Unconstant Love

By Timothy J. Meyer

Their fortunes are spent, frittered away on junk food and alcohol. Their crew is dwindled down to its last three members. The galaxy has all but forgotten about them.

Two years have passed since Captain Nemo rose to the heights of galactic infamy only to crash and burn in spectacular fashion. Hiding out in the galaxy’s bloomhole, the three remaining members of The Unconstant Lover’s crew are broke, desperate and ready to murder one another at the slightest provocation.

That’s when they stumble upon the greatest heist the galaxy’s ever seen, all planned and packaged just for them.

That heist will see them robbing blind the most feared megacorp in the galaxy – the impregnable Gitter Consortium. It will take all of the crew’s cunning, firepower and profanity to escape this one with the booty on board – and they’re two men down.

The greatest challenge the cutthroat crew faces, however, is not spice rangers or planetary blockades or corporate secrets – it’s themselves. With seven years of bickering and backstabbing under their belts, it will be a miracle if these three space pirates can pull together enough to pull off this one last job.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Timothy J. Meyer
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370944217

Timothy J. Meyer

TIMOTHY J. MEYER is wanted on five counts of piracy, two counts of brigandage and one count of enthusiastic corruption of the galactic good. If you have any information on his whereabouts, please contact the local branch of the IMIS (Imperial Ministry of Interstellar Security).

Book preview

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