Chapter Eighty. The Third Day
CHAPTER
EIGHTY
The Third Day
I went to her again that night.
I knelt. I begged. I wept. And not in a sex way.
“I have made no secret of my purpose,” she told me. “The machine foresaw that the most probable outcome included its destruction, and that has now come to pass.”
We’d needed to rip so many housings out of the core systems to get Fidelity running on the boat that we couldn’t now restore it from backup. A lot of its data was still retrievable, but it would never speak again.
“I’ve given two limbs now in the hunt,” she continued.
Her new leg was simpler than the old one, which had been the product of weeks of careful work by ships’ doctors and engineers.
I couldn’t know, but I doubted Pierce and Lobscouse had been able to connect the neurons properly in the time they’d had, which meant it probably low-key hurt like fuck.
“We have lost three boats in two days. We are committed. I am committed.”
And I could say nothing but Please. And she could say nothing at all.
When I returned to Q she held me again and said again what she’d said in the boat. “Ne dimittas eam, et custodiet te.”
I didn’t know what it meant, but I liked the sound of it.
Overnight the Beast had vanished into a cloud bank and so we pursued once again by a mix of hard math and guesswork.
No spout came this time. No trace on the array at all. On her new, much less carefully fitted leg, the captain stalked the deck like a woman possessed, which, when you got right down to it, she basically was.
“It’s no bad thing,” Dawlish was saying as we leaned side by side on the gunwale looking out over the sky. “The boats have taken a pounding and if we don’t catch up with the Beast today we can use the time for maintenance.”
If we’d taken it yesterday, of course, he’d have been a rich man and, more importantly, a free one. But he accepted that with grace. Like most of us, it seemed he’d gotten used to having things snatched away from him and learned not to place much value in half promises.
While we and the rest of the crew enjoyed the closest a hunter-ship ever got to a respite—which is to say we had a thousand little jobs to do but none of them were likely to immediately kill anybody—the captain, who was pacing a little way off, froze and stared out to stern.
“We’ve overflown him,” she said to nobody. And then, over comms, she repeated, “All hands, we’ve overflown the Beast. He’s behind us.”
Locke’s voice, which had been sounding even more studiedly measured since they’d failed to relieve the captain of duty and/or murder her, came cautiously back. “What reason do you have for that assertion?”
“Experience,” the captain replied, “and instinct. The Beast is angry and tired of fleeing. Then again, who amongst us is not?”
“If the creature has started hunting the Pequod,” said Locke, a growing sense of urgency in their tone, “then we need to get out and we need to get out now.”
“A spout,” the Old Ionian called out from the array. “Peaks like I’ve never seen in all my years, and hard astern.”
With a fatalistic triumph, the captain gave the order. “Lower.”
“The boats aren’t ready,” protested Locke. “Or most of them aren’t.”
But the captain was already taking the transport shaft down to the hangar bay. “That will not be a problem, Locke,” she announced over still-open comms. “I will only need the one.”
To say that lowering a single boat was irregular would be—I mean it’d be true, for a start.
It would have been a bad idea even if this was a normal beast, and it definitely wasn’t.
As I waited on the deck I tried to game through scenarios where the captain wasn’t, for absolute certain, flying to her cold and miserable death.
I came up blank. But it didn’t stop me chasing her to the launch bays yelling false objections all the while.
That it wasn’t procedure, as if she’d ever cared.
That she’d have no hope alone, as if she’d had any more hope with the crew behind her.
That I and so many others loved her, as if it mattered.
As if I could speak for anybody except myself.
She stopped, two paces from our last good boat. And for the last time she turned to me. “I’ll none of it,” she said. “My path was set before we met. Before you were born, perhaps. And I walk it now to whatever end it brings me.”
I looked up at her. Silent. Pleading.
And she kissed me.
I’ve rewritten this book three times. I’ve thought about that moment three thousand. And each time I look back, each time I try to describe how it was, I remember it differently.
It was fierce and firesome and devouring.
It was the first tenderness she ever gave me. And the last.
It was everything I’d been wanting from her.
It was just a kiss. Like any other.
It never happened at all.
And then she climbed into the last good boat, and was gone.
“Patching through to screens,” said her voice over boat-to-ship comms. She sounded calm. I didn’t want her to sound calm.
There were screens all over the ship. Entertainment screens like the ones Fidelity had hijacked.
