Chapter Fourteen. Fangirl
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Fangirl
Right about now, you might be wondering what the hell kind of book you’ve picked up.
And I’ll be honest with you, I’m not always sure myself.
Is it an adventure? A memoir? Why the fuck should you care about which bits of the Leviathan have what uses, or how we squeeze spermaceti from a corpse, or what the whir of the autocutters sounds like, or what it takes to hold a skyboat steady when you’re lined to a beast that’s diving into the hydrogen sea?
I don’t think I’ve got a good answer for you.
It’s a big system out there. A massive, all-encompassing, incomprehensible system.
And really you shouldn’t care any more about the Leviathan fleet than I care about deep-crust hydroponics or comet mining or any of the other millions of invisible industries that make the supply chains work.
Try to think about it all at once and your mind will probably give out under the strain.
Better to just shut up, look down, and assume that somebody—the Father maybe, or the trade-states—has a plan.
But while I might not have a good answer, I’ve got a bunch of bad answers. I think I mentioned that I used to be a schoolmistress and so I got really good at giving plausible-sounding responses to whatever questions were thrown at me.
So let’s start with sophistry.
I assume you’re used to war stories? You don’t think those are a waste of good data (or good ink, if you’re reading a very luxurious version of this text on one of the core worlds).
Perhaps, like me, you grew up on the tales of Captain Treyarch and her brave companions.
Perhaps you thrilled to see the brave soldiers of the Sixty-Ninth Company battle the bloodthirsty seditionists of the campus wars, or the ungrateful insurgents of the union rebellions.
Well, those heroes, like my heroes, were salarymen like any other.
Treyarch and her team had the advantage of being fictional and therefore less prone to undramatic errors or inconvenient silences than my living companions.
But the industry in which they worked was real enough (as is their employer, Limtoc Kinetic Solutions being a wholly owned subsidiary of Phobos Mil State).
You might respond, I suppose, that there can’t be any real comparison between the work of a soldier and the work of a sky-hunter.
Soldiers fight to keep you safe from the dangers of an uncaring universe, while we sky-hunters fight glorified fish so we can chop them up into pieces.
Our work, you might say, is more like mining or butchery than true honorable combat.
If you would say that, then you have never seen a Leviathan fought. I can’t fault you for that; we haven’t actually gotten to those bits yet. We will, don’t worry, but before we do I want to make sure you have a true appreciation for the people who fight them.
I suppose you might say instead that it isn’t the drama of the battle that makes the difference, but rather the importance of the cause.
The campus wars, for example, were vital to the safety of the entire system.
And on one level I can’t disagree. Even now my heart skips a beat when I reread Duty of Shadows and come to the scene where Lieutenant Ward, armed only with an anti-personnel flechette cannon, must hold his position against a baying mob of students chanting dangerous slogans.
But what of the belt wars? What of the scene in Duty of Fire where Corporal Raven assaults the Trojan asteroid mines?
Not only is that scene drawn from real history (the attack on mine 617 Patroclus is well known amongst military historians as the first use of the Mk III Vivisection Warsuit, optimized for use against lightly armed or unarmed adversaries), it also has at its heart the need to secure ore transports to the core worlds.
Of course, the records from that time make it clear that the Union of Asteroid Workers were also ideologically opposed to the very concept of freedom, but we cannot forget that the method they chose to use in their vicious if blessedly short-lived rebellion was the severing of supply chains.
So I ask you: If it’s right—and I’m sure you’ll agree it’s right—to celebrate those courageous warriors who fought to protect our resource lines from extremist extortion, should we not also celebrate those warriors who fight in the skies of Jupiter?
The end is the same, after all. My companions and I stared down the storm and leapt into the jaws of death to bring home the very spermaceti that burns in the energy-forges and the atmosphere-crucibles of whichever world you live on.
And while the independent sky-hunter seeks the Leviathan under contract, never again can the specter of organized labor threaten the peace and prosperity of the Commonwealth.
Which is to say, your peace and prosperity.
Does that not make us heroes, every bit as much as the folk of the Sixty-Ninth? And real heroes, not paper ones.
And if that doesn’t convince you, if you are not now satisfied that this tale is as full of excitement and importance as any war story, perhaps you’d prefer this alternative reasoning: I served on this ship.
I lived alongside these people. I watched as they braved the roiling skies of Hell’s Heart.
And, as I write this, every last one of them is dead.
Memorials are expensive, even in the tiny sky-hunters’ chapels in Cthonius Linea.
So as we do not collectively commemorate those who give their lives in the Leviathan hunt, this book is the best tribute many of them will receive.
Locke, I suppose, is recorded somewhere amongst the written-off assets of Olympus Extraction State, Dawlish down as missing, presumed escaped from indenture.
And the reputation of A, of her passion and her glory and her obsession, will, I think, pass into folklore with or without my help.
This is a war story.
This is a war memorial.
It is a tribute to dead people in a dying industry in—I am sometimes sure—a society that is itself dying.
In my chamber, as I write this chapter, hard against a deadline and just as short on funds as I was at the start of my journey, the strip-lights flicker. They too are dying. I’m not sure how long I have myself.
It’s the ship, above all else, I wish to make immortal. The ship. Her crew. Her captain. And Q.