Fuck, I could even have really gone for the symbolism and put the captain’s cabin at the bottom of the ship, instead of where it actually was.
Because she’s like the devil. Is the implication there.
Probably too heavy-handed. Would it surprise you to know that I’ve changed my mind at least twice about what sort of book I even wanted this tobe? Look close enough and you can see the ghosts of all my worse choices.
Anyway. The Delight.
With navigation down and the array half fried by the elves so it only really stood a chance of picking up the largest possible spouts—the kind you’d get from, just to take a completely random example, a legendarily large and deadly Leviathan your captain was completely obsessed with—the only way for us to reliably detect other ships was the eyeball mark one.
So I was the first to see her.
And fuck me, she was fucking fucked.
At first I honestly took her for a derelict. Her dome, made from a reinforced and supposedly impenetrable crystalline compound that could withstand vast pressures both internally and externally, had cracked like… You know, the depressing thing here is that there’s a ton of fancy metaphors I could use but if you live anywhere outside the core worlds (and you probably do, I’ve got no delusions about this book doing well on Mercury), I know you’ve seen a failed dome. Maybe you’ve lost family to one. There’s a slim chance you’ve been in one, although unless your particular colony has way better emergency services than most you’d probably just be dead in that case.
The dome of the ship was cracked like that one dome you saw come down when you were nine years old, that the newstold you was a very rare accident you shouldn’t be worried about. Or the other one you saw come down when you were fifteen. Or the one that’s always been standing just across the surface from the main gate of your colony-city. An error that we’ll never repeat, just like all the others.
It was a transparent demi-lozenge of high-tensile, ultracompressive, shear-resistant polymer, tested past specifications and now splintered into shards that could barely support their own weight. It was like a mouth full of broken teeth, if teeth were see-through. It was like a claw scratching the sky, if the claw was just the sharp bits. It was like that time you had to watch your friend asphyxiate on the other side of an airlock.
The damage to the rest of the ship was less dramatic, but that’s just because a dull metal box wears punctures more discreetly than a bright glassy dome. There wasn’t a deck that didn’t have a gouge ripped into it, probably sealed off by internal bulkheads but still representing a whole lot of lost metal, lost space, lost sperm, and lost lives.
Red emergency lighting seeped from her windows, suggesting that she’d either run her fuel tanks low or suffered a rupture. One engine was out, and here and there I could still see dribbles of sperm falling like rain from her wounds and then atomizing to fog in the wind.
We mostly had comms back after the elves but what came through from the Delight was barely coherent.
“Hast seen the Möbius Beast?” demanded the captain, the moment we could get our systems to handshake.
“… mative,” replied the Delight. Then, “… day ago…” then, “… mage to criti… systems” and, “… ive hands lost in the… st… oided total…”
We made no further effort at contact. It would have been too difficult and, honestly, too depressing. Nobody wanted to be reminded how badly a hunt could go wrong. Still, the mood on the ship was grave after that meeting. I went to Q for comfort and found her standing beside her coffin, staring down at it contemplatively.
“We will need this,” she said.
Q usually spoke her own language, and only resorted to Exodite to humor me, or if she thought it was really, really important that I understand her. It worried the hell out of me that this was option two.
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-EIGHTThe First Day
Though the captain later denied it, it was Marsh who raised the signal.
His followers took that as a sign. I took it as a basic question of probability. He’d been standing at the array for three straight days and nights, eating and drinking only what his cultists took up to him and, as far as I could tell, shitting down the back of his dick-skin robe.
Apparently it doesn’t do great things for your personal hygiene to believe that the universe is an inevitably corroding pit of entropy and your only possible joy is in watching the suffering of others. Who’d have thought?
In the captain’s defense, the specific cry Marsh raised was a little ambiguous. Rather than the usual call of “spout” or “hit” or a string of useful coordinates he called over comms: “For flesh and blood, sir, white and red, you shall see a rose.”
The chunk of the crew who had gone over to his side nodded along to every word like it was the wisdom of the ages. The rest of us went on deck to see what the fuck he was on about.
And holy shit, did we see it.
Your average Leviathan, through whatever peculiar psychokinetic phenomenon keeps it upright, will occasionally emit electromagnetic pulses that register on the ship’s scanners. That’s ultimately what the array isfor, that and the moreregular reflective sweeping and chaff deconflation. The very largest beasts sometimes emitted visible light, reds and yellows, sometimes greens for the oldest and the largest. The color of those emissions was—and this is backed up by my experience, the sky-lore of the Old Ionian, and the few scholarly treatises on the subject that the intelligentsia have deigned to write—as dependent on the chemical composition and ambient excitation of the atmosphere as it was on any quality innate to the monster, so you couldn’t necessarily identify a beast perfectly from its spout.
But that didn’t seem to matter much this time.
The sky was burning.
A white fire plumed along the whole visible horizon. Thicker, just slightly, near its heart, where the creature generating it would be, and tapering away to a wick-like thinness at the edge of vision.
