“Nobody on this ship had any choice but to sign aboard. I won’t pretend that serving your masters is the same as serving the crew.”
“But you’ll pretend that serving your vengeance is?”
I’d never seen the captain chastened, and I didn’t think I was seeing it now. But she shut her eyes and looked down for a moment. “And that’s what you think this is?”
“Honestly? No. But I thought you’d acceptvengeancebefore you accepteddespair.”
“You’re very keen to judge me today.”
“As we’ve established, I know you.”
At that, the captain looked up. From my angle I couldn’t see the expression on her face, but I didn’t need to. I never needed to. So much of what I knew about her is imagination. “And what is it they say about a little knowledge?”
“That sometimes it’s all you need. You feel trapped, I understand that—”
“I assure you, you do not.”
“Apologies, Captain. I overspoke. Whatever your motivations are, whatever you’re feeling right now and whatever you’ve been feeling for the last year, or ten years, or all your life, the crew deserve to make their own decisions.”
The captain blinked. Once. “Theyaremaking their own decisions. They could have followed Wolfram and turned pirate. They could have followed him again when he took the lifeboat. They could refuse to lower for spouts or, if they were really concerned, they could refuse my orders entirely.”
“You know that isn’t true.” Locke’s voice was different now, more pleading than defiant. I could see their face clearly from where I watched, but they weren’t looking at me. They were looking at the captain with a cocktail of hope and betrayal and the most useless kind of love.
“Ah, yes.” I didn’t like to think of the captain as sneering, but this was pure sneer. “But somehow it will magicallybecometrue if I go back to doing what Olympus Extraction State wants of me.”
“It will magically become true if you turn back from a path that, right now, looks like it’s going to get everybody killed.You can make all the high-minded speeches about the impossibility of self-determination under the trade-states you like, A, but people can’t make choices when they’re dead.”
Outside the broad, semipanoramic window of the cabin, the skies roiled bloodred and fire-orange and, because anomalies were growing more frequent now, hell-green. “I do not offer death. I offer an alternative.”
“It’s not an offer when everybody is trapped in a metal box that you control.”
“We live our whole lives in metal boxes. Houses. Offices. Ships. Habitation domes.” She turned her head slightly and gazed out the window. “So certain that anything outside them will destroy us.”
Locke’s expression was fading from concerned compassion to frustration. “Anything outside themwilldestroy us. That’s basic physics.”
I wasn’t quite sure what the captain was going to say to that. On the one hand, Locke was objectively right. On the other hand, she was very seldom stuck for an answer, and on a third, biomechanically grafted hand, this was exactly the kind of situation where I was sure she’d say something terrifying that I’d find way sexier than I should.
She didn’t disappoint.
“You have a very narrow understanding,” she said, “of what it means to be destroyed.”
Pressing their hands to their temples, Locke rose to their feet. “Fuck me, A, you’re not a fucking prophet. You’re not humanity’s last hope against an indifferent cosmos. You’re not Lilith or Lucifer or Prometheus. You’re just some random asshole like everybody else and you are going. To get. All of us. Killed.”
The captain remained kneeling. It was a power play, I think. So many people have to be physically above somebody to dominate them, but the captain never did. After all, she’d spent her whole career exerting her will on things that were larger and more terrible than she would ever be. Physically, at least.“You keep saying that,” she said. “It’s almost as if you want it to happen. Better for my hunt to end in tragedy than for you to be confronted with the fact that you could have chosen differently. That you lost the war half a lifetime ago, without even realizing you could fight.”
Locke was tense now. They’d probably been tense since they came in, but years of corporate stooge work had made them excellent at hiding it. “Please remember,” they said in their levelest, most reasonable voice, “that in extremis, I do have the authority to relieve you of your post.”
“Do you?” It was a question born of confidence, not ignorance.
“Officially, yes.”
The captain bowed her head. “Ah. Officially.”
“You’re going to say thatofficiallydoesn’t mean much here in the deep skies.”
“It seems I don’t have to.”
A note of hesitation was creeping into Locke’s voice, and for that matter into their movements. And if there was one thing they should have learned from the hunt it was how fatal hesitation can be. “The crew would follow me.”
