Chapter Twenty-Six. Chasing Ghosts
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
Chasing Ghosts
As it happened, I didn’t get the opportunity for a while. Because the captain was fickle, and before too long she’d moved on to a new obsession.
It was Marsh who saw it first. A shimmering in the readouts that didn’t quite look like a Leviathan but couldn’t possibly have been anything else.
It was far enough out that it wasn’t worth dropping boats immediately but the captain gave orders to adjust course towards it, and from the observation platform on the prow we could see electromagnetic flares that weren’t elveses or sprites but didn’t look quite like a Leviathan-sounding either.
It was a pale flare, almost ghostly, but we definitely saw it. I saw it myself.
But while we followed the trace for some hours, it slipped off the readouts as mysteriously as it had appeared and, when the captain ordered that we drop boats anyway and search for it, we found nothing within a hundred klicks.
In the end, we started calling it the ghost-trace.
We chased that shadow for a week at least, and after our first unsuccessful launch the captain began standing at the prow herself, staring out into the storm and moving from her vigil only when we took, as we did once or twice a day, to the boats again.
And then she would lead the hunt, canopy down, the holographic specters of the thought machine casting her in eerie blue light so she looked pretty damned otherworldly herself.
It didn’t do a lot of good for the rumors that the ship was haunted.
“We’re off our course,” Locke tried to tell her, three days into the chase. “Pursuing what’s almost certainly an atmospheric anomaly, wasting food, fuel, and time.”
For a long while, the captain acted like she hadn’t heard anything. And when it at last became clear that Locke wasn’t going to take no answer for an answer, she said, “Noted.”
“You have a fiduciary responsibility.”
Once again, she tried the silent treatment. When it once again didn’t work she just repeated “Fiduciary responsibility,” in tones so contemptuous that I half expected Locke to shrivel up like a polyp too long out of water.
But they were made of sterner stuff. In their own way, I thought, they were made of steel as sure as the captain, though theirs was polished until it gleamed like chrome while the captain’s was buried deep inside her and covered in blood and gristle and hate.
“Olympus Extraction State will not hesitate to pursue recovery if they feel you have harmed their interests.”
I don’t know why that, specifically, was what made the captain react. But it was. She spun on her heel, caught Locke by the wrist, and pressed their hand to her chest. “Do you feel that?” she asked.
Looking back, the gesture must have meant more to Locke than I realized at the time.
After all, it would have been achingly naive for me to think I was the first to get drawn into the captain’s orbit.
But Locke had been down this road many times and many years ago, and the captain could no longer faze them so easily.
“What exactly do you think I should be feeling?”
“Flesh and bone,” she said. “Skin and soul and a heart that beats for vengeance. Your master, shipmate, is a paper god. An eidolon fashioned from laws and ledgers and contracts. And yet you tell me of their right to pursue recovery, which I say is just vengeance of another sort. So I tell you in return that recovery is my aim and the aim of this ship while I am her captain, and recovery we will wrest from the Mobius Beast and the skies of Jove and the very universe itself if we may. And when we go to our graves it will be with our heads high, knowing that at the last we had just compensation.”
Locke made no reply. Then again, what reply could they make? In the captain’s wake you swam or you drowned but you didn’t argue, any more than you’d argue with a hurricane.
Over the rest of the chase a great many other crewmen followed Locke’s example, approaching the captain to advise or encourage or cajole her in one way or another.
For a while Truelove joined her, and they stood side by side gazing out into the void.
But his pious reveries could not match the captain’s silent focus.
“It’s a portent,” Truelove explained to the world in general. “Even if it isn’t the Beast, it’s a sign. We live in the days of the Great Devouring, and it will be upon us soon.”
The captain said nothing. I—and I’ll be honest, I really did have better things to be doing in other parts of the ship—pretended to work so I could carry on listening.
“The crew are beginning to say you’re mad,” Truelove continued. “They think losing your leg broke you. Screwed up your judgment.”
Still no reply.
“That isn’t what I believe.”
In the captain’s place, I would at least have asked him what he did, in fact, believe. But that’s probably why she was the captain and I was just a deckhand she sometimes fucked.
“I believe,” Truelove continued, in tones that were at best somber and at worst self-important, “that you have touched the void in a way that few ever do and live. I believe that you are a herald of what is to come and a shadow that precedes a great darkness. I believe that you are the instrument of something great and terrible and obliterating, and so I will serve you body and soul until the night consumes us.”
And once the second mate’s words had died away and there was nothing but the electric hum of the ship and the barely audible rush of the storm beyond the dome, the captain spoke. “I care nothing for your religion. Leave me.”
She didn’t even look at Truelove as he left, but I wasn’t surprised. She seldom looked at me either.
Flint came to her only once during that long vigil. And only to tell her that he’d started recalibrating the ship’s cannon and that he’d let her know if he needed anything, before he scampered off quite content.
Eventually, I had a window. A time when my duties didn’t take me somewhere else and no other member of the crew was near enough to see. And so I approached the captain myself.
I wanted to touch her, but I wouldn’t dare. Not on deck and not without being told to. So instead I sidled as close as I could and just said, “You need to sleep.”
She said nothing.
“It’s been days.”
Still nothing.
“Let somebody else watch for you. Let me.”
She didn’t even acknowledge that I was there.