Chapter Twelve. Queens and Pawns （II）
CHAPTER
TWELVE
Queens and Pawns (II)
My fixation on the ship’s elusive captain continued unabated, even as I grew more familiar with the vessel and the folk who served aboard her.
The closer we grew to launch, the more my continued failure to catch sight of the woman began to gnaw at me (Qgrew quite irritable about it), and so, in an effort to allay my curiosity, I brought it up one evening in the mess.
“Patience,” said Truelove, “is a virtue. Not that I would expect you to understand.”
“He just means”—Marsh fingered the trapezohedral talisman about his neck—“because you’re not with the Church.”
The discovery that Marsh was to be flying with us hadn’t exactly thrilled me.
I’d been even less thrilled to discover that the reason he was flying with us was that the ship’s second mate—the Truelove you’re just meeting—was a devout follower of the Starry Wisdom, and Sister Jermyn had put in a good word.
Truelove scowled. “It isn’t your place to tell me what I mean.”
“Sorry,” mumbled Marsh into his meal of spiced pureed polyps. It honestly surprised me to realize that Marsh was a harpooner. I think of harpooners as mavericks. As bold warriors in the hunt. But it was hard to look at Marsh and not have the word lickspittle come immediately to mind.
Still, I wasn’t here to judge him, I was here, in theory, to work with him. And that meant playing nice. Well, nice-ish. “I’m with a church,” I replied, a little defensively.
Truelove’s lip curled derisively. “The Golden Church, that teaches you to worship worldly things. It’s no faith at all.”
“Whereas worshiping oblivion makes complete sense?” I tried. I’d been aiming for lighthearted banter. It didn’t quite work. Truelove wasn’t the lighthearted banter type.
“I will not bandy words with outsiders.”
Across the table a slight, pretty Vestal looked up at the crowd.
There’s a stereotype that everybody on Vesta is a sex worker, on account of it being a stopover for mining convoys and relying a lot on service industries.
The fact that at least one or two of them wound up sky-hunting instead probably won’t dispel that stereotype entirely, but I thought I’d mention it.
“I suspect,” he said, “that we all struggle with the teachings of our faiths from time to time. I’ve had difficulties with my own church before now. ”
“Which church is that?” I asked.
“How about we stop talking religion?” suggested a broad-set man sitting opposite us. His name was Dawlish, and he was harpooner under the third mate (Flint, if you’re counting). He also had cheap metalwork replacing most of his jaw, half his arm, and a decent chunk of his chest over the heart.
Truelove glared; he didn’t like being gainsaid, whether by members of his own congregation or by outsiders, and still less by people who fell further down the phenotypical hierarchy than him. “Perhaps we should all remain silent?”
“Because there’s nothing else we could possibly talk about?” I ask-stated.
Trulove’s glare flicked to me. “Not usefully.”
That was probably true, but I’d never been afraid of uselessness, and my curiosity was still stabbing pins in my spine. “I wish I knew more about the captain.”
By my side, Bulkington—a stalwart and vital member of the crew whose important role in the voyage you may hear more of later—leaned forwards. He set his chiseled jaw on one hand like some great heroic statue and spoke. And when Bulkington spoke, the crew listened.
“Let me see,” he said, “what can I tell you about the captain?”
Truelove looked about to object, but Bulkington silenced him wordlessly.
“I’ve sailed with her before,” he went on. “So’ve Truelove, Flint, and Locke. You’ll hear great things about her, and terrible things. But more great than terrible if I’m any judge. Last voyage, though…” He drew in a sharp breath. “Bad business.”
Bad business could mean just about anything. “What happened?” I asked.
Bulkington’s voice lowered. “The Mobius Beast.”
“It’s a myth,” Dawlish replied. “A great white Leviathan longer than any you’ve seen, hide all pitted with craters and a hundred wicked eyes all gleaming its evil intent.” He laughed, which was a strange sound through an artificial larynx. “It’s a skyfarers’ tale.”
