Chapter Sixty. Paying the Price
CHAPTER
SIXTY
Paying the Price
The mutiny didn’t happen. Not immediately, anyway, and Wolfram had been infuriatingly right about the captain.
I’d told her (and yes, I’d been on my knees at the time, and probably my position hadn’t helped my position if you see what I mean), and she’d been all “He seeks to set his will against mine” but it’s not like she did anything.
I told Locke as well (and yes, I also told them in a sex context, I’d been having a bad week and it was that or the razor blades), and they were more attentive but in a very I’ll take that under consideration kind of way.
Looking back, it’s almost quaint that I was concerned at all. There I was, in a tin box with monsters within and without, and I was worried about a few voiders with guns.
Two full years had passed. I think. At the very least it felt like two full years had passed.
Feels like that looking back. Two full years had passed and we were drawing ever closer now to Hell’s Heart.
While the hunting was getting better—unquiet skies seemed to bring the beasts out of hiding—the crew were increasingly discontent.
More lowerings meant less downtime, and although on an ordinary hunt that would have meant less time to dwell on mutinous thoughts, on this particular voyage it didn’t seem to be shaking out that way.
We managed to avoid casualties—permanent ones, at least—but the pall that had hung over the entire voyage was growing heavier by the day and somehow even our victories were tasting hollow.
The growth of the Starry Wisdom hadn’t helped.
Where normally every barrel of sperm we wrung from the skies would remind us of the profits we stood to reap when we got back to shore, between Wolfram’s casual reminders about the uneven split of the proceeds and Marsh’s constant talk of oblivion, it was hard to take joy in them.
By this point, Marsh’s congregation had gotten about as big as it was going to get, but while their numbers had stopped increasing, their activities hadn’t.
They were growing louder and more influential with every passing day, and those of us who hadn’t fallen under his sway were getting more and more annoyed with those who had.
“Will you please,” the Pretty Vestal was saying over the mess table to one of the acolytes, “just knock it off while people are trying to eat?”
The acolyte, who I thought was Phobosi but I might have just been making assumptions, replied with a look of pious affront. “I’m only telling you how things are.”
“What if,” I tried, “we all agreed to disagree vis-à-vis the imminent consumption of this ship and by extension the entire cosmos by the Thing That Lies in Wait and focus on getting the boats flight-ready?”
“Get them ready or don’t,” replied the acolyte. “It will make no difference in the end.”
The Pretty Vestal pinched his temples in frustration. “What fucks me off is that you seem so damned happy about it. Like suppose you’re actually right and a horrific space monster devours all of humanity, so what? What do you get out of it?”
To their very limited credit, the acolyte seemed to genuinely think about this. And to their even more limited credit, it felt like they gave an honest answer. “Vindication.”
We didn’t get much further because, to everybody’s relief, an announcement went over comms that a ship had made contact. Which meant that for the first time in a very long while we were going to get to interact with people we hadn’t been stuck with for literal years.
The ship in question was called the Samuel Enderby, and unusually, A insisted on taking a boat out to meet her before our two ships hooked up for the gam proper.
This wasn’t normally necessary either for practical or social reasons, and it only really happened in emergencies.
Although what counted as an emergency aboard the Pequod was anybody’s guess.
Since the captain’s boat was crewed by a machine intelligence, she didn’t particularly need anybody to go over with her. But I was in the hangar anyway running tune-ups, so I was able to persuade her to bring me along.
As a pilot, I found riding as passenger, especially passenger to a machine that would almost certainly have been trained to value my life less highly than the property of Olympus Extraction State, a little unnerving.
Then again, feeling unnerved and kind of like a passenger was pretty much my entire life when I was near the captain.
All our lives, really. The woman was a great tidal current, a rush of wind that carried us with her like a boat in a purposeful sky.
“They have seen the Beast,” she said aloud as we flew across the red-roiling space between our ships.
“They have,” replied the intelligence. “Although their navigational data is inconsistent.”
“Then I shall speak with their captain, and learn the truth of it,” replied A, partly to herself and partly to the intelligence and partly to the sky and whatever lay beyond. “If truth there be in a world of vapors.”
Not quite replying, the intelligence kept up its own commentary, so that I felt like I was listening to two soliloquies that occasionally collided. “Their claims are consistent with prediction. If our data is good, the target is within the Heart.”
“And so after all these years I shall find you, and though it be the last thing I do I shall wring from you a kind of reckoning.”
I was feeling very, very ignored. Of course, my relationship with the captain wasn’t exactly a verbal one and since we were outside the ship, we were both dressed in voidsuits which made our usual mode of interaction untenable.
For now I contented myself with just sitting and listening to her, and I tried to convince myself that she wasn’t talking like somebody who would 100 percent get us all killed.
And when that failed, I tried to convince myself that I didn’t like it.
Docking at the Samuel Enderby was more of a pain in the ass than I’d expected it to be, because the captain had singularly failed to tell them we were coming across.
The crew were very nice about it anyway, allowing us to land in their hangar and even providing us with stowage for our voidsuits.
And when the logistics were dealt with, they escorted us both to the captain’s quarters, where we were received cordially by a man with a biomechanical arm and a woman in medical whites.
They introduced themselves to us as Captain Statler and Dr. Waldorf. And the captain introduced herself as she always did.
“Thou said thou hadst seen the Mobius Beast.”
Captain Statler, an aging man with a Titanian accent, nodded gravely. “Oh yes.” He raised his mechanical arm. “And he gave me this to remember him by.”
“I think you’ll find I gave you that to remember him by,” replied Dr. Waldorf. “He just took the one you had originally.”
