Chapter Sixty-Nine. The Happy Ship
CHAPTER
SIXTY-NINE
The Happy Ship
It was unusual for hails to be broadcast internally. Normally they were a private matter between the captain or whichever officer was fielding them, and their opposite number on the other vessel.
Which was why I immediately smelled a rat when Locke’s voice came over comms with the words, “Reading you, Bachelor, request gam and request assistance.”
I nudged Q. “Are you hearing this?”
She was, although whether she was understanding it I couldn’t say.
“What kind of assistance do you need, Pequod?” asked the captain of the Bachelor. Her voice was light and airy, full of the kind of joy you get when you’ve just come to the end of a hard road of toil. Like a hunter-voyage or a really difficult shit.
“Our backup fuel tank breached,” Locke explained. “Your manifests say you’re homeward bound.”
“That we are,” replied the captain of the Bachelor. “Homeward bound and laden down with so much sperm that even the deckhands have stopped laughing at the name.”
“Then would you share a little of your good fortune with us? We can compensate you, of cour—”
“Bachelor,” the captain’s voice came through on the override. “Ignore my first mate. I am the captain of this ship, and I’ll not delay our mission when the end is so close. I need know only one thing from you: Hast seen the Mobius Beast?”
There was a half second’s dead air. Then, “Please repeat.”
“Hast seen,” the captain repeated, “the Mobius Beast?”
“Not a term I’m familiar with, Pequod,” replied the Bachelor, “but if you’ve need—”
She got no further, because the captain cut comms.
At least, she cut external comms; internal comms went wild.
“Captain”—Locke’s voice had priority, which was good because it was the only one that was remotely calm—“I strongly advise that you reconsider.”
“Your advice is noted and discarded. We continue.”
“But Captain—” Still Locke. And then, in desperation, they tried “But A—”
For clarity, though I’ve elided it here, they used her full name. Her personal name. A name that Locke would once have used as an equal.
It didn’t help. The captain remained firm as death and cold as steel.
“Captain I am. And Captain you will call me. And while captain I yet be my word is law on this ship.” Fuck, she was sexy.
I really wished it wasn’t the kind of sexy that was going to get absolutely everybody killed, but hey, you couldn’t have everything.
And then another voice cut in. It was using Truelove’s ident but wasn’t Truelove. “While you remain captain.”
“Is that a threat, Mr. Wolfram?”
“The crew have come a long way, through a great and horrible deal of pain, and I’ve a sense that they’d sorely like to know why you just chose to fuck them.”
“I think some of us”—this was Locke, who despised disorder even more than they despised little things like refusing vital fuel out of pure monomaniac obsession—“would like to know why it’s you speaking on this channel and not Mr. Truelove.”
“Is that so?” Wolfram’s tone made it sound like he was pondering the idea. He wasn’t. “Or would you like folk to be wondering that, when in fact I’m just saying what everybody is thinking.”
When the officers’ channels went quiet, the public comms lit up again with noise that lasted until the captain replied, icy calm, with, “If you wish to challenge my decisions, Mr. Wolfram, I will meet you on the foredeck. Now.”
And with that, comms went dead. Because nobody was especially interested in standing by a panel and listening to broadcasts when they could stand on deck and, quite possibly, watch somebody get a spear rammed through the back of their skull and out their mouth.
As I’ve said before, days were long on the barque. We had to make our own fun.
The crew—and it really was the entire crew; enough was automated that there wasn’t a station on the ship you couldn’t step away from for a minute or two if you were expecting a show—gathered on the foredeck to see the captain standing at the prow, ichor-anointed harpoon in hand.
And I can’t say whether it was hope or trust or general sex glow, but in that moment I was completely certain that she had a plan.
Wolfram pushed his way through the crowd.
Since he would have been expecting this meeting, been coming from Truelove’s quarters, and been able to get to the front of the mob easily if he’d wanted to, that suggested he wanted the symbolism.
A man emerging from amongst the people to tell it like it is.
The captain stared at him. Behind her a storm raged and the clouds—still the white of ammonia here, though we were catching more and more glimpses of the red of the Heart—formed shapes as ominous as they were indistinct. She terrified me then, which continued to be a turn-on.
And she was silent. Letting Wolfram speak first.
He took the bait.
“Captain. It seems that the crew would like you to explain yourself.”
A tightened her grip on the harpoon. “And why should I answer to you? A prisoner and a pirate.”
“A redeemed prisoner,” Wolfram reminded her, “and a reformed pirate. As are many of your faithful hands.” He inched aside then to demonstrate that half a dozen former buccaneers were only a short distance behind him.
“And of course a loyal devotee of the Church of the Devouring God. But it’s not me I say you should answer to.
” He half turned to direct the captain’s attention to the gathered crew members.
Once again few were openly armed, but most happened to be carrying something heavy, hard, sharp, or, in many cases, all three. “It’s them.”
And as meek as you like, the captain did as she was asked. “You want to know,” she said to the crew, “why I sent the Bachelor on her way without so much as a handshake?”
There was a chorus of general affirmatives.
