“I tell you this.” Her voice was low now, which only made us strain to hear all the more. “I plan to make a bloody voyage. We will hunt, and we will harvest, but we do not seek only the precious spermaceti. We do not seek only the good of Olympus Extraction State.”
Locke’s jaw tensed here, as well it might have. But everybody else had stopped their muttering. They were listening now, rapt.
“We seek the Möbius Beast. The greatest of Leviathans. We seek it not for wealth, not for glory, not even for revenge—because let me be clear, it was that very beast that took my leg and my shipmates’ lives—no, we seek it so that we might say that we have touched the void itself. That we have faced the monsters that dwell at the heart of the stars andhowledour defiance.”
In spite of myself, I cheered. In spite of ourselves, a great many of us cheered. Not all of us by a long way, but enough.
“So that we might tell this devouring world that welive.”
We cheered again. And this time there were fewer holdouts.
“That we fearnothing.”
And again. Even the First and Second Europans joined us. Even the Pretty Vestal.
“That the skyitselfwill remember our names.”
With the mob now fully on her side, she strode down amongst us and to the foot of the array. A series of touchscreens were embedded in the masts, each displaying distant sensor contacts, and the captain activated one of them. A swirling golden trail of data appeared in the center and when the captain pressed her fingertip against the screen, it locked into a solid disc with numbers forever interweaving inside it.
I’d seen this kind of crypto-lock before. We used them on messenger-ships all the time for data payloads and large currency transfers. They were indelible once set up.
“This,” the captain said, “represents the whole of my lay from this voyage, whatever that may prove to be when all’s done. One twentieth part of every drop we wring out of the storm clouds. And I’ll pay it to whichever of you first brings me sight of the Möbius Beast.”
Blood and thunder were well enough on their own, but now that she’d made it clear there was money on the line, the captainreallyhad the crew’s attention.
“The Beast,” the captain went on, “is bone-white half its length, pitted all over with harpoon scars and other, stranger wounds. And it’s long, longer than any of its species, almost of a length with the great Behemoths that swim the hydrogen sea. See it, call it out, and I swear to you that all of this”—she pointed for emphasis at the golden disc—“will be yours.”
The crew exploded in a riot of celebration, drunk on the twin promises of glory and wealth. And also probably on alcohol—voiders are a drinking lot. And although I so often find myself apart from the crowd, this time I was drunk right along with them. There and then we all belonged, heart and soul, to the captain. Me as much as any.
More than any, really. Even then, even in that first moment, I loved her.
I sayeven in that moment. And time was, that’s what I believed. That it was a first-sight thing. But looking back, all these years later, I know now that I loved her before I saw her. That I had loved her all my life.
Because I know now that she was death.
CHAPTER
FOURTEENFangirl
Right about now, you might be wondering what the hell kind of book you’ve picked up. And I’ll be honest with you, I’m not always sure myself. Is it an adventure? A memoir? Why the fuck should you care about which bits of the Leviathan have what uses, or how we squeeze spermaceti from a corpse, or what the whir of the autocutters sounds like, or what it takes to hold a skyboat steady when you’re lined to a beast that’s diving into the hydrogen sea?
I don’t think I’ve got a good answer for you. It’s a big system out there. A massive, all-encompassing, incomprehensible system. And really you shouldn’t care any more about the Leviathan fleet than I care about deep-crust hydroponics or comet mining or any of the other millions of invisible industries that make the supply chains work. Try to think about it all at once and your mind will probably give out under the strain. Better to just shut up, look down, and assume that somebody—the Father maybe, or the trade-states—has a plan.
But while I might not have agoodanswer, I’ve got a bunch ofbadanswers. I think I mentioned that I used to be a schoolmistress and so I got really good at giving plausible-sounding responses to whatever questions were thrown at me.
So let’s start with sophistry.
I assume you’re used to war stories? You don’t thinkthosearea waste of good data (or good ink, if you’re reading averyluxurious version of this text on one of the core worlds). Perhaps, like me, you grew up on the tales of Captain Treyarch and her brave companions. Perhaps you thrilled to see the brave soldiers of the Sixty-Ninth Company battle the bloodthirsty seditionists of the campus wars, or the ungrateful insurgents of the union rebellions.
Well, those heroes, like my heroes, were salarymen like any other. Treyarch and her team had the advantage of being fictional and therefore less prone to undramatic errors or inconvenient silences than my living companions. But the industry in which they worked was real enough (as is their employer, Limtoc Kinetic Solutions being a wholly owned subsidiary of Phobos Mil State).
You might respond, I suppose, that there can’t be any real comparison between the work of a soldier and the work of a sky-hunter. Soldiers fight to keep you safe from the dangers of an uncaring universe, while we sky-hunters fight glorified fish so we can chop them up into pieces. Our work, you might say, is more like mining or butchery than true honorable combat.
If you would say that, then you have never seen a Leviathan fought. I can’t fault you for that; we haven’t actuallygottento those bits yet. We will, don’t worry, but before we do I want to make sure you have a true appreciation for the people who fight them.
I suppose you might say instead that it isn’t the drama of the battle that makes the difference, but rather the importance of the cause. The campus wars, for example, were vital to the safety of the entire system. And on one level I can’t disagree. Even now my heart skips a beat when I rereadDuty of Shadowsand come to the scene where Lieutenant Ward, armed only with an anti-personnel flechette cannon, must hold his position against a baying mob of students chanting dangerous slogans.
But what of the belt wars? What of the scene inDuty of Firewhere Corporal Raven assaults the Trojan asteroid mines? Not only is that scene drawn from real history (the attack on mine617 Patroclus is well known amongst military historians as the first use of the Mk III Vivisection Warsuit, optimized for use against lightly armed or unarmed adversaries), it also has at its heart the need to secure ore transports to the core worlds. Of course, the records from that time make it clear that the Union of Asteroid Workers werealsoideologically opposed to the very concept of freedom, but we cannot forget that the method they chose tousein their vicious if blessedly short-lived rebellion was the severing of supply chains.
