Chapter Seventy-Seven. Delight
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-SEVEN
Delight
After they completely failed to shoot the captain through the heart, I …
it’s not fair to say I lost interest in Locke.
The downside of fucking people you’re trapped on a ship with instead of people you meet at a transit station or in a nightclub toilet is that you have to keep seeing them, and that means you wind up giving a measurable number of shits about them, which means you’re screwed.
Emotionally, as well as in the good way.
The problem was, what I really, really liked about fucking Locke was that they started out as this upright, dress-uniformed bastion of authority and conformity, and then I got to take that apart piece by piece and kiss by kiss and moan by moan.
And that got a whole lot less fun now I’d seen them taken apart far more effectively and far more thoroughly by a woman who didn’t even need to take her coat off.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t exactly short of options. Or rather, everybody was short of options which meant I became an option which meant we all got more options. But I did still wind up taking far more long walks on the deck than I would have under other, less cucked circumstances.
Which meant I saw the Delight.
We were out of the anomalies now, so the light was back to being all red all the time, like we were flying our own private inferno.
Hey, wouldn’t it have been a cool literary device if I’d pretended the ship had exactly nine decks and they got worse as you went down and the bottom one was really cold?
If you’re reading this, I didn’t bother to go edit that in.
Fuck, I could even have really gone for the symbolism and put the captain’s cabin at the bottom of the ship, instead of where it actually was.
Because she’s like the devil. Is the implication there.
Probably too heavy-handed. Would it surprise you to know that I’ve changed my mind at least twice about what sort of book I even wanted this to be? Look close enough and you can see the ghosts of all my worse choices.
Anyway. The Delight.
With navigation down and the array half fried by the elves so it only really stood a chance of picking up the largest possible spouts—the kind you’d get from, just to take a completely random example, a legendarily large and deadly Leviathan your captain was completely obsessed with—the only way for us to reliably detect other ships was the eyeball mark one.
So I was the first to see her.
And fuck me, she was fucking fucked.
At first I honestly took her for a derelict.
Her dome, made from a reinforced and supposedly impenetrable crystalline compound that could withstand vast pressures both internally and externally, had cracked like …
You know, the depressing thing here is that there’s a ton of fancy metaphors I could use but if you live anywhere outside the core worlds (and you probably do, I’ve got no delusions about this book doing well on Mercury), I know you’ve seen a failed dome.
Maybe you’ve lost family to one. There’s a slim chance you’ve been in one, although unless your particular colony has way better emergency services than most you’d probably just be dead in that case.
The dome of the ship was cracked like that one dome you saw come down when you were nine years old, that the news told you was a very rare accident you shouldn’t be worried about.
Or the other one you saw come down when you were fifteen.
Or the one that’s always been standing just across the surface from the main gate of your colony-city.
An error that we’ll never repeat, just like all the others.
It was a transparent demi-lozenge of high-tensile, ultracompressive, shear-resistant polymer, tested past specifications and now splintered into shards that could barely support their own weight.
It was like a mouth full of broken teeth, if teeth were see-through.
It was like a claw scratching the sky, if the claw was just the sharp bits.
It was like that time you had to watch your friend asphyxiate on the other side of an airlock.
The damage to the rest of the ship was less dramatic, but that’s just because a dull metal box wears punctures more discreetly than a bright glassy dome.
There wasn’t a deck that didn’t have a gouge ripped into it, probably sealed off by internal bulkheads but still representing a whole lot of lost metal, lost space, lost sperm, and lost lives.
Red emergency lighting seeped from her windows, suggesting that she’d either run her fuel tanks low or suffered a rupture. One engine was out, and here and there I could still see dribbles of sperm falling like rain from her wounds and then atomizing to fog in the wind.
We mostly had comms back after the elves but what came through from the Delight was barely coherent.
“Hast seen the Mobius Beast?” demanded the captain, the moment we could get our systems to handshake.
“… mative,” replied the Delight. Then, “… day ago…” then, “… mage to criti … systems” and, “… ive hands lost in the … st … oided total…”
We made no further effort at contact. It would have been too difficult and, honestly, too depressing.
Nobody wanted to be reminded how badly a hunt could go wrong.
Still, the mood on the ship was grave after that meeting.
I went to Q for comfort and found her standing beside her coffin, staring down at it contemplatively.
“We will need this,” she said.
Q usually spoke her own language, and only resorted to Exodite to humor me, or if she thought it was really, really important that I understand her. It worried the hell out of me that this was option two.