Locke barely looks up. “Belay that,” they command. “The ship is lost. Those who can to the life pods.”
Metal screams and the talons grasp closer. They rend longer, deeper tears into the walls.
Locke sets the picture slab on their desk face-down, then steps away and, at last, turns to face the void. They know that they’re already dead. That in a few months Olympus Extraction State will update its ledgers to classify them as a depleted asset.
They do not flinch. They do not blink.
The atmosphere of Jupiter rushes in.
The two Vestals, fleeing from Truelove’s grisly dismemberment, are pinned to the ground when the monster crushes the eighth and ninth decks together like tinfoil. Dawlish, himself fleeing, stops to help free them.
Cybernetically augmented, he’s able to pry loose some of the twisted metal that’s half crushing, half skewering one of them, and he hoists them both across his shoulders just in time for the Möbius Beast, at last, to reach the try-works, the spermaceti stores, and the engine room.
Raw spermaceti is volatile, and between the severed power cables, the chemical fires, and the electromagnetopsionic presence of the Beast itself, there are a hundred ways it could have been set off.
I will never know which one it was.
The ship explodes.
EPILOGUE
So I survived. Obviously. Like, I wouldn’t be telling you this if I didn’t survive.
Most days I’m okay with that. The days I’m not… actually, those are the days I get the most writing done.
You probably want to know how I made it out, but honestly—and I hope you don’t just think I’m blowing smoke up your ass—I kind of assume you’ve figured it out already.
It was the coffin.
I know, I know. It’s so fucking symbolic. Ooh, do you see, it’s a coffin, which is, like, adeaththing, but it actuallysavedher life. Ooh, she must think she’s so fucking clever.
If it helps, it is in fact true. Or at least it’s mostly true. I might have embellished some of the details, but the heart of it is real. The heart of it is what matters. The heart of it is that I was on a ship that went down, and I made it out even though I didn’t deserve to, and now I’m here and I’ve told you what it was like, and you can do what you want with it.
I hope it was worth it for you. I hope it was worth it for me.
Sometimes, it feels like sincerity isn’t something we value anymore. And I’ll admit that in at least two of my previous rewrites I started this epilogue withWell, that just happened.Because it’s safer, in so many ways. To treat it all like a joke. Or like an adventure story. Or like an abstract exercise in philosophy.
It wasn’t. The Old Ionian had sailed twenty voyages. He willnever sail another. And if his children or his grandchildren could afford to place a memorial for him in a hunters’ chapel I wouldn’t recognize it because I’ve forgotten his name.
Sorry, this is getting self-indulgent. You probably want some details.
The thing is, I should have died on the Pequod. I would have died. And not just when the fucking thing blew up. I should have died a hundred times falling between decks, getting mangled by machines, crashing boats, and getting scythed in half by Leviathans.
But Q saved me.
She saved me every time. In a way she carries on saving me every day.
I don’t know why she did. She might have just really enjoyed the sex.
Looking back, though, I’m sure she knew the voyage was fucked from the start.
I think the coffin thing was legit. Like I think she actually believed she was dying and wanted to at least give me something to do and maybe to make sure that she had a hope of a decent burial, or its sky-bound equivalent. But once she realized she’d recover I think she saw an opportunity. Life pods on a hunter-barque are unreliable; they’re usually poorly maintained; we don’t normally drill for them because nobody wants to encourage the crew to abandon the ship; and frankly, given how A went towards the end, I suspect Q didn’t trust that she wouldn’t jettison them.
When she took my hand and pulled me back to myself she led me straight to the coffin. I’d thought it was some kind of fucked-up sex-and-death thing at first, but she eventually managed to explain to me that no, it had life support, it had foils, and it had a beacon, and we were only a few days away from where we’d met the Rachel, which we already knew was in the area looking for survivors.
Still, those hours clinging to her in the dark, sealed away from the horror outside and wondering every moment if allwe’d done was trade a fast death for a slow one, were some of the worst of my life.
Or they would have been, if she hadn’t been with me.
