Chapter Eighty. The Third Day #2
Scattered pockets of Marsh’s cultists walk the halls, their day of reckoning come at last. There are fewer of them than I might have thought. Praying for destruction and living it are such different things.
“Your tears are delicious,” intones Truelove, leading a small band of the still faithful as he watches two Vestal voiders huddling behind a bulkhead. “Cry mo—”
He says nothing else. The long, questing limbs of the Mobius Beast have found him.
Its least deadly tendrils are still tipped with a chitin that will carve iron and crack stone.
The first pierces his back, just below the right kidney.
The organ would sell well in the markets of Cthonius Linea, but its value is spoiled now.
A second tendril takes him about the waist and a third, the finest and most delicate, designed for filtering microorganisms from air currents but tipped, as a result, with a thousand thousand tiny barbs, rips off his face.
The First Europan, his companion already long dead, runs down a corridor hoping that the escape pods are functioning.
In truth I remember little about him—not his name, not his face, not the tone of his voice.
He kicked me in the head once, of course, as did his friend. But it’s hard to resent it now.
He’s had the sense to wear a voidsuit, which means when he overrides the bulkhead to the emergency bay, he isn’t instantly blown into the void through the yawning gap in the hull.
But the Beast’s tendrils take him nonetheless.
“Ammo,” mutters Flint to himself as he digs through the now wide-open weapons locker. “I need more ammo. No point saving for tomorrow, we break out the big guns now or we—”
With a scream, the whole wall gives way as the Mobius Beast rips its way through the ship. A pulse rifle in each hand, Flint howls for as long as his lungs have anything in them and spits hypersonic rounds at his enemy.
It’s the right weapon and the right target. The flechettes do nothing to the ship but cut and sear into the Beast’s flesh, making it withdraw for a moment.
If it hadn’t already opened a gaping hole into the sky, he might even have made a difference.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” says Marsh, kneeling before the messenger of his consuming god. He is close to the hull, listening to every creak and crash and thump as the Mobius Beast dismantles the ship.
“And our little life is—” Butchering, scything claws plated with razor-ivory puncture the walls. The force behind them is so immense that they don’t slow down as they enter Marsh’s chest (each rib individually saleable to the right market, each lung more so) and pierce it through and through.
He hangs, suspended on a claw that gleams white and red and strangely beautiful, if you like that sort of thing. But although his end is fast there’s no peace in his eyes. Death, it turns out, is far less like sleep than prophets and poets would have us believe.
In engineering, Lobscouse’s finger tendrils withdraw from the guts of the exhaust accelerators. His readings are telling him it’s too late. Over comms, a voice is calling on the ship to evacuate, but there will not be time.
Data readouts tell the story already. The monster has breached the hull, and the engine core is already losing integrity. Somewhere, there is a tear in the coolant line and the drones have gone haywire.
He opens a hatch and goes to search for the fault. It will not buy the ship much, but it may buy it something.
The temperature is already rising. His thermoceptors tell him that he risks heatstroke and worse if he continues. It doesn’t matter anymore.
His skin begins to blister, and he takes a perverse comfort in knowing the heat will kill him before the Beast does.
“Void the cargo bays,” Locke screams into comms, “a fortune in sperm brings us nothing if we die for it. If we can’t outrun the Beast perhaps we can outlast it.”
Their office is deep inside the ship, but the Beast’s claws are long and merciless. They punch through the walls like biological harpoons.
Locke barely looks up. “Belay that,” they command. “The ship is lost. Those who can to the life pods.”
Metal screams and the talons grasp closer. They rend longer, deeper tears into the walls.
Locke sets the picture slab on their desk face-down, then steps away and, at last, turns to face the void. They know that they’re already dead. That in a few months Olympus Extraction State will update its ledgers to classify them as a depleted asset.
They do not flinch. They do not blink.
The atmosphere of Jupiter rushes in.
The two Vestals, fleeing from Truelove’s grisly dismemberment, are pinned to the ground when the monster crushes the eighth and ninth decks together like tinfoil. Dawlish, himself fleeing, stops to help free them.
Cybernetically augmented, he’s able to pry loose some of the twisted metal that’s half crushing, half skewering one of them, and he hoists them both across his shoulders just in time for the Mobius Beast, at last, to reach the try-works, the spermaceti stores, and the engine room.
Raw spermaceti is volatile, and between the severed power cables, the chemical fires, and the electromagnetopsionic presence of the Beast itself, there are a hundred ways it could have been set off.
I will never know which one it was.
The ship explodes.