Chapter Thirteen. A
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
A
We left for the sublunar well the following day, and for a good hour all I could hear was the roar of the VTOL jets as we rose through the barely-there atmosphere of Europa and then charted a course for Jovian transfer.
As an ordinary voider, I spent most of the launch troubleshooting. There are a hundred and one things to do on a spacegoing ship, but since most of them are done by machines the ultimate job of the skysailor is to step in when the machines go wrong. Which they do constantly.
So while the roar of the jets echoed throughout the superstructure of the Pequod, I was flat on my back in a service duct trying to work out why the maintenance drones couldn’t find a block in the fuel line. It was definitely the most bored I’d been while horizontal in a good long while.
Before too long the Pequod broke Europa’s gravity and, according to sensors, up and down dutifully switched places like they were meant to.
On board, of course, the relativistic compensators meant we barely noticed the difference.
Normally—at least normally on merchant ships, I had no idea what was normal on a hunter-barque—that stage of transfer would be followed by a short period of downtime.
Sailing, like soldiering (from what I’m told; I’ve never signed up for that particular flavor of self-destruction), is a lot of nothing punctuated by brief moments of everything, and letting the crew enjoy the nothings is an important part of keeping the voyage on track.
So I was surprised when the whole company was called to the observation deck.
Still more surprised when we were called aft of the array and surprised to the point of flabbergasted when the announcement—made by Locke over an intercom in dire need of tuning—added that we were to be addressed by the captain herself.
I was not, I was glad to know, the only one who was curious.
Or at least I wasn’t the only one with a strong reaction.
While Q had been sanguine, or seemed it (I confess I couldn’t always read her as well as I’d have liked), the rest of the crew were at least paying attention.
Marsh was almost excited, though he’d soon have that knocked out of him by Truelove’s relentless disapproval.
From amongst the crowd I could hear whispers—echoes and intimations of things people had heard, or had heard that others had heard, or had been told that somebody had heard that somebody else had told somebody quite different.
We were not, I had to admit, the best-informed rabble. But there was a kind of electricity in the air as we gathered beneath the array and waited for the captain, at last, to appear.
“What’s this about?” whispered one of the Europan crew, sky-hardened and cynical. “It’s not normal and it’s not right.”
“Aye,” agreed another, “a bad omen is what this is, and a bad way to start.”
While we stood there, murmuring and watching and wondering, I was struck by an overwhelming sense of unreality.
I get that sometimes, the strange sense of waking up and being shocked to realize that I am me and not some other person.
That, out of every identity I could have existed in, this exact body in this exact moment in this exact place is the one I seem, in defiance of all reason, to be occupying.
I feel, at times like these, a lot like an actor in a play that somebody left half written.
And that sensation was not helped by the fact that my fellows and I were standing on a literal stage—or as close to a stage as you’d find in the sublunar vacuum—waiting for the curtain to rise and the opening soliloquy to start.
It made me uncomfortable, profoundly uncomfortable.
Disquiet rose inside me like a slow poison, chilling and choking me until I could imagine no end to it.
And then I saw her.
The captain emerged from her cabin a vision in scarlet.
Her gloves, her jacket, her bodice, and her slashed skirt were all a stark bloodred broken only in two places.
First, it was broken by her hair, which spilled jet black to her waist, interrupted only by a white streak that lined up with a thin scar running from brow to chin.
And second, it was broken by her leg, which below the thigh was an intricate device of chrome and ivory, work like I’d never seen and doubt I’ll ever see again.
But despite her outlandish dress, despite the biotechnological wonder she walked upon, what most drew me to her were her eyes.
If I say they were fire, you will assume that I’m using a pretty metaphor. And in a way I am. Biologically speaking her eyes were, of course, eyes, made from humors and sclera like any other eyes.
Now that we’ve established that I know how literary devices work: her eyes were fire. They were comforting and consuming; an ever-shifting brightness that concealed. A gift stolen from ungenerous gods and bestowed by a titan on ungrateful humanity.
And then she spoke. And I was lost.
“There she is, shipmates.” She pointed over our heads and as one we craned our necks to look up and back.
The vast sphere of Jupiter hung above us, growing ever larger and closer and more all-encompassing.
“For some of you, this’ll be your first Jovian run”—here I felt sure her eyes lingered on me, just for a moment—“for some it’ll be your twenty-first. For the old hands out there, you know how this starts: I tell you all that we will face danger, that we may face mortal danger, that we will not see our homes or our families for three years or more, and I tell you that it will be worth it because we will come home with a hold swimming in spermaceti to sell in the forge-bazaars of Io. ”
She fell silent, and I waited in silence with her for three breaths. Beside me, I heard the Pretty Vestal whisper, “It changed her, the Beast, it changed her.”
