Chapter Seventy-Three. Rache
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-THREE
Rache
In these more prosperous hunting grounds, it wasn’t only Leviathans that crowded thicker in the sky. Ships too were a more common sight. Of course, “more common” is relative. Spoiler, reader: We only saw two more vessels before things went—to use the technical terminology—completely to shit.
The first of those was called the Rachel by its ident but the name painted on its hull (some ships did this, some didn’t, the Pequod might have at one point, but she was so bedecked with bones that it was impossible to say) had worn away, leaving only Rache.
“Vengeance,” said the Old Ionian. “In one of the tongues of Old Earth. It’s an omen, you mark my words.”
“An omen of what?” asked Locke, who was watching the ship’s approach beside us and who had, of late, been increasingly withdrawn.
“Not all omens are omens of things,” the Old Ionian replied with the cheap gravitas of age. “Some are just omenous all by themselves.”
“Ominous,” corrected Locke. “And if you’re looking for bad signs, there are far more concrete ones to think about than how a ship writes its name.”
The Old Ionian didn’t ask for examples, because there were hundreds.
Steering into an eternal storm, taking advice from an illegal machine intelligence, getting her harpoon blessed by an apocalypse cult, and of course the little fact that we were permanently bathed in bloodred light because the whole ship had been forced onto emergency power because the captain would rather burn a dead god than trade for better supplies all sprang to mind.
Then there was the tiny matter of demanding that the whole crew commit to backing her on a personal vengeance crusade against a single biological organism.
As if to illustrate this last point, the captain’s voice echoed across comms. Her eternal, obsessive, unchanging question. “Hast seen the Mobius Beast?”
And although we’d heard it before, a knife-twist of foreboding hit me right in the stomach when the reply came. “Aye.”
Not that I had much time for reflecting on foreboding, foreshadowing, omens, or portents, because the captain rattled on with a host of new questions, and these were far less rehearsed and suggested far less composure on her part.
When, she wanted to know. And where? On what heading? From what distance?
To her frustration, none of these questions received direct reply. Instead, the captain of the Rachel sent a request for permission to board. A request, I couldn’t help noticing, that came after she’d already launched her boat and crossed half the distance towards us.
“It worsens,” the Old Ionian muttered. “Signs on signs on signs.”
This sign, at least, seemed more practical than mystical, and I was grateful for that.
I didn’t need a long life’s worth of folk wisdom to know that somebody who got halfway to your ship before asking if she could come aboard was either trying something, desperate, or, most likely, trying something desperate.
In keeping with tradition, a reasonable number of us, including all the officers, the harpooners, and anybody who just wanted to rubberneck, went down to the docking bay to greet the visiting captain.
And in further keeping with tradition, we made a bunch of mean-spirited observations about her and her ship based on nothing but what her boat looked like and how she carried herself.
Although in this case even the boredom-born cruelty of the hunter-crew didn’t quite have the stomach for snarking on the captain of the Rachel.
Because she looked pathetic. Pathetic in the etymologically literal sense of evoking pathos.
She was like our own captain in negative.
Both radiated a sense of being driven by some all-consuming urge, of being hollowed out and shattered and remade by it.
Only with our captain it was, like, in a cool way. And with the captain of the Rachel it wasn’t.
“The Beast,” A demanded as she bore down upon the hapless visitor, ivory heel ringing on the iron grille of the landing platform. “Where. And when. And how far off?”
Although the captain of the Rachel had been broadcasting weakness since she’d stepped out of her boat, she stood her ground.
And while this might have been me projecting, I thought I recognized a very particular kind of weakness there.
The kind that circled all the way back around and became strength again because you had nothing to lose and no reason to hold back. “In good time,” she said.
“I call no time good that isn’t now,” replied A.
To which the captain of the Rachel said only, “Learn.”
I was pretty sure that one of the biggest reasons the captain wasn’t already super, super dead despite everything was that deep down she knew how to temper her obsession with pragmatism.
And she decided quickly enough that it would be more expedient to accommodate her opposite number than to waste time in a clash of wills.
“My apologies,” she said, half bowing, “you have come to my ship in haste. Doubtless you have priorities of your own, and I should not be selfish.”
That mollified the other captain at least a little. “I saw the Beast,” she said, “or something much like it, some two days ago—”
“Two days.” The captain couldn’t help interjecting. We were close now. Touching close. Close enough, not to put too fine a point on it, to be fucked.
“We were in pursuit of a pod of Leviathans when the eyes on the array caught sight of another signal—one too large and too majestic to give off pursuing, so I gave the order for our reserve boat to drop after it.”
“And ’twas the Beast?” demanded A. “Tell me it yet lives. If I hear that ye slew it—”
“The monster lives,” replied the captain of the Rachel. “When our boats gave chase, he fled.”
I’d spent so long watching the captain that I sometimes imagined I could read her thoughts on her skin.
What she was thinking now was that fleeing didn’t fit the story she told herself about the Great Leviathan.
