she's just seen, the sight so ridiculous.

In that heartbeat, Moira saw a dozen figures flying overhead, arrayed in a tight vee formation and with open flame bursting from their wrists and ankles.

When realization does come, Moira's momentarily dumbstruck, her ordinarily calculating mind reeling to catch up.

"A little fucking warning," sputters Nemo, spitting sand from his mouth and clambering on his elbows. "Bloom me out."

Despite his poor eyesight, Odisseus didn't miss a thing. "Was that...?"

Moira can only nod. The very sight of them passing transplants Moira immediately back to her teenage self, all giddy and speechless at coming so close to her childhood daydream.

"Moons're we boned," Odisseus remarks, slumping back against the glassrock wall behind him.

"Boned? What?" Nemo brushes clods of dirt from his beard. "You pushed me down and then it was loud."

"Spice rangers," Moira blurts, the word coming unbidden to her lips. She turns on him, all color draining from her expression. "Stargazers."

Nemo scowls and points a finger skyward. "That was–"

"Yup."

He then twists that finger around, now pointing east. "Headed–"

"Yup."

"Hence," Odisseus explains, for Nemo's obvious benefit, "boned."

The Captain absorbs this news stoically. He stares at his hands where they're spread, finger splayed, in the sand. For a long moment, he says nothing and his eyes scan back and forth in search of answers, like they're hidden somewhere beneath his filthy fingernails. "Fernhollow threw us off schedule," is the brilliant conclusion he eventually comes to.

Moira snorts. "You think?"

"Let's be clear, though," Odisseus makes the point. "It was you locking the keys in the ship that actually threw us off schedule. Actually."

Too lost in contemplation to hear this criticism, Nemo slaps a hand, suddenly and violently, against the sand. "Sure would be nice to have that fucking Attaché right about now, wouldn't it?" He presses the heel of his hand against his forehead, eyes slammed shut in concentration. "Only one thing to be done," he informs them, shrugging one shoulder helplessly.

"I don't suppose," Odisseus sighs, "you mean head back to the ship and forget this whole–"

Nemo explodes in frustration. "What're the chances that's what I–"

"No," Moira interrupts and they both turn to consider her. "He means we press on and get my damn pistols back."

"And how," Odisseus growls, thwarted again, "do you propose we do that?"

In response, Moira rises from her crouch and stares away east. "Stay here."

It's remarkable how silent and swift Moira can be when she loses her baggage train of two complaining numbskulls. She makes impressive time across the inhospitably rocky terrain, scrambling up ridges, wriggling through ravines and heading ever eastward. The spice rangers long gone, Moira follows their trail nonetheless, the orange glow and dull thrum of their heatblades echoing off the glassrock walls.

In moments like these, she pines for her days of itinerant bounty hunting – no nonsensical schemes, no incompetent accomplices, no impossible odds.

She'd contemplated a career change the entire way from the Splitspine nursery, northeast across the wasteland and up into the rocky uplands that fringe the box canyon. Made ornery by being outvoted, Odisseus grumbled every step of the journey and Nemo took each complaint as a personal slight, fueling an unending argument that swayed back and forth. The one mercy came from Gi's blessedly cooler night, the hateful sun sunk beneath the horizon and not about to torment the offworlders any further.

To Moira's surprise, she comes damn near the Skyscratch nursery before her suspicions are confirmed. Hugging a glassrock boulder to stay out of sight, Moira takes the slightest peek at what she suspected, where it stands sedately at the crest of a dune up ahead.

A single spice ranger, the moonlight glinting off the contours of her harness and her assault rifle, stands at attention atop the hill. Posting a sentry, Moira knows, is a very bad sign; the Stargazers must have reason to fear that someone else might intrude on their business in the Splitspine nursery. What's more, the sentry represents a challenge too steep for Moira to tackle alone.

She must, quite begrudgingly, seek the aid of her incompetent accomplices.

"Nemo, I need you," Moira forces herself to admit, soon as she's returned to the ravine where she'd left her companions. In all the time that Moira's been away, they've accomplished exactly nothing; they still squat in the sand and they still squabble like the siblings they are.

Nemo makes some noncommittal noise of complaint when Moira returns with her demands. When this fails to stave her off, he adds a flapping gesture of his wrist, warding her away as he might a bothersome insect.

"Now," she insists, with all the authority of a displeased parent.

"Take Odi," Nemo offers instead, thumbing a gesture at his aghast saltbrother.

"How come," Odisseus starts to speculate, a new beachhead in the eternal war between saltbrothers, "whenever somebody's actually gotta put your idiotic plan in place, you've always got a migraine or a very important comm or have to carry the torc–"

"Hey," Nemo counters with a pointed finger, suddenly all business. "Were Two-Bit here, he would tell you that my forehead felt very hot and maybe I should go lie dow–"

"It's gotta be you, Nemo," Moira hates to inform him. "It's a stealth mission and Odi would make too much noise." She pauses, putting the slightest hint of plead in her voice. "You're the only one who can do it."

At Moira's words, something changes in Nemo's aspect. "Well," he starts to swagger a little, rising from his slumped position, "if I'm the only one–"

"Trouble?" Odisseus wonders, in that concerned voice of his.

Moira purses her lips and shrugs a little. "Hopefully not."

They make considerably worse time returning to the sentry's post. Nemo is a chore to chaperone, Moira shushing him every step of the way and shepherding his graceless ass over the rocky terrain. Soon as they're within spitting distance to the sentry, Moira yanks him behind an outcropping, gives Nemo his instructions, listens to him repeat them – twice incorrectly – and then sends him on his way.

The dune the ranger's posted on is comprised of two slopes – one smooth and one not. The unsmooth slope is all loose glassrock gravel, a noisy and cumbersome climb. It's this direction that Moira sends Nemo, with another assurance of how vitally importance his silence and stealth are to the mission.

Sure enough, not thirty seconds after Nemo's disappeared on his errand, there's the unmistakable sound of loose scree and muttered curses, deafening loud in the quiet mountain pass. Possessing two ears and a brain between them, the spice ranger is instantly alerted. Rattling something clipped into her HUD's comm, the ranger hustles three steps towards the source of the noise and towards discovering Nemo – and that's when Moira has her.

Approaching up the dune's sandy side, Moira is the paragon of stealth. So distracted by Nemo's blundering, the spice ranger is surprisingly easy for Moira to ambush. Ten stalking strides is enough to put Moira at arm's reach. As the pinkskin humanoid ranger opens her mouth to speak, Moira strikes.

One hand she clamps over the ranger's mouth, to ensure she doesn't say anything into the live comm. The other hand she twists into a Hungry Zakoosa and crushes the ranger's windpipe, to ensure she doesn't say anything ever again. There's a wet sound as Moira feels something inside the ranger's throat break beneath her fingers.

With a savage kick, Moira deals with the rifle, sending the weapon clattering away onto the gravel. Taken wholly by surprise, the ranger hasn't the wherewithal to activate her heatblades. Instead, she simply wriggles like a caught fish, as she suffocates on her own green blood. Moira waits patiently for the struggling to cease and realizes that the comm's transceiver is inches from her own mouth.

"Confirm," the patched voice on the other end demands. Keeping her voice level despite the murder she's currently committing, Moira prays to all the moons the pinkskin didn't speak with some distinguishable accent.

"Negative," she growls, unable to keep the exertion completely from her voice. "False alarm. Small landslide or something. No organics." Completely guessing at terminology, Moira waits a few agonizing seconds to see how good her imitation was.

"Affirmative," comes the reply through the comm, seconds later. "Stay sharp, Tav."

"Roger that," Moira answers and the channel clicks dead.

In her arms, Moira feels the pinkskin go limp. Unable to bear the weight of ranger and harness, she drops the corpse, the machinery whining as it crashes to the ground.

"Can you keep it down?" exhorts Nemo, as he comes panting up the ridge. "This is supposed to be a stealth mission."

The threat neutralized, Odisseus is summoned and the scene is doctored some. Initially, Moira wants to strip the ranger of her harness, granting them some small modicum of firepower against the rest of the troop but Odisseus makes the inevitable point about an embedded tracking device. Better, then, Moira reasons, to pitch the whole corpse – harness and all – down a nearby crevice and let the Stargazers sort the mess out. She'd be found, no questions there, but the longer any spice rangers have to search for her remains, the better.

Moira takes the Domino and brooks no argument on that front. There's some carping from Nemo but he doesn't dare raise his voice above a mutter and therefore Moira chooses simply to ignore him. So long spent armed only with sword and torch, it's a glorious sensation to wield a firearm again, even some Consortium-commissioned trash like this Domino.

Nothing else impedes them, then, on their approach to the Skyscratch nursery.

It's incidentally a short walk. The terrain remains unpleasant and unforgiving, scaling jagged bluffs and descending rocky defiles. All the while, Moira's hyper-aware of their surroundings, fearful of a second line of defense before they reach the box canyon. Within the hour and without incident, however, that smell – the tangy, nostril-scorching stench of spores – first starts to reach them.

{Momentarily}, comes the first distinguishable speaker. The headache immediately starts to needle Moira as soon as she takes an intelligible whiff, a painful reminder of the consequences of breathing too much of this stuff. {Momentarily, Secondseed assures thee}.

"Is disrespect to thine elders," announces another voice – one that Moira suddenly realizes is actually, gloriously audible – from somewhere up ahead, "the custom of this new Foreplanter?"

{Secondseed does not presume}, stammers the native, {upon Foreplanter's intentions}.

"It does not please the Vesselborn to be treated in this flippant fashion."

{Secondseed is shamed and saddened by these tidings}.

Good fortune afford the three stealthy pirates a good vantage on the box canyon. Crawling on their bellies, they're able to scoot, on elbows and knees, through a stretch of sand to the very rim of the canyon. From here, they can, unobserved by the nursery's occupants, peer down on the happenings below.

For good measure, Moira unslings the Domino, props the weapon against her shoulder and takes a moment to get the weapon's acquaintance – its design, its heft, its scope.

Through the rifle's scope, the Skyscratch nursery looks much the same, with one key distinction. Among the bleached bones and squat seedlings, there stands a loose perimeter of humanoid figures, watching the kneeling cactoid population with a tangible unease. The harnesses each wear are glaringly obvious – a skeleton of naked thermosteel, glimmering greenly in the moonlight – as are the hefty assault rifles in their hands.

Though confident in the security of their hidden perch, Moira nonetheless shrinks back a little at the sight of such a fearsome retinue of badasses elite.

There are no members of the warband present, Moira notes. Indeed, only the Secondseeds are home, the immature cactoids that guard the nursery while the warriors are away. Where Foreplanter and the rest of his braves might be, Moira's no better idea than the spice rangers.

"How many?" hisses Nemo from where he lays beside her.

"Can you not count?" she hisses back.

"Yes," he counters, "but I know you already have."

This Moira cannot refute. "Fourteen," she admits a moment later.

"Too many," Odisseus growls across the way. "Way too many."

"Fuck," scoffs Moira, "three would be way too many."

{Hark!} cries the Secondseed spokesman. It thrusts a limb towards the western corner of the canyon and the sloped main entrance. {See where comes Foreplanter!}

The ranger's leader – a Darthen by the hooved and green-furred look of her – has no need of the Secondseed's announcement. She's already turning and striding towards the sandy slope before the cactoid's even finished speaking. The rest of the rangers react cohesively, as one entity. They raise weapons, tighten the formation around their leader and stomp purposefully across the nursery towards the arriving warband.

A pair of crosshairs tend to lend clarity to anything viewed through them. All the power of life and death rests comfortably against Moira's shoulder. Some sniper's instinct plants the Darthen's head directly in her crosshairs and Moira, without thinking, traces the troop leader's path across the nursery. This seems like the ideal move, to behead the beast with one swift stroke, so much so that Moira nearly pulls the trigger without a second thought.

Repercussions, of course, stay her finger. A killshot on their troop leader would both betray their position and send thirteen spice rangers rocketing up to confront them. What's more, it would spoil the entire deception – all the rigamarole and heartache they'd endured to sneak onto the planet under the Consortium's nose. Strong as that temptation is, Moira stays the killing shot.

She's next tempted when Foreplanter lopes into her sights.

Surrounded by a score of identical warriors, the flame-scorched Foreplanter is always immediately recognizable. In this case, it's made all the more recognizable when it refuses to drop to its knees, like the rest of its soldiers, in the Vesselborn's divine presence.

Once again, Moira's crosshairs come to rest on the flowered crown of the great Gitter chieftain. Visions of burning ditrogen blistering through that green flesh brings a flinty smile to Moira's lips. Once again, however, her better angels stay her hand. A clicked trigger here summons not only fourteen spice rangers but also a full Gitter warband and all it would achieve is Moira's petty revenge.

From this angle, Moira can't quite determine which of the many thongs draped around Foreplanter's neck might have Righty and Lefty festooned at its ends. A fist of fear closes around Moira's heart at the thought of her pistol's fate and she must redouble her efforts not to explode Foreplanter's head that instant.

"Behold your Vesselborn," commands the Darthen as she approaches. She stands there a moment, expecting a response from the towering Foreplanter.

None comes, however.

"We are arrived," the Darten continues, a twinge of surprise in her voice, "from the bosom of God Beyond, come to receive our moonly tribute, and what welcome are we given? One Foreplanter is slain, another absent and no ceremony, save this pitiful Secondseed, to welcome us?"

Confronted with this challenge, Foreplanter remains completely still, more an inanimate plant than a fearsome barbarian chief.

"Will you answer for this affrontery?"

{In the chaos}, explains Foreplanter, in a scent that's somehow slow and dangerous, {of my coronation, there was no spare moment or thought given to such a ceremony}.

To her credit, the troop leader makes no visible reaction to this insubordination. The thirteen spice rangers clustered behind her are not so composed. Baffled and outraged expressions pass between them, a few mouthing unpleasant things into their headpieces.

One gesture from the Darthen silences them all. "These words," she replies, seeming to savor the taste of the Gitter's insolent spores, "smack of blasphemy. Hast thou misspoken or dost thou provoke the Vesselborn's wrath?"

Once again, Foreplanter makes no reply. The eyeless cactoid is peerless in its ability to win any staring contest.

Moria snuggles the rifle's butt a little firmer against her shoulder. She's certain there's a way to exploit this supreme strategic advantage she's stumbled into – the higher ground, the element of surprise – if only she can locate the ideal target.

She sweeps the rifle across either crowd, Skyscratch and spice rangers both. She's forced to conclude, however, that either is as foolish a target as their leaders. What Moira needs, above all, is to retain her anonymity. At all costs, she must not surrender her position or even her very existence on this planet. That's a tall order for anyone, even from the security of a sniper's nest. All the same, she scans the nursery, searching out an unorthodox solution to her problem.

In theory, an unobserved strike against an unsuspecting Secondseed or, better yet, a sapling, could potentially sow some useful chaos. A spontaneous fire amongst the precious Gitter seedlings would throw both ranger and cacti into a frenzy. That could very possibly create the window of opportunity Moira would need to creep into the camp and recover her Lawmen.

This plan unravels even as it's devised. Someone would certainly spot the muzzle flash, there's no mistaking a ditrogen fire for a naturally burning one, there's no path both quick and safe down into the canyon proper. Most importantly, however, Moira doesn't have visual on her missing weaponry.

What Moira will not do is sit idle and squander such a superior position.

"We come not," the spice ranger commences, growing visibly impatient, "to bandy words about rites and ceremonies. We seek–"

The Darthen stops suddenly and stares, center mass, at something on Foreplanter's trunk. She gestures casually with a harnessed wrist. "Where hast thou come by those baubles?"

Moira's heart skips a beat when, with a ponderous movement, Foreplanter dangles something from its leathern harness before the spice ranger for her inspection. There's no mistaking Righty, caked in ceremonial powder, as it spins forlornly on the end of his leash.

{A trophy of conquest}, is all the more answer Foreplanter will provide.

The appearance of the firearm has an immediate effect on the spice rangers. The muttering, the glances, the curses all return in full and this time, the Darthen makes no attempt to quell them.

"So boned," opines Odisseus, his head dropping to his paws. Moira, in complete agreement, requires all her concentration not to sever the strand that keeps Righty prisoner with a perfectly-aimed shot from her borrowed Domino.

"That," the troop leader indicate significantly, "is from the raiment of a Vesselborn. It is a claim most sacrilegious to say thou hast conquered one of mine kin."

Foreplanter's reply is thick with threat. {The Vesselborn are no longer welcome in Skyscratch territory}. This time, it's the Gitter who draw back, spores of alarm, scandal and terror filling the box canyon. {Too long hast thou demons plagued our people, castrating our young, pillaging out–}

This is all the blasphemy that Foreplanter manages to speak. The Darthen listens politely to this for a few seconds before twerking both wrists and unsheathing both heatblades.

Faster than anyone in the canyon can react, the ranger's taken a step forward and made a rapid movement of her arms, the heatblades only a faint suggestion of shimmer and light.

Foreplanter staggers back, lines of fire tracing an "x" across his trunk.

It makes an abortive attempt to strike back, all ten arms lashing forward. This movement only causes the Gitter to collapse into smoldering pieces, fire ravaging the severed hunks of its torso.

Violence blossoms in the nursery. Foreplanter's entourage surge forward, a score of glasswork weapons unsheathed in a second and raised high to smite the comparatively tiny rangers. The Stargazers, however, are much too fast for that, opening fire with their rifles before the Gitter can even come close.

Green ditrogen savages the advancing Skyscratch marauders, cutting them down completely no more than three strides into their headlong charge. The slaughter is quick, brutal and utterly uncontested by any of the Secondseeds, watching in complete stillness and silence.

Meanwhile, the troop leader advances a few steps, stoops and retrieves something from Foreplanter's crackling carcass. At the end of a length of knotted vine, she inspects what's clearly Nemo's Carbon Industrial piece, likewise smeared in chalky dye.

"Hey, that's mine!" mutters an indignant Nemo.

The crosshairs converge on the Darthen's unsuspecting head. The chamber is primed. Moira massages the trigger with her finger and holds her breath. In between heartbeats, she clicks the trigger and the rifle kicks like a double shot of Borsk brandy.

The shot is absorbed harmlessly by a shimmering something that encircles the spice ranger in a sphere of protection.

Too fascinated by the study of Nemo's firearm, the sound of clattering gunfire too loud, the troop leader doesn't seem to take note of Moira's little indiscretion. For a chilling moment, the Darthen glances up and notices the ray shield's ripple. Still concealed on her perch, Moira nonetheless wants to shrivel up and disappear from that glance, the one that scans the canyon's brim.

How could she, spice ranger fangirl that she is, have forgotten the automatic ray shielding that activates soon as the heatblades are drawn? With the click of her too-eager finger, Moira's nearly given away their position, their existence and with it, the entire caper, like some trigger-happy amateur.

One by one, the Darthen collects each of the ornamental weapons – Nemo's pistol, Moira's revolvers, Odisseus' shotgun – from Foreplanter's smoking remains. This done, she stalks back across the nursery and approaches the Secondseed spokesman. Still kneeling, the poor cactoid visibly trembles before the advance of so powerful a godling, the one who effortlessly slaughtered all its grove's greatest warriors in the blink of an eye.

"Now," the Darthen begins, "tell me all you know about these Vesselborn."

CHAPTER 15

Odisseus is the one who found it.

"Found it," he announces over his shoulder, more mockingly than he'd necessarily intended. He'd taken such a dim view on everything that'd happened since they'd landed on this arid rock, the disparagement in his voice was quickly becoming a long habit.

At his call, his companions are pulled away from their own searching and eventually level up on either side of him. Together, all three of them gaze down at what lies smashed at the Ortok's feet like they'd discovered the priceless vase the family jborra accidentally knocked off the end table.

"Well, it's about what we expected," Moira is forced to admit.

"I guess," Nemo sighs, crossing his arms and burying his mouth in the meat of his palm. "Good news is, pot's still pretty much intact."

The pot is, as far as Odisseus can tell, still pretty much intact. The plant it was potting, however, has been overturned, stomped repeatedly and now lies, dried and desiccated at their feet. In this state, it's almost unrecognizable as a Gitter seedling – a flattened and shriveled mess.

"Good news is," counters Moira, stooping to retrieve the cracked pot from the crusty mess of pulped cactus plant, "there's no shortage of replacements."

Odisseus looks up from the sad spectacle of their smashed payday to the field of blossoming Gitter saplings, arranged in neat patterns all around them. There is, as far as Odisseus can tell, no shortage of replacements.

They'd awoken that morning, from a short, uncomfortable but very necessary sleep beneath a rocky outcropping, to discover the Skyscratch nursery abandoned. The Secondseeds had vanished, leaving only a pair of sentries to guard the grove's precious saplings. To go and case the nursery for their missing Attaché and seedling, it was a simple matter for Moira to gun these stragglers down, despite all Nemo's protestations to let him "have a turn". Two more Gitter bodies added to the charred pile at the foot of the slope and The Unconstant Lover's crew were free to search the canyon with impunity.

It didn't take long, of course, to stumble upon the remains of their precious prize. Smashed into oblivion, it was clear to see their booty had met the same fate as the helpless saplings of the Splitspine grove. The Attaché, presumably also confiscated by the spice rangers, was significantly nowhere to be found.

It was this otherwise predictable outcome that threatened to topple Nemo from the heights of blind optimism into the depths of more appropriate despair. He'd spent the morning combing the nursery, hands rooted in pockets, eyes downcast, boots occasionally skipping stones across the dusty ground.

Moira is marginally more productive. Recovered pot in hand, she went hunting across the canyon floor, inspecting individual saplings and prodding them testingly with her wingtip like she knew the first thing about xenohorticulture.

Odisseus, meanwhile, elects to stand here, stare at the squashed seedling and wonder what all the carnage and zealotry and dehydration was even all for.

The spice rangers had lingered in the nursery for more than an hour, extracting every scrap of information they could about the offworlders; their appearances, their behavior, every syllable they might've uttered. Thankfully, the Secondseeds could furnish them with precious little hard data. They could provide no description of the ship and no proper names, save "Badass Supreme" which, when uttered by a spice ranger, nearly sent Nemo into a fit of hysterics.

More importantly, the Secondseeds have no accurate information about their whereabouts, believing them as good as dead in the bowels of Fernhollow.

One squad of rangers headed that way, to allegedly search for corpses. The remainder flew back westward, summoned by a transmission of some kind. It didn't take much to infer what they might have discovered, abandoned anachronistically in the flatlands, that might draw their attention away.

"Hey," barks Moira from a short distance away. He turns to consider her and the sapling at her feet. "Can you, uh–"

To help sell the point, Moira makes a few clawing gestures with one hand and waggles the empty pot with the other. Odisseus makes a noise somewhere between a growl and a sigh as he harrumphs his way over.

The sapling she's chosen is identical to the thousand others that're littered across the nursery. Squeezed towards the back of its ribcage-shelter, Odisseus must scrunch down and lumber toward the one Moira requested. She, meanwhile, stalks off towards the shredded remnants of the environtents, muttering something about "lining".

His claws extended, the Ortok drops to his knees on either side of the sapling. He squats there a moment, no more a gardener than Moira and uncertain precisely the best way to start excavating this ugly alien plant.

{Curious}.

Odisseus scrunches up his muzzle. The smell came unbidden into his nose, too familiar, too immediate. He reels back a little, attempting to register the wordless sensation that's come with the smell. It's not unlike a Gitter's speech-spores but this is unrefined, more suggestive than specific.

The Ortok's eyes land on the open flower that sprouts from the very center of the sapling's crown. It's a blue-and-speckled thing, meager and fluttering and only there by the slenderest of stems.

{Curious}.

Keeping his gaze firmly on that flower, Odisseus plunges a claw into the moist earth surrounding the seedling, approximately six inches from the central bulb.

{Afraid}, comes the immediate sensation, filled this time with urgency. {Afraid. Afraid. Afraid}, it broadcasts over and over again, the only equipment it has to communicate.

Odisseus makes an uncertain sound in back of his throat and inches back as far as he can in these cramped conditions. Once again, he scoops a claw into the ground, searching for the plant's roots. All the while, as he digs, the pheromones relay fear and occasionally confusion, implicitly imploring Odisseus to be cautious and gentle with the excavation.

This worry must, in some way, show in the Ortok's expression or posture. Soon as Moira returns with pot and scrap of environtent lining, she questions him, in her gruff. "You alright?"

Odisseus simply nods. "Gotta be careful with the roots," he adds a moment later, when it becomes clear that Moira doesn't notice the smell, the spores or their suggestion of speech and sentience beneath.

Together, Moira and Odisseus work to gradually hoist the panicking plant from its place in the soil and into the pot. Soon as the sapling is situated, they tamp down any extra earth, to better support the unstable bulb, always mindful of the nascent thorns that cover the spiny bulge of its body.

The slew of {Afraid}, {Afraid}, {Afraid} eventually gives way to occasional declarations of {Confused}. From this, Odisseus chooses to believe that the sapling wasn't substantially harmed during the relocation. Once the chore's done, Moira rises and stalks off on other business, dusting dirt from her hands. Odisseus is about to rise and follow when a new pheromone reaches his nose.

{Thirsty}.

Dropping back to his squat, Odisseus retrieves his aquafier from where it hangs at his belt. Uncorking the top, he considers what little water the device's pulled from the parched atmosphere – a mouthful, maybe, sloshing at the tank's bottom. Gritting his teeth, he dumps what remains into the pot, around the base of the sapling.

Corking and stashing the aquafier back on his belt, Odisseus waddles out from underneath the overhang. He's stretching from his stoop when he catches whiff of one last pheromone.

{Content}.

No sooner has Odisseus rounded the ribcage's corner than he's unexpectedly greeted by another Gitter. Staggering unsteadily toward the center of the abandoned nursery comes a lone cactoid. By the height and the tattered harness, Odisseus supposes it must be a Firstseed. By its six or eight or ten severed limbs, Odisseus supposes it must have survived some catastrophe. Its trunk striated with gruesome scars, it limps forward, nearly toppling with each step, heedless of the world and the three Vesselborn around it.

Moira draws her glassrock sword but she keeps the weapon loose in her hand, seemingly aware this wretched creature's clearly no threat. Nemo, on the other hand, reaches Moira's discarded Domino and swings the rifle around, beside himself with excitement at the possibility that he might get to needlessly incinerate something.

The nearer comes the cactoid, the stronger grows its signature scent. Odisseus is suddenly reminded of that first afternoon beneath the desert sun; the heat, the exhaustion, the life-giving peaches he was fed.

"Stalkchopper," Odisseus mutters, shuffling a few steps forward. "Don't shoot," he commands Nemo, extending his paws like he's about to catch any ammunition they might fire.

Heeding his advice, Moira sheathes her blade but doesn't move an inch, keeping her respectful distance. Nemo, on the other hand, is not so easily discouraged.

"Who the bloom," he groans, "is Stalkchopper now?"

{Vesselborn?} the cactoid wonders, seeming to notice the offworlders for the first time. It stops its forward slog and attempts to drop to one knee, the typical Gitter gesture of reverence. It loses its balance and, too top heavy, thuds heavily onto the earth. Nemo suppresses a snigger.

Odisseus comes as close to the toppled giant as he dares, unsure what assistance he could or should render to an armless, spine-covered cactoid. With what severed stumps it still has, the wounded Stalkchopper attempts to lever its enormous body into a more dignified position.

"The fuck's wrong with you?" demands Nemo as he approaches, showing very reluctant interest.

{I was bested}, explains Stalkchopper, {in the games of succession}. It gestures feebly with a severed limb across its body. {This punishment is all that befits a failure such as I. That the Foreplanter might not have any rivals to its rule}.

"Flamescar," mutters Moira.

{It is no longer known by that name. It is Forep–}

"Yeah, that guy's cooked," Nemo informs him, swinging the Domino towards the heap of charred cactoid bodies still piled there. "Your Heavenly Douchebags beat us to the punch."

{The Skyscratch grove is no more, then}, concedes Stalkchopper grimly. {No Firstseeds are left standing to be Foreplanter}.

"What's he doing here?" Odisseus wonders, a question quickly translated by Moira. "Why come back?"

{For one day and one night, I wandered the wastes aimlessly, mine purpose in life cut away}. With a groan, Nemo stomps away, Stalkchopper's tale of woe too tedious to endure another second. {Steadily eastward did I head, seeking Fernhollow and the only honorable death mine maimed body might find. It was then}, the cactoid explains, horror tinging its spores, {that I came upon the Secondseeds, abandoning their duty as nurses and out about the duty of water-hunting, a task only the Firstseeds are worthy enough to undertake}.

"And?" prompts Moira.

{And here I came, to feel for mine own roots, what fate befell the noble grove that once I called my own}.

"And the Vesselborn?" advances Odisseus.

"Have you seen any sign," Moira translates, "of our kindred, out among the wastes?"

{Great vessels}, Stalkchopper informs them, wonder in its spores, {tearing the sky with their screaming. I erred in thinking they had come for me, to ferry me to God Beyond. It was folly to think so, that, in this impure form–}

At mention of these "great vessels", Odisseus and Moira exchange looks. As the Ortok starts to draw in the dirt with a claw, Moira provides the necessary translation. "These vessels," she prompts, "did they resemble this?"

Dragging his claw through the sand, Odisseus starts to make the crudest possible rendering of an R-Type 621 Dropcraft, composed of simple lines scratched through the mud. As best he can, Odisseus attempts to extrapolate how a 621 might look when seen from the ground, foregoing the fiddly technical details that distinguish the 621 from the 622 or even the 618.

Stalkchopper is a patient audience member. Soon as Odisseus has finished scratching, it renders its verdict. {So loudly did they roar}, it recalls vividly, {the very ground did shake with fury. As it screamed through my spores, such an outline did I behold}.

"The 621 Dropcraft," announces Odisseus, falling back on his haunches and sighing significantly. "Sorta good news. Means they're not landing any warships to hunt us down. Just more rangers."

"Probably don't wanna upset," Moira theorizes, "the natives anymore than we already have. Sight of a GCF cruiser breaking atmo would probably knock loose a few pieces of their theology. How many," she then asks of Stalkchopper, her tone a little gentler, "such vessels did you behold?"

{Three such tore the air past me}, Stalkchopper concludes, after a moment of contemplation.

"Let's assume, for Jotor's sake, those're each individual ships, rather than a single hopper making a series of patrols," Moira argues, tabulating quickly on her fingers. "That'd be ninety-six rangers, within a day's walk, maybe an hour's flight." She counts the pirates with thumb, pointer and middle fingers. "There's three of us and one gun between us. What we need is more guys."

{With thy blessing, Vesselborn}, entreats Stalkchopper, starting to rise clumsily onto its feet, {may I be permitted to continue my grim pilgrimage, that I might come upon Fernhollow before another sun may rise on my pitif–}

"Nah," comes the unexpected answer from Nemo. "We still need you." Finger extended, he advances a few steps, weaving between and stepping over whatever bones or saplings get in his way.

"For?" wonders Odisseus archly.

"You're right," Nemo answers, shrugging a little. He levels up on Moira's left, still scowling curiously at the wobbly Gitter who stands before him. "We need more guys." Both Odisseus and Moira share a scowl at this, unsure how a crippled cactoid could necessarily help them defeat five score spice rangers.

This does, however, appear to be Nemo's idea. "You're the only big guy we got," he admits, waddling a few steps closer to the standing Stalkchopper, "so you're gonna hafta do."

{I grow}, Stalkchopper manages, rising to a crooked and unsustainable height, {to serve}.

Jag is as surprised as anyone to discover the spaceship lying abandoned in the middle of the wasteland. Like a derelict tanker at the bottom of a dried-up lake, it tilts sickeningly to the side, is patinaed in a thick layer of dust and looks positively forlorn, a relic from a forgotten era of interstellar engineering. Every time his eyes fall across that sand-blasted hull, Jag reminds himself those aren't the time-picked bones of some ancient wreck.

That is the vehicle a team of offworlders used to penetrate all the Consortium's impregnable defenses.

It is not the duty of the Stargazers to speculate how. It is the duty of the Stargazers to track the interlopers down and bring them before Consortium justice.

Centered on the mysterious freighter, this patch of unremarkable desert had become a spice ranger stronghold. Two triangular Dropcraft – Alpha and Beta – sit on either side of the trespasser's vessel. The three wingtips are folded for landing, their hatches are wide open and their payloads go bustling about the scene.

Teams of rangers, from species originating all over the Hegemony, scamper across the freighter's hull, seeking any possible means of ingress. A squad of rangers from Alpha Flight goes hustling past the momentarily idle Jag and he spins to stay out of their purposeful path.

When the entirety of the Stargazer troop descended on the site, Jag and his comrades of Beta Flight, the original squad to discover the presence of offworlders, somehow became lost in the shuffle. According to Ark, the most senior ranger in Jag's Flight, the whole troop had never been assembled like this, not in the Kavobu's living memory.

By now, it was fair to assume this was far too elaborate to be a drill.

Overhead, Jag hears the thrum of Dropcraft Delta's engine as it goes juddering past, performing its concentric patrol circles. Aboard, crackshot Stargazer snipers were no doubt scanning the horizon for mottibles in every direction, searching for any sign of the offworlders returning to their abandoned ship.

The comms, thus far, had been silent. For a situation this severe, the Stargazers were reduced to their most basic measures, including word of mouth and visual targeting. Code Trespass assumed that, in order to breach this far, any interloper must already possess exhaustive knowledge of the Consortium's security and its protocols. Thus, even an encrypted channel was deemed unsafe against such a cunning foe.

All they could do, until word came back from Commander Hego, was scan the horizon and attempt to gain entry to the freighter, this impossible incongruity on Gi's primordial plains.

For a ship that supposedly circumvented every exhaustive layer of secrecy and security that protects the planet Gi, she's really not much to look at. She resembles more, to Jag's thinking, a piece of space trash, a hunk of mismatched teltriton that the atmosphere didn't burn completely to cinders, than any operative vessel anyone would willingly fly.

She's The Breadwinner, according to her registration, a Vbeck & Rhissol MO9 Expatriate-Class Cargo Scow. She's obviously not, however, as Crex's scan reveals; the MO9 is a far cry from the ship standing before them. Whatever she actually was, she's quite determined to repel any boarders.

The triple-thick hull is more or less impervious to both heatblade and cutting beam. All their efforts against the boarding ramp resulted in simply superficial scars to her outer shell. There's a devilish counter-measure installed in her door controls, something that all the Consortium's mechanical arts has yet to crack. The two airlocks, then, seemed the next logical choice for ingress – until the anti-boarding booby trap was discovered.

The ensuing explosion sent three rangers straight to critical condition and gave the team hard at work on the starboard airlock something to think about.

The trespasser might be devious, their vessel might appear impervious, but Jag knows it's only a matter of time. Sooner or later, armed with all resources afforded the Gitter Consortium, the Stargazers would be streaming aboard the trespassing vessel.

Soon as Commander Hego arrives from her eastern hunt, she shows no interest in these developments. The moment she's extinguished her heatblades and her hooves touch the earth, she's stomping purposefully towards that anomalous spaceship. Along the way, Beta Flight comes thronging around her, eager to hear the news and eager to brief her fully on the progress.

"–using a scramble codifier," reports Crex, having difficulty matching the Commander's urgent stride, "even with her primary motivator offline–"

"–Nix and Xell from Delta Flight," reports Wad, reading scrolling data from his visor, "third-degree burns across much of the torso and–"

"–trace of them, any closer to the grove?" presses Jag, ignored among the cloud of clamant rangers, crowding around their Commander. "What of the natives?"

Instead of answering any of these questions, the Commander comes to an abrupt stop. She stands at the foot of the slanted spaceship, its bow looming over her, and places a palm flat against its dusty hull. For a moment, Jag wonders if she's about to activate her heatblade and pointlessly attempt to cut her way through all that teltriton.

Instead, she simply sweeps her hand to right, wiping away the dust and revealing something else beneath.

Fractal paint twists in intricate designs of black, white and a dozen contrasting colors. It's faded by time, dimmed by dust and marred in a dozen places by scratches and scrapes but the inherent artistry is still striking. From this small glimpse, Jag thinks he maybe makes out the shape or structure of a skull, three nostrils flaring over alien incisors.

To see this design, writ so large upon the nose of the interloping vessel, draws an audible gasp from the assembled spice rangers. Even sequestered in the spice ranger corps this long, in this unreachable corner of the galaxy, it was impossible not to recognize that Jolly Roger.

"It's the Galactic Menace," Commander Hego explains, as soon as she's spun back around to face her clustered men. "He's on planet as we speak."

Moira knows an angry mob when she smells one.

They stand together as one encircling mass, perhaps three score in number, creating a hemisphere of cactoid bodies, arrayed before the pedestal and reeking of rage. They are each of them Secondseeds, lacking the height and scarification of the Firstseeds. To Moira, however, clocking in at an impressive height of five-foot-four, the appreciable difference between a fifteen-foot-tall angry cactus and a ten-foot tall one is pretty negligible.

This is not to mention, of course, the hundred or more glassrock swords, sabers, spears and battleaxes they grasp in their hundreds of hands.

All that stands between Moira and this mob is a limbless exile, some high ground and a stolen firearm, machine produced by Concord Industries and not impressing Moira any.

The limbless exile is Stalkchopper, standing fifty feet ahead and almost fully surrounded by the Secondseeds. For minutes now, both Gitter parties have stood stock still, evidently conducting some secret conference on their spores. Unable to process the smell, Moira chooses to interpret the fact they've not ripped the helpless Firstseed to pieces as a sign Stalkchopper's making their pitch passably well.

The high ground is the tuskwood table, the most strategically advantageous point in the whole nursery. Upon this, Moira stands, legs spread, weapon primed at the barely-contained horde below. She knows, when push comes to shove, how little this superficial advantage will avail her but it is Moira's constitutional imperative not to die a punk-ass death.

The stolen firearm is a Concord Industries KZ647 Domino Heavy-Automatic Assault Rifle, once the property of the pinkskin ranger Moira strangled the night previous. Like the high ground, the Domino will be made almost instantly useless, as soon as the green, spiky floodgates open. Moira consoles herself with the knowledge that, before she sliced to pieces, at least a few of her cactoid assailants will quite literally explode from too much ditrogen in their diet.

As for her partners in crime, neither will earn as lengthy a last stand as Moira intends to. One is too busy pacing to notice his imminent death by sword after sword after sword. The other is too busy puttering with machine parts.

"Anything?" presses the Captain, pacing the exact same route he had nights earlier, before ascending to the lofty title of Badass Supreme.

"Soon as there is," Moira answers coldly, her eyes locked on the crowd, "you'll be the first to know."

"Actually," mentions Odisseus, a touch pedantically as he sniffs the air, "that'll probably be me."

Before Moira can pull a face or make a withering comment, Nemo starts snapping his fingers in that way he does when he's brainstorming. "Run me through our assets again," he requests or demands, his gait urgent, his gaze focused on the ground before him.

"This rifle, pretty much," Moira sighs. "Plus half a bottle of DermEndure and what's left of the inclement weather shit. Whatever the bloom he's scratching at." With no glance or gesture, Moira somehow indicates Odisseus and his tinkered device. "Assuming he can even put all that together again."

Odisseus slaps frustrated paws to the tuskwood table, rattling all his odds and ends. What was once a functional device is now splayed across the improvised workspace, a thousand tiny pieces from one. "You're all aware," he snarls, interrupting his work to better harangue his unappreciative accomplices, "that this thing was originally designed with blooming asteroids in mind?"

During their search of the Skyscratch nursery, they'd made one lucky find, among all the saplings, bones and burnt cactoid bodies – an unexploded shield projector. The fist-sized hunk of machinery must have been scavenged by a Skyscratch water-hunting expedition while the Lover's crew were wandering Fernhollow below. Indeed, it never occurred to Moira to wonder what became of the hundred or so dummy ray shield projectors, rigged to dud out rather than explode when triggered remotely.

Their spacebergs long melted, Moira imagines the unremarkable pieces of tech, lying abandoned in the midst of the ceaseless desert.

One such projector, however, wound up in the Ortok's paws. Too desperate to ignore any potential advantage, no matter how thin, Odisseus was immediately put to work, all to the betterment of Nemo's latest large-scale suicide attempt.

"You'll figure something out," Nemo answers automatically, too absorbed in his scheming to offer his saltbrother any more encouragement than that. "That all?"

"Buncha broken spears and shit. A Gitter warrior who can't lift a sword. If all goes according to plan," Moira caveats, not intending to sound quite so sarcastic but willing to admit how thin their chances of success actually were, "these sixty-one Secondseed guys."

"Plus," Nemo reminds her plaintively, "our secret weapon."

"Well." Moira cocks her head a little. "Let's not count our lonktonks."

"And the opposition?"

"Three 621 Dropcraft. One hundred spice rangers. The full military and technological might of the invincible Gitter Consortium."

This stops Nemo up and he squints quizzically at Moira. "How many rangers?"

"Ninety-six," Moira shoots back. "Assuming the whole troop's here. Which three ships means they are."

Nemo points a patronizing finger at the Dominio she clutches. "Ninety-five."

"Best case scenario," Moira growls, peeved at his petulance, "we're still substantially outnumbered. And outgunned. Our swords're made of glass. Theirs're made of fire."

"And our guys," Odisseus pipes up, "would be made of wood."

"Whereas theirs," Moira adds, "would be made of spice ranger."

None of this seems to stop Nemo in his pacing, a look of intense calculation etched onto his face. It's into this momentary silence that Stalkchopper interrupts.

{Mine own spores}, it relays to them, {can only placate them so far. They wish}, it explains, stepping accommodatingly to the side, {to hear Badass Supreme speak}.

Nemo sighs, accepting his grim responsibility as the Vesselborn's crazed spokesman. He pointlessly brushes a layer of dust from his dust-encrusted bathrobe and slowly mounts the tuskwood table, all the better to address the masses down below.

Odisseus looks up as he passes. "You're not gonna lie to them," he presumes, more a statement than a question, "about their chances?"

Nemo shakes his head. "No, I don't think so."

At the emergence of their mad prophet, returned from beyond the veil of death, the cactoid crowd suddenly stills. The aggregate haze of their spores falls away a moment, indecision washing over them.

"He gave you the skinny, I assume?" Nemo wonders, thumbing towards Stalkchopper. The pacified warrior has scooted completely to the side, to allow Badass Supreme more room to pontificate. "So, yeah." Nemo's hands slap against his thighs. "Things ain't looking so great for you or for any of us." He points a finger towards the nursery's entrance and the trampled heap of ash. "All your dudes are dead. You don't got nobody to hang around here and guard your booty. Sooner or later, somebody's gonna come along, somebody bigger and badder, and they're gonna squash you. They're gonna squash all your saplings, same as you did to those other sorry bastards."

Threatening, in even an oblique way, the safety of their saplings seems an odd way to start this speech. There's a tide of sporic anger, of protective fury, that rolls across the nursery and into everybody's nostrils. Moira's grip on the Domino tightens as, heedless to the danger, Nemo continues on this line of thought.

"And I bet y'all blame me," he assumes, planting a hand on his chest, "and us for some of that. And, hey," he admits with a shrug, "we don't make half-bad targets for your blame. We're the infidels, right, we're the heretics, we're the ones that cascaded all this buhoxshit down on you and your peaceful way of life. It was definitely us that set you against the Skidstains, it was us that got Foreplanter killed." He lets out an anxious laugh, a little carried away with the self-incrimination. "You could even say, I guess, it was us that got all your goons massacred up."

A second wave of anger sweeps across the nursery. Nemo, however, shows no signs of stopping his depreciating tirade.

"I ain't gonna beat around the bush here – we're pretty squarely on the hook for that shit." He traipses back and forth along the table a little, wavering this way and that as he recounts the whole undignified chain of events. "You thought we were gods, turns out we ain't really gods so much, we blew your culture into tiny little pieces and I would naturally expect you'd be looking to repeatedly stab somebody vaguely Vesselborn-shaped on account of all that." He throws his hands up, a gesture of utter surrender. "Who could blame you?"

On cue, the first few rows of Secondseeds surge forward, overcome with righteous fervor. It's Moira's pure gunfighting instinct that saves them, the Domino spreading a few bolts across the sand and scorching it black a few inches from the running row of cactoids. She's priming a second burst when she realizes the horde's momentarily hesitated and Nemo's recovering from the shock.

This took the Captain completely by surprise. He stares astoundedly at the small murderous army he's just inspired. "Whoa, hey," he cajoles them, looking offended. "Gimme a second, though. Like, bloom, I didn't mean me, for Jotor's sake. I meant fucking them." He thrusts a finger far back over their heads, pointing west – out of the nursery, through the glassrock hills, across the wasteland, to that stranded spaceship and those that surround it.

Confusion and stymied violence ripples through Nemo's audience. The Captain grimaces. "Can I break something to you guys? You're boned. The most boned. Like, 'mechanic-caught-you-masturbating-in-the-engine-room' boned."

This all-too-specific reference provokes a profound scowl from Moira and a sad, confirming nod from Odisseus.

"Like," Nemo shamelessly continues, "there's no tomorrow, the sun's gone supernova, kiss goodbye to your loved ones and stuffed animals. You know what I'm saying?" Confusion persists among the Gitter as long as Nemo persists with these references destined to fly straight over their flowery heads. "You guys might be able to go water-hunt today, but you're no fucking Firstfucks or Tallasses or whatever. Sooner or later, some other group of cactus baddies is gonna come along and smear you or, what's worse, smear all your little babies here."

The destruction of their saplings invoked a second time, the Secondseed's confusion gives way to bubbling anger, a familiar scent in Moira's nostrils.

"That's a fact," Nemo, oblivious as ever, assures them. "Sure as I'm standing here. I can't save you from that. Whoever Up There," he points out with a literal finger to the sky, "can't save you. You can't save you. And whose fault," he poses, almost rhetorically, "is that, really?"

{Thine}, comes the unanimous response.

"Oh, right, yeah, sure," recalls Nemo. "In one, sorta immediate way, yes, this is all our fault. In another," he deflects before they can dwell on this first fact, "more institutional way, this is all whose fault?" To his credit, Nemo makes good use of their moment of confusion, to throw another westward point over their heads. "Theirs. Fucking theirs."

A deathly pall of silence falls over the audience, a sudden breeze seeming to whisk away all their collective spores.

"Those bloomholes," Nemo starts to snarl, his voice filling the figurative silence all the more, "roll down from the fucking Starsea or wherever. They harvest your motherblooming organs. They act like their shit don't stink and, when somebody's actually got the stones to stand up to them, they massacre whole scads of you. To keep you in your fucking place."

Moira hears his panting breath between stages of the tirade and spares Nemo a brief glance. He's adopted that dangerous aspect, the one with the slight tremble to his lips and fingertips and the cold fire behind his eyes. Angry as he seems, in that moment, Moira can sense his exposure, his vulnerability to the words he's saying.

This effect somehow seems to translate to the Secondseeds, for they listen without interruption, without a single spore in the air.

"You don't know me super well – and you pretty clearly shouldn't trust me – but trust me." The next two words, freighted with meaning, hang in the air a moment. "I know."

He takes a few more ragged breaths and starts to elaborate. "I know what happens when your planet is claimed as the sovereign property of somebody with no fucking right to it. I know what it means to have your way of life bulldozed by the whims of galactic supply and demand. I know what a planet looks like when it's leeched of everything still good and unshitty it has left."

He opens and closes his hands, slowly, squeezing tension from the air. "It's a super fucking powerless feeling, to see all the wheels and shit of the universe moving to crush you." He holds a finger aloft, wagging it slightly. "Something I learned a long time ago. It's infinitely better to die biting and clawing and gnashing your teeth, than it is to die in an orderly fashion, at a time and place preordained by some cunt."

Moira's actively lowered her weapon, to see him in this state. Over her shoulder, Moira can see that the Ortok's paws are still, his tinkering forgotten. She spares a glance behind, to see him and, even on his somewhat unreadable Ortoki features, Moira is taken aback to see something similar, a pale copy, to the very expression Nemo wears. It's a vulnerability, something essential to their saltbrotherhood laid bare in the sunlight.

"Two options," Nemo breaks the reverie by extending two fingers, "you're left with, then. Stay here, stay outta the Vesselborn's way, die slowly and pointlessly, feeding their corporate engine. Or die now and die fast, die throwing yourself into the gears, hoping that, even for a second, you might jam the works." He snaps his fingers and claps them together hard. "Up to you."

His bathrobe whipping around him, Nemo spins and hops off the tuskwood table, not waiting for a reaction. The cactoid confusion persists another few seconds, long enough for Nemo's boots to reach the sandy ground, before they make their verdict. In so doing, they seal the fate of everyone, Gitter and offworlder alike, in that canyon.

Rooty feet stomp the ground, the very earth trembling. A hundred glassrock weapons are thrown high, jostling and clacking. Though no voice is risen, the air is thick with the scent of Gitter cheers, all crying for death and glory and a bloody end.

Nemo wipes imagined dust from his hands, his companions staring dumbfounded at him. "Played my trump card," he explains. "Hope that things're ready," he mentions, inclining his chin towards the ray shield projector, forgotten on the tuskwood, "'cause we're off to battle."

CHAPTER 16

Odisseus blips his comm four times – long, short, short, short.

The raging sandstorm, it occurs to him then, may affect his reception. He's uncertain what effect a planetary sandstorm might have on handheld communicators because he has, in fact, never survived a sandstorm.

To be clear, if he does not survive this particular sandstorm, it may not actually be the sandstorm's fault. There is an equally likely chance that he might be gunned down or dismembered by heatblades or tortured to death in some nameless Consortium prison someplace. If he somehow survives all this, then there's always trusty old heat stroke, his constant companion during their sojourn on planet. That could still very likely kill him.

To walk through one of Gi's sandstorms is to walk through a white-hot inferno. Gale-force winds whip the sandy dunes into a frenzy all about them. Each step becomes a labor, against such oppressive winds. Visibility is dwindled to a paltry handful of yards in every direction, the white haze swallowing everything in sight. All noise, too – conversation, footfalls, even the Ortok's own echoed breathing inside his vacuum mask – are blotted out by the howling of sand and storm.

As terrible a development as this might seem, the sandstorm may actually have been a boon, sent down from the benevolent God Beyond. In these harsh conditions, their adversaries were grounded, neither their vessels nor their rangers able to take to the air until the winds calmed somewhat.

A niggling part of Odisseus wants to know how The Unconstant Lover, a vessel much bulkier than the slim Dropcraft, intends to fly in this storm, once they reach her. He cannot worry overmuch about that now, however. They would have to cross that bridge when they come, through battle and bloodshed, to it.

The adversary is invisible through the sandscreen but Odisseus and everyone else knows they're out there. Now and again, someone up ahead fires a Domino their way – a green spark of laserfire in the maelstrom – only to see the ditrogen deflected harmlessly away. Odisseus wonders whether they've pieced together the puzzle yet, how their motley Gitter warband came to be protected by a planetary-class ray shield, or whether they're frightened and mystified by the approach of this seemingly invincible army.

There was no way to know the spice ranger's exact fortifications, with their line-of-sight so shortened. The Secondseeds, with their sensitive roots, claimed the "Vesselborn were arranged all before us, encamped around the base of the largest Vessel" Armed with so little intelligence, it is imminently possible, Odisseus knows, that they could all be walking into a trap, a killbox carefully prepared for their arrival.

He takes small comfort in the knowledge that they too have prepared a trap for the Stargazers, one of a very different stripe, one that only Nemo could've concocted.

The centerpiece of that trap and indeed this whole plan is Stalkchopper. The great impassive Firstseed stands a dozen yards behind Odisseus and, when the Ortok turns, is only faintly discernible through the sandstorm. Affixed, center mass, to the cactoid's torso is the kitbashed projector, responsible for enveloping the entire Skyscratch warband in its ray shield dome. Protected from sniping laserfire, the Secondseeds could, long as they remained within a certain radius to the crippled Firstseed, safely close to sword's reach with the rangers, without fear from their almighty firearms.

This is the first phase of Nemo's attack plan – use the ray shield to reach melee range, let slip the cacti of war, pray for the best. It is the second phase of Nemo's attack plan, the one that's kicked off when his trap is sprung, that worries Odisseus the most.

Considering they were all marching to their own deaths, the Secondseeds look positively eager. As per Gitter custom, the warband stand in no formation, save a loose and disorganized cluster around Stalkchopper and his ray shield canopy. Each one is exhaustively overarmed, with swords, axes and spears, wearing the harnesses intended for Firstseeds like children in cardboard armor. They've blown the dye budget too, each one smeared red and yellow and blue in disparate patches. Their spores tossed about by the fearsome winds, Odisseus can nonetheless smell their terror, their rage, their thrill.

His companions look no less barbaric. To one side, a Moira Quicksilver plastered head-to-toe in yellow dye and adorned with a tribal fetish intended to bring about berserker fury, tests the heft of two glassrock sabers she's chosen as her weapons of choice. To the other, Nehel Morel, the one responsible for all this mess, is dyed a bright sapphire blue, wears a makeshift crown of flowers that once decorated Foreplanter's head and nervously twiddles his fingers against the stock of the Domino, likewise dyed and fetished by the fervent Skyscratch.

Odisseus is no exception. His pelt is smeared with scarlet dye. He clutches a long-hafted glassrock spear in his paws, one of three that he carries. He wears a harness of green leather, festooned with clacking shells and bones, that compliments his toolbelt.

The Ortok, however, bears one extra accoutrement. Hovering on a driftpack's retrofitted motor and tethered a few feet from a transponder in his belt, is the seedling, caked white by the whipping dust. Wherever Odisseus moves, the little floating potted plant follows and, even through the maelstrom, the Ortok can smell its primitive spores.

{Afraid}, it reminds him and Odisseus cannot help but agree.

The Ortok's comm blips back three times – short, short, long – and Odisseus places a hand on Nemo's shoulder.

On cue, Badass Supreme hefts the Domino high into the air and loses a few rounds. These disappear into the sandstorm but they succeed at getting him attention. The Captain, inside his vacuum mask, screams something, a few words of inspiration that Odisseus is certain contains the phrase "cuntmunchers", but through over the howling wind, his meaning is completely lost or garbled.

Without waiting another second, Nemo charges forward.

The entire warband is immediately on his heels, a great green tide of tall bodies, running limbs and shining glassrock weapons. There's a split second, the Secondseeds rushing past, when Odisseus and Moira lock eyes, before she too hastens once more unto the breach, leaving Odisseus to trundle behind, spear in hand and sapling floating nearby.

Moira meets her first opponent just inside the ray shield. This spice ranger, a Zkarson whose outer hide crackles and flakes with each movement, shoulders through the shield and attempts to bring his rifle to bear on the charging Moira. One swipe of her glassrock saber tosses the weapon aside, one thrust of the other impales the ranger through the midsection. Since he's a Zkarson, however, Moira must, quick as a flash, bring the first saber back around a few times, to slice through layer after layer of that cartilaginous hide, to ensure he's dead or defeated. Once both weapons are free, she advances towards her next opponent.

Her next opponent proves tough to locate. Everywhere she looks, Moira sees only more sand, whipped into a furious frenzy. The shimmering wall of ray shield is a constant, advancing with Stalkchopper, and she works to keep pace with this, lest she be struck by some hidden sniper. Occasionally, a spark of gunfire reveals a small battle, a Secondseed clashing with a nearby spice ranger, and this gives Moira all the bearing she needs.

A few stray bolts sizzle past her. Zeroing their trajectory, Moira spies a vague silhouette, some yards to her left and twists just in time to avoid a second burst of laserfire. She comes barrelling in, sabers spinning, and moves to swat this one's rifle from their hands the same as the first. Her timing, however, is infinitesimally off and, when the next burst comes, the Domino blasts a few holes straight through the flat of Moira's glassrock blade. Her righthand attack thrown way off balance, she swings wildly with the left. Good fortune sends her second blade up through the humanoid's chin and into her skull.

The ranger crumpling to the ground, Moira examines the three holes punched neatly through her blade and grunts in appreciation. She has little time for appreciation, however, as the fighting grows thick around her.

Now that the ray shield's membrane has passed over the shooting line of spice rangers, the full brunt of the Secondseeds goes swinging into battle. They press their smaller foes hard, taking advantage of their superior reach to stay out of the heatblade's way. The sandstorm even comes to their aid, the fierce winds mangling the aim of the second rank of spice rangers, sending their shots wild.

Outnumbered and outmatched, the Gitter fight with every ounce of their considerable strength, their ferocity and abandon far more than Moira was anticipating. To see them, hacking and slicing and stomping, even as they're punctured, burned and shelled, gives Moira's heart of stone a momentary excuse to flutter.

The sound of a heatblade activating snaps Moira from sentimentality. A ranger comes leaping at her out of the sandstorm, thrusting a sword of pure fire straight at Moira's heart. She's dropping to the ground and rolling into a Wheeling Tvorka as the ranger's second blade crackles the air above her. When she lands in a crouch, Moira hooks one glassrock blade around a stray conduit on the leaping ranger's leg and yanks.

Stray fire goes licking across the humanoid's lower half and his screams are somehow louder than those of the storm around them. He slams into the ground, his legs engulfed in flame, and Moira plunges her second glassrock sword through his ribcage.

Some sudden instinct spins Moira around perfectly in time to spot her next attacker. In comes a Qinson ranger, his great curved horns the least of her worries. His opening heatblade routine is vicious, incorporating savage kicks to throw Moira off-balance, and it takes all of her arts to dodge and weave and avoid being sliced, skewered or pummeled. Her instincts scream at Moira to throw up a blade, to parry an incoming blow, but she knows one flick of that white-hot heatblade will slice through glassrock like paper.

She's saved by an unexpected source. A short-hafted spear appears from nowhere to sink into the Qinson's unsuspecting side. Moira follows the spear's haft and is surprised to see Odisseus, of all people, guiltily gripping the weapon's opposite end.

The Ortok would be wiser to keep his distance, protecting the precious cargo as he is. He continues to clutch that sapling to his hip, retrieves his next spear and, seeming to read Moira's thoughts, scrambles back a little ways, further from the thicker fighting.

She's no time to catch the Ortok's eye or express her gratitude, however, as two Stargazers, working in concert, descend upon her at once. Their heatblades scorching the airborne sand, both rangers – a Tegoon with all his beads jangling and a hairless humanoid – weave an impenetrable attack pattern, advancing inexorably toward Moira. With no choice in the matter, Moira goes scrambling backward again, not able to mount even the paltriest defense with her feeble glassrock blades.

This time, her salvation comes from a staggering Secondseed. Its weapons and several of its limbs gone, the cactoid materializes from the storm, bearing down on the humanoid ranger. Seeing the lumbering giant too late, the Stargazer only manages to bring a single heatblade to effect against the Gitter's kneecap before it closes the distance. Wrapping the ranger in a great bear hug, the Secondseed pulps the ranger on its thousand thorns as it knee gives out and it crashes to the earth.

This proves the perfect distraction for Moira. Employing a similar tactics against the Tegoon, Moira lashes out at the aghast spice ranger with a jackboot, snapping the Stargazer's own knee in an unnatural direction. As the Tegoon drops to the earth, Moira draws a saber across his throat, severing both the strings of beads that dangle there and the Tegoon's jugular vein.

The ranger's not dead on the ground three seconds before his carcass is peppered with green ditrogen slugs. Moira doesn't need to turn to know that it's Nemo who comes screaming out of the swirl, Domino ablaze, wasting precious ammunition on the Tegoon's lifeless corpse. She almost voices a word of protest but, at the sound of his maniacal cackling as he races past, Moira knows he wouldn't listen anyway.

Besides, she's got this next ranger to worry about.

Her latest challenge is an adroit Vongrol ranger, her lashing tail incorporated into her heatblade technique. This time, Moira goes aggressive. She allows her opponent a few impressive displays of swordsmanship before she catches the corded whip of the Vongrol's tail around her forearm. One yank is enough to unbalance the ranger, then it's an elbow to stomach and a saber through the teeth.

Prying her sword from the Vongrol's skull takes Moira a moment. As she does, she keeps a vigilant eye, to ensure no one seizes on her second's vulnerability. Up ahead, through the sandscreen, Moira spies a great triangular silhouette that looms like a fell obelisk over the whole battlefield.

Once her sword's free, it's towards this shadow that Moira advances, the Secondseeds pressing the advantage all around her.

Jag can't get a bead on any of the offworlders.

This is precisely what his visor's infrared filter was designed for. Under normal conditions, he imagines the infrared visor would function perfectly and Jag would be able to effortlessly distinguish individuals from the great writhing biomass he sees all around him. Instead, his sensors scrambled by the sandstorm, it's frustratingly difficult to differentiate one flailing fighter – Gitter, spice ranger or trespasser – from another.

This one, the next figure to materialize from the broil and come swinging at him, is pretty definitely a Gitter. Laying about with a bloodstained poleaxe, the native barbarian proves frighteningly immune to all Jag's ditrogen. His opponent smoking and smoldering but not slain, Jag goes leaping backward, only the added boost from his harness keeping him from the poleaxe's deadly range. Finally, only once the Domino's glowing hot and Jag's fingers are numb from firing does the green fire licking the Secondseed do its work, crumbling the cactoid to cinders.

Jag's trembling fingers nearly fumble reloading the assault rifle. How the interlopers managed to corrupt the shattered remnants of the Skyscratch to their power, Jag has no idea. It's a frightening spectacle to behold, these suicidal Secondseeds, selling their lives so dearly.

The ray shield was some contrivance of the Galactic Menace, for certain, one that took the Stargazers entirely too long to counteract. From the mutters among the Stargazers, there was some fear that they'd gone to the trouble of arming the natives too, with something more deadly than swords and shields. When the lines crashed, however, fearsome as the opposition may be, there was no returning gunfire, the one small blessing the Stargazers could count from this whole catastrophe.

That catastrophe plays out like a horrorshow before Jag's eyes. Everywhere he looks, he sees only blinding sand, screaming rangers and burning Secondseeds. It's a new caliber of carnage the Galactic Menace has brought, its like not seen on Gi for centuries, not since the planet's brutal colonization at the Consortium's bloody birth.

In search of the culprits, Jag lopes around the side of the battle, seeking a new angle on the conflict. Along the way, he sprays a few loose canisters into any cactoid carcass he sees, each one still twitching or crawling their way across the sand, despite the flames that ravage their bodies. From this new vantage, the battle gains another dimension and, for a fleeting moment, Jag actually does catch a glimpse of a unique silhouette, one he's been scanning the chaos for this entire time.

There's a brief opening in the fray, large enough for Jag's visor to distinguish a humanoid figure wielding a pair of blades not made from heat but from actual blade. This is Quicksilver then, Jag realizes, the first mate, in the midst of a deadly dervish's dance. Through an oblique martial arts movement that Jag's sensors can't quite follow, she manages to dispatch one-and-a-half rangers with those swords, leaving one dead and another gruesomely injured.

This is the more view Jag's granted, however, before something more pressing occludes his vision. A ten-foot tower of thorns appears from nowhere, lead by a stabbing spear. Jag scrambles away, part combat roll, part undignified scamper, from that glassrock spearhead, desperately attempting to bring his Domino to bear. Terror wipes away his training and the rookie spice ranger has completely forgotten how to operate a firearm.

It turns out that he has no need, his attacker decimated before it could prep a second stab. A passing spice ranger, some Dhorjedo from Alpha Flight, slices the Secondseed into three servings with quick work from his heatblades. Sparing Jag a contemptuous glance, the Dhorjedo hustles away in search of another enemy.

When Jag looks again, Quicksilver is gone.

He blinks and another figure has entered his sights; not the first mate but one better, the Captain himself. From only his thermal signature, it's somehow not hard to instantly distinguish Nehel Morel, the 34th Galactic Menace, from the rest of the struggling combatant. Hunched over like a cackling goblin, he goes running about the combat, armed with what appears to be a Domino, peppering distracted and unsuspecting rangers with bright blasts of green ditrogen.

How the interlopers managed to get their hands on stolen spice ranger armaments, Jag isn't certain, but he's willing to bet Tav's disappearance on sentry duty outside the Skyscratch canyon is more than coincidental.

On his feet again, Jag starts to jog towards the Captain's silhouette, his purpose renewed. The battle's lines, however, keep shifting against him and, before he's taken a dozen steps, he's intercepted by a small squad of Skyscratch braves, a fierce wedge cutting through Stargazer ranks. Coming to his comrades' aid, Jag tosses his Domino over his shoulder, snagged by the servomotor and automatically slotted onto his back. Both heatblades live, Jag dodges around the edge of the fray, seeking an opening he can carve his way through.

When it comes – a momentary opening when a Secondseed is slain – Jag hustles forward, sweeping his heatblades this way and that to earn some distance from the other Gitter. To his surprise, he manages to sever a spear straight through the haft before it's plunged through his belly and he even punishes its wielder with a heatblade through the kneecap.

His foe staggering behind him, Jag clears the thick patch of fighting and emerges on the other side – only to discover the Captain disappeared.

He stands there, his teeth gritted in disappointment, when, for a fleeting moment, he spots someone else, the third offworlder, in the press of cactoid bodies.

The Ortoki physique is impossible to miss, especially among so many Gitter and humanoid silhouettes. The long shaft of wood in one paw, Jag supposes, must be a spear – another curiosity, that the Menace's entourage would choose to wield such primitive native weaponry. Of more interest to Jag, however, is what the Ortok clasps in the other paw.

Balanced against the Ortok's hip is incongruously a potted plant.

Odisseus blips his comm twice – long, short.

