Chapter Forty-Seven. Repelling
CHAPTER
FORTY-SEVEN
Repelling
I’m a lover, not a fighter. By which I mean that when my hypos get the better of me and I feel the need to do something self-destructive, I fuck a stranger instead of punching one.
But right now we were all fighters. The ones who threw spears at monsters for a living and the ones whose skills were mostly to do with pushing buttons and welding things were all rushing to the other arms locker to get tooled up for fighting pirates hand to hand.
I say rushing. But honestly there was a bit of a dawdle to it.
Out in the sky, hunters really are fearless—or at least able to master their fear—and will charge willingly into the claws of devouring gods without the least concern for themselves.
But back aboard the ship, when the enemy is individual people with individual weapons who want to stab you in your individual guts, we become a whole lot more aware that driving off the boarders doesn’t strictly need any one of us to put ourselves at risk.
So it was with frankly mixed enthusiasm that we collected our pistols and our personnel spears from the supply and faux-hurried to the site of the breach.
Still, there was a kind of camaraderie in it, with the Europans, the Bright-Eyed Titanian, and several others who’d kicked the shit out of me earlier in the voyage now cheerfully throwing me and Q weapons and taking as read that we wouldn’t immediately shoot or stab them.
It was heartwarming, in a way.
As we got closer the sounds of battle started echoing through the ship and that made the whole thing feel way realer and more worrying than I was used to.
A big feature of most void-work and sky-work is that you don’t really hear very much.
Either you’re in a vacuum where sound can’t travel at all, or else you’re in a sealed cabin that cuts out most of the noise alongside most of the atmosphere.
By the time we reached the breach, the pirates had succeeded in fusing their way through the hull and were pouring through in a mob.
A mob that, conveniently, was extremely vulnerable to harpoons, which, even more conveniently, could be relied on not to penetrate the hull or compromise the boarding seal and kill everybody.
As battle was joined, I was torn between my natural instinct to hang back and my new intrusive instinct to stick with Q and make sure she didn’t, y’know, fucking die on me. Not that I was actually going to be any help in that regard because see above re: lover-to-fighter ratio.
A string of white-hot flechettes scored a line across my arm, and I began to be painfully aware that this was about to devolve into a firefight in a relatively narrow corridor.
Worse, while the pirates were outnumbered, they’d brought boarding pavises, which meant they had at least a bit of cover and we did not.
The Second Europan definitely didn’t. The next volley took her clean through the throat and I watched her drop and choke on her own blood, three feet away from me.
Utterly fucking terrified of meeting a similar fate, I stuck close to Q, trying to use my pistol-and-spear combination to keep the boarders at bay and hoping to hell that she’d know what she was doing.
And she did. Because of course she did. With the same speed and agility she used to skewer Leviathans, kick the shit out of annoying crewmates—annoying crewmates now dead—and once to not-quite slit my throat while I slept, she slipped past swords and under gunfire and brought her knife home in thighs and guts and necks as they presented themselves.
I trailed after her and, when I saw the opportunity, grabbed a fallen boarding shield to hide behind. Although in a lot of ways I didn’t need it because you didn’t get far as a pirate without knowing a thing or two about threat assessment, and I was hugely not a threat.
Q, though, was.
The pirates were thinning out now, but there were enough standing that one was able to put a stream of flechettes into her back just as the rest of them were persuaded to surrender.
At which point I really lost track of the details of the scene. I remember dropping to a knee and trying to cover her with my stolen shield while Locke started doing the surrender logistics and arranging triage with the ship’s doctor.
And I remember the captain.
Her footsteps echoed through the halls and off the bulkheads as she bore down on her allies and her enemies alike.
She didn’t spare a glance for the crew members bleeding out around her, and in her presence the last of the fight went out of the boarders.
Approaching the leader of the raiding party, she took his chin in one hand and turned his face up.
“Hast seen the Mobius Beast?”
I didn’t listen to the answer. I was too busy keeping pressure on Q’s wound and hoping to fuck that the doctor would choose to prioritize her over people with worse injuries who I gave less of a shit about.
“Don’t. Fucking. Die,” I whispered in her ear.
She turned her face towards me, her lips inches from mine. “Crudelius est quam mori semper mortum temeri.”
Around us, people were organizing things. Or rather Locke was organizing things; the captain, having received her answer, had stalked away in a whirl of silk and leather. And the doctor was moving from fallen crew member to fallen crew member, slower—far slower—than I liked.
I’d come to the sky looking for destruction. And here, with Q’s blood seeping between my fingers and her breath slowing by the moment, I was finding it. And I was finding it far less to my liking than I’d hoped.
After too many precious seconds, the doctor came to us. She was a stern-eyed redhead by the name of Pierce who had a biomechanical eye and a bedside manner to match. Looking down at the pair of us, she waved over two medical drones.
“This one.”
The automata took Q as gently as machines could manage in their claws and lifted her onto a transport bed. I made to follow her, but Locke brought me up short.
“You,” they said, “are you injured?”
I answered in the negative. I could probably have lied but it would have been obvious, and Locke clearly wasn’t in the mood for my bullshit.
“Then stop following stretchers and escort this one to the brig.” They nodded at the pirate leader.
He was a heavyset man, his shaved head crisscrossed with scarifications, geometric tattoos running the length of his arms. Honestly, I didn’t fancy my chances escorting him, but then I wasn’t going to be doing it alone.
Trying my damnedest to sound like I knew what I was about, I gestured at him with my pistol. “This way.”
Between me and two other crewmates whose names—all these years later—I can’t remember, we more or less managed to wrangle him down to what passed for a brig on the ship, which was basically a storage room with a barred door that on a normal voyage we’d just have put extra barrels of spermaceti in.
And honestly if it had come to a choice between this man’s life and the storage space, there wasn’t a hunter-captain in the fleet who wouldn’t choose the sperm.
I mean, that was what we were here for, wasn’t it?
Though he looked very much like a professional murderer, the pirate was at least talkative on the way to his imprisonment. He told me his name was Wolfram, and that while we’d caught him fair and square, he would be freer in his prison than we were in our berths.
When I went back to my bunk alone, I tried not to wonder how right he might be.