Chapter Sixty-Seven. The Harpoon
CHAPTER
SIXTY-SEVEN
The Harpoon
A won in the end. She always won.
Okay, she always won except in the only confrontation that really mattered to her and even then I’m not totally sure. I suppose it depends on what you think she was trying to achieve.
“It’s a Temple lance,” Dawlish explained to me. “Least that’s what it’s called on the hunt. Its name on the patent is the Skyresh Toggled Lance mk17 (a) twelfth iteration.”
“Why Temple?” I asked. I felt a bit of a fool for asking. In so much of the hunt I was still basically a virgin.
“The patent calls it the Skyresh after Skyresh Toys and Munitions, the company that officially invented it. We call it the Temple, after the man who actually did.”
He was telling me this while the crew was gathering on the aft deck. The captain had something to say to us, apparently, but she was taking her sweet time getting started and I didn’t really want her to. It felt too much like sharing. “What was his deal?”
“Criminally indentured,” Dawlish replied. “Same as me. Hence his name not being on it.”
“What did he do?”
“Displayed immunity to the HVL8 pathogen. Immunity that could be traced to genetic markers that had been patented by a subsidiary of Aphrodite Pharma State.”
That had been sloppy of him. It wasn’t particularly uncommon for people to inherit proprietary genes, but a basic survival tactic was making sure that you didn’t let anybody know you had them or else the karyotic police would come knocking.
But our discussion of material history was cut off by the captain finally starting her address.
Even in the short time since she’d made the commission, the atmosphere on the ship had declined.
The star cult had continued to grow, in influence if not in number, and their weird biological graffiti was getting more and more common while the maintenance robots were getting less and less inclined to clean them up, possibly because their learning algorithms were coming to see them as a normal part of the ship’s structure.
So now she stood above the crew on boards half slick with gore, holding a new, wicked spear aloft like a scepter.
“Shipmates,” she called down to us, “this is the weapon I will use to strike down the Mobius Beast.”
I was concerned but, perhaps, unsurprised to see that this announcement was met primarily with apathy.
We’d been on the boat a long while, and the thrill of hunting legends had long since given way, for most of the crew, to a yearning for home and a break from the sky, and at least some kind of payout.
A lesser speaker would have been knocked off her rhythm by this. The captain was not a lesser speaker. “I know that my ways have been, at times, strange. I know that this is not an ordinary voyage—though I ask you all to ask yourselves, How much have ordinary voyages profited you?”
That got a better response. There wasn’t a soul on the ship, even the relatively well-off ones with the decent lays, who didn’t feel a nebulous sense that they should be getting more than they presently had.
“I know too,” she went on, “that many amongst you have opened your eyes to new and terrible truths in your time aboard this vessel, and though I cannot walk your path beside you, I would ask that there be accord between us.”
There was more enthusiasm now, but also more unease. The Starry Wisdomers made up a sight less than half the crew and it didn’t feel great to those of us who weren’t servants of a malevolent star-god to see them so nakedly pandered to.
“Come forth, Marsh.”
I’d been on intimate terms with the captain for actual years now, and I’d been privy to some of her most private thoughts—admittedly mostly because she soliloquized them to the window while she was fucking me—but even I’d not expected this.
Marsh walked through his followers and, Truelove trailing behind him, ascended the steps to stand beside the captain.
And if her calling him out had surprised me, what happened next promoted that surprise into shock.
She knelt.
She knelt and raised up the harpoon on her palms like she was in some old painting of a surrendering general.
“I give this lance now to the anointed representative of the Devouring God,” she declared, “and I ask humbly for His blessing.”
This was an angle. It had to be an angle. Somebody who would leap down the throat of a nightmare made flesh because it wronged her wouldn’t bow before another nightmare made flesh unless she was getting something out of it.
Wordlessly, Marsh took up the harpoon, and two of his followers came forward with rough Leviathan-bone bowls full of rank-smelling biological mush.
Dipping his hands in the mess of not-exactly-meat, he daubed it in haphazard strokes over the weapon.
“Let them lay by their helmets and their spears,” he said, and his followers gave a sharp intake of breath as if it meant something, “and both return back to their chairs again.”
The captain rose gracefully, snatched back the harpoon, and then faced the mob. “I take this blessing,” she said, “with a full heart, and knowing the worth of it.”
The applause that came from the crowd was strange, because it began with the Wisdomers, clapping in just slightly too much unison, so that it felt more like a pulse than a roar.
Then, because applause tended to be contagious, it was caught up by other crew members and spread through the crowd in ripples that resounded off the dome but didn’t quite drown out the sound of the storm.
And definitely didn’t drown out the sound of the explosion.