The fighting continues apace, struggling shadows in the sand. Odisseus watches a suicidal Secondseed shot to ribbons as it twists, hacks and chops with its host of glassrock weaponry. Odisseus watches an unsuspecting spice ranger trampled beneath a stampede of Secondseeds, his skin pierced and torn by the host of spines and thorns. Odisseus watches a dancing figure, undoubtedly Moira by the grace and the glassrock blades, twirl between Domino barrages and deal a jagged end to both gunmen.

All the while, Odisseus hangs back, an uncertain spectator. He's only the one spear remaining and, more importantly, he's guarding the sapling. His highest priority, above assisting in the assault, is to ensure no Stargazer eyes fall upon their most precious prize.

He has a third duty still, beside manning the comm and protecting the sapling. That duty involves Stalkchopper, the Skyscratch's single remaining Firstseed and the cornerstone of Nemo's booby trap.

So much taller than every other combatant, it's not difficult to spot. Towering above the squabbling masses, Stalkchopper too keeps its distance, awaiting the opportune moment, when a path is cleared to its objective. Clearing that path is allegedly Nemo and Moira's responsibility but it's easy to see that the fighting has spread them far afield.

Even as Odisseus watches, Stalkchopper takes its chance.

Lumbering forward on its great shanks, Stalkchopper is heedless of the carnage that rages all around it. It knows only its task, its last great deed, and it plows ever onward towards its destination. It pushes past scads of grappling fighters, ignored by Secondseeds and Stargazers, both with more pressing concerns than an unarmed cripple. It catches a few bolts, stray or intentional, Odisseus doesn't know, but it doesn't slow, even as the green flames start to ripple up its body.

Following a little ways behind, Odisseus spots Stalkchopper's destination, looming like a pyramid through the haze. One of the great triangular Dropcraft stands a short distance ahead, reputedly one of three the Stargazers have parked around the downed Lover. When seen through the sandstorm, it's only a vague shadow, its angular hull suggested but not defined through all the blown sand.

Second by second, Stalkchopper comes closer and closer to the ship. Wriggling the device from his toolbelt, Odisseus takes hold of the detonator.

This duty was entrusted to the Ortok for logistical reasons, hanging back and not embroiled in the battle. Of the three of them, Odisseus is uniquely the worst suited to this tack. He's taken countless lives – most in the defense of his saltbrother, he likes to think – but this, destroying a willing ally for a supposed "greater good" Odisseus doesn't truck with, feels distinctly wrong.

His hesitation nearly costs them the plan, clawed thumb hovering over the detonator and debating issues of morality. It's his comm that shakes him from his reverie, makes him realize how close Stalkchopper has actually come to the target.

The Ortok's comm blips back once – long – and Odisseus presses the button.

The shield projector that's affixed to Stalkchopper's side, the one previously rigged to dud out rather than explode, explodes. It's an explosion of catastrophic proportions, one that happens so suddenly, it seems almost to preempt the Ortok and his detonator. Everything some distance ahead of Odisseus is swallowed in a sphere of flame. As abruptly as it came, the fireball has vanished, leaving a blackened smear, a great smoke pall and no further sign of Stalkchopper.

When the sandstorm furiously swipes away the smoke, there are Stargazers and Secondseeds strewn about, those caught in the edges of the blast. More importantly to Odisseus, however, is the smoldered sides of the Dropcraft, one third of its hull burnt completely away. Ravaged by the explosion, the ship teeters a little drunkenly once before it loses its balance completely, with a teltriton moan, the whole thing tips backward and out of the Ortok's sight.

This is the signal. This is what Nemo and Moira should be waiting for. Assuming they weren't shot and smoking somewhere, they should both be hotfooting straight for that wreck even now, even as Odisseus stands here gawping.

His hind paws obey the signal before the Ortok's conscious mind can. Odisseus is running forward, the potted sapling clutched to his paunch and his spear forgotten in the sand. At any moment, he could be cut down by a heatblade or perforated by a Domino, Odisseus knows, but there's no other option. Up ahead, in that blackened spaceship husk, is hidden the Ortok's only possible means of escape from this wretched planet.

When a figure does come rushing out of the storm at him, Odisseus bares his fangs, ready to fight with tooth and claw, but it's only Nemo. Looking as crazed as ever with bathrobe flapping and assault rifle slack in his hands, the Captain attempts to scream something at Odisseus – a companionable brag, the Ortok imagines, about how many people he's just killed – but he's completely inaudible over the howling storm.

Moira has been running beside Odisseus for some time before he notices her. A silent specter of death, her forearms dripping with blood, Moira has no need to brag about the people she's killed – one glance and it's clear she's had a red morning. Nemo attempts to shout something at her too but she doesn't spare him a glance, her gaze locked ahead on the emerging silhouette of the ship.

The three of them, bloodied and battered but alive, achieve the foot of the toppled Dropcraft and go clambering into the shipwreck.

Moira is the first to scramble up the shattered hull and vault into the vessel proper.

The explosion tore a considerable bite wound of blackened and twisted metal in the ship's underside and this is no easy terrain to navigate. Moira is especially careful to clear the smoking black metal, ripped to shreds mere moments ago by Stalkchopper's sacrifice.

Both sabers drawn, Moira leaps over the gnashed hull and lands in the inverted spacecraft, ready for anything.

This R-Type 621 Dropcraft is divided into two clearly demarcated sections, both currently flipped on their heads. Moira lands on the triangularly sloping walls of the ship's lower section, the passenger bay, comprising the vast majority of the ship's overall size. Where once orderly seats were arranged to ferry spice rangers to the surface, now there's utter disarray, the explosion shaking loose seats, cushions and safety straps.

The jagged stump of an access ladder points like an arrow to Moira's destination – the sealed hatch that leads to the Dropcraft's conical bridge. She moves to hustle along the vessel's interior ridges, headed straight for that hatch, when some movement in the wreckage stops Moira in her tracks.

She spins precisely in time to see the spice ranger, a member of some humanish species, crawling wounded from the rubble all around him. His leg twisted at a disquieting angle, his heatblades nonetheless come alive at the sight of her and Moira drops into a defensive stance, feeling the sudden weariness in her bones.

It's a strange terrain to battle on, this topsy-turvy spaceship interior, full of ridges and platforms that make no sense when flipped at this angle. The ranger solves this problem simply by leaping across the short distance on his flamejets, forcing Moira to scramble back, lest she be incinerated. There's almost nowhere to go, however, and Moira's immediately confronted with a hard surface – some console or another – against her back. With no other choice, she instead lashes out with both sabers, hoping to complicate the ranger's landing such that she might gain a superior footing.

All this proves moot, however, when the report of gunfire echoes in the Dropcraft's hollow shell. In mid-flight, the spice ranger is riddled with streaking green ditrogen and he falls limp. His flamejets, still afire, pitch his body at a rakish angle and he crashes into one of the vessel's further corners.

Nemo and his Domino stand in the jagged opening, the sandstorm raging behind them. Pulling free his oxygen mask, he strikes a patriotic, Brock Rocket-esque pose. "Are you not impressed?"

"I'm impressed," Moira confesses, "that you've got any ammo left on that thing."

He breaks his pose to peek at something on the weapon. "Uh, this says '003'. What's that mean?"

Moira's already moving, an arm's reach from that hatch. "That there's one for each of us." With a finger against the access panel, Moira shrieks the teltriton door open. "For when everything goes tits up."

Nemo spends a moment to count on his fingers. "Well, not quite."

Tipped on its side, the Dropcraft's bridge is another bizarre geography of consoles and dashboards. Their gamble, that an explosion detonated at the foot of the vessel wouldn't damage too much of the internal machinery at its top, appears to have paid off. Compared to the wrecked and ruined passenger bay, the bridge is more or less in one piece.

By the time Odisseus manages to wrest and wriggle both his bulk and the potted plant through the wreck and into the bridge, Moira's popped open several panels and is on her back rummaging around in the mechanical innards. The breathless Ortok wastes another minute arguing with Nemo, over something petty Moira pointedly chooses to ignore.

"Whenever you feel like," Moira reminds him, fingering through a series of wires, "coming over here and helping me out."

With a sigh, Odisseus comes padding across the ship's cracked viewport, waving Moira away with a paw. "Outta my way," he starts to cajole her, "before you hurt yourself. If it's gonna be anywhere–"

"–it's gonna be attached to the sensor package." Emerging from beneath the instrument panel, she gives him a perturbed glance. "I read the Attaché."

"Then what're you doing," wonders Odisseus stoically, "under the nav mainframe?"

"...looking for the sensor package."

"Good luck." Dropping to his haunches before a panel Moira already threw from its hinges, Odisseus roots around with his free paw and, after some grunting, unearths exactly what they'd engineered all this death and destruction for – a field exemptor.

Like every other supposedly important piece of machinery the caper depends on, the exemptor's an ugly thermosteel doohickey, the one that'd reputedly save their bacon.

Not particularly sophisticated, these Dropcraft are unshielded, warp incapable and designed simply to ferry spice rangers from the cruisers above to the planet below. The only thing they possess, however, that The Unconstant Lover, desperate to escape Gi, doesn't is the field exemptor.

To attempt to fly through the climatic field without disabling one of the barriers would be tantamount to suicide; the ship's internal systems would short and overheat and the Lover would be adrift, target practice for all the blockade's broadside batteries. With the field exemptor installed aboard the Lover, they could reroute a particular coded sequence to the climatic field and open a gateway to outer orbit and the galaxy beyond.

That was the only hope for escape from this planet, escape from this caper and escape from the parched fate of dying, unknown and unmourned, on this asshole's errand.

"Um..." stammers Nemo from behind them, too stupid or too surprised to sniff twice like they've always agreed, and both Moira and Odisseus turn in unison.

Moira is somewhat less surprised to discover a spice ranger standing on the bridge's threshold. With the clack of harness against teltriton, he comes to stand across the opening – coated in dust, stance wide, Domino Heavy Autofire in his hands.

Moira's eyes, however, fall from that sand-splattered weapon to the ignored potted plant, easily within the spice ranger's reach.

Jag blips his comm once – long.

The interior of the toppled Dropcraft is still as a tomb, despite all the sound and fury outside. Out there, the sandstorm still howls, the battle still unfurls, chaos still reigns. In here, however, a muted calm has fallen over the scene, in the wake of a disaster large enough to upend the whole vessel, toss its furniture about and litter corpses across the floor.

Jag can hear their voices, though, if he listens.

Muffled by the ajar access hatch and the underlying thrum of the sandstorm, Jag hears them bickering some yards ahead and goes creeping across the expanse, to confront them.

At his feet, the ditrogen-riddled form of a fellow ranger – Crex, by the look of him – makes a gargling sound and reaches a few bloodied fingers towards Jag. He pays his comrade no heed, however, stepping delicately across the wreckage strewn across the passenger bay.

Strain though he might, he can't actually put a finger on what they're arguing about. One half of the conversation's conducted in Ortoki, which doesn't help, but the other half, he knows, is conducted by the Menace himself, from his wheedling, complaining tone. There's eventually the interruption of the third voice, confirming Quicksilver's here with them too.

He makes no pretense at stealth, soon as he's arrived. Standing across the access hatch, he surveys the scene before him and is almost instantly spotted.

In the inverted bridge, the three most wanted sentients in the galaxy go about, wrecking up the place. One stands guard – apparently the Galactic Menace, despite how shaggy and unrecognizable he is – while the other two rip open instrument panels and dig through their component wiring. One is the first mate, splattered all in yellow dye and the other is the Ortok, splattered red as blood and up to his elbows in machine parts.

With a slow deliberate motion, Jag raises a hand from the stock of his Domino and presses a smallish button on the side of his helmet. With a hiss, his visor retracts, the heads-up-display vanishing with it and the world becomes that much more tangible to Jag.

"What," he growls through gritted teeth, "happened to the fooking plan?"

In unison, both the first mate and the Ortok point accusatory fingers at the Menace.

"The fuck?" Nemo expectorates. "We got fucking executed, okay, is the reason we're late? How the bloom can you pin that on me?"

"It ain't about being fooking late," Jag snaps back. "What happened to the rendezvous, like? What happened to the fallback? What happened to any of the fooking protocols we spent bloody months–"

"He locked the keys on ship," the first mate tattles.

Nehel Morel, Galactic Menace and Jag's jagoff cousin, crosses his arms and leans heavily against a nearby console, like a scolded teen. "One time and now–"

"Five times," snarls the insistent Ortok. "Five times."

"You mean," starts Jag with a murderous slowness, "we can't get onto the fooking ship?"

"We can," Odisseus assures him, paws extended. "Technically." He grimaces a little, breaking some bad news. "It's just gonna be, well, uncomfortable for somebody." A realization slowly crosses those animalistic features. "It's gonna be me. They're gonna make me do it."

"You know what?" Jag thumbs over his shoulder. "I think I might go back undercover, actually. Think those guys've gotta much better–"

"Yeah, man," Nemo wonders amiably, "how's that going? You making friends and everything?"

Turning back towards the hatch, Jag's eyes land on the small shape, sitting abandoned in the center of the wall-turned-floor. It's, against all odds, the potted plant, a piece of weird domesticity dropped in the midst of the gunmetal gray militarism that's swallowed his life the past months.

In point of fact, Flask notices, it's a potted cactus.

"You got one," he mentions dumbly, complimenting this banal statement with a banal little point towards the houseplant where it sits idyllically.

"'course we did," Nemo answers breezily. "Think we'd be here, if we hadn't?"

"I'd gone and assumed," Flask explains tonelessly, "that everything'd went tits up. When they found your guns, when we found your ship. I assumed if we found anything whatsoever, it'd be your blooming bones or summat."

At this, Nemo only scoffs, but Flask can see Moira and Odisseus nodding knowingly. "Never thought," he continues, stooping to better examine the cactus and its one blooming flower, "you'd actually bag one of the things."

He's not squatting here more than a moment before he crinkles his face. "Moons, they stink, don't they?"

Odisseus makes some untranslatable Ortoki noise of annoyance at this but Nemo only chuckles companionably. "Yeah, how's about that?" he asks a moment later. "How soon'd you know the trees were actually, fucking, like people?"

"Like, day fooking one, tell you the truth," Flask replies, slapping his hands against his thighs with a complaining squeal of his harness' servos. "It was practically in the orientation holo–"

"And you didn't think to, I don't know," Odisseus starts to snap, "mention–"

"And fooking compromise all the–"

"Dickwads!" Quicksilver's snapping her fingers to interrupt the budding argument. "You don't think we've maybe got blooming bigger fish right now? We gotta ship to break into, a blockade to run and, don't any of you fuckers forget," she warns dangerously, "my pistols to find!"

"Oh," grunts Flask and taps out a sequence on the thigh of his harness. The hidden holster activates, grinding away with a hiss of machine parts and revealing a number of sheathed sidearms, easily accessible for quick draw purposes. "Here ya go."

One by one, he yanks two AccCo Lawmen and one Carbon Industrial antique from where they're secured at his sides. The first two he tosses to an astonished Quicksilver, who catches them like a shell shocked mother reunited with her kidnapped children. The last one he throws towards Nemo, who fumbles the catch and lets the weapon clang to the floor.

"Apologies," Flask offers to Odisseus with a helpless shrug. "There was no sneaking yours outta there without somebody noticing."

Odisseus, the climatic exemptor to one hand, the potted plant returned to the other, shrugs.

"We about ready, then, to–" Flask starts to turn about, considering the best path towards the parked Lover, only to throw a glance back around at the blank, sanctimonious face of Quicksilver, visibly experiencing a storm of emotions at her reunion with her firearms.

Nemo, meanwhile, is continually unable to recover his gun off the floor, the thing somehow noisily escaping his grip again and again and destined to fatefully misfire any moment now.

"–or do you need a minute?"

FOURTH INTERLUDE

Two-Bit Switch couldn't rightly tell the difference.

To be completely objective, he smelled both samples again and he tasted both samples again. He even gave both samples a little twirl inside their snifters, as though this might dredge up the truth, as he considered either option. He was about to confess his ignorance when, smacking his lips, Two-Bit actually did detect a subtle irregularity in the taste of the second sample.

Borsk was keen to this whole scene, watching Two-Bit makes his assessment with a wry smile on her face. "Well?"

"They ain't the same," Two-Bit admitted with a slight nod a moment later. "This one," he continued, waggling the sample in his right hand, "is a little flatter, you might jabb staler, I guess, than this one." He shrugged a little as he sniffed them both again. "Tell you the gritty, I never, ever woulda noticed if you hadn't jabbed something first."

"That's sadly not the case," sighed Gella, taking both glasses from him, "with the rest of the galaxy." She too took a moment to glance into the indigo depths of the second glass, the one that's different-tasting in some discreet way that's impossible for Two-Bit to nail down. "This one's a clone."

Two-Bit screwed up his face at that. "A clone?"

"Well," Borsk immediately contradicts, shooting down her own poetic metaphor. "A contradiction in terms, perhaps. You cannot, after all, clone a beverage."

"Not that I ever ord," confirmed Two-Bit, now considering the snifter of allegedly counterfeit Borsk brandy in his hostess' hand. "Though, I'd be the first to fess that I ain't exactly a bleeding expert on the subject."

They'd strolled into the private wine cellar of Gella Borsk, booze baroness of her eponymous brandy, twenty minutes earlier as a prelude to their actual discussion. Two-Bit Switch wasn't even thirty seconds through the doorway, however, when he knew the place was a fake, a polite forgery for the sake of her guests. It was entirely too cozy, with sandgranite walls and wine racks of aged wood.

There was no way Gella Borsk's surviving supply of Borsk brandy was stored in these precious little chambers. This was a small piece of theater, meant to impress any potential guests with Borsk's presumed modesty. In truth, Two-Bit imagined that, somewhere beneath their feet, in the moonlet's core, was an expansive warehouse – industrial and unrefined – where the dwindling supply of Borsk's livelihood was stashed, under much better security than this.

Under no circumstances would he, Two-Bit Switch, career criminal, be allowed near the genuine article.

"It's a molecular replication, then," Borsk corrected herself. "An attempt to cook Gitterswitch Gin in a lab, more or less. The science exists," she assured him, setting both glasses down on a convenient table. "More complex substances than Gitterswitch have been effectively 'cloned' via this method."

"But?" Two-Bit dangles.

"But," Borsk sighed, inclining her head towards him in acknowledgment, "you can taste the difference. It's subtle, like you say, almost indescribable, but that actually exacerbates the problem. People aren't sure why they dislike the replica – they just do."

"They can delly," theorized Two-Bit, "that it ain't Gitterswitch."

"Just goes to show," Gella remarked with a helpless shrug, "how irreplaceable of a substance Gitter actually is."

"Means, if you wanna stay in the green," Two-Bit summarized, mimicking her helpless shrug, "you gotta score some dodgy bloke to go and blag you one."

"Precisely," Gella smirked, circling around Two-Bit to commence their little stroll through the wine cellar.

As she passed, Two-Bit Switch dawdled a moment, considering the two snifters where Borsk'd set them on the end table. Caught in the conversation, he hadn't necessarily grokked which glass was which, which was authentic and which fabricated. Making his best guess, he snatched one, took a sniff and turned to follow his hostess.

This was shaping up to be the single strangest weekend of Two-Bit Switch's short life. That's no small achievement, considering that Two-Bit once spent a weekend imprisoned by Kemetra insurgents in the gizzard of a living zurompta beast. Still, as a gunrunner, jailbreaker and criminal mastermind, one came to expect a certain amount of danger and strangeness in their life. What one didn't expect was wealth and luxury.

Following their initial meeting over brunch, Gella Borsk proceeded to wine and dine the shit out of Two-Bit Switch. Every hour or so, it seemed they were sharing brandy and cigars on her pressurized veranda or playing holopolo on her well-manicured lawn, all the while serenaded by her quartet of Tinxa musicians. Every time, Two-Bit knew, it was a thin pretense to discuss some new element of the caper, as though Borsk couldn't possibly broach a topic without also throwing a minor garden party to celebrate.

His hostess pacing a few steps ahead of him, Two-Bit Switch knew, the moment before she turned her head, what she would bring up.

"I spent the afternoon," she mentioned, as offhandedly as she could, "familiarizing myself with your notes. With your proposed plans."

"Oh, yeah?" Two-Bit posed, not attempting to sound surprised in the least. "And?"

"Ingenious, in many places and respects," she acknowledged. "Reminded me why I commissioned an outsider, rather than attempting the feat myself."

Considering all her haughty bearing, an honest-to-moons compliment was not what Two-Bit Switch was anticipating. "Hey, uh, thanks. That–"

"–doesn't mean I'm without my questions, of course," she was quick to stipulate, before Two-Bit could read anything more into her moderately kind words.

"Of course," Two-Bit consented, beckoning her with a gesture that she, several paces ahead, certainly couldn't see.

"For the overwhelming majority," Borsk seemed intent on making the point, "I think the essential bones of the caper will work. The infiltration plan, with the molecular strip, seems excruciating but should produce the results you wish. The virus you're requisitioning sounds indescribably complex but, as that's not my area of expertise, I'm inclined to trust your judgment."

"But?" Two-Bit provided her.

"But," Borsk accepted, slowing her stroll a little in acknowledgment, "then there's the undercover portion."

Two-Bit might have guessed. If there was one element to the Gitter heist that Two-Bit was dreading the most, the one he thought stood on the shakiest ground, it was certainly the undercover portion. It spoke well to Borsk's perceptiveness that she too flagged this area as needing some further review but it behooved Two-Bit to show confidence here, rather than uncertainty, since the entire caper was cruxed on that going smoothly.

"Vizzes a little antwacky, don't it?" Two-Bit admitted, attempting to get some distance from the idea, to suss out Borsk's actual objections.

"That it does," she agreed readily. "Tell me – what's your personal experience with spice rangers?"

Two-Bit elected, in this case, to be actually honest. "Hoofing away from them, mostly."

"As I expected," commented Borsk. "The Corps are not, I repeat, not to be underestimated. Many of the popular rumors in circulation about them – they're brainwashed as youths, they worship the Gitter ruling family as demigods, they commit ritualistic suicide when their harnesses become irreparably damaged – are based on more fact than you'd assume." Here, she turned, to better address her concerns to him. "From the way it's detailed in your notes, I'm concerned you don't understand the gravity of what you're proposing."

When he made no immediate reply to this, she clearly felt the need to summarize. "One does not simply steal a harness and sneak into the Spice Ranger Corps."

"And that ain't what I'm propoing," Two-Bit disparaged back, rising to play Borsk's game of polite criticism. "You made the case earlier, though, didn't you, that this part – the sneaking, the skullduggery – ain't your area of expertise, right? That you mished me, an outsider, precisely for this razz?"

"I did."

"Then I'd ring you," he continued, not quite allowing her the chance to elaborate, "to ball it up for me on this one."

Borsk arched an eyebrow. "That's it? Trust you?"

"Trust that I know what's hanked and what ain't," Two-Bit clarified, refusing to give her another chance to denigrate. "You gotta understand, you gotta plant somebody, no matter what you're scheming. There's nothing better for squeezing a buncha security protocols, to coop very valuable intel, than by–"

"There's no need for that," Borsk moved quickly to deny him. "All the intelligence about the Gitter Consortium you'll have any need for comes through me."

"Even if that were true," Two-Bit countered, "which it ain't, since you're years outta the quitty, there's more than intel that a planted spice ranger's gonna net us."

Borsk looked like a petulant teenager, planting her hands on her hips like that. "And that's?"

"The field exemptor," Two-Bit explained with a sigh. "That's the main stook. Only way to get starside with the goods is through that climatic field and the only way through the climatic field is with a field exemptor and the only way I know to get wanks on a field exemptor is plant somebody in the Stargazers that can swipe us one."

"There must be–"

"You're welcome to vizz," Two-Bit offered, shrugging expansively. "I mean, if anybody in the blooming galaxy could finger a backdoor onto that rock – besides the Stargazers – it'd be fucking you, wouldn't it?" He dug both hands into his pockets and shrugged again, giving Gella Borsk the exact treatment he would an uppity client attempting to shirk expenses. "I'm only criming from what I got."

"There's no way," Gella started to theorize, rubbing the space between her eyebrows with an exasperate hand, "to short the climatic field some other way?"

"Not that I've snuffed," Two-Bit attested. "The code phrase, the one that opens the climatic field, is keyed to each particular gantine that the Stargazers use to get dirtside. Can't really forge a flimmy without a legit one to study and you know better than me," he made the point, "that the Consortium's pretty fucking unders about their manufacturing. Particularly when it comes to the fucking door to their secret fucking planet."

That stopped Gella in her tracks and, while she appeared to ruminate over the options, Two-Bit laid out the rest of his pitch. "Plus, we gotta plant inside the Stargazers, we can control the intel much more than we might've otherwise. Now, we got somebody inside that can vizz the ship at precisely the moment when we want it vizzed. Now, we gotta secret weapon, should things go antwacky when the Stargazers touch, right?"

Gella remained silent another few moments, even after Two-Bit made his additional points. "It is a tremendous risk."

"It is that, yeah," Two-Bit was ready to agree. "Ball it up for me, I wouldn't–"

"Not only to your man," Gella interrupted him, "but to the whole operation and those behind it, too."

Two-Bit scowled at this. "I don't–"

"You're putting one of your accomplices immediately in the Consortium's clutches," Gella illustrated for him, somewhat unnecessarily. "You're asking them to pose as one of the most deadly and dedicated mercenaries in the galaxy – for an unspecified length of time. From what I read, there's no contingency for that accomplice, should the entire caper disintegrate–"

Two-Bit spread his hands, a failed attempt to assure her. "It's on my–"

"The operatives on the planet," she proceeded anyway, unconvinced by his breezy attitude, "are far more likely to simply be shot on sight, should the whole thing come apart at the seams. It's the undercover operative," he mentioned gravelly, "that's already in the enemy's hands, that's the most likely to be interrogated, tortured even, to reveal who funded this little expedition."

Two-Bit blinked. "So, me, then."

Gella blinked back. "You?"

"Me." Two-Bit jabbed a finger into his own chest. "The undercover operative."

"Why would you," Gella endeavored to learn, looking a little aghast despite her normally composed demeanor, "undertake such a risk? A needless risk, I would say."

"Well, tell you the gritty," Two-Bit responded, flapping his jacket out with his hands in his pockets, "I'm the only one I'd really trust with the delicates. I mean, you get the right team," Two-Bit went on to add, "the actual caper – sneaking on planet, blagging the tree, running the blockade – kinda crimes itself. It's the plant, that's the part that needs a wank at the wheel. Plus, ain't nobody in the galaxy's ever gonna know more about the caper than I will, right?"

Gella's face was still a carven scowl, unwilling to accept this explanation. "And you wouldn't be needed elsewhere? You'd be incommunicado for the better part of a year, I would imagine."

Two-Bit scoffed. "Six months, tops. These kinds of jobs, you're always a transfer from another outpost. I pose as a Comettail or Sunspot or Starduster, we flimmy some digitwork that suggests my valor in battle against pirates or spicerunners or the like, I get a shiny and a spot on the super elite squad, the Stargazers. Feez as sin."

"Simple as that," Gella muttered, clearly unsatisfied. "Would you allow me some stipulations?"

Two-Bit shifted his weight. "That's really gonna depend on the proviso."

"There're a few things I can provide you," Gella began, tapping something seemingly into the open air. Two-Bit was alarmed, in that instant, to see a slight holographic interface appear from nowhere, summoned by Gella's simple touch. "I can provide documentation or, at the very least, some very convincing letterheads and stationery. A blueprint, if you will, for your paperwork."

"I groof that," Two-Bit acknowledged with a nod.

"I can provide you a harness," she continued, rapping out her sequence of keys on thin air, "and the knowledge it won't be as simple as wearing the thing. You'll need to have the whole suit keyed to your life signature. You can wear the thing all day long but you'll never be taken as a genuine ranger without some internal authentication inside the harness."

"Yeah, yeah," Two-Bit agreed, nodding. "Whatever you jabb."

"I can provide you an expert," Gella finished, swiping away the summoned interface with a dismissive gesture. "She was certainly never a Stargazer but Zuss, my head of security, spent the better part of her career bouncing around the various spice ranger troops. She'll no doubt have plenty of anecdotal advise you'd find helpful. Run you through some drills, even, when the time comes."

"That sounds squeamy," Two-Bit admitted, gritting his teeth a little.

"I am choosing to trust you, Two-Bit," Gella announced, once her holographic projection disappeared completely from view.

"You're making the right choice, love," Two-Bit assured her with a slow nod. "Well, that is," he made the stipulation as he waggled his brandy snifter, "unless you gotta clone or, what, a molecular replication of me in some back room someplace." The charming joke somehow failed to amuse his host and Two-Bit's forced to reiterate. "If anyone in the galaxy can pull this off, it'll be me."

CHAPTER 17

Moira Quicksilver is brought nearly to tears by the sensation of Righty and Lefty back in her hands again. Thankfully, the vacuum mask she wears should shield any unbecoming emotions – happiness, sentimentality, relief – from any onlookers. Plus, she's forced to assume, most onlookers are likely too busy attempting to kill her.

She puts her babies to immediate work, murdering some very deserving motherbloomers. Much as it breaks some small teenage part of her heart to gun down spice rangers, it too brings a shiver of vicarious thrill. What would angsty thirteen-year-old Moira think, were she here now to see this?

Aiming in this sandstorm is an utter shitshow but Moira, Righty and Lefty, make do. The three of them – plus two other assholes – hunker in the shadow of the capsized Unconstant Lover. Ignored by the majority of the battle, the pirates're free to take potshots at any spice rangers that come close enough to identify them.

More than once, Moira's had to put down a rampaging Secondseed, driven mad by blood loss and berserker fury, charging anything vaguely humanoid-shaped. At this point, Moira will put the kibosh on anyone – animal, vegetable or mineral – that stands between her and escaping this moons-forsaken planet.

It mostly just feels good to be gunslinging again.

"Well, where are you now?" one of those two assholes screams into his comm. This asshole, the Captain, is especially undiscerning in his gunplay today. While he harangues his saltbrother on the comm, he fires completely blind over his shoulder.

Fully fluent in the snarly language, even Moira can't start to make sense of the Ortoki response, so mangled by static and muffled by wind.

"Think for a second," Nemo snaps back. "If I remembered where I'd left them, they wouldn't be blooming lost, now would they?"

From where they crouch, the bloody battle is nothing but a hazy blur, broken by occasional green flashes and occasional staggering silhouettes. Most often, these staggerers are Gitter, in their flaming death throes. Whenever Moira can snag a spice ranger's unprotected back, she seizes that opportunity with relish.

Sooner or later, one of the rangers would notice the three of them, squatting guiltily in the shade of their spaceship. It's not the wisest strategy but sheer frustration compels Moira to murder and who is she to deny herself the small pleasures?

The other asshole, however, seems a little more concerned about their chances. "Shelf life," Flask grunts into the comm, his Domino unloading another clip, "on this's pretty fooking brief. He don't find them keys soon, somebody's gonna catch wise."

It still spooks Moira to glance aside and, expecting to see Nemo's oily Galwegian cousin, see a fully-armored spice ranger instead. His ray shield engaged, his assault rifle blaring, there's precious little recognizable about Flask.

His near-perfect disguise, however, is betrayed by the potted plant that hovers a hand's length from the transmitter secured in his pocket. While Odisseus made his play for the Lover's keys, the Gitter sapling was entrusted to Flask and his handy ray shield, to ensure no stray bolts happen to destroy everything they've struggled so hard to achieve here.

"I suppose," Moira absently agrees. She's a little busy at present, trying to decide if that scrambling shadow she sees in the midst of the storm is a viable target or not.

"No," snarls Nemo, in response to something equally snarly that Odisseus warbles through the comm, "you have no such permission. Go near my room at peril to your shaggy bloomhole."

"Do not," countermands Flask urgently, "listen to him. You go in whatever room you gotta, if you think that's where those keys'll be."

"Hey!" barks Nemo, twisting his mask about to face Flask. "Who killed me and made you Captain?"

"You know," reminds Flask, for the umpteenth time, "it probably ain't too late for me to run back out there, take my lumps with the rangers. Far as they're concerned, I'm still Jag, yeah?"

"Yeah," agrees Nemo, teeth bared, "turn your back on me. See how far you get."

"This seems," Moira feels the need to mention, "like a good use of our collective energy right now."

That shape she'd been squinting at materializes into a stumbling spice ranger, a host of Secondseeds and their glassrock blades on his heels. The ranger's attention anywhere but behind him, the unsuspecting humanoid receives a pair of complimentary bolts to the back and is dead long before the cactoid weapons rend his body asunder.

Not wishing to give the Skyscratch any more potential targets, Moira slinks behind the Lover's landing foot. There's no way to know how the overall battle's going, toward which side the tide's turning, but she's determined to make what little contributions she can, here or there.

Through the comm, Odisseus make some desperate plea to Nemo, sounding like nothing but Ortoki gobbledygook to Moira's ears.

"What my steps?" Nemo asks, the creases of his mask indicating his deep scowl. "Retrace my what?"

"You're kidding me," Flask growls, twisting his wrist and automatically slotting a new banana clip into his Domino with a smooth move of his harness' servomotors; Moira battens down a rising tide of envy and arousal at the sight. "How'd you stomach this, day-to-day?"

"Nicotine," is Moira's immediate answer, one that instantly makes her crave a Yellowtooth more than anything – more than escape, more than air conditioning, more than ditrogen holes through Nemo's skull.

"We somehow claw our way outta this," Flask suggests, his Domino primed and ready, "first pack's on me."

"Deal," agrees an enthusiastic Moira Quicksilver.

Odisseus is brought nearly to tears by the sensation of even crawling through the Lover's mechanical veins. It is cramped and uncomfortable and a nightmare at every inch but, even in her organs, she is still his spaceship and he'll never not be happier aboard her.

Back in Fernhollow, when the idea struck him that the ship might actually be accessible through the anterior ventilation duct, Odisseus bought into the myth that he was a mechanical genius, his mastery and knowledge of the Briza Light Freighter absolute. That belief died, however, as soon as he pried open that grate and laid his eyes upon the path he was expected to navigate; all switchbacks and additional grates to unscrew and scamper over.

He'd attempted to balk, upon seeing this. Why should he, the indisputably largest member of the crew, be the one forced to wriggle through this unforgiving passage? There was no avoiding the fact, of course, that he was the only member of the crew with any hope of navigating those tunnels, the only one who spent any time in the crawlspaces.

It actually wasn't quite as arduous as he'd expected, when literal push came to literal shove. Negotiating his bulk through these cramped quarters was actually a sight easier than negotiating with Nemo over the comm about the last known location of his damn ignition keys.

"Retrace. Your steps," Odisseus reiterates, against what sound like all the interference in the galaxy – sandstorm, poor reception and laserfire. "From the moment you turned the ship off to the moment you–,"

"Yeah, yeah," squawks the comm in Nemo's voice. "We crashed, I shit my pants–"

Odisseus crawls beneath a low-hanging canopy of wires, wondering where those conduits lead and how they came unfastened. He dawdles a moment, as Nemo continues rambling, and reaches a paw up to re-attach them, in case they lead somewhere vital like ignition or life support. The sound of gunfire, whistling past Nemo's end of the comm, however, inspires him to keep moving.

"–made a smoothie, washed the shit off my ass–"

Pinpointing his exact position is proving a little difficult for Odisseus. Considering how far and fast he's crawled from the anterior vent, Odisseus would likely guess he was still somewhere beneath the Lover's cargo hold, nearer the companionway stairs and the betweendecks corridor. Of course, the last time Odisseus assumed he was crawling beneath the cargo hold, he'd surfaced in the water closet, so, really, all bets were off.

"–went to meet Moira, the Gitter showed up, all that shit went down–"

Something immediately ahead of Odisseus bursts suddenly to fizzing life, a fusebox of some kind, spraying bright blue sparks in every direction. The Ortok recoils a second, a little unwilling to proceed lest the fusebox come alive again and catch his fur on fire. The little gray rectangle of stained thermosteel – a pitch calibrator, it turns out – sits completely dormant, smoking quietly after its recent outburst.

Much as time presses him, Odisseus does spend a moment here, fiddling with the device. After all, should it and its ilk all across the ship choose to act up during their daring escape, it would wreak havoc with the ship's external sensor bank.

"–we did the DermEndure, I finished my smoothie and that's when, I think, we lit out for the territories."

The misbehaving calibrator raises another concern for Odisseus, as he scoots deeper and deeper into the bowels of his spaceship. There'd been no time, after the Lover came down on the planet's surface, for Odisseus to examine or repair the dozens of breaks, fractures and discombobulated systems the ship no doubt suffered during her freefall from high orbit.

She might have been ray shielded and shrouded in space ice but there were still likely to be dislodged components or fried circuits or moons knew what, lying in wait to trouble the escaping Lover. They would be very lucky, Odisseus appreciates, to escape the planet without something vital failing when they needed it most.

"Where'd we do the DermEndure?" wonders Nemo speculatively, as though this might be the missing piece of the puzzle. "You remember?"

"The cargo hold," Odisseus answers by rote, not wishing to resummon the memories of spraying down his naked saltbrother with a can and a half of DermEndure. "By the laundry–"

At that moment, the Ortok's flashlight plays against a vertical duct, headed for the deck somewhere above. Once again, Odisseus performs his famous squeezing act and manages to lever his body into the joint between crawlspace and access hatch. A little more strength of his shoulder and the grate above, all that separates Odisseus and freedom from this infernal deathtrap, is popped free.

Soon as his neck and shoulders are through, Odisseus sucks in a long breath of dusty, stagnant air, more refreshing than the most bracing of ocean breezes. This time, he'd actually guessed right and emerged in the center of The Unconstant Lover's cargo hold.

It's utterly dark, a void that Odisseus only recognizes as the hold by the sheer sense of space. His flashlight punctures that darkness and reveals the jagged arteries and housing mechanisms of the molecular strip, that great ugly landslide of corrugated thermosteel that dominates one corner of the hold. Swinging the flashlight about reveals more familiar sights – the steering column, scattered cargo crates, the companionway stair.

It is certainly true that somebody is shooting at his saltbrother right now. Odisseus still spends the time to savor this moment of homecoming, so many perils faced and overcame in the desert.

That moment savored, there's still somebody shooting at his saltbrother, after all.

"That's where I'd look, then," mentions Nemo through the comm. "Over by the laundry whatzits. Where we did the DermEndure."

"Sure thing," grunts Odisseus, as he yanks his shoulder, paunch and hindquarters through the hatch in the floor. He had no intention, of course, of heeding his saltbrother's dubious advice. Wherever Nemo thought was the likeliest place was certainly not the likeliest place, not by a long shot. Based on the Captain's retraced steps, Odisseus would head for the galley, the blender and the last known location of Nemo's supposed smoothie.

First things first, however, there's the boarding ramp. The missing keys would be no help to anyone if their only pilot gets shot to pieces before he can even board the spaceship.

En route to the boarding ramp's control panel, Odisseus passes the fateful keyrack, riveted against one of the hull support beams that jut like ribs from the hold's walls.

The Ortok stops dead. There is no way it's that simple.

Moira's pretty sure they've spotted her by now.

Somewhere, in that white haze of billowing sand, someone is definitely shooting at her. That green muzzle flash is all too consistent for stray shots or misfires. First, it was just the one shooter, a shooter that was eventually overcome by a flaming Gitter and thus vanquished. Now, however, it's three separate shooters, firing from three separate angles and, unless Moira misses her guess, they're moving closer and closer with each shot.

She can and is returning fire. She can even extrapolate, with reasonable accuracy, where the brain, throat and heart of each approaching spice ranger, with some variance for species, would be. What Moira cannot do, with either Righty, Lefty or even Nemo's discarded Domino, is blast through the personal ray shield that envelops each ranger.

Plus, with no ray shield of her own, Moira's forced to spend most of that time cowering behind the Lover's extended landing feet while they barrage her endlessly with sparking green ditrogen.

Flask, on the other hand, has no need to cower. Outfitted with his own ray shield, he can simply stand unimpeded and rattle off his return fire. On its own, his Domino's no better at puncturing their ray shields than Moira's pistols but at least he can stand on two legs and take clear shots at his revealed enemies.

It's only together that they have any chance of evening the odds.

"Far right!" Flask barks. Moira hears his harness whine as he swings about to pepper another approaching ranger.

"Far right?" she screams back. "Isn't the far left closer?"

"Far right!" is Flask's only response. With no other options, Moira swings both Righty and Lefty around to join in the barrage.

The rapid fire from three firearms is enough to visibly short and fizzle the far right ranger's ray shield. Before the ranger behind can retreat or even scream, they're riddled with a torrent of green and yellow laserfire.

"Suck it, Raz," Flask is heard to mutter into his comm. "Been thinking about that for months, you prick."

Moira has nanoseconds to withdraw back behind the landing gear before the ignored ranger on the far left riddles her too with ditrogen. Instead, it impacts against the landing gear as, with a furtive move, she slinks back into cover.

"Much as I'm delighted," Moira comments casually to Flask, "to help you to your petty revenges–"

"Odi? Odi!" Nemo continues to holler into the comm, clouding the airwaves with his desperation. "What've I told you about answering the bloo–"

The answer that comes is the sound of hydraulic pistons firing, a mechanical motor grinding and some motion out of the corner of Moira's eye. She shoots a glance behind, toward The Unconstant Lover's hull. She's astonished as a chunk of that sand-blasted hull uncouples from the rest of the ship and descends down to meet them on the ground.

It's the boarding ramp, Moira realizes. The boarding ramp is descending to meet them.

Angelic white lights blink into being along the hydraulic pistons, revealing the heavenly ramp in all its pockmarked, sand-scored beauty.

They also reveal a figure, paunched and shaggy, that stands at the top of that ramp. "You ready?" comes the Ortoki through the comm, accompanying this unlooked-for godsend.

It takes all Moira's ironshod discipline not to simply go running, arms flailing, up the ramp and into the safety of the spaceship. Instead, she stays put, unwilling to grant the ranger on the left the opportunity they need to paint her backside green with ditrogen.

It is, of course, Nemo who does go running, arms a-flail, back fully exposed to those that were shooting at him only a moment before. None of the shots actually hit him, of course, whizzing and twanging off the thermosteel of the extended ramp. Six strides and he's disappeared up and into the bowels of the ship.

"On three?" offers Flask, shifting his position to absorb some of the landing gear within his ray shield. A grateful Moira nods and hustles inside the shield's enveloping embrace. Cramped as hell, the two of them manage to scuttle backwards, on four uncoordinated legs, onto the ramp, protected the whole while by Flask's ray shield.

So lambasted with laserfire, the shield won't last much longer before it shorts out. Odisseus is already reversing the servos and withdrawing the ramp the moment before they step aboard. The rangers go surging forward, materializing from the sandstorm, ready to leap onto the ramp.

Odisseus proves to have the answer for this too. One paw on the ramp control, the other produces from nowhere a bleeping grenade. This he rolls calmly down the ramp. His timing proves perfect, the tiny black orb slipping off the end of the ramp the exact moment the rangers reach its edge.

There's a momentary glimpse of the explosion, the terror and surprise blasted across the face of the approaching rangers. Then there's the sound of the boarding ramp hissing shut and a quiet boom, muffled almost to silence behind the Lover's triple-thick teltriton walls.

"You did it!" a flabbergasted Nemo exclaims to Odisseus as he staggers up.

"Where'd that fooking grenade come from?" is what Flask wants to know.

Odisseus thrusts high a ring of keys on one claw. Among an "I Heart Takioro" keychain and a set of suspiciously familiar ignition kets, there's a grenade's pin, clipped alongside the rest of the paraphenalia.

"My keys!" a flabbergasted Nemo exclaims.

"Where'd you find them?" Moira is a little frightened to ask.

The Ortok thrusts an insistent claw toward the hull support beam, not three feet away, where he'd long ago riveted the keyrack.

Flask presses his thumb against the recognition pad. After a moment of deliberation, the harness cooes softly in confirmation. As one, all the pressurized clasps decouple with metallic clanks. With a shiver of his shoulder, he slips from the now-slackened harness and, in the same movement, Flask throws himself into the gyroscopic co-pilot's seat.

Only thrice before now has Flask ever actually been aboard his cousin's galactically famous spaceship. Nemo's fervent cult following would be surprised and disappointed to discover The Unconstant Lover a broken-down wreck, more a spaceworthy trash heap than some sexy pirate corvette. As his cousin of nearing three decades, Flask is anything but surprised – disappointed, certainly, but never surprised.

The helm exemplifies this better than anywhere else aboard. The supposed center of all the villainy, the seat of command of the most wanted pirate vessel in the known galaxy looks like a teenager's bedroom – all dirty undies, dirty dishes and dirty tissues. Having spent a decent amount of time in the Captain's actual teenage bedroom, Flask can attest to the impression's authenticity, even as he delicately avoids physical contact with everything but the seat and the controls.

Right now, all Flask cares about is whether or not this thing'll actually even start up.

This does not appear to be primary worry of the Captain as he plops comfortably into the timeworn pilot's seat. Nemo, still powdered bright blue and wearing his crown of flowers, flips switches and cranks dials, the pre-flight sequence long since memorized.

"Shouldn't we," Flask starts to ask, unable to keep the terror from his voice, "be, like, seeing something?" He points an uncertain finger towards the consoles, lifeless and unresponsive to Nemo's efforts.

Nemo blinks and seems to notice this for the first time. "Huh," he grunts. "Good eye." He torques the keys in the ignition a few more times and receives nothing but subterranean grumbling from somewhere far below their feet.

Unfazed, with a shove of his legs, Nemo throws the pilot's seat backward and slams into a bulky console far to his starboard. Slamming a fist against the console pops open a cabinet and burying an arm to the elbow roots out a small block of blackish plastolieum, trailing wires. Drawing in a great breath, Nemo blows fiercely into the block's row of sockets, back and forth, like a harmonica.

This done, he pops the cartridge back into place, slaps the cabinet shut with a heel and cranks the chair back into place. Flask opens his mouth to balk but soon as Nemo cranks the ignition keys, the boosters, after some cursory whining, sputter to life.

"There's my girl," purrs Nemo, revving the engine like a dasher in traffic, to threaten or impress adjacent drivers. The whole helm of The Unconstant Lover comes hiccuping back to life, her boosters cycling and stuttering somewhere away and far below.

Screens all around Flask falter and waver in unsure green, their systems coming awake like yawning children. One console literally coughs dust into the air as its internal machinery comes alive, components shuddering and humming like chattering teeth. A pair of squeegeed arms, their fluid long depleted, descend from somewhere above the viewport and attempt to wipe away all the accumulated sand. Instead, they get stuck, twitching spasmodically, a quarter of the way down.

So too does the co-pilot's station activate, the gyroscopic chair unclasping and the sensor monitor flickering with its green-lined grid.

Behind him, Flask hears the helm door open with a complaint. Nemo spins proudly around, big stupid grin on his face. "See? What'd I tell you? Started right up for Daddy."

"You are," Odisseus states, "definitively not Daddy." The Ortok waddles into the helm, field exemptor under his arm. "Moons, listen to that." He stops on his way to the sensor array and stands there, scowling. "Can't even imagine how much sand's gotta be lodged in the turbines."

"Think she'll fly?" poses Flask hopefully.

"She'll fly," Nemo answers, a little too quickly. Before either of them can offer a counter argument, Nemo's gripping a lever and activating the driftjets.

There's a nauseating lurch to the starboard as the whole Unconstant Lover levels out a little. In the tilt, a decent percentage of the sand that's heaped against the viewport sloughs away. Unfortunately, all that's revealed behind that sand is more sand, this time blowing about instead of heaped about.

"Ain't the flying so much that worries me," Odisseus mutters behind Flask, taking a knee to examine something beneath an instrument panel. "It's the crashing."

"–noticed or not," crackles the broadband comm, the communications package scrambling to come online, "but there's still a blooming sandstorm out there."

"Fuck me, is there?" remarks Nemo acidly, leaning all the way forward to squint exaggeratedly out the viewport. "And here I've been this whole time, wandering around with my face riveted to my asschecks."

"You say that," counters Quicksilver through the comm, "like it's not a distinct possibility."

"Puh-leeze." Nemo waves away everyone's concern. "How quickly we forget the Byorzi Knot. If I can fly her through a gravity maze," he reminds them, voice cocked an octave up in pure condescension, "pretty sure I can fly her through, what, a fucking sandstorm?"

With that, he, in one simultaneous motion, cranks the yoke back and pumps the clutchlever. Flask is far from an expert pilot. He's pretty sure you're not supposed to do that.

The Unconstant Lover seems to agree, flatly refusing to budge. Her engines moaning with exhaustion, she doesn't blast off as Nemo intended but rather hovers heavily on her driftjets and is swayed this way and that by the fierce winds.

Odisseus barks something that's completely lost beneath the booster's groan. When faced with so much dissent from friends, family and spaceship, Nemo only doubles down. He pumps the clutchlever three more times, sending a fresh torrent of fuel to the boosters.

At first, the freighter seems to pay this no heed, lingering uncomfortably there, battered back and forth in the abusive wind. Then, miraculously, this strategy somehow seems to work. There's a great jerk forward, throwing Flask against his safety restraints, as the Lover launches upward at an exponential curve and gives battle to both gravity and sandstorm.

The higher they climb, the stronger grows that storm. Within seconds, the helm and the whole spaceship are thrown violently about at the wind's every whim.

Laundry, dishes and miscellaneous garbage sloshes and slides across the floor like water caught in a sailing ship's bilge. The gyroscopic rig is especially susceptible to all the turbulence, bouncing madly about this way and that. Long as Nemo and Flask are both strapped in, however, they're borne along for the bumpy ride.

For Odisseus, caught unawares, the ride is substantially more than bumpy. Flask catches occasional flashes of the poor Ortok, tossed helplessly about the helm with the rest of the trash. By the third such glimpse, Odisseus is clamped firm – eyes closed, fangs clenched, hind claws dug into the floor's grating.

"We're fine," Nemo explains placidly, a trickle of vomit running down the corner of his mouth and into his beard. "Everything's fine."

The viewport is a blank white canvas, colored only occasionally by the shadow of more or less sand blowing past. Even with the high beams alight, Nemo flies the Lover completely blind, twisting the yoke up and down, port and starboard, at odd intervals with no correlation to the wind or visibility.

A sudden gust dips the Lover low then flips her completely over, showering all the helm's garbage down on their heads. A plastic food container beans Flask on the shoulder, reeking of spoiled leftovers but thankfully empty of its expired contents. From somewhere behind, there's a startled Ortoki yelp as something much harder and heavier than a leftovers comes down atop Odisseus.

For one sickening moment, The Unconstant Lover flies upside-down through the sandstorm. A discarded tee shirt flopped over his head and his crown, Nemo exploits with the next gust to right the vessel with a second white-knuckling lurch.

How long the Lover flounders in that sandstorm, Flask would never be certain. It is possible that he blacks out for a spell, his memories of that hellish moment of the escape never coming clearly again. One moment, the freighter is flopped on her head and the next, the sunlight's growing and growing through the haze.

When Flask's senses do return to him, the Briza is blasting away skyward. Gi's overwhelming sunlight glints off a viewport rapidly losing all its sand. Still caught in the planet's gravitational pull and the inertial compensator missing in action, all the helm's flotsam and jetsam, Odisseus included, is plastered against the back wall as the Lover climbs into the atmosphere.

Nemo grins as he unsuccessfully wipes the vomit from his mouth and beard. "You got something smart to say, Quicksilver?"

"I'm not gonna congratulate you," Quicksilver replies, "for not killing us."

"I ain't complainin', like," Flask, palms up, would like the record to reflect.

"Thank you, Two-Bit," Nemo grants with a nod.

"...the fook did you just say?"

"Can I make a request?" wonders Odisseus from where's he's plastered flush against the wall. Nemo throws a glance over his shoulder at this while Flask can't stop staring astonished daggers his direction. "Would you," Odisseus requests between gritted fangs, "mind turning the inertial compensator fucking on?"

Nemo blinks. "Oh. Yeah." He flicks a trio of switches. "Sure."

No sooner has he done this than the polarity of the helm and, indeed, the entire ship instantly equalizes, no matter how rakish the Lover's angle as she races through the sky. The sudden reversal of gravity comes as a physical relief even to Flask, pressed into the ratty leather of the co-pilot's seat.

Free from the crushing pressure, Odisseus staggers forward, trash scattering about his hindpaws. "Much appreciated," he snarls, anything but appreciative, as he stoops to collect the field exemptor.

"You called me fooking Two-Bit, didn't you?"

"Hm?" Nemo glances at him, eyebrows raised, face blank.

"Eyes open, helm," warns a voice from the topturret. "Bogies incoming, 9 degrees."

It's with great reluctance that Flask – temporarily – leaves off that line of questioning to squint through the viewport at these supposed bogies incoming.

The glare from Gi's yellow sun is all-encompassing, shimmering the viewport as monochromatically white as the sandstorm did. Magnified by the climatic field, the sunlight's impenetrable and how Quicksilver thinks she can see anything but the blinding noon is beyond Flask.

The scopes wouldn't lie to him, though. Glancing at the sensor monitor, Flask would honestly describe Quicksilver's terse warning as an understatement. Dozens of hateful red triangles drop from the planet's low orbit to intercept the Lover on her skyrocketing course upward.

Flask squints through the viewport again and, indeed, after a moment, he does see blackish blots start to appear, like sunspots, in the glossed over viewport. These tiny pinpricks of silhouette only grow and grow by the second as they plummet, in loose formation, down towards the Lover. He can't start to count them all but the sensor monitor at his arm bleeps a warning, feeding him the necessary data.

"Captain, there's–"

"I see 'em, I see 'em," Nemo acknowledges, snapping a couple of dials on the console and snatching up his headset. "These're your buddies?"

"I oughta object to that description," Flask stipulates before shrugging, "but, yeah, I suspect you're probably fooking right."

Thirty-four Dropships, launched from various points all across the climatic field, descend in a predatory pounce upon the outnumbered Lover far below. As the freighter shoots upward through the sky, the Dropships plummet downward, the space between them shrinking and shrinking.

Individually, the triangular dropcraft were no real match for a freighter of the Lover's size and armament. In a great undisciplined mass like this, in a maneuver the surface-to-orbital vessels were never designed nor trained for, who knew what they were capable of?

They were far off protocol now, Flask knew; an interloper vessel, with a sapling confirmedly aboard, blasts towards escape and thwarts all the Consortium's paranoid defenses.

As fast as he can, Flask moves to unclip his buckles. "Should I–"

"Angle ray shields?" suggests Nemo archly, dancing ten fingers across the instrument panel, keeping the yoke throttled all the way back with a knee. "Why, what a marvellous idea."

"But I'm not–" Flask starts to stammer, considering all the foreign doodads and blinking lights all about him. He could probably muddle his way through piloting a vessel, especially with a generous autopilot. He couldn't realistically be expected to man the shielding station in the midst of a dogfight. "I don't think I'm the best–"

This actually causes Nemo to stop what he's doing, to throw a glance his way. "You see an abundance of other co-pilots lying around?"

A panicking Flask turns to Odisseus, founding crewman with an intimate knowledge of everything Unconstant Lover. When he turns, he discovers the Ortok on his back beneath the communications package, loose machinery scattered all about.

"Yeah, he's terrible," Nemo explains.

"Or I have an exemptor to install?" offers Odisseus in his own defense.

His objections all dying, Flask is shaking his head vigorously, palms extended. "This isn't what you–"

"Closing to firing range," announces Quicksilver over the comm. To support this, there's a whining sound and a rattling green barrage of the freighter's topturret. In answer, the black dots visible far above start to spark with green of their own, arcing ditrogen down to meet the Lover.

"Moons," growls Nemo, straining far across the dashboard and snapping a handful of switches in Flask's reach, in a quick and memorized sequence. This immediately grinds something into operation within the bowels of the ship and indeed on all Flask's screens – the ray shields're online. The Captain's precisely on time too, the first incoming ditrogen bolts twanged away by the suddenly appearing ray shield.

Flopping back into his seat, Nemo's wearing a rare expression of exasperation. "Make yourself useful, huh?" With that, he cranks the yoke far to the port and the ship comes lurching after.

Stripped of all possible objections, Flask fastens those few buckles he'd unclasped and does his level best to understand all the beeping and booping instruments around him.

CHAPTER 18

Moira Quicksilver could die happy.

Righty and Lefty are heavy in their holsters and omnipresent in Moira's every movement. Nestled between her legs, more intimate than any lover, is Moira's beloved Antagonist Heavy Autofire, the laser cannon that's delivered her and the spaceship beneath from countless tangles and turmoils.

Moira could very happily seal the access hatch beneath her and stay up here, safe in her topturret, for the rest of forever. It makes no difference what dangers – sandstorms, asteroid fields, broadside barrages – the universe might throw at her, so long as she was off that planet and strapped to her three-pronged murder machine.

Here, amongst her three favorite firearms, Moira wasn't worrying about field exemptors or inexperienced co-pilots or the squadron of enemy ships that descends on them even now. What's more, the intermittent system failure that's plagued The Unconstant Lover seems to have claimed another victim – the munitions computer, that precocious twat.

There are no witnesses there to confirm this, but it is possible that, as she opens fire, there's a big stupid grin on Moira's face.

The Antagonist is a little sluggish out of the gate, somewhat gunshy after being cooped up so long beneath the spaceberg that coated the ship. Her internal machinery whines and clanks in a way that pangs Moira's heart to hear. True to her superior craftsmanship, however, this proves no real problem for the Antagonist. Once she's warmed up, the chamber is clicking fiercely through its ammunition chain.

In no hurry, Moira simply chooses the nearest of the three dozen dropcraft as her first target. From this vantage, they look like little more than holes poked through the climatic field's scintillant ceiling of sunlight. At this extreme distance, it's hard to know for certain whether she hits or not, the Antagonist thrumming contentedly all the while.

Then the tiny black dot veers drunkenly off course, terminating in a sudden starburst of orange and red fire.

She can only repeat this tactic once more before the gap between the ships is cinched tight like a drawstring bag. Their numbers thinned by a paltry two ships, the distance between the Lover and her attackers almost instantly dwindles to zero. In that heartbeat, Moira's afforded the briefest of glances at the shower of sun-streaked teltriton that drops all about the Lover.

Nemo's canny enough to avoid any collisions, of course. He effortlessly threads the Briza through the second gap Moira and her Antagonist opened for him in the divebombing hordes. Nevertheless, the ray shield takes a heavy toll, the target of so many barrages from the passing dropcraft.

"What blooming now?" spits Flask through the comm, the background of his transmission all blaring klaxons.

"Angle ray shields aftwise, port and starboard," Nemo answers by rote, swaying the freighter back and forth to present a less predictable target for everyone that's about to come chasing after them. There's a considerable pause here before a frustrated Nemo is forced to translate. "The back part! And both sides!"

"I know what fooking–"

Like water poured into a basin, the dropships that race past the Lover splash back and come surging up at the Briza from either side. One second earlier, the two sides of the dogfight were charging straight at each other and now, it's quite suddenly become a chase upwards into the stratosphere. The dropcraft swarm after the Lover's exhaust trail, sunlight glinting off their sides and their turrets afire.

To chase down new targets, Moira cranks the Antagonist on its axis, pointed vertically towards the planet below. Lugging the heavy weapon with her, she does her best to select a single target among their many pursuers. There is no rhyme, no reason, no squad tactics to shadow and exploit here. No central intelligence guides the individual dropships and this chaos is what's most dangerous to The Unconstant Lover.

Moira does manage to chase down one of the pinwheeling dropships, tracing its flightpath with short clusters of fire. Her aim proves so exact, she manages to pare an integral seam along one of the ship's three ridges. Fringed by fire and torn teltriton, the Antagonist peels open the Dropship like an Ortok might an oyster. Screaming spice rangers spill from its interior and disappear into the sandstorm below.

The careening vessel comes spiralling out of control, pointed straight at the Lover's aft section. Shielded against laserfire she might be; shielded against collision from crashing spaceships, The Unconstant Lover is not.

"Helm!" Moira barks. "Incoming, 46 degrees starboard!"

At the speed of instinct, Nemo pirouettes the Lover to port, twisting her bulk like a top. The fire-belching spacecraft goes blazing harmlessly past. As it does, Moira gets a nanosecond's glimpse inside the torn-apart vessel – at the fire, the rangers tossed about in panic, the sparking machinery. Fast as it came, it's gone, headbutting into another unlucky dropship, the two of them collaborating on one ship-shaking explosion.

"Bloom me," Nemo mutters, a moment later. "No idea that was coming. There's nobody," he pauses, caught halfway through the thought, "in the sensor room."

Fortunately, there's no time to dwell on this. There are plenty of ships still to shoot, ray shields to angle and always that climatic field, looming closer and closer above them all.

At full burn, the Briza Light Freighter is much faster than these orbit-to-surface dropships and she continues to stretch the distance between them. The Unconstant Lover is pointed unerringly upward, toward the climatic field, toward outer space, toward escape. The hounding pack of dropships stumble over themselves to chase after her, dozens of turrets firing ineffectually.

Only one turret – wielded very effectively, Moira might add – fires back down at them.

The sandstorm that roils and scours across the surface of Gi is a much better backdrop to shoot against than the blinding sun. The topturret clacking as it swings this way and that, Moira slots one ship after another into her crosshairs and her darling Antagonist makes fireworks.

The dropcraft are easy pickings for an eye as dead as Moira's and a cannon as merciless as the Antagonist. Unshielded troop transports, they're wholly unprepared to dogfight with a fleet-tested freighter. One by one, Moira works her methodical way through the disorganized mess of dropships, leaving smoke and shrapnel in her wake.

Their return fire is a sight to behold. It's a great swath of flashing green, shot from so many ships, but at this extreme range, their aim is laughable. With gunnery emplacements only intended to fire downward, no doubt meant to awe the natives and not much else, it's weak sauce against both evasive action and ray shielding.

Those regenerating ray shields prove more than enough to shrug away even the best gunners the dropships can boast. Now that Flask's been browbeaten into angling the shield properly, it ricochets or absorbs the odd shot that would otherwise strike the Lover's aft. Meanwhile, the freighter is perpetually wreathed in green laserfire, all the frantic missed shots of the dropcraft below attempting to overwhelm her with raw ditrogen.

Free to swat enemy ships with impunity, Moira vents some much needed frustration. She rides a machine of death, meticulously designed to destroy by master artisans. Fire and destruction is wrought with the slightest pressure from Moira's knees and thumbs. The impact of each canister vibrates through her whole body.

She is no one's prisoner now, no stranded outlander deprived of firearms or cigarettes or air conditioning. Now, she is a god of death and she rains her hatred from the sky with fists full of green lightning.

This is the particular power fantasy Moira is enjoying when a new and massive ditrogen bolt, half the length of the Lover, goes racing a few feet past the topturret.

Moira scowls and lets go of the triggers a moment in surprise. That shot didn't come from below, far too powerful anyway to come from one of the dropcraft. It came from above.

"Um, anybody else catch that?" Moira wonders through the comm, as she swivels the Antagonist around, from the planet's surface to the planet's orbit. "'cause it very nearly caught me."

"They wouldn't dare," mutters Nemo, his breath in this throat.

"Who wouldn't dare what?" an Ortoki voice is heard to ask, over the clatter of hand tools.

Once spun fully around, Moira squints into the sun's oppressive glare. The longer she watches, though, she starts to see something winking, a faint flashing, on the other side of the climatic field. Following this flash, there's a brilliant barrage of laserfire that comes streaking down, through the climatic field and directly towards them.

"Evasive–" Moira starts to shriek in panic but Nemo's preempted her. He wrenches the Lover away from the laserfire and it howls past, blindingly green and strong enough to shrivel a lesser spaceship with a single strike. Thanks to Nemo's quick maneuver, that barrage connects somewhere among the dropcraft, considering the orange reflection on the inside of Moira's plexishield.

"The capital ships," Nemo answers too late, another flashing starting again far above the climatic field, in Gi's low orbit. "They're fucking firing on us."

Moira screws up her face. "An orbital bombardment?"

"Thought you said," Odisseus objects, in the instant before Nemo's forced to duck and weave again, to avoid a second incoming ditrogen shower, "that was never gonna happen?"

"It wasn't supposed to!" Nemo snaps defensively. "That was everywhere in Two-Bit's shit. Even in extreme emergencies, orbital bombardment's strictly forbidden!"

"Could fook with the soil," responds Flask coldly. "Way against protocol."

"I assume," Odisseus scoffs, "we've got no plan, then?"

"Well," Nemo starts, mockery thick in his tone, "we could start by angling ray shields double blooming bowside!" The freighter groans, the boosters sputter and the broadside whistles past, Nemo narrowly avoiding the laserfire even as he screams at Flask.

There's some grumbling from the press-ganged co-pilot as he fumbles about his duties as best he can. In the time it takes Flask to fold the ray shields twice across the Lover's bow, Nemo's obliged to dodge another pair of barrages from above. With each one, the unseen gunners become more and more precise, measuring the Lover's reaction time and adjusting accordingly.

The shields come the instant before they're needed. When Nemo can't completely duck the next broadside, they absorb the brunt of the glancing blow. When struck by such a powerful blast, however, even The Unconstant Lover's sophisticated shields are torn practically to ribbons, dropping to a smear of their former strength.

"Shields're, erm," Flask struggles to interpret all the data his console assails him with, "30% power?" There's a pause here as he taps a few buttons. "And climbing?"

