Chapter Seventy-Six. The Pistol
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-SIX
The Pistol
I was curled up in a corner of the captain’s bed, naked, alone, and abandoned, when there was an unexpected buzz at the door.
Not that unexpected buzzes at the door really bothered the captain, who was kneeling in front of her table poring over charts that she still seemed to believe she could navigate by.
“Read the wind,” she was telling her intelligence. “If the Beast is out there we will smell it.”
“I’m not quite sure that’s how it works,” replied Fidelity. “But we should be able to check the currents for biological traces. The deeper we go into the Heart, the more likely it becomes that those traces come from the creature you’re looking for.”
The door buzzed again, and this time a voice came over what was left of comms. It was Locke. At least it sounded like Locke. Everything had gotten so staticky recently.
Shutting the table down, the captain rose and went to the door.
“What do you want?”
Locke slid inside with an easy formality. “I want to talk, A—”
They used her full name, of course. And no title.
That was interesting, because they hadn’t since the day of Wolfram’s failed mutiny.
It was also interesting that the captain didn’t immediately tell them to fuck off.
Instead she went calmly inside, knelt down, and waited for Locke to kneel opposite her.
“Well?”
“You destroyed navigation.”
The captain didn’t so much as blink.
“You’re not going to at least say it was a calculated risk?”
I was watching now from behind the curtain at the edge of the alcove. Locke didn’t know I was there, and the captain might or might not have remembered. “I’ve known you too long to lie.”
“Then have you known me long enough to listen?”
It was a rhetorical question to which the answer was definitely no. “This ship nears the end of her voyage. We no longer need the navigational computers. Our goal now is not to go to this longitude or that latitude or rendezvous with some skyport. Our goal is—”
“Our goal,” Locke interrupted, “is to hunt Leviathans, collect as much sperm as we can, and then bring our crew back alive and, if at all possible, better off than they were when they left port.”
The sheer amount of derision the captain managed to pack into a short exhalation was borderline miraculous. Although that could have been the sex skewing my perspective. “You think the three hundredth part of this ship’s haul is enough to pay anybody back for three years mortgaged to the sky?”
“If it wasn’t they wouldn’t have taken the job,” Locke pointed out.
“Ah, yes. Because of course they chose to take on this career freely. None of them feared starvation, or were fleeing debt, or pressed into bondage by the law.”
Locke’s lips were a hard, set line. “How convenient that social justice happens to align perfectly with your ego.”
“Nobody on this ship had any choice but to sign aboard. I won’t pretend that serving your masters is the same as serving the crew.”
“But you’ll pretend that serving your vengeance is?”
I’d never seen the captain chastened, and I didn’t think I was seeing it now. But she shut her eyes and looked down for a moment. “And that’s what you think this is?”
“Honestly? No. But I thought you’d accept vengeance before you accepted despair.”
“You’re very keen to judge me today.”
“As we’ve established, I know you.”
At that, the captain looked up. From my angle I couldn’t see the expression on her face, but I didn’t need to. I never needed to. So much of what I knew about her is imagination. “And what is it they say about a little knowledge?”
“That sometimes it’s all you need. You feel trapped, I understand that—”
“I assure you, you do not.”
“Apologies, Captain. I overspoke. Whatever your motivations are, whatever you’re feeling right now and whatever you’ve been feeling for the last year, or ten years, or all your life, the crew deserve to make their own decisions.”
The captain blinked. Once. “They are making their own decisions. They could have followed Wolfram and turned pirate. They could have followed him again when he took the lifeboat. They could refuse to lower for spouts or, if they were really concerned, they could refuse my orders entirely.”
“You know that isn’t true.” Locke’s voice was different now, more pleading than defiant. I could see their face clearly from where I watched, but they weren’t looking at me. They were looking at the captain with a cocktail of hope and betrayal and the most useless kind of love.
“Ah, yes.” I didn’t like to think of the captain as sneering, but this was pure sneer. “But somehow it will magically become true if I go back to doing what Olympus Extraction State wants of me.”
“It will magically become true if you turn back from a path that, right now, looks like it’s going to get everybody killed. You can make all the high-minded speeches about the impossibility of self-determination under the trade-states you like, A, but people can’t make choices when they’re dead.”
Outside the broad, semipanoramic window of the cabin, the skies roiled bloodred and fire-orange and, because anomalies were growing more frequent now, hell-green. “I do not offer death. I offer an alternative.”
“It’s not an offer when everybody is trapped in a metal box that you control.”
“We live our whole lives in metal boxes. Houses. Offices. Ships. Habitation domes.” She turned her head slightly and gazed out the window. “So certain that anything outside them will destroy us.”
