“True. I am more feared than loved. You could even disburse my lay amongst them as a gesture of goodwill.”
“I don’t want to—” Locke began.
“Then we come back to the question of choice, do we not?”
“So far into the sky”—they made the mistake of glancing out the window and seeing the empty hell beyond—“this isn’t just a matter of updating the paperwork.”
The captain shook her head. “No. But of course you came prepared for that.”
In answer to her not-actually-a-question, Locke drew the pistol I’d taken from the locker for them. If they did shoot the captain in cold blood, the evidence trail would point directly to me.
“Ah.”
“You know”—Locke was speaking so slowly and so carefullythat I thought they might break—“I can’t let you take us deeper into the storm.”
And this—this right here—was the time the captain chose to rise to her feet. She was a pace and a half from the barrel of a gun that would fill her chest with so many tiny metal shards they could reprocess her corpse with a magnet. From the look of her, she a world of didn’t care. “No,” she said, “you can’t.”
“You’ll get us all killed,” Locke said again, more desperately this time.
“So you seem to believe.”
It was becoming very clear that even though Locke had known the captain longer than any of us, they’d underestimated her as badly as Wolfram had. As badly as I had. And perhaps it wasn’teven thoughat all. Perhaps it wasbecause. There’s very little more dangerous than somebody you used to love. “Is that all you can say?”
The captain wasn’t one for being goaded, but she seldom needed encouragement to talk. “We each of us live in little metal boxes,” she said. “And yours, Locke, yours have always been here”—she stepped forwards and touched them gently on the forehead—“and here”—she touched them over the heart. Which meant getting close enough that her own heart was pressed right against the muzzle of a gigawatt sublight flechette pistol. “You have the key to those boxes in your hands. Will you turn it?”
Locke was trembling now, visibly trembling.
“This is your chance, isn’t it? To save everybody from me? To give them theirchoicesback?”
Locke had their finger on the trigger the whole time, and the triggers of pulse guns were sensitive things. There was a better-than-zero chance that this was going to get bloody by accident.
“You’re a good officer,” the captain went on, as if she were in no danger whatsoever. “And the crew are lucky to have you to speak for them.”
The faintest tremor of tension moved through Locke’s fingers. A little tremor more was all it would take.
“But this ship,” the captain finished, looking deep into the first mate’s eyes and wearing a smile so enigmatic you could use it as an encryption key, “is mine.”
She took the pistol from Locke’s unresisting hands and laid it, with a metal-on-glass clink, on her chart table.
“Stand down, mate,” she said. “You may return to your duties.”
And silently, dejectedly, Locke did exactly that.
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-SEVENDelight
After they completely failed to shoot the captain through the heart, I… it’s not fair to say I lostinterestin Locke. The downside of fucking people you’re trapped on a ship with instead of people you meet at a transit station or in a nightclub toilet is that you have to keep seeing them, and that means you wind up giving a measurable number of shits about them, which means you’re screwed. Emotionally, as well as in the good way.
The problem was, what I really, really liked about fucking Locke was that they started out as this upright, dress-uniformed bastion of authority and conformity, and then I got to take that apart piece by piece and kiss by kiss and moan by moan. And that got a whole lot less fun now I’d seen them taken apart far more effectively and far more thoroughly by a woman who didn’t even need to take her coat off.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t exactly short of options. Or rather, everybody was short of options which meant I became an option which meant we all got more options. But I did still wind up taking far more long walks on the deck than I would have under other, less cucked circumstances.
Which meant I saw the Delight.
We were out of the anomalies now, so the light was back to being all red all the time, like we were flying our own privateinferno. Hey, wouldn’t it have been a cool literary device if I’d pretended the ship had exactly nine decks and they got worse as you went down and the bottom one was really cold?
If you’re reading this, I didn’t bother to go edit that in.
