It hadn’t for anybody I knew either. But when I’d pointed that out to people back home they’d gotten really angry at me for it.
“I do my job,” Locke went on, “and I do it right and I do it well. When I do itreallywell nobody gets killed and we all come out just a little bit better off than we were before. When I do it badly…” They shrugged and spread their hands in a gesture that eloquently expressed the sentenceYou get shitshows like this.
For a moment we lapsed into silence. Except there was never silence on a ship, and now with the perpetual outrage of the wind outside, our every moment of quiet was underscored by the thrumming of the engines in dialogue with the shrieking of the skies.
“I trust her,” I said. And it was true even though it shouldn’t have been.
“Then I envy you.”
“I trust you too.”
That got a gallows laugh. “One day, I—” Locke was also the only person that really saidmyname on the ship, and that made me feel a bunch of strange things, not all of them comfortable. “You’ll have to actually commit to something. You can’t trust the woman who might be sailing us all to our deaths andalsotrust the person who says she definitely is.”
In a futile effort to lighten the mood, I smiled and said, “Seminary girl, remember? Accepting contradictory beliefs is my whole thing.”
“Go on then. Unpack the theodicy. How do you trust both of us?”
Having to justify myself sucked. There’s a reason I’ve chosen to tell this story in a way that means you absolutely can’t talk back to me. “I trust that she’ll do the right thing,” I said. “And I trust that you’ll stop her if she doesn’t.”
I couldn’t help noticing Locke’s eyes straying to the weapons locker. “Do you now?”
Fuck it. I got up, punched my code into the locker, pulled out a heavy, snub-nosed flechette pistol, and threw it to them. “Yes. I do.”
“I think you’re getting me mixed up with Flint. He’s the one who thinks shooting bad people solves everything.”
Honestly I didn’t think Flint’s philosophy had even that much nuance to it. “He’s not wrong, though.”
“You don’t think one mutiny per voyage is enough?”
“I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure it’s not mutiny when you’re first mate. It’s just necessary checks and balances.”
Locke didn’t argue. And they also didn’t give the gun back. Instead they secreted it—more expertly than I’d have expected for a bean pusher and a pen counter—inside the line of their once-more-immaculate uniform. They nodded an acknowledgment that was something like gratitude.
For a moment, we understood each other. Or I thought we did. For a moment, things were calm.
That much remains true about storms, of any kind, whatever world they happen on.
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-FIVEThe Queen of the Elves
Hunters are at once a whimsical and a rules-oriented folk, which is why they speak about sprites and elveses instead of Stratospheric Perturbations Resulting from Intense Thunderstorm Electrification and the even more tenuous Emissions of Light and Very low frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic pulse Sources.
I tried to explain to the Old Ionian that an acronym wasn’t really an acronym if you ignored half the words, and he told me I was missing the point.
Most of the time, these phenomena are limited to the upper atmosphere (sprites are stratospheric by definition), but the nominatively appropriate fury of Hell’s Heart combined with the cerebral emissions of its Leviathans led to constant flares and pulses lighting the skies, even at mid-to-low altitudes.
For most captains, one of the chief difficulties of navigating the Heart was skirting the boundaries of these unpredictable events, while also not missing the ones that were actually Leviathan spouts andalsoremembering that having half your ship’s electronics overloaded by something that could appear and then vanish at literal light speed was (checks notes) bad.
A was not most captains.
“We arenot,” Locke insisted, pointing through the forward windows of the captain’s cabin, “steeringintothat.”
Thethatin question was a storm-within-a-storm-within-a-storm sending waves of elf-light rippling across the skies some three hundred klicks from our present position.
“My orders were clear,” replied the captain, unblinking and unhesitating. “I expect them to be obeyed.”
The loss of Wolfram had calmed the crew in some ways, agitated them in others. On the one hand, he wasn’t stirring shit or actively plotting to take over the ship. On the other hand, the fact that the man with the best survival instinct on board had felt safer in a life pod that might just crash into the sea than he did on the Pequod was kind of telling.
