Chapter Sixty-Eight. Starving
CHAPTER
SIXTY-EIGHT
Starving
Redundancy is the name of the game aboard a hunter-barque.
Redundancy on redundancy wherever possible.
It’s a running joke in the fleet that most captains would take a duplicate ship if they thought they could manage it.
The mission is long and takes the ship months or years out from any form of repair or resupply save what the crew can improvise from the remains of their prey.
Which meant that as well as a fuel tank, the Pequod had a backup fuel tank, and a backup-backup fuel tank.
It was the backup that ruptured.
In a lot of ways that was the worst-case scenario. The main fuel tank was mostly depleted thanks to the demands of the voyage and the backup-backup was half the size of the other two owing to how rarely it was needed.
And it was rarely needed. I might have been new to the fleet, but I listened well and read better, and so I knew that it should have been practically impossible for the backup fuel tank to be lost when it wasn’t in operation.
It was heavily armored, which meant it was unlikely to be punctured by anything short of a warship, an angry Leviathan, or an orbital collision.
Mechanical malfunction was a risk with the main tank because it was being regularly used, but the backup was only in operation for maintenance cycles and those cycles were almost by definition closely monitored by maintenance crews.
Then again those crews were mostly automated, and the automated systems seemed to be going increasingly weird, so it’s not inconceivable that they’d decided to make some helpful but unsupported upgrades to the system under the influence of the ship’s ever more erratic environmental prompts.
“It was sabotage,” Locke speculated aloud while I did my best to distract them from the ship’s current problems and convince them that fucking me rigid was a much better use of their time.
It sometimes worked these days but not when the ship had a crisis.
And crises, unfortunately, were getting really common.
“Sabotage by who?” I asked. I could think of multiple answers, none of them good.
“Her,” they said. “Or him.”
I didn’t really need to ask who her or him were. “It wouldn’t be the captain,” I said, probably too defensively. “She needs the ship in working order to take us into the Heart.”
“Does she?” Locke looked the kind of doubtful that fundamentally rational people got when trying to comprehend fundamentally irrational minds. “Or does she need us desperate?”
“A desperate crew will want to turn back.”
“Desperate people are unpredictable,” Locke countered. “And the captain seems to have gained a liking for the unpredictable. The crew is getting less and less convinced that hunting a beast from myth that might kill them all is good business, even with her offering up her lay.”
They weren’t necessarily wrong. “Perhaps, but she’s not the only one with plans. And a pirate seems more likely to be playing the chaos card than somebody who’s already getting what they want.”
“True.” Locke frowned. I definitely wasn’t getting fucked tonight. At least not by them. “The worst of it is, I don’t know which of them I’d rather it was.”
“Wouldn’t you rather it was just an accident?”
Locke laughed a bitter, mirthless laugh. “Certainly not. If it was an accident this ship has structural problems that will probably destroy us. If it was the captain or Mr. Wolfram, well … that might be managed.”
“And who would be easier to manage?”
I’d not meant it as a trick question, but Locke grew very silent at that.
And they didn’t need to say out loud why.
Theirs was a mind of tonnages and percentages and bargains.
They were a corpo to their little tin heart and though they’d never admit it, that gave them far more in common with pirate scum like Wolfram than with a true believer like A.
“If we are very, very lucky,” they said at last, “there might be a third outcome.”
I left it there, because I was afraid to take it further.
Locke would never, under any circumstances, consider mutiny, but as first mate and the appointed (not anointed, funny how different those words are when they’re so close together) representative of Olympus Extraction State they had the theoretical authority to remove the captain from her post, although they’d need cause.
Worse, from their perspective, they’d only be able to take that kind of action if they could justify it both to Olympus after the fact and to the crew in the moment.
And those two groups had radically different motivations.
Fearing I’d get no more of anything I wanted that evening, I crept back to my bunk.
Q was waiting for me, sharpening her knife.
That wasn’t a particularly unusual thing for her to be doing—a sharp knife was an important tool on a ship for a whole lot of reasons.
But context was everything and it made me uneasy.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Si vis pacem, para bellum.”
I didn’t understand all her words, but I got her tone. “You think things will go badly?”
She shrugged. “Perhaps.”
Since she’d been shot once by a pirate already, I suspected it was Wolfram and his allies she was concerned about, rather than the captain, but maybe that was just me projecting my own wants. “Whatever happens,” I said to her, “keep your head down.”
“Head down?”
“Don’t get involved. Don’t try to be a hero.”
“I do not,” said Q. And then as if she was directly trying to confuse me, she added: “Will.”
Whether that meant she didn’t want to be a hero or that she wouldn’t try because she’d succeed, I had no idea.
“It won’t come to violence,” It was my best not-sure-who-I-was-reassuring voice. “I trust the captain.”
She smiled. “Amor et melle et felle est fecundissimus.”
With that one she’d completely lost me, so I crawled across the bed towards her and laid my head in her lap. “We’ll be okay,” I told her. And I kept telling her, until she set aside her knife and stroked my hair and soothed me until I fell asleep.