"Moons," remarks Nemo. "That's even full forward, double folded." He sighs heavily, his frustration mounting. "Motherbloomers can't wait their turn to shoot at us?"

"Yeah, I don't see us taking another one of those and still staying a spaceship," Moira theorizes. "That'll short the shields right the fuck out."

"Unless there's something you could do...?" dangles Nemo significantly.

"Of course," huffs Odisseus, hard at work on the exemptor. "Lemme drop everything and solve your problem."

"Kinda everybody's problem, really," Nemo makes the point in the same breath that he jukes the Lover unexpectedly to port. This buys him a considerable berth from the laserfire – only because his dodge comes at the last possible second. "Meantime," he pants, a little winded from the effort, "guess I'mana hafta get sorta original with these."

Before he gets a chance, however, there's a sudden screech of rent teltriton and the sort of shipwide shake that everyone knows means hull damage.

"The bloom was that?" Odisseus is the first to growl, soon as he's recovered from the jolt and the surprise.

"You know," Nemo speculates through gritted teeth, spiralling the Lover through a spray of capital-class laserfire, "maybe I'm not the ideal person to fucking ask in this situation."

"Erm, erm," stutters Flask, overwhelmed by the sheer number of unfriendly noises and blinking lights the shielding station must be throwing his way, "the thing says 38%, though. I don't understand how–"

"I do," Moira realizes.

With a push of her knees, she swings the topturret around. Heavy like a pendulum, it's happy to go, pointing its barrel back toward the planet's surface. From this angle, it's easy to see what's happened. There's a smoking crater in the ship's hull, a trail of black smoke pointing like an accusing finger towards the guilty party.

Scavengers to the capital cruiser's apex predator, the cloud of dropships are closer than ever thanks to Nemo's aerial acrobatics. With the ray shields angled across the freighter's bow, there's a clear shot to The Unconstant Lover's exposed backside.

On their own, their anti-infantry weapons are too puny to pierce the Briza's exhaustively thick hull. In the dozens, with coordinated fire, they'd be more than enough to swat the freighter from the sky.

This explanation receives mixed results amongst the Lover's crew.

"That sounds," gasps Nemo, flattening the freighter against the horizon, "like another problem," rolling her twice over to the starboard, "for Two-Bit," and goosing the jetboosters for all their worth to outrun the next barrage, "doesn't it?"

"If you're jokin' with that Two-Bit buhoxshite," Flask warns dangerously, "it ain't funny and it ain't helpin', like."

"You can at least," counters an Odisseus frantic at the prospect of repairing all that hull damage, "redistribute the ray shields, though, can you not?"

"And what?" Flask snaps back. "Get plastered by them fookers up there?"

"It's that," Moira explains, staring down the quickly encroaching dropships, "or get plastered by these fuckers down here."

"Nah, it's fine," promises Nemo blithely, pitching the vessel erratically this way and that. "I'll just dodge them all, shall I, simultaneously, with no eyes in the sensor room and no," he pauses to grunt and strangle a curse, "margin of error."

Sandwiched between two destructions – one from a great number of smaller ships, the other a massive ship many times her size – the trap the Consortium's laid starts to close. Chances were, The Unconstant Lover would drown in the swelling ocean of ditrogen long before she could reach that climatic field, open space and escape beyond.

Moira Quicksilver aligns an enemy ship down her ironsights. Thumbing the Antagonist's triggers, Moira resolves to take as many of these sanctimonious, application-rejecting spice rangers down with her as she can.

Odisseus connects the coupling and is rewarded with zilch – no power, no sparks, no static. With a sigh, the Ortok sniffs around the relevant wires, searching for the scent of ozone, a burnt conduit or fused connector. He scooches this way and that beneath the communication console, to better examine each converging thread, and discovers nothing amiss. Setting his jaw firm, he returns once again to the coupling, simply yanks loose the stud and plugs it back in again.

For no discernible reason, this works. The ship's system power reroutes from her exterior comm and instead brings the field exemptor to sporadic life. That perpetually dead series of little rectangular indicator lights, so tiny and so hateful, that the Ortok's been studying for the past ten minutes or so, blink a wavering blue. His work here – sprawled on his back beneath the least spacious of the helm's instrument panels – is done.

Odisseus wriggles free from the cramped workspace and returns to the larger doom and destruction that's unfolding all around him.

Through the viewport, the climatic field eclipses all. It's a great firmament of rippling yellow, honeycombed by hexagons of gray teltriton. Each hexagonal arm shelters docking bays, monitoring stations and shield projectors the size of cities.

Beyond that shimmering, impenetrable field, their capital ship tormentor is finally visible. It's some Consortium Corporate Cruiser or another, its broadside batteries glittering like fireflies. Now and again, a missed shot from below, from the fleet of dropcraft in hot pursuit, will zip past the viewport, a constant reminder of how narrowly they're avoiding fiery death with each passing second.

To survive each passing second, the Captain must subject the ship to maneuvers she's never performed, especially not under these increasingly hostile conditions. Attempting a planetary ejection at this speed, her ray shields hanging by a thread and hounded by laserfire from both directions, would outright kill a lesser vessel – even flying in a straight line. Instead, Nemo dances the Lover back and forth, testing the patience and power of her boosters above and beyond what any machine, even overachievers like Port and Starboard, could be expected to perform.

Normally, Odisseus would balk at all this abuse to the jetboosters. In this case, however, the Ortok's wise enough to understand that sparing the ship is pointless if they're all incinerated in the process.

In this case, all Odisseus wants is to escape this sinkhole of a planet.

The engines, worked to the absolute brink, have it easy compared to poor Flask. Moment to moment, he's scrambling to spin dials, snap switches and constantly calibrate something. The criminal turned spice ranger turned co-pilot looks ten years older than he did before he strapped into that gyroscopic rig.

To his credit, the ship has yet to explode in a fountain of ditrogen and scrap metal, so he must be doing something right.

Odisseus, meanwhile, simply stands back and watches the pretty lights. He stands at a remove, watching these fateful events, the crux point of all their labors these past two years, fall into place, one by one. He's done his last duty – the field exemptor is successfully installed. With the simple act of connecting that last conduit cluster, he's gone from a collaborator to a spectator, a passenger on this runaway train to riches or rubble.

The next time Nemo swings the Lover heartbreakingly to starboard, he gets a glimpse of Odisseus standing idly behind him. "Working hard," he breathes, weaving the freighter through another cloud of laserfire, "or hardly–"

"Exemptor's all connected," Odisseus replies with a strange calm. "Establish a comm connection with one of the relays," he explains, pointing a claw over his saltbrother's shoulder and out the viewport, "and the thing'll fire up."

"Well," Nemo mentions offhandedly, sweat pouring down his face, "unless you're too busy with your claw up your bloomhole, would you mind maybe doing the honors? Idle hands're kinda at a premium right now." As he's making his request, he's tilted the Lover sixty degrees, twisted the yoke to make her go rolling away starboard and plunged her so suddenly that the Ortok's twin stomachs wrap around themselves in fright.

It is with a heavy and disappointed sigh that Odisseus thumps back into the communicator's chair, activates the broadband scanner and sweeps for available signal-ports. How naïve he'd been – as long as The Unconstant Lover was an unexploded spaceship, as long as Nehel Morel's heart still pumped warm blood, there'd always be one more task for Odisseus to do.

It's child's play to calibrate, of course. He chooses a likely relay and then hovers his claw over the execute button. Soon as he presses the button, the climatic field would accept the connection, interpret the broadwave the exemptor sends and then open the doorway for them to zoom through.

Timing is key here. There is a chance, if deactivated quick enough, they may be able to catch a few dropcraft unawares. They each came equipped with their own field exemptors, certainly, but in the confusion, the Lover could maybe shake a few poor pilots by an unexpectedly re-appearing climatic field.

"Say when," cues Odisseus placidly.

There he hangs for the next few moments, as the Lover rocks and rumbles all around him. All the same noise and nonsense – incoming laserfire, terrible engine strain, that "shields low" alarm – continue their song and dance around Odisseus. The Ortok, however, exists in a bubble of quiet serenity, staring at the communicator's console and unable to invest in all the lights and colors and explosions.

All he's waiting for is the signal from Nemo.

"How's about..." Nemo starts, panic bubbling at the edges of his calm, "...now?"

His claw punches the button, the communications monitor comes alive with scrolling digits. Odisseus leans back in his chair to get a better view of the disappearing climatic field.

The climatic field does not disappear.

Odisseus is speechless, mouth open, brow furrowed. All the viewport is the sparking, shimmering climatic field, an impassive yellow barrier that'll fry every system aboard The Unconstant Lover, should they dare come too close. She's still hurtling closer at full burn even now, with only seconds to spare.

"Um," screams Nemo, "ideas?"

"This wouldn't happen," Odisseus mutters, gazing at his paws. "This can't happen."

"This is happening!" reminds Flask.

Nemo's positively apoplectic. "Can you fix it?"

"There's nothing to fix!" Odisseus insists in a frenzy of self-doubt. His eyes dart all over his console, paws held helplessly in the air. "It's all wor–"

"Can you fix it?"

"Not immediately," Odisseus admits, snapped from his reverie and bursting with renewed urgency. He scoots off his seat and squirms back beneath the communications panel, uncertain exactly what's gone wrong down there.

"Am I crazy," wonders Moira Quicksilver, her voice barely audible over the rattling gunfire, "or is the climatic field getting awfully–"

Whatever cutting remark she was about to make, the galaxy would never know. In deference to plunging the ship through the field and certain doom, Nemo performs some blasphemy on the ship's yoke. At a speed and angle that threatens to liquify the organs of everyone aboard, the jetboosters reverse direction. In one sickening swing, Port and Starboard send the freighter careening downward again.

They're suddenly headed back – back to the planet, back to the sandstorm and the wasteland and the spiny green barbarians, back to the pack of pursuing dropcraft.

On his paws and knees beneath the instrument panel, Odisseus has no visual on what's happening outside the ship. The Ortok endures each jostle, each tilt, each manic maneuver of the yoke as best he can. He imagines the swarm of spaceships that The Unconstant Lover must somehow plow through as she regroups from her disastrously failed run at the climatic field. A few of the shakes, Odisseus recognizes to be impacts, with the telltale pitch to the side and whine of bent hull plates.

Odisseus has no idea what Nemo's plan could be, how he intends to circumvent the sudden shutting of their escape route. All the Ortok's mental energy is going towards this accursed field exemptor, this ordinary metal box, and wondering what wire he mistakenly left unplugged or kinked or slotted into the wrong slot.

The next impact he feels, Odisseus knows immediately, comes from no laser bolt. The force of the blow throws the Ortok forward, crunching against the loose machinery and exposed wiring of the communications panel. When the tremors that rock the Lover last more than a second or two, when the boosters start to make a high-pitched keening sound, the Ortok's frustration and embarrassment transform into genuine terror.

The next thing he knows, Odisseus is leaping from beneath the console to discover what's happening. What he discovers is that the helm's equilibrium is completely off-balance and he nearly spills back onto the floor. One glance at the smoke that comes pouring from the inertial compensator tells him only part of the story. As he collects his footing against the communicator's chair.

Odisseus shoots a glance out the viewport, to see what he might see about this newest disaster. The climatic field is there one second, disappeared the next, reappeared the second after, as The Unconstant Lover tailspins through Gi's upper atmosphere. Intercut with those flashes of the climatic field, Odisseus can see the faraway sandstorm on the surface of Gi.

Second by second, the climatic field is shrinking and shrinking, the ground below growing and growing. Far as he can tell, The Unconstant Lover and all her souls are plummeting inexplicably from the sky.

"The bloom is happening?" he roars.

"Summat hit us!" Flask roars back, scanning frantically across his screens for a more elaborate answer than that.

"You think?" yelps Odisseus. "What happened to the shields?"

"Shields're fooking steady at 15%," Flask shoots back. "Weren't a laser weapon what hit us. Gotta be something else."

"A collision?" wonders Nemo, straining against the yoke with all his strength.

"You could say that," comes the reply from Moira. "Funny thing is, it's still attached."

Moira's not quite sure what happened there.

One moment, they were rocketing through the atmosphere, a minute or less away from deactivating the climatic field and sailing through into open space. According to all the helm's comm chatter, the exemptor was installed and ready to fire, backed by the Ortok's best assurances.

The next moment, Nemo'd flown the Lover through a sommersault, severe enough to send the topturret spinning. Now, they were plunging back towards the surface again – straight into all the dropcraft that'd been snipping at their tail feathers.

Soon as she'd recovered, Moira'd done the best she could with the Antagonist, laying about among the swarming starships. Three or four, she knew for certain, she'd smeared into smoke and spare parts. In seconds, though, they were overwhelmed, the sky about them blotted out by teltriton on all sides.

Before she could react, one of the dropcraft rammed smack into the Lover's starboard side.

The force of that impact quite nearly throws Moira from her seat, the threads of her safety straps starting to tear. She spends too long – three seconds or more – collecting her wits from the sheer whiplash. When next she looks, The Unconstant Lover is crashing back towards the planet's surface. More interestingly, she'd somehow sprouted a dropship.

Like an arrow jutting from a wounded beast, the angular dropship juts awkwardly from the Lover's starboard side, crunching all the teltriton at the point of impact. Moira's keen eyes catch the three docking clamps – jagged spears of metal – imbedded in the Briza's backside, anchoring the dropcraft at its untenable angle. It waggles there, battling wind and gravity and good sense but holding tight nonetheless.

Unsurprisingly, The Unconstant Lover isn't meant to fly with a piggybacking buddy. With that much extra weight, no fancy flying from Nemo or exhaust-spewing effort of the jetboosters will keep the Briza airbourne. Like an asteroid dropped from high orbit, both ships go plummeting towards the surface and a fiery grave, corkscrewing madly the whole way down.

There's another screaming match in the helm, Moira can hear. Meanwhile, in the topturret, she's attempting to brace her feet and somehow stop all this spinning without snapping her kneecaps clean off. By the time she's stabilized her gyroscopic seat, they're no closer to discovering the truth of what's happened and why they're dropping like a derelict from the sky.

"A collision?"

"You could say that," Moira provides, the problem staring her in the face. "Funny thing is, it's still attached."

"Still attached?" shrieks Nemo. "The bloom does 'still attached' mean?"

"I'm getting in the engine room," resolves a woozy Odisseus.

"You're not going blooming anywhere!" Nemo savages back. "Your one job is that bloody field e–"

"What does 'still attached' mean?" Flask, on topic, demands to know.

"As in 'still attached to the hull and dragging us back to the surface'!" Moira explains, in as plain Commercial as she possibly can.

Flask is beside himself with disbelief. "Why the fook would they–"

"It's a boarding party."

However they might respond, it's drowned out beneath the Antagonist's roar.

Moira's no idea why the field exemptor didn't work. There's practically nothing she can do about that, all the way up here in the topturret. She allocates, then, a smaller, perhaps more important task for herself – to keep the ship from crashing.

Her window of time to save the ship is rapidly closing. It is Moira's intention to pour so much laserfire into the cause of this calamity that there will be nothing left but a ditrogen whisper.

With the ship pitching about, it's no easy task to keep the cannon properly aimed. Moira wastes precious time with each shot, spinning the Antagonist this way and that. Much of that ammo goes wide, some even comes close to hitting the Lover but that small percentage that does find its target is devastatingly effective.

The rattling Antagonist gains immediate purchase on the unshielded side of the dropcraft. The hull buckles and punctures, laced with green fire. With each successive hit, Moira imagines she can feel the dropcraft's grip on the Lover slip and weaken.

This both emboldens her and further frustrates her whenever the ship's whipping momentum tears the Antagonist away from its target. Moira's forced to spend too much strength and too much time muscling the turret back into place. The next time she's thrown off target, Moira makes a special effort to brace both legs against the turret's side, to better lock the swiveling seat in place.

This done, Moira's free to rain firepower onto the dropcraft's vulnerable side and she takes great pleasure in doing so.

Half a clip is all it takes, the Antagonist chewing through the last of its ammunition just in time. All that ditrogen unleashed onto an unshielded starship reduces teltriton to cinders in moments. The laserfire crumbles, curls and blackens the hull, exposing its interior to the drunken gravity and the green flame, ripping open the ship's rooms and chambers.

More crucially, Moira watches the docking clamps start to slacken, their hydraulics spasming with each hit. Eventually, with a cataclysmic burst of fire from the dropcraft's bridge, the docking clamps judder and withdraw. Like a dead bird falling from a branch, the dropship flexes its claws once and spirals away from the Lover, disintegrating as it falls.

For good measure, Moira and her Antagonist follow its fall, peppering what's left with more laserfire. A little distance away, it explodes properly in a green-flecked ball of orange flame.

The effect on the Lover is immediate and immensely satisfying. Her equilibrium, with some effort, starts to balance out and Moira can rest her aching knees from their braced position. Her downward momentum, however, doesn't seem to cease. From where she sits, Moira can see the boosters spewing nothing but black from their turbines.

Recovering from the shock of their release, Moira's attention is more focused on something else, something even more problematic than their headlong collision with the planet below.

There's still a morsel of dropcraft stuck, by one persistent docking clamp, to the Lover's starboard side. Moira brings the Antagonist back around but, from her angle, she can't line up a clean shot that won't deal as much damage to the Lover as it would her metallic parasite.

It's not lost on Moira what manner of ship component – a boarding-lock – clings to tenaciously to the Briza's side.

Most of the spice rangers aboard that kamikaze dropship, Moira knows, went down with their ship. With all the exhaustive ship-to-ship boarding procedures they'd need to undertake, there's no more than a handful of rangers inside that boarding-lock.

A handful of spice rangers, however, could easily kill everyone aboard, reclaim the Gitter sapling and end this whole caper in a matter of minutes.

Sheer instinct moves Moira to unbuckle the straps of her gyroscopic seat and hurry down the gundeck's access ladder. She does this despite all the wild pitching about that still plagues the ship and despite the trembling in her hands and heart.

Moira Quicksilver knows what must be done and she knows it must be done alone. From the shouting match that still fills the Lover's interior comms, it's clear there's not a warm body aboard the ship to be spared. The task – one more suicidal than all of Nemo's harebrained schemes and daredevil getaways – falls to Moira and Moira alone and she's got maybe two minutes to prepare.

That's assuming, in the next thirty seconds or so, they don't actually slam into the planet's surface and die in a humiliating fireball.

Is it terror, one might ask, or excitement that's clasped a hand around Moira's heart?

Given two minutes, there's only one precaution she has time to take before company arrives. To accomplish this, Moira runs – as fast as jackboots will carry her – to the medbay, to retrieve from the body of the dead Umijo spice ranger the one piece of equipment that might help her repel those boarders.

She gets to wear a harness, rejoices Moira's inner twelve-year-old. She gets to die in a harness, reminds her adult pragmatist.

CHAPTER 19

Flask has never survived a shipwreck. As The Unconstant Lover drops to her death, corkscrewing through the air like an Okberrian maple seed, he has zero idea what to expect when the impact does come. Maybe he'll be shredded to bloody ribbons by torn metal. Maybe he'll crack his skull open against the helm's ceiling. Maybe, hopefully, he'll be instantly incinerated in a ship-sized fireball like in the Brock Rocket holofilms.

None of these horrific fates seem to concern either of his two companions. Flask then remembers, in a burst of clarity, that they've both professedly survived no less than three shipwrecks over the course of their careers. They don't, Flask observes, look too worried about a fourth.

"Oh, hey," mentions Nemo, peering at a readout. "We're balanced. Whatever it was let go." He snaps a switch near his comm transceiver. "Topturret, that you?"

No reply comes from Quicksilver; simply static on the comm.

"Huh. Weird. Well," Nemo resolves with a shrug, ignoring the spiraling peril all around his freighter, "no reason to stand on ceremony."

With his right foot and his right hand, the Captain pumps some pedal and cranks the clutchlever forward. If the ship is intended to putter sorrowfully and keep plunging towards the ground, this is a wild success.

"That's no good," Nemo notices, a little put-out. He tries again but the ship's engine groggily refuses to start. In response, Nemo pouts his lip a little and eventually throws a glance over his shoulder. "Odi?"

"IMPACT IMMINENT," reminds an alarm patiently. "T-MINUS 20."

"Yes'm?" comes the peeved growl from somewhere beneath the communicator's dashboard. An Ortok's only partially visible down there, as an abdomen, hind paws, a toolbelt and tail, that sway back and forth with each sickening swing of the spaceship.

"Boosters don't wanna turn over," Nemo complains, a little mystified. "I'm all over the clutch and the–"

"IMPACT IMMINENT. T-MINUS 17."

"And the intake pedal?" poses Odisseus archly, his reply muffled beneath the instrument panel and all the screaming alarms.

"And the intake pedal, yeah," a nodding Nemo finishes. "I tried–"

Odisseus braces one paw against the communicator's seat as a particularly bad shudder wracks the ship. "You tried giving the clutch a second to breathe first, right?"

"IMPACT IMMINENT. T-MINUS 14."

"Yes," Nemo supplies, his demeanor increasingly less pleasant the thinner his patience wears. "I tried giving the clutch a second to breathe. I'm not an–"

Flask raises a tentative finger. "Not to interrupt."

"How about goosing the ignition a second time?"

"IMPACT IMMINENT. T-MINUS 11."

Nemo's mouth opens to object, only to close again with a contemplative frown. "That I did not try," he allows. With a grandiose gesture, he takes hold of the dangling keys that bounce from the ignition.

"See if that don't work for you," adds Odisseus, nearly under his breath.

"That alarm," Flask starts to point out, "are–"

"IMPACT IMMINENT. T-MINUS 8."

"Yep, that's the one," Flask appreciates with a nod. "It means we're abou–"

Nemo cranks the ignition once. Something snarls and sputters far beneath the helm's deckplates, something suggestive of a jetbooster's roar, and then falls disappointingly silent. The ship still spins, flips and tumbles through the sky. The raging sandstorm grow still closer in occasional flashes through the viewport.

"What now, smart guy?" Nemo wants to know, slapping a hand against his thigh in frustration.

The Ortok's temperament is unchanged by either the clear and present danger or by his saltbrother's bad attitude. "All at the same time. Pedal, clutchlever, ignition."

"IMPACT IMMINENT. T-MINUS 5."

"Itmeanswe'regonnafookin'crashlike!" Flask screams, the words vomited from his mouth in a paroxysm of terror.

Nemo, the galactic champion of ignoring people, pays this no mind. Instead, he scowls confusedly at the controls. "How's that even–"

With effort and the creative use of his elbow, Nemo manages to accomplish all three – twisting the ignition, pumping the clutchlever and pressing the intake pedal to the floor.

"IMPACT IMMIN–"

This is met with immediate success. There's an ungodly sound in the bowels of the ship, the boosters sighing heavily as they reluctantly agree to ignite. There's a newfound buoyancy to the freighter, bopping pleasantly as though dropped onto the surface of still pool.

Miracle of miracles, The Unconstant Lover stops falling.

Now that's the vessel's stopped spinning mad circles, the view through the viewport normalizes. Flask can see the upper clouds of the rampaging sandstorm, still scouring the planet's surface, as they rise up to lap at the Briza's underside. The sandstorm's rippling dust clouds almost appear as a silk cushion to break the Lover's fall.

She hangs there a second, almost peacefully. She's fallen so far that the throng of harrying dropships are nothing but teltriton glints high above. In that second, the Captain takes the time to slowly turn and consider his saltbrother. "I stand corrected."

The Ortok, still buried beneath the instrument panel, idly scratches an inch with his hind claws and makes no other response.

As the storm's upper winds buffet The Unconstant Lover like a jborra with a rat-canary, Nemo tilts the yoke back skyward. The ship soon pointed back towards orbit, the climatic field and the fleet of dropcraft. "You know what they say," he resolves with a sigh. Before anyone can ask, he supplies the answer. "Second time's the charm."

Flask doesn't feel the need to correct him, fearing a dreaded third run at the climatic field. The clutchlever ratchets all the way forward and The Unconstant Lover leaps into her second atmosphere exit.

Moira anticipates smoke grenades and is proven almost immediately right.

A pair of them come clunking into the cargo hold, spewing whitish smoke in every direction. It'll take more smoke than two grenades worth, Moira knows, to completely cloud the Briza Light Freighter's expansive cargo bay. At the very least, the rangers will cover their own entrance through the ship's starboard airlock.

It's an assumption that'll cost them precious lives.

The first two rangers come right on the heels of their grenades, stalking forward in a loose formation. Rifles up, shields engaged, visors down, they're a humanoid and a Moshi, the one much bulkier than the other.

They've come with triggers half-clicked, ready to murder anything aboard this vessel. Desperate these commandos might be, their ship might be destroyed behind them, but they're still the best trained killers in the galaxy. Now, they're on a sacred crusade, the holiest of holies – retrieving a Gitter sapling that was nearly stolen out from under their sacred paymasters.

Moira can't decide. One part of her champions the idea of attacking immediately, as soon as she's got clean shots to her targets, to hopefully bottleneck them inside the airlock. The other part, the more prudent voice in Moira's already prudent head, says to wait, to maintain the element of the surprise and consider their numbers.

Oddly, it's the former plan, guided by Moira's killer instincts, that triumphs. She knows, one way or the other, this whole thing will end with ditrogen-riddled corpses. Her life, she is determined, will cost them as much as her years of training and preparation can buy her.

Two shots, one in the head of each ranger, is Moira's opening play. The first one's the easiest. Armed with complete surprise, Righty can puncture his skull whenever it wants. The second, immediately following, is the more critical. She must catch the humanoid still unawares, despite the shriek of laserfire and the death of his compatriot. This is Lefty's task and it performs admirably, catching the second ranger straight through the side of his surprised face.

Neither of the rangers were expecting their first pirate to be squatting atop the airlock door, pistols ready and aimed at the back of their exposed heads.

One after another, both rangers thud onto the cargo deck. The first two boarders in the Lover's history are dead inside of three steps. There's a moment of stunned shock that Moira feels palpably from the rest of the airlock's unseen troops – wholly unprepared to see their invincible vanguard dispatched in the first four seconds of the boarding action – and then all hell breaks loose.

The next two rangers, an Alortan and a second humanoid, come scrambling backwards out their airlock. Fully swaddled by their ray shields, their Dominos are uplifted and blazing the moment they pass the threshold. This too Moira anticipated and is already calculating her next series of angles and trajectories, even as her own ray shield absorbs the brunt of their fire.

The longer they keep shooting, of course, the weaker and weaker that shield'll become and thus, Moira's not long for her perch. The next three seconds see her relocated to another vantage, somewhere Moira can exploit the second phase of her surprise – that their first and only opponent is wearing a harness too.

There are no words that can adequately describe Moira's elation when she leaps from her crouch, cranks her ankles back and feels the flamejets spring from her feet. To fly across the cargo hold transforms the dump into somewhere wholly new, with fascinating new vantages to all the grime and mold and rust.

There's no time to enjoy this, however. She's a little too busy controlling the twist and contortion of her body as she soars above and around the spice rangers. They open fire, peppering her half-shell of ray shield with sporadic bursts from their Dominos. Personally, Moira is saving her ammunition, well aware that she'll need each and every one of those canisters before this is through.

Through a carefully controlled motion of her feet, Moira keeps her shield interspersed between herself and her adversaries the entire flight until both feet touch down on the hold floor.

Less surprised than the first two, this pair of spice ranger boarders easy follow Moira's flightpath with their fire. For the most part, they too keep their own shields between Moira and her Lawmen. For the most part, however, is not all and a careful eye's able to spot a few telltale places the rangers, their bodies twisted awkwardly around, leave exposed.

The grayskin's right shoulder peeks ever so slightly into view, as does the Alortan's taloned ankle. Righty tags the first, the humanoid screaming and spinning aside. Lefty tags the other, the Alortan squawking and thudding heavily to the deck. In their pain and surprise, both rangers open themselves up even further and it's simple work for Moira to bury a bolt in one's back and the other's throat. Two more rangers drop, dead or wounded, to the deck, their harnesses hissing spasmodically.

This maneuver's price, however, is steep. Now, Moira's element of surprise is spent and her position revealed. A casual glance reveals another four spice rangers, crowded into the airlock's tube – all with deadshots to Moira and her weakened shield.

This is about as far as Moira'd planned, hoping that only a tiny portion of the dropcraft's rangers survived to board the Lover. It's time, she supposes, to improvise.

To their credit, the remaining rangers don't hesitate a second at the sight of another two wingmates gunned down like punk-ass trainees. The front two – a pinkskin and a Hazric – drop instantly into a firing crouch, Dominos raised. When combined with the two rangers standing behind them – an Uvhog and a fourth humanoid – they create a perfect firing box.

To minimize her shield's surface area, Moira too drops to her knees, in the heartbeat before they open fire. She's almost forced backward by the sheer strength of their barrage, the hold ringing with the exact type of gunfire that slew all the warriors of the Skyscratch grove. This time, however, it's all aimed at one kneeling target, her shield seconds away from failing and with zero ideas in her head.

In the timeless gap between canisters, Moira reviews her options.

Her first thought lands on grenades but that's not really feasible here. A grenade thrown inside the Lover's hold might wreak untold damage against not only her attackers but, more importantly, the freighter herself. The last thing Moira wanted was to blow a screaming hole in the Briza's starboard side, even if it yanked all her boarders out in the process.

For another thing, Moira doesn't actually have any grenades, so.

Her second thought involves charging forward, closing to melee and forcing the rangers to switch from rifle to heatblade, exploiting that nanosecond of transition. Beside the general Nemoness of this plan, Moira rules this too. While the kneeling rangers might require that window to swap weapons, the two rangers behind them would feel no such need and could easily fill Moira full of holes five steps into her charge.

What to do, wonders Moira, what to do.

Fortunately, The Unconstant Lover provides her own answer. In the instant before Moira's ray shield evaporates, something bucks the freighter hard to port – a laser blast, Moira suspects. It's the ship's faulty inertial dampener that catches the spice rangers by surprise. Like the bridge crew on those hokey Brock Rocket specials, the boarding party is pitched forward and bowled to the side, their fire flying wildly in every which direction.

An old hand at the Lover's fits and starts, Moira instinctively braces a leg to keep her balance. Seeing her foe's collective stumble, she seizes her opportunity.

From her crouch, Moira leaps straight into the air and gains as much vertical as she can before she kickstarts her flamejets. A trail of Domino fire follows a few seconds too late in her wake but Moira keeps rocketing towards the cargo bay's high ceiling, debating her next move.

She's airborne when her comm's transceiver goes off, ducking back and forth to avoid the uncoordinated laserfire. "Gee," wonders the Captain's voice over the broadband comm, "anybody know what happened to our blooming air support?"

Odisseus must be missing something.

All the cables are connected. The blue indicator lights are lit. The box's even warm to the touch, the surest sign that something's fully operational. He can't seem to wrap his head around what could have caused the field exemptor to crap out on him like that.

It's honest embarrassment, less the fear of death and destruction, that's making the Ortok so paranoid. In any other circumstance, this would be a routine procedure, no more complex than installing a scramble codifier or autotranslating incoming transmissions.

To be fair, one could hardly fill a cocktail napkin with everything Odisseus knew about these field exemptors. The principle behind a comm interrupter is far from a foreign idea to the Ortok, resident gearhead aboard a pirate freighter for six years and counting. For this exact reason, he'd neglected researching the exemptor enough, during the planning phases. Here was that neglect, biting him in the bloomhole.

"Something," responds Moira over the broadband, "came up."

"What something," Nemo is quick to respond, "could possibly have come up?" Another impact from starboard arrives to accentuate his point. Everything aboard the Lover – the exposed cables and wires beneath the communications panel included – quakes. "Bloom me out," Nemo starts to snarl. "Shields–"

"Are doing the very best that they bloody can!" Flask hollers back. So many unhappy alarms are ringing around the co-pilot's seat, Odisseus is inclined to guess that shields' very best may not quite be enough to keep them unexploded. "Sure would be peachy," opines the poor beleaguered co-pilot, "if somebody felt like shooting back at these gobshites, like!"

"In a," grunts Moira with exertion, "minute."

All of this is distraction. All Odisseus needs to focus on is the field exemptor, why it is not working and what he must do to get it working again.

He spends perhaps a minute busy at work – unplugging connectors, adjusting valves, rebundling conduits, everything minute and inconsequential that he can think of, to ensure he's not neglecting anything. Outside, laserfire scorches the ship, the Captain threads the Lover through competing crossfire and the feeble ray shields are pushed to their absolute brink.

Odisseus doesn't care. Odisseus is busy.

His labor pays off eventually when he stumbles upon what may well be the culprit. The humblest of malfunctions, a feed cable has become so twisted it no longer carries its charge. All it needs is a length of conduit yanked from his toolbelt, a few quick bites and some careful twisting and it's repaired. This even seems to please the exemptor, those blue lights performing a little dance to show their approval.

"There," the Ortoki mechanic announces, scooting out from beneath the panel. "That oughta do it. Was the fucking stupidest–"

"Do it," Nemo orders, the strain in his voice increasing the longer this manic escape dragged on. "Do it now."

"What?" Odisseus starts, clambering to his feet and squinting out the viewport. "Are we there al–"

Far as Odisseus can tell, there's still a minute or more before they need to fire the exemptor. The sky that separates The Unconstant Lover from the climatic field is still swarming with dropcraft, a concern the Ortok feels is much more pressing. Plus, at this extreme range, the field's command team may even have a chance to override their clearance and prevent their specific exemptor from unlocking the proverbial door.

"Too early," Odisseus starts to object. "We void the field now, that's just extra time for them to negate–"

That's when the realization comes, Odisseus watching Nemo navigate a thicket of capital-class laserfire. "You don't trust that I fixed it."

"I trusted," Nemo answers without hesitation, "it the first time. Shouldn't be a problem, though," he counters, dipping the Lover a hair to avoid a blistering barrage, "if you fixed it, right?"

It is not without some childish petulance that Odisseus, back to his feet, leans heavily over the communicator's panel. With eyes out the viewport and up into orbit, he presses the button with a claw.

The climatic field does not disappear.

He stands there a few seconds, claw still pressed against the button, pretending that the communication channels need a moment to open, that the exemptor takes a little time to broadcast its codes. Deep in his stomach, he knows it didn't work. He bobs and sways with each rocking motion of the swerving ship, his gaze fixed on that still-there hexagon of shimmering yellow climatic field, willing the thing to deactivate.

"You gonna push it, or...?" Nemo, facing forward, wants to know. It takes an act of legendary restraint to keep Odisseus from reaching forward and pulping the Captain's windpipe with his claws.

"This makes no sense," Odisseus mutters under his breath.

"What makes no sense?" Nemo perks up, endowed with inconveniently good hearing all of a sudden. "That you pushed the button and the climatic field's still up?"

"I–"

"Thought so." There's a sudden crank on the yoke as The Unconstant Lover shifts her heading slightly, setting her sights on some new section of the climatic field.

It's Flask who poses the obvious question. "So, what blooming now?"

"There's gotta be a way–" Odisseus starts to insist, flush with embarrassment and rage, and he turns back toward the exemptor and the console it hides beneath.

"Nah. New idea," Nemo announces, his tone suggesting this was maybe the idea he'd rather they went with all along. Now that the ship's realigned, the Captain makes liberal use of the clutchlever to send The Unconstant Lover skyrocketing up at unprecedented speed.

Not quite recalibrated after the previous collision, the inertial dampener doesn't really feel like dampening any inertia at the moment and subsequently tosses Odisseus backward and into the communicator's seat. He lands with a grunt, all his objections smacked out of him.

He knew they were all dead anyway but a small part of Odisseus is somewhat relieved to be absolved of responsibility for their fate. This time, it actually sounds like all that's required of Odisseus now is to buckle his restraints and scream in terror at the appropriate moments.

Moira loves this harness so much, she would consider marrying it. She will certainly be buried in it, she knows that much.

Tebi-Gali, as a martial art, is very much the "one-on-one bout" type of martial art. Other disciplines – Thousand Fist or Zamazaghotra for example – are quite the opposite and revel in the multiple man melee. The most skilled of Galis, however, the myth-shrouded masters, were supposedly capable of engaging upwards of six opponents at once. In all fairness to Moira and her humanoid physique, the original species that pioneered Tebi-Gali were four-limbed, triple-jointed combat-savants.

Four combatants, all arguably better trained than she is, is something of a tall order for Moira. Even the advantage of the harness, miraculous as it is, is more-or-less nullified when each of her opponents wears one and is an expert at incorporating it into their attack and parry routines.

Nonetheless, it's an incredible rush, to feel the sheer strength behind each familiar blow and counterstrike, augmented by the servos inside the harness. She could strike twice as hard and twice as fast, cover double the distance she once could with each bound. If that somehow wasn't enough, she could always activate the flamejets and literally fly.

Then, of course, there were the heatblades.

Both of her opponents, the pinkskin and the Uvhog, don't seem too overawed by the feats of strength and athleticism their harnesses can achieve. They seem, to a ranger, more interested in putting Moira down as quickly as possible.

She purchases a little wiggle room with a Whirlwind Ibexbok, one of the few Tebi-Gali maneuvers designed to engage multiple opponents at once. The humanoid scampers left, the Uvhog sidesteps right and Moira hardly has an opportunity to pant in exhaustion before the other two rangers open fire.

Posted at complimentary angles to the main melee, the humanoid and the Hazric provide artillery, pecking at Moira's ray shield with fire whenever there's an opening. Moira'd chosen the cargo hold's starboard corner to make her last stand, ensuring she's not completely surrounded by rangers. Long as she kept two of them engaged with fisticuffs or heatblades, she couldn't be ignominiously gunned down by the other two.

Every time those Dominos find an opening, though, her own ray shield takes quite a beating. It behooves Moira, therefore, to stay in combat with either of the rangers as long as she can, to grant her harness the time it needs to recharge.

For her next attack, she chooses the pinkskin, based on the humanoid's unsteady footwork. Moira swings one heatblade around and into a stabbing motion, thrusting for the Comettail insignia in the harness' central plate. To give her stab a little more muscle, Moira kicks open her flamejet and skates the short distance between them, boosted by a sudden burst of fire.

The pinkskin is indeed a little wobbly on her feet and it takes all the ranger's energy to scramble aside and dodge the flying thrust. In retaliation, she launches into a pre-coordinated maneuver – Drunken Palima – and it would've been child's play for Moira to dodge and deflect that routine, had the Uvhog ranger not come charging up to her defense.

He leads with a headbutt, one powered by both flamejets and complimented by his pair of sloping tusks. Moira avoids this by leaping into the air, goosed by her own flamejets. The Uvhog goes rocketing beneath, narrowly missing headbutting a nearby hull support beam.

No sooner has Moira gained this sudden height than the assault rifles blare back to life, rippling against her ray shield. Its dwindling strength – 8% and falling – flashes in her visor as Moira kills the flamejets and drops to the floor, landing in a Poised Hukia crouch.

She's just landed, preparing to dodge the next attack the pinkskin's spinning to deliver, when her comm crackles.

"You doing anything right now?" wonders Nemo idly, stress stretched tight across the illusion of his calm.

Here comes the pinkskin's gambit – a flying kick, obviously inspired by Moira's own flying stab – and Moira goes ducking beneath, rolling across the hold floor to hopefully outmaneuver the leaping ranger. She's too slow, of course, and Moira only manages to clamber to her feet in time to meet the pinkskin's flurry of heatblade attacks.

"Me?" Moira grunts. She dodges right, right and then swings left to right with her own heatblade – a sloppy, unprincipled attack but savage enough to earn a little space.

Whatever space she does earn is quickly filled by the Uvhog, once again pounding in to trouble outnumbered Moira. The squat and stocky ranger, half a head shorter than Moira but twice as heavy, is more musclebound than most of his comrades and that shows in the powerful strikes he rains down on his cornered opponent. In the hands of the Uvhog, Patient Daridro is a devastating haymaker and Teekapar Swarm might, if landed properly, break through her ray shield and kill Moira outright.

As always, of course, what his size gains him in strength, the Uvhog loses in speed. Moira's able to keep a few inches ahead of each of his teltriton-shattering swings.

"No, Garrock buttfucking Brondi. Yes, you," Nemo snarks. "Are you, Moira Quicksilver, doing anything right now?"

Heatblades are nothing like true swords in practice and Moira cannot port over any of her knowledge of electrobaton or glassrock saber to apply to these strange weapons. They're weightless and can't, most crucially, be used to parry, the shimmering heat passing harmlessly through other blades. Tebi-Gali, then, makes sense as the ideal martial art to compliment this strange swordsmanship. Moira's problem is that she's not practiced at incorporating the extra ranger into her routines, constantly overestimating the distance to her foes.

What Moira really wants is to find a window to bring either of her pistols back into fight, the weapons she feels most comfortable with. Against these ray shields, though, both Righty and Lefty are all but useless and Moira must be patient.

Working in concert, the pinkskin and the Uvhog drive her further and further into the corner. To either side, the hold's teltriton walls start to encroach, constricting Moira's ability to dodge and weave. She'll make a fatal mistake any moment now, miscalculate a swing or bump stupidly into a wall and so end her life.

"Kinda," Moira hisses between gritted teeth. "Why?"

In their overconfidence, however, the rangers overextend and that's the opportunity Moira seizes. The Uvhog commits both arms to a Clapping Ksaosiok, one Moira ducks to avoid. From there, she's perfectly positioned to spot the ranger's exposed thigh, his legs planted so wide that a patch of shaggy hide penetrates the outer edge of his shield.

Fast as she can, Moira spins from the Clap and torques a wrist like a dash's handlebar to banish the heatblade. With a blur of her arm, Lefty leaps from her holster to her fist. The pistol cries out in joy to have an actual target and, at point blank range, the blast is devastating.

The meat of the Uvhog's thigh practically explodes in a spray of teal blood. His pelt aflame, the ranger tumbles to the ground with an inhuman squeal. To her left, the pinkskin's shock is all too tangible and Moira moves quick to exploit this.

"Hm," Nemo contemplates over the comm. "No reason."

Moira swings her heatblade violently left, forcing the surprised pinkskin to stumble back a moment. This buys Moira the room she needs to drive a baby-stomping heel into the shield projector at the crux of the Uvhog's harness. There's a grunt from the downed ranger, a satisfying crunch from the projector and a single retort from Lefty.

The Uvhog's ray shield down, there's nothing to stop Lefty's bolt from burying in the ranger's brain. The force of the shot shatters his visor and his great shaggy body falls limp.

"Somebody in the torpedo tubes woulda been handy," Nemo offers by way of explanation.

As one, the two covering rangers open up with their Dominos, hammering Moira's poor shield that's barely had a moment to recharge. The pinkskin, at the same time, comes racing recklessly in on her flamejets to avenge her fallen comrade. That's her crucial mistake.

Moira's only just fast enough to scoot backwards and, as the ranger goes roaring past, snag her flying wrist. There's a moment of awkward grappling, both women's servomotors whirring and complaining. Moira's able, with some effort, to convert the pinkskin's surprise to her advantage. When the dust settles, the spice ranger is held fast in Moira's Vooranga Chokehold, a live heatblade less than an inch from her throat.

She flashes suddenly on another Vooranga Chokehold on another pinkskinned spice ranger the night before and wonders whether she should incorporate this into her daily exercise routine.

This stops the gunfire dead, though it doesn't matter much. The way their bodies are positioned, their two ray shields are layered, one over another. Were they to fire through the first shield, they'd still need to puncture Moira's own shield – plus avoid hitting their comrade – to draw a bead on Moira.

"No big, though," Nemo dismisses. "Have fun!" The transmission clicks dead.

Everyone's at a complete standstill a moment, panting and soaked with sweat.

"Yield," growls Moira, the heatblade close enough to the woman's throat to scald her flesh.

Flask must have heard that wrong.

"Excuse me," he mentions to the room, soon as he can find an unoccupied second, when the shields're properly arrayed and actually holding steady, "did you fooking just say torpedo tubes?"

His concentration admirably on the task ahead, Nemo's reply takes its time. "You heard that, did you?" he smirks, between harrowing twists of both yoke and Lover.

Flask spread his hands. "I'm right here, ain't I?"

His hands're off the controls one second before there's a fresh alert that starts blaring at him. There's more shield damage to the Lover's port quarter, presumably from some dropcraft. Once again, it's Flask's newfound duty to do something about that. He's back on the case, scrolling the gyroscopic seat about to better position the shield power and praying the sections he's leaving exposed don't now receive laserfire of their own.

Out the viewport, the climatic field is once again an unbroken ocean of yellow. The Consortium cruiser is a hungry leviathan beneath the surface of that ocean, waiting to devour them soon as they dip a toe. The cruiser's broadside batteries keep firing but, to Flask, they seem somehow less accurate, their desperation to stop them showing through. More of their cannon fire lands among the dropcraft's dwindling ranks. Nearby explosions are common but no less deadly than laserfire.

The part of Flask's mind that's still Jag can't comprehend the bureaucratic disaster this's become for the Consortium – a CCF cruiser, firing on its fleet of dropcraft, swatting their own soldiers from the sky. All to prevent this one interloping freighter and the one potted plant it carries from escaping the planet.

Flask is starting to wonder about the Captain's exact heading. The higher they climb into Gi's atmosphere, it becomes increasingly clear that Nemo's not aiming The Unconstant Lover for the open expanses of climatic field. Instead, he's aiming towards the mechanical arms of the station, the strands of hangars and projectors that form the edges of the field's honeycomb. At first, he'd simply assumed this was to better shield the freighter from capital-class barrages but all this talk of torpedos suddenly has Flask very apprehensive.

"These torpedos," wonders Odisseus cautiously, thinking exactly what Flask's thinking, "don't have anything to do with this new idea, do they?"

"Gee," Nemo responds innocently, "what gave me away?"

Flask shudders to hear the off-kilter lilt in Nemo's voice, that half-crazed quiet that seems to overtake him whenever he plays dice with everyone's lives. Flask considers the speed of the ship. He considers the distance between the ship and the bank of projectors. He considers, from months living and working aboard the station, the very, very many decks of very, very solid teltriton they were soaring straight towards.

"Nemo," Flask starts to plead, before that same "dropping shields" alarms draws his attention back to the consoles. "You gotta believe me on this, I been aboard that thing, it's too thick to–"

Midway into his argument, Flask catches sight of the blue booster wash of a torpedo as it rockets away from The Unconstant Lover's dented nose. The Captain, steering with one hand, keeps firing them as he answers, tapping the launch button at seemingly random intervals. "Too thick to...?" he repeats significantly. "You were saying?"

Flask's words evaporate as he watches the torpedos soar away from the freighter. In uneven clusters they're shot from the tubes below the helm – first two, then three, then another two. A small parade of missiles herald the Lover's approach to the space station ahead, with more and more torpedos falling into line all the time.

"Worked before," Nemo is heard to mutter. "No reason it wouldn't work again."

"Flask!" barks a desperate Odisseus. "Bombard shields, double forward!"

Snapped from his hesitation, Flask goes scanning across the shielding station, in frantic search of the necessary controls to swap the Lover's shields from ray to bombard. With the pointing of claws and furious Ortoki yammering, the press-ganged co-pilot does eventually discover the necessary combination of keys and the actionable lever. With speedy fingers and one hasty yank, he activates the bombard shields the second before the first torpedo hits its target.

The missile meets no resistance against the unshielded hull; no reason to shield the station with no spaceworthy enemies within the nearest thousand zottibles. Like a flaming drill, the torpedo punches a ragged hole straight through the teltriton, its edges toothy and blackened.

This is only the opening, however, as torpedo after torpedo come happily on its heels and detonates inside the hole already blasted in the station's hull. There's a series of receding explosions, deeper and deeper within the station, and a rain of charred and twisted wreckage that comes clattering down onto the Lover below.

The bombard shield performs admirably, deflecting and bouncing away whatever comes crashing down to batter them. For the most part, they're pieces of nondescript teltriton, too mangled and burnt to be recognizable. Here and there, Flask sees the fractured hulk of a dropcraft or even the odd harness, its servos spasming wildly as it twangs off the ship's shielded bow. After each significant impact, the bombard shield's stretched dangerously thin. Flask is run ragged, modulating the energy levels and attempting to stave off disaster.

When approximately half the torpedo chain has exploded, that's when The Unconstant Lover, guided by Nemo's steady hand, first enters the makeshift tunnel the explosives have carved through the station.

The fit's a little tight. Grasping talons of jagged metal caress the edge of the bombard shield. Gouts of open flame, extinguished in seconds by the exposed vacuum, lick against the freighter's hull. Always Nemo is tilting and spinning the Lover to some new angle to better thread the Briza through the corridor of demolished decks they've made.

Flask catches occasional and horrifying glimpses of the station they've shattered their way through. Crewmembers scream and stumble about. Rooms and chambers are rent to ribbons, fire spreads hungrily. For months, he'd lived in constant fear of discovery on a section of this station identical to the one they're now flying impossibly through. To see the place brought to ruin in an instant, Flask cannot decide if he feels revulsion or relief.

The last few torpedos find the climatic station's last few decks. Through the flames, Flask gets a glimpse of the planet's upper orbit, the blockade and the stars beyond. All sound seems to be sucked away at this sight, this hopeful glimpse of escape and freedom.

To reach this point, however, Nemo must guide the Lover through the last few openings his torpedos have blown through the station and these're easily the most harrowing.

The Briza Light Freighter dodges to port and jukes to starboard, the ship squeezing through doorways created three seconds ago and by explosives. Flask feels every near miss in his bones, the whole Lover shuddering with each scrape and scratch.

When Flask comes back to his senses, they've cleared the last hurdle and are blasting into open space. The whole universe seems to open up on either side of The Unconstant Lover as she escapes Gi's clutches. This is the first sensation he's aware of – the vastness to either side, the curvature of the pale planet below them.

The second sensation he's aware of is all the chaos and commotion of the shielding station. A cursory scan of the flashing alerts and bleating alarms spells out exactly how dire the situation's become. "Shield's critical!" all his screens warn him. "Shield power at 0%!"

His third sensation is the sight of the looming capital cruiser, moving sluggishly to intercept the Briza's flightpath. He sees its great bulk, casting an ominous shadow across the Lover's viewport. He sees its many cousins, fellow Consortium capital cruisers, summoned by the action on the planet. He sees its broadside batteries take aim and fire, a ditrogen storm opening in the great ship-shaped clouds overhead.

"Shields critical!" the station reminds Flask. "Shield power at 0%!"

CHAPTER 20

Moira didn't expect the pinkskin to escape her chokehold simply by standing on her tiptoes.

Standing on one's tiptoes, while wearing a harness, activates the ankle's flamejets. The pinkskin goes rocketing upward, knocking Moira's heatblade wide. To escape the roaring flames, Moira scrambles back. The second the skyrocketing ranger's clear of Moira, the other two open up again with their Dominos. Moira's careful to land in a crouch, to spare her weakening ray shield as much fire as possible.

The pinkskin's maybe eight feet off the ground when she both summons her own assault rifle off her shoulder and makes one pivotal mistake. She's neglected her facing, so concerned with escaping Moira's grasp. Even though she's far above everyone's head, she's exposed her unprotected backside to Moira and, more importantly, Lefty.

With a well-aimed shot, the Lawman strikes the harness' motivator clasp. The whole exoskeleton goes into overdrive, its servos spasming this way and that, the ranger's limbs twisting in ways they certainly weren't meant to. She swerves harshly to starboard, disappearing over Moira's shoulder and crashing with a crunch against the cargo hold's wall.

Moira's in no mood to celebrate. Those Dominos are still firing at her and her ray shield's on its last leg, flashing 2% power in her visor.

This is about when Moira realizes how bloomed she actually is. By standing on her tiptoes, that damn pinkskin's flipped Moira's advantage completely on its head, depleted her ray shield and left her completely exposed to the firing squad. She can envision very few scenarios from here that won't see Moira gunned down, the rest of the crew slaughtered and the Gitter sapling recovered.

With no more compelling options, Moira goes charging at her two remaining foes. She activates her own flamejets to transform her run into a twenty-foot pounce. She comes down hard between the two rangers in the moment before her ray shield evaporates.

Once she touches down, she takes a wild swing – her last action in this galaxy, Moira's convinced – towards the humanoid, the nearest of the two rangers.

The very kind of stupid luck that loves to hover around the Captain grants Moira a small boon. The scintillant edge of her heatblade happens to catch the very snub of the ranger's Domino as it peeks from behind the ray shield's cover. One slice later and the humanoid's simply holding a smoking replica, a piece of very expensive equipment that only resembles an assault rifle.

Then the gunfire comes.

The Hazric's Domino barks somewhere behind Moira and she, not for the first time that second, anticipates the end. There's instead a sudden heat and pressure in her shoulder, hot claws poking holes through her flesh. Moira watches, in muted astonishment, as green ditrogen bursts through her shoulder and sizzles against the humanoid's ray shield.

In the next moments, instinct takes total control of Moira's body. It's instinct that drops her to her knees, in pain or preservation, as the humanoid's next swing goes sizzling over her head. It's instinct that thrusts Lefty towards the Hazric, doubtlessly readying her Domino to fire again, to fill her heart and lungs with ditrogen. It's more dumb luck, however, that happens to slip the pistol, held at arm's length, past the Hazric's ray shield. When the shot comes, it claims the ranger in her finned chin, snapping her head back and tossing her body to the deck.

Then Moira, from her kneeling position, is dealing a savage kick to the humanoid's shin. He cries in pain but Moira cries in surprise when, in the midst of her kick, she accidentally activates the foot's flamejets with a tweak of her ankle. The kick, therefore, has a fiery chaser and the unintended effect of skidding Moira a dozen feet away, in awkward stumbles and agonizing thuds against her wounded shoulder.

She wants to leap to her feet and bring the battle back to him but her shoulder, past numbness and into sheer pain, refuses. Moira is sprawled, panting, for too long and expecting the inevitable gunfire to smear her across the hold floor. It never comes, however; Moira instead gazes across the ship to discover the humanoid ranger, his knee a mess, his Domino useless and his twin heatblades drawn.

Moira takes her time, then, climbing to her feet, sheathing her heatblade and drawing Righty from her shoulder holster. She takes an immense pleasure in raising both 665 Lawmen and starting to shoot, unimpeded, at the ray shield of the last remaining spice ranger aboard their vessel.

At full charge, the ranger's ray shield accepts the shots greedily and without diminishment. Moira's in no hurry; the pistols have plenty of ammunition and her quarry's going nowhere fast, with a leg broken and burnt. All she has to do is keep her distance and this should become a simple war of attrition, chipping away at his ray shield until the ranger's fully exposed.

The humanoid seems to understand this, his weathered face cast with determination. He stands still a moment, eyes flicking about the hold as he debates his options. Instead of advancing to meet her in melee, he bears the agony of kickstarting his flamejets and starts to rise, a little wobbly, into the air.

Moira stays put, hoping the wounded ranger will misjudge an angle and give her an opening to exploit. No idiot, he's very careful to keep the shield between them and, rather than swooping down on her, he reels backward a little, heading towards the bow. Keeping him in comfortable range, Moira paces a few steps forward, Righty and Lefty shooting all the while.

That's when she sees his intention and a new dagger of fear pierces her heart.

He slackens his upward thrust and eventually lands atop the companionway stairs with a clang. He reaches a hand behind and the double doors behind him grumble open. Two steps backward and the doors, irritated at being bothered, gratefully close.

Now, there's nothing that stands between the last spice ranger and the helm.

Flask screams until his throat's gone raw.

From the comfort of a bar stool or a cargo crate in some dingy hideout, Flask has personally planned a hundred or more smuggling operations over the course of his career. Some of those operations would have involved a blockade run very much like this one, the one The Unconstant Lover was attempting in its escape from Gi. Whenever the need for one arose, the smugglers in question would always smirk, make some quip and betray no fear at the dangers involved.

Never, in all his years as a criminal fixer, did Flask imagine that a blockade run would be this terrifying.

A spray of laserfire misses the unshielded nose of The Unconstant Lover by an inch, leaving a black scorch across the viewport as a souvenir. For a moment, Nemo's forced to duck and weave the freighter about, seemingly at random, to avoid assumed laserfire. While the scrubbers take their sweet time clearing the view, Flask can see nothing but green flashes and he's forced to imagine how close they've come to annihilation each time.

A consumate professional, Nemo handles this with aplomb. "I can't see!" he screams. "I can't see! I can't see! I can't see!"

"Look out!" Flask screams back, pointing a desperate finger out the viewport towards a particularly bright flash, coming straight at them.

More a flinch than an evasive maneuver, Nemo cranks the yoke in a random direction. Remarkably, this does seem to avoid whatever was shooting them by virtue of the fact that they're not immediatey exploded. In fact, the ship goes on existing another few seconds, careening away whichever direction until the scrubbers manage to clean the viewport.

A Consortium cruiser – the Liquidation at a glance – swallows the viewport for a moment. Its gunbanks and portholes slide past at an askance angle as The Unconstant Lover circles around its port side. The freighter ducks beneath the belly of the great capital ship, the Liquidation's cannons spitting green fire inches from its wake all the way. As the Lover starts to rise on the cruiser's opposite side, she's greeted by another pair of identical cruisers – the Requisition and the Entrepreneur – and their batteries are eager to open up on the defenseless Briza.

Beyond those cruisers, Flask can see the distant stars of freedom, of escape, winking at him.

Nemo's only idea to avoid this newest danger is simply to spin the Lover endlessly on its axis and hope that this somehow dodges all the incoming laserfire. To hedge his bets, he also throws in a shouted string of idiocy over his shoulder, towards his saltbrother and the shielding mainframe.

"Shields! Do we have shields? Where're the shields? We need sh–"

"The shields aren't made of magic!" comes the Ortoki reply, packaged with a good deal of Ortoki bile. "I'm not some kinda space wizard that can wave my paws and make everything all better again! There are procedures and protocols that–"

All the ship's spinning simply sends the co-pilot's seat into a tizzy. Flask can only catch the occasional glimpses of the mechanic and all the hopeless work he does on the defunct shields. The primary cabinet's been thrown wide and a great tangle of wires and conduits dangle out like spilled noodles and sway with each movement of the ship. Odisseus stands, bothering with no safety restraints, as he yanks more and more strands of bundled cables from the mainframe, like a magician producing scarves from his sleeve.

At this, the Captain risks a glance behind and sees the utter disarray the station's become. "Moons alive," he remarks. "Didn't ask you to rebuild the thing from scrat–"

"Nemo!" Flask shrieks, pointing about another flash out the viewport.

This seems to grab his attention and the Captain reverses direction to barrel-roll the Lover past a new flurry of fire from the Entrepreneur. As long as Odisseus continues his field surgery, all Flask's screens and devices are dead and lifeless and his only responsibility seems to be screaming at Nemo to warn him about incoming blasts.

Apart from the occasional dodge to eithe side, The Unconstant Lover continues racing forward. With her boosters fully open, it's only a matter of moments before they've actually reached the next two cruisers, the blockade's last line of defense. All they need to do is circumvent these last two crusiers without incident – a big ask, Flask understands, with no shields – and they'll be home free, free to warp out at their leisure.

Flask's heart stops.

"We got coordinates?" he throws at Nemo. The Captain emerges from his barrel-roll and balances the freighter precariously on her vertical axis, to better weave between the approaching capital ships.

Nemo spares a moment from his panic to turn and blink at Flask. "Coordinates?"

"To warp," Flask supplies, his cousin's confusion not boding well. "To warp away from here. The coordinates Abraham cooked for you." There's nothing but blankness on the Captain's face. Flask thrusts a finger past the cruisers and into deep space. "For when we get there!"

"Um." Nemo's eyes go flitting across the controls and instruments, in obvious search of something. He raises a great cloud of dust when he takes one hand from the yoke to pat down his pants and robe, looking for the completely intangible warp coordinates. "They're around here somewhere..."

"Who's gonna–" a trepidatious Flask starts to ask, terrified of the answer. At the exact moment he starts to ask the dreaded question, a broadside battery scores a lucky graze off The Unconstant Lover's port side. The ship jerks violently to starboard, its metal whines pitieously and the recoil dashes the rest of Flask's words right out of him.

"Guess that's you, buddy," Odisseus sighs, taking a moment from his digging through the mainframe to fix Flask with a significant glance.

"Oh!" exclaims Nemo, a sudden ray of brightness. "Found them." With three nimble fingers against the keys, he beams something across to Flask's nearest monitor. It's a warp drive interface, Flask can assume, that'll send them to Bennevikos, the designed post-caper rendezvous.

He can feel his hands trembling, even in all the chaos and insanity of that helm, the individual beads of sweat as they slide down his face. Manning the shield station is already far over Flask's head. Warp engineering, on the other hand, is reputedly more delicate and difficult than actual rocket science by a factor of ten.

In theory, a prepackaged set of coordinates, like those scrolling on Flask's screen, should be perfectly primed to punch and go. Still, there were untold ways Flask could miscalculate; he could factor the information wrong, he could mix up the procedure's proper order, he could forget to account for gravitational drift. The consequences of such a failure, even in this extreme situation, were hard to ignore. The horror stories – warping through a black hole, directly into a planet's surface, even into the dead space between systems, far too far to make contact with another gate – were legion.

There were a thousand possible deaths, all much less immediate than exploding, awaiting Flask on the other side of those warp coordinates. To judge the distance between here and open space, he's got less than a minute to execute them properly.

With still trembling hands, Flask unbuckles his restraints, rises from his chair and heads to the warp room, to decide the fate of everyone aboard.

Moira comes flying at full throttle, flamejets open, the moment the abovedecks doors give her enough space. The spice ranger's wounded leg prevents him from anything but shambling backward down the corridor and he's made little progress by the time Moira descends on him.

With both heatblades engaged, her plan is simply to land and gut him with a few quick strikes. This plan is thwarted somewhat by a shooting pain in the meat of her right shoulder. She does land and does make an attack but her righthand swing is a feeble thing, so weak he hardly needs to dodge out of the way.

His counterattack is all fury, lashing out with his own two heatblades in a murderously fast Qarmeo Quills. To properly avoid this, Moira must flatten her body against the portside wall, his swords boiling the empty air.

Her next tactic has no name. She lashes out with a vicious street-fighter's kick to the kneecap, hoping to complicate the humanoid's injured shin and topple him to the ground. Her aim's a little off and his reaction's a little too quick. Her kick instead lands against the machinery of his harness and twangs uselessly aside.

The ranger's response is an inelegant stab at Moira's own wounded shoulder. She's able to twist away and further down the corridor but still winces to see the heatblade puncture a thin slit straight through the teltriton wall. There's a heartbeat's hesitation from them both, waiting to see if he's actually breached the hull and whether the outside world will come sucking greedily at them.

When there's only the sizzling of burnt metal, both combatants leap back into the fray simultaneously, each attempting to outpace the other.

They battle this way for an indeterminate stretch of time – both wounded, both tossed about whenever the ship pitches this way or that, both careful not to rend the ship around them to pieces. As the fight drags on, the ranger keeps giving ground, falling back further up the corridor and closer to the helm. Moira's attacks become all the more frantic, eager to prevent him from reaching the helm and causing more chaos in there.

A frantic attack, of course, is by definition a less successful attack. Wounded, wearied and worried, Moira finally discovers she may not actually have the strength to defeat one more well-trained opponent.

The sound of a door grinding open interrupts the harnessed pair of them, mid-struggle. They both turn to catch the figure that comes hustling down the helm stairs and heads straight for the warp and sensor rooms.

That figure, dressed too in spice ranger fatigues, stops short and scowls. Flask makes brief bewildered eye contact with both Moira and the bleeding intruder. He opens his mouth to speak and, when no words come, he disappears down the side passage.

This is precisely the hiccup Moira needs to turn the tide. Recovering her wits a hair faster than the ranger does, Moira makes her move, slicing horizontally across the humanoid's windpipe with the extreme edge of her right heatblade.

Heatblades don't cut; they burn. A line does appear across the ranger's throat, tracing the path of Moira's blade, but it's black, not red, scorched completely through. His esophagus shriveling up, the ranger coughs once, struggles to breathe and staggers on his feet. Moira scoots fully backward, giving the last boarder the space he needs to experience his death throes and in desperate need of a moment to catch her breath.

He drops to his knees with a thud, his servos whining. The pain in his leg ignored, he grasps a little at his scorched throat, unable to draw a satisfying breath. Soon, he's slumped into a corner of the corridor, his ragged pants slowing and stopping.

A moment later, Moira too discovers she's on her knees. The pain in her shoulder returns with new fury, radiating outward to consume the rest of her body. Moira's vaguely aware of the rocketing and buffeting of the ship as she squats there, bleeding slowly out. How the blockade run's going, she's no idea – whether they've actually reached the planet's orbit or whether they're likely to be incinerated this moment or the next.

One moment, Moira is imagining The Unconstant Lover in flight, battling heroically against the odds stacked ludicrously against them. The next moment, she is flat on her back. She stares upward through the plexishield ceiling, at the stars that wheel past, unsure whether what she's seeing is reality or hallucination.

Her last sensation, before blood loss takes her, is the churn of the warp drive, somewhere within the ship's bowels, and the unmistakable stomach-flip that accompanies the Lover leaping away at faster-than-light speed.

Flask never had the chance to meet Gella Borsk, their mysterious benefactor. Now, he never really would, considering the smoking hole straight through her skull.

To Flask's right, Nemo is particularly saddened by the senseless loss of life. "Fuck," he is heard to remark. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!" he goes on to say.

