Chapter Twenty-Four. Gams
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Gams
If you’ve never shipped in a hunter-fleet, you might not know what a gam is.
Even I didn’t really know when I first heard the word, because it’s not something you get in the merchant service.
But hunter-missions are different. You take long voyages, and on those voyages you crisscross Jupiter so many different ways and in so many different directions that you’re bound to pick up another ship eventually.
The planet is enormous, of course, but so are the ranges of your sensors, and ships are easier to detect than Leviathans.
In a way it’s a bit of an odd sweet spot.
If the voyage was lonelier you’d never meet another ship so the whole tradition would never have evolved, and if it was more crowded, if fellow hunters were met more often or there were ports to visit in between as there are on other journeys, gams would be unnecessary.
As it is, a hunter-barque can expect to meet another hunter-barque once every few months; regularly enough to be an anticipated event, rare enough that it’s worth anticipating.
And that’s what gives us the gam: an informal social meeting between hunter-ships where the captains exchange data, the crews exchange stories, and we all take advantage of the chance to fuck somebody we haven’t been living with for way too long.
While the captain hadn’t made the most of our first opportunity to link up with another vessel, we had a second not long after, and while she’d been willing to let an opportunity pass if circumstances went that way, she wouldn’t turn one down flat.
She was no fool and, just as she knew the crew wouldn’t stay with her for long if she denied them the opportunity for profit, she knew also that they’d get jumpy if she kept passing up opportunities for recreation.
So the next time we were hailed, by a ship called the Town Ho, she arranged an intercept and let us travel to each other’s decks, and we spent a pleasant evening doing all the things that lonely people did when they met other lonely people in a cloudy sky a million miles from any other human life.
The captain, of course, cared only for news of the Beast, but the rest of us had more eclectic interests.
Dawlish picked up a tale from one of the Town Ho’s engineers that he passed around to the other harpooners and from there it spread to the pilots and the lancers and all the hands.
For about a week it was the only thing we could talk about.
Although honestly that might have said more about how repetitive life on a ship can be than anything else.
The version I’m going to tell you now is the version I told to a woman named Pandora who took me to bed one long hot evening on the shores of Ligeia Mare.
She was a tall, exquisitely beautiful Ganymedian, and I mean that even by Ganymedian standards, which—since they can usually afford to eat well in childhood and to have their aesthetic imperfections biomechanically corrected in adolescence—is a very high standard indeed.
I caught her eye one evening while she was slumming it in the docklands and for a while we let ourselves be each other’s worlds.
“You must have seen a lot,” she said. It was half a question.
I had, of course, but at the time I wasn’t ready to talk about the things I’d seen personally. The things I’m telling you about now. “Some,” I said instead, and she knew it was an evasion. “But nothing like what I’ve heard from other people.”
And she stroked my hair and kissed me and I wept from looking at her because sometimes beauty is too much to bear, and she asked me to tell her a story.
So I told her about Ironhands.
“I first heard this from a man,” I told her, “who heard it from a man who lived it. Which makes it truer than most voiders’ tales.”
She laughed like a songbird and pressed her lips to my throat.
“Many years ago, a ship called the Town Ho had a first mate called Rannick. He was—no offense, but he was Ganymedian and—”
She propped herself over me on her elbows and looked down smiling in mock-outrage. “And he was the kind of person who would sweep up a pretty dockhand and carry her off to his penthouse on the methane sea?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh that sort is the worst. Believe me, I have no illusions that I would be an asset to a hunter-barque. I see myself strictly as a patroness.”
For a moment I wondered if she was younger than me. She seemed it, but it was hard to tell with people who could afford senescence-reduction.
“This Rannick,” I went on, “he had it in something fierce for one of the regular voiders.”
A light was dancing in her eyes that made me want do something unwise, self-destructive, and sharp. “The mysterious Ironhands?”
“He wasn’t that mysterious.”
“Did he have iron hands?”
“You know, I actually never thought to ask.”
And she laughed again. As if she couldn’t imagine somebody not caring about the things she cared about or not asking what she would ask.
I envied her in so many ways. “I hope he did,” she said.
