I knelt. I begged. I wept. And not in a sex way.
“I have made no secret of my purpose,” she told me. “The machine foresaw that the most probable outcome included its destruction, and that has now come to pass.”
We’d needed to rip so many housings out of the core systems to get Fidelity running on the boat that we couldn’t now restore it from backup. A lot of its data was still retrievable, but it would never speak again.
“I’ve given two limbs now in the hunt,” she continued. Her new leg was simpler than the old one, which had been the product of weeks of careful work by ships’ doctors and engineers. I couldn’t know, but I doubted Pierce and Lobscouse had been able to connect the neurons properly in the time they’d had, which meant it probably low-key hurt like fuck. “We have lost three boats in two days. We are committed.Iam committed.”
And I could say nothing butPlease. And she could say nothing at all.
When I returned to Q she held me again and said again what she’d said in the boat. “Ne dimittas eam, et custodiet te.”
I didn’t know what it meant, but I liked the sound of it.
Overnight the Beast had vanished into a cloud bank and so we pursued once again by a mix of hard math and guesswork.
No spout came this time. No trace on the array at all. On her new, much less carefully fitted leg, the captain stalked the deck like a woman possessed, which, when you got right down to it, she basically was.
“It’s no bad thing,” Dawlish was saying as we leaned side by side on the gunwale looking out over the sky. “The boats have taken a pounding and if we don’t catch up with the Beast today we can use the time for maintenance.”
If we’d taken it yesterday, of course, he’d have been a rich man and, more importantly, a free one. But he accepted that with grace. Like most of us, it seemed he’d gotten used to having things snatched away from him and learned not to place much value in half promises.
While we and the rest of the crew enjoyed the closest a hunter-ship ever got to a respite—which is to say we had a thousand little jobs to do but none of them were likely to immediately kill anybody—the captain, who was pacing a little way off, froze and stared out to stern.
“We’ve overflown him,” she said to nobody. And then, over comms, she repeated, “All hands, we’ve overflown the Beast. He’s behind us.”
Locke’s voice, which had been sounding even more studiedly measured since they’d failed to relieve the captain of duty and/or murder her, came cautiously back. “What reason do you have for that assertion?”
“Experience,” the captain replied, “and instinct. The Beast is angry and tired of fleeing. Then again, who amongst us is not?”
“If the creature has started hunting the Pequod,” said Locke, a growing sense of urgency in their tone, “then we need to get out and we need to get outnow.”
“A spout,” the Old Ionian called out from the array. “Peaks like I’ve never seen in all my years, and hard astern.”
With a fatalistic triumph, the captain gave the order. “Lower.”
“The boats aren’t ready,” protested Locke. “Or most of them aren’t.”
But the captain was already taking the transport shaft down to the hangar bay. “That will not be a problem, Locke,” she announced over still-open comms. “I will only need the one.”
To say that lowering a single boat was irregular would be—I mean it’d be true, for a start. It would have been a bad idea even if this was a normal beast, and it definitely wasn’t. As I waited on the deck I tried to game through scenarios where the captain wasn’t, for absolute certain, flying to her cold and miserable death.
I came up blank. But it didn’t stop me chasing her to the launch bays yelling false objections all the while. That it wasn’t procedure, as if she’d ever cared. That she’d have no hope alone, as if she’d had any more hope with the crew behind her. That I and so many others loved her, as if it mattered. As if I could speak for anybody except myself.
She stopped, two paces from our last good boat. And for the last time she turned to me. “I’ll none of it,” she said. “My path was set before we met. Before you were born, perhaps. And I walk it now to whatever end it brings me.”
I looked up at her. Silent. Pleading.
And she kissed me.
I’ve rewritten this book three times. I’ve thought about that moment three thousand. And each time I look back, each time I try to describe how it was, I remember it differently.
It was fierce and firesome and devouring.
It was the first tenderness she ever gave me. And the last.
It was everything I’d been wanting from her.
It was just a kiss. Like any other.