Borsk is spreadeagled on the short stairway that leads from her private bathroom. The pose, legs sprawled, head reclined backward on the topmost stair, looks vaguely peaceful, like she's taking an unorthodox nap here in the middle of everything. Then there are the brains, spilling from her open skull and staining the hardwood floors.

Flask and Nemo stand at the foot of the short stairway, considering the gruesome scene and a little dumbstruck by all the ramifications that tumble through their heads. Quicksilver is somewhat more productive, stalking about the carnage like a six-legged Aldine stork through swampy water. At the first whiff of bloodshed, Odisseus elected to man the Lover's sensors, keeping a weather eye in case any ship might drop warp in the system and ambush them.

They all knew this place – Planetoid YRK7860905 – was completely off every known grid in the galaxy and that no one would find them here. Considering the spread of sprawled bodies all about their feet, they'd all become much more skeptical.

"Rangers?" Flask supposes tentatively. "Think somebody beat us to the punch? Bonaventure's codes're pretty fooking old, after–"

"Nah," Quicksilver denies, all business when surrounded by guts and gore. "Weaponry's wrong. I ain't seen a single heatblade death." She goes picking amongst the liberal spread of dead bodies. "Canister, canister, canister. Huh. Electroblade. Canister."

"Fuck," mutters Nemo, eyes locked on Gella's lifeless corpse. "Fuck."

Flask, the resident spice ranger expert here, scowls at Quicksilver's diagnosis. "Wouldn't be without precedence," he argues, knowing there's something fishy in his theory even as he voices it, "for rangers to stand at a distance, use rifles to end enemies. Particularly ones with ditrogen weapons of their own, like."

She's shaking her head before he's even finished. "Ain't rifles. Pistols, for the most part. A shotgun here," she denotes with a casual point to particular corpses, "and there."

Flask pulls a little face to mock her, despite all the horror and death at his feet, and turns to see if Nemo'll notice. Instead, the Captain's simply shaking his head, still staring at the dead booze baroness. "Fuck."

Replete with knowing-it-all, Quicksilver eventually comes to stand between them, following their eyes to where Gella's been sprawled. "Recognize this one anywhere," she points out, with all the grim authority of a homicide detective. Squatting to better examine the gunshot skull and the serene expression on her face, Quicksilver makes her ruling. "AccCo. 341, I'd say, mabe 345 Ambuschade. Pistol, close range. Probably came rushing outta the bathroom to take one through the brainpan."

"Friend of yours?" Flask poses archly.

"The gun?" Quicksilver clarifies, craning a glance back at him. "The most common AccCo on the market. Could be anybody," she decides as she rises.

"Fuck," remarks Nemo.

In truth, there's some part of Flask that's not too surprised to discover Borsk dead like this. When the whole situation – a famously invisible alcohol magnate appears from hiding to offer these hoodlums the biggest score they'd ever imagine – was first explained to him, he'd been more than a little skeptical. He'd assumed the opposite; that, soon as they arrived, the Lover's crew would be jumped by Borsk and her ex-spice ranger goon squad.

This – Borsk and all her bullies butchered – was something else entirely.

Following the skin-of-their-teeth escape from Gi, The Unconstant Lover and her crew took a momentary detour on Bennevikos, to catch their breath, calibrate their heading and patch Moira's wounds. From there, they leaped straight to Borsk's unnamed planetoid, the coordinates provided them by Two-Bit Switch and known to a handful of sentients galaxywide.

That trip was something of a somber one. Whatever elation or congratulatory spirit they might have shared was overshadowed by how narrowly they had escaped. Quicksilver was wounded, Odisseus was persnickety about all the Lover's thousand malfunctions and there were eight spice ranger corpses to heap in the airlock and space. Flask felt decidedly out of place, a crewmember aboard a surly spaceship that was missing two pivotal members.

Four days they'd spent in warp, racing across Myxo Quadrant to reach Borsk's hideout. Here, they'd make the exchange and warp away again, 68 million credits the richer.

The first hint of trouble reared its head when their long-distance comms, confirming they'd escaped Gi with the cargo intact, went unanswered. The second hint, a red flag unfurling, came when they'd dropped warp and their approaching hails also went unanswered. Unnerved by their patron's eerie silence, The Unconstant Lover was nonetheless left with no recourse, save to dock and investigate, less they go unpaid for all their toil and trouble.

Smelling a trap coming a sector away, they'd entered the palatial asteroid-base with all caution, weapons drawn, ready to retreat at the first whiff of trouble. The further they moved through the manse, though, the more they saw the obvious signs of struggle – last stands made across counters, in doorways, behind marble fountains. It was plain to see they hadn't been the target here.

This particular chokepoint, at the foot of Borsk's ivory bathroom, appeared to be the center of the thickest fighting. What's more, Quicksilver, in all her investigations, couldn't get eyes on even a single dead attacker – someone not a member of Borsk's ex-spice ranger brigade – anywhere in the complex, the most perplexing aspect of this whole unexpected slaughterhouse.

"My bet would be," Quicksilver renders her final opinion as she crosses her arms, palms flat against the butts of her pistols, "an unrelated beef. Bad timing for her, worse timing for us."

"Who," Flask starts to object, "in all the galaxy, even knows she–"

"Fuck!" Nemo screams, shattering the silence of the blood-spattered hallway and snapping their previous conversation off at the branch. A sudden spasm overtakes him and he, with both feet, stomps up and down, like a child throwing a tantrum in a toy store. "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" he hollers with each stomp.

He stands panting, soon as he's worn himself out, clutching the wall and frothing a little at the corners of his mouth. Flask is taken aback by his cousin's sheer vitriol, normally all stupid smiles and carefree attitude. The expression on Quicksilver's face, however, tells him this isn't the first time he's thrown such a fit.

"Maybe," Flask starts to venture, very tentatively, aware that he may be stoking a powder keg. "this isn't the end of the universe. Maybe we're looking at this wrong."

"You think?" Quicksilver snarls. "You know anything about manufacturing alcohol? You got any use for a Gitter sapling? You thinking about getting a Gitterpeach orchard off the ground?"

"Yes and no," Flask considers, eager to deflect both of their anger somewhere more useful. "68 million, right?"

"Plus that percentage," adds Quicksilver. "On the back-end."

"Well," Flask cocks his head to consider. "That percentage's probably lost, 'cause I can't imagine anybody else'n the galaxy's got the means to make all this," he makes a sweeping gesture to encompass Gella Borsk's entire business, "happen with that little tree."

"What's your point?" presses Quicksilver.

"No reason we gotta lose the 68 million, though." He turns back to his companions, gives them a knowing look and waits for them to put the pieces together.

Nemo seems to ponder this a long moment. "Fuck," he eventually decides.

"Damn thing's the most valuable plant in the galaxy," Flask feels the need to remind them both.

"Find another buyer?" states an incredulous Moira Quicksilver.

"We find," Flask awards her, with a beneficient point of his finger, "another buyer, like."

Her incredulity only increases. "For 68 million."

Flask makes a small shrug. "Or thereabouts."

Quicksilver is not convinced. "Thereabouts is not what we signed on for."

"Yes, well," Flask counters, a little bile rising in his own throat. "It's pretty much that or get buggered, so. Besides," he's quick to change topics and tone, "galaxy's overflowing with people'd pay for this thing. Breaking the booze monopoly? Come on."

"And earn the ire of the Gitter Consortium. For, you know, ever."

"Don't see," Flask explains with a shrug, "how's that our problem."

"Fuck," Nemo agrees.

"I can't imagine," Flask elaborates, before Quicksilver can make another objection, "it'd be too difficult to drum up some interested parties."

Quicksilver shifts her stance. "Who?"

This proves a stumper. The three of them stand there amid all the carnage of Borsk's hallway for a minute or more, staring at wallpaper or carpet stains or gunshot wounds and attempt to produce some names. They retain this pose for a painfully long time, not generating a single answer, when they're interrupted by the muted grumble of the Captain's stomach.

"Fuck," he remarks. "I'm starting."

Odisseus presses the button again. The proximity sweep is programmed to refresh automatically every ten seconds. It doesn't really need the Ortok's manual supervision to function at peak efficiency. It would be child's play to rig the ship's sensor package to ping the crew's comms as soon as something of interest happened – another ship dropping warp in the system, for example.

In the very unlikely event that would happen, The Unconstant Lover could even be remotely started and primed to leave, which really nullifies the need for someone aboard to prep the engines for a hasty exit.

All in all, Odisseus is pretty superfluous right now. He could easily, with no threat to the safety of the ship or its crew, have joined in picking over Borsk's bones. When given the choice, however, the Ortok would very much prefer to remain on the ship, even under such redundant pretexts.

{Warm}, cooes the sapling. Placed next to the thrumming torridity unit, the little potted planet actually seems contented, despite how swelteringly hot this makes the sensor room. As uncomfortable as this might make the Ortok, it was a vast improvement on listening to the seedling's pathetic {Cold} again and again.

Odisseus lounges in the sensor room's single chair, his hind paws on the dashboard, the chair cranked back to its absolute limit. Two of the room's mammoth screens are swamped by static, there being no feedanchors in this supposedly empty patch of space. One screen shows a live feed to the ship's immediate surroundings – the Lover, the planetoid it clings to and a whole lot of nothing nearby. The fourth screen broadcasts some Saurian Space pirate broadcast, the only watchable thing Odisseus could raise on the sensors.

At the moment, it's all war coverage. As hissingly reported by a grave-faced Saurian newsanchor, the ongoing death toll on Midworlds like Aerio and Jamai climbs higher and higher.

Odisseus presses the button again; nothing happens.

{Warm}, the sapling repeats from where it sits at the foot of his chair.

Odisseus presses the button again; still nothing.

(Warm}, the sapling is, once again, happy to report.

Odisseus presses the button again; nothing.

{What am I?}

Odisseus opens his mouth to speak, staggered by the sheer weight and surprise of the question. Uncertain whether or not the sapling can even hear or understand him, the Ortok stays in silence a moment before he, somewhat reluctantly, furnishes an answer. "Thirdseed?"

The word falls from the Ortok's mouth and seems to thud heavily onto the floor. Feeling foolish, Odisseus presses the button pointlessly again, happy there's no one here to hear him conversing with this potted plant.

Three clicks later, the potted plant responds. {Thirdseed?}

"Yup," is all Odisseus can think to reply with.

{Thirdseed}, it states with a sudden swell of confidence. {Thirdseed is warm}, it concludes after another moment of deliberation.

"Good for you," congratulates the Ortok.

This revelation made, Odisseus is happy to return to his mindless button-pressing. A snatch of overheard dialogue from the screen directly behind him, the one broadcasting the newsplash coverage, catches his ear.

"...for you Galactic Menace conspiracy nutjobs out there," a Saurian voice informs him, causing Odisseus to twist his torso around and actually pay attention to the broadcast.

The anchor is a gray-scaled Saurian with a pattern of blue diamonds running over the crest of her head and down her serpentine neck. Next to her, on the screen, is that very same image of the Ortok's saltbrother, the holo taken aboard the Surimiah and the Imperium's only reliable rendering of the Galactic Menace.

"This story comes to us out of the Gitter Consortium, of all places," the anchor reports, her arch tone discernible even through the static and the thick Saurian accent. "It seems the head honchos in the booze business believe there's some truth to those rumors that Morel's still slinking around someplace."

Odisseus yanks both paws off the dashboard and spins his chair completely around.

"An hour ago, the Gitter Consortium has offered a fresh reward on the head of Nehel Morel, 34th Galactic Menace. And it's a hefty price too," remarks the Saurian with a soft chuckle. "19 million, if you can believe that. Alive."

"Moons of Jotor," breathes Odisseus.

"Keen Nemo fans will remember," continues the anchor, "that's exactly one million more than the Imperium's current offer. Begs the question, of course." She spreads her reptilian hands, like she's expecting some member of her holovision crew to answer it for her. "Is the Consortium crazy? Is Nemo still out there somewhere? If he is, what's he done to piss the Consortium off so badly, so badly they'd undercut the Imperium like this?"

Odisseus drops his head into his paws. This was supposed to be the end, when they could finally slink into the shadows and now, even the shadows were proving too bright to hide them anymore.

"In light of this frankly astounding development, we're gonna take some buzzes here in the studio, to see what the galaxy really thinks. Hello?" The Saurian taps a piece of tech embedded in her scaly head. "Hello? You're on Saurian Side with Qorine Eggswallower. Do you think the Consortium knows something we don't?"

"Tell you what, Qorine," comes the sibilant voice of the first caller, someone the holoticker that runs across the screen identifies as Vizrak Venomspitter: Concerned Citizen, "them Consortium types ain't nothing but trouble and Nemo, if you're listening, then–"

"We are fucked," remarks Odisseus to no one but the plant.

{Thirdseed is warm}, reminds the plant pleasantly.

### PART III:

### HER POOR DAMNED CREW

### CHAPTER 21

Odisseus cranks open the chiller door to a refreshing blast of frigid air. Once there, he doesn't bother debating which precise flavor of frozen ghroshi shrimp – Lemon Garlic, Mango Marinade or Butter Blast – that he most prefers. With a paw, he scoops up every package his arm can reach down and drops them all and into his awaiting basket below.

They crash amid good company. The Ortok's basket overflows with cans of sporefin sardines, fillets of spiced zegofish, those packages of homemade sushi with the Zibbian instructions. A lime green spraycan of engine degreaser and a bright blue bottle of Gitterswitch Gin round out the ensemble.

The Warp Gate Junction in orbit around Arzenka certainly didn't skimp on the seafood. Home of the aquatic Arzenk, the idyllic blue dot occasionally glimpsed out the Junction's bay windows was the sector's largest exporter of fish. As chance would have it, it was also the nearest inhabited system to Borsk's hidden headquarters.

Cast adrift in the galaxy with nowhere to move their priceless cargo and months removed from true galactic civilization, The Unconstant Lover and her crew, late of the Borsk massacre, needed to make a pit stop. They chose nearby Arzenka to resupply and, consequently, made a little massacre of their own.

There's something strangely sublime to Odisseus about being advertised to again. They'd spent so many days slogging through the deserts of Gi, dodging the Gitter Consortium's watchful eye and otherwise removed from galactic civilization at large. To be back in the galaxy, back reading adverts and watching holovision and visiting planets that're other colors than stark white, seems like a bizarre luxury.

To the pirates, Arzenka's dopey little Junction became a junk food paradise, full of all the cheap plastic trappings the galaxy could offer.

"Carcinocrisps!" exclaims the Captain with glee, like some scripted poster child in a Carcinocrisps advert. With covetous fingers, Nemo snatches a brightly-colored sack off a nearby shelf. Rather than dropping this into his own overflowing basket, he squeezes the bag in a heartfelt embrace. "I forgot you even existed, Carcinocrisps."

"Those things'll," repeats Odisseus by rote, slapping the chiller door closed and stooping to retrieve his overloaded grocery basket, "kill you."

Nemo pulls away from his embrace to examine the bag. "That's what it says, yeah." Impatient to start getting killed, the Captain tears the bag open with a squeal of plastic.

Some part of Odisseus still sighs inwardly at the sight of his saltbrother tucking merrily into the foul-smelling bag before he's paid for the thing. The Junction's proprieter, a Fivvite with a hole through his heart, probably won't complain, of course, since they weren't really buying so much as stealing these supplies.

"You got everything?" he asks instead, shifting the weight of his basket and peering down to inspect what's Nemo's getting.

There's enough junk food in the Captain's basket to give half a hundred toddlers stomach aches. Boxes of Frootie Gooshies are wedged between bottles of chococino fudge syrup. Shit holovision dinners – fish sticks, macaroni and cheese, corn dogs – are stacked atop sacks of salted duzzum rinds. Three bottles of Gitterswitch Gin are stashed perilously close to an innocent looking box of Marshmellow Meteors, implying some dreadful future union.

"Think so," Nemo answers around an irresponsibly large mouthful of Carcinocrisps. "Couldn't find those little snack cakes, you know, the green ones? What're those fuckers called?"

"Pond Scums?" Odisseus grunts, craning his head towards the back of the convenience store. "Pretty sure I saw those," he mutters, "someplace."

"Yeah?" Nemo comments casually, Carcinocrisps falling from his open mouth. "Lemme ask Flask. Flask!" he barks, a spike of sudden volume over the Junction's deathly quiet. "You know if they've got any Pond–"

"Second aisle, I think," Flask answers immediately. Soon as he's summoned, he comes hustling closer, his own grocery basket in the crook of his elbow. On the way, he circles around the Iella's bloody corpse and, with a squeamish expression, he's very careful not to get congealing purple blood on his shoes.

"Seriously?" Nemo screws up his face and peeks into the adjacent aisle to confirm this theory. "Pond Scums!" he exclaims and disappears into the deeper racks of junk food.

Flask, meanwhile, levels up on the Ortok's right side, collar hiked up and sniffing nervously, like they're about to make a palm-to-palm Spicion deal. His own grocery basket, Odisseus notes, contains every single one of the Junction's cigarettes, in a potpourri of brands, with a single bottle of Gitterswitch Gin tossed in for flavor.

"We about ready to bounce here, or...?" Flask mutters to Odisseus, hardly audible over the mumbling holovision and the sound of Nemo tearing into the Pond Scums behind them.

"You know," Odisseus feels the need to remind him, somewhat bitterly, "nobody here's gonna overhear you." He makes a weak gesture towards the rest of the Junction, empty save for the pirates. "Nobody here's still alive."

"Don't remind me, like," Flask remarks, still unaccustomed to getting his hands dirty.

In what was quickly becoming their disturbing new tradition, the crew of The Unconstant Lover hit the lobby of the sleepy little Warp Gate Junction with guns blazing. There was no other recourse, much as the thought soured the Ortok's stomach. With the Consortium's fresh bounty riding high on their heads, they'd instantly become more wanted than free beer and lower taxes.

There'd been no hope for a quiet in-and-out at Arzenka. The moment that all-too recognizable IZ36 Briza Light Freighter made the Warp Gate, half the random spacers in the shop were laying an impromptu ambush of their own. Bystanders or not, they were eyewitnesses, each and every one of them, and that was something the recently emerged Galactic Menace decided he could not afford.

These days, the Galactic Menace couldn't afford to be anything but cutthroat.

Bodies are scattered sporadically across the Junction, just like they'd been on Loceto and Hagara and Xreed during the caper's planning stages. Considering how ill-frequented this border world was, there weren't too many corpses but there were enough to make the two less-than-professional killers uneasy.

The security cameras were even more important to the Menace and his posse. Each of these waystations came equipped with a set, there to discourage spaceway robbers more than anything. Moira made these her primary targets the moment she passed through the Junction's airlock. In short order, Righty and Lefty reduced the three of them to sparks emplacements and blackened smears against the ceiling.

In the deathly silence they'd made, then, the Lover's crew did their "shopping", plundering all the junk food they could carry, free from the inconvenience of cash or cashiers. Only the holovision set, riveted to the wall, kept chattering, midway through a long blast of commercials pushing some all-girl astroglam outfit that was touring Saurian Space at the moment.

"Ain't too keen," Flask continues, shuffling his feet anxiously, "on hangin' around, is all. Never know when the next fooker might come through here, like." He points with his chin towards the far wall's bay viewport, the great ring of the Warp Gate and the blue marble of Arzenka beyond that.

"I hear ya," Odisseus agrees and peers up over the nearest shelf, attempting to shout his next question to the Captain. "You got Pond Scums, you got Carcinocrisps – think we can make tracks?"

"Soon as Moira's outta the shitter," comes the unseen reply, from a mouth full of green, sugary sludge.

On cue, the women's bathroom door shunks open, the sound of faulty pipes moaning somewhere inside. Out strides Moira Quicksilver, snapping loose water from her hands, a disquieted expression on her face. "Remind me," she mentions, her voice a little haunted, "never to be an Arzenk and need to shit."

"Yeah," Nemo concurs, rounding the corner of the aisle. There's an open container of Pond Scums in one elbow, the bag of Carcinocrisps in the other, like he's the proud mother of a pair of radioactive twins. "Their plumbing down there?" he assures them, with vague gestures towards his nether regions, "Ain't pretty. Trust me."

When Moira catches a whiff of the Carcinocrisps, she crinkles her nose in disgust. "What flavor are those, anyway?"

"Uh," he considers the package a second time. "Honey Mustard Gas," he reads.

"I can't believe," she squints, almost disbelieving, "you're actually putting that in your mouth."

"It's what Two-Bit would've wanted," Nemo reminds her with a condescending cock of the head, "so fuck you."

Moira stoops to retrieve a basket that's lightly packed with bottled water, toothpaste and granola – all ideally positioned to conceal pistachios, chiller cream and Gitterswitch Gin, Odisseus knows. She gives Nemo her traditional look of disdainful superiority. "Still gross."

"I would love to fooking leave here," Flask reminds them wistfully.

Moira takes her opportunity, spinning on Flask. "Does that mean we can talk about where we're going now? About these mystery contacts of yours?"

Put on the spot, Flask digs his hands deeper into the pockets of his windbreaker and attempts to play the whole thing off. "Maybe I made a coupla buzzes, you know, real discreet, like."

Odisseus is skeptical. "What exactly did you say?"

"Nothing damning," Flask is quick to disavow. "Lucky for you blowbags, I still got contacts in the Ring what don't know I've thrown in with the Galactic Menace."

"And you said nothing about Thirdseed?"

Flask screws up his face at the Ortok. "The tree? Get bloomed, man. I ain't braindead." He pulls both hands, palms up, from his pocket and makes his excuses. "All I said was, I'd come into some cargo, some primo stuff, and was shopping around the Ring for buyers. Details're always sketchy on these kinda deals, trust me, from the get-go."

Her suspicion become grudging respect, Moira inclines her chin towards Flask. "How many leads?"

"Half-dozen, maybe less." As he shrugs, his windbreaker creases and the items in his cart jostle together. "Can always branch out from there, we can't find somebody with the price point we want." Wearing a stern expression, he sweeps a finger past the assembled pirates. "That's the thing to remember here, right? Would be very surprised if we don't take a loss. 68 million's gonna be all but impossible from my people, like."

Moira gnaws her lower lip a little. "Granted."

Something occurs to Odisseus and he scrunches up his muzzle. "What's the first stop?"

Flask squints through the nearby window as though he could somehow see his first potential buyer somewhere in orbit around Arzenka. "Depends. Qetapi's the closest. Maybe six days, depending on how clean the warp is. Most likely buyer, though," he stipulates, after a significant moment spent pondering, "is on Pursma and that's another blooming quadrant."

"That's what I'm worried about," the Ortok confesses. "Without a navigator, we've gotta make clean jumps everywhere and use both Gates. Clean jumps that'll get tagged and logged."

"Which means bounty hunters," Moira assess grimly.

"Best case scenario, that means bounty hunters. Unless we're prepared to commit this," Odisseus makes a motion of his paw towards the carnage, corpses and broken cameras that lie strewn about the establishment, "everywhere we warp to, I don't see another way 'round that."

"A...different ship?" proposes Flask in a progressively quieter voice.

Like a belligerent brushvezzer provoked from its burrow, Nemo emerges from his bag of Carcinocrisps with crumbs on his chin and murder in his eyes. "Get fucked, you."

"Okay, okay." Flask's hands return to their earlier defensive gesture. "Thought as much. Other option's to hire a new navigator."

"A fifth share'll just cut our take all the more," calculates a skeptical Moira. "Down to something like 13 million apiece."

"That's assuming," Flask reminds her, "we're walking away with 68 million. Which, chances're very good, we won't be." He shrugs again, shoulders almost touching his ears. "So, who the fook knows?"

"Hey!"

Left to his own devices, the Galactic Menace has gone wandering around the Junction, munching on his snacks all the while. When he shouts, he's standing in front of a hunk of smoking machinery, pointing an accusatory finger towards the handful of ditrogen holes burnt clean through its side. "Who the fuck shot the slushie machine?"

"...the fuck shot the slushie machine..."

There's a moment of confusion, each pirate scowling and glancing around, searching for the source of the strange echo. It sounded like Nemo's voice but faint, tinny and, significantly, a few seconds delayed. There's only more silence, however, one mirrored by the Lover's crew and they gawp around like idiots.

A moment later, there's a second voice, this time unfamiliar, drawing all their attention towards the holovision set. "If you're just tuning in, this is the Galactic Menace, caught live on simulcast footage. Long thought missing or dead, he's suddenly reappeared in the Arzenka–"

"Hey, we're on HV," comments Nemo pleasantly with a point.

"Oh, bloom me sideways," moans Odisseus, following that point.

On the holovision, Odisseus sees convenience store aisles, a few murdered corpses and the four of them, blinking and spinning stupidly around. A new figure – some Zourim newsperson, overcome with hushed euphoria – is superimposed over the hologram's lower right corner.

"You've seen it here on GAC first, galaxy. Nehel Morel is alive and currently in Arzenka system, not far from the Midworlds' northwestern–"

"I thought you nixed all the bloody cameras!" hisses Flask, unsuccessfully attempting to shield his face from a camera he can't see.

"I did!" Moira snaps back, Righty and Lefty leaping eagerly into her hands as she too spins in search of that camera.

"Pretty clear from the footage we're seeing," the Zourim continues, one of her prehensile toes pressed to an earpiece, "the woman to the Menace's right would be Moira Quicksilver, the–" The anchor makes a sudden gasp, the moment the hologram catches up with reality. "That confirms it! Those're her trademark firearms, a pair of AccCo 665 Lawmen–"

Ducking behind the gunshot slushie machine, Flask peeks enough of his face into view to utter his question. "How much you think they heard?"

"I mean, too much," Odisseus answers, swiping a paw to grab Nemo by the collar. His saltbrother sees him coming much too soon and ducks out of the way, attempting to slap his paw away.

"The fuck're you–"

"We're leaving?" Odisseus points out, baring all his fangs to emphasize the point. "Or is that no fucking obvious?"

"Chill, will you?" Nemo scoots a foot or two away, earning a little berth. "Lemme get my blooming shit a second, fuck," he demands, stooping to retrieve his overflowing basket. As he does, he shoots a glance up towards the holovision and his face brightens. "Hey, who's that handsome mug?"

"–only be Odisseus, the Menace's personal bodyguard. Now, according to some sources, he's an Ortok but, according to others, she's actually a Quar–"

Odisseus does not bother to consider the holovision and what is undoubtedly his own face, broadcast for all the galaxy to see. Instead, he sinks his claws into the Captain's bathrobe and drags Nemo, gripping his grocery basket all the while, across the Junction and towards the exit.

Flask is way ahead of them both, ducking into cover wherever he can, like he's escaping from a firefight. Moira lags the furthest behind, weapons in her hand, attempting to extrapolate the exact position of that one pesky security camera.

"Leave it!" exhorts Odisseus, fully out of the camera's view and with his struggling saltbrother in tow. Moira ignores him and instead, she studies the counter – its register, the slumped Fivvite cashier, its spray of spilled lottoholos. Odisseus sees her stop suddenly, her body tensing, and extend one pistol at arm's length.

"You cheeky bastard," she mutters and fires a single shot. The bolt connects with the Fivvite's flopped-forward face, directly in the bony cashier's right eye socket. There's an explosion of both blood and, strangely, sparks that's perfectly timed with the sudden shorting of the holovision's picture.

If anything, this only seems to electrify the Zourim all the more. "How exciting is this, galaxy? The Galactic Menace, Captain Nemo, alive after all these years and back on the run! Stay tuned to GAC for up to the minute–"

Odisseus is thankful when Moira, hustling to meet him at the exit, spends a moment to crank a pistol backward and plant a bolt in the noisy holovision set.

Moira Quicksilver has discovered, quite by accident, a most fascinating combination; three-fifths of a bottle of Gitterswitch Gin and a scalp-scorcher.

She spends a second, simply fascinated by the action of turning the scorcher off and turning the scorcher back on again. The thin red laserline, so fine it's almost invisible, bathes her face with heat and light each time it's strung between the scorcher's two prongs. For an unspecified length of time, this enthralls Moira, wondering where exactly the little ribbon of laser goes when the scorcher's deactivated.

She's not sure, exactly but she has a theory. It might be somewhere at the bottom of her booze bottle.

The Cannonball Dogs howl so loud, they could unbuckle the plates from the medbay's walls. When she first started shaving, she was reasonably sober and had no intention of peeling any paint with the volume of her music. The drunker she's gotten, however, the louder and louder she keeps cranking it up. By now, it's blasting so loud they'll soon be receiving noise complaints from the planets the Lover's warping past.

Moira wipes her mouth with the meat of her thumb and sets the Gitterswitch bottle on the basin's precarious edge. Stifling a burp, she summons all her mental fortitude and steadies her trembling hand.

It's a calm and even stroke across the crown of her head, one that requires all her gunfighting prowess to perform, the scorcher's blade hovering a milimeter above the scalp. In its wake, the scorcher leaves behind only a vague suggestion of hair and the faint smell of ozone. Moira couldn't be happier to lose it all; all the extra weight, all the extra fuss of the lopsided shave the spice ranger's flamejet had given her.

Also, she's burning her hair off with a fucking laser and that's pretty metal.

Three nights from now, they'd touch down on Karvela and make contact with some smuggler baron of Flask's extended acquaintance, someone potentially interested in taking the Ortok's pet sapling off their hands. Paranoia had driven them from their first choices, either Qetapi or Pursma, for fear that the trillion some viewers of Galactic Airwaves would be hastening there even now, hoping to catch or simply catch sight of the Galactic Menace.

The rational part of Moira's brain knew that, ten to one, they'd encounter trouble on Karvela and that part of her brain was determined to meet any trouble with a traditional, no-nonsense arsekicker haircut. The irrational part of Moira's brain agreed but also wanted to get smashed on gas station gin, listen to her music at full blast and do the deed with a live laser.

Moons forfend, of course, she be left in peace to shave her head and get drunk and listen to some actual fucking music for a change.

Neither the stomping and hollering of Cannonball Dogs nor the scalp-scorcher can completely drown out his entrance. "Bloom me out," he announces at full volume as he appears in the medbay's open doorway and the corner of Moira's eye. "Don't know how you listen to this buhoxshit." He flits past her, all shag and baggy clothing, appearing for a milisecond in either side of the mirror, before he hops onto the surgical bench and wiggles this way and that.

"And look," remarks the Captain, pointing a finger her direction. "Your ears aren't even bleeding."

The alcohol's banished any witty retort she might have used. "I like it," she answers instead, a little petulantly, a little unsteadily. "If you don't, then you can go and get fucked."

He extends a grubby finger. "I already did." With a drunken lurch, he hoists something from his waist – a partially-full bottle of his own, the acid blue contents sloshing about inside. "To fucking off," he toasts, "and getting rid of all this blooming hair."

Moira actually can't find argument with that. Switching the scorcher off with a thumb, she too raises her own bottle and they clink too loudly together, neither party quite judging the distance accurately. This is followed by a bunch of guzzling, bottles pointed to the medbay ceiling and all conversation paused. When Moira brings her tossed-back head down to earth, the whole universe lags a few seconds behind, her brain made sluggish by all this poison and scrambling to keep pace.

At a glacial speed, a question starts to dawn on Moira. She turns to better face the Captain, to better put that question to him. "You're shaving your head too?" She'd never considered the possibility before but, looking at him, she can't deny it would noticeably improve the bedraggled mess she's looking at.

Over a week's passed since they left the surface of Gi. The dust, in small patches, is still caked to his body. The late bathrobe that once belonged to the late Gella Borsk hangs off his shoulders in piss-yellow tatters. Torn by wind and stained by sand, it's been transformed into a shabby shawl, the kind worn by crony Adrogi fishwives on their way to market. The flimsy Pirateton tee sports a few open sores, exposing bare chest beneath, the fabric far too shoddy to withstand the vigors of wasteland, Fernhollow and pitched battle.

That hair, though, is his most egregious offense. Mingling with the beard, it's become one great black ring that wraps wholly around his face in a matted, tangled mess.

The sight of him standing there brings to Moira a sudden flash of another scraggly humanoid that she, years ago now, tended to in this very medbay. Then the underturret crushed him with all the weight of the ship.

"My head?" Nemo recoils, confused. "Bloom no. I'm no maniac." Instead, he loops a few fingers through his beard, that untamed beast that clings to his chin, and makes a fist. "All this shit's coming off. Gotta be presentable, if we're gonna go meet the crowned heads of Flask's holodex."

To accomplish this, he produces from a robe pocket a hair flenser, a gunmetal gray hunk of machinery that looks like it might have fallen off one of the jetboosters. Its mouth is a vortex of blades, now inert, that're sure to become a whirring hole of destruction when activated. The thick brown hairs that bristle from the flenser's nozzle immediately tell Moira where Nemo pilfered it from.

May the moons have mercy on Nemo's soul when Odisseus discovers his flenser both stolen and, invariably, broken.

"You know this first contact of his?" she asks as she reactivates her scalp-scorcher. "This Turquoise character?"

"Know she's a Gronqo. Know she's supposed to be some big-shot smuggler." Nemo gestures gamely with the Gitterswitch as he talks. "One of the contacts he inherited when Abner passed. Guy we usedta peddle our buhoxshit to, back when we was tykes."

Moira is doubtful as she swoops the scorcher down the side of her head, cinders falling on her shoulders. "Think she's good for 68 million?"

"Fuck if I know," Nemo resolves into the bottle, the answer echoed strangely within the little grass prison. "It'll work out. We'll find somebody. Damn thing's the most valuable piece of green in the whole blooming galaxy."

Moira can only scoff. "Yeah?" She switches the scorcher off again and brushes ash from her hand and wrist. She reaches for the bottle, down to its dregs, before she adds, in a bout of grim humor, "Then what?"

"Hm?" grunts Nemo into his gin. "Whazzat?" he asks only a little clearer once he's surfaced.

"Then what?" Moira wants to know, doing her best to maintain eye contact in the mirror, despite how woozy she's become. "Say you're right and everything works out in short order. This Turpentine person or the guy after her or the girl after him," she explains, aware her mouth is running a little ahead of her mind, straining at its leash, "fronts the cash we want, we sell them the tree, we somehow dodge the Consortium and everybody else with a loaded gun and empty pockets in the galax–"

"Right," mutters Nemo.

"Then what?" Moira shrugs dramatically, tossing blue booze about inside her bottle and, were the scorcher active, slicing some meat off her thigh. "The bloom do we do then, with all that money and all them enemies?"

On instinct, Nemo starts to shrug. Halfway through, he stops suddenly, keeping his shoulders high and tense, as he realizes he doesn't have an adequate answer. "Lay low, I guess," is what comes out of him, as a reflex, before his shoulders fall. When that answer fails to impress anyone present, not even the electromonica solo in the middle of Devil's Dowry, he goes digging for something more satisfying. "And that'd just be, you know, temporary. Heat'll die down. Always does."

The only response Moira can make is activating the scorcher again and prepping another – the last – row of scalp-scorching.

"The money we're gonna make, though," Nemo reminds her as he hefts the Gitterswitch again. In lieu of continuing, Nemo simply buzzes his lips, beside himself with his own cleverness and daring.

"That's gonna depend," Moira points out, "on what happens with Flask's Gronqo friend."

"Well, sure," Nemo allows before taking a hefty draught of the gin. That fact that he now knows how the proverbial sausage is made, that he's drinking the mashed up bladders of sentient cactoids, doesn't seem to bother him – or her, Moira supposes – any, guzzling happily away. "But, I mean," he starts to stipulate, "no reason we gotta accept chump change. Assume we clear 50 million, easy–"

Moira stops the scorcher an inch from her hairline and attempts to divide 50 million into four equal shares. Try though she might, her boozy brain simply won't make the numbers dance the way they need to.

"–that's gonna leave us tons of options, you know."

"Options," Moira repeats dryly, less paying attention to the conversation and more parroting the last thing he's just said.

"For the next thing," Nemo explains casually. "What we do after we lay low."

She doesn't dignify this with any response other than running her laser through her hair with a smoking hiss.

"Thinking about it," Nemo starts to speculate, a little conspiratorily, like someone might overhear them through all the Cannonball Dogs, "what I hear about Gertie these days, they might be one and the same thing."

It takes all Moira's concentration to send the scorcher on a number of strafing runs around the ear, scraping away all those pesky hairs that refuse to stay tucked.

"Rumor has it," he mentions, sounding more and more like he's telling spooky stories around a campfire somewhere, "after all the Freebooter business went tits up, she'd gone to ground somewhere deep Lhvargo Quadrant, just inside the Offchart's border out there, right?" He pauses here to add an ounce of unnecessary dramatic heft to his pitch. "And she'd bagged herself a planet."

Moira snaps the scorcher off and, once again, starts scattering the soot that's accumulated on her wrist. For good measure, she dunks both hands into the basin and splashes them around a little, her mind swaying drunkenly from topic to topic.

"You know what I'm saying? Boss Ott style. Except," he goes on quickly to clarify, leaning so far forward, he looks poised to fall off the surgical bench and flat on his face, "this time, the planet ain't one the Imperium gives two shits about. Some real boring rock, you know, south of Huoin or someplace."

"And?" cues Moira, the direction of this discussion quickly sobering her.

"And she runs the blooming place!" Nemo exclaims, his exuberance splashing a small amount of Gitterswitch on the floor. "Sure, she's 'laying low'," he makes the point with big obvious air-quotes, "but half of everything I heard's true? They worship her as a goddess out there."

Moira runs a hand satisfyingly across her scalp, in search of any spots she might've missed. "Been there," she reminds him. "Done that."

Nemo ignores her, too absorbed with his own alcoholic fantasy to remember she's even in the room. "And all that's out there for the fucking taking, man. All's you gotta do," he theorizes, full of sudden and sage wisdom, "is find the right planet. Someplace far enough out, right, that everybody ain't recognizing you, that bounty hunters ain't always hanging on your dick."

Moira does her best to sweep the loose pelt of crisped hair off her neck and shoulders. When this isn't enough, she staggers towards the emergency chemical shower in the medbay's bow corner, dragging her Gitterswitch along with her. Walking suddenly unmoors her whole drunken body, reminding Moira exactly how smashed she is and how urgently she needs the sturdy teltriton wall for support.

"But not someplace so far out," Nemo supposes, "that you can't beam in halfways decent holovision or find a Pickle Planet that's actually open fucking late or whatever."

With a toss of her head, Moira tips back her bottle and drains the rest. The dreggy peach guts that always linger on the bottle's bottom are like pungent paper on her tongue and teeth. She takes a page from Nemo's book and drops the bottle, where it thunks hollowly against the floor and rolls away.

"Think maybe Haliquant's the key," Nemo considers. "You go far enough out, most people ain't gonna bother braving the real wartorn shit to come find you. What's out there?" he wonders abruptly. "Nuvoon, I know and Quorom, I think too."

Her head hung, it takes Moira a few attempts to blindly grab the shower's chain. With a yank, the showerhead sputters to life, a little temperamental at being roused after so long. Freezing cold water piddles from the emergency shower and Moira stands back, letting the truly stagnant stuff drain out before she dares dunking her head under its flow.

"Bloom," remarks Nemo. "I think Spithax is out that way too, you go far enough."

When the time's right, Moira douses her head and lets the water spatter off her. It's still cold as fuck but it feels unspeakably refreshing after scorching her scalp within an eighth of an inch of its life.

"Well, wherever we go," resolves Nemo, starting to inch off the surgical bench, "I feel like that's what's next. Find the right boondock, shoot the dude with the shinest hat and hang up our shingle there for a spell."

Moira lets the water and his words wash over her. She knows he's only speaking from self-preservation; when faced with the unavoidable threat of failure, destruction and ignominy, one makes concrete plans for the future, to combat the fate all but assumed.

These drunken plans, she knows, will never actually come to fruitition, considering the Captain's ability to become distracted by new and shiny ideas. Maybe he will run off to become King Shitlicker of Buttfuck Nowhere; bully for him, if he does.

The thought of accompanying him on that fool's errand, on any more fool's errands, makes her physically ill.

This was supposed to be the curtain call, the last hurrah, the one last job. In memory of Two-Bit Switch and not much else, they were all committed to seeing this accursed shitheap of a caper through to its conclusion. Though it typically went unsaid, Moira thought it was mutually understood that they would all take their leave the moment the cash hit their pockets.

Abraham – crafty bastard – didn't even last that long. Contriving to have himself thrown off the caper was a masterstroke, a piece of genius foresight. So recently shat out the bloomhole that was Gi, the Consortium's rigors and Two-Bit's caper, Moira would happily trade places with the fat Grimalti geezer, wherever he was.

Memories come unbidden, then; meeting Abraham in the Junction above Kuzu Minor, that grim ghost the buccaneer had become, the ultimate fall he seemed certain they were, all of them, rocketing inexorably toward.

For six plus years, Moira'd been chained to the shipwreck that was Nehel Morel. If this storm didn't capsize him, the next one or the one after that or the one after those would.

Another yank silences the shower and Moira can once again hear both Nemo and the screaming refrains of Cannonball Dogs, now looped back to the album's start. He's still talking, she knows, while he fiddles with the hair flenser and it takes all her Tebi-Gali focus to drown out his nonsense with the sound of her own breathing.

Moira has charted her own course, one dramatically different from Nemo's daydream, one that would rewrite all four of their futures, Odisseus and Flask included. She would bide her time a little longer, wait out that potential payday and, when the time was right, she would shoot him in the skull and claim his bounty.

A towel across the familiar frictionless curvature of her head remids her who she is. Even plastered on Junction gin, she is still Moira Quicksilver; gunfighter, bounty hunter and nobody's friend. She's played pirate for entirely too long and it was time, after all these years, to go back into business for herself.

"Oh, there." The moment she's ironshod her resolve again, Nemo's inane comment manages to pierce all Moira's defenses. The flenser roars to life, its whirlpool of vicious blades singing their barbaric song of metal on metal. "That's got it."

She's a step away from the medbay door, unable to stomach his noxious presence another second, when he calls out to her. "You mind if I change the tunes?" Moira stops in the doorway, unwilling to turn and show him any scorn. "I listen to this crap another second, my head'll probably fucking explode or something."

"You can do what you want," she mutters and stalks out. She's headed down the corridor and back towards her quarters, towel over her shoulder, scorcher in her hand and purpose in her stride.

Moira reaches the hold's double doors when the beard hits the fan, Nemo screaming in sudden terror. "My face! My face! It's eating my fucking face!"

CHAPTER 22

Flask can fix this.

Back on his feet, Flask and his Domino lay down another layer of suppressing fire. It twangs against the lobby's tables and holoslots and just generally misses its many hidden targets. At the same time, two sharp blasts of yellow from his right manage to prick an exposed elbow, spilling its Venewla owner to the ground in a fountain of orange blood.

Quicksilver, at least, knows the value of covering fire.

Soon as his Domino's chamber clicks empty, Flask scoots back into cover behind his own holoslot machine before any of the assembled thugs get their act together enough to return fire. "Last chance, Turq!" Flask hollers in the momentary lapse of gunfire. "Tell your bozos to drop their guns and you can still walk away from this in the fooking black, like!"

"SURRENDER?" snarls the unseen droidvox of his former friend and smuggling contact. "BUDDY BOY, YOU MIGHT WANNA RUN THOSE NUMBERS AGAIN."

"We got more," informs Quicksilver, making a motion with her revolver towards the lobby's pillared wings. "Bloom me out, I thought you said she ran a smuggling ring, not a home for disenfranchised fucking goons."

"Go way back, you said," mutters Odisseus, squeezed behind the same sparking and deactivated holoslot machine. "Like a grandmother to me, you said."

"I can fix this," Flask attempts to argue. "We shoot enough of her blokes, she'll see the wisdom of making a deal and then, bam, we're–"

A streaking bolt of red ditrogen impacts against the machine a few inches from Flask's throat, shot from a surprising new angle. Before Flask can react, Odisseus has hefted his Haymaker and carved a new cavity in the chest of a Chellar in the process of flanking the four besieged pirates from behind.

"You were saying?" cues the irritated Ortok.

"Come on now," the Captain calls over, from where he crouches next to Quicksilver. He's been transformed from the hairy creature they'd found on Gi and once more resembles an actual person. His bathrobe's been replaced with his partially-atomized leather duster and there's a swatch of bloody bandages where his beard once grew wild and free. "Let's be reasonable here, Turquoise. What would old Abner say, were he to see us like this?"

"I AM ACTING PERFECTLY REASONABLE," the Gronqo answers in a calm voice, made all the more calm by her speaking apparatus. "JUST BECAUSE YOU WENT AND GOT ALL FAMOUS," she makes the point with all the sagacity of the grandmother Flask pegged her for, "DOESN'T MEAN I'VE GONE AND GOT ALL STUPID."

There's another lapse in the conversation here, the silence broken by the occasional gunshot, near miss and the casino's ambient muzak. "Meaning?" Nemo wonders.

"Meaning," Quicksilver deduces, "if she kills us, she gets our bounty and our tree. You know, the same logic that everyone in the galaxy is going to operate under."

Flask blinks. "You don't know that."

Quicksilver purses her lips. "I really do."

In his defense, coming to Karvela was not Flask's first choice. Had their cover not been so publically blown, they could have gone to Qetapi or Pursma and dealt with Tish Vicious or Honest Orgo before anybody could really catch wise. Instead, here they were, surrounded, outnumbered and trading ditrogen with Turquoise's endless supply of no-talent thuggery in the lobby of the dingy Lucky Stars Casino.

On one hand, the Gronqo's rumrunning ring was one of the best in the business, a persistent thorn in the Consortium's bloated side. Its head honcho, therefore, made an inspired choice for a buyer. On the other hand, her reputation pegged her for a coldblooded opportunist, not living to her ripe old age by playing nice or honoring every past agreement.

That said, the number of trustworthy and discreet customers looking to launch their own Gitter vineyard and good for 50 plus million credits was not so high as to exclude any potential options.

Flask can feel the eyes of the crew, all expecting miracles of him, all looking to him to remedy the situation. "She'll come around, like," he assures them and himself. "Trust me."

"I don't know," Nemo makes the point with a shrug and a waggle of his pistol. "This ain't so bad. Kinda reminds me of old times, honestly."

The return fire suddenly stops. Shouldering his Domino, Flask and his comrade keep peppering Turq's entrenched position with laserfire, hoping to catch any unwary goons. As usual, though, Flask's assault rifle finds no purchase against the enemy, only shattering and sparking against their cover.

Nemo fires with utter abandon, his concussive blue shots whizzing harmlessly past anything that might resemble the intended target. A shot from the Ortok's shiny new YN9 Haymaker practially tears a holoshot machine in two and Quicksilver works her magic on those crouching behind it. A Jrosk in a bomber jacket falls screaming while an Eussi manages to squeeze off one swan song shot before Lefty pegs him between the eyes.

That shot races across the casino and slams into some vital component in the holoslot machine Nemo and Quicksilver both cower behind. There's a shower of sparks, a short congratulatory ditty plays and the machine's internal droidvox makes the auspicious announcement. "CONGRATULATIONS," it declares lusterlessly, "YOU'VE WON."

With that, a cascade of chips, each tiny hologram broadcasting its worth, comes pouring from the machine's dispenser and onto Nemo and Quicksilver's heads. As one curses and the other hurries to scoop the chips into his open duster pocket, Flask grimaces and makes a useless gesture towards them, feeling somehow responsible for even this small embarrasment.

"I can fix this, I can fix this," he chants, almost to himself.

Flask knows that wasn't an ordinary laser blast. An ordinary laser blast might rattle the ship some when it impacts the shields. It takes something more, something stronger and more solid, to whip the pilot and co-pilot so violently about in their seats.

Collecting his scattered wits, Flask has a sudden flash of Gi's upper atmosphere and the dropcraft that latched parasitically onto the Lover's starboard airlock, the one full of spice rangers.

"Not blooming again," bemoans the Captain, evidently struck with the same memory. He gives the yoke a few quick toggles, port to starboard, and seems dissatisfied with the result. "Controls've gone all wonky."

The helm and the whole ship, presumably, is lurched unnaturally to the side and serves as perfect proof of the Captain's theory. Every time Nemo fruitlessly twists the yoke, the entire Unconstant Lover can be heard to whine and groan from the marrow of her metallic bones but she doesn't move an inch, for all Nemo's efforts.

"That weren't no ordinary shot," Flask puts out there, attempting to raise any relevant data on the dozen or so screens arrayed before him, "what hit us. That last one, like."

"A torpedo?" wonders Nemo. "What's your thing say?"

"Uh," stammers Flask, soon as his equipment feels like behaving. The data comes streaming out and Flask, hungry for the answer, opens his mouth to reply. The more he reads, though, the less it makes sense. "It's givin' me these readings I don't bloody understand, like."

They weren't two minutes out of warp above Qetapi before everything went wrong. Flask could see the planet before them through the viewport, a great sphere swirled with purple against yellow. Down on its surface waits Tish Vicious, all ready to make them an offer on their purloined Gitter sapling. Soon as a straight line to the payday came into view, of course, every motherbloomer in the universe must take up arms to oppose them.

Today's motherbloomer was a 516 Cataphract, thorny with gun emplacements and lurking in the Warp Gate's shadow, like the muggers that prey on Arrival Tier tourists back on his beloved Gallow. Whether they were tracked here or simply anticipated, the moment the ship appeared on scopes, its weapons were hot and the Lover was under attack.

Her skeleton crew were still scrambling to battle stations when that strange impact hit, the one that baffled both Flask and his sensors.

"There's drag for days," Flask attempts to explain, "and I'm also reading..." He whallops the dashboard once, the same as he's seen Nemo do innumerable times, in an attempt to make his instruments make sense. "A fooking hull breach? In the hold? But there's no pressure los–"

Nemo is flabbergasted. "Um."

"Perhaps I can explain," offers an Ortoki voice over the comm. "So, I'm standing here in the hold, minding my own–"

Another laser barrage rattles the angled shields of the stalled out Lover. "Explain faster," demands the impatient Captain.

"When a great blooming hullpoon punches its way through the wall. Missed my whiskers by this much."

"Oh, no," comes the voice of Quicksilver as she hustles through the freighter.

"The fook's a hullpoon?" asks Flask, a little indignantly.

"Sound it out," snaps Odisseus in a flat voice. "Hull. Harpoon. Got the nuances?"

"They shot us with a motherfucking harpoon?" remarks Nemo, sounding a little too impressed. "Who are these bastards?"

"Flask," address Quicksilver with a knowing air, "you called the ship a 561 Cataphract?"

"Says it's a 516 Cataphract. Friend of yours?"

"Bounty hunter. The Cannibal. Owned by this Grimalti hag, calls herself Queequeg. Been around for-fucking-ever. Trust me," she adds after a moment, "you do not want her reeling us in."

Even as Moira's making her warning, Flask can feel the tug, the ship's sickening list to starboard worsening with each passing second. Worse still, the sensors seem to confirm this, the distance between the hunter and her prey shrinking and shrinking.

"Open to suggestions, then," declares Nemo. "Getting nothing from the yoke."

"Can you," Flask puts tentatively to Odisseus, "dislodge the thing?"

Odisseus makes the Ortoki version of a scoff. "I mean, the thing's strong enough to puncture three layers of reinforced teltriton. Plus, you know, not super interested in opening a vacuum to space, so."

"The cable," provides a panting Quicksilver a second later. "Gimme another minute, I'll get into the topturret, see if I can draw a bead on the actual fucking rope."

"Oh, sure," Flask agrees, his argument supported by another hail of gunfire from the Cannibal, chipping away at their ray shields. "We'll just sit here and get fooking shot at, shall we?"

"I didn't say sit there," Quicksilver counters meaningfully.

Pilot and co-pilot share a scowl at this before both pairs of eyes drop to the clutchlever, ignored at Nemo's side. A devilish grin, the ancestor to a devilish idea, corrupts all of the Captain's face as his hand lands heavily on that clutchlever.

Drinking carbon petro in great gulps, The Unconstant Lover struggles at her leash. To be so pierced by the Cannibal's hullpoon, the Briza is none too happy. The overtaxed hull voices its teltriton displeasure at every turn, but she starts to crawl forward nonetheless.

As expected, the drag is massive and seems insurmountable at first. No engine aboard a measely Cataphract, however, could possibly hope to match a pair of JR-1 Yeltain jetboosters in sheer horsepower.

Laboriously at first but with greater and greater speed, The Unconstant Lover drags its supposed pursuer through Qetapi's high orbit, an impaled levitathan pulling its harpooner across the waves. Growing from sproadic chuckles, through fits of giggling and eventually into a full-blown maniacal cackle, Nemo keeps laughing all the way.

The ship's instruments, however, are not laughing but rather screaming. Internal damage is spiking across several systems and the fuel reserves are tailspinning to zero. Flask's hands run ineffectually across the controls, tapping buttons, flicking switches, attempting to make anything beneficial happen.

"Um, um, um," stammers Flask, nearly watching the ship come apart before his very eyes. "I can fix this!"

Flask spins his weapon on the newcomer. Everyone else follows suit and now there're a dozen firearms all pointing at her where she hovers a few inches off the blast-blackened and glass-strewn ground.

This newcomer, with the same wide-set eyestalks and slate gray skin of their Nminese hosts, elbows her jetpack's kill-switch and lands heavily on the warehouse floor. As she recovers her poise, the plates of her Kelkian battle-chassis squeak against each other and she levels a nasty-looking piece – heavy ordinance, something that might shoot acid or poison gas or confetti, for all Flask knows – straight at the Captain.

There's a moment of absolute silence following this, none of the warehouse's dozen occupants quite certain how to react.

The newcomer with the confetti-shooter takes the initiative to garble out a long string of Nminese, gesticulating violently towards Nemo.

"The bloom was that?" the Captain demands to know, his flintlock pointed at the level of his hip. "What'd she say?"

The designated spokesman among the Nminese hit squad, the one with the hunk of blinking metal over his right eyestalk, spends a moment conferring with his comrades before turning back to Nemo. "That she are being a bounty hunter," he answers in his best pinyin Commercial. "That you are worthing much coin."

"Lovely," Flask responds. "Can you do us a favor and tell her, 'cause it don't much seem as she can count, that she's outgunned, ten to fooking one?"

The spokesman digests this a moment, nods and turns to make the translation, his many-layered lips pulling back to expose wicked canines as he snarls at her.

"How'd she fooking find us, is what I'd like to know," mutters Flask to no one in particular.

For someone with ten guns pointed at her, the Nminese bounty hunter maintains her cool. She absorbs the spokesman's threat stoically and proceeds to ramble out another string of spittle-flecked obscentities in the two's shared language.

"How'd any of them find us?" Odisseus counters, standing a few feet around the circle from Flask and shifting the weight of his YN9 Haymaker shotgun.

This was precisely the outcome Flask knew they'd avoid this time around. After the disasters on both Karvela and Qetapi, he'd hatched a foolproof scheme that should've prevented any bounty hunting interference. Headed to the politically unstable hotbed of Nmino, Flask knew they'd be spotted the moment they dropped warp in the populous system. Thus, it'd been his idea to warp instead to Kashda Major, an adjacent and uninhabited system, and simply make the voyage between the two systems the old fashioned way.

This maneuver added another week onto their travel time and meant they were coasting into Nmino on fumes but, up until it now, it'd proved wholly successful. Then this Nminese whackjob and her pet jetpack burst through the warehouse's upper story window and threw everything into disarray.

Once the bounty hunter's finished speaking, another member of the Nminese death squad pipes up. Tuning to his leader, he makes a short statement, full of "hoota"s and "shoota"s that the pirates are woefully ill-equipped to translate.

"And?" Nemo attempts to interrupt, throwing his arms wide a moment. "What'd she say?"

The cartel's spokesman, his pistol level at the bounty hunter, extends a single finger toward Nemo, begging the Galactic Menace's patience a moment. This done, he continues chatting with the newly-arrived bounty hunter twice as fast, making the occasional gesture towards Nemo and The Unconstant Lover parked a short distance away, looming over the whole transaction.

The Nminese drug cartels that ran this sector, the local government quite comfortably in their collective pockets, were notorious for the massive amounts of capital they splurged on bizarre and expensive fripperies. Playing a hunch, Flask gambled that the uniqueness of the sapling – the only one of its kind in the greater galaxy – might tickle the fancy of some cartel headman.

Once the proper introductions were made, the Lover touched down amid one of the planet's worst ghettos, parking in the firebombed ruins of a warehouse. There, the crew successfully made contact with the local criminal element – six repeater-toting Nminese with about a hundred words of Commercial between them. After a few handshakes and a few harrowing mistranslations, they were well on their way to a sitdown with the resident kingpin when somebody felt the need to crash a window and make a big entrance.

Now, here they all stand, an eleven-member Talosian stand-off, while everyone Nminese in the room, friend and foe alike, conducts a private conference.

"Guys," warns Quicksilver in a tentative tone, "we're losing this."

The gestures exchanged between the two parties – bounty hunter and death squad – become more emphatic and Flask certainly catches a few unnerving glances towards the four pirates and their extended firearms.

"We're fine," Flask attempts to brush aside, unwilling to lose another potential buyer. "Everything's fine. See? He's shaking his head."

The spokesman is indeed shaking his wide-eyed head back and forth and swapping the point of his weapon between the bounty hunter and the Briza Light Freighter behind them all.

"And she's nodding," Odisseus makes the point.

In response, the bounty hunter vigorously nods her head a few times. This causes a general consensus to ripple through the Nminese gangsters, glancing to one another for approval. The spokesman squints for a moment, attempting to squeeze something meaningful from the newcomer with his one working eye but eventually relents.

"And now," Quicksilver sighs, "he's nodding too."

"So, what?" Nemo puts to his own gunmen. "I shoot her?"

"You do that," Quicksilver informs him, "she's gonna fill your belly with shrapnel. That's 53B Fletchette Launcher she's got there."

Flask's eyebrows spike. "Is that what that–"

On a barked command from their leader, the Nminese death squad, as one, turn all six of their ratatats on the Lover's crew. Flask strangles a curse as everyone reshuffles their guns, the pirates suddenly overflowing with enemies to aim at. Flask chooses one member of the death squad, the too-eager one that was the first to turn coats and point his repeater at Flask's heart. Nemo chooses the spokesman, Odisseus another of the hit squad and only Quicksilver, with two pistols to hand, keeps the bounty hunter covered.

Her other pistol, Flask observes, seems to choose its target more on instinct.

"Pointing at me," he points out politely.

"Oh." Quicksilver blinks and her Lawman's pointing at another target, one of the Nminese thugs. "Sorry."

"Guys?" Nemo questions the whole group, the ones pointing their seven guns his direction. "What gives?"

"That we is making of an arrangement. That she are having you for the bounty, that we is having the tree." He waggles his repeater a little towards the grimy warehouse floo. "You is now putting your guns down, I am to think?"

"Gee, what a fucking coincidence," chimes in a cheerful Quicksilver.

"Nobody say shit," Flask commands them, as forcefully as he can. "I can fix this!"

Flask knows one of these moons-damned doors is gonna open and unleash some slavering monster on the four of them. The only question is which door and which monster.

Chained to his three comrades at the center of the killing floor, he can only see four of the beasts and, of those, he can only identify two. Thankfully, they had Moira Quicksilver, amateur zoologist, here to edify them all.

"Could be the musk vool," she remarks, seemingly to herself but perfectly audible to everyone at these close quarters. "It's the musk vool, we're really gonna be fucked."

"I think it's fair to say," Flask attests, twisting his ankle to offset as much of the chafe as he can, "no matter what comes outta there, we're really gonna be fooked."

"Not if it's a treezma," Quicksilver counters quietly. "I know how to kill a treezma."

"With your fooking bare hands?"

"Which one shall I choose?" booms the amplified voice of Creezok Skullchewer, loud enough that all in attendance – those inside the death cube and those outside – can hear him deliberating. "Shall I pulverize the so-called Galactic Menace? Shall I have him exsanguinated and wear his shriveled skin as my cloak?"

This is met with a thunderous roar, the Saurian pirate king's entire court hissing and snarling their approval. Garbage – bottles, bones, rotten hunks of meat – go splattering against the scintillant pink walls of the death cube's deflection shield. This doesn't seem to stop or discourage the Saurian hordes, however. They keep showering the arena with improvised missiles all the same.

"Worst case scenario," Quicksilver informs them all, with a slicing gesture, "it's the xydomander. Neurotoxin'll make you brain dead before you hit the ground. Doesn't touch the pain centers, though. That's worst case," she stipulates a moment later.

"Quit wiggling the chain," Odisseus suddenly complains, turning a mouthful of fangs on his saltbrother.

Nemo responds in typical Nemo fashion, wrenching his foot and the chain it's attached to all the way to the side in a petulant little kick. "You quit wiggling the chain."

"I am not," Odisseus swears, "the one wiggling the chain."

"You know," Flask mentions offhandedly, "I sure wish somebody'd fooking mentioned to me that Creezok Skullchewer had beef with them. Maybe then I wouldn'ta suggested coming here in the bloody first place!"

"Well," weasels Nemo, now wiggling the chain out of some inbred sense of spite, "how was I supposed to know he'd remember that? That was two cannons I stole, what, six years ago?"

"Almost seven, now," Quicksilver corrects.

"Seven years ago?" He tosses his head in the direction of the enthroned Saurian and pulls a condescending face. "Moons, Creezok. Grow up."

"Shall our guests make good sport for Gutwrencher?" Creezok put to his audience, hovering his many-ringed claws over the control panel that could open any of death cube's dozen doors. "Or shall Skinshriveler teach them the meaning of agony?"

Flask isn't sure, from the sound of their screams, which gruesome fate the bloodthirsty throng would prefer.

Following the calamitous events on Nmino, Flask was determined they not be recognized when they approached the palace-away-from-palace of Creezok Skullchewer, barbaric captain of The Beast's Belly and notable terror to interstellar society. He honestly thought they were verging on paranoia, landing on Ptemesis' smaller moon, commandeering a moonhopper and making the approach in that completely unrecognizable vessel.

That part of the plan, actually, went off without a hitch. It was the moment they were led before Skullchewer himself, in all his oily opulence, that the whole thing went, skidding and screeching, off the rails. It was then Flask made the charming discover that the two Captains shared some ugly history, that the Galactic Menace had boosted the Lover's twin Antagonist gun emplacements out from under the Saurian's forked tongue many moons ago.

It had been Flask's second erroneous assumption of the evening that they'd rot in a dingy prison cell a few nights and eventually be sold to the highest bidder, whether Imperium or Consortium or some other surprise pirate beef Nemo neglected to mention. Instead, they were to be fed to an undisclosed member of Skullchewer's menagerie of pet monsters, to the delight of his teeth-gnashing, tail-lashing underlings.

Here they were, then – trapped inside the shimmering pink walls of the death cube, chained to one another by their ankles and awaiting the arrival of their drooling, many-fanged executioner.

"I choose," declares Creezok in his best barbarian king voice, "Bonebreaker!"

The hovering claw clacks a button, one of the dozen portcullises shunts into the ceiling and the room veritably shakes with the crowd's screaming approval. Flask does actually reognize the beast that comes swaggering into view, one meathook after the other, but it brings him little comfort.

"Oh, it's an arlaxi," Moira comments idly. "Hm." She throws one glance down the length of chain and up to the faces of her companions shackled there. "Too bad."

Out comes the arlaxi, four hundred pounds of rangy muscle and bristling scruff. It's a knuckle-walker, thudding the ground with each step it takes into the death cube. The muscles of those powerful forearms flex and glisten with secreted slime. The sloping tusks mark this specimen, pitted and scarred from a hundred battles, as a bull. From the way the quills along its flanks thrum with excitement, Flask knows its primed to either kill something or fuck something or both.

At the sight of the four prisoners, it lolls its lowering head, saliva dropping in gobbets from its maw. With one nine-fingered hand, it paws at the dirt and the littered bones of the cube's previous victims.

"I can fix this," Flask reminds everyone, in the moment before the monster charges.

Flask makes his ultimatum. "We ain't going lower than fifty. Period."

"Pity," croons Honest Orgo. "I'm not prepared to go higher than forty-five."

Despite his eponymous honesty, Orgo is quite the practiced liar. It may have taken Flask the better part of this negotiation to zero in on the gangster's tell. Now that he has, Flask intends to milk the Midzu for all he's worth. Whenever Flask sees those suckered fingers temple and loudly unsuction, he knows he's played his cards just right. All he needs to do now is stand firm and keep his less canny confederates from chiming in.

"It's w–" an outraged Nemo starts to sputter but Flask's gesture – a subtle slicing of the hand – is enough to keep the Menace quiet. He obviously means well, in his brutish way, but it's these childish outbursts, more than anything, that'll allow Orgo to walk all over them.

Flask brushes some imaginary dust from the front of his windbreaker and starts to rise from his seat, a motion that makes Orgo's circle of thuggery instantly twitchy. "Puts us at an impasse, then, I suppose."

"Not from where I'm sitting," Honest Orgo replies, calm as cold water. "You'll play ball." The Midzu splays his suckered fingers out, indicating the damp backroom as though it were the entire breadth of the galaxy. "You got nowhere else to go. You think I don't know you've chased every other buyer in the galaxy into the woodwork?" He folds his hands back together and sits patiently, toying with his food. "So, I'll pay what I want."

"You'll pay–" snarls Quicksilver, her temper rubbed as raw as all their ankles, following that incident with the arlaxi. Once again, Flask quiets her with a small gesture and she, while unhappy at the yanking of the leash, still understands the wisdom in letting Flask do the talking.

