The boat splintered. Holographic ghosts danced a moment in its ruin, and the captain fell.
Having taken our boat downwards rather than upwards, we were best suited to intercept. Even before Locke gave the order I was matching her coordinates and trajectory, hoping in the face of a sudden, half-anticipated despair that she’d stay conscious enough to activate her patagia.
She did. I saw the membranes billow between her legs and arms and the part of me that, despite the desperation of it all, was still more suited to the classroom than the cockpit thought she looked like a falling angel. I downed canopy as early as I dared, pulled the boat into a tight helix, and by a half miracle of trajectory, caught her.
She landed in our boat with the adjusted heaviness of somebody passing from raw Jovian to boat-compensated gravity, her spear still gripped firmly in her right hand. At the back of the cabin, Locke waited with bated breath, half expecting, as I and the rest of the crew were no doubt expecting, that she would command us to keep up pursuit.
But the captain, we should have remembered, was ice and fire in equal measure. And whatever passion drove her on, the chill, calculating mind of a serial slayer of monsters held her back.
“First mate’s boat to Pequod,” the captain barked into comms, “intercept at our location. We will slay the Beast yet, but there are preparations we must make.”
Somewhere, through clouds so thick and violent that no eye could pierce them, the sun was rushing below the horizon.
Days on Jupiter are short and easily wasted.
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-NINEThe Second Day
I spent most of that night supporting the chief engineer in overhauling Locke’s boat. After a mercifully short argument, the captain had insisted that it be retrofitted to properly house Fidelity, the machine intelligence that she had come to rely upon to guide her in her quest for the monster.
This, it turned out, was a massive pain in the ass. Machine intelligences are in their own way as voracious as the Leviathan, although what they hunger for is energy and processing power. And since the captain’s boat had been reduced to absolute flinders we couldn’t salvage any of its memory stacks, data veneers, or neural shards. The shipdidhave backups of all these things, but in theory they were meant to be reserved for repairs to the main computer, not jammed into a boat so that its autopilot could be upgraded with a more reassuring voice.
When the retrofitting was done, I went to the captain. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find, but when she admitted me to her cabin I found her shirtless and rubbing liniment into her arms. I’d never seen her do anything like it before—it felt strangely humanizing.
Slightly less humanizing was the way she held the bottle out to me and, barely looking at me, said, “Back and shoulders, can’t reach myself,” in that half-order way I was so used to.
It was the first time I’d felt her skin this way, somethingexposed and needing to be touched instead of something I clawed at furtively or desperately while she either fucked or ignored me or, quite often, both at once. Her muscles were taut and so knotted they could have been a message in code. And she was thin. Danger-thin. When-was-the-last-time-you-remembered-to-eat thin.
“Is this…” I began, then fell silent.
Masseuse is one of the few jobs I’ve managed to avoid in my eclectic, eventful, and ill-planned career, but I did my best. I worked the oil firmly into her shoulders and tried to avoid putting any direct pressure on her spine because even I knew that much, and giving the captain a slipped disc on the very night we caught up with the Möbius Beast would have been…
Well, I suppose in a funny way it would have saved us all.
But I was careful. Or as careful as the captain would let me be given that she was, y’know, driven by an obsession that slipped into monomania and from there into a drive so harsh and pure that it could break planets.
“Harder,” she told me, which was usually my line. Although she followed up with, “Do you think me some porcelain figure in a Stilbon pleasure garden?” which was much more her own idiom.
I tried to obey, because I always tried to obey. But that obeying gave me the courage to finally finish my sentence. “Is this worth it?”
“It does the job, as best it can be done.” She was intentionally misunderstanding me, and we both knew it.
But I screwed my courage to the sticking place and clarified. “Is the hunt worth it?”
“You signed aboard, knowing it may kill you, knowing all you’d gain from it was small pay and a few years’ dodging the flesh-bailiffs. Wasthatworth it?”
My heart betrayed me and made my lips say “yes” before I could come up with a better answer.
“Well then.”
“You have more to lose than me,” I replied. And I’d felt it before I thought it.
It was the truest and the clearest and the saddest I’d ever heard the captain laugh. “What a life you must think I have.”
It was still a season for doubling down. “I mean it.”
“I have but one thing to lose,” she replied, holding up a single finger in frankly unnecessary illustration. “Which is the only thing I have and the only thing I am.”