“Well, if we’re being precise,” retorted Captain Statler, “a wild harpoon line took the one I had originally.”
Dr. Waldorf looked over a pair of spectacles she wasn’t wearing. “If we’re being precise to the point of pedantry, your own poor judgment took the one you had originally.”
“That isn’t precision, that’s censure.” Captain Statler let out a long sigh. “You see what I put up with.”
Although I had been following all this with the rapt attention necessary to write it down from memory several years later, the captain was less patient.
“When?” she asked. “And where? My calculations”—she didn’t say my quasi-legal machine intelligence’s calculations for uncharacteristically sensible reasons—“show that your data are not consistent.”
“Not six months back,” replied Captain Statler.
“Nearer four,” the doctor corrected him.
“It’s more, I’m sure it’s more.”
“Nothing like it.”
Statler glowered. “I’ve had this arm four months. It took you two to build it—”
“Two months? What kind of—”
“But no longer,” A interrupted them, a new sense of urgency in her voice. “No longer than six and no less than four.”
Neither Captain Statler nor Dr. Waldorf were quite willing to commit to this, but the captain took their disagreement with each other as concord with her.
“And this was in the Heart?”
On that much, at least, they agreed.
“Where?”
On this much, they agreed less.
“Nine thousand spinward, and up,” said Captain Statler.
“Counterspinward,” insisted Dr. Waldorf. “And down. And twelve thousand not nine.”
I was beginning to find this vaudeville routine frustrating, and I wasn’t a monomaniac with prophecy on the line. The captain was edging towards frantic. “And you’re sure it was the Beast, not some lesser creature you took for it?”
She had been hoping, I’m sure, for a clear and honest yes. What she got was more of a well …
“I’d never even heard of the Beast,” Captain Statler admitted. “Until after I met it and I went poking around in the ship’s archives.”
The doctor glanced indulgently in his direction. “Gossiping with the crew more like.”
“A bit of both perhaps. But from what I learned then the creature we met was the Beast for certain.”
“If it exists,” added the doctor skeptically.
Questioning the existence of the monster that had cost her a limb was not a reliable ticket to the captain’s good graces.
“If?” She propped her leg on the captain’s desk, her skirts cascading about it like blood from a slashed artery.
“Is this not proof enough? Is your own captain’s arm not proof enough? ”
There was something about the doctor that reminded me of Locke.
More playful, perhaps because her relationship with her own captain was older and closer.
But in dealing with A she was similarly guarded.
“I don’t doubt you were both injured, and gravely.
But grave injury happens on the hunt. It doesn’t mean that the same beast was responsible for both accidents. ”
“Accidents?” Straightening her biomechanical leg, the captain stepped fully onto Statler’s desk, scattering the few personal items he kept there and nearly cracking the screen of his map tablet. “Do you look at this”—she swept her arm in an arc—“and see only accident?”
Much like the Pequod, the captain’s chamber on the Samuel Enderby had great windows overlooking the void, so the captain’s gesture included not only me and Statler and the doctor but also the wreck she was making of the other captain’s personal effects and the raging storms of Jove outside the ship.
It felt like a powerful statement, to me at least. But then I was predisposed to think that on account of desperately wanting to fuck her.
“I see chaos, certainly,” replied Dr. Waldorf. “Rather more of it than there was ten minutes ago. But I don’t mean to offend you, only to point out that you weren’t necessarily injured by the same beast.”
Disgusted past bearing with the skeptical doctor, the captain turned her gimlet stare fully on Captain Statler. “Describe it.”
“Well, I—”
“Describe it.”
Statler straightened his rather overstarched dress uniform. “I was just about to. But I need a moment to marshal my thoughts.”
The captain’s gaze was withering.
“It was … very big,” he tried.
“Go on.”
“And white. Well. Mostly white.”
“Mostly?”
I recognized Captain Statler’s look. People responded to A in one of two ways: either they hated, resented, and feared her (in roughly equal proportions) or else they became determined to please her.
I was distinctly in the second camp, and so was Statler.
It probably said terrible things about both of us.
“It might be better to say it appeared white,” he admitted.
This neither fazed nor impressed the doctor. “All color is appearance.”
“Its carapace was, in places, uncommonly smooth, and so it reflected the ship’s lights and the clouds. And in other places it was—well, yes—I suppose it was pale. Pale and scored with the scars of many battles I’d say.”
The captain was nodding as if this meant something. A tiny, traitorous voice at the back of my mind was telling me it didn’t. That she was only hearing what she wanted to hear.
“And was there a harpoon,” she asked, “lodged in its larboard flight-membrane?”
It was, by any objective standard, an absurd detail to expect a man to remember from an encounter four to six months earlier that had cost him a limb.
But being as desperate for the captain’s approval as I was—okay, slightly less desperate for the captain’s approval than I was—he gave her the most calculated-to-please answer he could. “It … it may have?”
Springing down from the desk, a captain was an image of triumph. She took Statler by the shoulders and shook him in what I thought was probably gratitude. “There now, that lance you saw was mine, and the beast you saw was the Beast for certain.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed, but I had just enough common sense not to say so.
“Then it seems we are done?” offered Dr. Waldorf rather curtly. “We will of course update our navigational data to reconcile any of these … irregularities that are so concerning you. But as I’m sure you understand, skies shift.”
The captain was ignoring her. As for that matter was her own captain.
No longer being shaken, he now had his own hands on A’s shoulders and was looking up at her in a way I tried really hard not to identify with.
“You’ll stay,” he said, “for the rest of the gam? It would be my honor to host you at my table.”
And I also tried not to identify too hard with his disappointment when she turned away from him wordlessly and swept out, leaving me to scurry after her.