"We're a fooking x-factor, though, ain't we?" Flask counters. "He's the blooming Galactic Menace, mate. We're the lunatics who stole this impossible thing in the first place." He shrugs fatalistically. "You don't wanna meet our price, maybe we'll walk. Get shot to shit by the Consortium or the Imperium or all them fookin' bounty hunters." He finishes his patch with a small spike of his eyebrow. "Then where's your profit?"

He puts on a brave face but this clearly digs into Orgo. One doesn't become a "legitimate" business tycoon of Orgo's size and affluence by letting too much gangland posturing stand in the way of opportunities like this one.

For all that their host is the unofficial ruler of Pursma and all the surrounding worlds of any worth, the environs chosen for this powwow – the stock room at a third-rate laundromat – couldn't possibly be less auspicious. On the way to some charity ball or investor luncheon, Orgo's dressed to the absolute nines, way out of place in this dredgy locale. His muscle, however – redskins and Panuvans from the planet's mean streets – much more match their surroundings, each one of them overawed at the sight of the Galactic Menace, sitting a folding chair an arm's length away.

The sight of those suckered fingers steepling back together is how Flask knows he's finally bagged his buyer. "Let's see this thing, then, that I'm to spend fift–"

The fact that the explosion catches them all – Orgo and his goons included – is how Flask knows this isn't a frame-up job. The wall behind the gangster bursts outward in a sudden spray of dust, rubble and fire. The sheer force topples Flask, Nemo, Quicksilver and Odisseus to the hard ground, rolling away from the blast area and batting out small fires on their persons.

The sensation of blood that trickles down his forehead is how Flask knows he's still alive. Their hosts, however, aren't nearly so fortunate.

Orgo is nowhere to be seen, buried completely beneath the partially-collapsed wall. Here and there, a Panuvan arm or redskin leg pokes out of the rubble, sometimes wriggling, sometimes not. It's the three figures that Flask sees standing amid the smoke and settling dust that command his attention.

One's a fat-throated Lhovuss, outfitted with advanced targeting goggles and a smoking grenade launcher, the wall's obvious demolisher. Another's a scaly-scalped Neek, with baggy fatigues and a sparking pair of electochettes. The third's a sunken-eyed Yvora, his mismatched armor blackened and his massive underslung repeater nearly twice his size.

They're, all three of them, undeniably bounty hunters.

Flask discovers that he's screaming. "No, no, no, no!" He also discovers, in the same instant, his pistol – a Halisdro OT9 piece borrowed from the Lover's overstocked armory – in his hand and his trigger finger clicking madly. The poorly-aimed shots fizzle uselessly against the Yvora's reinforced armor, until one blasts him in the shoulder.

The Yvora, cursing through his needle-teeth, sprays the room with ditrogen from his repeater, his aim marred by his wounded arm.

Flask is climbing to his feet, spilling the contents of his pistol at the unexpected trio of new attackers when someone stops him. That someone is much stronger than him, gripping his shoulder with a black-clad sleeve. It's Quicksilver who's dragging him away, the rest of his crew hustling towards the exit. Flask, meanwhile, filled with more fight than even the Captain, keeps shooting and struggling all the same.

"I can fix this!" he's screaming, even as he's pulled through the door and into the laundromat's lobby. "I can still fix this!"

Flask is forced to consider the possibility that he might not actually be able to fix this.

When presented with this crisis of competence, a repeatedly bested Flask decides to double down on those few skills that he knows he excels at – drinking like a fish and smoking like a chimney.

To this end, he has colonized the Ujad mahogany at the far end of The Unconstant lover's mess hall. Considering the length of time they spent imprisoned here, Flask feels confident none of the freighter's crew will come and disturb him here. Most of the cigarettes he'd purchased above Arzenka were smoked, their stubs arrayed all around him in a gruesome display of carcinogenic conquest. His own meager supply of booze long depleted, he'd since resorted to those few bottles he could scrounge from here and there about the ship. Fortunately for his scavenging habits, the Lover was a vessel so exhaustively stocked with alcohol, one could open practically any hull panel and discover a hidden cache of goodies.

Where they were headed next, Flask had no idea. From this stage forward, that was officially no longer his responsibility.

Pursma was the latest and greatest catastrophe, chased through the city streets with three heavily-armed lunatics chomping on their tail feathers the whole way. Ptemesis was an utter fiasco, the four of them nearly ground to chum and fed to Skullchewer's frothing Saurian hordes. Nmino had such promise before the unwelcome and cliché arrival of a bounty-hunting third party threw the whole deal into disarray. Qetapi had no opportunity to go well, the Cannibal's orbital attack forcing them away with Port Authority on their heels.

Had things with Turquoise, Flask reflects, on Karvela gone even a little smoother, they might not be warping from Who Knows Where to Noplace In Particular with half the galaxy on their scent and the galaxy's most valuable cargo burning a hole in their hold.

By now, Flask has exhausted all his contacts in the Ring, outed himself as a Galactic Menace collaborator and earned a bronze place, three spots from the top of the galaxy's perpetual shit list.

All because, once again, he'd been convinced to throw in with that monomaniacal cousin of his.

"Where," comes the unexpected voice of that monomaniacal cousin, "in the name of every shitting moon of Jotor," he points an accusing finger as he storms through the mess hall's doors, defying Flask's expectations yet again, "did you get that?"

Flask wiggles his left fist, bottle of Gitterswitch Gin sloshing its contents. "This?" he asks, startled by how slurred the word sounds when it escapes his lips.

"That."

Flask extends the bottle to arm's length, pointing back towards the galley. "Think this one was in that little drawer, you know, underneath the oven, like?"

"Oh," Nemo realizes, all anger and accusation instantly vanished. "That must be Odi's stash, I think. Never mind, then."

With a great dramatic sweep of his forearm, Nemo wipes away most of the mess hall's scarred and stained tabletop, the cigarettes and empty gin bottles cascading to the floor in a sooty, clattering heap. In its place, he slaps down a stack of laminate charts, improperly folded and crusty with age and use.

"Fook's that?" Flask manages, as soberly as he can.

"Nav charts," Nemo responds, flipping one over and examining what's written there with a deep scowl. "Tell you what, I ain't a million-year-old, fat-assed Grimalti sonuvabitch but I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how Abraham ever gotta handle on this warp navigator stuff." He snaps that particular chart closed and tosses it back on the heap. "Boils the brain."

"Lookin'," Flask stammers, reach a hand towards the charts, "for summat?"

Nemo slaps that hand away before Flask would have, in all likelihood, knocked the stack completely over. "A heading," answers Nemo as he leafs through the various charts. Soon as he's found the one he's searching for, he snaps it open and presses its creased edges flat against the table, grabbing an empty bottle or two for paperweights.

"We're here." The Captain jabs a finger at a particular system. Flask cranes forward a little and manages to wrangle his boozy brain into deciphering the upside-down letters as Nenoa Major, a wholly unfamilair planet to Flask. "Or will be, come tomorrow."

"Means," Nemo starts to speculate, idly reaching a hand towards Flask's forgotten bottle, "there's only five possible jumps outta there that I'm confident I got the skills to make." Taking a gulp from the bottle, he spiderwalks his other hand across the chart, tapping different systems with each finger. "There's Wask," he comments, soon as he's swallowed. "Chellek, Dynomic, Gy Mbano and..."

His thumb lands heavily on the fifth possibility and this stops the Captain cold. He pulls his hand off the chart and instead rubs his jaw in contemplation, a beardless version of the same gesture he might've made weeks ago.

Flask strains to see what system his cousin's contemplating so hard. He practically has to stand to see the label that's etched there.

Takioro, the nav chart reads.

CHAPTER 23

Velocity had just assumed he was dead.

The last time Takioro's Depot-Commissioner had seen on the Galactic Menace, it was a chance encounter, passing in a Second Ring sidestreet. The Freebooter Fleet had come, in all its regalia, to Takioro Defederate Station to celebrate a Valladian Shipping Line well sacked. Its big kahuna, then, was out among his people, heading someplace or another, doubtlessly on one of his many important duties.

Velocity too was about on business, attending to some new disaster the visiting pirates had wrought upon her defenseless station. The two parties, Nemo's entourage and her own, passed through one of the narrow sidestreets the wise use to circumnavigate the station.

Their entourages merged and blended for a moment, hers all bodyguards, his all sycophants. Velocity had realized only too late who it was she was actually passing behind the Astrobounce and Second Ring Wok. When they actually did pass, Nehel Morel didn't spare Velocity a glance, too deeply invested in listening to himself talk. It was that grimy counterfeiter Two-Bit Switch that she actually made eye contact with. A terse nod was all he gave her and, not reacting quite quickly enough, she could only respond in kind.

He was there and, quick as that, he was gone. Turning a hard corner around the Astrobounce's left side, he and his gaggle of followers disappeared up the alley.

Four years previously, he'd been the least talented smuggler on her laundry list of pet smugglers. Then, behind Velocity's back, he'd gone and become a blooming galactic sensation, leaving her in his wake.

The only appropriate way Velocity could pay Nemo back for his ingratitude was with ingratitude of her own. If he ignored her, she would ignore him right back.

In the years and months that followed, then, Takioro's Depot-Commissioner was far too preoccupied with the day-to-day business of her station – squabbling landlords, tenant's rights, breaking the occasional thumb – to pay much attention to the occasional rumors she'd hear about the Galactic Menace's fate. The Freebooter Fleet never returned to Takioro following their attack on Trija and, in Velocity's mind, it was good riddance to them all.

No matter her disinterest, the occasional mumble or whisper would still reach her ears. The odd depraved deep spacer would claim they saw the Menace robbing some liquor store or another on remote moon someplace. This was unavoidable; far as Velocity was concerned, though, as long as he wasn't causing trouble aboard her station, he might as well be dead.

In her mind, he eventually was.

It was certainly more credible than half the blooming stories that the rest of the galaxy cooked up to explain his disappearance. According to some, he'd lead the remainder of the Freebooter Fleet away from Trija's defeat and conquered some Offchart planet somewhere, where he was worshipped as some kind of buccaneering god-king. According to others, he'd warped away from Trija too quickly and the Lover crashed on Spithax or Jotor or Crawk's Locker or somewhere even more mythical. According to still others, he'd been apprehended by the Trijans and was rotting away still in some lightless prison cell beneath Zaraskevi.

Velocity dismissed each of these in turn as the poppycock they were. She had more immediate concerns, bigger jiihu to fry than the whereabouts of the troublesome Galactic Menace. Things aboard the Defederate Station were far from hunky or dory.

It seemed that every other week, some stationside business or another was drying up and rolling down its shutters for good. First, it was Skarn Tarvish and her Traditional Sozonese Pub, not clearing enough on punters to keep the lights on and to pay Velocity's very reasonable taxes. Then came Tooth and Nails, the two joints so intrinsically linked that, if one went, the other was bound to follow. Much as Velocity might wish to frown and blame the vissisitudes of a plunderous economy, the trend was becoming far too frequent to dismiss.

As the Midworlds fought their small wars, the revolts, insurrections and outright rebellions against the Imperium, it invariably created more shadowports, licentious dens of vice and villainy where any scoundrel could shelter and turn a quick profit. Planets like Ponembra, Gy Mbano and Danboowui were growing their own litle Takioros, smugglers' paradises that specialize in moving contraband through the wartorn cracks in the Imperium's borders.

This meant fewer and fewer of the region's outlaws needed to brave Takioro's steep docking fees and could instead drink and lounge and fuck in any of the lawless boomtowns springing to life on the moons of Wask and Ganad Minor. With the customers, of course, went the vendors. Velocity knew for a fact that more than a third of those vendors that closed up their station shops had relocated to these nearby upstarts.

What Velocity and Takioro as a whole needed was to stay relevant. It only took one stray glance at a holovision to discern that, right now, there's nothing in the galaxy more relevant than Nehel Morel.

When he did seemingly emerge from hiding, even then, the Vollocki queenpin wouldn't swallow the story whole cloth. She'd naturally assumed, when rumors of the Consortium bounty and the sighting above Arzenka reached her ears, that this was another Imperial plot, like the Nemo lookalike they'd collared in that Xhorish whorehouse. Then the story kept developing, the prodigal Menace leading an extended police pursuit all across the Midworlds.

That's when Velocity truly started to wonder whether or not this might be the real deal, whether the actual Nehel Morel, asspain of asspains, had indeed returned from death or obscurity.

Soon, she was convinced this was the genuine article, tooling about Bad Space in his unmistakable Briza Light Freighter. Soon, she became convinced of something else. Like a child running back inside when it rains, he would come back to where he started; maybe to stay dry, maybe to gloat about how wet he got out there.

Either way, Velocity saw him coming half a galaxy away. True to form, he came bearing a suspiciously lucrative business offer and, also true to form, he tried her patience from moment one.

Velocity sits alone at the corner table of an abandoned Bloody Afterburn. Her nearest office, the backroom of Infamous Issipor's Borulbaan BBQ, is down the street and, on the way between, Velocity had a strange little stroll, hands in pockets, through the utterly abandoned Second Ring. Each clomp of her hooves echoed, one set of footfalls filling halls normally filled by screaming, stomping and the occasional explosion.

When he'd established contact with her, he'd made three demands, each one as unreasonable as the last. Then and there, Velocity nearly scoffed in his face and went about her way. Her station and her livelihood, however, was three inches this side of a fatal tailspin and the Depot-Commissioner couldn't afford to look a gift Menace in the mouth.

First, he'd demanded that they meet alone and he meant alone. He wanted the station, tip to top, emptied of all occupants – every swinging dick that sauced, shopped and slept here – all to conduct this chat in paranoid privacy. His extreme caution was logical, in its way, and she'd assured him of his safety but he was adamant; an empty station or no sit down.

Given no choice, she'd emptied the station. It took no small amount of effort. For the brainless masses, she employed a broad and hilariously implausible cover story. Beyond that, there were a few costly bribes and favors towards those heavy-hitters who still called Takioro home. It wasn't easy but this was her station and here, Velocity could make anything happen. There wasn't a bum, beggar or busker left aboard to draw one breath of Takioro Defederate Station's artificial air – save her and soon, her guest.

The second demand was perhaps easier but much more obnoxious. They were both to be unarmed. Once again, it's a logical move, considering how lucrative his mere presence could prove. This still put Velocity at a considerable disadvantage, even if he pretended to play fair. Not knowing his motives, there was no way to assume he wasn't here to settle an old score and put a ditrogen slug straight through her, when she thought they were meeting on even turns. Not born yesterday, Velocity was hesitant to put herself in so vulnerable a position before the galaxy's professedly most dangerous man.

Unfortunately, there was nothing for this either, despite the balking of her bodyguards. To ensure her own security, she'd taken a few small precautions but sat at that table wearing no weapon, visible or otherwise.

Velocity recognized the third demand as a concession to sentimentality. He was to make his pitch in the Bloody Afterburn over a pair of Bile Backwashes. These she'd mixed herself, taking liberty with Unhappy Roger's supplies, and wondered idly whether Nemo, the drink's biggest connossieur, would notice the difference. Whether or not Velocity would drink hers, she'd yet to decide, her own tankard bubbling ominously before her.

Poison occurred to her instantly, his corpse alone probably worth enough to save her station from the scrap heap. He'd suspect something, of course, was prudent enough to request no weapons and were he actually coming here bearing an opportunity, a bungled poisoning would squander the whole thing.

The corner table, the one reserved for him and his crew by long tradition, wasn't one of his express demands. It was Velocity's instinct, however, the moment she entered the tavern and it was the only place that seemed appropriate to meet him.

Empty of all the scum, the Bloody Afterburn isn't quite the scumhole she'd always assumed. For one, it's roomier than she remembered in here, with no crowd to clutter up the place. For another, the place doesn't stink quite so bad, that fault evidently lying with the patrons rather than the establishment.

All in all, there's something oddly serene about the bar's vast emptiness, a cathedral of teltriton girders and crosspieces. The only sound is the slight swing and sway of the tavern's namesake turbine where it hangs from the Afterburn's ceiling, spattered with blood long ago dried sickly brown.

Velocity isn't certain how long she waits there, listening to the creak and whine of those chains. Her comm is jury-rigged to warn her when The Unconstant Lover makes contact, when the ship touches down in Docking Port #6188, when a shoot fires from the First to Second Ring.

She's not remotely surprised, then, when Nemo strides through the tavern's front doors. He, however is taken completely by surprise the moment he steps through those doors and the gun detectors stop him dead.

Nemo's frozen in place as oscillating lines of yellow laserlight trace across his body in a spreading grid. He doesn't seem particularly hassled by this, instead throwing a finger towards the arch that encases him. "These new?"

"Borrowed them," Velocity answers, no need to shout in the eerie silence, "from our buddy down the 'bounce." She spreads her hands a little in a revealing gesture. "You understand."

"Better safe than smoking," he concurs. The detector completes its scan, the cautionary yellow becomes acceptant green and Nemo's permitted to pass through. The moment he does, he thumbs over his shoulder, rapt with amazement. "Fucking trippy out there, isn't it?"

"Fucking expensive," she corrects, "is what."

He makes a dismissive swipe of his hand as he approaches. "Stick with me, kid," he scoffs with that accursed tone of his, "and you're gonna be rolling in it."

"That so?" she poses flatly, thoroughly unimpressed by all his bravado. "Do tell."

As he approaches, Velocity makes an subconscious survey of the captain she used to know, wondering whether interstellar fame and fortune have changed anything in his swagger.

It's less the high life that Velocity sees in those familiar features and more the low life. His years spent off the radar, lurking in the galaxy's bloomhole, have taken an obvious toll on the Captain. The unimaginable stress of a hunted life is etched heavily on his face, despite his youth and exuberance. The hair's longer, shaggier and more unkempt but the costume's virtually unchanged. He wears a nondescript blue thermal, forgettable gray trousers and, as ever, that cumbersome leather duster that's more a part of Nemo than his own shadow.

It's his expression that has changed the least, though. He wears the exact combination of arrogance, carelessness and stupidity that he might've four years earlier, though the face beneath is carved with cares and worries.

Plus – and perhaps she's misremembering – he's a little chunkier. More junk food and holovision, she supposes with all his time in hiding, than gunfights and bar brawls.

"All business?" he comments archly as he approaches. He's much more killer than charmer, Velocity knows, and the smooth-talker angle clanks awkwardly against his persona. She wonders whether his years in exile have blunted his negotiation skills.

"Every minute there aren't drunkards spending money out there," she points past him, through the gun detectors and onto the station street, "I lose money."

Nemo flaps aside one wing of his duster and plants his ass on the opposite side of the booth. "Appreciate all the trouble you've gone to. Your safety as much as mine, really."

"I'm sure."

Once he's sitting, he slaps his thighs and gazes appreciatively around at his surroundings. "They remodel in here?" he comments idly, pointing vaguely up at the walls.

"I can assure you," she sighs, impatience growing, "they did not."

"Huh. Seems new."

"Is there some way we can–"

His eyes land back on the Bile Backwash and fill with sudden relish. He rubs his hands together in anticipation before taking hold of the tankard. "Tell you the truth," he confesses, excitement in every aspect of his body language. "Was probably the most excited about this part."

"I'm fucking touched," Velocity sighs, frustrated twenty seconds into their first interaction in years. "Thought about poisoning yours, but–"

He throws his head back and chugs happily away at the tankard's nauseating contents. Two gulps in he makes her wish she had poisoned him; Nemo has the audacity to stick a finger in her face and sue for quiet while he indulges his complimentary drink. The Depot-Commissioner next debates a savage kick under the table but, considering her hooves and her Vollocki strength, she doesn't imagine breaking his bones would speed the conversation along any.

He drains the entire thing, slamming the empty tankard back to the tabletop. His exhale threatens to become a burp, his face scrunching into a grimace. "Roger mix these?" he says, glancing with surprise at what he's just drunk. "Tastes like hot garbage."

For some reason, this bristles Velocity a little, somehow insulted by her inability to mix a drink that's supposed to taste like garbage in the first place. "You've got three moons-damned seconds," she threatens, leaning forward to point an aggressive finger in his face, "to tell me why you arranged this whole sheba–"

"Gotta move some merch," Nemo explains, wiping sour foam from his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket, bleached beige from repeated use of this tactic. "Looking for buyers with lotsa scratch and more balls. Interested?"

"Could be." Velocity is unimpressed with his vagaries. "Depends on damn near every detail you ain't given me yet."

The smarmy look on his face makes her instantly reconsider her earlier "hoof-to-knee" idea. "You looked at a holovision lately?"

Of course she had, the damn things buzz pestilentially all across the station, and she wasn't so braindead that she couldn't guess what he was implying. The rumors she'd heard surrounding the Menace's reappearance were so utterly preposterous and full of obvious embellishment, Velocity simply couldn't credit anything she'd heard.

"Consortium ain't happy with you," is all she chooses to give him. "To the tune of enough scratch to buy me a new central spire."

"What?" Nemo's face instantly scowls. "You don't like the asteroid? Trust me," he very unnecessarily assures her, "I been to Ikoril and those things ain't all they're–"

"You can arrive at the point," Velocity suggests dangerously, "or you can depart from my fucking sight."

"The merch I'm looking to move," Nemo explains, "is a tree."

This bomb dropped, he's leaning back, studying her reaction as intently as Velocity works to control that reaction. She keeps her face utterly blank, no surprise or incredulity or anything, forcing Nemo to speak next.

"The rumors you've heard are true," he goes onto say. "'cept for the one where Moira's killed me and taken control of the shp. Or the one where Odi's killed me and taken–"

"A tree?" Velocity repeats. "A tree tree? A Gitterpeach tree?"

"That's the one." Reaching into his voluminous duster for anything but a gun, the Captain withdraws a slim holodeck. He slaps this onto the table and, after a moment, bids Velocity to activate it.

The hologram that comes leaping into view doesn't look like any Gitterpeach tree Velocity's ever imagined. It's a squat cactus with a dozen thorny ridges descending down its bulbous sides and a single flower, all blue and white speckles, that blooms from its crown.

The hologram spins and Velocity spends a moment in study. Nemo, momentarily ignored, crawls one hand across the table and snags Velocity's ignored Backwash with a few fingers.

Her first question is the obvious one. "How do I know–"

"Blech," squeams Nemo, pulling that same sour face again. "Tastes like the wet end of a diarretic yuzzoboar."

"How do I know," Velocity insists, "it's authentic?"

He shrugs as he wipes his mouth again. "Consortium's pretty eager to get me. Alive, right?" He licks his lips to catch any spare Backwash he might find there. "Plus, were this some kinda elaborate hoax, don't you think I'd try a little harder to make the thing look like an actual fucking tree?"

Velocity can't necessarily argue with this backwards logic. By now, the long-smothered pirate captain in Velocity, the one that once planned daring raids and captured rare booty, has overcome the pragmatic Depot-Commissioner. Now, she's only curious about the caper, about how this moron got his hands on the holiest of holies. "How'd you come by this thing?" is the most eloquent way she can encapsulate all her burning curiosity.

With that certain storytelling zeal he must've learned from his Grimalti mentor, Captain Nemo starts to spin out the yarn. There're no doubt embellishments, certain thornier areas are skipped over and Velocity would've been an assbrained fool to believe that nonsense about the natives declaring him a god of war. Velocity knows a spacer's story when she hears one and she's more than skilled at telling the fact from the fiction.

By the time he's finished, though, the Depot-Commissioner has no trouble believing there's an actual Gitterpeach tree aboard her station at this moment.

"You can imagine," he starts to explain, flopping back as far as he can in the incommodious booth, "how much've a bitch's been, finding a buyer in this climate. I mean, the goods're as valuable as the Emperor's nephew in handcuffs but, you know, being the Galactic Menace tends to complicate things a tad."

A million calculations go running through Velocity's head before she asks her next question. She envisions her criminal network, the favors she's owed across two quadrants, the costs of arable land, fertilizer, bottling distribution. She knows, even before the words come out of her mouth, that in order to pursue this endeavor, it would mean selling everything she has here and rebooting her life entire. "Asking price?"

"68 million," he states without blinking.

"Is what Borsk promised you, sure," Velocity allows, attempting to simply nod and wave her way through the haggling phase. "That ain't what I asked. I asked your asking price."

"68 million," he states again without blinking.

"Do I look like some ex-Consortium crone?" Velocity makes a show of gazing around the Afterburn, searching for something she doesn't find. "Does this look like some super fucking secret asteroid base, out in the middle of nowhere, where spice rangers'll never find me?"

"Don't see as how," Nemo starts to demur, "any of that's my–"

"Kiddo," scoffs Velocity, "that's exactly your problem. You wanna know why you can't find a willing buyer? You don't know what you're selling. You ain't selling a tree and that's all. You're selling a business. You're selling the most dangerous business there is."

Nemo makes no immediate reply to this. Instead, he crosses his arms and pouts, precisely like the naïve little boy he is and has always been. This gives Velocity the permission to continue her apparently much-needed tirade.

"Damn thing you got don't do nothing on its own," she informs him, "'cept summon spice rangers outta the woodwork the moment you let the thing see the light of day. You really think," she reiterates with a chuckle, "me or anybody else, for that matter, is gonna pay hand-over-fucking-fist for a useless little tree, when they've gotta turn right around and found–"

There's a twitch in Nemo's face. "Useless."

"–their own independent brewery, someplace and somehow that the Gitter Consortium won't come descending down on them like righteous fucking angels the minute they hang up their shingle." She takes a moment to breathe and to allow him his retort. When he keeps silent, she shakes her antlered head sadly. "You got no idea how much that'd all cost, do ya?"

"What price, then," levels Nemo slowly, "would you pay?"

Velocity thins her lips a moment. "How's about," she wonders, appearing to speculate, "21 million?"

Nemo's downright terrible at hiding his outrage. "21, huh? How very specific of you."

"Well," Velocity starts to explain, running her hand along the bottom of the table, "it's exactly one million more than I'd make, where I to hand you in for the bounty."

Before he can react, she's placed the butt of the MI Model 77P Tattletale immediately before her on the table, its flanged barrel aimed straight at Nemo's heart.

Velocity did not often carry a gun. It was her preference to employ people who carry guns. She was once a murderer extraordinaire, back at the command of The Gyspy Laddie, and could more than find her way around a firearm. The Tattletale isn't her preferred pistol either. Her preferred pistol is smuggled beneath a hidden panel in Dujic's Holo-Ink Parlor but this little number had exactly the right specifications to perfectly fit Velocity's needs today.

There's a moment of utter silence that follows the gun's appearance, broken only by the bloodied turbine as it swings on its collider chains overhead.

"Stick-spray," Velocity elucidates, feeling the adhesive material she'd coated the weapon's one side with clinging to the meat of her palm. "To the underside of the table. Stupid trick."

"Very stupid," Nemo agrees. "What's your plan here?"

"Pretty much depends on you," she's willing to admit. "You can lower the price to something more reasonable, say, 21 million?" She gestures one direction with the pistol. "Or," she offers, gesturing the other direction, "I can take you in for the bounty."

"How original." Nemo nods slowly before swinging a finger around to indicate the station. "Things're that bad around here, you gotta go all bounty hunter on me?"

"Wouldn't say that, necessarily," Velocity disagrees. "Things ain't so good that I got 68 million burning a hole in my pocket. Nor," she adds with a sad smile, "can I afford to have 20 million go waltzing out the airlock. Not when I know you're unarmed and got no Ortok within shouting distance."

"Oh, he wanted to come," Nemo informs her. "Told him he wouldn't be needed, though, mostly 'cause I figured you were above something like this."

"Then, I guess," Velocity sighs, disappointed with an old friend, "you don't know me too well."

"I feel like I do." Now Nemo's shaking his head with disappointment. "You're too old school for me, Vel."

"What's it gonna be, then?" She adjusts the pistol to reinforce the threat a little. "I'm happy to re-negotiate, if you are, but I'm also perfectly happy to do the other thing."

"I say that," Nemo continues, ignoring her ultimatum, "because if you're too old school for me, then I guess I must be a little too new school for you. You gotta trick up your sleeve," he indicates the gun with a slight nod, "but you also assumed that, long as you borrowed Gozzer's gun detectors for the afternoon, I wouldn't have one too."

Some tiny paranoid fragment of Velocity wants to run her hand along the bottom of the table, hunting for a second pistol he's impossibly smuggled there. Instead, she keeps her gun level and calls his bluff. "Prove me wrong."

Hands moving slowly, Nemo takes hold of his shirt lapels and, with a tug, exposes his bare chest. Velocity's surprised to discover, however, that, attached to the bare flesh of his sternum with a few layers of vacuum tape is a plastic sack of dull orange goo. Her scowl deepens as he continues to unbutton the shirt, revealing more and more identical such sacks, taped down his torso and around his waist.

He's standing by this point, flapping out his duster to better illustrate the precise placement and sheer amount of orange goo that's strapped to his body. From deeper inside his sleeve, he produces the small detonator.

Nemo makes a sweeping gesture, a grand presentation. "The trick up my sleeve."

"That's–"

"Doxychoraphum," he supplies with that stupid smile of his. "Repellent. Big boom-boom juice. Enough," he estimates, considering all the explosives he's wearing, "to destroy most of this Ring, I would think?"

"Isn't that stuff," Velocity wants to confrim, a certain tremor in her voice at the sheer stakes, "liable to ignite for like, zero fucking reason?"

"Is the rumor, yeah." Nemo nods, glancing at his attire admiringly. "Well, not a rumor, I guess. It's definitely true. Seen it happen, actually, a few times–"

"Get the fuck off my station," Velocity demands, aiming the Tattletale at his forehead. She debates pulling the trigger anyway, ending this whole ordeal, but the idea of his dead body falling backward and squashing all that volatile repellent stays her hand.

Captain Nemo's already inching backward, heading towards the gun detectors, when he inches an eyebrow. "That's a hard no, then?"

"It's a hard no," Velocity is happy to confirm. She's a cool customer, is Takioro's Depot-Commissioner, but fifteen pounds of the galaxy's most destructive explosive, brought aboard her station and in the hands of a noted maniac, is enough to break anyone's cool.

Velocity rises to follow him out the door and considers following him further, making sure he arrives safely at the shoots. "You come back to my station again," she waggles the Tattletale an inch or so in warning, "I put one through your skull on sight."

"We coulda had something great, Vel," Nemo adds wistfully, staggering backwards, step-by-step, through Gozzer's gun detectors. "All I'm asking is that you meet me in the middle."

"You call this the middle?" snarls the Depot-Commissioner. "68 million ain't meeting me halfway and neither is coming aboard my station dressed like a supernova. You leave now, I'll give you fifteen minutes before I call every headhunter I know, make 'em suck your coordinates outta my dick."

"Ask Abraham, you don't believe me," are Nemo's final words to Velocity. "Things ain't like they once were."

Odisseus really doesn't think taking off the suicide vest is too much to ask.

"What?" remarks the Captain in the moment right before he shoves an irresponsible amount of caramel corn into his mouth. "You said it was important," he complains with a mouth full, spewing caramel flecks with each word.

Odisseus cannot tear his eyes from the concentrated bags of doxychoraphum, literal water balloons that Nemo wears vacuum-taped to his torso. Only the very edges of each sacks are visible beneath both the flapping duster lapels and the partially unbuttoned shirt but, very concerned about exploding, Odisseus can't stop staring.

The talking timebomb stands snacking in the sensor room's doorway, only minutes back aboard after his unsuccessful powwow with Velocity. As soon as The Unconstant Lover was speeding away from Takioro Defederate Station, her Captain was summoned here on the Ortok's orders to hear some new developments. He'd not bothered with a change of clothes, still carrying enough firepower to obliterate the freighter, and for once, Odisseus doesn't appreciate Nemo's punctuality.

All the while, Nemo's enjoying the dregs of a Second Street vendor's popcorn, his fingers sticky and his teeth smeared with caramel.

"Not so important," Odisseus points out, never taking his eyes from the repellent.

"This?" Nemo jostles the nearly empty newspaper roll. "It was on the way back and there was nobody manning the thing. It was literally taking candy from a baby."

Odisseus scowls at this. "Well, it wasn't literally if there was no–"

"Literally."

"That's not what–"

"Literally."

"Play the fucking message," demands Moira Quicksilver from further inside the sensor room. At her insistence, Odisseus waddles to the center of the chamber and, with a paw tapped against the floor, activates the holopad.

"Came in, maybe, an hour ago?" he explains as the pad calibrates, displaying the logo fo whatever posh Inner Sector tech firm they boosted it from all those years ago. "Was gonna buzz you but didn't wanna, you know, interrupt."

As the holographic image sputters and comes into focus, Odisseus settles against the nearest console. In short order, a fourth person appears in the center of the cramped sensor room.

She's a humanoid female, dressed in that outlandish costume that Odisseus eventually recognized as the Trijan style, an outfit he'd not seen for years. He recognizes the massive coat, its many sashes and ribbons and, most of all, he recognizes the periwig, the distinguished white coils cascading down the figure's shoulders.

For one illogical moment, Odisseus thought he was looking at the specter of Sorocco Charybdis, somehow back from the dead. The hologram's face, is too pale of complexion, however, not a Trijan's chocochino brown.

That face, what's more, is immediately and frighteningly recognizable.

"The fuck, man?" Gertie Gundeck exclaims. "Out of the blooming blue, I see your name toppin' the Consortium's charts. Then I see you go running around the Midworlds, your pants around your ankles. Then I hear you gotta moons-damned sapling to sell and I," she presses an affronted hand against her chest, "ain't the first number you buzz?"

Her expression changes, curling to become somehow more mischevious. "Frankly, boys," she purrs, her gaze falling perfectly on Nemo in the doorway, "I'm offended."

The image shorts suddenly out, replaced by a string of coordinates that flashes for a second before the whole hologram shrivels up into the pad.

There's a sizable pause here, long enough for Nemo to swallow the last handful of his confectionary corn. Moira idly enters a few numbers into a nearby terminal, her face suddenly cast green by the console's light.

Nemo's upended the popcorn container and is now pouring its crumbs into his open mouth. "Where're those coordinates?" he asks Moira between licking his lips.

"Thaksu," supplies Moira instantly.

"Thaksu," agrees Nemo an instant after that. "That's where she's at. Now I remember."

FIFTH INTERLUDE

Two-Bit Switch couldn't find a molecular strip.

He'd put this search off for far too long. Of all the things his nascent super-caper required, all the myriad parts and pieces he'd need to assemble, the molecular strip was, in some ways, the hardest to acquire. This was mainly because Two-Bit didn't really know what he was looking for and couldn't really ask anyone without giving them far too many specifics about why he needed one.

Not knowing the specifications of the ship that would eventually pull the super-caper didn't help much either.

That's why he'd procrastinated, Two-Bit assured himself. It had nothing to do with the past year he'd spent as a member of this dysfunctional crew of pirates that had, to this day, never – intentionally – tried to kill him, unlike some past confederates Two-Bit could name.

Now, however, Gella was breathing down his neck for an update and Two-Bit had nothing to show for the past six months, nothing that the booze baroness would view as legitimate progress. A solid lead on a molecular strip, however, was something Two-Bit could certainly have dressed up to look like progress but, short of pulling one from his bloomhole, it was looking like Two-Bit would come up lonktonk-eggs on this one.

Idiotic instinct made him actually glance up from his Attaché, to consider his surroundings, and see if he miraculously spotted a spare molecular strip that nobody was using.

Illuminated only by the blue glow of his Attaché, the deserted holoplex was a ghostly suggestion all around him. Every seat, save his own, were empty, no doubt filled not long ago with the jeering combined crews of the fortress's pet pirates, that came down here for a little entertainment. The holowell, where that entertainment would be projected, was a blank void, the projector lying inert somewhere far above. There wasn't a sound to be heard, the walls' soundproofing sufficient to blot the sounds of the busily running fortress and even the polar winds of Baz.

That's precisely why Two-Bit Switch had come here, ostensibly to research molecular strips but also potentially to sulk after the disaster that was the Haess Hustle.

Yes, they'd made it out with the goods intact and yes, none of the Lover's crew had actually been killed, but they'd come alarmingly close, rescued only by Moira's late entrance from the bathroom. Their employer could seemingly care less, as long as he could deliver new weapons to the native insurgents. Two-Bit, meanwhile, couldn't help feeling like every caper he planned for the Lover and her crew ended in a gunfight or a boarding action or a cellblock.

In that case, Two-Bit Switch would plan his own caper, the caper-to-end-all-capers, and he would plan that so exhaustively that there was no chance for mishap or disaster or incompetence.

First, however, he'd need to find a molecular strip.

What would really make this simpler would be consulting an actual mechanic, someone who could point him in the right direction and steer him should he go astray in his search. The thought of asking Odisseus kept recurring to Two-Bit but there was no way to couch the request in enough innuendo to prevent the Ortok from getting curious and wanting answers.

The other option, the one staring Two-Bit in the face, would be to ask Ott.

The Galactic Menace had enough contacts and connections all across the galaxy and could certainly put a finger on a molecular strip that would suit Two-Bit's needs. The proverbial ink on their unwritten contract, however, was still wet and Two-Bit wasn't quite sure he wanted to push those boundaries with such a strange request. He was doubly sure he didn't want to go behind the Captain's back with the request nor was he certain Ott even knew who he was.

It was an option to pursue down the line, perhaps, when they were even cozier with Ott than they were now, when Two-Bit felt more comfortable approaching the Galactic Menace in a covert way.

Until then, he would slink around the fortress' dark corners, squeezing out an hour of research here or there, while his crewmates were off availing themselves of Ott's gymnasium or swimming pool or skooshball court.

Two-Bit nearly jumped out of his skin the next moment, when that dark amphitheater was suddenly flooded with light. The massive screen before him transformed from a well of darkness into an unstable hologram, showing some production company's logo or another. Poorly recorded audio sizzled and crackled through the speakers, interrupting Two-Bit's quick reverie with a sudden explosion of music.

Someone had switched on the holoprojector and starting playing something. Two-Bit Switch gazed up in confusion at the show they'd chosen to watch.

It was animation, that much Two-Bit could suss, and it was made with tech and aesthetics about three or four decades antiquated by now. In such a modern theater, it didn't hold up especially well, the hologram frayed and juddering at the edges. Once the slurry of production logos passed, the actual feature presentation began, sparking some faint sense memory, at the very back of Two-Bit's nostalgia.

"They found him," the narrator announced, over a twinkling field of cartoon stars, "in a dingy cantina on a backwater moon on the edge of civilized space. Once, he was the single greatest space pirate captain in the known galaxy." The character capering around on screen – brandishing a pistol, somersaulting through the air, dodging explosions – was a ludicrous stereotype; eyepatch, atrocious haircut and shirtless under a ragged combat vest. "Until that galaxy spat him out. Now," the narrator tantalized the audience, "he's been given another chance."

Next came a quick montage of the cartoon's supporting cast – a busty orangeskinned babe, a goofy alien sidekick, a helpful looking robot – all in incongruous poses of action or comedy. "Along with his ragtag crew of smugglers, thieves and mercenaries, Captain Starstrike flies his trademark vessel, The Starstriker, against the evil Emperor Xarkoth and his Blackskull Empire." The piece's villain was exactly as camp as its hero, complete with flowing robes, death's head visage and maniacal laugh.

"It's a tale of peril and adventure," promised the narrator, over a grand finale of random and disassociated clips, "as Captain Starstrike and his crew strike back against the tyrannical Blackskull Empire, all the while staying one step ahead of Xarkoth's evil clutches as they explore..."

Here the show's title wavered onto screen, precisely as the protagonist's spaceship zoomed past. "The Endless Night."

Two-Bit was watching the opening titles to a cartoon show about a space pirate and he knew exactly who it was that switched on the holoprojector.

"I'm missing it!" that party announced frantically, as he hustled through the holoplex's opening doors. Two-Bit worked quickly to deactivate his Attaché, to hide the hovering plans he'd been perusing before he could be discovered. "I'm missing the best part!"

Nemo appeared on Two-Bit's periphery, hustling down the aisle at top speed as the show's opening titles faded away, in favor of the actual episode. In his arms, the Captain carried an irresponsible bundle of junk food – popcorn, boxes of jangling sweets, a spool of fluffy green candyfloss – and he was rapidly approaching Two-Bit's row. Nemo's eyes fixated on the holo, Two-Bit was pretty sure he hadn't been spotted yet and was debating slinking away to sulk someplace else when the Captain scooted into, of every row in the theatre, his row.

"Cap'n," Two-Bit greeted with a small sigh. His prediction proved accurate when the Captain emitted a little shriek at spotting Two-Bit, slouched there in the dark holoplex not ten feet away. That shock, however, quickly mutated into pleasant surprise.

"Well, I'll be bloomed," Nemo reacted, with what looked like genuine delight. "The man of the fucking hour. You mind?" Not waiting to see if Two-Bit minded, Nemo plopped down into the seat immediately next to him, his snacks all rattling and spilling everywhere.

"Thought you and Odi were still casing the Messenger," Two-Bit probed, still vainly hoping to give Nemo the hint that he'd interrupted his personal brooding time.

"We did," Nemo grunted in reply, visibly attempting to decide which confection to devour first. "Took for-blooming-ever." Settling on the candyfloss, Nemo turned to consider Two-Bit. "You came in here to jerk off or what?"

All Two-Bit's lying skills flew right out the airlock. "Uh–"

"You know," Nemo made the point, gesturing with his candyfloss at the Attaché lying deactivated in Two-Bit's lap, "you wanted to watch some porn, you coulda used the big screen." He nodded his chin towards the cartoon that continued to play overhead. "Moons know he's got a shit-ton of it. I saw a whole thing back there."

Two-Bit was skeptical. "A shit-ton of porn?"

"A shit-ton of everything," Nemo countered. "I mean, he's got this." He made an indicative gesture towards the screen, where space adventures of the most ludicrous sort were playing out, amid shoddy animation and shoddy dialogue. "You never watched Endless Night?"

"Not really," Two-Bit admitted. "I can flash on like, one episode."

Nemo buzzed his lips. "I was a kid, you couldn't tear me away from this crap with a graviton. Really rare, actually, on Gallow. Never gotta watch the thing in syndication because, that far into the Inner Sectors, all we could get were pirate broadcasts, you know, whatever you could beam in. Imperium didn't like it, right, thought it was bad messaging for kids." He chewed his candyfloss thoughtfully, watching the screen with the critical appreciation of a holo historian. "Pirates as good guys."

Glancing between Captain and screen, it wasn't hard for Two-Bit Switch to see how formative this very stupid cartoon must have been upon an adolescent Nehel Morel.

"Sorry again," Two-Bit mentioned, a few minutes into the broadcast, when Captain Starstrike suspects one of his crew might actually be a Blackskull spy. "About the whole Haess thing."

By now, Nemo's attention is fixated by the cartoon, flashing competing colors onto his great moon of a face. "Sorry for what?"

"Haess," Two-Bit reminded him, a little sheepishly. "How the whole thing got outta wank."

Nemo turned to his crewmate, green caramelized sugar stuck to his teeth. "The bloom're you talking about?"

"The gunfight, Nemo," Two-Bit repeated, now becoming concerned for the state of his Captain's memory. "How that Prul put a piece to my head and we nearly got kuc–"

"No, no," Nemo cut to the chase, "that I remember. I don't understand what you're apologizing about." He shrugged, looking honestly bewildered. "That went great."

"That did not go drongo," Two-Bit was insistent, shifting his weight to better address his captain. "That is not how a drongo caper is supposed to go. A drongo caper wouldn't have a blooming firefight right in the middle–"

"A boring caper, you mean," Nemo muttered.

"But, for some razz," Two-Bit continued, unable to completely stop his own rant, "every heist I schemed for you, since way back with Nemen Uil, always goes lollies up at some point. Like, we always make tracks and we even usually make tracks with the goodies but, I don't know, there's always something I can't specc that makes the whole thing go a little antwacky."

Nemo stretched both legs, plopping them atop the next row of seats in a manner anyone sitting there would find supremely annoying. "Example."

"An example would be the Kapla Caper, or–"

"Weren't your idea to knock over that Pickle Planet," Nemo scoffed. "That was all me."

"–or the Bozee Bushwhack, I guess–"

"Yeah, but Mongoose was asking for one in the brain," Nemo argued, "and after that, we had a really good reason to give it to him."

"The Zaboola Blockade, then," Two-Bit resolved, confident in his logic.

This only caused Nemo to smirk in remember. "I'd always wanted to try that."

"What I'm jabbing is," Two-Bit reached his bottom line, "I don't know whether this is actually working out all that well. Me on the crew, I mean."

The silence that followed with filled with all Endless Night's cartoonish clamor and Two-Bit's anxiety at finally voicing that niggling doubt he'd nursed the past few months. Nemo simply stared.

"Dude." He blinked once, like his point was self-evident. "I haven't shot you. We're buds." He punctuated this heartfelt sentiment with a great mouthful of candyfloss. "You think all those jobs you planned were failures? I think all those jobs you planned were a blast." He shook his head slowly, sucking sugar from each of his fingers. "That's precisely the reason I like your plans. More fun."

With that, Nemo had turned his attention back towards the exploits of Captain Starstrike and his lovable crew of misfits. "Nah, buddy," he decided, the matter closed for discussion. "You're stuck with us now."

To that, Two-Bit made no immediate reply. His eyes had landed at the Attaché in his lap, now deactivated and all its secrets hidden. His thoughts ignored the frenetic cartoon that blazed all around him, peppered by the occasional snort, whoop or fist of thrown popcorn from his left. Instead, his thoughts dwelled on the caper that Attaché contained and all the pieces still missing from it.

When he'd left Gella's care, nearly a year ago now, she'd tasked him to find – chief among many other things – a team that he trusted to run this caper for him. It was impossible for Two-Bit Switch not to consider this clunker, her crazed captain and her capable crew as candidates for the job. They weren't perfect, that much was clear, and they weren't particularly professional but they did have that inexplicable ability to always pull a messy victory from the jaws of certain defeat.

It wouldn't be clean, it wouldn't be the way that Gella would like it, but Two-Bit believed that they could walk away from that planet with a tree in tow.

That was all assuming he was there to chaperone them, every single step of the way.

That was when he remembered that last fateful conversation with Gella, the one they'd shared in the small hours of their final morning together. They might very well be capable of pulling off the caper but could Two-Bit really go through with his exit strategy, in that case? Wouldn't complete strangers be preferable, considering what he was planning for the grand finale?

There would be another team, Two-Bit Switch knew. This one, like all his previous partnerships, would dissolve following a betrayal or a capture or a job truly gone awry. He was allowed his fun now, paying the bills while he researched and collected the disparate pieces of the caper, but when the actual showtime came, Two-Bit Switch would seek another crew, one with fewer sentimental attachments.

Until then, he supposed, he was stuck with these psychos.

CHAPTER 24

Flask has never been to Thaksu. Flask doesn't know anyone who's ever been to Thaksu. In point of fact, Flask had never even heard of Thaksu until they'd received Gertie's transmission. He knows Thaksu is deep Outer Ring and that means, in his imagination, it's an uncivilized boondock whose criminals are drooling hicks and where a heist is only considered successful when the entire planet's police force has been murdered in the process.

He's no idea, then why Thaksu's atmosphere would be littered with an impenetrable curtain of space junk.

"The bloom?" remarks Nemo, soon as they're through the Warp Gate and into the outer fringes of the debris field.

"Sensors're all wigged out, like," Flask adds, all his instruments fuzzing over with static. "Can't raise nothing down there."

"Get Gertie on comms. We better not've come all this way to get fucking bushwhacked."

Peering nervously at the spinning wreckage that Nemo steers them ever closer towards, Flask inputs the coordinates and sends an introductory hail down to the planet below. By the time he's finished, Nemo's in the thick of things, navigating their bulky freighter through the maze of debris that seems to circle the entire planet.

The wreckage they pass is silhouetted against the planet's faint worldshine, highlighting every piece of charred, crunched or chewed up metal. The Lover's bombard shield brushes the smaller flotsam aside but it takes Nemo's trademark reflexes to steer the Briza past the few hunks of garbage large enough to, even at their decelerating speed, spell an end to the freighter.

At a glance, Flask would describe most of the wreckage as ancient mining equipment, based on the drills and pumps and magma drains he spots, typical of the Inner Sector mining megacorps. Scattered amongst these, now and again, The Unconstant Lover will zoom past a partially-hollowed asteroid or even through the fractured hulk of a capital spaceship. Whatever resources Thaksu might once have been responsible for, that industry's long since been abandoned.

Moments later, the comm chirrups to life as, against all appearances, someone's alive enough down there to answer his hail.

Her regional Talosian accent is unmistakable. "You made it!"

"Nearly didn't," gripes Nemo as he strains the Lover through a thorny patch of detritus, the ripped remains of an orbital backloader. "You know, you coulda mentioned we might warp into a fucking minefield up here."

The connection crackles with what Flask assumes is the woman's chuckle. "Didn't really believe you'd make the trip, tell you the truth. Be careful, is basically the whole spiel."

"Cool," grunts Nemo unhappily. "Good timing."

"Little worried about landing, like," Flask leans forward to confess. "Screwing with our sensors up here."

"That's sorta by design," the woman replies. Before Flask can give Nemo a look, she goes onto explain. "Don't want the Imperium or whomever the bloom getting a bead on our operations here. It'll clear up," she assures them, unconcerned about their destruction, "you get through the worst of it."

"Sure hope there ain't the wrong kinda welcome," Nemo suggests, the faintest trace of threat behind his voice, "waiting for us down there."

This earns another laugh, distorted weirdly through the comm's interference. "Coordinates I sent you should keep you outta the public eye. Trust me, chaps. You're in good hands with me."

"Much obliged."

"See you dirtside," the voice purrs and the connection shorts out.

As Flask is beaming the coordinates to the navpanel, the Captain ducks and dodges through the last outskirts of the scrap field, freeing the freighter from all that spins and drifts about it. Finally, The Unconstant Lover can make her approach to Thaksu unimpeded, with no more impedimenta to obstruct their view of the planet.

There's not much to the planet they discover behind the debris field. Thaksu is a ball of brownish-beige crud, devoid any splotches of blue and green to denote oceans or vegetation. The Lover's cursory scan indicates a high concentration of active technology but a comparatively low amount of organic life – some high density pockets but not nearly enough to occupy a whole planet.

At this distance, though, Thaksu appears to be anything other than a whole planet.

Jagged gouges mar the planet's surface, so deep they're actually visible from high orbit. So scratched and scraped, the planet resembles a piece of hard candy, masticated by a mouth of cosmic proportions. In one quarter, far on Thaksu's southern hemisphere, the entire crust has been punched clean through, sunlight streaming through the planet's grevious wound.

Whatever was once mined from Thaksu, it was clear to see, at even a passing glance, that it was all long gone.

The strange sight, beautiful and bizarre, draws the breath from both Nemo and Flask. "The bloom's she doing here?" wonders the Captain.

Moira stares across the mountains of stacked cash at the woman that she, Moira decides in a flash of prescience, will one day kill.

That woman in question, Gertrude Guspatch, looks positively pleased as punch to receive the four of them in their bedraggled state. After all, she – once Good Luck, then Gertie Gundeck and now, finally, Governor Gertie – is the allegedly benevolent ruler of this backwater dump. As long as they're here, in her court and at her suffrage, there's a certain amount of kowtowing and homage to be paid – something Moira Quicksilver flatly refuses to do.

Flask, however, has no compunction against kowtowing. It's he, goaded occasionally by a bashful Nemo, that makes the pitch. To his credit, he's a natural-born pitchman, spinning a tale of their daring and heroism that Moira, witness to all the fuck-ups and buhoxshit, nearly even believes.

"Colored me interested," remarks Gertie, soon as she's heard the whole thing. She reclines there in her seat, the wad of cash in each hand so fat, she's practically spilling bills onto the floor around her.

"Can we," supposes Nemo, a little ahead of Flask's obvious wishes, "color you an interested buyer?"

"For now," she points one wad of cash his direction, taunting him, "just interested. Awful big decision to make, you gotta understand. Especially with that price tag." She wears the expression of a hammy panhandler, undercut somewhat by the literal heaps of money all over her desk. "Times're tough."

Flask's face is perfectly neutral. "Of course. We understand. How could we not?"

The five of them are crammed like canned sporefin into what passes as Gertie's office. This tiny thermosteel box would have been cramped for its ancient operating crew and, even with its instrument panels long since stripped clean for parts, the decrepit bridge is hardly enough space to accommodate a quartet of visitors.

It took even Odisseus a few moments of mental cataloguing to identify what Gertie's behemothic headquarters might have been during its own lifetime. This gargantuan hulk, the largest of the million similar that were littered across Thaksu's grimy surface, had obviously never been spaceworthy, not even fresh off the factory floor. Climbing through the ship's superstructure on their way to meet Gertie, Moira couldn't fathom what the craft could possibly have been originally constructed for. Essentially the same shape as a spaceship, she lacked thrusters, stabilizers, viewports and practically every other spacefaring feature.

When examining a patch of exposed hull plating, Odisseus concluded it was a magma diver, a submersible meant to navigate the molten sections of the planet's core.

Now it was flopped here on Thaksu's surface, like a beached leviathan, and Gertie Guspatch was running her current criminal enterprise out of its bridge.

Thaksu's primary terrain appears to be mudslicks, bottomless quarries and derelict mining equipment. On their overland stroll to the magma diver, they'd wound, boots slogging through grime and gravel, between dizzying drops into the planet's crust and the bones of timeworn machinery, rusted by rain and scrapped by scavengers. Looking at this wretched place, Moira couldn't start to fathom how Gertie transformed Thaksu into the criminal cash cow it evidently was.

The planet was clearly lousy with thuggery. A healthy spread of species, plus a gentle majority of local color – Naskren, Tixani, Ponduur – could be seen loitering around the dump, nursing nicotine halos, shooting the shit and universally tinkering with mining equipment. They climb and clamber about the skeletons of grim machinery, bickering and soldering and generally mucking about.

How all this translated into the topography of cash on Gertie's desk, Moira's no idea.

The Governor of Thaksu tosses her two handfuls of bills so carelessly onto the desk it threatens to topple all the careful stacks. She rises from her chair with a creak and stretches like she's heading home after a long day at the office. "Gimme a day or two, mull things over, talk you down from your price a bit," she commands more than requests. "Then," she resolves, at the absolute limit of her stretch, "I bet we can make each other very happy."

Something in her expression or her voice makes Nemo and Moira cringe simultaneously. Flask is not to be fazed, however. "I'm sure that we can."

"Enough fuckin' business, though, huh?" Gertie croons in a companionable way, adjusting the stupid frilly sleeves of her Trijan naval officer's duds. "How you like my new digs?"

"Not much," opines Odisseus from the doorway and earns a glare from Flask.

At Gertie's raised eyebrow, Moira helps with the translation. "Not much."

Much to Moira's annoyance, this seems only to amuse the gloating Guspatch all the more and she simpers. "I admit," she confesses, milking the whole routine way too much, "don't make mucha first impression but, you know, you gotta look past the exterior, see the potential underneath."

"Yeah?" Nemo grunts, a little willing to bite. "Potential for what?"

Her reply is sickly-sweet. "For carnage."

A finger against a nearby control pad activates some hidden mechanism behind the wall and a panel shunts away, exposing the bridge to Thaksu's open air.

Scowls on their faces, the four pirates crane a little forward, eager to see what the bloom Gertie's hiding on this remote planet. Like a museum curator, their gracious host stands to the side, arms folded delicately while they take in the scenery.

Through the magma diver's observation window isn't the greatest vantage but the arena is impossible to miss, its uppermost spires like jagged teeth against Thaksu's purple twilight. At this distance, the roar of the crowd is muted into a faint hush but, as Moira watches, she does see some carnage, crossing back and forth through the massive spotlights that bathe the arena's floor.

When two war machines grind into one another, sparks and spare parts go flying. One vehicle is all rusty spikes and hard edges while the other is nothing more than an incline plane on boosters. There's some exchange of bladed weapons, revealed from hidden compartments, and the sparks only double, shooting high into the night sky. Both vehicles, bastardized nothings built only for destruction, disengage long enough to snarl at each other, like squared-off beasts, before the flamethrower makes its entrance.

The distant arena glows unearthly green, the crowd's cheer intensifies to a distant drone and Moira doesn't even need to look at Nemo to understand the expression that's plastered across his face.

"Demolition derby," he breathes.

Odisseus would basically consider this torture-porn.

A 687 Autogrinder, heavy on its mag-treads, is still nearly toppled when its frontispiece is gored by the vicious teeth of an OreWorld CH8 forkdrift. The two vehicles, each one so retrofitted and jury rigged that his classification system is basically useless, jostle back and forth, neither one making a lick of progress, particularly with the mag-treads in the mud.

They don't struggle too long before a third party, a monstrosity of mangled metal called the Bucking Buhox, comes careening backward into the tangle, its stabiliziers ablaze. There's a heart-rending screech of twisting thermosteel as hull plates are peeled like fruit rinds. In moments, all three vehicles are inseparably gnashed together. Odisseus covers his eyes with a paw as all three pump their thrusters to escape, attempting to tear away. They only succeed, however, in ripping free the Buhox's fuselage in the process – spraying the battlefield with carbon petro.

Odisseus hears Nemo suck in his breath in anticipation of the ground-trembling explosion that comes a moment later.

The Ortok's momentarily worried his fur will catch fire, the heat is so intense in that horrendous moment of destruction. Through his paw, Odisseus can still see and can especially smell the fire, the shorn metal, the scorched petroleum. He peeks just in time to see unrecognizable hunks of wreckage come hurtling at them from the blast. At the precise last moment, the bombard shield appears to bounce the debris away, where it crashes back to the arena and even onto some competitors.

The explosion's impact on the overall derby is universal, more than one innocent bystander caught and rolled away by the shockwave.

Somehow, Flask's furious shouts are louder than all of this. "Well, fook me for breathin', then!" he exclaims from where he sits behind Odisseus, slapping his thighs in impotent rage.

Gertie cranes over a shoulder at him. "One of those was yours?"

"Fooking sixty on Daddy's Favorite," Flask growls.

The mistress-of-ceremonies can only unsteeple her fingers and shrug, reaching a free hand towards her milkshake. "Thanks for playing, friend."

"I wanna do it," breathes Nemo for the umpteenth time.

This time, it's Moira turn to relieve Odisseus of his sacred duty. "You're not doing it."

"I wanna do it," he repeats, convinced that his will alone is enough to alter reality.

Flask, meanwhile, continues to gripe. "If fookin' Buhox minded its own business for ten fookin'–"

Odisseus spins around in his supremely uncomfortable chair, no doubt salved from some mining juggernaut or another. "Favorite's anterior motivator was shot. Rear ventral compartment was sparking. From the get-go." Flask does not visibly react to this news. "That's how Psychopomp," Odisseus continues, "was even able to get its hooks in. Another thirty seconds, it would've been a lemon."

Flask, slumped so far down in his own chair, his knees're at eye level, blinks. "Well, you coulda blooming said something to me, couldn't ya?"

"I just did."

"At any point before I made the fooking bet and it were fooking exploded!"

"I'm gonna do it," Nemo resolves and starts to rises with purpose from his chair.

Spinning back around, Odisseus plants a heavy paw on Nemo's shoulder and instantly reverses his momentum, plopping him back in the chair. "You're not gonna do it."

There's a sudden eruption from the crowd at this, reacting to more demolishing in the arena rather than Nemo's ambitions thwarted.

The audience's sheer size staggers Odisseus. Somewhere near ten thousand spectators scream and jeer and throw their concessions into the massive arena, far rowdier than any sporting event the Ortok's ever seen. From where they sit, high on the arena's northern side, Odisseus could see three separate brawls in the stands, each one about to be quelled by incoming house security. Every few seconds, the bright spark of laserfire, shot in anger or exuberance, would catch the Ortok's eye from some new corner of the stands.

There's something about the sight of all these slavering, trigger-happy yahoos that reminds Odisseus of Pirateon more than a little.

Where, in all the moons of Jotor, Gertie had found these people and brought them to Thaksu of all planets, Odisseus couldn't fathom. It wasn't difficult to see what attracted them in the first place. Blood-sport is undoubtedly the official pastime of Bad Space.

The makeshift stadium is absolutely filled with jeering spectators, more than its wobbly design can realistically hold. Scads of seats sprout like rogue patches of coral across the surrounding barrier of crashed spaceships, mining equipment and one honest-to-moons junk heap that demarcates the arena's edges. Every square inch of space overlooking the carnage contains a hooligan, cussing out the competition, spilling their bright blue beer and, most importantly, throwing around enormous wads of cash.

All this sound and fury, Odisseus marvels, over a little spattered mud, a little spilled blood and the occasional explosion.

Back in the arena, the last few pieces of the most recent crash come smoldering back to the ground. The remaining competitors, however, have long since been revving their engines and crashing into one another. A few of the drivers are nimble enough to avoid the smoking wreckage, spinning frantic circles in the mud. The rest are either too slow or too foolhardy to care, smashing right through the charred pieces of their comrades to cheers or disaster.

The clear frontrunner, an utter remix that must've been an X811 driftdumper in a previous life, freewheels around the arena's center. It spews a double dose of exhaust from its amplified nozzles and dares any to rise to its challenge. Unlike the competition with its host of mechanical terrors, the only weapon the Rubadubdub boasts is the small platoon of weapon-wielding psychopaths, riding on its hoverbed and shrieking defiance at any who come too close.

One such challenger, a Heavy 472 with a preposterous pair of lever-action jaws, takes the bait. With a squeal of its engine, Lockjaw makes a strafing run, attempting to dig its sharpened metal fangs into the driftdumper's exposed rear bumper. It's a squealing miss, jagged themosteel teeth scraping uselessly against Rubadubdub's side.

This is exactly the window that a member of the boarding party needs. That boarder, a Ponduur in dasher's leather with a hatchet to one hand, a blowtorch to the other, goes scampering across his moving vehicle with all the abandon of a suicide bomber. With a flailing leap, the boarder slams onto the Lockjaw's windshield and it gives way beneath him, rolling the screaming Ponduur into the cockpit of the swerving craft.

There's still more swerving as Lockjaw careers away, wildly out of control. The bloodied and burnt bodies of its original crew start spilling from its opening doors while its big stupid jaws flap open and closed like a pair of novelty dentures. With a sad crunch, the Heavy 472 crumples against one of the arena's uneven sides and lies still, immediately the target of the crowd's derision and various shades of sprayed piss.

All the while, Nemo is clapping and giggling like a child at the circus.

Flask sounds a little more bemused. He points a finger between the heads of Odisseus and Nemo, indicating the Rubadubdub and its next victory lap, hissing and honking at its lesser competitors. "Can they do that?"

Gertie shrugs, in the middle of a long draught on her milkshake. Soon as she finishes slurping her straw, she makes with the explanation. "Why not?" She extends two fingers as she replaces the drink in her cupholder, more a laser-blasted hole than a design feature. "Derby's only got the two rules."

Nemo is all too interested. "Only two?"

"Nothing ditrogen," counts Gertie on her fingers, "and nothing offworld. Means they gotta make their monsters on planet and they gotta pay me for the parts. Also means," she adds with a devious grin, "they gotta get creative."

Nothing evinces this more than the three vehicles left sputtering down below, each one more madcap and lunatic than the next.

The five of them, plus a pair of Gertie's boner-toting bodyguards, lounge in her exclusive box, with a commanding view of the entire arena and every moment of the bloodshed and battery. Their seats, the cushiest in the house, are torn leather and musty fabric, pilfered from the mouldering wrecks that comprise Thaksu's countryside. Their window is clearly the result of some dreadful accident, the opening they watch through all ripped and rent thermosteel.

To reach their seat, they climbed enough dubious catwalks and wobbly gangplanks to convince Odisseus how poorly made the whole enterprise is, arena and all. One ill-aimed harpoon, he theorizes, or one jackknifing competitor and this whole operation could quite literally come crashing to the ground.

"You build all this?" is the kindest way Odisseus could think to propose the idea, translated a moment later by Moira, where she lingers near the minibar.

"Oh, moons, no. I'm pretty much fresh off the boat." Nonetheless, she gazes down at all the destruction and debris with a certain motherly pride. "Maybe made a few changes here and there, you know how it is. Mudwrecking on Thaksu's older than fucking. Betting on who dies first?" she adds, gesturing with her milkshake. "Older than that, even."

"How'd you get here, then?" Flask wonders, always eager to find a new angle. "Hill didn't have a fooking king already?"

"Oh, my usual way." The very tone of her voice is enough to make Nemo shudder with discomfort. "Much less a headache than running dash, I tell you what, or even that piracy game you were runnin' way back when." She makes this reference idly, mentioning the disastrous Freebooter Fleet so casually, as though it had been nothing more than a momentary scheme Nemo pulled to make a little scratch on the side.

"And how's that?" Flask, an armchair dash enthusiast since he was seven, rises to the challenge.

"In that there ain't no egos to deal with," she explains, matter-of-factly. "Nobody becomes a mudwrecking star because, nine times outta ten–"

She's interrupted by a tremendous cheer from the crowd, loud enough to actually activate the bombard shield in places. Odisseus consciously decides to avert his eyes and Gertie only smiles into the roar, pleased as plunder at her fortuitous timing.

"–there are no survivors."

"And you never miss it?" Nemo poses, a strange note of thoughtfulness in his voice. "The captaincy? The booty? The life?"