And if it didn’t fit the story, it wasn’t real.
Or at least, it was part of a lesser reality.
“That would have been no bad thing,” the other captain went on, “since we’d made kills enough for a day’s work. But one of our boats got a dart in the creature and was dragged along with it as it flew.”
That sort of thing happened all the time. Hell, it had happened to me a fair bit, even in hunts I’ve described in these pages. It was scary and sometimes even fatal, but not the kind of thing that would drive a captain to the state this woman was in.
“When the hunt was done, the boats that had gone for the pod were all accounted for, but the one tethered to the beast had been dragged from sensor range.”
“Then fire the beacon,” replied the captain. Every ship has a high-intensity beacon it can use to guide errant boats back to the ship if necessary, and its use has saved many lives over the decades. “If they live they’ll return to you. If they do not you’ve lost nothing.”
The detached, matter-of-fact if they live struck the captain of the Rachel like a bucket of cold sewage. “Have you used your beacon lately?” she asked. “In the Heart?”
We hadn’t, but the captain had been in the skies long enough that she knew what her counterpart meant.
The atmospheric conditions made electronic communication over long distances incredibly unreliable.
“Then give them up for gone. You cannot mean to search the skies like the barques of old? With boats and scans and mortal eyes?”
The captain of the Rachel couldn’t help but nod.
And the captain of the Pequod couldn’t help but laugh.
Not a long laugh, not even a cruel laugh.
If I had to pick an adjective, I’d go with nihilistic.
“Then th’art a fool. Either the boat will find its way back on instruments, or it is lost. You must have sailed these skies near as long as I and so I think you know this. So why come to me with your tale?”
“You could help us search.” She wasn’t quite begging, but she was making it clear that begging would be an option. And to give the woman her due, the captain did like to hear begging. Just not in this context. “Between us we still might save them.”
With her typical flair for theatrics, the captain turned to her assembled officers.
“First Mate Locke,” she said. “Shall I do as this woman asks? Shall I take my ship from her appointed duties, forsaking my fiduciary responsibility to all her stakeholders, and spend a week scouring the skies for a boat whose crew, if I am to be honest, are like as not already dead?”
I could see tension in Locke’s jaw. They knew, of course, that they could only answer one way.
Or at least, they could only answer one way that wasn’t You’re a giant fucking hypocrite for pretending you give the tiniest shit about your fiduciary responsibilities.
“You should not, Captain,” they said dutifully.
And then added, “Although there may be other ways we can help her.”
But the captain entirely blanked the second half of Locke’s reply and solicited opinions from Truelove and Flint.
Since Flint was compelled by his faith to expect people to solve their own problems and Truelove was compelled by his to want the universe to be devoured by space monsters, neither of them were much help.
“Voiders are lost to the skies every day,” the captain concluded. “Why should I care more about these than any of the others?” A sly twitch troubled the side of her mouth. “For that matter, why do you?”
Seeing no option but the truth, the captain of the Rachel told it. “My son is on that boat.”
“Somebody’s son is on every boat,” replied A. “Or daughter, or child. And a captain should put no member of their crew above any other.”
“Not even herself,” added Locke pointedly.
The captain of the Rachel was still keeping eye contact with A. “I was a mother before I was a captain and will be after.”
“Noble,” conceded A, “but not my concern, or the concern of this vessel.”
And once again I got the sense that the captain of the Rachel was trying something desperate. “I know of you,” she said. “And your ship. They say you’ve a child of your own back on Europa.”
The captain half shrugged. “What of it?”
“If he—”
“She.”
“If she were lost in the skies, would you not give anything to find her?”
I knew the captain well enough to know that this was the wrong question.
Because it was going to get the expected answer for all the wrong reasons.
“If the sky took from me,” A replied, “I would tear it apart. If my daughter had gone to an airy grave towed behind a Leviathan, I would hunt that Leviathan and put its eyes out with my lance and split its corpse in my rending bays and tell the gods themselves that they were next.”
“Then—” began the captain of the Rachel fruitlessly.
“But I would be a fool to hope that I would see her alive again. Gone is gone and dead is dead and the storm swallows us all in the end and what is left to us is fury and defiance and the breaking of worlds.”
“You would not even look for her?” The captain of the Rachel sounded uncomprehending, unbelieving, and increasingly uncomfortable.
“I would not. Hope is a monster more foul than anything we hunt in the skies. It kills and it betrays and it brings good people to death and weeping. Would that the old Grecian had kept her box shut and her eyes closed.”
She’d even lost me at this point, and I was very, very accustomed to her rambling.
“If you were wise,” she told the other captain, “you would join me in my hunt and take your solace from your share in the corpse.” She shook her head in what read to me as genuine sorrow.
“But you won’t. I see that we are of different temperaments, and that is either my tragedy or yours. Time and fate will tell us whose.”
That much, at least was prophetic.
As, perhaps, was the fact that when the captain of the Rachel departed, Wolfram hijacked an escape pod and followed her.