Announcement screens that told us when a spout was sighted or when an officer needed us.
The ubiquitous advertisement screens that reminded us of our place in the world.
But now they were all overridden, all showing us the live camera feed from the captain’s suit.
So as I staggered, dazed, back to the more populated parts of the ship, I watched her.
I saw her fire the engines, evacuate the hangar, tuck a coilgun and the anointed harpoon in beside her.
Standing now in the mess alongside a handful of my crewmates, I saw her finish checks and start the manual launch.
I began to cry.
As she soared out into the sky, we saw a trail of scavenger-Wyrms gathering in her wake. Some nights, tired and hungry and asking where it all went wrong, I wonder if they had the power of foretelling, or if they were just playing the odds, or if there’s a difference.
Through my tears, I tried to tell myself that the Old Ionian had been wrong.
Or that he’d been making up stories, which, honestly, he did a lot.
The only sign we’d seen of the Mobius Beast that day was the captain’s hunch and an energy spike on the array, and that hadn’t been confirmed. Or at least I hadn’t confirmed it.
The only sign until that moment. Because then the feed from the captain’s cockpit showed us the Beast in all its glory. Head-on, head-down, clouds billowing crimson about it like the lions of Old Earth. Or like I imagine lions to be.
“I see you now,” she said to him. And looking back she had always been speaking to him. When I’d thought she was speaking to the sky or to the fates or to me. “And I know you. Since before I heard your name I have searched for you, and now—”
She downed canopy and I looked away. The slaying of Leviathans was a grisly business. Being slain by them more so.
I heard a coilgun loose and I heard the captain’s voice once again. “There. I have you and you have me. And we will end this.”
The same unconquerable force that draws us to railway crashes and celebrity drama pulled my eyes back to the screen. Her harpoon had struck the Beast full in the eye and she was riding the line fast and true towards it, spear raised and shining red in the storm light.
Hope kills.
For a tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a heartbeat I let myself believe in her one last time.
And then the monster turned its head and from beneath its armored nonface it unfolded jaws that seemed to adjust and distend and distort and become never-ending as they reached out and snatched the captain from the sky.
O captain my captain.
Over comms, somebody was saying something, but I just stared at the screen and watched as hands that had touched me and eyes that had looked into mine and a body I had wanted to worship with my own vanished with the mind and the soul it housed into the bloody gullet of a beast from a different creation.
“Move, girl.” That was the Old Ionian. “She’s dead. Naught for it now but to flee.”
“Stations,” Locke was shouting over comms. “Engineers, we need a miracle. Hands, we need to cut ballast. Now.”
OLD IONIAN VOIDER: What are you doing?
LOCKE (OVER COMMS): Repeat, all hands to stations. Emergency protocols.
I do not know where I am or what I am doing. I am a schoolmistress dressed as a deckhand. I am not here.
TALL GANYMEDIAN VOIDER: It’s coming. We’ll never outrun it.
FIRST PHOBOSI VOIDER: Not with that attitude we won’t.
FLINT (OVER COMMS): Arm yourselves! Everybody arm yourselves. We won’t let this bastard take us without a fight.
I am not here. I am outside myself looking down. I am watching a play that I was never cast in. I failed the audition because I couldn’t dance.
MARSH: Our revels now are ended.
TRUELOVE: To me, faithful. To me and we shall see prophecy fulfilled.
MARSH: These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air.
DAWLISH: Ballast. The mate’s right, we need to shed ballast. If we can just cut some weight—
I awake in the night screaming. This was a dream. Just a dream from long ago and far away. Or here and now. In the long and empty sky they’re the same thing.
[THE SHIP SHAKES AS THE BEAST COLLIDES WITH HER]
TALL GANYMEDIAN VOIDER: I have money, beast, if you will but take it.
[THE DOME CRACKS]
A hand takes mine. Through tear-stung eyes I see glowing marks on a face I half remember.
“Sequere me.”
Q’s hand tightens in my grip and leads me through the ship as outside the Mobius Beast winds its limbs about her like a violating god.
On the deck, the Tall Ganymedian voider watches with grim fascination as the dome splinters. The Jovian atmosphere floods in raw and freezing and deoxygenated. He tries to hold his breath, but how long does he think he can hold it for?
A third of the crew retreats inside the ship, an atavistic rodent instinct telling us that deep and dark and quiet is the same as safe. It half works.