“There,” announced the captain. “Starboard and down and declining. To the boats! As one, to the boats.”
The crew were about to jump to it when Truelove, whose role in Marsh’s little group I’d never quite pinned down, spoke out with a kind of thin determination that made my skin crawl. “The key first, if you please.”
I half expected the captain to completely blank him, but he had enough people behind him that she had to answer. Although admittedly her answer was “What?”
“Open the lock. Mr. Marsh raised the Beast and won your bet. Release the funds and transfer them to the Church, if you please.”
I’d have said that this was a strange time to talk about money, but I was raised in the Church of Prosperity. There was never a strange time to talk about money, and taking advantage of somebody’s desperation to get them to pay you—sorry, I mean seeing that somebody was in trouble and offering them the opportunity to help themselves through a wise investment—was a worthy and pious action.
“I shall not,” the captain replied. “Your man raised a signal,but it was I that saw the fire first. I that knew it for the Beast that we hunt. I that the fates favored and so it is I who shall have the prize.”
For so long now, the crew had been under a spell of sorts, but if there was anything that might have snapped us out of it, it was this kind of appeal to the bottom line. Nobody likes to feel cheated.
In a lot of ways, I felt more cheated than anybody. I couldn’t quite imagine the captain actually caring about money, of all things, when she was so close to what she’d wanted. The part of me that was still stuck in the seminary said that it was the invisible hand of the Father reaching down at the last moment, trying to bring us back to our senses. Back to the true path. Back to Prosperity.
“Captain.” Truelove’s tone was hard, cold, and appropriately businesslike. “The Church has followed you because we believed you a pious woman. Will you take from us now? Will you show yourself as false and faithless as Wolfram was, or as Elymas of old?”
The fire on the horizon was fast fading, and this, more than anything, made the captain speak quickly. “I never claimed to be your Constantine, nor even your Cyrus,” she said, “and so help me, if you cross me in this moment I shall play Nero to you all. To the boats. Now.”
The storm outside the ship did not, in fact, stop raging for a moment, quelled by the sheer force of the captain’s presence. But it sure as fuck felt like it did. We were close, I think, to turning aside. To the chase breaking down at the first sign of disagreement.
Except then Marsh himself descended from the masthead and, without further comment, obeyed the captain’s order to take to the boats.
Why he chose to contradict his mate, I couldn’t say. Perhaps he didn’t realize he was. Perhaps it was simply that for him it really had never been about the money, when for Truelove it had always been.
That was the problem with pinning your hopes on true believers.
When their prophet broke cover, the cult went with him, and that ended the last resistance to the captain’s orders. Not that the orders, in this case, were unreasonable. We were on a hunt. We had seen a spout. We were lowering after it.
Nothing could be more normal.
Except, of course, it wasn’t normal at all.
We were back in our regular boats, the captain apparently no longer needing me, probably because she no longer needed distraction. I flew straight and true to the point where we’d last seen the spout, adjusting course periodically when it let off another pulse.
In an ordinary lowering, the boats stayed in a strict formation, at least during the first stage of the chase. The skies of Jupiter are deceptively vast and it only takes a slight deviation from a planned trajectory to put a mile or more between you and your companions. And that’s when boats get lost or picked off piecemeal by angry monsters.
This time, though, we had the captain’s wild, impetuous hunger to reckon with. She flew at the head of the group, as fast as her engines would take her, and fast enough that there was honestly a good chance that her engines wouldn’t take herbackif the flight didn’t go exactly to plan. Consumed with the hunt, she didn’t bother relaying orders to the rest of us, so we had to do our best to strike a balance between having her back and observing basic protocols. A balance that, in Locke’s boat, under Locke’s command and therefore with Locke’s priorities, still leaned heavily into protocols.
I wondered, idly, if they were hoping the captain would get herself killed at last, freeing the ship to return home with her bounty and, perhaps more importantly, freeing Locke to return home to their family.
That was probably unworthy of me. Locke was many things, but they weren’t underhanded.
For a long time, we chased the Beast through dense redclouds, navigating by instruments and instinct, hoping to hell that its next pulse wouldn’t knock out our scanners and leave us scattered on the wind. But then the clouds broke, and we saw a mass not three klicks ahead of us. Something vast and living and writhing and a hundred shades of black and white and gray.
“There!” The captain’s voice over comms was triumphant.
But it was met by a response from Dawlish. “No,” he said. And then he added, “Wyrms.”
And Wyrms they were. An impossible cloud of them, riding the wake of something still hidden from us. Riding it or perhaps fleeing from it, because they burst towards us as if panicked, as if frenzied, as if they’d seen the face of the Father.
“Dive,” commanded Locke behind me. “Fuck formation, evade at all costs.”
I dove. Other boats climbed, or rolled, or yawed to get away from the swarm because if we hit it at this speed, the absolute best-case scenario was that it would fuck our jets six ways to Sunday. The worst-case scenario was that a series of impacts would hairline the canopy and then we’d be rolling the dice on death by implosion.
The one lucky thing about running into a swarm of horrified sky-Wyrms was that they didn’t seem to be hunting, which meant that when we ducked below them, few if any dove to pursue us. Instead, they hurtled overhead like spray from a malfunctioning fire suppression system.
Pulling us level and resuming our original bearing as best I could, I found myself overwhelmed by the majesty of it. And okay, by now you’re probably pretty sick of me being overwhelmed by the majesty of things but this is my memoir, not yours. And that moment of leveling out the boat while overhead millions upon millions of voracious, terrified carnivores teemed past in a monochrome shoal—red clouds seeping between black-and-white bodies like blood on ash and snow—has stuck with me all the years since, and I’m putting it down now in electronic ink so that when I die it might not die with me.
