Chapter Fifteen. The Foredeck
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
The Foredeck
FIRST EUROPAN VOIDER: Tap the casks, Finch, captain’s orders. We’ll drink well tonight.
It is an hour after the captain’s speech. Less than an hour. I am here but I am not here.
SECOND EUROPAN VOIDER: I know your games. You hope if we’re all drunk you’ll be first to spot the Beast and take the captain’s prize.
The casks are tapped. I let a dispenser-droid scan my palm and take a glass of white hydroponic spirit.
OLD IONIAN VOIDER: Don’t be a fool. We’ll see no beasts of any stripe till after contact. And the Great Leviathan himself, him we’ll like not see at all in three years’ voyage.
LOCKE: Drink now, those that have a mind to. Contact in eighteen hours, and if you’re not sober by then it’ll cost Olympus its investment and all of us our lives.
In other company, at another time, on another ship, Locke would command all my attention. They stand tall and severe, overlooking the revels like a sentinel statue in some ancient temple.
But my eyes and my thoughts are still all with the captain.
STARRY WISDOM VOIDER: You others chase prizes if you will. They will not protect you from the Devouring God.
ALL: Fuck off.
A VOICE (behind): You dance?
I am lost, still, in the captain’s words. But a hand on my shoulder brings me back to the moment. Unwillingly.
I turned to see Q, her markings shining brightly in the starlight.
She was holding a disposable synthetic cup whose reactive polymer coating had detected the exact brand of cheap spirit it carried and was now proudly scrolling a banner advertising Uncle Jimbo’s Finest Shine, a product of Coradini Food and Beverages, a wholly owned subsidiary of Aphrodite Pharma State.
“What?” I asked her above the noise.
“Nunc est bibendum,” she said, “nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus.”
I shook my head. I had learned a little of her language in the time we’d been together, but not so much that I followed her now. “What?” I tried again.
So she reached out and took me gently by the arm. “Dance with me.”
My fingers tightened on my glass. My heart quickened and I was all at once very aware of how many people were around me. I wanted to spit blood and run. “No,” I said, too fast and too firmly.
The look in Q’s eyes was hard to place. More confused, I thought, than hurt. More understanding than either, when understanding wasn’t what I looked for or deserved. And then she shrugged, and smiled, and spun off into the crowd.
I finished my drink as quickly as I could and turned away. Snatches of other people’s conversations kept catching on my thoughts like jagged metal on bare skin.
The wonderful thing about a hunter-barque was that there was always solitude to be found if you needed it. The whole crew—barring automata—filled maybe a third of the deck, leaving the whole of the rest of the vessel to lose yourself in.
Of course it didn’t do to get a reputation.
The last thing I wanted was for it to be put about that I was the kind who crept off alone and dug herself into strange corners of the hull whenever she was off duty.
Nobody liked to ship with a crewmate like that.
You never knew where you were with them.
So I contented myself to walk just a little way off, to drift a handful of yards fore of the array and to look out at the terrible sphere of Jupiter beneath us.
Before this voyage I’d never seen it so close, never had a sense of the vastness of it. Even now, eighteen hours from touching its outer atmosphere, it stretched out as good as infinite. As we descended it would only grow larger, closer, and more magnificent until at last it swallowed us.
Even as I looked it was impossible to encompass the scale of it. To understand that this was a place where there were storms the size of planets, clouds that could drown worlds. Was it really any wonder that so immense an arena housed horrors like the Leviathans and all their predatory kin?
I stood like this, half dreaming, until a new needle pricked its way into my consciousness. When I’d left the crowd for the foredeck I’d thought I was alone, but now I saw a figure at the prow. Although I suppose that just made us alone in two parts.
It was undoubtedly the captain. Even at that distance her gravity was unmistakable.
She stood like—the hack in me wants to say that she stood like a queen overseeing her domain, but that would undersell the stark, Promethean glory of her.
She stood—and I would come to learn over time that she always stood—like she had just killed an emperor and was now looking over his empire, deciding how best to dismantle it.
For a while—I won’t tell you how long a while because it’s actually a bit embarrassing—I just watched her. It seems like a joke to talk about masterful inactivity, but I stood there transfixed as the captain did … nothing. But in my mind I conjured such soliloquies for her. Such philosophies.
In the end I gave in to her magnetism or my own curiosity or the inevitability of fate and approached. It wasn’t protocol, but then protocol was a little suspended with all the crew except me and her drinking themselves blind to consecrate a hunt.
I was yards from her when she noticed me. Or when she decided to admit that she’d noticed me. She turned and fixed me with those burning eyes of hers, and I walked on anyway. I’ve always been a fan of walking into fire.
“Shipmate?” There was interrogation in the word. But from her lips it felt more intimate than my own name.
“Captain.” There wasn’t much else I could say. I had no message for her. No question. I should have stayed with the crew.
Or perhaps not. When it became clear that I had only silence to contribute, she turned away, but she seemed perfectly content for me to stand beside her. And eventually she spoke. “What do you think of her?”
“The ship?” I asked. “Or the planet?”
She didn’t answer.
“Beautiful.” The reply fit both.
“And have you had luck, so far, with beautiful things?”
It was my turn not to answer.
“I have not.” She still didn’t look at me; she might as well have been talking to Jupiter itself. “For more years than I dare count I have faced beautiful, terrible things in beautiful, terrible places and the outcome has always been bloody.”
Neither I nor the stars had a reply for her.
“The end of my life approaches,” she said.
I wasn’t quite sure what she meant because she didn’t look especially old.
Then again, with the radically different lifestyles and levels of access to regenerative therapies across the system, it was often hard to tell if a person was twenty-five or fifty-two or two hundred and fifty.
Especially if they’d lived an adventurous life with rich rewards.
“Whatever befalls on this journey, I’ve a premonition it will be my last.”
That, finally, prodded me into responding. “Do you believe in premonitions?”
When she looked round, it was almost as though she was seeing me for the first time. “I’ve seen much, and so there is little I don’t believe in.”
“Is that why you’re hunting legends?” The question was out before I could check myself. It hung in the air between us like vapor from a narcotic inhaler.
I wasn’t sure if I’d angered her or intrigued her. Honestly, that was something I got a lot from people. “Make yourself useful, girl. Fetch me my pipe.”
The captain’s word was law on ship, but it was a slightly strange instruction. “Where is it?”
“My cabin.” She brushed her fingertips over a nearby terminal and made some adjustments to one of the ship’s many, many lists. “The locks will recognize you.”
My desire to remain at her side and bask in her strange personal electricity was at war with my curiosity to see where she worked and slept. I call it a war, but her command overrode both instincts. She was my captain, I her hand. She had only to reach out and I would move according to her will.