“It’s real as you or I”—a note of warning crept into Bulkington’s voice—“I’ve seen it, all the mates have seen it. Tell him, Truelove.”
Mr. Truelove once again did not like being given orders, but he wasn’t about to miss an opportunity to exposit his worldview. “I have always held that the skies were full of monsters. The Mobius Beast is one of them. Neither greatest nor least.”
“Not the greatest,” Bulkington agreed, “but to the captain perhaps the one that matters more than any other. Tore her boat apart it did, cast her out into the open sky then snatched her up in its great mandibles. If her leg’d not come off in its jaws it would’ve had her whole.”
“Bullshit.” This was Dawlish again, surprisingly skeptical for a man mostly machine himself. “She’d never survive a suit breach.”
Bulkington gave a half shrug of his broad shoulders. “Auto-seals. Closed round what was left of her thigh. Still, the cold did a number on the nerves. I hear she’s half in agony most days, all in agony the rest.”
“Don’t spread rumors about your betters, Bulkington,” said Truelove with an air of command that felt out of place.
That went down sourly with Bulkington, and indeed with everybody in the room not wearing a trapezohedron. “I count nobody my better,” he said levelly, “nor myself another’s. Not even you.”
There were two ways that could have been meant, and Truelove chose to take both at once. He stood, bowed his head in a very forced show of respect, and fucked off, taking Marsh with him.
“Wisdomers,” Dawlish muttered into his mush. “Fucking weirdos.”
Bulkington nodded sagely. “I daresay we seem just as strange to them.”
Keen to turn conversation back to something I was actually interested in, I tried to return us to talk of the captain. “And has nobody seen her since her last voyage?”
“Nobody,” Bulkington told me. “Save maybe the owners.”
The Pretty Vestal looked nervous. “That doesn’t seem right. You say we’ll hear great and terrible things about the captain, Mr. Bulkington, but so far what I’ve heard has been much closer to terrible.”
“Quid audistis?” asked Q. Then she clarified, “What?”
The Vestal seemed to shrink into himself. “I don’t like to say.”
With what I can only call serene disapproval, Bulkington looked down at him. “Speak, lad,” he said, “or be silent, but don’t hint at things you won’t talk about.”
“I’ve heard,” the Vestal continued at last, “that she bows before dark gods, that she hoards illegal technologies, that she went stark staring mad after her last trip and now she lurks in the dark, hobbling about on a mechanical leg—”
“And what,” asked Dawlish, very pointedly leaning his mechanical chin on his mechanical hand, “does her having a mechanical leg have to do with anything?”
Realizing that he’d fucked up in front of somebody who substantially outranked him, the Vestal backpedaled. “Nothing. Of course. I just … well … she must have been through a lot, and that must make a person do unusual things.”
“What does it matter if it does?” asked Dawlish. “One captain’s much like another, and we’re all unusual in our way. I’m the last to take against a person just because they’ve been reconfigured.”
The whole exchange caught me off guard. It wasn’t her reconfiguration that drew me to the captain, or to the idea of the captain, but the suggestion that it might be touched nerves I did not want touched.
“I’m sure he didn’t mean to—” I began, then finished with a shamefaced, “You’re right, we shouldn’t be speculating. ”
Dawlish laughed. “Speculate away, everybody does. I’m sure you want to know how I came by this”—he indicated his jaw—“and this”—his chest—“or even this”—he pointed his mechanical arm back at itself. “Just as no doubt there’s a story to tell about where you come from.”
I’d spat out a “No” before I could remind myself how sus that would look. “That is, nothing interesting. Just a skyfarer.”
“Typical shipboard nobody?” suggested Bulkington with the kind of warm smile that only a very few men are capable of. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty of those. And we’ve all got tales we’d rather not share.”
On which note he too departed. And when Dawlish finished eating he went as well. But on the way out he laid a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, girl,” he whispered. “We’re voiders. We choose our pasts.”
It was a comforting thought. Though I wasn’t really sure what past I wanted to choose. Or what future, for that matter.