“An omen of what?” asked Locke, who was watching the ship’s approach beside us and who had, of late, been increasingly withdrawn.
“Not all omens are omensofthings,” the Old Ionian replied with the cheap gravitas of age. “Some are just omenous all by themselves.”
“Ominous,” corrected Locke. “And if you’re looking for bad signs, there are far more concrete ones to think about than how a ship writes its name.”
The Old Ionian didn’t ask for examples, because there were hundreds. Steering into an eternal storm, taking advice froman illegal machine intelligence, getting her harpoon blessed by an apocalypse cult, and of course the little fact that we were permanently bathed in bloodred light because the whole ship had been forced onto emergency power because the captain would rather burn a dead god than trade for better supplies all sprang to mind. Then there was the tiny matter of demanding that the whole crew commit to backing her on a personal vengeance crusade against a single biological organism.
As if to illustrate this last point, the captain’s voice echoed across comms. Her eternal, obsessive, unchanging question. “Hast seen the Möbius Beast?”
And although we’d heard it before, a knife-twist of foreboding hit me right in the stomach when the reply came. “Aye.”
Not that I had much time for reflecting on foreboding, foreshadowing, omens, or portents, because the captain rattled on with a host of new questions, and these were far less rehearsed and suggested far less composure on her part. When, she wanted to know. And where? On what heading? From what distance?
To her frustration, none of these questions received direct reply. Instead, the captain of the Rachel sent a request for permission to board. A request, I couldn’t help noticing, that came after she’d already launched her boat and crossed half the distance towards us.
“It worsens,” the Old Ionian muttered. “Signs on signs on signs.”
This sign, at least, seemed more practical than mystical, and I was grateful for that. I didn’t need a long life’s worth of folk wisdom to know that somebody who got halfway to your ship before asking if she could come aboard was either trying something, desperate, or, most likely, trying something desperate.
In keeping with tradition, a reasonable number of us, including all the officers, the harpooners, and anybody who just wanted to rubberneck, went down to the docking bay to greet the visiting captain. And in further keeping with tradition, we made a bunch of mean-spirited observations about her and hership based on nothing but what her boat looked like and how she carried herself.
Although in this case even the boredom-born cruelty of the hunter-crew didn’t quite have the stomach for snarking on the captain of the Rachel. Because she looked pathetic. Pathetic in the etymologically literal sense of evoking pathos. She was like our own captain in negative. Both radiated a sense of being driven by some all-consuming urge, of being hollowed out and shattered and remade by it.
Only with our captain it was, like, in a cool way. And with the captain of the Rachel it wasn’t.
“The Beast,” A demanded as she bore down upon the hapless visitor, ivory heel ringing on the iron grille of the landing platform. “Where. And when. And how far off?”
Although the captain of the Rachel had been broadcasting weakness since she’d stepped out of her boat, she stood her ground. And while this might have been me projecting, I thought I recognized a very particularkindof weakness there. The kind that circled all the way back around and became strength again because you had nothing to lose and no reason to hold back. “In good time,” she said.
“I call no time good that isn’t now,” replied A.
To which the captain of the Rachel said only, “Learn.”
I was pretty sure that one of the biggest reasons the captain wasn’t already super, super dead despite everything was that deep down she knew how to temper her obsession with pragmatism. And she decided quickly enough that it would be more expedient to accommodate her opposite number than to waste time in a clash of wills. “My apologies,” she said, half bowing, “you have come to my ship in haste. Doubtless you have priorities of your own, and I should not be selfish.”
That mollified the other captain at least a little. “I saw the Beast,” she said, “or something much like it, some two days ago—”
“Two days.” The captain couldn’t help interjecting. We wereclose now. Touching close. Close enough, not to put too fine a point on it, to be fucked.
“We were in pursuit of a pod of Leviathans when the eyes on the array caught sight of another signal—one too large and too majestic to give off pursuing, so I gave the order for our reserve boat to drop after it.”
“And ’twas the Beast?” demanded A. “Tell me it yet lives. If I hear that ye slew it—”
“The monster lives,” replied the captain of the Rachel. “When our boats gave chase, he fled.”
I’d spent so long watching the captain that I sometimes imagined I could read her thoughts on her skin. What she was thinking now was that fleeing didn’t fit the story she told herself about the Great Leviathan. And if it didn’t fit the story, it wasn’t real. Or at least, it was part of a lesser reality.
“That would have been no bad thing,” the other captain went on, “since we’d made kills enough for a day’s work. But one of our boats got a dart in the creature and was dragged along with it as it flew.”
That sort of thing happened all the time. Hell, it had happened to me a fair bit, even in hunts I’ve described in these pages. It was scary and sometimes even fatal, but not the kind of thing that would drive a captain to the state this woman was in.
“When the hunt was done, the boats that had gone for the pod were all accounted for, but the one tethered to the beast had been dragged from sensor range.”
“Then fire the beacon,” replied the captain. Every ship has a high-intensity beacon it can use to guide errant boats back to the ship if necessary, and its use has saved many lives over the decades. “If they live they’ll return to you. If they do not you’ve lost nothing.”
The detached, matter-of-factif they livestruck the captain of the Rachel like a bucket of cold sewage. “Have you used your beacon lately?” she asked. “In the Heart?”
We hadn’t, but the captain had been in the skies long enoughthat she knew what her counterpart meant. The atmospheric conditions made electronic communication over long distances incredibly unreliable. “Then give them up for gone. You cannot mean to search the skies like the barques of old? With boats and scans and mortal eyes?”