Locke’s expression was fading from concerned compassion to frustration. “Anything outside them will destroy us. That’s basic physics.”
I wasn’t quite sure what the captain was going to say to that.
On the one hand, Locke was objectively right.
On the other hand, she was very seldom stuck for an answer, and on a third, biomechanically grafted hand, this was exactly the kind of situation where I was sure she’d say something terrifying that I’d find way sexier than I should.
She didn’t disappoint.
“You have a very narrow understanding,” she said, “of what it means to be destroyed.”
Pressing their hands to their temples, Locke rose to their feet.
“Fuck me, A, you’re not a fucking prophet.
You’re not humanity’s last hope against an indifferent cosmos.
You’re not Lilith or Lucifer or Prometheus.
You’re just some random asshole like everybody else and you are going. To get. All of us. Killed.”
The captain remained kneeling. It was a power play, I think.
So many people have to be physically above somebody to dominate them, but the captain never did.
After all, she’d spent her whole career exerting her will on things that were larger and more terrible than she would ever be.
Physically, at least. “You keep saying that,” she said.
“It’s almost as if you want it to happen.
Better for my hunt to end in tragedy than for you to be confronted with the fact that you could have chosen differently.
That you lost the war half a lifetime ago, without even realizing you could fight. ”
Locke was tense now. They’d probably been tense since they came in, but years of corporate stooge work had made them excellent at hiding it. “Please remember,” they said in their levelest, most reasonable voice, “that in extremis, I do have the authority to relieve you of your post.”
“Do you?” It was a question born of confidence, not ignorance.
“Officially, yes.”
The captain bowed her head. “Ah. Officially.”
“You’re going to say that officially doesn’t mean much here in the deep skies.”
“It seems I don’t have to.”
A note of hesitation was creeping into Locke’s voice, and for that matter into their movements. And if there was one thing they should have learned from the hunt it was how fatal hesitation can be. “The crew would follow me.”
“True. I am more feared than loved. You could even disburse my lay amongst them as a gesture of goodwill.”
“I don’t want to—” Locke began.
“Then we come back to the question of choice, do we not?”
“So far into the sky”—they made the mistake of glancing out the window and seeing the empty hell beyond—“this isn’t just a matter of updating the paperwork.”
The captain shook her head. “No. But of course you came prepared for that.”
In answer to her not-actually-a-question, Locke drew the pistol I’d taken from the locker for them. If they did shoot the captain in cold blood, the evidence trail would point directly to me.
“Ah.”
“You know”—Locke was speaking so slowly and so carefully that I thought they might break—“I can’t let you take us deeper into the storm.”
And this—this right here—was the time the captain chose to rise to her feet.
She was a pace and a half from the barrel of a gun that would fill her chest with so many tiny metal shards they could reprocess her corpse with a magnet.
From the look of her, she a world of didn’t care. “No,” she said, “you can’t.”
“You’ll get us all killed,” Locke said again, more desperately this time.
“So you seem to believe.”
It was becoming very clear that even though Locke had known the captain longer than any of us, they’d underestimated her as badly as Wolfram had.
As badly as I had. And perhaps it wasn’t even though at all.
Perhaps it was because. There’s very little more dangerous than somebody you used to love. “Is that all you can say?”
The captain wasn’t one for being goaded, but she seldom needed encouragement to talk.
“We each of us live in little metal boxes,” she said.
“And yours, Locke, yours have always been here”—she stepped forwards and touched them gently on the forehead—“and here”—she touched them over the heart.
Which meant getting close enough that her own heart was pressed right against the muzzle of a gigawatt sublight flechette pistol.
“You have the key to those boxes in your hands. Will you turn it?”
Locke was trembling now, visibly trembling.
“This is your chance, isn’t it? To save everybody from me? To give them their choices back?”
Locke had their finger on the trigger the whole time, and the triggers of pulse guns were sensitive things. There was a better-than-zero chance that this was going to get bloody by accident.
“You’re a good officer,” the captain went on, as if she were in no danger whatsoever. “And the crew are lucky to have you to speak for them.”
The faintest tremor of tension moved through Locke’s fingers. A little tremor more was all it would take.
“But this ship,” the captain finished, looking deep into the first mate’s eyes and wearing a smile so enigmatic you could use it as an encryption key, “is mine.”
She took the pistol from Locke’s unresisting hands and laid it, with a metal-on-glass clink, on her chart table.
“Stand down, mate,” she said. “You may return to your duties.”
And silently, dejectedly, Locke did exactly that.