DAWLISH: Ballast. The mate’s right, we need to shed ballast. If we can just cut some weight—
I awake in the night screaming. This was a dream. Just a dream from long ago and far away. Or here and now. In the long and empty sky they’re the same thing.
[THE SHIP SHAKES AS THE BEAST COLLIDES WITH HER]
TALL GANYMEDIAN VOIDER: I have money, beast, if you will but take it.
[THE DOME CRACKS]
A hand takes mine. Through tear-stung eyes I see glowing marks on a face I half remember.
“Sequere me.”
Q’s hand tightens in my grip and leads me through the ship as outside the Möbius Beast winds its limbs about her like a violating god.
On the deck, the Tall Ganymedian voider watches with grim fascination as the dome splinters. The Jovian atmosphere floods in raw and freezing and deoxygenated. He tries to hold his breath, but how long does he think he can hold it for?
A third of the crew retreats inside the ship, an atavistic rodent instinct telling us that deep and dark and quiet is the same as safe. It half works.
Scattered pockets of Marsh’s cultists walk the halls, their day of reckoning come at last. There are fewer of them than I might have thought. Praying for destruction and living it are such different things.
“Your tears are delicious,” intones Truelove, leading a small band of the still faithful as he watches two Vestal voiders huddling behind a bulkhead. “Cry mo—”
He says nothing else. The long, questing limbs of the Möbius Beast have found him. Its least deadly tendrils are still tipped with a chitin that will carve iron and crack stone. The first pierces his back, just below the right kidney. The organ would sell well in the markets of Cthonius Linea, but its value is spoiled now. A second tendril takes him about the waist and a third, the finest and most delicate, designed for filtering microorganisms from air currents but tipped, as a result, with a thousand thousand tiny barbs, rips off his face.
The First Europan, his companion already long dead, runs down a corridor hoping that the escape pods are functioning. In truth I remember little about him—not his name, not his face, not the tone of his voice. He kicked me in the head once, of course, as did his friend. But it’s hard to resent it now.
He’s had the sense to wear a voidsuit, which means when he overrides the bulkhead to the emergency bay, he isn’t instantly blown into the void through the yawning gap in the hull.
But the Beast’s tendrils take him nonetheless.
“Ammo,” mutters Flint to himself as he digs through the now wide-open weapons locker. “I need more ammo. No point saving for tomorrow, we break out the big guns now or we—”
With a scream, the whole wall gives way as the Möbius Beast rips its way through the ship. A pulse rifle in each hand, Flint howls for as long as his lungs have anything in them and spits hypersonic rounds at his enemy.
It’s the right weapon and the right target. The flechettes do nothing to the ship but cut and sear into the Beast’s flesh, making it withdraw for a moment.
If it hadn’t already opened a gaping hole into the sky, he might even have made a difference.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” says Marsh, kneeling before the messenger of his consuming god. He is close to the hull, listening to every creak and crash and thump as the Möbius Beast dismantles the ship.
“And our little life is—” Butchering, scything claws plated with razor-ivory puncture the walls. The force behind them is so immense that they don’t slow down as they enter Marsh’s chest (each rib individually saleable to the right market, each lung more so) and pierce it through and through.
He hangs, suspended on a claw that gleams white and red and strangely beautiful, if you like that sort of thing. But although his end is fast there’s no peace in his eyes. Death, it turns out, is far less like sleep than prophets and poets would have us believe.
In engineering, Lobscouse’s finger tendrils withdraw from the guts of the exhaust accelerators. His readings are telling him it’s too late. Over comms, a voice is calling on the ship to evacuate, but there will not be time.
Data readouts tell the story already. The monster has breached the hull, and the engine core is already losing integrity. Somewhere, there is a tear in the coolant line and the drones have gone haywire.
He opens a hatch and goes to search for the fault. It will not buy the ship much, but it may buy it something.
The temperature is already rising. His thermoceptors tell him that he risks heatstroke and worse if he continues. It doesn’t matter anymore.
His skin begins to blister, and he takes a perverse comfort in knowing the heat will kill him before the Beast does.
“Void the cargo bays,” Locke screams into comms, “a fortune in sperm brings us nothing if we die for it. If we can’t outrun the Beast perhaps we can outlast it.”
Their office is deep inside the ship, but the Beast’s claws are long and merciless. They punch through the walls like biological harpoons.