“Suppose I had stopped and boarded that ship,” she went on. “Do you think they’d have let us have their fuel for free?”
The chorus conceded that no, this was unlikely.
“Wouldn’t have and couldn’t have. They’ve the same fiduciary responsibilities”—she almost spat the words—“as we. Though sure as I’m standing here their holds overflowed with sperm, they could not have let us have one drop of the refined fuel they didn’t sell to us for more than it was worth.”
The chorus signaled its grudging agreement. And fearing, perhaps, that he had underestimated his opponent, Wolfram tried to step in. “Is that the best you can—”
I’ve learned to my mingled cost and pleasure that the captain hates interruptions. She swung the anointed-and-desecrated harpoon around and held it—steady as a rock—level with Wolfram’s throat. “You came to me on my own ship and demanded I make account. You will be silent until account is made.”
For a moment, the clash of wills between the two sparked invisible flames that bathed the deck in an intangible heat and echoed with inaudible thunder. Behind them, I half imagined hellish faces in the clouds.
In the end, the captain triumphed. “Had I struck a bargain with the Bachelor, I would have been stealing from you. From your families and your children. I’d have robbed you sure as the man who sabotaged the fuel lines robbed you.”
The implication was clear but it was left as implication.
And to his credit, Wolfram blanked it like the professional deceiver he’d always been.
Instead he pivoted. “Fine words, but it seems to me that so long as you’ve enough fuel to face the Mobius Beast, you’ve no care for what happens next.
” He turned back to the mob then and added dramatically, “What happens to us.”
The crew was on a knife’s edge. The tiniest nudge could tip them to one side or the other.
“I’ve made no secret on this voyage that I’ve a quarry of my own,” said the captain, her voice clear and low and level.
“And I’ve asked you all to join me in the hunt and join me you have.
You’ve joined me and though I say it myself you have profited by it.
We’ve taken old beasts and young beasts and beasts half dead and beasts that fought us to within an inch of our own meagre lives and we have sperm, friends, we have sperm aplenty. ”
“Then return home now,” cut in Wolfram. “Why risk voyaging on with fuel tanks near empty?”
Turning back now would also, incidentally, have brought the ship within striking range of the pirate bases and made seizing the ship and turning the whole thing brigand a much easier, and so much more tempting, prospect for the existing crew members.
But the captain didn’t mention that. Instead, she gave Wolfram an openly contemptuous smile. “And here I took you for a man of faith. Does your god not promise to you that your people will be last devoured?”
That put a silence over the crowd. Within the still-technically-a-minority of the crew who had gone over to Marsh’s cult, there was—in reality—something of a split between the pious, the desperate, and the cynical.
But since nobody wanted to think of themselves as in the second category or admit to being in the third, everybody had to act like they were in the first.
“Fine words for an unbeliever,” tried Wolfram, and against anybody else it would probably have worked. In the game of us-against-them, us was a far easier hand to play. But the captain played them masterfully.
“Words,” she echoed with an actual sneer. And then, to my surprise, she called out, “Mr. Dawlish.”
Dawlish, who had been lurking with me near the back of the group, ready to run or fight as it became clear which was necessary, stood to attention. “Aye, Captain?”
“Look at the readouts from the array and tell me what they show.”
With an air of professionalism I had to admit was lacking from so much of the crew these days, Dawlish consulted the screens. “No spouts,” he said, “but a mass of some kind, large and static and twenty klicks straight down.”
Still hovering at the end of the captain’s harpoon, Wolfram raised his hands in a gesture of innocent conciliation. “That’s all very well, but what of it?”
The captain said nothing, but from the fringe of the crowd, the chief engineer spoke out. “You’re suggesting we strip a Behemoth, aren’t you?”
“We’ve the machinery,” the captain confirmed. “And I trust you know how it can be done.”
Lobscouse nodded. “In theory. But it’s not been standard practice since the early days of the hunt.”
It was becoming clear, even to Wolfram himself, that he’d massively underestimated the captain. “You can’t seriously propose,” he said, “that we give up the chance at freely traded oil in order to wring what we can from a floating carcass?”
You’d have needed to be watching the captain as carefully as I’d been watching her for three full years before you could spot the gleam of triumph in her eyes.
Because yes, she was proposing exactly that, and if Wolfram had been amongst the crew longer or hunted for more than five minutes, he’d have known that it was what the crew would favor too.
Barely smiling, the captain snatched her spearpoint away from Wolfram’s throat and held it again like a scepter. And then she walked calmly into the mob, to where Marsh was standing in his cassock of flayed dicks.
“Mr. Marsh,” she said, in that soft-and-loud-at-once way she had when she really, really wanted to make a point, “when I knelt before you and bade you anoint this spear, it was in the belief that your god would give this hunt his blessing. Was I wrong?”
“It is a blessing that he bestows on beasts,” Marsh replied. “Make tigers tame, and huge Leviathans forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands.”
It was gibberish, but the captain made victory out of it. “So speaks the prophet, friends. We descend, and we carve our fates from the flesh of ancients.”
The crew, ready to mutiny moments before, cheered. And a little way off, Locke watched them with calculating eyes, and wondered.