Chapter Eleven. Queens and Pawns
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Queens and Pawns
The morning after signing up, Q and I moved what little we had into a two-bunk berth on the Pequod.
She was a vast old ship, long of deck, broad of wing, and deep of hull.
Though her crew was a little over a hundred, she was quite empty, in a lot of ways.
Most of the ship’s systems were automated, most of her bulk given over to storage, or to space where things would in future be stored.
It meant there were a lot of places to be alone, if you wanted to.
Which I sometimes did, and sometimes really, really didn’t.
I’m not going to give you a full schematic. That would be tedious and confusing and probably involve the kinds of diagrams I was never trained to draw. But Q and I spent a while exploring, and I can give you a bit of a breakdown if you follow us.
That’s a literary device, obviously. You aren’t actually following us, you’re reading a book written years after the event. I’m not really talking to you and you have no control over how I tell this story.
We began on the top deck, or the observation deck as it’s also called.
On a lot of vessels, this is an aesthetic inclusion—it’s nice sometimes to go out under a transparent dome and watch the stars go past, and it’s useful to have somewhere to gather everybody if the captain needs to make an announcement in person instead of over comms. On a hunter-barque it has a more direct function.
While most spacegoing ships are searching a huge area of hard vacuum for asteroids to mine or, in many cases, other ships to blow out of the sky, the Leviathan hunter is looking for a specific type of biological organism in a three-dimensional space filled with sheet lightning and neon rain.
That makes the array—the three great masts that stand up in the center of the observation deck and conduct detector-signals perpendicular to the plane of flight—vitally important.
It’s so important, in fact, that it symbolically cuts the ship in half, with before the array being the domain of the regular ship’s hands and aft of the array being the domain of the officers.
Fortunately, Q was with me and, as a harpooner, she occupied a liminal space.
That’s the funny thing about ships; they all have their own customs and, unlike surfaceside, those customs tend to include recognizing the actual value of things.
On a hunting voyage, the only job that truly matters is killing, and the kill is impossible without the harpooners.
Thus they go where they will, eat in the captain’s cabin, and sleep where and with whom they want.
And all they have to do in return is leap down the throats of monsters.
The observation deck was also where Q and I first encountered the first mate. Or perhaps more accurately, they encountered us.
“You there,” they barked as we were lingering by the gunwale looking out over Cthonius Linea. “Haven’t you work to do?”
Turning away from the domescape, I looked at our upbraider.
In a lot of ways, the view was an upgrade; the first mate—Locke, I would later learn—presented themself like something out of a corporate brochure.
Immaculately put together in not-quite-dress-uniform, they somehow gave the impression of wearing epaulets despite not in fact wearing epaulets.
Their hair was cropped tidy to the point of severe, their fingernails trimmed neatly.
Still, lines around the eyes and weathering about the cheeks said they hadn’t lived exclusively behind a desk.
“Well?” they continued when I took more than two seconds to reply.
“Harpooner sum,” Q explained. “Nothing to harpoon.”
“There’s stock to bring aboard.”
I put my hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Wouldn’t know where to take it until we’ve got the lay of the ship, though, would we?”
To my surprise, they smiled at that, which made a winsome bracket form at the side of their mouth, just shy of the natural frame formed by their vitiligo. “Well argued.”
“I apprenticed as a lawyer,” I lied.
“You’ve come down in the world.”
I decided to try smiling back. “Depends what you think of lawyers.”
Unfortunately, while Locke was open to a certain minimal level of badinage, they were mostly concerned with keeping the ship running smoothly.
Which meant that having accepted my excellent point about not being able to do any productive work until I’d familiarized myself with the Pequod and all who sail in her, they made it their personal mission to rectify that problem as quickly as humanly possible.
It was nice, in a way, to be personally escorted around the vessel by a ranking officer, but I’d far rather have carried on lingering. Especially because throughout the tour, Locke insisted on conveying pertinent information to me with a directness and efficiency I found borderline offensive.
“Captain’s quarters,” they indicated as we marched hurriedly past an ominous-looking door at the aft of the observation deck. “Captain herself isn’t available. Complications from reconfiguring.”
That caught my attention the way your own name sometimes catches your attention in a babble of words you’re otherwise ignoring. “What did she have reconfigured?”
“Leg.” Locke tapped their own thigh in illustration. “Last voyage. Bad business. Want my advice, don’t talk about it.”
“What’s there to talk about?” I asked, all innocence. “I don’t know anything.”
Q leaned over to me and asked in a soft voice, “Quid?”
I tried as best as I could to explain that the captain had lost a leg in an unspecified incident and that we’d been instructed to keep silent about the whole matter. Although I will admit that, having heard mention of her, I couldn’t quite keep her from my mind for rest of the tour.
The Pequod, after all, was such a strange ship. And it seemed natural that a strange ship should have a strange captain. What manner of creature was it, I wondered, who kept so much to herself in this flying sepulcher? What wonders or horrors had she seen in the skies and what had they made of her?
What would they make of me?