The chorus conceded that no, this was unlikely.
“Wouldn’t have and couldn’t have. They’ve the samefiduciary responsibilities”—she almost spat the words—“as we. Though sure as I’m standing here their holds overflowed with sperm, they could not have let us have one drop of the refined fuel they didn’t sell to us for more than it was worth.”
The chorus signaled its grudging agreement. And fearing, perhaps, that he had underestimated his opponent, Wolfram tried to step in. “Is that the best you can—”
I’ve learned to my mingled cost and pleasure that the captain hates interruptions. She swung the anointed-and-desecrated harpoon around and held it—steady as a rock—level with Wolfram’s throat. “You came to me on my own ship and demanded I make account. You will be silent until account is made.”
For a moment, the clash of wills between the two sparked invisible flames that bathed the deck in an intangible heat and echoed with inaudible thunder. Behind them, I half imagined hellish faces in the clouds.
In the end, the captain triumphed. “Had I struck a bargain with the Bachelor, I would have been stealing from you. Fromyour families and your children. I’d have robbed you sure as the man who sabotaged the fuel lines robbed you.”
The implication was clear but itwasleft as implication. And to his credit, Wolfram blanked it like the professional deceiver he’d always been. Instead he pivoted. “Fine words, but it seems to me that so long as you’ve enough fuel to face the Möbius Beast, you’ve no care for what happens next.” He turned back to the mob then and added dramatically, “What happens tous.”
The crew was on a knife’s edge. The tiniest nudge could tip them to one side or the other. “I’ve made no secret on this voyage that I’ve a quarry of my own,” said the captain, her voice clear and low and level. “And I’ve asked you all to join me in the hunt and join me you have. You’ve joined me and though I say it myself you haveprofitedby it. We’ve taken old beasts and young beasts and beasts half dead and beasts that fought us to within an inch of our own meagre lives and we have sperm, friends, we have sperm aplenty.”
“Then return home now,” cut in Wolfram. “Why risk voyaging on with fuel tanks near empty?”
Turning back now would also, incidentally, have brought the ship within striking range of the pirate bases and made seizing the ship and turning the whole thing brigand a much easier, and so much more tempting, prospect for the existing crew members.
But the captain didn’t mention that. Instead, she gave Wolfram an openly contemptuous smile. “And here I took you for a man of faith. Does your god not promise to you that your people will be last devoured?”
That put a silence over the crowd. Within the still-technically-a-minority of the crew who had gone over to Marsh’s cult, there was—in reality—something of a split between the pious, the desperate, and the cynical. But since nobody wanted to think of themselves as in the second category or admit to being in the third, everybody had to act like they were in the first.
“Fine words for an unbeliever,” tried Wolfram, and againstanybody else it would probably have worked. In the game of us-against-them,uswas a far easier hand to play. But the captain playedthemmasterfully.
“Words,” she echoed with an actual sneer. And then, to my surprise, she called out, “Mr. Dawlish.”
Dawlish, who had been lurking with me near the back of the group, ready to run or fight as it became clear which was necessary, stood to attention. “Aye, Captain?”
“Look at the readouts from the array and tell me what they show.”
With an air of professionalism I had to admit was lacking from so much of the crew these days, Dawlish consulted the screens. “No spouts,” he said, “but a mass of some kind, large and static and twenty klicks straight down.”
Still hovering at the end of the captain’s harpoon, Wolfram raised his hands in a gesture of innocent conciliation. “That’s all very well, but what of it?”
The captain said nothing, but from the fringe of the crowd, the chief engineer spoke out. “You’re suggesting we strip a Behemoth, aren’t you?”
“We’ve the machinery,” the captain confirmed. “And I trust you know how it can be done.”
Lobscouse nodded. “In theory. But it’s not been standard practice since the early days of the hunt.”
It was becoming clear, even to Wolfram himself, that he’d massively underestimated the captain. “You can’t seriously propose,” he said, “that we give up the chance at freely traded oil in order to wring what we can from a floating carcass?”
You’d have needed to be watching the captain as carefully as I’d been watching her for three full years before you could spot the gleam of triumph in her eyes. Because yes, she was proposing exactly that, and if Wolfram had been amongst the crew longer or hunted for more than five minutes, he’d have known that it was what the crew would favor too.
Barely smiling, the captain snatched her spearpoint awayfrom Wolfram’s throat and held it again like a scepter. And then she walked calmly into the mob, to where Marsh was standing in his cassock of flayed dicks.
“Mr. Marsh,” she said, in that soft-and-loud-at-once way she had when she really, really wanted to make a point, “when I knelt before you and bade you anoint this spear, it was in the belief that your god would give this hunt his blessing. Was I wrong?”
“It is a blessing that he bestows on beasts,” Marsh replied. “Make tigers tame, and huge Leviathans forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands.”
It was gibberish, but the captain made victory out of it. “So speaks the prophet, friends. We descend, and we carve our fates from the flesh of ancients.”
The crew, ready to mutiny moments before, cheered. And a little way off, Locke watched them with calculating eyes, and wondered.
CHAPTER
SEVENTYTitanfall
