Chapter Forty. Head
CHAPTER
FORTY
Head
Like me, you might be ever so slightly disappointed that this chapter isn’t about going down on somebody in a shipboard toilet.
I mean I completely did, obviously. It was a three-year voyage and with media storage glitching out there was no other way to pass the time except scrimshawing, which as we’ve already very firmly established I’m shit at. That’s just not what this chapter is about.
If it helps, somebody is eventually going to wind up covered in sperm.
The most important part of the butchering—so important that it’s not trusted to humans—is the severing of the head and ridge and their careful removal to the draining station on the floor above the hold.
Since I’d never seen it done before, I stayed for the whole process this first time. I stood on a walkway overlooking the upper chamber and watched as the floor opened and a hundred mechanical arms and automated winches hoisted the great head of the monster into place.
It rose slowly, far more slowly than it had ever moved in life. And because the head was so valuable its armored plates had been left in place, in case some stray bone shard or metal fragment might damage the precious contents.
The whole hunter-voyage is a long carnival of beautiful horrors, but standing there on a rickety metal platform looking up at the head of somebody else’s god—or an aspect of it, or a servant of it, I still wasn’t clear on the theology—I saw the greatest beauty and the greatest horror I’d seen all voyage, except maybe in the captain.
Somehow being severed from the body and held up inside the ship made the head seem even bigger than it had in the sky, or hanging from the keel.
Part of that was just proximity, of course.
During the hunt you’re farther away and the distances are big enough that you can’t get a reliable sense of perspective.
Then during the cutting-down you’re far too close so you don’t appreciate how huge it is, any more than you appreciate the size of the wall you’re fucking against.
But here it was far enough away that I could see the whole of it, yet still close enough that I could see what “the whole of it” actually meant.
How broad and tall and magnificent it was, even with its eyes and feeding tendrils removed so it was little more than carapace lined with membranes, its mandibles hanging slack and useless beneath a severe, shearing upper jaw.
We weren’t due to start draining for an hour or so, which meant I’d assumed I’d be alone in the station, but I was wrong. I heard footsteps clanging harsh and metallic from around the lee side of the head and, just as I was trying to work out if I should stay or go, I heard the captain’s voice.
“And what have you seen?” she was asking. Asking the head, it seemed. “In your voyages through red skies and white skies and into the cold and crushing seas that no ship may sail? What secrets have you gleaned from the dead on the winds of Jove and the celestial cold that birthed you?”
Looking back, I sometimes catch myself wondering the same thing you might be wondering right about now.
Which is why anybody in their right mind would trust a woman like that to lead them into danger.
Can’t you see, I find myself screaming at the younger me, that a woman who soliloquizes at the severed heads of monsters is clearly bad fucking news?
Hell, Q as good as did scream that at me—okay, she didn’t scream it because screaming wasn’t her style, but she told me, repeatedly—and I didn’t listen to her either.
So I certainly wouldn’t listen to my allegedly wiser future self.
The thing is, at the time, it felt different.
Less obvious how completely fucked everything was getting.
Maybe it was the isolation. Maybe it was—and I’ve tried to make this clear but maybe I haven’t made it clear enough—that the captain was extraordinarily hot.
Maybe it was the inescapable, neutron-star gravity of her that no amount of words on paper (or more likely on electroreactive Wyrm skin, another useful byproduct of the noble trade of the Leviathan hunters) can really capture.
Or maybe I’m just a fool.
“Captain?” I called out to her as she came into view around the creature’s quadripartite jaw.
She stopped and stared at me like I was some kind of ghost. “Do you mean to haunt me, shipmate? I assure you I am haunted enough.”
Yeah okay, not doing myself any favors here on the why-are-you-into-this-person front. “Just inspecting the head.”
She came and stood beside me, gazing up at the beast in silence. “All life in the system,” she said, “all human life, at least, depends on the unknowable power that rests within that creature’s brain.”
The image of Q’s scrimshawed drawing came back to me. There were places, I was now strangely aware, where that wasn’t true. Where you didn’t need to burn the cerebrospinal juices of star-monsters just to breathe. The thought was still alien to me, and it stuck like a fish bone in the gums.