“I think that might be rather fun.” And in case I hadn’t gotten her point, she let her weight shift onto one side and traced her fingers downwards.
I tried to focus on the story. I wasn’t massively successful. “He’d—Rannick—he’d give Ironhands all the worst jobs on the ship. Jobs you’d leave for bots and raw recruits. Flushing the waste pipes, sweeping the observation deck, refilling the commissary machines.”
Pandora screwed up her nose. I suppose that from her perspective all work was equally undignified.
“Until at last Ironhands couldn’t take it anymore.”
“What did he do?” Pandora’s eyes grew wide. She was probably expecting something salacious, but that was coming later.
“He said no.”
“That’s all?”
She didn’t understand. Of course she didn’t understand. “On a ship, saying no is a big deal. You follow orders”—often badly, I’ll admit to you though I didn’t to her—“or systems fail and seals breach and people die. You need to be really, really sure to say no to an officer.”
“So what did Rannick do?”
“Made a mistake.”
“What sort of mistake?”
I was beginning to regret starting the story.
Honestly I wasn’t sure why I had except for the fact that telling it brought me back to my days in the hunter-fleet, and all I’d seen and felt and found and lost. “He made threats. He told Ironhands to do as he was told or he’d thrash him.
And personally thrash him, like in a fight.
Not just have him slung in the brig and flogged.
” I began to run my fingers through her hair in the hope of lulling her to sleep, or getting her more interested in other things.
It didn’t work. “But Ironhands wasn’t the kind of man who’d stand for that. Touch me, he said, and I’ll kill you.”
She was listening now, really listening.
I think it might have been this experience right here, a woman so beautiful it made me hate myself listening rapt to a story I wished I wasn’t telling, that made me think this book might be worth writing.
That even if it didn’t make enough to buy me into heaven it might at least let me pin some ghosts onto the page and set them free in the void.
Or, failing that, might get me laid.
“So Rannick touched him. Not hard. Not fast. Not violent. And if a man like Ironhands says not to touch him, the only way to touch him is hard and fast and violent.”
She kissed me again, right over the breastbone. Hard and fast and violent.
“He stretched out one finger and prodded Ironhands on the shoulder. So Ironhands laid him out. And that was where the real trouble started. Striking an officer’s a hell of a crime on a ship, but Ironhands was popular the way men like that are often popular, and a good chunk of the crew downed tools in his name. ”
Her lips worked their way across my skin. There was something acquisitive in it, proprietorial. But I was used to that from my lovers, especially the ones who knew my past. You may have had a more interesting life than me, they said with their touch, but I’ll make you a bauble all the same.
“The captain, I won’t say who he was because last I heard he was still”—I shuddered as her fingers brushed somewhere distracting—“still with the fleet. The captain didn’t know what to do.
He wasn’t a kind man, but he hated confrontation, and in the end it was Rannick insisted that anyone who wouldn’t fall back in line at once go to the brig. ”
Teeth at my hip, the tip of her tongue dancing across my body. I thought she might, perhaps, have been sufficiently occupied for me to stop talking, but when I went silent, she looked up at me and asked me what happened next.
“They went to the brig. Ironhands and a dozen of his supporters. But over the next few days the boredom and the isolation did their work on most of them and they trickled back to their duties. In the end it was only Ironhands and two of his closest allies that held out. And between them they hatched a plan. They’d surrender and then, when they were being led to the bridge, they’d overpower whoever was sent to fetch them, take their weapons, kill Rannick and the captain both, and seize the ship. ”
Pandora gasped. And the fact that it was a story about a long-lost voidship making her gasp and not, say, my fingers inside her or my lips on her throat or just the sheer delight of my body made me feel like a fraud.
“But it turned out his closest allies, they weren’t so close. Ironhands made his move but they made it faster, pinned him down and turned him in, all for a pat on the head from the captain and the restoration of their lays.”
It was a natural pause in the story, and for the moment at least Pandora seemed more interested in physical indulgences than verbal ones.
And while her whims ran in that direction I let my mind go blank and tried to feel the way I had a few years earlier, when I had been hunting the great Beast of Jupiter alongside A and Q and Locke and all the rest.