Chapter Sixty-Five. Wolfram’s Move
CHAPTER
SIXTY-FIVE
Wolfram’s Move
The storm lasted days. Or rather the storm lasted years but we traveled through it for days. Standard days, I should say, not the short Jovian days, which as I think I’ve mentioned ran little more than ten hours.
Sound is strange on a ship.
If, like me, you lived most of your life in the outer worlds, you’ll have been born and will have grown up and will someday die in a glass-and-crystal bubble with hard vacuum—or whatever stray molecules pass for atmosphere on your home body—all around you.
Stand by the walls of your dome and you’ll hear nothing from outside unless some piece of debris drops into a decaying orbit and strikes it.
At which point you might then hear the rush of escaping air and, quite possibly, your own screams as a standard atmosphere of pressure all at once blows you through the cracking surface into frozen, oblivious death.
But on a ship, an atmospheric ship, not an interwell one, you’re surrounded at all times by matter, as tangible as the air your life-support systems pump into your module. And matter carries sound.
It’s muted, of course. The observation dome of a hunter-barque, like the protective dome of a hab-city, needs to be reinforced and insulated or all kinds of terrible things might happen.
But when the winds pass 250 miles per hour, even a muted version of their roaring is pretty fucking noticeable.
Especially because sometimes—with just the right combination of windspeed and trajectory and skipped repair cycles—they can set a resonance somewhere in the hull and so you’ll hear a banging and a cracking throughout the ship, like some great monster is attacking it.
Or at least what you’d imagine some great monster attacking it would sound like. As somebody who’s been aboard a ship when a great monster actually did attack it, the sounds you hear then aren’t very much like the wind at all.
That’s the problem with similes. They sometimes only work if you’re ignorant of one half of them.
Where was I? Ah yes, the winds. Even three years into the journey, I walked the decks a lot.
The views never ceased to overawe me, and I’d come to the skies precisely because I wanted to be overawed.
Or at least to have overawing as a consistent option.
And that meant I was on the deck when the deputation came.
Since Wolfram—and several of his less-loquacious companions—had been anointed into the Sect of the Starry Wisdom, things had gotten complicated.
He was, technically, still a prisoner, but while Locke had at least managed to arrange for the Wisdomers never to be alone on guard duty, they hadn’t managed to stop him from extending a pernicious influence over the crew, even from behind bars.
There was no single tipping point. At first, it was just an aesthetic shift.
Starry Wisdom iconography began showing up in more and more parts of the ship.
That was bad enough in itself because they’d increasingly embraced blood and viscera as artistic media, and while regular head counts of the crew and spot DNA checks by Dr. Pierce confirmed that they at least weren’t using human blood or viscera, it didn’t make for a particularly pleasant working environment.
Then there were the gatherings. The cultists were more likely to move in groups now, and to share talking points not just on theology, which they always had, but on shipboard policy. They started to agitate for things to happen.
And the first thing they agitated to have happen was for Wolfram and his companions to be released.
Marsh and Truelove and some twenty of their followers, robed in Leviathan leather or bloody polymers, came to the deck in force and descended, while I watched from the shadows, upon the captain’s cabin.
Since the captain’s cabin was biometrically locked and the door was inch-thick steel, this didn’t turn as immediately disastrous as it might have. They demanded she come out via intercom and then, with a surprising amount of restraint for an Armageddon cult, waited for her to emerge.
She could have just stayed below and hoped they’d get bored, and if she’d been in a different mood or if her machine intelligence had been saying something particularly interesting to her (which, I’d learned by then, in practice meant something that particularly reinforced a position she already agreed with), she probably would have.
But they’d caught her on a good day. Or a bad one. Depending on your perspective.
After a mere five or six minutes, the doors to her cabin opened and she rose—like Venus from the waves if you’re feeling classical, like a beast from the sea if you’re feeling more ominous—and ascended the short stairway to the deck, where the deputation from the Cult of the Devouring God pressed in close around her.
She didn’t ask them what they wanted. She didn’t berate them for disturbing her. She didn’t really say anything. She just stood and waited and watched Truelove—Truelove, I noticed, not Marsh—with her gaze steady and her expression impassive.
“It is not for prisoners to be too silent in their words,” said Marsh, his voice soft but carrying even over the storm.
With the captain still looking exclusively at him, Truelove translated: “You’re keeping members of the flock hostage. We’ll stand it no longer.”
I expected a reply from the captain here. I didn’t get one.
“Brother Wolfram,” Truelove went on. “He has repented his evil ways and embraced the teachings of the Church, as have several other former members of his boarding party.”
Once more the captain responded with silence.
“We demand they be released into our care.”
None of the crowd were armed exactly. But the life of a voider is a busy one and hardly a minute goes by when we aren’t fixing something or opening something or cutting something apart.
So while they weren’t armed a lot of them had …
tools. Tools that could fuck a person up royally if they had to. Or if they wanted to.
This didn’t seem to faze the captain. She just nodded, chased the ghost of a smile, and then said, “Then let us speak with them.”
I followed her, and the crowd that was going with her, down to the brig. Wolfram was lounging on his cot, watching the assembly with a detached expression that read to me as smug.
“These fine people ask that you be released,” the captain told him.
“Let it never be said,” replied Wolfram, “that I stood in the way of giving the people what they want.” Then he shot a wary eye at Truelove and added piously, “Although in the end it makes no odds. The Devourer comes for us all regardless, does it not?”
“Some to the common pulpits,” said Marsh in his usual low and distant tone, “and cry out ‘Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement.’”
The captain pressed the switch on the nearest intercom. “Captain to central, open the brig.”
For a moment there was nothing. Then, “Central; request confirmation,” followed by Locke’s voice saying, “Belay that.”
“Belay nothing,” demanded the captain. “Open the—”
She was cut off by Locke again. “You surely cannot have decided to set a gang of pirates loose on the ship.”
“We’re about to enter the Heart,” the captain replied with a certainty that, had I been one of Marsh’s cultists, I would have found concerning. “We will need every good hand.”
This, to Locke, was a terrible answer. “They aren’t good hands. They’re thieves, traitors, scoundrels, and vagabonds.”
In his cell, Wolfram raised his hands in a you-got-me gesture. “I’m all that and more,” he admitted. “But I know my way around a ship and I’m a fair pilot and”—he smiled like a serial killer—“I’ve seen the Truth of Endings, so I’ve no longer got any ambitions you need worry about.”
I’d love to believe that I was the kind of woman who could speak truth to power.
Who would grab Truelove by the shoulders and shake him and say something like This man is obviously playing you.
But who am I kidding, that’s not me and never has been.
Besides, why would he believe me? At the end of the day, people are like clouds.
We see the shapes in them we want to see.
“Orders?” came the query from Central.
And the captain, without hesitation, repeated, “Open the brig.”
After all that buildup, I’d half expected the consequences to be explosive. They weren’t. And what, realistically, had I thought would happen? That Wolfram would burst out of the cell and tear the captain’s neck open with his teeth? That he’d yell “Yaharr me hearties, I be in charge now”?
So many of my expectations of the voyage, looking back, were a child’s expectations. The stuff of bedtime stories and pulp novels. The reality was so much stranger and wilder and quieter and louder and more boring and more terrible.
The doors opened, and Wolfram stood, stretched, and walked out into the waiting arms of his new coreligionists, and then they went calmly to the cells of the other redeemed corsairs, and let them out as well.
They made no move that day.