“And yet,” the captain continued, “it tells us none of its secrets. It hides and withholds and flees into clouds and liquid hydrogen. It has touched the face of Heaven and yet its face reveals nothing.”
I should have realized she was losing it.
I should have mentioned something to somebody.
But what would it have helped? Once the voyage has begun the ship is its own world and the captain rules over it like a king or a god or, if you’re really lucky, a competent and dispassionate middle manager.
I had no power to challenge her, and no will to.
Also, right in that moment I mostly just wanted her to do me.
For a while, she and I stood in silence contemplating the vastness and the incomprehensibility of the Leviathan. And then the rest of the crew—those members of it who were on draining duty, at least—started to arrive, and we were back in the world of chaos and industry.
The extraction of the sperm (still hasn’t stopped being funny, has it) from the neurological system of the Leviathan is of such importance aboard a hunter-barque that it’s overseen by a specialized demi-officer called the trepanissimer.
They’re mostly a drone-wrangler, and it’s their job to make sure that the incisions through the skull are made with minimal contamination of the spermaceti.
Our trepanissimer aboard the Pequod was a grim-faced woman by the name of Enderman, but as vital as her function was to the success of the voyage, she and I barely interacted and so I won’t say any more about her.
I will talk a bit more about her drones, though.
They start the process by meticulously cutting around the frontmost head plate of the Leviathan.
They do this with a kind of small vibrating saw that slices easily through rigid materials but can’t penetrate softer ones.
This allows them to pry away the head plate and reveal the glistening, surprisingly tough membrane that fills the interior of the monster’s head, sheltering its brain, its spinal bundles, and its precious, precious sperm.
C’mon, say it with me now. It’s fun.
Once the membrane is exposed, a different variety of drone hooks up further cables to allow the head to be tilted so that the exposed area of membrane faces upwards.
They have to do this because otherwise the creature’s head is so positively brimming with delicious sperm that if the—it has a technical name, but I’m going to say “sperming hole”—isn’t exactly level it will spill out and if it does, well.
Then you have sperm going everywhere and not only is that unprofitable it’s also extremely messy.
The next step of what I flatly refuse to stop calling the sperming process has to be done by hand.
Spermaceti, by its nature, is electrodynamically and psychokinetically active to an uncharted extent—the refined form we use as fuel isn’t really refined at all, it’s processed and diluted to make it manageable.
Which means that if hunter-barques tried to get drones to harvest it they’d fry their circuitry and waste a bunch of good kit and a bunch of good sperm all at the same time.
Instead, the drones run a crisscrossing pattern of lines across the draining chamber in two layers, allowing the crew to walk along one while holding on to another.
This is, to use the official terminology, really fucking dangerous.
But it’s the way the hunter-barques have been doing it for centuries, and change costs money.
On this particular occasion it fell to Marsh to make the initial incision, under the watchful—if distant—eye of Enderman.
He made his way carefully to the center of the room, walking on cables and clinging to cables, gripping a long, sharp spear (which isn’t called a sperming spear but should be) under one arm.
When he’d gotten to the right spot, he hunkered down, hooking his arms over the upper cable to free his hands, and he forced the spear downwards, hand over hand, until it pressed against the rubbery sac of the Leviathan’s cranial membrane.
In spite of myself, I held my breath.
As he leaned just a little more weight downwards, the tip pierced at last, and sperm began to well up through the …
okay I’ll admit it, even I’m finding this a bit silly now.
But look, this is a serious industrial process that just happens to produce a product whose name has unfortunate connotations.
Once he’d poked a big enough sperm hole, Marsh signaled for the pipes, which came coiling down from above like …
like I don’t know what. If you’re a coreworlder and have seen plants and animals that aren’t star-Wyrms and ice fish, there’s probably a comparison here.
Half a dozen long, sinuous tubes unfolded in Marsh’s direction and his last job was to guide them into place so they actually went into the sperm instead of bouncing off what was left of the protective membrane.
And this last job, he fucked up spectacularly.