This does give Gertie a moment of pause, the smallest flicker in her otherwise smug demeanor. "The life's still out there someplace, you know, but the climate ain't right. Now ain't the right time, it don't feel like, to make a go at swashbuckling again. That'll change, I'm sure, but–"

Odisseus is suddenly very aware of the Captain's stillness, containing a dangerous calm, to the Ortok's immediate right.

"–for the moment, I'm actually pretty content. 'sides," she sighs, a sudden wistfulness in her tone, "duty calls."

Nemo's instinctive snort at the word "duty" and the automatic hiss of the chamber's bulkhead door are simultaneous. Without warning, there's an immediate third party in the Governor's spacious viewing box.

"Apologies, apologies, apologies," comes the accented voice. Odisseus twists to see this newcomer as he hustles down towards the front row of seats. A thick purplish mist hangs about him and Odisseus recognizes the scent of Votagi tobacco a moment later.

His protective instincts bristling, Odisseus knows that Moira's all but drawn Righty and Lefty, ready to fill the stranger with ditrogen at the first unfriendly move.

Gertie, however, is cool as a cucumber. "What happened?" she offers over her shoulder.

"Is remembering Hezou, yes?"

Gertie spends a moment thinking, time enough for the newcomer to reach the box's lower level and peer down at the proceedings in the arena. The smoke dissipating from his face, he's revealed to be an orange-skinned Votagi himself. "This is Hairless Hezou?" Gertie wonders. "With the unibrow?"

"Is him," confirms the Votagi. He leans forward, gazing into the arena below to check the progress of the bout. As he does, one of the foot-long prehensile feelers extending from his upper lip dashes away a little purple soot from the cigar's end. "Is always cornering me, him and his boytoys, whatever chance he gets. Is demanding this and that from me."

"Lemme guess," posits Gertie, looking at the ceiling a moment to jog her memory. "he's unhappy with Bottom Feeder's spread?"

"Is fecking surprise to me," the Votagi discovers, in mock epiphany, throwing his hands up exactly as something smashes into something else in the arena. As he makes the gesture, the pair of great folded triangular wings on his back seem agitated and flutter and rearrange. "Is saying 'moons of Jotor' to him. Is saying how grieved I is to hear this, how can I ever, blah blah blah, suck my dick, who cares?'"

To this, Gertie laughs, inspiring a scowling exchange of confusion between Odisseus, Moira and Nemo. While all three of them wear the same expression, Flask is clueless and attempts to mouth something Odisseus can't discern, while pointing a discreet finger at the newcomer.

"Anyway," the Votagi resolves, turning back around to address the seated Gertie and gesticulating with one cigar-gripping feeler. "Is sending Geen and her girls to push him around a little, make pee his pants? Is meeting with your approval?"

"Yeah," appraises Gertie, rising from her seat to fuss suddenly with the Votagi's vest in a shockingly domestic way. "You're a very important fellow, after all, and we can't have unibrowed blowbags like Hairless Hezou stopping you on the fucking streets."

"Is maybe sending you after him instead?" suggests the Votagi, bringing the unoccupied feeler around to stroke the side of Gertie's face and play with a few loose strands of her hair. "Is you thinking you've lost your, how you say, edge?"

She extends a finger too close to his face. "You watch it, buster, or I will reacquaint you with my edge."

Then, to a crowd of mouths hanging open in shock and confusion, they kiss for a period of time thoroughly irresponsible considering the number of other people in the room. About the time when all four hands and both feelers are involved, Nemo's shock has given way to disgust. "I think I'mana ralph."

At this, they disengage and turn to acknowledge their audience, wearing completely opposite expressions of embarrassment and indifference on their faces. The Votagi, the embarrassed half, steps around the side of Gertie and extends both hands and feelers up in a gesture of forgiveness. "Apologies again."

Gertie, the indifferent half, simply wipes a smear of purplish saliva from her mouth and curls one corner of her lips into the faintest hint of a mischievous smile at the Captain.

"Is not imagining," the Votagi comments to Nemo, extending a four-fingered hand to him in greeting, "you, of all people, is accustomed to be overlooked?"

Nemo accepts the offered hand. "Is very confused."

"Is Galactic Menace agreeing," the Votagi makes the concession, sweeping a feeler behind to indicate Gertie, "that a woman such as this cannot be ignored for even a moment?"

"Uh, sure," Nemo agrees, with no clue what he's agreeing to. "Didn't catch your name."

"Is Triggan," the Votagi introduces with a slight bow, complemented by a spread of wings.

"And it's you that's," Flask makes the leap, rising from his seat and pointing towards the open window, "responsible for all this?"

"Is thinking," Triggan allows with a chuckle, "once upon a time, this is maybe true. Is different these days. Is, how you say," he twists partially around, extends one mustache-feeler back towards Gertie and wraps the thing around her finger, "partnership."

"How cute," is Moira's single contribution to the conversation.

"Is the greatest of all honors," Triggan bows again, his wings fluttering a little with the depth of his humility, "to play host for such illustrious guests. Is most welcome, the Galactic Menace and all with him, to our lowly establ–"

"I wanna do it," Nemo declares suddenly, seizing his opportunity. He thrusts a finger towards the arena, so far and so fast the bombard shield nearly activates to stop him.

In place of the bombard shield, it's Odisseus who activates to stop him. "He's not gonna do it."

Triggan shrugs both feelers, hands and wings a little, making the classic mistake of giving the Captain an inch. "Is what Galactic Menace wants–"

"See?" Nemo practically shrieks, swinging his pointed finger from the arena to point, a little too closely, at Triggan's face. "He says I can do it."

Odisseus doesn't relent. "That's very kind and stupid of him."

"Darling?" interrupts Gertie, inclining her head towards the arena. Every set of eyes in the viewing box follow, to see what the Governor's indicating.

All the chaos and clamor appears to have actually died down some. Destroyed and deactivated vehicles lay in utter smoking ruin all over the arena. One's been rolled fully onto the bombard shield, hanging in suspension a few feet above a scad of fans complaining about their obstructed view. In the center of the ring, the once triumphant Rubadubdub lies upended, its boarding crew spread in circles of roadkill all around. The nominal winner, Green Machine, spins a braindead circle, its green flamethrower sputtering and its engine still active enough to draw the same circle over and over again in the mud with the dead pilot's dragging corpse.

"Is having a winner!" declares Triggan, throwing hands and feelers into the air. "Is supposing I should haul ass down there now, yes?"

"You adoring public awaits," Gertie reminds him, slugging the Votagi on the shoulder hard enough to practically launch him through the window.

"Is most lovely to meet you," Triggan extends to the whole room as he hustles back towards the doorway. "Is having a drink later, yes?"

A chorus of muttered agreement is his only answer before he disappears, with another flutter of wings, through the bulkhead and back into the arena's superstructure.

There's a healthy pause before anyone else speaks, the silence filled by the hooting, cheering and chanting of the crowd.

Nemo points a finger through the entryway after the departing Triggan. "That's..."

"My husband," Gertie confirms with a nod, obviously savoring everyone's confusion and shock. "My third, actually."

"Your third," Odisseus states evenly, remembering well the fate of Captain Rancore, once her first husband and now a piece of bloated space trash floating somewhere in orbit above Abmar.

"Was there a second one in there somewhere?" Nemo wonders, looking around like he might find Gertie's second husband like his missing keys.

Gertie offers a single shoulder shrug. "A real prick and a long story."

Nemo points a thumb back through the doorway, towards the long gone Votagi. "Well, I like him."

"Thanks." Gertie smiles. "Me too."

CHAPTER 25

Gertie makes her grand entrance.

For three minutes and more, she'd lingered behind the appropriate curtain, waiting for a lull in their conversation so that she might draw everyone's fullest attention. Unfortunately for her theatrics, her husband and her guest-of-honor got on perhaps a little too well and the conversational lulls weren't as frequent as she'd like.

When her moment does come, Gertie brushes aside the curtain with a sweeping gesture of both hands. She's rewarded with both pairs of eyes – her husband's great purple orbs and the Menace's slate gray ones – swinging across the room and ogling her entrance.

"Gents," she greets, all casual. True to form, her husband screws his face into a grin, knowing what's to come next. True to form, the Captain is as clueless as a gamorka toad and just blinks, drooling a little from his open mouth.

Those expressions – lascivious grin and vacant stare – hold steady as Gertie thumbs button after button on her massive Trijan officer's coat. The great jangly heap sloughs off her shoulders and into a heap at her feet. The jborra out of the bag, it's a wholly naked Gertie Guspatch – ditrogen scars, prison tattoos, that birthmark on her right thigh that looks like an AV2 suborbital blockader – that pads her way across the room. Once she reaches the cauldron's edge, she daintly dips one toe into the slime.

"Sorry," she apologizes, not even remotely sincere. "Didn't mean to interrupt your conversation."

Triggan, of course, is far from fooled. "Is you not? Is very curious."

"How's the goop?" she wonders, even as she descends, step by step into the soak.

Nemo withdraws a hand from the slime, long tendrils of the stuff clinging to his fingers. "Goopy," is his response, both innocent and slurred enough to betray how strongly it's affecting him.

"That's better," Gertie sighs contentedly as more and more of her body sinks beneath the slime. A sluggish ripple spreads across the cauldron's surface as the goop settles around her shoulders. Gertie inhales deeply of the amalgamated cocktail of narcotics that rises to her nose.

One of Triggan's feelers makes a beckoning gesture and she complies, spacewalking her way through the slurry over towards where her husband reclines. As she does, Triggan returns his attention to the Galactic Menace and cues him with a flick of the other feeler. "Is continuing?"

Soaking is probably the strangest new experience Gertie's been exposed to by her third husband. On Tagi, Triggan's distant homeworld, the preferred method of getting supremely fucked up involved soaking one's entire body in a superheated soup of concentrated narcotics. Despite its obviously unpleasant appearance, soaking was quickly catching fire in this farflung corner of the Quadrant, thanks to Thaksu's extensive bathhouses.

It's exactly the sort of experience – like having sex with someone that grows two prehensile feelers from his upper lip, not to mention the pair of wings – that looks absolutely revolting but only to the uninitiated.

Absorbed through the pores, the blend of herbs and chemicals is twice as strong and works twice as fast as any of the traditional methods of snorting, shooting or sniffing. In addition, each bath could be individually flavored, designed to inspire different effects on its users. A soothe conferred a pleasing numbness. A boost increased adrenaline levels. A muse inspired profound and creative hallucinations.

This particular recipe, known simply as seduce, was concocted by Triggan's very best cooks to render its bathers extremely suggestible, more so than a few bottles of Gitterswitch Gin ever could. As such, the Votagi preferred this blend as a negotiation tactic, a good way to butter up a prospective client before signing on the dotted.

It was practically tailor-made for the final round of negotiations with their guest of honor, the 34th Galactic Menace.

For the past week, The Unconstant Lover's very wanted crew were the very special guests of Thaksu, her quadrant-renowned mudwrecking league and her two generous Governors. They'd kept mostly to the shadows and their ship early on, understandably gunshy after months of all the galaxy's heat coming down on them.

As the week wore on, however, no immediate threats emerged to threaten them. The protection of Gertie and Triggan's operation here held firm and they started to creep from their burrow, to take advantage of all the criminal civilization Thaksu could offer.

Flask, the Captain's supposed cousin, was the first to embrace the drinking, the debauchery and especially the gambling that made Thaksu go round. He was the least wanted and most capable of blending into the hooligan crowd. Embolded by his cousin's show of trust, Nemo followed shortly and wherever Nemo went, Odisseus followed.

The great Ortoki shadow never took part in the festivities, nor did he explicity approve of their occasional public appearances. It was immediately clear that he dogged the Menace's steps merely as bodyguard, rather than willing participant, but Gertie was more than happy to call that a victory all the same.

The bounty hunter Quicksilver was the rarest seen and, to Gertie's estimation, the rarest missed. The two of them had exchanged perhaps ten words in all these years, none of them friendly, and Gertie could care less whether Nemo's angry ex-girlfriend hung around or didn't.

It was the Captain that was her real quarry, the galaxy's certifiably most dangerous individual. Here he was, relying on her hospitality, her protection, and desperate for a buyer for his priceless, unmovable cargo.

Like a wild beast, skittish before humanity, the Galactic Menace was a labor of love to slowly tame. All her millions of unrequited advances unsuccessful so far, Gertie tried a different approach to domesticating this particular specimen; the tried-and-true method of male bonding. Triggan was enough of a Galactic Menace fanboy that he didn't need much prompting to cozy up to Nemo in a way that Gertie, considering their long and colorful history, never could.

It took more than a dozen offers to come and have a soak for Nemo's disgust to wear away. Considering his character, this too was understandable in its own way. The bathhouses were very public, the baths appear pretty gross and there was the unimpeachable fact that he'd be naked, an arm's length and a stew of chemicals away from an equally naked Governor Gertie Guspatch.

Triggan's irrepressable charm, however, could batter down any wall. It had proven too much even for the one that Gertie had erected against matrimony, considering the averted disaster that had been her second husband.

"Oh, I don't know," Nemo explains when prompted, sloshing his hand through the inky black substance that simmers all about him. "I just don't think he's having any fun, you know?"

"Is understanding," Triggan agrees, sagely. "Is not in keeping with his character, no, having fun?"

"No, I s'pose not," the Captain admits, allowing his hand to sink into the goop and staring at the utter lack of ripples this makes.

"This is...?" dangles Gertie as she nuzzles into the sheltering embrace of Triggan's spread arm and wing.

"Is the Ortok," Triggan provides.

"Odi," Nemo supplies, no enthusiasm or even inflection in his voice.

"Is thinking," Triggan explains, gesturing a dripping feeler towards their guest, "his saltbrother is, how you say, being killjoy."

Gertie spikes her eyebrows. "Ah."

"That's not even really how I'd describe it," Nemo makes the point, a look of preteen angst on his face. "It's like, the whole vibe's different now, you know? Like, the energy. Sure, they'd yell at me before but it was all, I don't know, superficial, then. Stupid. Never meant anything."

"Is diferent now?"

"Feels like it means something." There's a degree of melancholy there that Gertie suspects is deeper and truer than whatever the soak's dredged up in him. "I mean, who knows. Maybe everything'll get better once we've actually got a fucking buyer."

Gertie and Triggan are free to exchange a glance while Nemo stares morosely into the depth of the narcotic stew.

"Speaking of which," Gertie transitions, shifting her weight as she shifts the conversation onto another topic. "I've – we've – given your offer a good deal of thought," she starts slowly, hoping to slowly warm him to their counteroffer, "and we're prepared to, with one caveat, accept."

A bubble pops on the surface of the soak before Nemo reacts.

"Accept," he repeats listlessly. "Accept means you accept? That you'll buy the tree?"

"With one caveat," Gertie stipulates, a small smile growing on her face to match the Captain's own.

Astonishment slowly dawns on the Galactic Menace's great moon of a face. "Governor Good Luck Gertrude Gundeck Guspatch," he recites with admiration. "You–"

"Gertie," she reminds him, as ever.

Addled by the soak's vapors, Nemo's only too happy to take the correction. "Governor Good Luck Gertie Gundeck Guspatch," he recites again, with no less admiration. "You know, I'd pretty much lost any hope we were ever gonna move the blooming thing."

"Is your lucky day, yes?" Triggan congratulates, a little astonished himself at Nemo's unexpected outpouring of positivity, so morose mere seconds ago.

"With one caveat," Gertie feels the need to keep reminding everyone.

"Is, for you, I think," Triggan introduces, taking her cue, "an interesti–"

"You're sure," Nemo continues, completely ignoring their tagteam attempts to steer him onto the right course, "you can handle the heat? Like, we sell you this tree and the Consortium ain't gonna be–"

"It's a danger," Gertie acknowledges, "and it's baggage we've taken into consideration. There're a few favors we'd maybe ask you, concerning where you go from here and where the Consortium thinks you might've dumped the thing, but," she shrugs a little, considering Triggan while she says this, "it should go without saying that we wouldn't be conducting any harvesting or moonshining or what-have-you in the public eye."

"Is avoiding the attention," Triggan explains, sweeping a feeler across the private soaking room, "of the bigwigs for years and years, our operation is, no? Is you, Galactic Menace, even knowing of our humble little Thaksu before Gertie contact you?"

"I suppose that's true," Nemo admits. A moment later, a fresh objection comes burbling from his mouth, almost as though he's attempting to dissuade them from buying the thing in the first place. "But, Gertrude, you don't–"

"Gertie."

"But, Gertie, you don't know the first thing–"

"Is 70 million," Triggan announces abruptly and all three stew in the silence that follows. "Is how much we is prepared to pay you."

"Is 70 million," repeats a vacant Nemo.

"Is how much you stand you make," Gertie explains, before he has a chance to run away with the number. "There's the caveat to consider, of course, but, assuming you'd be game for that, you could be making tracks from Thaksu with 2 million more in your pocket than Gella would've put there."

"That's..." Nemo starts to tabulate in his head, "...more than we ask–"

"Is 2 million more," Triggan reiterates, "than you ask for."

"Remember what I said, Nemo," Gertie makes the pitch, appealing to his soak-riddled emotions. "We could make you very happy."

It takes a remarkable stretch of time for this idea to penetrate the Captain. A few deep bubbles rise and pop before Nemo surfaces one hand from the soak and, slime dripping of his fingers, extends it across toward Gertie or Triggan or both. "Deal," he agrees.

His hand lingers there a second, goop sloughing off to splat back into the sludge. Gertie purses her lips and she knows without looking that Triggan's curling his feelers – the Votagi equivalent of same.

"What? Nemo wonders, bringing the hand up to his face and, in the process, smearing slime everywhere. "Is there something on my face?"

"Is the caveat," Triggan informs him, "yet to discuss."

"Oh yeah," Nemo remembers, spreading the sticky stuff between his fingers, unfazed by whatever could be lurking behind that caveat. "What's that?"

"Come to bed with us."

Gertie anticipated all kinds of reactions to this. She'd imagined a blunt refusal. She's imagine shocked terror. She'd imagined a dumbfounded stare. In the inimitable tradition of Nehel Morel, the reaction she does get would have been impossible to predict.

"What would we do there?" Nemo wonders, captivated by the strands of gunk gumming the distance between his spread fingers.

This time, it's Gertie's turn to be dumbfounded. The soak, she realizes, has affected him much more profoundly than they'd thought it would. Thankfully, Triggan is there to pick up the slack. "Is thinking the usual."

They allow the idea some time to sink in, letting the conversation lapse into silence. For nearly a minute, the only sounds are the bubbling cauldron, the ambient crash-and-clamor of the debauchery outside and the sloshing sound of Nemo and his slime-drenched hand. Eventually, the neurons in his brain fire correctly and his hand freezes.

"The three of us," he starts to puzzle out, "in bed," he turns the slowest possible gaze towards the pair of them, where they lounge across the cauldron, "doing the usual." He blinks once. "You mean fucking."

"Is meaning fucking," Triggan confirms, a parent guiding a child to a conclusion.

Nemo screws up his face, some errant piece of logic snagging somewhere in his brain. "Aren't you two married, though?"

"We're married," Gertie scoffs. "We're not boring."

"Is forgiving me, I hope, for saying so," Triggan starts to explain, as delicately as he can. "Is the lover my wife has always desire for but has never attain." Spoken so plainly, Gertie actually starts to blush, a sudden heat in her cheeks, and she's forced to gaze down at the simmering cauldron, like a schoolgirl with her crush. "Is best to consider a toast," Triggan continues, "celebrating a successful business venture."

Gertie sneaks a peek at him, to see how he's absorbing all this. Nemo massages his chin with his hand, inadvertently smearing more sludge across his face. He mulls the idea over much longer than he ever has in the entire history of their relationship. Triggan even gives Gertie a little squeeze on the shoulder, a show of faith that all their efforts are about to pay off.

"You're saying," Nemo seeks to reiterate again, "that you'll buy the tree for 70 million," he screws up his face again, the idea sounding completely preposterous to him, "if I have sex with you?"

"Is inelegant but accurate."

Nemo stares not at them but at the space between the two of them. "That would make me a whore." There's no judgment in his voice at this, simply stating a rational fact.

"Doll," Gertie breaks in, favoring him with an indulgent smile, "that would make you the highest-priced whore in the galaxy."

The Captain extends two fingers, one for each of them, and makes a sudden stipulating gesture. "If I agree–"

Then the chamber's door explodes inward.

In the heartbeat before it happens, Gertie is certain she sees a brilliant orange line, jagged and swiftly struck, slice through the thick thermosteel. The first thing through that door, the moment it crumbles, is the smouldered corpse of Ugbur Two-Tongue. Charged with guarding the door to their private cauldron, the unfortunate Naskren tumbles onto his back with an identical gash, still smoking, carved completely through his midsection. Made a ragdoll in death, his carcass flops awkwardly onto the floor as, through the smoke, their adversaries arrive.

There's no time to commiserate with husband or Menace about what this means or what defensive strategy to take. Gertie Guspatch, once headliner of the Consortium's Most Wanted knows exactly what's about to happen and she's less than an eyeblink to react.

"Down!" she commands in her pirate captain's voice. Trusting Triggan to understand, she grabs Nemo by the hair and yanks him beneath the surface. Praying to all the moons he was quick enough to close his mouth before submerging, she follows him, disappearing into the gunk with a sudden sucking sound.

Beneath the surface, everything is thick as molasses and suffocatingly toxic. They cannot remain down here for more than a moment or two. Through the deadening sludge, Gertie still hears the telltale clatter of a Domino opening fire across the chamber, pockmarking the walls and sometimes the edges of the cauldron. In seconds, their assailant would cross the distance and empty the next clip into the soak, like shooting sporefin in a barrel.

She may very well, Gertie appreciates, have killed them all with this maneuver.

Instead, she searches through the viscous fluid with her hand, groping against the cauldron's side for the release lever. Every second she doesn't find it, Gertie knows there're harnessed boots hustling across the chamber to come and execute them. Finally, by the grace of the moons, Gertie's fingers wrap around the necessary lever and, her lungs straining, she yanks the thing open.

There's a sudden rush, the liquid drains from all around them, sluices out of the cauldron and spills across the chamber's floor. Their ray shield incapable of repelling a tide of toxic goop, the spice ranger is taken wholly by surprise and recoils in disgust, their legs suddenly swamped. Gertie seizes her opening and goes shooting through the opening, sliding on her bare stomach and clambering as fast as she can from the cauldron.

The spice ranger – a hairless Helker, with six ears flapping in panic – loses his balance and splashes into the soak, the feet of his harness suffused with slime. Moving as quickly as she can, Gertie scrambles to Ugbur's corpse, fumbles for his piece and bears down on the prone Helker, his harness unresponsive in the sludge.

The Naskren's sidearm is a bulky, cumbersome, cobbled-together piece but she still manages to squeeze off a pair of shots. One sizzles uselessly in the slime. The second clips the Helker through the roof of the skull, burning his face away in a flash of orange ditrogen.

The ranger flops limp and, in seconds, is swallowed completely by the seduce that keeps pouring from the cauldron's open hatch. For a long moment, Gertie can only hear the sound of her own panting. That's when the rest of the universe comes crashing back into her ears and she can hear what's actually happening outside their private soaking chamber.

Through the shattered remains of the door, Gertie sees utter pandemonium brought down on her humble operation. Where once highrollers and their assorted thugs lounged in cauldrons of soothe and arouse, a battalion of spice rangers now runs amok, making mincemeat of any who stand before them.

Whores of a dozen species and three genders, all covered strategically in slime, go shrieking and scrambling in every direction. Here and there, pockets of armed resistance give brief battle but goons armed with sidearms and shivs are no match for spice rangers with Dominos and heatblades. The air of the bathhouse is thick with hovering rangers, opening fire into the panic with blaring green ditrogen, swooping down harpies to slice and sever with their heatblades.

The whole horrific scene is immediately blocked from view by a great, shaggy silhouette, blotting out the light from the doorway with his bulk. The silhouette growls something in Ortoki and prowls into the room, stomping past Gertie without a glance or a second thought to her.

"The fuck's happening?" she questions him. Her question's completely stupid; she knows he won't answer, she knows she can't understand him and she knows exactly what's happening outside.

In three swift moves, Odisseus has reached into the mostly drained cauldron, yanked free his saltbrother and thrown his naked body over his shoulder. The Galactic Menace, leaking seduce from his open mouth, makes no objection as he's carried, like a sack of grain, through the chamber.

As they pass the random pipe where he'd hung his clothes, he scrambles to collect his things but Odisseus doesn't stop. In the end, he only manages to snag his duster and his gunbelt, his pants, shirt and underpants landing in a slime-soaked heap on the ground.

Still numb from their sudden reversal of fortune, Gertie has no words to shout at him as they disappear through the open door. Nothing she says would stop him dragging the Galactic Menace away, no screamed apology or indignation or anything at he who brought the wrath of the moons down on everything they'd built here.

She has only enough time to turn and exchange a bewildered glance with Triggan, newly emerged from the soak, before they need to start hatching escape plans of their own.

Odisseus knew this would happen.

He knew that, sooner or later, all the fun and games on Thaksu would shrivel up and that bounty hunters or spice rangers or tax collectors could come tromping out here in force to capture their collective asses. He'd even guessed a few of the specifics. He'd probably be dragging Nemo out by the earlobe. Moira, sulking on the ship, would probably be of little help to him. Within minutes, Flask would probably appear, pants around his ankles, all shocked and alarmed and with nothing to contribute.

To look at the screaming, absurd panic of everyone around him, one would think Odisseus a psychic, to have made such a prediction. Instead, he simply had common sense, a sixth sense that might as well be supernatural, considering how absent it was amongst pretty much everybody out here in Bad Space.

Slimy, naked Nemo is muttering something over the Ortok's shoulder as Odisseus snarls and swats his way through the frantic gamblers, scrambling to escape Gertie's pleasure halls and flee to their spaceships. For the most part, he's managed to avoid any actual spice rangers, against all odds, they're smuggled safely among the alien crowds a moment. Again, however, the Ortok's acute common sense tells him they'll inevitably be discovered, sooner or later.

One step removed from the bathhouses, the gambling hall is utter disarray. Walkeens and greenskins and Cyngoks go running in all directions, their collected winnings spilling out of overful arms with each step. The spacious chamber has become a crowded obstacle course of upturned tables, stray holochips and rampaging criminals – some gunshot, some dismembered, a few actively on fire.

As he struggles through the press of bodies, Odisseus has spotted his preferred exit, the one that'll open onto the southern landing fields and eventually, the Ortok hopes, The Unconstant Lover. Shouldering and stomping his way along, he's not remotely surprised when Flask materializes from the crowd.

"We're fooking rumbled!" he announces pointlessly, shoving loose cash into every available pocket on his windbreaker. "Where's the–"

"Here," Odisseus grunts and shoves past him, trusting him to fall into the path the growling Ortok carves through the chaotic mess.

"Oh," Flask remarks, noticing the slime-streaked naked body tossed over the Ortok's hairy shoulder for the first time. "Howdy, coz," Flask greets to the Captain, his leather duster flapping back and forth with each step. "The fook's all your clothes?"

"They got dropped," the Captain explains groggily, pointing back the way they'd came with his pistol, "back there someplace. My pants. My shirt. My undies."

Flask spikes an eyebrow at this. "What's with him?"

"All hopped up on Votagi narcotics," Odisseus offers by way of explanation, elbowing his way past a Tracath that's so hairy, it's basically a shambling mound of white fur. "Had the all the brat boiled off him."

"Huh," remarks Flask, taking a moment from all the bloodshed and insanity to point at Nemo's exposed back. "Tattoo's getting pretty big."

Odisseus stops dead, about to smack the shaggy Tracath where he assumes the head must be, when the realization occurs to him. "The keys."

Flask scowls. "The what?"

"The keys. The spaceship keys." Odisseus is frantic, visions of heat stroke, Fernhollow and pitched battle in his mind. "Nemo, where're the spaceship keys?"

"Uh..." is Nemo's very reassuring response.

"Check the jacket," Odisseus orders Flask, standing still amid the swirling press of panicked species all around. "Check all the pockets."

Needing no further bidding, Flask hustles around the Ortok's back and takes hold of Nemo's duster. The Captain makes some wordless protest but, from the frantic sounds of the leather creasing, Odisseus assumes Flask doesn't listen. Odisseus, meanwhile, holds position, growling away a greenskin that comes too close and shoulder-checking a Prydak so hard, they crash backwards into an open vat of sizzling soak.

"I hear them!" Flask announces, shaking the jacket so that it produces a jingling sound. "They've gotta be in here someplace, like!"

"We're not going anywhere," Odisseus makes the ultimatum, finally earning a respectable berth from the surrounding screaming masses, "until I have visual on those keys."

This is followed by another few seconds of searching, grown increasingly more desperate. "How many fooking," Flask growls through gritted teeth, "pockets're in this bloody thing?"

"Everybody's yelling," Nemo groans.

"Here!" Flask announces triumphantly, shoving a familiar key-ring into the air. Odisseus throws a glance behind to see the "I Heart Takioro" keychain that dangles from Flask's fist and that's all the more confirmation he needs.

"And we're moving," Odisseus announces as he starts forward again, not waiting for Flask to catch up.

"Moons," Flask remarks, hustling behind and shoving the fistful of keys into his pocket. "Can you fookin' imagine? Good thing we checked."

The crowd parts a moment like a breaching wave and Odisseus is granted a momentary glimpse of the exit, maybe a dozen yards ahead. His renewed purpose is cut short, however, when he catches sight of who stands astride the door. A Xhorian, Domino-armed and harness-strapped, stands a dozen yards from Odisseus and, even now, is leveling his rifle for a killshot.

Surprised by his own nimbleness, Odisseus spins away, simultaneously shoving Flask back with a paw as green laserfire blisters past. An unlucky purpleskin takes the short burst in the torso and falls, screaming, to the thermosteel at Flask's feet.

"How many?" Flask mutters, craning past Odisseus to glance the door and yanking loose his own firearm.

"More, now," Odisseus groans as the Xhorian's triangular mouth starts yammering into his visor's headset. A quick sweep of the gambling hall reveals another pair of rangers – humanoids both and hovering on flamejets both – swerve from their search to converge towards their position.

"New plan?" proposes Flask, more a question than an actual proposition.

"That door," improvises Odissues, pointing a claw across the room, towards an opening in the western wall made from a pair of deactivated blast doors. No sooner has he done this than a second barrage of green ditrogen sizzles the fur clean from a strip of his pointed arm. Swallowing the pain, Odisseus stoops and plows his way through the crowd.

"Raise Moira on the comm," he commands over his shoulder. "Tell her to take off, come meet us on the western side of the compound."

"Don't let Moira fly my ship!" shrieks a panicked Nemo.

"Nobody's gonna fly your ship," Odisseus assures him. He adds, as quietly as he can in all the clamor, to Flask. "She'll use autopilot."

"Don't let autopilot fly my ship!"

They're interrupted by a circle of screams from all around the fleeing pirates. Bolts of ditrogen streak down like vengeful lightning, landing amid the crowd to wound and outright slay anyone they touch. A quick glance over the shoulder not draped with saltbrother reveals the pair of spice rangers, hovering some distance on their trail, their Dominos afire.

Odisseus forces his way through the crowd, weaving as erratically as he can, the ruffians all around him smote by laserfire. Flask follows suit, covering his head with his hand, like this'll somehow deflect ditrogen, as he screams into his open comm channel.

"Quicksilver! We need what," he glances to Odisseus for confirmation, "evac or summat? Come fooking get us!"

There's a pause on the frequency, long enough for Odisseus to trample an unsuspecting Vossa from behind. "You want me to," Moira wonders tentatively, "fly the ship? To where?"

"Autopilot," Flask's quick to shoot back. "Captain was very clear on that."

"Don't let autopilot fly my ship!"

"The western side of the compound," Odisseus provides, somewhat more helpfully. "Lower the ramp, too – this probably ain't gonna be too clean."

There's a sigh on the other end of the line as Odisseus throws his body, passenger and all, into one of the shallow alcoves on either side of the bulkhead. "Bounty hunters?"

The Ortok swings a paw around, as laserfire pockmarks the wall inches from where he's hidden, attempting to feebly slap the door control. "Nemo," he beseeches his much better positioned saltbrother, "can you–"

"Oh, sure," Nemo replies cheerfully. "Happy to help."

"Spice rangers," Flask replies into the comm. "No idea how in the fook they found us."

"How in the fuck did it take them this long?" Odisseus asks instead.

As Nemo gropes and fumbles with door controls so simple a trained arlaxi could figure them out, the spice rangers close the distance, landing a little ways away. Unable to find purchase with their firearms, they're both sheathed with a quick motion and the dreaded heatblades extend from both wrists.

"Huh," remarks Moira through the comm. "Weird that nothing woulda come through on my end."

"Any blooming century now," Odisseus growls to Nemo.

"Might wanna hop on them sensors, then, too, eh?" Flask suggests. "See exactly how fooked're we?"

"Yeah," Moira agrees acidly, "lemme grow an extra arm, then."

Nemo's aghast. "She can do that?"

That's precisely the moment that the bulkhead doors grind open with a tortuous sound. The Ortok's relief is immediately shattered when he realizes what's actually behind that door. The sound of roaring, backfiring and exploding engines fills Odisseus with a sudden sinking dread.

Demonic vehicles, mongrelized bastards born in the deepest layers of engineer's hell, smash and crash and rip one another apart on a muddy arena of spilled fuel and spilled blood. The defeated carcasses, smoke coughing from their grills and engines whining pitifully, are strewn across their path, creating a gauntlet for the remaining competitors to navigate. The stands are sparsely populated, though, less than a hundred total spectators here to watch this match of seemingly little consequence.

"The qualifying round," hisses Flask to the Ortok's right. "There's gotta be another–"

They both turn to consider the gambling hall and any other potential exits they might take. Instead, they see two spice rangers, a yard and closing from heatblade distance.

"Nope!" resolves Odisseus and, taking a deep breath, sprints into the midst of the demolition derby.

He's not taken three steps before, hurtling unseen from the Ortok's left, a bellowing monster of a driftdozer, drenched in crimson paint and studded with whirring buzzsaws, races past, nearly reducing Odisseus and his saltbrother into red spray. The name Meat Grinder flashes before the Ortok's eyes before the whole massacring mess crashes into another less fearsome wrecker.

Looking both ways, Odisseus slogs further forward, all senses alert in every directions for the next death machine that's liable to bear down on them.

The smell of burning carbon petro, the thunder of engines, the squeal of thermosteel grinding against thermosteel jogs something in Nemo's scattered brain. "I wanna do it."

"You're doing it," Odisseus assures him, certainly too quiet to be heard.

Ahead looms – the first of many hurdles between here and escape – a the gutted ruin of a capsized gravelmulcher. Odisseus clambers inside the hulk's open belly, moving awkwardly to keep Nemo safe from the forest of jagged metal he navigates. Here, the Ortok stops to catch his breath, calm his quivering paws and survery the surroundings for the next hurdle.

He's somewhat surprised when Flask, all jittery agility, slides into the destroyed cabin right alongside him. "We ain't outta the shite yet," he confirms between panting breaths.

"Really?" snaps Odisseus gazing around in surprise at their ravaged surroundings. "This isn't the ship? I coulda sworn–"

Then a shivering spear of flame, vibrating with sheer heat, slices the air between them. The strike came from above, shearing through shoddy thermosteel and missing Odisseus by the whiskers. On instinct, they both leap aside, to avoid the next few stabs of the spice ranger, squatting atop the gravelmulcher's cabin and going to town with his heatblades.

By some good fortune, Odisseus and Nemo reach the mud safely, no spice ranger obstructing their escape. It's Flask that comes face-to-face with a descending ranger, her heatblade extending. Odisseus shrieks something animalistic, afraid his childhood comrade will meet a fate too similar to Two-Bit. He's prepared to leap back through the gravelmulcher and save him when Flask, quite unexpectedly, saves his own life.

When Flask's feet hit the mud, he was close enough to hump the spice ranger's ray shield. As the heatblade swings back around to impale him, Flask moves a little faster and his weapon only requires him to click a trigger. The snub of his pistol sneaks just inside the ray shield and his single shot blasts the humanoid ranger in the shoulder.

Her counterstrike interrupted, the Consortium's finest staggers a few feet backward, gritting her teeth against the pain. Then Meat Grinder, reversing at top speed, flattens her to the earth.

Flask scrambles back through the gravelmulcher to join his crewmates, green laserfire pelting the mud all around him. Odisseus scoops up the Captain, tosses him over his shoulder and, soon as he's joined by Flask, makes a mad scramble for the next piece of wreckage. He knows he won't make it, however, the spice ranger still atop the gravelmulcher ready to gun them down in moments.

Instead, Odisseus is tossed fifteen feet forward by the kinetic energy of a massive explosion behind them. Slamming onto his stomach, Odisseus yelps in pain and surprise, throwing a glance behind to see what in all the moons just happened.

There's no gravelmulcher or spice ranger behind them. Instead, there's an enormous blackened crater, steaming green smoke. What could possibly have made such an impact, Odisseus has no immediate idea, until, moments later, it happens again. A chunk of the stadium, a good distance above them all, is struck by a godlike bolt of green ditrogen from somewhere far above, obliterating the thermosteel stands in a puff of green gas.

"I feel like," comments Nemo in a moment of clarity, "that's bad."

"Two things," Moira informs them, crackling through Flask's comm. "First, autopilot is–"

"Blue button," Odisseus replies on instinct, "beneath red panel. Upper inside of pilot's dash."

Moira's mood seems to brighten ever so slightly, hearing this. "Second," she continues, matter-of-factly, "we're being bombarded from orbit again."

"That so?" Odisseus wonders as he gazes up to consider the rain of capital-class laserfire that streaks through Thaksu's crowded atmosphere to crater the earth in every direction. Not every blast that pours down from on high lands within sight. Those that do, hitting the stadium's shaky stands or occasionally impacting the actual arena, do so with devastating, demolishing effect.

"By who?" wonders a dumbstruck Flask, also staring up at their incoming destruction.

"Make an educated guess," suggests Moira, the sound of the ship's engines rumbling in the background. "With all this buhoxshit in atmo, that's the best I can do. Think he's up to the task," comes Moira's next pointed question, "of flying us outta here?"

As one, Odisseus and Flask look from the sky to the Captain and try to assess his ability to fly a spaceship or stand on two legs or wear clothes. When they do, they discover he's sitting fully upright, he's pointing behind them and he's suddenly awash in a pair of headlights. "Hey," he warns them calmly. "Look out."

Quick as he can, Odisseus slams both humanoids painfully to the ground with a paw planted in each chest. The shouts are drowned out by the thrum of what sounds like a Grav9 driftmotor, firing on all cylinders, screaming past, scant inches above them.

Once it's past, Odisseus doesn't have a chance to glance up and confirm his theory about the mudwrecker's engine. It doesn't make a dozen yards before it catches a glancing blow from a stray capital-class bolt. The vehicle, Grav9 and all, is destroyed in a column of showering dirt and blinding green ditrogen.

Dirt clods and hunks of thermosteel thud to the ground all around them. Flask makes a profound observation. "I would like to leave here."

"You're in luck," Moira Quicksilver announces over the comm. Then, distinct from all the din of destruction and death and derby, there comes another sound. The sound is so pleasingly familiar that Odisseus, in a fit of madness, pricks up his whiskers in an Ortoki smile. Rising over the stadium's flanged and flaming walls comes the sound of The Unconstant Lover's jetboosters.

"I'm not even about to ask," Moira clarifies, "why the bleeding shit you're right in the middle of the demoliti–"

Something takes Moira completely aback, stopping her smug superiority routine in its tracks. Odisseus is instantly terrified that she'll, for whatever reason, fly away and leave them.

"–where's his clothes what the fuck."

High above, capital-class laserfire streaking past her, that sweet IZ36 Briza Light Freighter bobs into view. She hovers a moment between the stadium's struts before she engages jetboosters to, Odisseus imagines, swoop gracefully down into the arena, boarding ramp yawning welcomingly open. This is what he imagines, of course, but it's not exactly what happens.

It becomes immediately clear that The Unconstant Lover has someone else behind the helm. With a little hiccup, she bumps into the stadium's upper lip and proceeds to scrape her entire starboard side against the thermosteel with a cascade of sparks.

"Autopilot," Moira is screaming. "Autopilot, I swear! Autopilot!"

"Fuck you, autopilot!" barks Nemo, shaking a fist cartoonishly at the darkening sky as the Briza's shadow shelters them overhead.

CHAPTER 26

Moira is tossed unceremoniously starboard by a sudden shudder of the ship. With as much grace as she can, she clutches the wall of the abovedecks corridor, attempting to decide whether that was a laser blast, a collision or simply another swerve of the ship. She lingers there another second, trying to ratify that they weren't instantly destroyed by whatever it was – ditrogen, scrap metal or incompetence. Still alive and the whole ship around her, she hustles forward, headed straight for the gundeck.

If that drug-addled moron was really about to kill them all, Moira Quicksilver sure as shit would die strapped to her Antagonist, gun literally blazing.

When the three of them came scrambling aboard, manic and wild-eyed, Moira made the conscious decision to ask very few questions about what had happened. She didn't ask what the situation on the ground was. She didn't ask why they'd wandered into the middle of a demolition derby. She didn't ask where in the bloom all Nemo's clothes went.

Thankfully, by the time they'd passed in the hall, someone had the foresight to throw his duster over his shoulders. That same someone hadn't the foresight, Moira was horrified to discover, to actually button the duster.

With all speed, Moira made for the gundeck and a view much less grotesque.

Three more times between corridor and topturret, Moira is tossed this way and that, most frighteningly once on the access ladder, where she's her most vulnerable. In short order, she's clambering into her cherished bucket seat, fumbling with safety restraints and surveying her surroundings.

This gives her pause.

The airspace all around The Unconstant Lover is thronged with floating and exploding junk. Shorn machine parts, busted mining equipment, the hollowed-out husks of moons-know-what, spin and collide and scrape against each other. The sky above Thaksu is a moving minefield, an ever-shifting maze of potential explosions, lurking behind every false move and every miscalculation. Through gaps in the tangle, Moira can catch glimpses of Thaksu's pockmarked surface below and even occasional flickers of the distant stars far above.

All this Moira anticipated. She's known the atmospheric exit from Thaksu would be a complete crapshoot, as perilous as their arrival. Now, however, their captain is hopped up on bathtub narcotics and there's a capital-class cruiser unloading a planetary broadside at them.

Every few seconds, there's a blinding green flash from above, so bright Moira must squint and look away. One moment, the freighter's rocketing around the side of gigantic decommissioned drilldrifter. The next, there's a brilliant green flash and all that remains is a few scraps of blackened thermosteel, spinning idly through the atmosphere.

Once again, all The Unconstant Lover wants to do is leave the atmosphere and all the Gitter Consortium wants to do is obliterate them from orbit.

Then the freighter slams into a hunk of floating wreckage and all Moira's bones are practically liquefied from the sheer whiplash.

"Bombard shield!" she snarls, her safety straps fastened a moment before the impact.

"Well, that's the question," argues Odisseus over the comm. "Bombard against the wreckage or ray against the laserfire?"

"Gotta be ray," counters Flask. "One of them shots," he times this observation perfectly as another blast tears through the surrounding scrap metal, "is gonna be the end of us. Few of them flotsams or jetsams," he continues a little too casually, considering the thousands of jagged shards of thermosteel all around them, "the hull'll handle."

This inspires a growl of consternation from Odisseus on behalf of the hull and how much it can handle.

"How's about," Moira starts to suggest, when the disembodied arm of a driftcrane sails by, inches from crashing into the topturret and hurling her into open space, "we try to actually, I don't know, dodge a few of them, then?"

"Sorry," is a woozy-sounding Nemo's honest reply. "I'm feeling sorta dizzy."

"Oh, okay," Moira allows bitterly. "Don't worry about it, then."

"Wow. Thanks for understanding," a disturbingly sincere Nemo replies, before he crashes abruptly into another piece of trash, a loose scrap of unpeeled hull plate.

Soon as the shaking's stopped, Odisseus is howling over the comm. "You can't use sarcasm with him right now! The fucking soak's fried his brain and he's gonna take you literally!"

"Well, excuse blooming me!" Moira snaps back. She decides to take matters, along the reins of her Antagonist, in her own hands. "Guess it's all up to Auntie fucking Moira again."

The firing chamber buzzes with anticipation before Moira lets fly. She draws a bead on the nearest piece of space junk – some shattered satellite or another – and, a few canisters later, it ruptures in green sunburst. The force of the blast even spins away nearby wreckage and clears a path for the unobstructed Lover to race through.

There's no time to celebrate when she's swinging the turret around and choosing a new target. An orbital backloader is dismantled by precision strikes here and there and here, leaving only smoke and dust for Nemo's unsubtle piloting to plow through. Something ignites the spare fuel cells aboard the next shapeless hulk that Moira targets. The ensuing explosion is both fantastic and mostly deflected by the Lover's ray shield. An onslaught of ditrogen punches a hole clean through a massive sheet of thermosteel, large enough to steer a Briza Light Freighter through with only minimal scraping at the edges.

This allows what's left of Nemo's rotted brain to focus on the task at hand – avoiding those ship-destroying laser blasts. Thanks to the bright telltale flashing and Flask's terrified screams, the Captain's squirrelly attention is kept focused long enough to stay a little ahead of their destruction.

To dodge the next barrage, his innate piloting instincts spin the freighter hard to port and straight towards a spray of scrap metal. With a fierce pivot of her hips, Moira's able to swing her Antagonist rattingly around and rip them into small shreds that dink harmlessly against the Lover's hull.

"Can I ask you guys a question?" posits a suddenly contemplative Nemo. "I think I need some advice."

Not thinking, Moira makes her typical snarky reply. "By all means."

The Ortok's rebuke is sharp and bestial. "No sarca–"

"Thanks for understanding." Nemo dips the Lover a hair to allow another great green laser bolt to burn past the ship and especially past the topturret. "So, Gertie offered us 70 million even, you know, to buy the sapling–"

"She did what?" Flask spits.

"–but she also said that I had to quote unquote come to bed with her and Triggan?" This is met with a pause of legendary proportions. "Her husband, right?" Nemo clarifies, for no one's benefit. "With the wings and the funny accent and the things on his fa–"

"And what," a reluctant Odisseus strives to ask, "did you say?"

"See, that's thing," Nemo starts to explain, "'cause I didn't really say anything, 'cause that's pretty much when the spice–"

"We gotta proximity spike," blurts Flask, the appropriate alarm bleeping in the background. "Another ship, maybe ninety degrees off the starboard."

"I got visual," Moira confirms, glancing that direction as she hauls the turret around.

Only spitting distance to starboard, there's another vessel. She's smaller, in much better repair and of some specific make and model that Odisseus could certainly identify and Moira certainly didn't care. Her bombard shield engaged, she navigates the tangle of space junk as best she can and braves the occasional capital-class blast that's thrown her way.

Fast as Flask can report them, Moira can spot them, smuggled among all the other moving metallic parts in Thaksu's atmosphere. A fleet of scrappy, third-hand ships – the spacecraft of the sector's gambling scum – race The Unconstant Lover to the Warp Gate. While not the Galactic Menace, the local riffraff are no more eager to be caught or killed in this random Consortium raid than the galaxy's most wanted are.

Those few ships not blessed with Nemo's dumb luck, however, quickly meet their comeuppances. For the crime of flying with only bombard shields activated, the odd fleeing freighter is caught in a blast from above and reduced to a spinning, fiery carcass. Crashing into adjacent trash or occasionally adjacent craft is a brief, horrific and illustrative death, a sharp education for Moira about the consequences of bad luck or bad steering.

For every ship that gets pulverized, another rises to take its place. The whole way up to Thaksu's high orbit, The Unconstant Lover is accompanied by a loose, unofficial escort of other scumbags.

"Do you guys think I should do it?" Nemo proposes to the ship as a whole. "'cause like, if you think about it, I'm pretty sure when they said quote unquote come to bed, they were really talking about–"

"Do I think you should fook that nice lady?"

"And her husband," Moira reminds them both. "With the things on his face."

This doesn't seem to bother Flask one bit. "Bloom me out, for 70 million credits, I'd fook you and your husband. You get me?"

Odisseus is taken aback. "Is that supposed to be a reference to me?"

"Hey, that's really nice of you," Nemo appreciates. "I don't really have 70 million credits to give you, if we did fuck, but the offer is–"

"Is there still time," wonders Odisseus, "to turn around? Do you think it's still on the table?"

"We're outta time for turning around," Moira regrets to inform them. "Dead ahead."

Open space is mere dottibles away. Moira can see its comforting blackness in the seams between the space trash ahead. The obstacles start to thin, the planet's gravitational grip lessens and soon, they'll be free of Thaksu and that much closer to the Warp Gate and escape.

First, of course, Moira must shoot their way to freedom.

Right as she's choosing her first target, a broadside from the Consortium cruiser destroys every loose piece of trash – the skeletons of beam drills and moongrinders and driftsleds – that floats between the Lover and open space. For one moment, everything in Moira's line sight becomes an orange-and-green hellscape. When the proverbial dust settles, there's a fine mist of razor-sharp thermosteel racing towards them.

There's no time to aim. Her bombard shields disengaged, The Unconstant Lover is about to be nickel-and-dimed to destruction – unless Moira and her Antagonist can save her.

One hand snaps open the cylinder and prepares another ammunition chain. The other hand and a guiding knee open fire, laying about in great sweeps of the Antagonist, hoping to spread a fine green net across the Briza's bow. She's rewarded by little pops, her ditrogen finding marks on each little fleck of shrapnel coming their way.

Of course it's impossible to catch them all. Drawing lines of sparks and peeled paint, the flecks she did miss claw against the Lover's triple-thick hull to little effect. The real danger comes when one impacts against the topturret's viewport. A single rivet imbeds with a little chipping sound in the plexishield and there it freezes, framed by a corona of cracks that reach out in every direction.

Moira too freezes and stares. The Antagonist's fire dies and her body goes rigid, her life hanging in the balance of that little screw. As Moira watches unblinking, the cracks spread no further and, for the moment, she's safe from an asphyxiating death.

When she returns from her personal peril to the general peril, Thaksu's junk field is behind them. Open stars span outwards before The Unconstant Lover, interrupted by two notable landmarks.

The first is the Warp Gate, that distant hoop that the rest of the galaxy beckons them through. Without a dedicated navigator aboard, the Warp Gate was their only hope of true escape from Thaksu and the clutches of the second notable landmark.

A Consortium Corporate Cruiser, that very same outline that haunted them from the skies above Gi, drifts across their view and moves to intercept their straight shot to the Warp Gate. Vital information scrolls across Moira's panels, naming the ship the CGF Logistic and one of the Quadrant's native mercantile envoys. Here to play bad cop, the Logistic must have borne the nearest spice rangers the Consortium could possibly scramble, which explains how a naked and zonked out Nemo could've escaped their clutches.

The moment they emerge from the trash cloud, the Logistic's generous supply of broadside batteries doesn't ignominiously gun them down. This, Moira supposes, is thanks to the protecting halo of fleeing freighters, rattletraps and jalopies that emerges at the same time they do. In moments, Moira knows, the gunnery crews will decide that plastering all these vagabond spacecraft will do the Quadrant a favor and open their fire.

Before they make that decision, the Lover needs to cut a very hasty retreat.

"Coordinates," Moira is barking into the comm, "soon as we can raise them–"

"Who're you blooming talking to? Me?" demands Flask after too long a pause. "Are you suggesting I abandon the fooking shield station here, so's I might run off and–"

Nemo won't countenance this. "Oh, no, Two-Bit. We need you at the shield station."

Flask's response to this is nonverbal but still somehow strong enough to register on comms.

"Should I be heading to the warp room, then?" Odisseus starts to volunteer.

"Somebody fucking should," Moira makes the somehow ambiguous point.

"Then, do we have any idea for a heading? Nothing's nearby enoug–"

Her eyes fixated on that faraway Warp Gate, Moira notices its activation lights before even, seconds later, Flask reports that it's coming online. He prattles off some warning in his Gallwegian brogue but Moira's attention is occupied solely by what actually comes through the Warp Gate.

The impossibly long silhouette of a TFD 545 Pylon-class Capital Warship pops into existence, vomited through the Gate at reality-bending speed. The powerhouse of the Imperium Interstellar Navy is joined, moments later, by the rest of its friends. Four Chaperone–Class Capital Clippers shimmer into view around the vastly larger Pylon. The gang's not yet all here, of course, as a pair of Overwhelm-class Mobile Fighter Gantries, soon to be swarming with Spurs, warp in last.

Where, seconds later, there was empty space, there now awaits a full fleet of the Imperium Interstellar Navy, seemingly panting from hustling over here so fast.

To the starboard stretches a Consortium Corporate Cruiser, here to punish The Unconstant Lover and collect or destroy her stolen sapling. To the port is arrayed all the might the Endless Imperium could bring to bear upon the Galactic Menace at such short notice. In between, at the end of this hellish gauntlet, is that Warp Gate, the only door still open to escape.

The next few seconds are flooded with external comm chatter. Admirals and executives, captains and financiers are bickering with each other, attempting to determine who outranks whom. In one ear, the Consortium is asserting its property rights and in the other, the Imperium is ordering an immediate ceasefire in their august presence. Soon, Admiral Dzerric of the Pincer Maneuver, the 27th Fleet's flagship, is threatening to invalidate the Consortium's ability to trade in the Inner Sectors. Captain Jessaline of the Logistic responds by accusing the Admiral and all she represents of committing war crimes.

Meanwhile, The Unconstant Lover's internal comms are also flooded with chatter, no less officious or galaxy-shaking.

"Holy fooking shite," Flask is still repeating. "Holy fooking shite. Holy fooking shite."

"It's still processing!" Odisseus snaps, all prickly. "I'm looking at that blooming little hourglass thing!"

"There's no way they were scrambled this fast," is Moira's assertion, attempting to make sense of the intergalactic incident that's playing out before them. "We're talking about separate rats, right? Somebody tips off the Consortium, somebody else tips off the–"

"I think I'mana do it," Nemo resolves. "I think I'mana fuck Gertie and her husband with the things on his face."

"Holy fooking shite."

"There!" announces Odisseus. "We have contact with the Warp Gate!" Everyone aboard the Lover is silenced by this, only the external comm continuing to prattle with more accusations between the galaxy's superpowers. "Says we're outta range to establish a firm coagulation," the Ortok reports, crestfallen.

"Meaning?" Moira, no warp engineer, demands to know.

Odisseus, also no warp engineer, nonetheless renders his judgment. "We gotta get closer."

"Roger that," Nemo confirms and pumps the clutchlever.

Taken as much by surprise as her crew, The Unconstant Lover surges forward and, after a sporadic start, is speeding into the gulf between the two opposing lines of capital ships. Moira doesn't have a chance to offer argument or complaint before movement catches her right and left peripherals. The other ships, the hordes fleeing the Consortium's raid on Thaksu, have happened upon the same idea as the Lover and made a break for the Warp Gate.

As a loose, uncertain crown do the scummy spaceships of Gertie's gambling empire creep into the territory contested by two of the galaxy's most impregnable navies. Without a better idea, Moira mans the Antagonist – for all the good it'll do against the Logistic or the Pincer Maneuver – and hopes they can squeeze past while both sides're still tangled in bureaucracy.

"Holy fooking shite," Flask keeps muttering, like a skipping hologram.

"Shields'd be nice," Odisseus has the presence of mind to propose. "Sure wish our shield operator could pull his head outta his bloomhole for a second."

Moira admits he's got a point. In all the confusion, the ray shields'd been neglected. Angled double forward to protect against orbital bombardment, they'd currently be little protection against either adversary, stretched out to either side.

All the Ortok's plea does, however, is supremely confuse the Captain. "I'm looking at Two-Bit's head right now," he mentions skeptically. "Doesn't look like it's up his bloomhole."

"Sarcasm," Moira's only too happy to chide, "remember?"

"And how're you proposing I do that?" Flask wonders, snapping back to reality. "I angle double starboard, they blast us from port. I angle double port, they blast us–"

"An even spread?" Moira suggests, knowing that's not enough.

"One layer's never gonna stand against a capital-class battery like that," Flask shoots down, as she knew he would. "Might as well cover our heads and hide under our blooming desks."

"But," Nemo starts to object, "I gotta steer the ship."

"And that's a very important job," Odisseus is certain to assure him. "One we need you to keep doing, no matter what anybody says, okay?"

"Shields, anybody?" Moira reminds them, scanning the gundecks of both Logistic and Pincer Maneuver, far too close for comfort on either side.

"I can give you an even spread, like," Flask tells her, seeming to wash his hands of their fate. "Your explosion," he resolves, spreading the ray shields evenly across the hull.

No sooner he done this, the Briza encased in protective energy, than the Logistic opens fire.

"Evasive!" hollers Moira, the moment she sees those green winking lights. In an unbroken line, all along the crusier's starboard side, the broadside batteries ignite. Some instinct in Nemo's soaked brain registers Moira's shouted command and the Lover spins and weaves as the first fusilade streaks in.

The closest bolt grazes the freighter's underside by inches. Two or three of her fellow freighters are not as lucky, their own ray shields meager defense against such mighty firepower. Blown to bits, shrapnel showers The Unconstant Lover again but, by some idiot chance, she manages to scrape past with only cosmetic damage and a little bruising on her ray shield.

Moira is more amazed when she discovers that they weren't the actual target.

The Pylon shrugs off the barrage, Moira knowing from long experience how thick those shields are. One of the Mobile Gantries lists a little, inky black smoke streaming from a support strut. It's the Chaperones that fare the worst, their shields juddering and a few giving out entirely. The unluckiest of those four takes three hits, her shields and even pieces of her hull blasted away. At a tortuously slow speed, she starts to explode from the inside.

Sillence seems to envelop Thaksu's entire orbit, the gravity of that act of aggression sinking into everyone present.

"Um," Flask is the first to venture, "was that supposed to happen?"

"They weren't aiming for us," Moira swears, hardly able to believe it.

"Less talking," Odisseus growls, "more–"

However Odisseus would've finished that sentence, no one else would ever know. There's a coruscation of red flashes, running three parallel lines down the seemingly infinite length of the Pylon's port broadside. The Imperium's opened their own fire and all the ray shielding in the galaxy couldn't protect their target.

Once again, The Unconstant Lover spins scrapingly away from utter oblivion. The ray shields, while only glanced, still take a grievous blow, their yammering alarm filling the ship. Once again, many ships in the gambling horde cannot avoid all that cannon fire and are reduced to their atoms. Once again, the true target is no crappy cargo freighter but rather the opposing capital cruiser and the Logistic does not take its beating well.

Hundreds of capital-class blasts find purchase on her ray shield, flickering and fizzling the thing within an inch of its life. In the end, that shield somehow still stands, though it seizes spasmodically and is one stiff fart away from giving out entirely. The sheer force of all those impacts, however, literally pushes the enormous capital crusier back, a runty child shoved by a school yard bully.

There's another momentary respite here, time enough for the Logistic to recover from its beating, for gunnery crews on both sides to prime another salvo and for The Unconstant Lover to find herself smack dab in the middle of the crossfire.

"Shields?" squawks Flask meekly, right before they both open fire again.

An imperfect net, woven of red and green ditrogen, closes around The Unconstant Lover. Some threads carve craters into three fleeing freighters in Moira's immediate line of vision. She must bring the Antagonist to bear on their shards, threatening to puncture through their useless ray shields and shear through their unprotected hull.

Other threads, sizzingly green, buffet and bump against the Lover, rattling her bones beneath her failing ray shields. Every time the Briza is jostled this way and that, the rivet imbedded in the turret's plexishield shifts, spreading its cracks a little further.

There's not time to contemplate her own mortality, however. Instead, a Chaperone clipper puts on a sudden burst of speed and moves to intercept them, quartet of starboard batteries firing on all cylinders.

Nemo's flipping the Lover this way and that, Flask screaming about shield strength all the while, when their guardian angel arrives. An out-of-control freighter, her engine bank smoking, comes careering in, aimed headlong at the Chaperone's bridge. The ensuing fireball is large enough to send fingers of flame groping along Moira's topturret but not so large that Nemo can't circle around it, the two crashed spaceships passing fast on the starboard side.

Boosters overhauling, The Unconstant Lover banks harshly starboard to avoid colliding with the actual Pylon. All the Pincer Maneuver's cityscape stretches out on the port side. Like the Exacting Counterattack all those years ago, the Briza Light Freighter strafes past stabilizing wings, control panes, command nodules and gun emplacements. Somewhere ahead, perfectly framing the rivet lodged in her plexishield, is the Warp Gate. Moira takes some strange solace in its neutrality, hanging back and offering escape to any who come within range.

The next moment, there's a proximity alert shrieking in her ear. The Antagonist is swinging about when the Spurs, spinning together in a tight squadron, shriek all the louder overhead. Their fire rains down, scoring more hits against the Pylon's invincible ray shield than the Lover's fragile one, but it's still enough to short them out completely.

The Unconstant Lover is completely unshielded when she banks away from the Pincer Maneuver and back into the fray, the Spurs scrambling to reassemble for another strafing run.

By dumb luck, they time their return to the killing zone perfectly, both sides reloading batteries, repairing damage and rerouting power to weapons. Nemo navigates his Lover between the gunshot wrecks of Thaksu's escapees, the shadow of the squadron lurking on the corner of their sensors.

With no shields, their unseen death could come at any moment, from any angle, scorching easily through their helpless hull. Moira wheels her Antagonist this way and that, attempting to keep up with both Nemo's evasive maneuvering and the predatory circling of that fighter squadron.

Moments later, The Unconstant Lover emerges into a patch of open space between smoldering spaceships. The squadron shows their hand a moment before they attack, sweeping down in attack formation from a cloud of green ditrogen smoke, their weapons hot. Moira strangles her triggers to send a counterattack their way as they pass but, inevitably, some of their fire gets through.

Moira watches the Lover's hull take the damage all along her dorsal side, shredding the sturdy teltriton to burning crisps a yard or less from her topturret. The impact seems to come a heartbeat later, shaking the freighter to her chassis. The following groan the Lover makes is life-threatening, the most terrifying sound Moira's ever heard the tough old Briza make.

So shaken by all the danger and destruction, Moira doesn't know whether her return fire hit anything or not. The Spur squadron is banking, some part of her brain knows, ready to swoop back down and finish the job with a second barrage.

For the very first time in that topturret, fear utterly paralyzes Moira. Everywhere she looks is flame and ditrogen and pieces of ships. For once, The Unconstant Lover was simply another one of them, with no special reputation or luck or magic to keep her safe from the thousand deaths all around her.

Something else impacts the Lover, something other than that fatal laser blast. When this new danger rears its head, Moira is jostled back into action. She's already spinning the topturret around, searching for this new attacker, when Flask's warning crackles in over the comm.

"Graviton lock, Cap'n!" he announces, various alerts and alarms blazing behind him. "Logistic's reeling us in!"

In her searching, Moira's eyes land on the Consortium cruiser, that great shadowed bulk far – and getting nearer and nearer, Moira notes – to the Lover's starboard. The freighter is juddered this way and that as she's drawn closer to the Logistic's side, plucked from the fray by some crackshot with a graviton projector.

"Hey," remarks an annoyed Nemo. By the sound of the boosters straining at the leash, it's not hard to imagine the Captain jerking the yoke around. "It's not working."

"How bad?" demands a harried Odisseus.

"Er," stammers Flask, searching across the dozen instruments. "This thing says 39% rigidity. And climbing."

"Two-Bit?" Nemo casts about, searching for someone to take him seriously. "How come it's not working?"

"That," is all Flask has to say, "does not help."

"Topturret," implores Odisseus, the Captain in the absence of the Captain, "can you get a bead on the projector? You gotta cut us loose, if you can."

"Aye aye," she chants back by rote, setting her scattered mind to hunting across the Logistic's broadside for the graviton projector that's snagged them.

Her ray shields a distant memory, the GCF Logistic has not fared especially well in this unexpected fleet action. Her hull is blackened and pockmarked, its worst wounds exposing empty corridors and vital ship systems to open space. Many of her batteries are inoperable and it's not hard for Moira to zero the projector in question. Its two prongs pointed straight at the thrashing Unconstant Lover, it's as sleek and streamlined in design as everything else aboard the Logistic and especially notable for remaining in one piece.

Once she's got a clean shot, Moira opens up with the Antagonist, pounding as much ammunition at that projector as she can. To her horror, she finds her aim is somehow wildly askew. Her shots keep flying wide, despite the straight line between her and her target, instead of peppering the hull to either side of the projector.

Then the Antagonist's chamber is clicking empty, ready for another string of shells. For all that they're drawing closer, Moira still hasn't planted a single bolt into that projector.

"63% rigidity," reports Flask, terror starting to grip him too.

"Window's kinda closing here, topturret," Odisseus informs her.

Moira can find no adequate words to explain why she's flinching. "I can't–"

She's fumbling for more ammunition when the Pincer Maneuver intervenes on their behalf. On either side of The Unconstant Lover, red laserfire, bigger than death, comes streaking in to explode against the GCF Logistic. Her ray shields gone, the shots strike true, devastating the cruiser's burnt and broken broadside. The Logistic rocks away from the blast, spouting smoke and shrapnel, its once unbreakable grip on the Lover giving abruptly away.

"Oh, hey," notices Nemo, when the yoke starts to respond, "it's working again." A throttling boost of speed zooms the Lover away from the growing explosion to starboard. "Thanks, Two-Bit!"

