All the while, the captain stood on the prow, ramrod-straight and staring out into the skies. The elf-light bathed her and limned her and made her look like a star come down from the heavens to walk the decks of a hunter-barque.
As beautiful as the fires were, as majestic as they made the captain look by the light of their hyperfine emissions, there’s a reason hunter-barques don’t fly into electrostatic anomalies as a rule, and after a few moments marveling at the spectacle, we found out exactly what that reason was. What those reasons were.
Doors jammed. The dispensers in the mess locked up. Comms went down at the worst possible time. And navigation shorted.
The last one was the real fucker.
Navigating in the Jovian atmosphere is next to impossible without a working uplink and some very, very specific computer wizardry. On other worlds you can fly by dead reckoning or by looking at landmarks, but the thing about landmarks is that they need, y’know, land. In an ever-shifting miasma of ammonia and sulfides, you have no way of knowing where you are one day to the next.
The fact that, in the days after the storm, the captain seemed totally unbothered by this was a giant fucking red flag. Then again, every flag had been red since she stood up and told us she was out to hunt legends.
Somehow, it didn’t change how badly I wanted her, or how much I believed in her.
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-SIXThe Pistol
I was curled up in a corner of the captain’s bed, naked, alone, and abandoned, when there was an unexpected buzz at the door.
Not that unexpected buzzes at the door really bothered the captain, who was kneeling in front of her table poring over charts that she still seemed to believe she could navigate by.
“Read the wind,” she was telling her intelligence. “If the Beast is out there we will smell it.”
“I’m not quite sure that’s how it works,” replied Fidelity. “But we should be able to check the currents for biological traces. The deeper we go into the Heart, the more likely it becomes that those traces come from the creature you’re looking for.”
The door buzzed again, and this time a voice came over what was left of comms. It was Locke. At least it sounded like Locke. Everything had gotten so staticky recently.
Shutting the table down, the captain rose and went to the door.
“What do you want?”
Locke slid inside with an easy formality. “I want to talk, A—”
They used her full name, of course. And no title. That was interesting, because they hadn’t since the day of Wolfram’s failed mutiny. It was also interesting that the captain didn’timmediately tell them to fuck off. Instead she went calmly inside, knelt down, and waited for Locke to kneel opposite her.
“Well?”
“You destroyed navigation.”
The captain didn’t so much as blink.
“You’re not going to at least say it was a calculated risk?”
I was watching now from behind the curtain at the edge of the alcove. Locke didn’t know I was there, and the captain might or might not have remembered. “I’ve known you too long to lie.”
“Then have you known me long enough to listen?”
It was a rhetorical question to which the answer was definitely no. “This ship nears the end of her voyage. We no longer need the navigational computers. Our goal now is not to go to this longitude or that latitude or rendezvous with some skyport. Our goal is—”
“Our goal,” Locke interrupted, “is to hunt Leviathans, collect as much sperm as we can, and then bring our crew back alive and, if at all possible, better off than they were when they left port.”
The sheer amount of derision the captain managed to pack into a short exhalation was borderline miraculous. Although that could have been the sex skewing my perspective. “You think the three hundredth part of this ship’s haul is enough to pay anybody back for three years mortgaged to the sky?”
“If it wasn’t they wouldn’t have taken the job,” Locke pointed out.
“Ah, yes. Because of course they chose to take on this career freely. None of them feared starvation, or were fleeing debt, or pressed into bondage by the law.”
Locke’s lips were a hard, set line. “How convenient that social justice happens to align perfectly with your ego.”