To be fair, it’s hard. I’ve tried it myself since, and you’re high up, you’re standing on something extremely wobbly, you’ve just been handling a long spear covered in sperm. In some ways I’m amazed accidents don’t happen more often.
But one happened now.
Reaching for an errant sperm pipe, Marsh overbalanced, slipped from his cable, and tumbled headfirst into the Leviathan’s cranial cavity.
Most of us just stood there like unused dildos, watching. Dawlish made a brief move to go after him, but there was no way his cybernetics would have taken the exposure to raw spermaceti so he had to stop himself. He looked stricken, but it wasn’t like anybody else was rushing to help.
The impact of the fall combined with Marsh’s first extremely doomed attempts to haul himself out had set the head swinging, and now it slammed into the walkway, jolting me and the captain backwards and sending a good few of our other crewmates sprawling.
A cable snapped and the whole thing pitched sideways, spilling bucketfuls of spermaceti to the floor where it began to crystallize like frost on an ice miner’s beard.
“Secure the head,” called Locke from the upper walkway. “If it falls the voyage loses millions.”
Inside the heart of every true-blooded void-dog watching, there was a sudden conflict.
Yes, a man was drowning. But he wasn’t exactly a pleasant man—none of us liked Starry Wisdomers, chiefly because they didn’t like us—and even for those of us on long lays, the two hundred and fiftieth part of the price of the sperm in that beast’s head was a whole lot of money. Even set against Marsh’s life.
Truly, it was a dilemma.
But not for Q.
I’d come to the draining room alone, but Q was there too, on the upper walkway beside Flint, who was resting a hand on his pistol and trying to work out if there was any way to solve this problem by shooting something.
She sprang, full-body, into the air, caught one of the trailing cables, and rode it down onto the side of the bucking head. And I felt a weird mix of pride and affection that was tangled up with the fact we were fucking but wasn’t just about that.
Weird.
“That’s it,” Locke called encouragingly. “Refix the cable and then get the tubes back into place.”
Beside me the captain was watching intently, the fire that was her eyes burning low and sulfurous.
Except Q didn’t seem that interested in reattaching the cable. Instead, she crawled, spider-like, around to the underside of the head where she hung, nestled in what was left of the beast’s mouthparts.
The Leviathan is well armored above, but below its defenses are mostly that it will fucking kill you if you get near it, and that’s a threat that goes away when the thing is dead and dismembered.
So Q seemed to have decided to go in through the jaw.
She had her knife with her, the same one she’d nearly killed me with when we first met, and she was using it now to slice her way through what would have been the monster’s throat.
“By the Father,” exclaimed Locke from above, “what is she doing?”
“Obstetrics,” replied Dawlish, with a smile that read to me as almost wicked.
And he was right, in a way. We couldn’t see—at least I couldn’t—through the mess of the beast’s lower hide, but Q filled me in on the details later.
She cut her way through the crook of the jawline and up into the skull, where the cranial membrane housed the oh-so-valuable spermaceti and also, less importantly, a drowning asshole.
There, pressed between the immense weight of the sperm sac and the hard beastbone of the skull, she’d set about feeling for Marsh, who she’d predicted—correctly—would by now be struggling at the bottom.
Swimming is a rare skill outside of the core worlds.
Even the subsurface fishers of Ganymede and Europa don’t have much call for it since the waters of those worlds would freeze you dead if you actually tried to swim in them without an environment suit, and swimming with an environment suit is more like doing a spacewalk.
The first evidence we saw of her success was when a trickle of sperm began oozing from beneath the head. And then a trickle became a stream and an ooze became a gush and then—
“Fuck”—Locke began barking orders—“you and you, cables, now. We can’t lose the whole kill.”
While two more teams of crewmen were scrambling out onto the head—not, in my opinion, anywhere near as gracefully as Q had done—Q and Marsh slithered, headfirst, out of the swinging carcass and plunged several feet onto the floor.
They landed with a wet thump, thankfully (well, thankfully for them, not so thankfully for those who cared more for their lays) cushioned by an ever-deepening layer of spermaceti.
Locke stared down at Q. “You,” they snapped, “report to my office at first watch.”
Q looked back up at them. And nodded. And smiled.