Chapter Twenty-Seven. Less Erroneous Pictures of Leviathans
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
Less Erroneous Pictures of Leviathans
When we gave up on the ghost-trace at last, the captain was seized with a profound melancholy. It was when those moods took her that she was most likely to call for me. So I wasn’t particularly surprised when she did.
I was surprised when the Tall Ganymedian, both the Europans, and a gaggle of crewmates I remember even less well than those three collared me on the way to her cabin.
“Going somewhere?” asked the Tall Ganymedian. It was hard, honestly, to be intimidated by a Ganymedian. He might have been tall, but the Ganymedian reputation for indolence made him profoundly unthreatening.
“None of your business,” I told him.
“We’ve been through this,” said the Second Europan. “Shit on this ship has got weird, you’re the only one the captain even talks to—”
“If she talks to her,” the First Europan chimed in. “Not sure I’d think she was worth listening to, if I were the captain.”
I gave the First Europan a look that I hoped was withering. “Are you trying to use reverse psychology?”
“No, I just sincerely doubt she listens to you.”
I wasn’t quite sure what the safest way to play this was. Unusually, I went with honesty. “Good. Because she doesn’t.”
“Make her,” the Tall Ganymedian insisted. “Because right now the whole crew is getting twitchy and you really don’t want a twitchy crew deciding you’re the problem.”
I wasn’t normally good at defiance, but Ganymedians barely counted. “And why might they decide that?”
The Tall Ganymedian shrugged with an innocence so obviously fake I almost respected it. “What can I say? Crews get funny ideas.”
With that parting shot still lodged in my head like a barbed dart, I was more than usually on edge when I arrived at the captain’s cabin.
So on edge that she noticed.
“Where are you?” she asked when she caught my mind wandering.
“Here,” I lied. I’m a terrible liar, but old habits are hard to break.
“I say you are not. I say your thoughts are elsewhere, and though I know well the call of the wild skies, I find I mislike the insult.”
In a strange way, I was pleased. She so often spoke through me or past me instead of to me. And I would have taken her displeasure a thousand times over her indifference. So I told her what had happened. “Some of the crew,” I explained. “They wanted me to speak to you about the data-stacks.”
She looked at me like I was a voice from another world. Like I was shouting to her through deep water. “The data-stacks?”
“They’re corrupted,” I explained. “At least, the entertainment storage is. Footage of Leviathans is getting spliced into everything. Or at least everything worth watching.”
“Worth watching?” asked the captain, as close to bewildered as I’d ever heard her.
“Porn, mostly,” I clarified.
The captain was staring at me like I was the most tedious sort of mystery.
“This ship,” she said, “that even now pursues a beast whose name the boldest dare not speak. That I have bent my will to guide upon its fated course. That none save I may…” She stopped.
Blinked. “The crew are up in arms for want of pornography?”
I tried to look matter-of-fact about the issue. “Entertainment in general, but … yeah. It’s sometimes months between gams, and with the stacks down there’s nothing to do except craft projects and sex.”
This was the closest I’d ever really come to a proper conversation with the captain. To her listening to something I said instead of extemporizing a soliloquy off the back of it.
It didn’t last.
“To have come so far,” she said to the empty air as she rose from bed fully clothed and stalked to the imaging desk, “to be hindered now by so small a thing. Report.”
This last command was neither directed at me nor at the cosmological sounding board she so often made the universe into. It was a direct instruction to her thinking machine.
“Sorry,” it said at once, “that was me, actually.”
“Explain.”
“You asked me to analyze the Beast’s weaknesses. That meant scraping all existing data regarding Leviathan physiology and constructing simulations. I had to do that somewhere.”
“Speculate. Will—”
“I’m not meant to speculate.”
“Do it anyway. Will this disruption to the crew’s recreation endanger the hunt?”
The machine intelligence thought about it and, while it was thinking, I imagined I could hear whirrings and strainings from deep inside the ship.
From the bank upon bank of data-stacks that over their distributed network made up the vessel’s computing power.
And then, after a few moments, the thought engine, the intelligent machine, the entity that all doctrine told us was wiser and more terrible in its thoughts than any mere human could be, replied, “Could go either way.”
“Bring up the images.”
The air above the imaging desk shivered, and the same pictures that had been haunting the crew’s spank banks for the past several weeks coalesced into view.
Except they were different now, more refined, closer to reality—or at least close enough to be usable.
And at the captain’s command they went from mere pictures to diagrams, plans, schematics.
On the imaging layer above the desk, the thought machine plotted out attack vector after attack vector, scenario after scenario, and as the captain watched the images, I watched her.
Saw her enthralled and entranced and endlessly, endlessly calculating.
So no, I didn’t manage to get the crew their porn back.
Which was why the next time I found myself alone in an out-of-the-way service tunnel, six of them kicked the hell out of me.
That night, Q tended my wounds. Medical supplies, like most other shipboard commodities beyond the absolute bare minimum level of nutrition we needed to stay upright, were charged out of our lays, but she didn’t seem to mind. Besides, there was a lot you could do with water and salvaged scrap.
And then, as she was cleaning blood from my scalp, she said, simply, “Leave.”
I’d been expecting it for a while, I always did. So even though I was feeling bruised and sore and aching and all around fucked I eased myself out of bed, but Q put a hand on my shoulder and guided me back down.
“Leave her.”
I didn’t need to ask which her she meant. “I thought you didn’t believe in owning people.”
Her jaw set and her expression grim, Q looked down at me. “This,” she said. “Her machine. Her hunt.” And then, though she absolutely didn’t need to say it, she said, “Dangerous.”
It wasn’t just the beating that was making me uncomfortable. I’d fought long and hard for the right to make my own shitty decisions, and being reminded how shitty they were wasn’t helping me right then. So I said, “She isn’t…” and then I said, “It’s not…” then, “You don’t…”
And finally, despite Q’s protestations, I slipped away from her and went to walk the lower decks.
I felt like a child. And not in a safe, cared-for way. In a what-the-fuck, why-can’t-you-just-fucking-grow-up way.
And I hated it.