And then, almost in reply, the captain said, “Well, fuck that.”
“Not right at all,” said the First Europan.
The Old Ionian seemed calmer. “Wait her out, she’s a strange one is Old Thunder.”
“We will go into danger,” the captain repeated, to a crowd half with her at best, “into mortal danger indeed. And we will return, one day, to port, where we will hand over our cargo to the fine folks of Olympus Extraction State and they, from the bounty of their hearts, will grant us…” She stopped, her eyes roving over the crowd until they landed on one grizzled voider.
“You there, what lay did they give you.”
“Two seventy-fifth,” the voider replied.
“And there you have it, shipmates.” She sounded almost victorious.
And as is so often the way, sounding victorious was more than half of victory.
“The two hundred and seventy-fifth lay. Three years’ labor.
Peril and hard toil. Sweat and sorrow. And not for half of a tenth of a tenth of what this ship brings in. ”
As hard as I was finding it to take my eyes from the captain, I could still sense an unease amongst the crowd. This wasn’t how a voyage was meant to start. Locke looked especially troubled, or rather they were a studied mask of not-troubled-ness that suggested they were very troubled indeed.
“After long, long years I worked my way to captain,” A continued, “worked my way from the two hundred seventy-fifth lay to the twentieth. A few more voyages, a little luck with the darts, and who knows, I may retire a rich woman.”
The crowd’s unease only grew at this. Nobody liked to be reminded that other people were getting paid more than they were. I heard a “What’s she got to complain about then?” from the Second Europan.
And the captain, by some witchcraft, answered her.
“Ah, but the price, shipmates, the price. My last voyage, the Leviathan took my leg just as sure as it took the lives of three of my crew. The voyage before that, the sky took two good folk; the voyage before that, none, but we counted ourselves uncommon lucky. Make no mistake, my friends: It is not oil we squeeze from the stars. It is blood.”
Though her speech had taken a sharp turn for the bizarre, the crew was beginning to fall in line. That was the thing with talk of blood and money: crowds went one way or the other, and they went that way hard.
“I tell you this.” Her voice was low now, which only made us strain to hear all the more. “I plan to make a bloody voyage. We will hunt, and we will harvest, but we do not seek only the precious spermaceti. We do not seek only the good of Olympus Extraction State.”
Locke’s jaw tensed here, as well it might have. But everybody else had stopped their muttering. They were listening now, rapt.
“We seek the Mobius Beast. The greatest of Leviathans. We seek it not for wealth, not for glory, not even for revenge—because let me be clear, it was that very beast that took my leg and my shipmates’ lives—no, we seek it so that we might say that we have touched the void itself.
That we have faced the monsters that dwell at the heart of the stars and howled our defiance. ”
In spite of myself, I cheered. In spite of ourselves, a great many of us cheered. Not all of us by a long way, but enough.
“So that we might tell this devouring world that we live.”
We cheered again. And this time there were fewer holdouts.
“That we fear nothing.”
And again. Even the First and Second Europans joined us. Even the Pretty Vestal.
“That the sky itself will remember our names.”
With the mob now fully on her side, she strode down amongst us and to the foot of the array.
A series of touchscreens were embedded in the masts, each displaying distant sensor contacts, and the captain activated one of them.
A swirling golden trail of data appeared in the center and when the captain pressed her fingertip against the screen, it locked into a solid disc with numbers forever interweaving inside it.
I’d seen this kind of crypto-lock before. We used them on messenger-ships all the time for data payloads and large currency transfers. They were indelible once set up.
“This,” the captain said, “represents the whole of my lay from this voyage, whatever that may prove to be when all’s done. One twentieth part of every drop we wring out of the storm clouds. And I’ll pay it to whichever of you first brings me sight of the Mobius Beast.”
Blood and thunder were well enough on their own, but now that she’d made it clear there was money on the line, the captain really had the crew’s attention.
“The Beast,” the captain went on, “is bone-white half its length, pitted all over with harpoon scars and other, stranger wounds. And it’s long, longer than any of its species, almost of a length with the great Behemoths that swim the hydrogen sea.
See it, call it out, and I swear to you that all of this”—she pointed for emphasis at the golden disc—“will be yours.”
The crew exploded in a riot of celebration, drunk on the twin promises of glory and wealth.
And also probably on alcohol—voiders are a drinking lot.
And although I so often find myself apart from the crowd, this time I was drunk right along with them.
There and then we all belonged, heart and soul, to the captain. Me as much as any.
More than any, really. Even then, even in that first moment, I loved her.
I say even in that moment. And time was, that’s what I believed. That it was a first-sight thing. But looking back, all these years later, I know now that I loved her before I saw her. That I had loved her all my life.
Because I know now that she was death.