Moira spares one glance towards the GCF Logistic, explosions rocking its deeper interiors and whole sections of hull blasting away from severe internal damage. The Lover hasn't cleared fifteen dottibles before its entire rear quarter is gone, dissolved into ditrogen and debris.

Free from the Consortium's clutches, the Briza puts on speed and then puts on more speed, accompanied by the tiny minority of other tramp freighters that actually escaped. Together, they break into open space, beyond the immediate reach of the Pincer Maneuver or the exploding Logistic, with only the threat of starfighters somewhere on their trail.

With a few snapped switches and struck keys, the Antagonist's targeting protocols go dark and the weapon is suddenly lifeless in her grip. "That's all the weapons power I got," Moira announces over the comm. "Anyone wanna re-route to shields?"

"Happily," agrees an eager Flask before Odisseus makes another case.

"I'mana say warp drive, actually," attests the Ortok.

"We're in range?" wonders Moira.

"As of..." Odisseus delays, everyone aboard The Unconstant Lover, save one, holding their breath, "now." There is nothing to indicate this, neither on Moira's consoles nor on the Warp Gate, grown all the larger through the topturret's plexishield. "Soon as I get a heading, we can put this clusterfuck the bloom behind us."

"What's nearby?" Flask demands to know. "What can we calculate the fastest?"

There's silence as Odisseus scans the options. A glance at her proximity sensor, one of the few instruments still running up here, tells Moira that their window of deliberation is shrinking fast; a squadron of Spurs is closing quickly. "Frankly, there ain't much," Odisseus is sad to report. "There's Pyonek Minor, the closest and the most obvious and certainly where these bloomholes came from. There's Kagno, which's a little further–"

"And pretty much one big fooking electromag storm, ain't it?"

"And then there's Pok."

The mere mention of this word shakes the Captain instantly from his soaked state. "No."

Odisseus doesn't pause a moment to allow the Captain to make any more objections. "It's the farthest, it's the toughest jump from here and it's the biggest leap, both logically and in terms of distanc–"

"No."

"The rest of these bloomholes," Odisseus continues, "are headed to Pyonek, most like, or maybe Kagno, for the stupi–"

"No. No. No! No!"

"The fook's wrong with Pok?" Flask, the crew's newest member, demands to know.

"Well," Moira starts to mediate," all we need's a jump point, right? Somewhere we can start the idler's course? Can we not do Kagno, just for the distance, and then jump–"

"You wanna know the truth?" Odisseus starts to explain. "The truth is–"

"I will fly this ship into a sun," announces Nemo in all seriousness, "before I would fly this ship to–"

"Fighters!" Flask shrieks, the exact moment Moira's proximity alert is beeping at her. "We got ten seconds, tops, before we're blown to very small pieces!"

"The truth is," Odisseus endeavors over his squabbling crewmates and the squealing alarms, "we need someplace to set down. The hull's absolutely gotta get looked at. I'd be blooming surprised," he adds, a little reluctantly, "if she's even gonna warp, how rough she's–"

A shower of laserfire, blistering red hatred, burns past The Unconstant Lover. Some preternatural instinct of the Captain ducks the Briza down and away. The frustrated Spur squadron jets past, reforming for a second pass and adjusting their aim. The Lover may avoid another strafing run or two but the number of tricks up Nemo's sleeve is certainly dwindling.

"I ain't touching down on that planet," Nemo snarls and Moira imagines little flecks of foam at the corners of his mouth. "Not if you blew me a thousa–"

"Nobody on this ship," Odisseus snarls right back, teeth bared and bestial, "gives a good moons-damn what you–"

"Can a fooking decision," pleads Flask, "be reached here?"

"If it's gotta be Pok, then I say Pok," supposes Moira. "Our feelings be bloomed."

"Sure," Flask immediately agrees. "Where-blooming-ever. Set the heading."

"I just did," Odisseus admits. Even as he does, Moira hears the sweet sounds of The Unconstant Lover's warp drive spinning into operation, somewhere in the ship's undercarriage. All the while, this near-unanimous decision is met with howling derision from the Captain.

"I'll hang you all for mutineers," he bellows, loud enough that Moira must peel her earpiece off lest she be deafened. "I'm gonna go down to the galley and I'm gonna find that stupid melon baller that Odi bought for no fucking reason and I'm gonna scoop out your fucking intestines and I'm gonna wrap them around your neck and I'm gonna hang you all for motherfucking mutin–"

The last few words of his tirade and the second wave of divebombing Spurs are both interrupted when the Lover's warp drive completes its calculations. The Gate stretches near-invisible tendrils of interplanetary velocity out to envelop the Briza. With that paradigm-shifting lurch of nausea, it slingshots the ship fast enough to defy reality.

One moment, they were seconds away from death by fire and ditrogen. The next moment, they're speeding away from the sector at faster-than-light speeds, leaving Thaksu, Gertie Guspatch and a budding galactic war behind.

Moira's not thinking about any of that. All her attention is focused on that rivet, vibrating from the sheer exertion of interstellar travel, threatening to rupture at any moment and suck Moira into the nameless space between realities.

CHAPTER 27

Flask steps off the boarding ramp and onto the lily pad. He does so with zero confidence, keeping one foot on solid teltriton and testing the rubbery yellow surface with his boot. Part of him expects – quite reasonably, he thinks – that the entire thing will give way beneath his probing foot and plunge him into the reddish water below. The other part of him knows that the lily pad's clearly strong enough to support The Unconstant Lover so it can probably support him too.

Nemo has no such reservations. He stomps straight off the ship and wanders a few feet into the planet's exceptionally muggy air. He wears the same grumpy expression he's worn the past three days; all the primordial landscape appears to have no effect on his stormy disposition.

"This is Pok?"

"I wanted Kagno, remember," Nemo calls over his shoulder. "With the electromag storms."

Flask, the lifelong urbanite, examines their surroundings and attempts to imagine something worse.

Trees, thick and towering as starscrapers, stretch out as far as the eye can see, their grooved bark carpeted with sickly yellow moss. Overhanging branches, draped in similar stringy vegetation, weave together into a drooping canopy. Only the most daring daylight squeezes past that canopy, speckling the water and plant life below.

That water, a murky and unnatural shade of maroon, swallows the roots of every tree in sight, a miniature ocean that sinks, Flask imagines with a shudder, to an unfathomable distance below. The closest thing the bayou can offer to solid land are the lily pads. Enormous yellow circles of half-rotted plant matter, they float on the swamp's surface, presumably tethered to the distant lake's bottom by unseen stalks of unimaginable strength.

It was atop one of these impossibly strong lily pads that The Unconstant Lover touched down, much to everyone's incredulity.

"And we're sure it'll hold the ship?" Flask barks out to Quicksilver, where she stalks the pad's perimeter, pistols loose in her hands.

The woman turns to regard him. "No."

His confidence restored, Flask braves the walk to where his cousin stands, covering his nose against the stench. "Moons, this place fookin' stinks, don't it?"

The swamp chooses not to reply. Instead, something croaks, something else splashes a distance away and something still else flaps past overhead on half a dozen wings.

Thoroughly bored by the wildlife, Nemo has turned his attention away from the landscape and is instead examining the Lover, looming over them. "You know," he appraises, glancing this way and that, "she don't look so bad to me. Maybe a few days," he starts to estimate and Flask can already see the Ortok's expression at this estimation, "and we can–"

Somewhere, in the depths of the swamp, comes a most unnatural sound – the revving of a driftmotor.

This sound stops Nemo dead in his buhoxshit. "Bloom is fucking that?" he bemoans, not turning around to look.

It's Quicksilver, of course, who has all the details. "Vehicle approaching," she summarizes. "I'd say north but it's hard as fuck to tell with all these trees. Waterbourne, I think. There," she points and Flask turns to squint. "You can see the ripples."

Flask could squint all day towards Moira's supposed ripples and see nothing. Moments later, though, he does spot the vehicle as it emerges from between the trees. From his limited experience, watercraft might as well be sorcery but, soon as he sees that swampskimmer round the corner, he knows the thing's weird. Made from some strange material – wood or ceramic or acorns for all Flask can tell – it comes puttering between lily pads and beneath low-hanging branches. The ungainly thing's powered by a massive rear-mounted driftmotor so loud it echoes through the bayou for miles.

"Natives?" Flask wonders, more suing for theories than supplying an answer.

"I mean, sure." Quicksilver shrugs. "Planet ain't uninhabited, remember. Just backwards as fuck."

The longer Flask watches the thing, the more convinced he becomes that it isn't weaving about randomly through the bayou. Instead, it keeps coming closer, an observation not lost on either of his companions. Those Lawman pistols are taking aim long before Flask bothers to free his own pistol from its holster.

Natives do materialize, clinging to the swampskimmer's side as it draws closer. Stilt-legged, swan-necked, spear-beaked creatures grip the gunwales of their watercraft with enlarged prehensile feet. In their cumbersome hands, they grip cumbersome looking firearms, held together with bandages and prayers. Once they're within spitting distance, a few of the creatures leap suddenly from the approaching skimmer and, great webbed feet unfolding, come dancing across the surface of the water and straight onto the lily pad.

Caught by surprise, Quicksilver hesitates, backpedaling with both weapons raised to fire on the nearest stilt-walkers. There's a tense moment as the swampskimmer thrums to a stop and three natives, their rifles held loosely in their claws, stalk the edges of the lily pad. Clustered together, the three pirates are uncertain how to respond to these newcomers, besides with rank and immediate violence.

This looks like the direction things're about to head, the natives clicking their beaks together in some bizarre native patois. When the access hatch atop the swampskimmer cranks open, all three of the Lover's crew crane upward to see who's emerging and whether they might present some answers.

"By score of can'n her hull shot through."

Nemo and Quicksilver both jump to hear that drunken refrain echoing up from inside the skimmer. The Captain is grinding his teeth together as the shanty grows louder, its singer climbing an interior ladder towards the hatch.

"Her sheets all rent to ribbons too."

As the truth dawns on her, Quicksilver starts to lower her weapons. As the truth dawns on Nemo, however, he's reaching for his sheathed pistol. The flintlock loose in his hand, the Captain looks for all the galaxy like he's about to plug whomever surfaces from inside that swampskimmer.

"Ne'er felt I fear, but shed one tear–"

What does emerge is a monstrous head and shoulders, skin mottled gray and wrinkled with age. As he sings, he shakes that grisly wattle that hangs beneath his great grinning mouth. The smile beneath that fleshy beak reveals a host of wide teeth, cracked and yellow. Something that almost resembles hair cascades chaotically down from his scalp, more corded ropes than luscious locks. There's only one working eye in that lumpy head, the other milked over in ghostly gray.

"What're the," Nemo growls through gritted teeth, "fucking chances."

"Ye buncha bastards," greets Abraham Bonaventure as he emerges from the swampskimmer's hatch. Like a submariner surfacing from his submersible, the Grimalti braces both forearms across the gap, an unreadable expression on his craggy face.

"This is expressly," Nemo chastises to his crew, neither of them responsible for what he's looking at, "what I didn't want to happen!"

"Ye can stand down, lads," Abraham cooes to the natives, looking uncertainly between both parties. "We're all friends here."

"Oh, are we now?" spits Nemo. "You're supposed to be fucking marooned."

The natives fall back, clambering back aboard the swampskimmer. Abraham, meanwhile, simply splays his hands, one mangled, the other whole. "Am I not?"

"King of the molehill, huh?" grunts Quicksilver with a certain respect, watching the natives skitter about at Abraham's beck-and-call. "Imagine my shock."

"Imagine me shock, hearin' from ye again," counters Abraham, deepening that grimy gin of his.

"Of course," sighs Nemo, all his paranoid suspicions confirmed. "Who buzzed him? Which one've you blowblags have I gotta shoot now?"

"Me," comes the Ortoki reply from further up the boarding ramp.

With the clink of claws against teltriton and the rattle of spare parts, Odisseus materializes behind them all, a box under his arm. He doesn't stop to greet anyone, Abraham or otherwise, nor does he stop to absorb his swampy surroundings. Instead, the Ortoki mechanic brushes past his saltbrother and is immediately examining the Lover, his critical eye scanning for damages and malfunctions.

Nemo flaps his arms against the sides of his duster. "Care to explain yourself or...?"

Odisseus slams the box down at his feet, snuffing up the length of a landing strut. "Because you're a baby and grow up and I need at least a week."

"A week?" spews the Captain in shock. "Where, in all the moons, do you think–"

"Bloom me out," remarks Abraham quietly as the age-old argument rages between the saltbrothers. "Like I never bloody left."

"A little worse, actually," adds Quicksilver.

"Well, I'll let you explain it to the Pincer Maneuver, then," exclaims Nemo, at the height of his frustration, "when they drop warp in orbit–"

"You wanna push me?" Odisseus growls back, unscrewing a conduit from the landing strut with progressively more annoyed twists of his wrist. "Go turn the ignition right now," he recommends. "See what–"

"Who's that with ye, now?" Abraham squints like a grandfather, shielding the sunlight with his one working eye. "That ain't Flask, is it?"

"Hey, yeah," Flask greets, a little awkwardly. "Brought me on full-time. For the caper, I mean." When Abraham keeps scowling, Flask purses his lips, searching for more words. "Nice to see ya again."

"Same, lad," he acknowledges gravelly. "Bloom, thought you was the ghost of Two-Bit, first turned me eye to ye."

Flask swallows a sigh. "Know the feeling."

"What're you gonna do, then?" demands Odisseus, turning from his work to finally confront his saltbrother. "Maroon me here too?"

Nemo scoffs. "Might wanna be careful what you wish for."

"Good luck making atmo, then," Odisseus challenges, stepping a little closer and enforcing his height over the substantially shorter Nemo, "on your tertiary motivator alon–"

"Come now," Abraham calls down from the open hatch of the swampskimmer. "Leave off disembowlin' each other a spell." He makes a beckoning gesture with the fewer-fingered hand. "Have a drink."

"Get bent," Nemo barks over his shoulder, not taking his eyes from Odisseus.

"Nemo." This rebuke comes from Quicksilver, her voice so level and emotionless, it somehow still sounds like a chastisement. That's enough for Nemo to turn from Odisseus and catch Quicksilver's next comment. "Don't be a douche."

To Flask's surprise, this seems to strike a chord with the Captain. He sighs overdramatically and, with it, all the childish tantrum seems to melt away from his face and posture. He turns to consider the swampskimmer and his old friend, with the slumped reluctance of someone who cannot avoid his fate.

Almost from nowhere, Nemo staggers forward, arms swinging limp and listless from his shoulders. Step by begrudging step, he slogs up to the swampskimmer, Abraham disappearing into the hatch. Nemo stops to call over his shoulder, before he reaches the strange vehicle.

"Don't wait up."

Abraham is expecting a spit take. Over the years and years and years of plying his trade, he'd come to understand that his moonshine was something of an acquired taste.

Filling his own stein, however, he hears no gagging or spewing from his guest. Once his tankard is full, the Grimalti turns back around to consider the Captain. He sits perfectly still, the foam on his lips and the white of his eyes proof enough that he actually did sample the spirit. Abraham settles back onto his recliner and waits a respectable length of time before he gently asks.

"Thoughts?" He brings his own frothing ale-jack to his lips.

"Strong stuff," Nemo squeaks.

"Me strongest yet." Abraham savors the acrid taste that, even after months of perfecting the formula, can still strip the skin from the roof of the Grimalti's mouth. "That's all thanks to the ingredients I got to work with, tell ye the truth. Place be kinda a moonshiner's paradise."

"Oh, good," wheezes Nemo, still recovering from his first sip. "That was definitely my hope, when I marooned you here."

"I'm sure."

The pair of them sit together in Abraham's cramped cabin aboard the swampskimmer. Now and then, the cabin is lapped this way or that by the bayou's soft currents or the suctioned feet of the Poki bootleggers, clambering about their vessel. On the best days, it was a little tight in here for even Abraham alone. With company, there's hardly room to turn around without upsetting some of the meager furniture the Grimalti's managed to collect during his supposed "exile" on Pok.

Abraham's installed on his recliner, the only memento of any value he'd carried with him off the Lover. Nemo, whereas, is perched on the Grimalti's makeshift cot and the two are practially knee-to-knee, with no room even to open the door.

Abraham is content to nurse his concoction in silence, allowing Nemo to have the next word. "You're okay here, though?" he eventually ventures, some attempt to revive the conversation. "I mean, I don't get the sense you're desperate for a lift someplace else."

"Ye know," Abraham appreciates, considering his surroundings, "I ain't in no hurry, that's true. There been opportunities afore ye, don't be mistaken, but," he savors the tankard's inky black smell, each spice and fermentation churning around in there, "there's something simpler here, ye understand? Reminds me of the old days."

"Doesn't everything?" Nemo remarks snidely.

"I was talking about," corrects Abraham, "Vhase. Back where we met."

This does seem to peel Nemo from his bad mood. He looks up at Abraham with new eyes, ones that cast back through the years to that prison hole, that nest of agwaifapedes, those games of Iniquity over tissue paper that would see The Unconstant Lover named. "And you're happy with that? Back in those days, running your little bootleg business, away from the booty and the battle and the shanties?"

"Oh, I still got me shanties," Abraham grins. Nemo's words, though, give him too cause to cast back through the months he's spent beneath Pok's soggy boughs and wandering Pok's reedy wilderness.

He thinks on those hard weeks, when the blue glow of The Unconstant Lover's boosters was fading in the orange sky. That's when food was scarce and shelter unsatisfying and all the comfort and convenience of life aboard a modern spaceship had flown away from him. He thinks on his chancy first encounters with the natives and how suspicious they'd been of offworlders – that is, until he'd charmed them with his brewing gifts. He thinks on the months he's spent, supplying Pok's lily pad communities with fresh moonshine in exchange for goods and favor.

He discovers that he's smiling, thinking on the simple joys of the brew, the local politics of chieftains, the greatest dangers a krobbo snapper or a tricky current to navigate the skimmer through.

"Nah," he decides, then and there. "Think I'll stay a spell."

"Fine," resolves Nemo, a teenager affronted. "Be weird. I don't care."

"That's plenty 'bout me, though," Abraham dismisses, taking a substantial gulp from his tankard and shifting his ponderous weight, the armchair creaking unhappily beneath. "Ye pulled off the caper, then, without a hitch?"

The mere mention of the job changes every aspect of the Captain's demeanor. In an instant, he goes from petulant child to worlds-weary adult. "You could say that. Gonna be done soon," Nemo sighs. "One way or the other."

"How's that, now?"

"We either find a buyer," he explains without inflection or preference, "or I put one in my skull." He shrugs one shoulder. "Not much longer, now."

"Thought there was Borsk?"

He takes a long pull on his moonshine before he starts to explain the caper and every hitch they encountered along the way. According to him, everything hinged on a pair of forgotten keys. The bounty hunters, he attests, the spice rangers, the unmentioned natives, the long string of buyers left murdered, incarcerated or uninterested in their wake – all this and more Nemo attributes to one keyring, locked aboard the starship for a day and a night.

It doesn't take someone as long-visioned as Abraham Bonaventure, old enough to see regimes rise and fall, to see the truth, to see what's actually descended on Nehel Morel. To him, to the eye of the swirling hurricane, he was simply plagued by a rash of bad luck. That alone, Abraham knows, is enough of an anomoly to spell the ending of an era.

"Told ye no good'd come that caper," he comments sagely.

"A thousand times," Nemo reminds him. "I remember."

Abraham is shaking his head at the memory of those first few meetings, those early discussions of how they might undertake Two-Bit's dying wish. "Too much deception. Too much sneaking about. Not enough honest freebootin'." He makes an allowing gesture with his tankard and his half-hand. "No ill towards the dead, ye understand."

"A thousand and one," Nemo sighs with resignation. "Tell you the truth, at this point, I'm about ready to leave the thing on a street corner."

"'tis a very 'ye' problem," appreciates Abraham with a veteran's distance.

It takes longer for the idea to germinate in Nemo than it does in Abraham. The Grimalti watches the thought dawn on the Captain's face in real time. "There's no absurd chance you're interested?"

Abraham plays dumb. "In?"

"Taking the thing off my hands," Nemo suggests. "For a price."

Abraham needs all his restraint to keep from snorting at the suggestion. Centuries of practice, however, have given Abraham the galaxy's greatest poker face. Before he makes any actual reply, the Grimalti clambers from the recliner and waddles across the swaying cabin to his keg. "Another?" he mutters to Nemo and, with a moment's reluctance, the Captain passes him his tankard.

"I couldn't possibly afford ye," Abraham shouldn't need to point out. When the keg dwindles down to dribbles, the Grimalti moonshiner wraps an arm around the great wooden thing and tips it forward, draining the last juices from his personal batch.

"There ain't a beating heart in the galaxy can afford us anymore," Nemo dismisses, though it visibly pains him to say so. He takes the tankard wearily. "I know for a fact, though," he adds as the Grimalti harrumphs back into his chair, "you ain't broke. You got stashes across the galaxy."

Over a foaming stein, Abraham considers his guest. "Could be that's so."

"You were the thriftiest bastard of us all," Nemo remembers cautiously, "especially during the Freebooter business. Even Odi spent his capital on indulging the ship. You, though. You're a hoarder – always have been." He lets the supposition hang in the air a few moments. "You always were holding out on us a little."

Abraham sucks the foam from the top of his drink. "Could be that's so."

"You think about it," Nemo keeps pitching, scooting forward on the creaky cot, "that's really the ultimate moonshiner score, right?" His smile is a devious thing, a devil tempting the unwary to sin. "No more squeezing seaweed and quorki shit into the recipe. This is the real deal, all ready for mass production."

Abraham wipes foam from his beak with a hand. "How much?"

"Not 68 million, of course," Nemo acknowledges and that's when the desperation creeps into his voice. "Something more reasonable. You gotta understand; I got maybe one more chance at this before they all fucking mutiny on me."

That's when the realization strikes him then. Nemo leans a little backward. "Before you get what you wanted."

Abraham allows this idea a moment to stew and maintains his poker face. That realization, impossible to expunge, creeps outward to fill the Captain. Though they maintain eye contact, Nemo seems to stare straight through Abraham, gazing back across all his actions since the Trija Tragedy and seeing, for perhaps the first time, the sense behind them, the foreknowledge that lead the Grimalti here.

He makes his excuse, perfectly reasonable and nowhere near the truth. "Yer outta me league," he explains, shrugging sadly. "Even were I to give ye everything I've stashed, think they'd still mutiny on ye, considering everything they been through."

"Makes sense," mutters Nemo, lost in his daydream where his ship, his crew, his infamy crumbles away to nothing. "This," Nemo supposes, seeking to clear the air, "is because I marooned you, right?"

Abraham sighs again and considers the depths of his drink. "Once saw a blighter marooned above Jotor."

"Yeah?"

"Once ye dropped in orbit 'round that planet, ye never hit the ground, legend goes. Bastard's up there still, I shouldn't wonder," Abraham speculates, imagining the horror pleastered on that dead Ismoda's face. "Another one of Jotor's million moons."

"What'd they do?" Nemo poses, a little dangerously. "This blighter you saw marooned."

Abraham scrunches up his face. "Ain't sure that I recall now."

"Sabotaged the ship, maybe?" Nemo suggests, a little more dangerously. "Started pulling pieces off the warp drive mid-fucking warp, you think?"

Abraham is a patient parent with their temperamental teenager. "I paid for that crime, did I not?"

"You woulda, for sure," Nemo sputters a little, "if I had my way and we'd dropped your bloomhole on Kagno. This place?" He scoffs bitterly. "This slimeball ain't no punishment for you."

"I had my reasons," is all the more explanation Abraham will offer.

"I'm sure that you did."

Over the years, Abraham Bonaventure was connected to an uncountable number of pirate captains, of every possible species and temperament, rising stars all. Each one, in their own way, gave the timeworn Grimalti hope that maybe they, of all the candidates, would usher in his hallowed age of high piracy. To a soul, however, they either had that same shattering fall or that one unwise decision or that ballooning arrogance or that trick of circumstance that brought them low and exposed their true unworthiness.

Never had one come so close to achieving that ideal as Nehel Morel did. Despite the freshness of the wound, that deserves Abraham's respect.

He extends the tankard and the frothing mug of moonshine hangs there a moment, its foam settling as Nemo understands his intent.

"To The Unconstant Lover, eh?" offers Abraham, along with a genuine smile.

Still sunk halfway into his next funk, Nemo has the grace to smirk and raise his own tankard, to thud quietly against Abraham's. "To The Unconstant Lover."

Odisseus works with both paws. One paw wrangles the twisted pieces of teltriton back into place with the neticgrappler. The other paw welds them as flush as he can against the Lover's hull with the fusioner.

"Her sheets all rent to ribbons too."

This is far from a perfect or permanent solution. Considering the utter lack of teltriton to be found on Pok, it's the best Odisseus can currently do to repair some of the grievous hull damage the Lover suffered on her escape from Thaksu.

"Ne'er felt I fear, yet shed one tear."

He leverages the next metal spike, jagged and charred, with a powerful yank of his forearm. He then takes a moment before bothering with the fusioner, tongue lolling from his mouth from the exertion.

"To clap eyes on her poor damned crew."

As he stretches, Odisseus gazes back across the Lover's dorsal deck, at everything he's accomplished this evening. Since early this afternoon, here Odisseus squatted, painstakingly bending and blasting the Briza's shredded hull back into place. In all those hours, he's repaired maybe five feet of damaged hull. Odisseus is exhausted, frustrated, sitting on a heap of awaiting repairs and sick half-to-death of that same depressing sea shanty. He's about ready to call this a night.

Moonlight streaks between gaps in the oppressive tree boughs, lending aid to the Ortok's meager lantern. In this light, The Unconstant Lover is a strange topography of exposed machinery, peeling yellow paint and patches of worrying rust, leftover from the ship's six week stint as a spaceberg. Beyond the ship stretch the swamplands of Pok, lit by drifting motes of multicolored light that could be insects, plants or something still stranger.

Down at the water level, a pack of stilt-legged Poki, overseen by their singing Grimalti foreman, scamper about the tangled nnokoss roots, in search of the choicest botanicals. Three nights running, they've come out at this hour, when the fast-growing ttoksiis plant glows its brightest blue and is the easiest to collect.

As was his wont, Abraham's taken a supervisory role. Installed atop the swampskimmer, he bawls out his piratical shanties for inspiration and points out, with his somehow so keen eyesight, the odd patch of luminescent weed his native underlings have missed.

Flask and Nemo have both disappeared inside the ship, one vanished at the merest suggestion of manual labor and the other still sulking after his private chat with their Grimalti host. No one among the crew knew precisely what went down but, if Abraham's sunny disposition and Nemo's stormy one were any indication, it did not bode well for the Captain's continuing mood.

Only Moira, then, among the Lover's remaining crew sought to take advantage of the fresh air, no matter how muggy and thrumming full of insects it might be.

"For a maroon," she comments from a dozen feet behind him, "he certainly doesn't seem too miserable."

"No," Odisseus agrees, watching the Grimalti fumbling with his pipe, "he doesn't."

He glances over his shoulder to see Moira at her own workstation. She too wields a fusioner and blasts away at the cracked shell of her turret's viewport. Pok's oppressive humidity was finally enough to do away with her restrictive black attire. She wore instead her exercise outfit and, for once, no holsters nor pistols for ease of labor.

"He told me," Odisseus adds, "he even had some chances to leave." He shakes his head a little, considering their former crewmate down there in the muck and the slime. "Cargo ships, you know, looking for supplies or directions or whatever. Says he coulda commandeered them, had the manpower but he just..."

"Just?"

"Didn't wanna," concludes Odisseus. He pops the visor back over his eyes, so he needn't look at Abraham anymore. He's reaching to reactivate his fusioner, to solder that errant piece back into place, when he catches a scent that stops his paw.

{Thirdseed is uncomfortable}.

Odisseus sighs and glances up from his work towards Thirdseed. There the little potted cactus sits, on a rare level patch of hull, supervising Odisseus and Moira's work as much as Abraham supervises his own underlings. It's obviously expressionless and motionless but Odisseus swears, to look at the squat seedling, there's something contemptuous about it.

"Well, I'm sorry," Odisseus answers under his breath. "It's this or the ship again. Your choice."

The cactus makes no immediate reply and Odisseus has no time to wait for one. He snaps on the fusioner and sets back to work, sparks flying. Soon as he has, however, he smells those pheromones shift and provide him Thirdseed's opinion.

{Thirdseed stays here}, it resolves, stinking of resignation.

"Thought so," rumbles Odisseus, his answer inaudible over the fusioner's hiss.

It takes only arduous labor, rather than any great skill, to weld the twisted tooth of metal back onto the hull. All the while, Odisseus feels the proverbial eyes of Thirdseed on him, watching him, wondering what they're doing here and why it's so humid and why must it dwell forever in this restrictive ceramic prison. It's possible he only feels this way because of some latent mind-controlling element in the Gitter's spores but, regardless of their source, Odisseus feels the guilt and regret all the same.

When they found a buyer, they were going to press this little creature, this newborn lifeform, into a lifetime of captivity and walk away with money in their pockets. It was slavery under Gella and it would be slavery under whomever else actually wound up signing on the dotted.

"Kinda makes you wonder," Moira starts to wonder, soon as Odisseus has switched off his fusioner and waddled a few inches further along the ship's dorsal deck.

Not particularly interested in Moira's musings at the moment, Odisseus bites nonetheless. "What does it make you kinda wonder?"

"If this was somehow all his doing," wonders Moira, glancing about at the idyllic wilderness all around them.

Odisseus is skeptical. "You think he marooned himself? You forget," he reminds her, "I was there. Definitely was Nemo who marooned him."

"Marooned him here, though," Moira points out. "He was a moaning sack of buhoxshit for months and months, wasn't he? The whole time above Kuzu Minor." She shrugs a little. "Coulda sabotaged the warp drive at pretty much any point there."

"Nemo wanted to maroon him on Kagno, though."

"And you stopped him."

Odisseus scowls at this. Moira's assertions that he's some manner of master manipulator are immediately undermined by the cantankerous sounds of his singing and shouting in the background. "Why Pok, then? The bloom makes this mudhole so special?"

"Damn fine place," smirks Moira, "to be a moonshiner."

Odisseus twists to see him down there, the ringleader of his weird little circus. The Poki, with gobs of ttoksiis in their puny arms, go speeding back across the surface of the water on those absurd feet of theirs, depositing the heaped weeds back aboard the swampskimmer. Abraham, meanwhile, keeps fiddling with his pipe and humming around its stem.

"Let's assume," stipulates Moira, "that all my paranoid reaching's true. Doesn't tell us why."

"Why?"

"Why go to all the trouble," she explains, standing to lean an elbow casually against the triple-barrel of her Antagonist. "To plan all this, devise such a complex blooming scheme." She shrugs again, turning back to Odisseus. "Easier ways to leave the ship."

Odisseus has the answer without thought. "Makes Nemo angry. Means he won't come clamoring back, weeks later, begging him to sign on to some shiny new stupidity. Keeps him away for good."

"Almost," grunts Moira but Odisseus isn't paying her any attention, focused instead on the sight of Abraham down below.

The Grimalti reclines against one of the swampskimmer's contours, nursing his calabash pipe and watching the nameless motes flit through the air around him. Too distant to read his expression, Odisseus reads everything he needs to about his demeanor in his pose – he's carefree, leading a life unfilled with gunfights, broadsides and wanted posters.

Baby-stompers against the hull snap Odisseus back to reality. Moira strides past, walking with undue grace across the Lover's sloped and uneven hull. "Headed back in, I think," she mentions, replacing the fusioner she borrowed on the spread cloth containing all the Ortok's tools. "You stay out much longer, the real nasty fucking bugs're gonna find you."

Odisseus makes some noncommittal grunt and turns his attention back to the work at hand, discouraging though it might be. Were he to patch the whole thing, every scar the Spur squadron punched into the outer hull, he'd be neticgrappling and fusing until dawn. It was another day's work or more up here, to repair all these holes and keep the ship from peeling open like a tin of sporefin the next time she jumped warp.

As he reaches for the neticgrappler, he spares a glance toward Thirdseed. He's struck then, in the sporadic light of his lantern and the wispy motes that drift past, by how haggard and sickly the cactoid looks. When they'd left Gitter, it was green and vibrant and rotund, a near-perfect sphere of spines, topped by one fluttering blue flower.

Now, its skin is substantially more gray, its ridges more pronounced, its body mass reduced by a third or more. It still reeks of its signature pheromones but there's no denying that the plant's not faring well aboard spaceships and among alien climates. He's no horticulturist; Odisseus has no idea how much longer the sapling will last under these unfriendly conditions but he cannot imagine it's a promising diagnosis.

{Thirdseed is uncomfortable}.

CHAPTER 28

Flask is pretty sure he's got everything.

Dubix trout, Yellowtooth, Carcinocrisps, copious quantities of Gitterswitch Gin – the gang's all here. His driftshopper runneth over with The Unconstant Lover's bare essentials.

All he needs to do now is escape this crowded Galaxmart without getting recognized, arrested or murdered.

Any one of the people surrounding him – the elderly Lrissi couple unloading their groceries ahead of him, the Ruuvian cashier with the imbedded scent dampener, the punky humanoid that's so impatient behind him – could be a bounty hunter, a spice ranger or an Imperium agent. He almost smirks at the idea that they're one of each.

Unlike the disaster at Arzenka, however, this time Flask's had the foresight to go incognito. Incognito, in this case, means a Kelkian Targeting Helmet, bulky enough to disguise the shape of his head and fearsome enough to discourage anyone from messing with him. Once the property of a dumbass bounty hunter of Quicksilver's acquaintance, Nemo took a shining to thing and, ever since, the helmet's collected dust on an upper shelf of the ship's galley, like an antique cookie jar. Today, it was precisely what Flask needed to sneak in, buy supplies and sneak back out undetected.

Once they made planetfall on Vabob, the pirates split up to run their very necessary errands. It was Flask's task to purchase the groceries, the freighter's larders so diminished after running hither and thither across the galaxy.

Where they were headed next, none of them knew but wherever it was, they universally agreed they would need junk food there.

"Thuwo Minor," the Ruuvian cashier mentions to Flask when he's counting his change.

"I'm sorry?" stammers Flask.

"Thuwo Minor," he repeats. "Uklio Quadrant, I think." Flask is staring at him, too shocked to reach for the pistol sheathed at his side. "He says he'll meet your price, if you meet him there."

Utterly dumbfounded, Flask somehow manages to conjure a reply. "Who says?"

The Ruuvian extends his three fingered fist to Flask, clutching a handful of change. "Have a nice day," he requests cheerfully.

Taking his change, a stunned Flask leads his driftshopper from the aisle and out the door, eyes wide, mouth partially open and targeting helmet hiding them both.

Moira doesn't know what to think. "What did he look like?"

Flask stalls a little, scanning the Lover's companionway stairs like he expects to see the guy he's describing standing there. "Ruuvian. Short. Wrinkly. That weird browny-purplish color. You know. A Ruuvian, like."

"He smell?" Odisseus cues.

"Nah, he had one of those stink suppressor things," Flask replies, making an approximate gesture around the side of his head. "So, only a little."

"And his exact words?" Moira demands again. "Take your time."

"Well," Flask starts to recollect, "he just goes 'Thuwo M–'"

"Carcinocrisps!" exclaims a delighted Nemo, tearing through the plastic bag on his lap to discover them. It is with great relish that he yanks free the sickly green-and-yellow package and examines it, like a proud uncle to his newborn nephew. "Aw," he bemoans, in sudden disappointment, "Nicotine & Onion? Honey Mustard Gas, I said.."

Everyone else – Moira, Odisseus and Flask – has the good sense to ignore him.

As Flask recounts every minor detail of his conversation with the Ruuvian cashier, Moira plants both elbows against the rail at the top of the companionway stairs and gazes out across the hold. This mysterious omniscient buyer could be their escape, a means to transform the shitslide that was the caper's final phase into a profitable payday, to assuage weeks of heartache, humiliation and hull damage.

It was exactly as likely, of course, that this was all an elaborate trap.

It doesn't take her companions long, Odisseus partway down the stairs, Flask only just returned with groceries, to discover this schism and organize on either side.

"I mean, how blooming convenient, right?" scoffs Odisseus, tossing his paws into the air. "We escape both Consortium and Imperium above Thaksu by the hair on our assholes and then, whaddya know, here comes this mysterious stranger, offering to buy–"

"If the Consortium," Flask argues, "could finger us, they'd drop a fookin' squad of spice rangers to collect my arse. They wouldn't bother with this cloak-and-dagger buhoxshit."

"Well, here goes nothing," resolves Nemo with a sigh, tearing open the package with a plastic squeal.

"Then it's a bounty hunter," Odisseus decides, changing tactics. "Or the Imperium. Or whomever killed Borsk and all her people. He shrugs violently, a gesture of hopelessness. "Makes no blooming difference, far as I'm concerned."

"It don't make no sense, though," Flask protests. "As a strategy, I'm saying. No bounty hunter's got that kinda network, to send fookin' dudes wherever we go to resupply–"

"Some do," counters Moira too quietly enough to be ignored.

"And the Imperium," Flask continues, "ain't gonna make a move so blooming shady as that, like. Not without a fanfare of fooking trumpets to announce their presence."

"The Imperium," Odisseus reminds, thoughts of Ikoril Federate Station and the bait-and-switch they pulled there also occuring to Moira, "is capable of some extremely shady shit."

"You know," appraises a chewing Nemo, Niccotine & Onion speckling his lips, "these're not too terrible, actually."

"Ultimately," Flask decides, "you're probably right. This could absolutely be a very cunning and very confusing trap someone's laid for us. Without actually going to Thuwo Minor, there's no way to know. Like, conclusively."

"Then, I say," Odisseus spells out in plain Commercial, "we don't go to Thuwo Minor."

"Fine," relents Flask with a shrug that rattles all the groceries he still carries. "We don't go to Thuwo Minor."

"Thuwo Minor," Nemo wonders, digging his hand deeper into the Carcinocrisps. "Why's that ring a bell?"

"My question is," Flask starts to introduce, refusing to completely give up, "where, in all the bloom-fooking moons of Jotor, do you suggest we go, like?"

Odisseus, sensing a trap, only scowls. "I don't follow."

"Next," provides Moira, seeing Flask's line of thought. "Where do we go next."

"That," Flask thrusts an affirmative finger at Moira, plastic bag dangling from it. "Coffers're dry as a fooking bone. We didn't hardly have the scratch to make this supply run. We've exhausted all your friends and mine. There ain't a wet rock left in the galaxy we could hide under, not long as that weed's still aboard the ship." Something about this makes Odisseus bristle but he doesn't argue Flask's point. "Trap or no trap, we got maybe ten more jumps before we're outta fuel and sitting lonktonks for rangers or Imperials or bounty hunters or whoever."

He stands panting a few seconds, collecting his wits from his little tirade. "So, if you've gotta better heading than Thuwo Minor, I'm sure we'd all love to hear it."

Odisseus stews in this very good point for a moment. When Moira starts to shift her weight, he raises a paw to her instead, to ward her off. "Don't tell me he's fucking right." He sighs an Ortoki sigh, his whiskers bristling. "I know."

Nemo thrusts the open maw of the Carcinocrisp bag up towards his saltbrother as a consolation prize. "Want some?"

Garrock Brondi can't wait to see the look on his stupid moon of a face.

He's waited an exceptionally long time to see that look. In the short term, he's waited months for his hated rival to stop dragging his ass across the galaxy, exhausting every other possible option before he would come beg on Brondi's doorstep. In the long term, Garrock's waited years for Nehel Morel, Galactic Menace, to arrive at Thuwo Minor, head hung and hat in hand.

He could hardly contain his excitement when The Unconstant Lover did actually drop warp in system and initiate docking protocols with the Warp Gate Junction. He practically skipped about the place.

The overwhelming majority of his organization thought this would never happen. At best, his captains and advisors told him, this was an extreme longshot and, according to the franker ones, a waste of resources. His majordomo was their champion, wrinkling his Oodani snout at every expense Garrock "flushed down the shitter" on this "little revenge trip" of his. It was precisely that frankness that Garrock valued in his majordomo but that would only increase the smuggler's swagger when he returned victorious, Gitter sapling at his side.

Besides, Garrock needed a holiday. Thuwo Minor's dingy Warp Gate Junction wasn't an ideal place to headquarter his smuggling operation the past few weeks but he liked to think he'd made the place his own. There was something refreshing about escaping the hustle-and-bustle of Menoyar, even temporarily.

A thoroughly unimportant gas giant, an arm's reach from Takioro Defederate Station, Thuwo Minor's planetary deed had been child's play to obtain for his nefarious purposes. Besides the pittance he made on traffic fees, Garrock found it rather convenient to own a little patch of space on Velocity's doorstep, to conduct business deals without the need to pay the Vollocki's exorbitant taxes.

That wasn't why he'd purchased the planet, though. He knew he'd need it one day – for gloating purposes.

As the two airlocks make each other's acquaintances, Garrock and his people leap into action. His bodyguards – a menagerie of interspecies muscle, the very finest of Brondi's considerable goon pool – come hustling from their repose all across the station, readying weapons and barking orders. Pushover, a humanoid bigger than some Walkeen on Garrock's payroll, strides past his employer. He carries his Acathi K89 Yellowbelly over one shoulder, Garrock's very special chair over the other.

His cane clicks against the plastolieum tile as Garrock Brondi follows leisurely behind his underlings. Once the chair's in place, he takes his seat, an envelope of thuggery arrayed all around him.

The chair was quite a lucky find in the administrator's office, an anomaly among the rest of the Junction's drab furnishings. Very swank, the thing's all red velvet and graceful curves, with golden upholstery and a quartet of clawed feet. It was the very epitome of Garrock Brondi – an item with the outward appearance of class but, underneath, as tawdry and criminal as everyone else – and he was instantly enamored with it.

Regardless of how this exchange went down, Garrock Brondi is taking this chair home with him.

The airlocks pressurize with a satisfying hiss. Garrock's bodyguards raise weapons and take aim at the figure they imagine will soon come through that door. Garrock, meanwhile, positions his cane immediately in front of his chair and waits, the very picture of the omniscient mafioso.

The door control blinks green. The airlock rolls begrudingly away. Through the hissing steam, Garrock Brondi gets his look at that emerging face.

That face is scowling, attempting to peer through the haze. He's thinner than usual and his hair somehow even shaggier but that high-collared duster is absolutely unmistakable. Even when the smoke's completely cleared and his posse of familiar faces has fanned out to either side of him, he's somehow still scowling. Now, he's leaning all the way forward and staring Garrock Brondi, his archnemesis, in the face, with a look of utter bafflement.

"The fuck is that?" he asks aside, to whomever stands to his left.

"It's Brondi, Nemo," Moira provides him.

"Oh, bloom me out," Nemo reacts instantly, hand flying to his holster and yanking out that antique flintlock of his.

Garrock purses his lips. He hadn't recognized him.

On their Captain's cue, the outnumbered pirates follow suit. Moira Quicksilver summons her 665 Lawmen to her hands like magic, the Ortok pulls free a Haymaker and the new face, the one his associate tapped on Vabob, produces a Halisdro and seems unsure where it should be aimed.

Simple as that, both parties – twelve to one side, four to the other – find themselves in a good old fashioned Talosian standoff, a staple of the smuggling profession.

"Howdy," greets Garrock Brondi, enjoying this too much.

The Ortok rumbles something, making exaggerated and unwise gestures with the shotgun. The new face, the Gallwegian, turns a disdainful scowl the Ortok's way. "Don't you fooking start, like."

"Howdy," repeats Garrock Brondi, his patience ebbing away.

Odisseus huffs again, shrugging his hairy shoulders and leveling his weapon back at Pushover. Nemo meets and matches this shrug with an even bigger one. "I mean, I can shoot him right now. That'd kill the whole trap thing right in its–"

Garrock adjusts his posture, grasping for control. "That won't work ag–"

"Then what'd happen, you dumb gobshite?" Flask expectorates, lowering his gun to better berate the Captain. "They'd fooking shoot us, wouldn't they?"

Odisseus makes some monosyllabic reply in support or condemnation of this.

Nemo scowls again and starts to argue. "Well–"

"Can someone," implores Moira, eyes closed, "do me a favor and pay fucking attention?"

"68 million," offers Garrock Brondi, cutting immediately to the chase. This draws every piratical eye in the room, their argument interrupted by something vastly more interesting.

"What about 68 million?" ventures Nemo.

"Well," Garrock starts to amend, realizing his error. "67 million. I should say. I will give you 67 million credits," he starts again in as simple Commercial as he physically can, "if you give me your Gitter sapling. And," he also amends, "shut your fucking mouths for ten seconds."

This further dumbfounds the pirates until, nine seconds later, Nemo speaks up again.

"How come?"

"Because," Garrock relays with a tired paternal sigh, "I'm the one responsible for everything you've suffered sinc–"

"No, no," Nemo corrects him, waving away whatever Garrock was saying, "how come 67 million? You said 68 million first and then you said–"

Interrupted mid-monologue, Garrock Brondi attempts not to sound too crestfallen. "You owe me a million credits? Do you not remember? The last time we were supposed to meet at Thuwo Minor? Last I checked, Trija remains unsacked."

"Thuwo Minor." Nemo snaps his fingers with the force of a gunshot. "I fucking knew it sounded familiar."

"Bully for you," congratulates Flask.

Odisseus yammers out a string of Ortoki syllables. "That's what I'm wondering," agrees Moira. "What was that you were saying about 'being responsible' and 'everything you've suffered?'"

Garrock splays his fingers, cane swaying somewhat to the side to display Garrock Brondi in all his criminal mastery. "I'll give you a minute."

"You're the one sent those bounty hunters after us?" wonders Flask.

Moira scowls. "You tipped off the Consortium." She scowls deeper. "And the Imperium."

"You shot Borsk, didn't you?" Nemo realizes, his face crinkling up.

"All of the above," Garrock Brondi is pleased to announce. "Gotta come clean here. I was quite impressed with the scope of your late friend's vision. Never quite got all the specifics, of course, but the results speak for themselves. Biggest oversight, though, if I may give a piece of constructive criticism?" He gives them all his most disappointed look. "Keeping me outta the loop."

The face that Nemo's wearing right now, that amalgam of shock, outrage and impotence, that's exactly the face Garrock waited all these weeks and months and years to see.

"I'm a little offended," Garrock confesses with the smallest of shrugs. "About how long it took you to come to me. Realistically, I really shoulda been the beginning, the middle and the end of that list. Discreet as fuck," he starts to count on his ringed fingers, "the epicenter of the galaxy's largest contraband network–"

"We didn't come to you," confesses Nemo bluntly, "because you're a dickbag."

"66 million," counters Garrock and this, much to his amusement, seals those unsealable lips.

"You killed Borsk to drive our business to you," Moira struggles to comprehend, "but why the bounty hunters? Why the Consortium?"

"Don't forget," Garrock feels the need to add, "that Borsk was becoming a bigger and bigger thorn in my side anyway. Nobody wants to pay top shelf for smuggled Gitterswitch when there's an alternative solution." This explanation out of the way, Garrock Brondi affects a sigh. "I guess it was spite, maybe. Hurt that you didn't come to straight to me, your oldest friend, with the greatest prize the galaxy's ever seen."

"Again," Nemo reminds, "dickbag."

"65 million."

Flask slaps Nemo hard on the upper arm to silence him, precisely the reaction Garrock hoped for.

"If one of the bounty hunters or the Consortium or the Imperium somehow managed to actually apprehend you," Garrock continutes nonchallantly, "that too could have suited my business, after a fashion, since you wouldn't be selling to one of my competitors. Should you swallow your pride and drag your bloomhole out to visit me," he explains sweetly, "then we could do business."

The moment of silence that passes between the four members of the Lover's crew prompts Garrock to continue. "Can we do business?"

A second silence follows the first, broken by the Ortok after a considerable pause. Odisseus voices some growling dissent, shaking his shaggy head and gesturing emphatically towards Garrock. No one immediately responds to this, forcing Odisseus to once again break the silence and growl another objection. A heavy, shoulder-slumping sigh from Nemo stops Odisseus in his tracks.

"Go get it," relents Nemo, turning his shoulder back towards the Ortok.

Odisseus starts to sputter, to snarl more objections, but Nemo doesn't rise to anger. Instead, the Captain's voice is calm, level and, most deliciously to Garrock Brondi, defeated. "There's no fucking point, man. Let's not make this a bigger thing than it's gotta be."

Odisseus makes a tentative noise and shuffles a few steps back towards the airlock.

Before he's quite left, Nemo turns to look fully around at the Ortok. "Let's do the thing that Two-Bit would've wanted."

The Lover's crew has three separate reactions – Moira stiffens, Flask exhales and Odisseus pricks his whiskers once. Then, with great Ortoki bluster, he spins and tromps back through the airlock.

The decision officially made, Garrock Brondi makes a small gesture to whichever bodygurd is nearest on his lefthand side.

"Bring the money."

Odisseus finds Thirdseed exactly where he'd left it. The little cactus basks in the simulated heat and the artificial glow of the miniature habitat the Ortok's engineered in his quarters. The moment he slaps the door release, he's blasted with all the trapped pheremones the cactoid's been broadcasting the past hour or so.

{Thirdseed is comfortable}, it reports, the scents an amalgam of fresh and stale. {Thirdseed is lonely also}. A few feet inside the chamber, the freshest and most eager scent reaches Odisseus. {Foreplanter came back!}

"Hey, sprout," Odisseus mutters, coming to stand before the whole production he's constructed smack dab in the middle of his quarters. The little nursery demanded the dominant portion of his room's floor space and electrojacks. To reach anything else inside – his bed, his footlocker, the model spaceships collecting dust in the corners – he'd need to skirt around the sides of the purring torridity unit and each of the three mechanic's lights, angled downward at Thirdseed.

Now Odisseus stands there, paws on hips, attempting to figure out the best way to dismantle the whole thing.

One by one, Odisseus unclips the mechanic's lights, deactivates their power cells and sets them aside. He snaps off the torridity unit with a mumbled growl of apology to Thirdseed. With deliberate paws, he scoops up the demonstrably confused Gitter sapling – {Thirdseed is cold. Thirdseed is confused} – and attempts to juggle all his many burdens.

He would ensure, by whatever means necessary, that Brondi's people took the very best possible care of Thirdseed.

The truth, Odisseus knows, is that Brondi and his galaxywide operation were infinitely better suited to raising a Gitter sapling than he was. There was nothing to stop Brondi from creating an honest-to-moons habitat, rather than this shoddy improvised stopgap, that would help Thirdseed grow taller and healthier and into a Gitter adult. Indeed, Brondi's whole interest in the sapling demanded he do so.

The mere fact that Thirdseed hadn't died while in the Ortok's care could be counted a minor miracle. By all accounts, this was a unilaterally positive move for the seedling.

At the same time, Odisseus can't help clenching his claws protectively around the sides of Thirdseed's pot. Burdened with all the sapling's necessary equipment, he shuffles from his quarters and back into the abovedecks corridor. With an elbow against the door release, there's nothing else to be done, save marching back through the freighter, through the airlock and passing Thirdseed into Garrock Brondi's greedy hands.

"So, hey," Odisseus begins as he plods on his way, wheeling the torridity unit behind him. "I'm not sure how much you can understand me but there's some stuff you really oughta understand before this all goes down."

{Thirdseed is cold}.

"I know, pal," Odisseus sighs, hiking the pot a little higher on his hip. "The situation you're coming into, it's, well, it's unfair. And," he chokes a little on this concept, unsure whether the seedling can read his emotion or not, "there's no other way to say this. It's me. I'm the one putting you in that situation. To make money. To put more money that I don't really need in my pocket."

{Thirdseed is cold}.

"And that," Odisseus searches for the right words as he nudges the next door open, the one that leads into the Lover's cargo hold, "fucking sucks. It just does."

The abovedecks doors rattle apart, revealing the shadowed expanse of The Unconstant Lover's abandoned cargo hold. Devoid of cargo, the place is stark in its emptiness. The molecular strip has been disassembled and stacked somewhere out of sight. Every click of the Ortok's claws echoes hollowly in this cavernous space.

"Me and them," Odisseus continues, humping the torridity unit down the companionway steps, "and everybody on the ship worked and hurt and fought really hard for that money. One of my friends," he explains, startled at the term he uses, "died for it. And we were operating off some bad information about you and your planet–"

The thudding of the unit against each step interrupts him, seeming to dispute his characterization of the essential facts.

"There're lots more excuses I can make," Odisseus realizes. "None of them make things any different or easier for you. You don't have control over what's happening to you, of where you're going right now–"

The unit slams into the hold's teltriton floor and Odisseus swallows what was rising in his throat. "And that sucks too."

{Thirdseed is confused}.

Up ahead, Odisseus can see the light that beams through the open airlock, the unhealthy yellow of Thuwo Minor's Warp Gate Junction. Mustering his strength, he strives onward, plodding reluctantly across the great faded blue digits of the Lover's registration number.

"It's gonna seem like exactly the opposite," Odisseus warns the seedling, lowering his voice lest he be overhead chatting with a houseplant, "but you gotta remember – he doesn't own you. You can't own people," he states through fangs clenched against emotion. "You're very small right now but, soon, you're gonna be big and strong like the rest of your people and you're gonna be able to put him in his place. You understand?"

The airlock yawns open and he pauses a little, certainly visible to Brondi and the rest of them. He's only able to utter one last warning before he's forced to turn and face the light that streams in from the Junction. "Don't let," he exhorts the sapling under his breah, "what they told you when you were small make you a prisoner."

{Thirdseed is curious}, is the Gitter's reply and Odisseus must consider this a victory.

Each footfall heavier than the last, Odisseus plods back aboard Thuwo Minor's Warp Gate Junction.

There's a moment of reverent silence from all assembled when he does actually emerge, clutching the genuine potted article in his paws. Brondi and his people are particularly awed and none of them, to their credit, makes a peep – no muttering, no gawking, no spiked eyebrows. Instead, they simple stare and, as necessary, shuffle backward to make room for the Ortok and his most precious treasure.

His own crew are a little less agog. Righty and Lefty slacken a little in Moira's grip. Flask pauses in his inspection of the steerage crates of cash to consider Odisseus. Nemo stops pretending he's not picking his nose and actually pays attention.

To break the tension, Odisseus strides up to Garrock Brondi and plops the plant in his lap.

No sooner has he done so than the Ortok starts to rattle off all the necessary instructions for Thirdseed's care – the correct temperature, the humidity and moisture that Thirdseed can withstand, the conditions most harmful to its health. Uncomprehending at first, Brondi silently appeals to the Lover's crew and it's Nemo, on reflex, who provides the translation.

When he finally runs dry on pointers, Odisseus adds one final stipulation. "And it only speaks Ortoki, so. I'd invest in a fucking translator, were I you."

When the translation comes through, Brondi raises an eyebrow. "It speaks?"

This is too much for Odisseus. He spins and stomps away, headed back through the airlock and into the darkened Unconstant Lover, pretending the whole time he can't smell Thirdseed's confusion or curiosity.

Flask can't quite read the room. There's only one other person in this room – the Captain at The Unconstant Lover's helm – but Flask is still uncertain whether he should say anything and what, if anything, he's expected to say.

Far as he can tell, this should be a happy occasion. They'd finally, finally sold the moons-damned tree, for good and for all and for more money than they'd any right to expect from anyone anymore. Now, they should be in the free and clear, nothing but a single uncomplicated warp between them and escaping this whole bloody affair.

Yet, as Nemo unmoored from Thuwo Minor, the mood aboard the freighter was surprisingly somber. A glowering Moira, upset that the Captain's insolence cost them three million, retired to the galley, to count and distribute the money into its equal shares. A glowering Odisseus, upset about bloom-knows-what, retired to the engine room, to grumble and putter about and do whatever the Ortok actually did with all the time he spent down there.

The Captain is glowering too, over there in the helmsman's seat. It undoubtedly has something to do with Brondi, Flask knows, and the crew's unanimous emnity towards him.

It went without saying that Flask didn't give a hot drongo shit about Garrock Brondi. To him, Brondi was a nice enough fellow with 65 million credits burning a hole in his well-tailored pockets. By all accounts, this was precisely the right person to know in their situation and precisely the wrong person to hold an unreasonable vendetta against.

All the same, here they were, moping and groaning and bellyaching about the mind-boggling amount of cash that was currently riding in their hold.

The Unconstant Lover detaches from the Junction's airlock with a gentle sway to port. Flask starts to run through the pre-warp shielding protocol, a thoughtless habit by now. Nemo, meanwhile, simply stares out the viewport, piloting the Lover more on autopilot than the actual and dreaded autopilot.

The Junction is a lumpy gray pustule stuck to the side of the Gate's graceful hoop and it slides more and more into view through the Lover's viewport as she disengages from it. Repositioning to warp far, far away, there's only one other vessel visible to the Briza and her crew – a Vbeck & Rhissol CL1 Courtesan-Class, now docked alone at Thuwo Minor's Warp Gate Junction.

"That's Brondi's?" Nemo grunts, the first words he's uttered since they'd reboarded the ship.

"Must be," is Flask's curt reply.

Simply put, the ship's a show-off. Sexy as she might appear, the only reason someone flew a flashy vessel like that, racing stripe and all, was to unambigously establish the length of their own dick. The pride of showrooms and collections galaxywide, the sleek and inefficient Courtesan was hardly the primary spaceship of Bad Space's premier smuggling kingpin. It was clearly a fashion statement, no doubt intended to wow and aggravate the Lover's crew with its ostentatious show of wealth and extravangance.

Nemo frowns in appreciation. "Sweet ride," he allows, his finger already pressing the torpedo launch button.

Flask can only watch as a solitary torpedo jets from the Lover's forward-facing tube, trailing a little stream of exhaust on its unerring way to the Courtesan. Nemo doesn't bother arcing the Briza away from the coming explosion, determined to stay and watch the fireworks. Scrambling to react, Flask can't decide whether to activate ray shields, in case of flames, or bombard, in case of flying wreckage, and ultimately activates neither.

It is a pretty spectacular explosion. A picturesque orange fireball mushrooms out, pieces of Courtesan spewing forth in every direction and narrowly missing the Lover where she idles. Some small part of Flask's heart is grieved at the destruction of something so pristine as that glossy spaceship. Considering the dangerous look on the Captain's face, he elects not to complain.

He wonders who was aboard, whether they just nuked the very thing they'd worked so hard to steal, when Flask catches sight of figures, running frantically to the Junction's bay windows. They're nothing more than tiny black silhouettes from here but, even from here, Flask can still see their panic at the sight of their destroyed ship. He knows they aren't stranded permanently, that someone like Garrock Brondi can summon a dozen spacecraft to retrieve him, but he can almost sense the smuggling kingpin's thwarted rage even from this distance.

Once the smoke dissipates, there's nothing but the shorn remnants of the Courtesan's airlock, drifting harmlessly away from its mooring. His hands back on the yoke, Nemo steers the Lover away, angling her to pass through the Gate and dialing up the necessary warp coordinates. All the while, he wears a big, broad smile on his face, every trace of his foul mood faded away.

CHAPTER 29

Odisseus swims in his sleep.

The open ocean is there with him again, immeasurably deep and broad. There is no promise of play this day, however. Full of youthful exuberance, Odisseus could pull a dozen aquatic acrobatics – flips, spins, dives and rolls – but he does not. This day, when he and his fellow Ortoks departed the lodge, they came with a purpose greater than food or sport.

They embarked today in a great pod, some dozens in number. Odisseus is an anonymous Ortok among a cloud of his peers. Only a year weaned from his litterbearer, he's a new swimmer in the seas, having exhausted the lakes and rivers and capes he's known all his short life.

On the fringes of this loose cloud swim the Ortoki adults. They're far fewer in number but each such accomplished hunters that they command instant respect and obeisance from the pod's pups. They steer them like shepherds, exactly as they herd a school of fleeing fish. Whenever a young swimmer becomes too daring or motors too far from the center of the pod, a waving paw or the lash of a tail is enough to encourage them back into formation.

Today, however, they're headed somewhere different. Something tells the young Odisseus, ignorant to the higher mysteries of his homeworld, that it's somewhere momentous, something the adults in his life only spoke of passingly.

These are dark and cold waters they swim, waters farther to the north than Odisseus has ever been. The sea floor beneath falls away to a bottomless abyss, impenetrable by what little sunlight reaches them through the ice. That ice, in a crust thick enough to blot out the sky above, envelops the surface of the frigid northern sea. Only through sporadic holes, like stars poked clean through the fabric of the firmament, is any light shed down below.

Odisseus is gazing up through one of these airholes, attempting to imagine the world atop that ice. That's when something, with a contained splash, drops down through the hole.

At the noise and the motion, the whole pod reels in surprise, forming a wide halo around the hole and the falling object. Odisseus notes the adults, keeping their distance as the young pups squirm and swim small anxious circles at the sight of whatever fell through the ice above.

It's surprisingly small, that figure sinking slowly towards the abyss, even smaller than any of the young Ortoks. It struggles uselessly, its pudgy limbs neither fins nor flippers and unable to gain any purchase against the water. Utterly unprepared for these arctic seas, the creature's only fur coats its head, waving black locks that seem completely pointless.

The helpless little humanoid sinks and sinks. All the young Ortoks stare, in bafflement and confusion, as the tendrils of dark sea seem to reach up to ensnare the unfortunate child.

There's another flash of motion as one of the Ortoks darts suddenly downward and arcs toward the drowning child, her tail pumping furiously. That much faster than the humanoid's rate of descent, the speeding Ortok has intercepted him within moments and, clutching her prize in webbed fingers, starts to ferry the terrified child back toward the surface.

Numb and confused, Odisseus hovers there in the water, paws paddling idly, as his fellow Ortok carries the child toward the airhole above. There starts to come more splashes, Odisseus knows, from somewhere above. A storm of new and conflicting emotions has overtaken him, however, freezing him in place.

As he watches, the water is punctured by more boys and girls, plummeting through holes in the ice amid streams of bubbles. They sink less and less now before more Ortoks, embolded by the example of the first rescuer, swoop towards the helpless children. With paws around their limbs and midsections, the agile aquatic hunters take hold of the gawky, gangly humanoids and deliver them from the watery grave that whomever, far above, would send them to.

All but Odisseus, too frightened and overwhelmed to move, unsure what madness compelled his companions or those dropping the children from above.

That's when another child, a squirming little boy, drops immediately past Odisseus. His shock of inky black hair, dancing on his head, is dark enough to stand out even against the stygian darkness of those shrouded seas. When they momentarily make eye contact, boy and Ortok, those silver eyes are widened as far as they go, terror etched on his youthful features.

With feeble hands, the boy grasps for Odisseus but he's out of reach, pudgy fingers less than a foot from the Ortok's pelt. Simple as that, the boy's gone, swallowed by the all-consuming blackness below them both.

A future then flicks past the Ortok's understanding in space of a heartbeat. He's fishing and roving the oceans and rearing pups and teaching the riddles and rhymes to a new generation of Ortok. He imagines the life he's certain to lead on his homeworld, away from the hustle and bustle of the preoccupied universe, where predators and prey and paternity will be the greatest demands on his primordial life.

That isn't the future he chooses.

Instead, he dives down like a streamlined torpedo, spreads his webbing to brake at speed and lays paws on the boy's sinking shoulders. Instead, he's thrashing his tail with desperation, mind filling with fear that his hesitation has already cost the stupid, hairless thing its life. Instead, these instinctive actions are branding onto his brain, forever and ever, the biological imperative that will come to define him – protect this idiot.

Arms wrapped around that idiot's spasming chest, Odisseus makes for the airhole with all the speed his young body can lend him. The nearer and nearer he comes to that point of light above, the brighter and brighter it glows. Soon, it has wholly subsumed him and Odisseus can see nothing through his third eyelid but more blinding light, the untarnished sunlight of his homeworld.

That's when the spike of nausea flips his stomach. The dream disintegrates and the Ortok's true eyelids open. Tangled in the sheets of his bunk, Odisseus comes back to his body as he stares at the feeble, flickering light above his quarters. Back aboard The Unconstant Lover, back in his aged body, he's decades and zottibles away from that fateful moment of decision, the one that sentenced him to a life of wandering the spacelanes.

The flickering lights and the rumbling beneath the deckplates tell Odisseus everything he needs to know. The Unconstant Lover's running through her warp exiting procedures and, in mere moments, she'll drop into orbit above the next planet on their idler's course. Following Nemo's very necessary destruction of Garrock Brondi's ship, they'd made quick and chaotic tracks across the sector, hoping to confuse the bounty hunters he'd inevitably sent after them.

With a few frustrated kicks, Odisseus frees his feet from the blankets and brushes away the scattered pieces of the recirculator loop he was tinkering with before he dozed off. The dust of his dream still lingering in his eyes, it's a groggy, grumpy and therefore extremely dangerous Odisseus that stalks from his suddenly spacious quarters, empty of all Thirdseed's apparatus.

Instinct steers him down the corridor and into the helm, even though that's precisely where he'll meet the one person he doesn't really wish to meet right now.

It's a mildly surprising scene the Ortok chances upon inside the Lover's helm. He discovers not only pilot and co-pilot, installed at their seats, but even the ship's first mate, her elbows propped against the back of the navigator's chair. All three gaze out the viewport at the rapidly approaching planet.

Smallish on the planetary scale, the world that grows in the Lover's viewport is crusted completely with storm clouds. From orbit, they're peaceful enough white fluff but Odisseus knows they contain a year's supply of rain for the planet's miserable inhabitants. This is Rhav, Odisseus remembers, the first Offchart world on their upcoming tour of that sparsely-visited region, an unimportant backwater among unimportant backwaters.

"It's not the scramble codifier I don't trust," Moira is arguing, a little more companionably than Odisseus can remember her being. "There's no reason to check the idents of every tramp freighter what touches down here."

"Your point being?" dangles Nemo.

"You're what I don't trust," asserts Moira casually. "It's not gonna be the inbred mouthbreather in the control tower that makes us. It's gonna be you, shooting your mouth off in the first watering hole within pissing distance of the docking bay."

"That assertion," huffs Nemo, puffing up his chest a little, "is entirely unfair and entirely accurate."

"We're touching down?" wonders Odisseus from the doorway, officially announcing his presence to the room. "We're staying?"

"For a minute," Nemo confirms, a little reluctantly.

"Gotta circle the wagons," Moira explains, turning to glance backward at the Ortok. "Sketch out some next steps."

"Next steps?" Odisseus wonders and, to this, Moira only offers a commiserating shrug and a matching roll of the eyes.

"You?" Nemo poses towards Flask, splaying ray shields across the Lover's bow, in preparation for her entry into Rhav's atmosphere. "You stepping off too?"

The Captain's cousin scowls to be addressed. "Hadn't planned to," he ventures skeptically.

"Could you?" Moira volunteers for him. "Need somebody to go to ground, see if we can't rustle up some halfways believeable scramble codifiers. This place's a boondock but still – oughta be able to scrounge up something, I expect."

Flask mutters some begrudgment. Moira turns a glance to the Ortok. "Think you can stay, then? Keep an eye on the sensors?"

Odisseus waggles his head. "Well, long as we're touched down," he makes the point, "both of the boosters're in dire need of new conduit couplings. We make another warp, condition we're in, she'll overheat so bad we won't know we've exploded until we have."

Moira frowns. "Hm." She turns to consider the back of Nemo's head. "Guess you'll hafta watch the sensors, then."

"And you'll be?" Odisseus wonders.

"Checking the bounty." Before the Ortok can object, Moira is raising a hand to quell however he might've phrased the obvious question. "We're too far from a feedanchor. Ship's comm package is never gonna reach that far. Just gotta pray the rock's not so deep in the woods, she doesn't have an orbital transceiver."

"Whatever," grunts Nemo, quickly becoming bored of the logistics. "Anybody who's actually getting off, keep your fucking comms to hand. We get bushwhacked now," he argues, "there's 65 million more credits at stake, you read me?"

"Look who's," remarks Flask, sounding for all the world like Two-Bit Switch in that moment, "blooming talking."

Rhav's tempermental clouds starts to whip past The Unconstant Lover's viewport as Odisseus, not waiting to hear the continuation of the bickering, spins on his paw and stalks from the helm.

The conduit couplings were a lie, plain and simple. There were certainly parts that needed replacing aboard the Briza – moons knew those couplings were ancient – but they were in no immediate danger. Odisseus could fritter away the better part of an afternoon at Rhav's junkyards and scrap shops and actually spend that time more usefully, his mind elsewhere.

His words would need to be chosen carefully. He would need to somehow devise a way to tell Nemo that, when The Unconstant Lover departed Rhav for a better hiding spot, Odisseus would not be aboard.

He would need some way to tell Nemo that he was done.

Moira can finally exhale, soon as she catches sight of Buckethead's targeting helmet, elbowing its way through the crowded marketplace. Considering Rhav's unusually high blueskin population, it shouldn't be much of a chore to spot one bright-orange Kelkian Targeting Helmet in a sea of aquamarine faces. For the past hour, Moira's had to keep a careful lid on her panic, fearing she's missed him and, by proxy, her window.

Yet, all the same, here Flask comes down the street, Buckethead's unbecoming headgear masking his very wanted features from the Rhavian populace.

From her hideaway in the shadowed alcove, Moira takes extra precautions to ensure she's not equally visible to him, scooting from sight the moment she gets eyes on him. There's absolutely no reason that Flask should be looking for her, much less looking for her in the seventh in a string of dingy dockside cafés that line the outskirts of Rhav's single spaceport. All the same, carelessness will get her killed and Moira Quicksilver is anything but careless.

She waves away the attentions of the place's Prulish waiter with a dismissive gesture, all the while keeping an eye on Flask's threading progress down the thoroughfare. Sure enough, he comes to stand before a Bombaga heavy and the shadowed alcove she's straddling. A few words exchanged, Flask disappears inside an adjacent building and Moira is, figuratively speaking, alone again in the busy street.

A smattering of crumpled bills, a shoulder shove to push past the Prul and she's free from the café, negotiating her way up the street and back the way that Flask came.

As the planet's one serviceable spaceport, the streets are clogged with bodies, shoving and shuffling about their errands in this unremarkable little burg. The only people on Rhav are ragged Offchart pioneers and disreputables, seeking refuge on the map's raggedy edge. There's gravel crunching beneath everyone's boots and walls of white, stain-streaked composite closing everyone in. A dome of ordinary plexishild yawns over everyone, protecting all the spaceport's streets and pedestrians from Rhav's single distinguishing characteristic – the rain.

There's nothing even noteworthy about the rain. It wasn't No'tiukki's mud-rain or Ebroc's acid rain or Artelse's reverse-rain. Here on Rhav, it simply rains all day of every day of every year, without end. The citizenry, those unlucky few who wound up scratching out a living here, grew more and more accustomed, more and more waterlogged, until they no longer noticed the tapping of the downpour on the plexishield or the layer of mud all over their boots and trousers.

Moira wouldn't be here much longer. Moira is getting out of the rain.

Through careful orchestration, she'd ensured that each member of The Unconstant Lover's crew – save the one – were all conveniently somewhere else. Odisseus is hunting down conduit couplings. Flask is investigating a lead on some new scramble codifiers. Even Moira is supposedly keeping a tab on the unimaginably high bounty on their collective heads.

That leaves the Captain, the most wanted figure in the history of the galaxy, alone aboard the ship, utterly defenseless and prime for the taking.

All that complicates Moira's plan now is where exactly she'd find Nemo. Given his mercurial nature, he could be lounging, moping, snacking or masturbating in any number of nooks or crannies aboard the ship. While he certainly wasn't anticipating an ambush within the Lover's protective embrace, catching him completely unawares was a vital aspect of Moira's plan.

A single canister through the back of the skull was Moira's precise plan. Had he the time to turn, to anticipate the shot coming, even for a second, he would somehow – somehow – escape his inescapable fate.

A young Moira Quicksilver could not have asked for a simpler bounty to hunt. There was no need for infiltration; she had every access code. There was no need for stealth; the quarry was completely unguarded. There was precious little need for discretion; the quarry was completely blind to any such attacks from this direction.

Any other professional would agree – this bounty should hunt itself. Yet Moira Quicksilver, celebrated hardcase, somehow can't stop her hands from shaking.

For months, all that stood between her and this one fateful bounty was the Gitter score. With her promised millions counted and awaiting her aboard the Lover, there was nothing to stay Moira's hand. She could collect a sample of dead Nemo's blood, decamp with her hard cash and disappear into the galactic woodwork, all before Odisseus could return from squabbling with junk dealers or Flask with scramble codifiers under his arm.

She would leave their individual millions behind, Moira decided. She would even leave Nemo's cash there, for the pair of them to fight over. She bore neither Odisseus nor especially Flask much ill-will but she was wise enough to know that she had to put as much distance between herself and the bereaved Ortok as she possibly could with what little window of time she'd earn.

There was the inevitable fact that Odisseus could come rampaging after her, willing to hound Moira to the ends of the stars, because of whatever mysterious and unbreakable bond the saltbrothers shared. Should Moira Quicksilver choose to go to ground, however, there was no exhuming her; there wasn't a trick the Ortok could pull to snag her scent and this she's counting on Flask to argue for her.

By the time they could give meaningful chase, Moira would have her bounty and her winnings and be halfway to nowhere, with thirty-six million credits in her pocket and no reason to show her face in the greater galaxy ever again.

From here, she'd head to Cylmia, the nearest system with any Imperial presence. Between the Imperium and the Consortium, Moira would take her chances with the former. The sapling in Garrock Brondi's hands, the latter was substantially less likely to forgive.

The deed down, there were a dozen different systems from Cylmia she could slink away to. A few jumps later, with some comfortable distance earned, Moira would be in the clear – retired under thirty, with a queen's ransom to keep her happy and wealthy the rest of her days.

As far as Moira is concerned, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. From the very first day, when she'd yanked him from No'tiukki's grime, she knew she'd eventually claim his bounty. Seven years later, she is simply keeping that promise to herself.

There's no need to bring emotions into what was simply a business necessity for her.

Under a comfortable alias, The Unconstant Lover – now known as the Far Fetch – was parked on Pad Kappa, one of the score or more docking bays on the spaceport's western side. Soon as Moira arrives, she slips discreetly inside, sealing the portage doors behind her as she goes.

Pad Kappa is more or less exactly how Moira left it. A soaring dome of plexishield and walls of off-white composite, it's one step this side of parking on a mud flat, with nothing more advanced than walls and a roof to shelter the spacecraft. Rhav's torrential rain beats a tattoo on the plexishield, drowning out Moira's footsteps against the gravel and casting queer, dappled shadows across the whole docking port.

There's one crucial snag, however. The Unconstant Lover is nowhere to be seen.

Her footprints are there; great depressions in the gravel that suggest where her landing feet once stood, less than an hour ago. Her scent is still there; Pad Kappa reeks a little of scorched carbon petro and rotten eggs, that specific sulphurous smell of the Briza Light Freighter's driftjets.

The actual spaceship, of course, with the actual Captain – and the actual 65 million credits – aboard, is gone.

With the fluid grace of emergency, Moira Quicksilver is yanking loose her communicator from her belt. In two quick moves of her thumb, she's dialing the ship's internal frequency. Fully expecting that he won't answer and that she'll be forced to leave a vox-recording, Moira is instead surprised to hear an automated droidvox on the other end.

The frequency she's attempting to reach, the droidvox is telling her, does not exist.

She stands there a moment, devoid of emotions, the nervous tremble in her fingertips gone. After too long a dumbfounded moment, she dials a different frequency – Nemo's personal comm – and is similarly met with another error message.

The frequency she's attempting to reach, the droidvox repeats, does not exist.

Moira lowers the communicator from her mouth and stands stock still. She's immediately hyper-aware of her surroundings – the shuffle of the occasional pedestrian down the corridor outside, the crackle-and-buzz of the hissing comm in her hand, the rapping of the rain against the plexishield overhead.

She cannot tell whether she imagines or actually hears the whine of those jetboosters, incredibly faint through the rainstorm, rocketing away.

Moira should buzz Odisseus or Flask. That would be the logical thing to do and she knows, in a moment, that's exactly what she'll do. For the moment, though, she can only stand there numbly, denying the idea over and over again that this is what's happening.

He could have been captured, she reasons, or even simply attacked. Dumb luck could have allowed some other bounty hunter to jump the gun on Moira Quicksilver and force or spook Nemo into moving the ship. She wasn't necessarily made, she argues ineffectively, and he hadn't necessarily disappeared with all their money stashed in the freighter's hold.

Moira should buzz Odisseus or Flask. Instead, she staggers a few feet into the center of the landing pad, like she'll actually discover what happened by searching around for fucking clues. Some idiotic impulse in Moira's brain causes her to gaze skyward, looking for the silhouette of a ship zooming guiltily away from the scene of the crime. In the process, she nearly crushes her one actual clue beneath a baby-stomper as she blunders into the center of the landing pad.

A metallic sound turns her eyes downward. Amid a puff of dust, a slim piece of tech skips a few inches across the gravel, nudged by Moira's jackboot. Scowling, she stoops to retrieve the thing between two fingers, as slim as a playing card but twice as heavy.

A few brushing gestures wipes the excess mud from an exceedingly familiar holodeck, the same one that Moira remembers snatching from the mud of another rainy planet seven years past. A thumb against its center summons up the hologram.

It's predictably Nemo. Rendered in shimmering hologram, everything above the knees is visible and all the costume pieces are there – messy hair, leather duster, cocksure expression. He stands there, hands on his hips in a somewhat reluctant pose, looking straight towards Moira and presumably the holocorder.

"Hey." His greeting is as much sigh as speech. "Uh, wait." He stops suddenly, dropping character instantly and scowls towards his feet. He stomps forward once with his right foot and pauses a moment, gazing forward like he's waiting for something to take effect. "That work? I honestly don't know if you can see me right now. Well, okay. Let's hope."

The Galactic Menace takes another moment to compose himself and places his hands back on his hips. "Hey," Nemo tries again, with that insufferably smug tone. "So, I have some bad news for you."

Flask cannot believe what he is hearing.

"Hey," Nemo tries again, with that insufferably smug tone. "So, I have some bad news for you." He extends both hands, his fingers splayed, in a gesture that begs his listener's forebearance. "Better to get the whole thing outta the way first."

The Captain's miniaturized hologram turns to consider each of the three people seated before him with eerie accuracy, like he'd predicted exactly where they'd all be sitting when they sat down, as a crew, to watch this. "I'm not coming back. I'm not telling you where I went. You're not getting any of the money."

Before Flask can quite have any emotional reaction, Nemo shuffles back a step, his hologram partially disappearing. "Give you a minute."

It's the braggartism in Nemo's tone that pushes Flask over the edge and into irrational violence. The glass has shattered, the Gitterswitch spilled, by the time Flask realizes what he's done – hurled his drink against the booth's privacy screen. Beyond that screen, Flask can see the bar's blueskinned patrons glance upward, scowling and shifting in their seats at the disturbance. None of them, management or otherwise, are willing to come back here and mess with the three dangerous desperadoes in the cantina's furtherest booth back.

For their parts, neither Quicksilver – who's already watched the thing – nor Odisseus – an impassive mountain of shaggy fur – have any visible or audible reaction, either to the shocking news or Flask's sudden outburst.

The minute given, Nemo inches forward again, peeking up at the three remaining members of his crew. "Not sure if this helps or hurts," he stipulates cautiously, "but I doubt I'm actually gonna spend all that money. My share, maybe, but that's still way more than I'm ever gonna need."

As Nemo sighs and searches for the right words, Flask curls a fist and repeatedly reminds himself that punching the hologram would be pointless.

"There's a file in the Attaché," he explains, "that none of you read. That I made sure none of you read. Turns out, this was always a part of the plan. From the very beginning." He breaks out another smile from his seemingly endless repertoire, the "helplessly benefiting from your misfortune" one. "The person you really wanna blame here is Two-Bit Switch."

Flask opens his mouth to protest but something about the silent treatment both Quicksilver and Odisseus are giving the news stops him.

"From the get-go," Nemo continues, like this is all an unfortunate turn of events regrettably beyond his power, "Two-Bit was fixing to pull this maneuver. To haul ass with the money soon as things were clear. Originally had everything all worked out with Borsk, actually, but that clearly wasn't gonna work now."

Nemo shrugs ignorantly. "Not too sure what he was planning to do with 68 million on his own and there ain't no way to know now." He pauses a moment and his voice takes on a strange quality, far from his previously mocking tone. "That's who all this's about. This part and everything leading up to it. Been a thing for Two-Bit."

He scuffs his unseen foot a little, like he's embarrassed by the ostentatious present he's gotten his dead crewmate for his birthday. "Didn't seem right," he admits, "to go through with every other phase of Two-Bit's whole plan, what he spent years and years sketching out and arranging, and then just skip the grand finale. Cheapens the whole thing, I feel."

The Captain spreads his tiny holographic hands with pride. "That's how we all got here. Me making tracks, you scratching your heads and wondering what the bloom just happened to your money."

He smirks suddenly, his eyes landing on Odisseus. "Moira thinks she can find me. Ordinarily, I'd say sure. She's angry enough and determined enough to track me down, get your money back, make everything hunky-dory again." He takes too much pleasure in waggling his finger back and forth. "Afraid not. Not this time."

The relish he takes in this gesture spreads onto his face and he smirks again. "Doesn't make much sense, does it, for Two-Bit to plan all this and then run off with the winnings without some kinda insurance that his accomplices wouldn't come after him? Nah." He shakes his head knowingly. "Too clever for that."

A flicker of concern crosses Nemo's face. "Probably shouldn't say too much more, actually. Don't wanna give Moira too many clues. Suffice to say," he concludes, clapping his hands back together, "you could absolutely come hunting for me. Were I you, though, I wouldn't. Life's too short."

His own words seem to strike something of a chord with him. "I guess," he states, the idea seeming to occur to him for the first time, "we won't be seeing each other again. Had a couple more ideas, you know, for stuff we coulda pulled. There's a guy I know on Zycoon that's gotta sweet score, the kinda thing we'd be perfect for, really, but I suppose..."

Nemo trails off, gazing around at his unseen surroundings. "Guess I'mana have the place to myself from now on."

His searching eyes carry him back down and he remembers, quite suddenly, that he's being recorded. "That's it," he resolves, hands finding their way into the pockets of his duster. "That was my whole speech. Don't get captured, I guess, and," he recommends and shrugs suddenly, shoulders hovering near his ears a moment, "see you when I see you."

This final line delivered, Nemo puts a decisive foot forward, presumably to end the recording. As he does, Flask sits backward, anticipating the hologram to abruptly freeze. Instead, it continues a few more awkward, voyeuristic seconds, as Nemo clearly thinks he's done recording.

He stands there a moment, his hands dropped to his hips, appearing uncertain what to do with himself, his empty spaceship and his newfound millions. "First things first," he decides with a great sigh and starts to undo his pants.

With lightning speed, a disgusted Flask moves to cover his eyes at the same instant his cousin drops trow. His gaze averted, Flask can only listen in horror as the Captain keeps stripping his clothes away, sighing contentedly as they hit the floor.

It's Odisseus who eventually objects. "Can we–"

Quicksilver makes some gesture, reaching for the holodeck. "It goes on another minute," she informs them clinically, "but that's all he says of any value." A tapped finger against the central emblem and the holodeck goes inert, its broadcasted message fading away.

They pass the next moment in silence, absorbing this twist of events. Outside their sheltered booth, the sleepy cantina could care less about these developments, the privacy screen not completely silencing the bustle of drinks and servers. Most likely, one of the cantina's dozen patrons has made them by now, put the equation of bullet-headed bounty hunter and hulking Ortoki together. Without the Galactic Menace nearby, however, it was quite the brave bounty hunter willing to pull a pistol on these two dangerous looking characters.

In their current mood, no member of The Unconstant Lover would turn down the opportunity to pummel some halfwit wannabe bounty hunter to paste.

"The fook're we dawdling for?" an insistent Flask wants to know. "Every bleedin' second what passes, he puts more and more distance betwe–"

"There's no finding him," Quicksilver states evenly. "Not that easily, anyway."

"And why do you say that?" Flask demands. Something in her cold tone, though, gives credence to the creeping suspicion in the back of Flask's mind. "'cause he was shootin' his mouth off in th–"

"I told you," she reminds him calmly, somehow keeping her cool. "His comm's off the grid. The ship's too."

"So?" Flask scoffs. "He switched the blooming thing off."

"Off the grid," repeats Quicksilver. "Not offline. Neither of the freqs I dialed were even recognized as ever being legitimate." She gives her head the slightest shake. "I dunno what wizardry he or Two-Bit cooked up but it's serious shit. Don't know how far it reaches either but, for the moment, it's fair to say he's untraceable."

"So, what, that's that?" exclaims Flask, throwing his hands in the air. "We fought and bled and murdered and got chased twice around the galaxy for that fooking money and, simple as that, he gets to waltz away with fat pockets and that fooking smile on his face?"

"That's not what I said," Quicksilver states, her voice razor sharp. "All he's done is ensure he can't be traced by traditional methods. He may be able to cover his tracks but he can't turn invisible and he can't power the ship by spunking into the fuel tanks. He'll need to use gates and fuel the Lover and appear on security cameras like everyone else."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning he can hide," Quicksilver summaries, "but he can't disappear."

"Then we find him," Flask concludes. "We find him, we shoot out his kneecaps, we take the money, we leave him for dead." Neither makes any immediate response to this and Flask clenches his teeth in further frustration. "I do not see how there's any other line of thinking here."

"There's nothing we can do," Quicksilver disagrees. "There're things that I, as a professional bounty hunter, can do to track him down but those're not things I can do with a pair of groupies along for the ride."

Flask's breath is coming in heavy and ragged. "You ain't bleeding serious."

"All three of us," argues Quicksilver, her whole plan sketched out before she'd even come to them with the hologram, "will flag him from systems away. I'm the best and only chance we have of getting that money back and I cannot bounty hunt and babysit."

"Maybe you're not understanding," Flask endeavors to better explain, leaning forward on the table and thrusting a finger at the dour Quicksilver in a way that he knows is very unhealthy for the future of that finger. "I spent six fooking months, deep undercover in the motherfooking spice ranger corp to get hands on my share of that loot. There ain't nothing in the blowbagging galaxy gonna keep me from throttling the life from that slimy bastard – personally."

"You can throttle him," relents Quicksilver. "Lemme catch him first."

Flask's anger subsides a little, seeing the futility of his rage, and he slumps backward in his chair. Odisseus makes the next move, reaching a paw towards his untouched glass of Gitterswitch Gin. With a swift motion and a slow series of gulps, the great taciturn Ortok downs the whole glass and slams the empty pilsner back onto the table.

"That's decided, then?" presses Odisseus, turning a glance towards his two companions, Flask on the one side and Quicksilver on the other. "We're done?"

Flask doesn't quite feel qualified to answer the Ortok's question, still vibrating with bottled rage. That task falls to Moira Quicksilver who, with one hand pressed flat to the table, stares down into its woodgrain.

"Yeah," she agrees, in a strange and small voice. "I think we're done."

FINAL INTERLUDE

Two-Bit Switch couldn't sleep.

It took some work to rearrange his pillows properly, allowing him to lean back against the headboard. An arm stretched to the left retrieved his Attaché and a thumb against its activation pad spilled welcoming blue light into the darkened room.

In defiance of all the elegance and luxury of the rest of her headquarters, Gella's bedchamber was surprisingly spartan. The room was small, the decor simple. What furnishings she had bothered with were sleek and minimalist, her bed comfortable but not lush or ostentatious or draped in silk curtains like he anticipated. It belied a sensible core to the woman, something certainly hidden from anyone who did anything but the most intimate business with her, a harsh practically that laid substrate to the airs she put on.

The bedroom's main feature were its massive bay windows, looking out on Gella's beloved arboretum. From outside, the faint purple glow of the Ysinsa fruit made soft competition with the blue light of Two-Bit's Attaché through the partially-dimmed plexishield. These were a particular favorite of Gella's for this reason, her having instructed her gardeners to plant a small grove nearest her bedroom's window, so that she might admire their innate glow.

After dinner, they'd taken a postprandial stroll through the lush gardens. All the while, Two-Bit's host took great pains to point out every species of tree, all exotic, many extinct, that she'd planted and cultivated here, a fertile oasis on an otherwise lifeless planetoid.

It wasn't hard for Two-Bit to see the yearning in her – all this effort to collect every rare tree in the galaxy, while the one she truly wanted remained ever out of reach.

Tomorrow, Two-Bit would leave all this comfort and luxury behind. The same scrappy transport would ferry him back to Takioro Defederate Station, back to his humdrum life of crime and grime. His weekend away drawing to a close, he would soon be about the caper's real work. He spent the past three days daydreaming with Gella Borsk; tomorrow, he'd be slogging through the arduous actualizing phase, wrangling all the logistics behind each of their daydreams.

It would be a stark transition between the Gella's posh lifestyle and the grubby terminals of his home station. Two-Bit would, despite the strangeness and the near-constant paranoia that dogged him these past days, look back fondly on his time spent with Gella Borsk.

She hadn't, after all, conspired to kill him – quite the opposite, in fact.

One cue, there was some shifting in the sheets to Two-Bit's immediate right. A few seconds later, she was propped up on an elbow, silver hair falling across her face, and considering Two-Bit in the soft glow of his active Attaché.

"Can't sleep?" she croaked, her voice crawling back to coherence.

"Nag," he replied with a subtle shake of his head. "Never could, really. Never had much use for it."

Sleep was something that never came comfortably to a station waif. When did it come, it was always grabbed in brief fistfuls and never held onto for long, as predators and paranoia were far too prevalent. Even now, a decade and more removed from those desperate days, Two-Bit could not sleep for more than an hour at a time, his prey instincts too ingrained.

"Speak for yourself," Gella felt the need to contest him. "Some of us have a very strict sleep regimen, to ensure we actually get shit done tomorrow."

"I'm keeping you up?" Two-Bit considered, glancing at her. "There's lots of blooming other rooms in this squat. I can–"

"You're fine," she assured him, with the slightest suggestion that he wasn't. "I'm grandmothering you, is all."

"Well," Two-Bit supposed, glancing around at how much chic bedroom is visible in the low light. "You're the one that's running a galactic slosh empire, the one with the extinct fucking Ysinsa tree outside your vinder. You probably know what you're jabbing about."

"You oughta listen to me more often," Gella agreed, flopping back onto her pillow.

"It's a fair cop."

"You working?" she asked the ceiling.

Two-Bit sighed and gave her a glance. "Yes and no."

Gella Borsk's silver hair splayed out against the blue satin of her pillowcase and, from this angle, those few lines and wrinkles that betray her age had vanished. Two decades older than his usual partners, Two-Bit had nonetheless come to bed at her insistence. It wasn't hard to imagine how lonely her existence might become out here – managing the business year round, in utter secrecy, with no time nor people to fuck. His senses somewhat dulled by brandy, he'd agreed readily enough, in between paramours as he was, and he was pleasantly surprised by her skill.

For an older lady, she knew how to tussle.

"Yes and no?" she wanted to know.

Two-Bit made a waffling gesture with his hand. "I'm sorta teasing out a theory, I guess you'd jabb. Had a coupla things flash on me when I was supposed to be snoring. Wanted to run some digits."

"For the caper?"

"Indirectly, yeah," Two-Bit admitted. "I hink there might be a way to incorporate another little pet project of mine, to solve one of my crunches."

Gella rolled over, to better examine what he was playing with on his Attaché screen. "Do tell."

"For starters," Two-Bit began, swiping through hovering holograms to return to one of the first windows he'd opened, the best place to begin his lengthy explanation. "I don't specc you're too cozy with the way grabees – security holocorders – work, are you?"

"Let's assume I'm not."

"Fair enough," acknowledged Two-Bit, preparing to speak a little slower and clearer, ranging outside his usual jabber parlance to help communicate the bigger ideas to her. With a few more swipes, he summoned the relevant data file he'd compiled, scads of scrolling text speckled with occasional boring loop of security footage. "Facial recognition is the basic backbone of security corders, yeah?" He tapped one loop and the hologram enlarged, showing a pair of generic security employees patrolling down a nondescript hallway. "Corder knows there's two blokes there and that those two blokes're supposed to be there, because it runs their faces against a database of faces it recognizes as permitted in that zone."

Gella nodded slowly. "Right."

"Now, if you're a professional slambreaker, like I is, this'll put a stop to your professional slambreak before you've put your wozzers on in the morning." Two-Bit extended his finger theatrically. "Unless you got the right solution."

"Deactivate the corders?"

"Nag, that'd flag the whole system, usually sending a clinker into lockdown." The recording minimized, Two-Bit instead enlarged a square of coding, all streaming digits. "There's a simple cypher, something we call a masquerade, that'll boozle the software into accepting new faces into their database."

"Sure," accepted Gella. "That way, the corders recognize your face and don't trip the alarm."

"Bingo. Downside is, only works on a closed circuit. Every time you wanna infiltrate a joint, you gotta cook up a new masquerade to trick the new mainframe. Pain in the bloomhole, really."

Gella spiked an eyebrow. "Are you worried about the corders aboard the Requisition?"

Two-Bit shrugged. "Not particularly. You're familiar with a scrambler, yeah? Scramble codifier," he corrected himself.

Confusion at the sudden transition crossed her pink features. "In theory. Why?"

"'Cause they're sorta a big pain in the bloomhole too, ain't they?" Both hands working, Two-Bit went swiping through the thicket of holograms floating above his Attaché, to find another particular window. "You gotta keep buying new ones, right, once the old idents are burned through. Plus, the ship you're using ain't never gonna really look like the one you're pretending to be so any mouthbreather with peepers is gonna make you on the first look-see."

"Those're for ships, though," a scowling Gella endeavored to understand. "Were we not talking about the security corders aboard the–"

"We are," Two-Bit agreed, "and we aren't. My ringer is," he continued, heedless of her confusion, "why shouldn't it be the system that's rigged, rather than the ship? There oughta be a way to sweet talk the scanners themselves, you know, on a warp gate or a docking bay or bloom, even another ship, that there's nothing to see here, chaps, move along."

Gella opened her mouth to voice something but instead only scowled.

"And such a thing does exist," Two-Bit reminded her, "but on a very small scale. It is possible to trick one individual warp gate into misfiling a ship on its registry but, in theory, all the warp gates in the galaxy jabb at one another, right? That's how warping even works."

"You're very much losing me, I'm afraid," Gella eventually confessed.

Two-Bit started to count on his fingers. "There're a buncha ways to wink a retina scanner but nine-times-outta-ten, you gotta wear a doofy contact in your peeper. There're these data holes that you can, with some elbow grease, drop your comm's freq into, meaning you can make outcoming buzzes but cannot receive incoming ones. I once knew a guy, a real prick, actually, that managed to squeeze into the Ring ConFed's mainframe and swap his mugshot with some other berk's."

"Shall the point," wondered Gella, "be arriving anytime soon?"

"The point," announced Two-Bit, "is that these're all, for lack of a better term, two-bit fixes. They work, you know, in their own way, but they're small-time, unambitious workarounds. I've been scheming a way to take all these disparate tricks and tools, right, and combine them all into one, like, package or virus or what-have-you. Something I might sell, you know, as a service, or something I might use myself, should the need arise."

"And what need is that?"

"The need to lavender. To, er, disappear," Two-Bit summarized and turned to consider her. "Everything goes according to the plan, the plan that we spent all this time constructing and fool-proofing, the entire blooming Consortium's gonna come down on me head. And, assuming I'm the one what does the undercover bit, they're gonna have my bleeding picture, my retinas, my genetics, all that."

"Hm," Gella grunted. "That had occurred to me."

"What I need's some insurance, you get me? Something that can keep my bloomhole outta the clinker, you know? Lemme stay in the lavender as long as I need to."

"This's something you'll fabricate on your own?" Gella's tone is completely neutral, not conveying neither confidence nor skepticism. "This insurance?"

"Well," Two-Bit considered, "suppose it'll mostly be a virus, something to infect the galaxy's mainframes. Probably have to bring my Zibbian in, the one that's cooking Mayhem for us. Won't be happy about that, I expect, which'll drive the score up."

"Oh?"

Two-Bit waggled this hand this way and that. "Might've left him high-and-dry the last time we collaborated. Things on Balaria went a little sideways and I hadta make a quick hoof." He glanced at her, a little apologetically. "You know how it is."

"Indeed I do." She shifted her weight, brushing a few errant locks of silver from her eyes. "Who do you imagine will be footing the bill for this insurance of yours?"

Two-Bit gave her an irresponsible grin. "I suppose you could jabb," he made the point, "it would be in your best interest to invest in such a thing."

She didn't blink or flinch at this. "How do you figure?"

"You don't want me getting scooped up by the Consortium now, do you?" He blinked innocently at her. "How long do you think this pretty mug'd resist a spice ranger interrogation?" He tapped his temple a few times. "Awful lotta valuable intel in here, you know, about somebody's whole operation."

"That somebody," Gella supposed, planting a finger against his opposite temple, "could always put one through your brain. A pretty surefire way to ensure you don't squawk."

Two-Bit smirked. "Listen to you. Squawk." He shook his head, rueful grin still spread across his features. "You're not the type to waste a valuable asset, I don't think. And trust me, love – I'm much more valuable without any holes in my head."

"That is most certainly true." With a sigh, Gella rolled back onto her pillow, her gaze falling back at the ceiling. "Talk to your Zibbian. Get a quote. Open the discussion with me then."

"Truth is," Two-Bit admitted with a sigh. "May come to zilch, all this." He tossed a casual gesture towards the web of holograms hovering before him. "Maybe the different interfaces can't coordinate, maybe Sifer won't take the job, maybe it's too ambitious. Either way," he shrugged, tapping the Attaché's power button and plunging the room back into darkness, "it's a crunch's gotta be solved, one way or another."

There they laid in silence for many long minutes, long enough that Two-Bit assumed Gella had fallen back asleep. She mentioned instead, when even he was on the verge of sleep, in a voice crystal clear and devoid of emotion. "It does raise the question of your team."

"My team?"

"If you have the power to disappear completely," Gella explained simply, "why split the 68 million at all?"

That gave Two-Bit pause. The thought had never occurred to him, what would happen to the crew he'd used to pull the caper, once the caper was complete. As a jailbreaker, he was typically a consultant, a specialist brought in to plan, advise and very occasionally ride along. As a gunrunner, he was an equal partner, sometimes required to wrangle underlings and issue orders, but there was always Nabdres, his peer, to consider. Here, he would be the true mastermind, everyone else his subordinates, that he was free to dick over completely.

There was something about Gella's suggestion that stuck in his craw, some sentimental twang that made him uneasy at the thought of betraying the team that'd managed to pull the impossible con. It was not insurmountable, of course. He would simply need to hire a crew of bastards, scumbags with more skill than sentimentality, people he wouldn't feel bad betraying.

As long as he didn't become attached to that crew, it shouldn't matter what happened to them.

All that was a bridge to cross on another day. There was his magnum opus, his great life's work, to plan, arrange and execute first. Once he pulled this caper, Two-Bit Switch would have brought low the mighty Gitter Consortium, committed the crime of the century and, assuming Sifer could cook him up some insurance, he'd walk away with no price on his head and with sixty-eight million to his name. After that, there would be no need to plan another caper, to spend another sleepless night in some Third Ring dumpster, to show his face ever again.

He could disappear into the woodwork forever.

CHAPTER 30

Flask hefts the cargo crate with a groan. He totters there a moment, attempting to bring a knee up to relieve some of the weight and, in the process, almost loses his balance completely. Another crewmember, a passing Frigopi with a crate stacked on each bulbous shoulder, gives him a squinty eye as he struggles there. She makes some comment in her hooting language and, even though Flask doesn't speak Frigopese, he doesn't miss her meaning.

Flask would like the record to reflect that he has not been designed with manual labor in mind. He's certain that, to the common spacers aboard The Ship Shape, shifting a few crates of supplies doesn't actually constitute "manual labor" in the strictest sense. Judging by the brusque attitude his new crewmates are paying him, he anticipates this will be a long and unkind voyage back to civilization.

Squatting like a fat beetle above them on its six extended landing feet, The Ship Shape really doesn't look like much but, compared to The Unconstant Lover, she looks brand spanking new. Her outer shell's quite recently been painted – the cautionary orange color of a heavy munitions hauler – but her soft underbelly, immediately above their heads, is still all exposed machinery and inner workings.

A TFS something or other, it's a typical teamster workhorse. This kind of ship is so commonplace that Flask, even in his years as a landlocked criminal fixer, has some familiarity with the model. The crew is a hodgepodge of honest spacers from all over the Ring ConFed, hustling about the ship's underside and ensuring she's trim for departure within the hour.

Once he's got his crate under control, Flask starts to stagger his way across the landing pad, headed toward the Shape's extended ramp. There, hovering on her membranous wings, is the bosun that initially offered Flask the job. Keeping each of her four eyes on a different member of the crew, she barks orders and chastisements, lamenting the ship's schedule and reminding everyone that this ophilium ore was expected on Balaria yesterday.

Like any common spacer might, Flask went wandering about Rhav's dockside taverns, seeking employment aboard the dozen merchanter rigs currently on planet. The fact that The Unconstant Lover's crew dissolved here, on the inner edge of the Offchart Territories, actually came as a blessing in disguise – no tramp freighter this far out would require workman's papers of its prospective crew.

Under the pseudonym of Stubb, Flask booked passage for labor aboard The Ship Shape. According to the boatswain, the freighter was bound for the western worlds of the Ring ConFed and, from there, would meander into Uklio Quadrant, looking for more consignment. Somewhere along that line, "Stubb" knew he'd grow tired of the tramper's life and slink into the shadows, becoming someone else with some other calling.

What he would do and where he would go, Flask doesn't know. What he does know is that he must keep moving. That rage is not quenched, the shrieking injustice of Nemo's nasty trick still lodged somewhere inside him. All that seems capable of quieting his irrational anger are logistics, plans and schemes for his future. Were he to stop in any one place, Flask fears, anger would drive him to drink and drink would drive him to mistakes and mistakes would drive bounty hunters into his ass.

Gallow is where he belongs – with its sprawling squalor, its discreet underworld, its rules and practices of the urbane criminal – but that's exactly where he can't go. In all this heat his cousin's heaped on his name, Flask must find a new name and a new den of iniquity and start afresh somewhere else. He'd been a fixer, he'd been a spice ranger – it was time to be something else.

Talos occurs to him, knowing the great gas giant and its many mischevious moons isn't too far from The Ship Shape's route. Talos V occurs to him, famous for its dash racing and even more famous for the seedy web of corruption that surrounds its dash racing.

Where the other two were bound, Flask couldn't really say. He knew Quicksilver was determined to track down and apprehend his cousin and, in that, Flask wished her every possible success. A large part of him still wanted to accompany her on that mission but it was actually something about Odisseus and his weary resignation that cooled Flask's fire somewhat.

He still demanded regular updates from Quicksilver and she'd promised to deliver. A rendezvous would be established, she'd said, as soon as she's laid hands on his cousin and their purloined payday. Somewhere in the back of Flask's mind, he knew none of that would ever happen. Maybe Quicksilver had exaggerated her bounty hunting prowess and Nemo was gone, disappeared into the woodwork. Maybe she would apprehend him and, seeing no reason to share the wealth, she would simply pocket all 65 million.

Maybe Nemo or Quicksilver or Flask, for that matter, would run smack dab into the jaws of law and order and waste the rest of their miserable lives in some prison cell someplace.

Whatever the outcome, Flask would keep moving, would keep his options open, wouldn't give himself the time to stop and consider the betrayal or what it might actually mean to him.

Another passing crewmember, a woman with phosphorescent green hair, gives Flask the same look the Frigopi gave him as he and his crate hustle up the Shape's boarding ramp. For the umpteenth time, Flask is forced to wonder whether the whole crew is plotting to capture him in his sleep and collect his posted reward, soon as they make Belena.

This is bound to be a long and sleepless journey, Flask predicts. From Offchart to Uklio, he'll be bunking with strangers and keeping one eye open all the while.

The Ship Shape's cargo hold is a vast voluminous space, three-fourths the hauler's total size. It's overhead lighting dim and distant, all the ship's busy crew are reduced to silhouettes, occasional streams of light catching an arm or shoulder or face. As Flask waddles through them, they steer driftcarts and stack crates and argue about everything's organization, tossing about insults and tools.

None of these people are murderers or wanted criminals, it suddenly strikes Flask. In outward appearance, they're so similar to the galactic scum he's accustomed to dealing with. None of them have any fear of civilized space, he realizes, nor the overhanging noose waiting to snare them around the neck.

They're everyday stiffs, working for the man; law-abiding citizens. The greatest day-to-day fear someone aboard The Ship Shape might face was about making ends meet, about catching flak from their boss, about getting laid by the cute somebody on the bridge crew. Him the one exception, no member of The Ship Shape's merchant crew looks especially like they'll die in a firefight or a bar brawl or a prison cell.

Nothing could be further from his former crew. It was ten times more likely that a heatblade or blunt force trauma or firing squad would catch one before he would ever again lay eyes on them. Nemo would be butchered for a blood sample. Quicksilver would displease some gang boss and be made an example of. Odisseus would be apprehended by chance, in some supermarket aisle somewhere, and be imprisoned for the rest of his days.

Flask, he realizes, would be doublecrossed on some heist gone wrong and his body fed through a waste recycler, so as not to leave a trail.

With a grunt, Flask slams the burdensome crate onto the teltriton floor, next to all the other identical crates carrying the Shape's essential supplies. He's stretching his back moments later, preparing to go grab another and another and another crate, when someone slaps him companionably on the shoulder.

He turns to see the hand on his shoulder is at the end of a trunk. That trunk belongs to an Aurik crewmember, a shirtless swaggerer Flask previously gave a wide berth to. Instead of the typical scowl, the Aurik pays him with a broad smile and a joshing shove, all unwarranted. He make some quip, Flask knows, watching him speak and Flask even responds with something rote but the specifics all escape him. The Aurik doesn't linger more than a moment, stomping away before another word can be exchanged but the interaction roots Flask to the spot.

Here was no hidden menace, no posturing about who was stronger than whom, no undercurrent of deception that threads through all Flask's criminal relationships. A comrade saw that he'd worked hard to carry that crate and came to show his appreciation – no strings attached, no threats underpinned.

Knowing no other way to respond, Flask brushes imaginary dust from his hands and strides back down the boarding ramp. He wonders how much cargo there's to stow and how many stops there'll be between here and wherever the freighter is eventually going.

Complete with a chip on his shoulder, an honest crew and the workings of a light sweat, Flask is headed nowhere in particular.

Moira takes the corpse by the lapels of its flightsuit and heaves upward. The pilot's segmented insectoid legs make the task bloom-near impossible. It's a sweating affair of stances and leverage, the extremely conspicous Moira Quicksilver squatting atop the starfighter's open cockpit, before she makes any substantial headway in pulling the dead pilot from its seat.

Next time Moira Quicksilver intends to commandeer a ship, she'll wait until the pilot's actually exited the vehicle before blowing their buggy brains out.

She assumes the vessel's unfortunate pilot to be some stripe or another of bounty hunter, considering the craft they rode in on and the weapons it carries. A Xendo loner like this, separated from its colony, is rare enough, especially this far from Xendar, but even rarer still is the corpse's orphaned spaceship.

A Vbeck & Rhissol QX5 Peregrine, the subassault fighter – The Target Practice – was lean, angular and ugly. Designed for extreme manueverability in aerial combat, rather than out and out speed, she came equipped with swiveling laser cannons and a plethora of attitude jets that allowed her to spin twice on a dime. The Peregrine is a distant cousin to Moira's Bloodhound of old and thus, she knows the ship comes with pretty much zero amenities, more a crotch-rocket than a dwellable spaceship.

How in the moons this Xendo nobody came by such a nasty ride, Moira Quicksilver does not know. All Moira Quicksilver knows is that this vehicle is the ideal vehicle for the solo bounty hunter.

For the better part of the weekend, she'd stalked Rhav's sodden streets, seeking such an ideal vehicle and praying that her patience would pay off. During the interim, she'd been made twice, once by passerby and once by bounty hunter, and had coincidentally committed murder twice. Both bodies impossible to hide in this spaceport hermetically sealed against rainfall, the local constabulary was currently sniffing after her leavings, making "as soon as possible" a great time to get off planet.

All this while, Moira's comm stayed dialed to local inbound traffic, listening for the arrival of any ship that might serve her purposes. Considering how little reason ships had to visit Rhav, Moira's very fortunate, in one way, that something as perfect as The Target Practice arrived when it did.

In another way, Moira is very unfortunate, considering The Target Practice is certainly a bounty hunter and certainly only in system to pursue rumors of the Galactic Menace's ship, spotted in Rhav's single spaceport.

She's been squatting here in hiding, awaiting the Practice's arrival, ever since her comm squawked at her about Pad Upsilon. When the unattractive little fighter made landfall and its pilot activated its cockpit release, Righty made a little mess of Xendo brains against the cockpit's interior plexishield and the ship was officially Moira Quicksilver's.

Now, she just needs to pry the gunshot Xendo carcass from the pilot's seat, flee the system and start the laborious process of finding Nemo's trail.

Whatever safeguards Two-Bit Switch has prepared might be sophisticated as fuck, Moira knew, but Nemo was still fundamentally Nemo. There were the more traditional methods of hunting Moira could use, true, but her greatest weapon was still Nemo's abiding stupidity. He would, show-boating numbskull that he is, make some inevitable blunder and Moira need only keep within a short enough distance that, when he did, she could pounce.

His first mistake was choosing to run here, on Rhav. The northern cusp of the Offchart Territories, there were really only a handful of systems he could realistically jump to. Two-Bit's hocus-pocus or not, he went to Vothoi Minor, Cylmia or Runshaw. Factoring those distances, he would arrive there tomorrow, today or next week, depending.

He would leave some trace. He'd be caught on security footage or leave an impression in the mind of a service employee or even order fast food, were he dumb enough. With no navigator, all his jumps would need to be clean, dropping a little bread crumb that Moira could collect. Step by step, zottible by zottible, she would close the distance between them.

The real trick, Moira keeps in mind, is not to tip the hand of the legion of other bounty hunters, certainly on both their trails.

It's not a speedy art – old school, unplugged bounty hunting – and will require investigation and deliberation. The only real threat to Moira's potential success was another hunter or dozen, nipping at Moira's heels while she worked, hounding her every step with gunfights and explosions and big loud noises to scare her quarry into the woodwork.

Moira must be careful and she must be quiet, even more than Nemo must.

The prospect, she's almost ashamed to admit, excites her.

She's been pretending pirate for nearly a decade, a child dressed in a festive, ill-fitting costume. She's certainly reaped the benefits and she's certainly suffered the losses of collaborating with crewmates and, in the process, became an intergalactically recognized outlaw.

Moira Quicksilver does not necessarily look back over her time aboard The Unconstant Lover with only contempt.

At the very core of her being, though, she's always been a bounty hunter.

The work is arduous and hardly rewarding enough and approximately as life-threatening, in shorter bursts, as piracy. When push comes to shove, though, Moira the bounty hunter makes her own rules whereas Moira the pirate took rules from those with no authority to give them. She might be broke, she might be hungry but, out there, hunting lowlife scum in the untamed black, Moira Quicksilver is Moira Quicksilver and no one else.

She leaves her old life without a compunction to her name. All her fellow crew, scattered across the galaxy by now, are either dead or adults, capable of making their own way. Flask was a career criminal in the gutters of Underglow long before the Galactic Menace dragged him into the interstellar spotlight. Abraham Bonaventure runs a small bootlegging empire on Pok these days and wouldn't surrender that for all the Gitterswitch he could manufacture. Two-Bit Switch is a smear on a Trijan water fixture.

It is only for Odisseus that Moira feels a pang of unease, a stab of sympathy. The news that his saltbrother abandoned them, abandoned him, seems to leave the Ortok benumbed. They'd parted company brusquely, both parties uncertain what words they should share and neither party willing to overstep that intangible bond they'd developed as the Galactic Menace's babysitters by offering any genuine emotional sentiment.

Thus, they'd parted with a nod and a curt word, Moira hot about her task and Odisseus left aimless, to drift through the galaxy without a rudder. Were any of the Lover's crew doomed to capture following Nemo's disappearance, it would certainly be Odisseus, unequipped with the necessary criminal skillset to survive in this unfriendly galaxy.

Something chitinous cracks down below. One last great effort is enough for Moira to shift the Xendo's carcass completely from the pilot's seat. One undignified shuffle later, she pitches the thing full over the Practice's starboard side and it crunches against the gravel below. She doesn't bother to doctor the scene any, already wanted by Rhav's meager authorities and preferring to leave this soggy ball behind as soon as possible.

The bucket seat's clearly been modified for an insectoid and is a unique flavor of extremely uncomfortable. Moira nonetheless yanks down the cockpit viewport, scowls a little at the Xendo brain splattered there and ultimately decides that speed here is paramount. She runs her hands across the Peregrine's unfamiliar systems, scanning the consoles and dashboards for that all-important function – autopilot.

The necessary button pressed, the driftjets ignite. The radio starts gabbing about flight clearance; Moira Quicksilver is scanning the interior of the cramped starfighter for something even more essential – a rag and spray bottle.

Traffic control protesting all the while, The Target Practice departs the surface of Rhav and, guided by its passable autopilot, makes immediately for the planet's Warp Gate. All the while, Moira succeeds in cleaning the brains from her brand new vessel's viewport and smirks at the irony that her piratical career ended with a very honest act of no-strings-attached piracy.

The planet's many clouds are soon replaced by that endless field of stars. Moira Quicksilver's scanning through the jump possibilities, attempting to eliminate any obvious candidates before she cases Rhav's Warp Gate for clues. Runshaw seems the obvious choice, considering its zero population centers but, knowing Nemo, she couldn't rule out Cylmia, given his confidence in his newfound "insurance" and all the planet's teeming throngs to disappear among. The thought of either brings a small, unwilling smile to her face.

Armed with only her wits, her pistols and a fine piece of starship engineering, Moira Quicksilver is back on the hunt again.

Odisseus shifts his weight and adjusts the hang of his luggage, attempting to impress his looming bulk upon the dawdling Nimglo ahead of him in line. The Nimglo, meanwhile, is completely oblivious to every other person in the galaxy, save for the TransGalax employee that's scrutinizing her ticket. The TransGalax employee, an entirely too serious blueskin, keeps scowling from her handheld machine to the Nimglo's ticket, attempting to spot some imagined discrepancy between them.

The line to board the next transport off Rhav isn't necessarily long, considering the planet's tiny population. At this rate, though, it'll be nightfall before they're all processed and packed aboard what Odisseus is forced to assume will be an empty cruiser. As the end of TransGalax's Lhvargo Line, the Ortok can't envision Rhav is some dream destination for too many galactic travellers, considering its perpetual rain and its utter insignificance.

From where he stands in the queue, Odisseus can see the upper mantle of the shoddy passenger liner, enough to recognize a WW968 Starlight Incorporated Storage Hauler. No doubt "converted" to ferry passengers, TransGalax apparently felt no qualms about shipping people around the galaxy in the same vehicles used to ship livestock. The impending commute, with its seating and cuisine designed for non-Ortoki passengers, Odisseus predicts will be something of an ordeal.

Compared to scrambling madcap across the galaxy the past decade, running from engine failure, flamethrower-wielding psychos and entire fleets of warships, this would be a cakewalk, something the Ortok should honestly be looking forward to.

Here, at the end of everything, Odisseus can't decide how he feels.

He'd left Flask fuming, demanding assurances from Moira that she'd contact them, that she'd do everything in her power to see the Captain brought to justice. He'd left Moira cold and calculating, her mind fifteen steps ahead and eager to part ways, to take the impossible task under her own wings, to sever every tie that she could afford to sever.

His two former companions on opposite sides of the spectrum, Odisseus cannot seem to locate any emotion he actually feels – not anger, not sadness, not really even relief.

A still suspicious blueskin clears the Nimglo to board and the Nimglo, the living embodiment of wasting everyone's time, drags her fuzzy feet in collecting all her scattered baggage and rounding the corner. Eager to keep things moving, Odisseus is waddling forward and thrusting his papers in the blueskin's face before she's a moment to recover.

He'd purchased his ticket from a scalper, not daring to brave anywhere as crowded as a transpo terminal. His forged ident, through some small act of providence, was still on his person when Nemo flew off with the Lover and the rest of his things. They were, in fact, the very same Quargish credentials Nemo arranged for their infiltration aboard the Franchise, incorrect gender and all.

He doubts very much that this backwater blueskin has any more knowledge about Ortoki versus Quargish biology than the average galactic citizen. From all the attention he pays "her" and "her" ident card, Odisseus could be mistaken. Perhaps Nemo and Moira were right all along and Quargish physiology is considered quite common knowledge in the galaxy these days.

The same idiot chance that granted him this fake ident also allowed him a small amount of petty cash, the spare change from a successful haggle over the conduit couplings. Most of that cash's been spent now, dwindled away on essential supplies and the cost of his fare. There wasn't enough remaining to purchase another ticket, once the South Lhvargo Line reached its terminus on Traptor but that was a problem for another day. Allow Odisseus to reach Traptor without running afoul of a stray bounty hunter or Imperial checkpoint and the Ortok wouldn't make a single complaining peep.

Some part of Odisseus knows that, when he officially runs out of funds, he'll wind up back on some chopshop floor, selling his services again to make ends meet. Perhaps he should head back to Vollok instead, as good a destination as any for his pointless voyage across Bad Space. Perhaps Dirty Djembe's is all he deserves now.

The blueskin asks a few questions in her arch and skeptical manner. He answers, of course, in Ortoki and she thanks him with an uncomprehending and blinking stare. Soon enough, Odisseus, wanted criminal and present danger to all passengers aboard, is permitted entry to the space bus. With every possession he now owns slung in a satchel over his shoulder, Odisseus plows around the corner and marches towards the transport that'll take him away from this gloomy planet.

His paws scraping against the gravel, Odisseus gets his first proper glimpse of the ship, romantically named "4Q31Z9" in great blocky letters along her starboard loading ramp. As predicted, it's blockish, asymmetrical and in disrepair, a looming hulk that betrays its past as a cargo freighter at every hull plate. The sight of the enormous sluggish thing, dwarfing the short string of passengers in line to climb that access ladder instantly brings The Unconstant Lover back to the Ortok's mind.

Odisseus is surprised to feel nothing, no twinge of loss or remorse or any sympathetic emotion at the thought of the ship that cost so much time and labor and heartache to support.

The entire commute, from Rhav to Traptor, he would dwell on this emptiness – this conspicuous gap where he imagines he should be feeling a whole swirl of conflicting emotions – and he would come to certain conclusions. It is not, in his mind, that The Unconstant Lover is stolen or destroyed or even gone. It is to Odisseus, through some incredible feat of emotional acrobatics, like The Unconstant Lover never existed.

It is to Odisseus like those seven years, spent on hundreds of planets across the galaxy, in the dankest dives, the dirtiest gutters and the dizzying heights of galactic infamy, never happened.

To him, striding towards that towering transport, Odisseus never saved Nehel Morel from drowning all those years ago. They never misspent their youth in Gallow's alleyways and junk halos. They were never separated by half a galaxy and seven heart-rending years. They were never reunited in a dingy Vollocki garage.

That meeting was not the kickstart to a glorious career of piracy that would come, when all was said and done, to irrevocably change the course of galactic history.

In that moment and for every moment going forward, Odisseus has transformed himself into a simple wayfarer, a galactic commuter, someone making his way across the spacelanes and thinking nothing for what he leaves behind him.

A bond formed in salt cannot be so carelessly broken, screams every voice in the Ortok's head. With every step Odisseus takes away from Nehel Morel and onto his own trajectory, he feels that much more weightless, that much freer from the strings that once tangled him.

Step by step, Odisseus climbs that access ladder and falls in behind the pokey Nimglo, the grating of each step rough against his hind pad and his satchel slapping against his hip.

His only luggage, the rough canvas knapsack, is nine-tenths empty. On his unexpected pilgrimage, Odisseus brings only what tools he'd been wearing, what canned fish he could forage from Rhav's grocers and, with no way to dispose of the things on planet, the two conduit couplings.

It's hard not to feel unequipped for the galaxy at large. Not knowing where he's actually going, Odisseus doesn't really know what else he might need.

Traptor was the destination printed on his ticket and that's as far as he could ride before they'd throw him out. Never an expert in planetary lore, Odisseus doesn't know what manner of world awaits him at the end of the South Lhvargo Line. It must be one, he supposes, where TransGalax could profitably headquarter a public transit hub. Cosmopolitan, he suspects, and not really ideal, then, for what he needs, considering the staggering reward still balanced on his head.

That said, he'll be plumb broke by the time he makes Traptor. He'd need to hang up his shingle somewhere, even for a week or two, before he'd have the necessary capital to move on to brighter pastures.

Once actually aboard the transport, the Ortok's stomach sinks to discover how cramped and unaccomodating the passenger compartment actually is. For such an immense ship, there's precious little room to maneuver between the aisles and it's only with great difficulty that Odisseus elbows and muscles his way towards his specific seat.

He's flashing his fangs to force a blueskin to scoot out of his way when the idea of a long term destination occurs to him. Having somewhere concrete to aim towards might give Odisseus the motivation he'd need not to linger on Traptor and eventually get cornered or captured. Vollok immediately comes back to mind and there's a certain attraction there, a certain security knowing that Djembe would likely welcome him back with uncaring arms.

He gazes out the tiny porthole his row is allowed, at the grubby rain-shadowed landing pad, and supposes Vollok could easily be considered a step backwards or, at best, sideways. Numb as he is to thoughts of Nemo, The Unconstant Lover and his share of the 65 million, Odisseus cannot pretend time hasn't passed and he's not seven years older.

Somewhere new, he eventually decides, as more passengers push and shove their way to their respective seats. There must be somewhere new, somewhere meaningful that he can, step by step, work his way towards, to make the voyaging seem worthwhile.

It's only when he starts to doze, the wispy tendrils of dream starting to uncoil around him, that the answer comes. He'll return home, to what remains of the wooded shores and sheltered capes and plentiful reefs.

Carrying only what a simple bag will bear and no more, Odisseus is heading back to his homeworld, back to the dream-shadowed shores of Pequod.

Darling isn't her real name. The sign out front reads "Darling's Discount Dash Repair" and she supposes it's a fair cop that bloom near everybody that comes through that doorway – the ones not born on station anyway – take her, the place's proprieter and sole occupant, to be Darling. It was pointless to explain to every dumbass that she hadn't hung the sign, that she hadn't founded the place, that the place was older than even her memory and she'd been aboard Takioro Defederate Station since she was too small to reach the door access.

For the time being, then, she'd be Darling.

Moons knew she'd cycled through a whole holodex of names since those desperate days, when she begged, borrowed and stole every scrap of her life. They were all of them pseudonyms – Deshani, Nebula, Fleece – that she'd adopted at various phases but none of them touched her actual name. Far as she was concerned, she would always be Zoot.

There's presently nobody about to gainsay her. The shop's empty, same as it has been for a disquieting length of time. Customers with misbehaving dash bikes had become pretty few and far between, something Zoot really ought be more concerned about. The upshot, she considers, is that now she's got more time to tinker with her own machines.

This one's a Model G TurboTorque, a finnicky little beast that's fallen in love with overheating. Zoot swears there's a mild-mannered machine in there somewhere, even if she's gotta pull the whole thing apart to find it. The driftmotor's been utterly disassembled in the search and its insides lie in a random spread all around the gutted chasis. Zoot's on her hands and knees, elbow deep in the guts of the bike, puffing away on a Yellowtooth and tapping her toe to whatever the radio plays her – this time, a Spacers standard so loud it rattles the rivets.

This recent dry spell doesn't worry Zoot any. People come and go, economies climb and crash but Takioro Defederate Station endures.

Born and raised in her unhallowed halls, Zoot's seen Takioro Defederate Station, that unconquerable old bitch, rise and fall through a dozen calamities – gross malfunctions, temporary Depot-Commissioners, a score of Yarba New Years, even the Freebooter Fleet a few years back. There wasn't an act of moons or government or gravity that could bring this station low, that much Zoot knew. She might waver, her lighting might flicker and her casings might crack but Takioro could and would weather any storm that Bad Space threw her way.

Long as there were bad people in the galaxy who liked to drink and whore, Takioro Defederate Station would endure, limping or thriving.

She's plucking the cigarette from her mouth, ready to stub the thing out it's gotten so short, when she hears the back door swoosh open.

She scowls and calls out for the radio to stop. It instantly does, the classic astrorock refrain dropping away fast enough to leave a slight echo. Zoot strains to listen but there's no immediate reaction to this.

"You got some problem," she hollers towards the open doorway to the office, a dozen feet behind her, "using the front door like everybody fucking else?"

At first, more silence is her only answer. That's when she hears a tool clatter, hit the ground and someone make a muffled curse.

"If you do," Zoot continues, yanking both green hands from the dash and wiping them on her overalls, "I gotta 485 Hangman you can answer to. Ain't sure what you're packing," she sighs, "but I can guarantee, I'm a good enough shot to make whatever you're scheming right now more painful than profitable."

"All the shitting moons," the intruder mutters through clenched teeth, "of motherfucking Jotor." Behind her, he hobbles into the doorframe, his vaguely humanoid shadow playing out on the chopshop floor a few feet to Zoot's left. "I stubbed my cunting toe."

The Hangman retrieved from her nearby things, Zoot turns slowly about to face her unexpected visitor. A trim little AccCo piece, she always keeps the weapon handy, no matter where she goes, feeling a little naked wandering around Takioro without a firearm. Who knows what this headache could possibly be; it certainly wouldn't be the first time a drunk or a vagrant's stumbled in here and it wouldn't be the first time Zoot's had to put down a motherfucker that got fresh with her.

Who she does discover, leaning against her doorjamb and favoring one foot, takes her completely by surprise.

His voluminous jacket, an overdramatic number in brown leather that idles about his ankles, has seen better days and many repairs. One of his hands clutches what appears to be a hefty wad of cash, while the other clutches his knee, like this'll somehow rectify his stubbed toe. Despite the dim and unfavorable lighting, despite the distance and silhouette that obscures him in the doorway, despite the sheer impossibility of his unexplained appearance here, the Galactic Menace is unmistakeable.

"The moons?" spits Zoot, more confused than starstruck.

"Please tell me you're Zoot," he implores her, limping forward a little and making a slight gesture with the significant amount of cash he's playing with. "You're the third greenskin girl I've bothered tonight and my clock's really, really ticking here."

"Zoot's me," she confirms, uncertain where Nehel Morel, of all people, had heard that name from. "Is there something she can do for you and your money, Mr. Menace?"

"Matter of fact, there is," he seems both pleased and relieved to confirm, stepping forward still more and revealing a little more of that enigmatic smirk that's got the whole galaxy charmed. "You know the honeycombs, right? Down on the street?"

Zoot scowls. "The drug dens?"

"The very same." Soon as he's within arm's reach, he extends the wad of bills to her, still shrouded somewhat in shadow when he does. "Want you to find 16E. Combo's written on the top bill there," he mentions with a small point towards the stack.

She considers the crisp stack of currency in her hand, thousand credit notes all and with easily a hundred bills in each wad. Scribbled there, across the face of the planet Sellele, is a short, five-letter phrase, that causes the breath in Zoot's throat to catch – 3SIES.

"What's in your hands right now," he explains, inching backwards as he does, his package delivered, "is for you to keep. The rest, what you're gonna find in that honeycomb, is for the kid."

Zoot looks up from the hundred thousand credits she's just been handed, enough money to retire from disassembling dash, if only temporarily. Her expression is level but her voice and her hands shake a little when she speaks. "The kid."

"It's a lot," he warns her, in a reminding tone. "More than he's gonna be able to spend. I know you been keeping an eye on him but this is gonna be different. Now on, it'll be your job to see he isn't robbed or swindled or whatever, that he doesn't squander his father's share."

"His father. You mean–"

"It's his by rights," the Galactic Menace supposes, the last words he says before he disappears back around the corner. "It's what Two-Bit would have wanted."

She kneels there, long after he's vanished, stumbling his way out the back entrance again, the money so heavy in her hands she fears she might drop the whole wad. Upon that moment in time – a greenskin girl kneeling on the greasy floor of her chopshop, a massive pile of Garrock Brondi's money in her hand – hinges the lives of Zoot, her young bastard and indeed all of Bad Space.

For that's the last time anyone in the known galaxy would speak with the Galactic Menace for ten long years.

### AFTERWORD

Well.

That certainly looks like the end, doesn't it?

Never fear.

The exploits of _The Unconstant Lover_ , her captain and her crew will continue. There are plans and schemes in the works to expand and extend their space shenanigans. Those shenanigans may be in a new medium, a new format and under new circumstances but we're far from complete.

Fans of the original audio drama know that these books – the Bad Space Trilogy – have only covered the first leg of Nemo's piracy career. There's a whole other story to be told here and it's coming, just as fast as I can write it.

In the meantime, if you're hungry for more swashbuckling space piracy, I recommend you subscribe to the Bad Space Blog – www.badspacebooks.blogspot.com – and there you'll receive weekly updates – galactic lore, free fiction, tons of other goodies.

If you've come this far, you have my everlasting appreciation for supporting self-published authors and I hope you'll stick around for what comes next.

Because I, for one, can't wait.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To my loyal band of followers, for enduring all the purple prose and the egregious alliteration to arrive here, at the end of this arguably overwritten trilogy.

To Chris Allio of The Hydrilla, for his stellar cover deign.

To my family, for smiling indulgently while they explain the concepts of "space pirates" and "self-publishing" to their bemused colleagues and relations.

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, Sara Mountjoy-Pepka and Adam Allen Brant, for their help in promoting the book and creating what might be our most ambitious teaser yet.

To Hallie Clawson, for literally everything.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TIMOTHY J. MEYER is wanted on twelve counts of piracy, seven counts of interstellar smuggling, five counts of brigandage and one count of enthusiastic corruption of the galactic good. He is to be considered armed, intoxicated and extraordinarily 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)

UNCONSTANT LOVE (Bad Space, #3)

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_Year of the Horse_ (2014)

BATTERY LOW (January)

SHARE EVERYTHING (February)

THE COLOSSUS IN CLAY (March)

BAD SPACE: DELINQUENTS (April)

THE ROBBER QUEEN'S NET (June)

SIX DAYS IN MATSUGI (August)

THE AIR THAT REMAINS (October)

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