When she had bored herself with making me scream and weep and call her a goddess, she kissed me again, hot and dark and claiming, and asked, “What happened then?”
I was too fuck-drunk to quite remember what she meant.
“On the ship,” she explained. “With Ironhands and the others?”
So I told her the rest of the story.
“The captain wouldn’t dare flog Ironhands,” I told her. “But Rannick wasn’t so squeamish. Ironhands was lashed unconscious and, when the ship’s doctor cleared him—which they always do because it’s more than their job’s worth not to—he went back to work without complaint.”
“That seems a small ending.”
“It’s no ending at all. He went back to work without complaint but inside he burned for vengeance.” I found tears coming to my eyes again, and these weren’t sex tears, they were tears for a world swallowed up by a still larger world, in a great ocean of hydrogen in the depths of the sky. “Doing routine maintenance work far below decks, he strung together bits of spare cabling into a garrote. A thin, strong garrote that would cut as much as it choked and send a man to a miserable death.”
“He was going to kill Rannick?”
I nodded.
“How did he think he’d get away with it?”
“I don’t think he meant to. In the days of Old Earth”—the tears stung more sharply now, because all thoughts of Old Earth reminded me of still deeper losses—“it would have been a simple enough matter to pitch a corpse over the side.”
Once again she looked uncomprehending, and so was I, really. Born and raised in the stars, we had no way to understand a world where things wereopen. Where the lack of a wall or a window or an airlock didn’t mean inevitable death.
“Rannick would walk the decks in his off shifts, when a third of the crew was sleeping and the rest were way up on the array or deep in the inner workings of the ship. And one day, long enough after the mutiny and the flogging that a foolish man would think the whole thing had been forgotten, Ironhands crept up upon Rannick, garrote in hand. He was inches from revenge, but it seems that fate or the Father had other plans. Because just as he was about to strike, a cry came over comms. A spout.”
She was resting her head on my shoulder, and I wondered if she’d fall asleep before the tale was done. To my surprise, I found myself hoping she wouldn’t. For all I resented the role of storyteller, I thought I owed Ironhands an audience.
“The whole ship came alive and ran to the boats, because the signal had been a strong one, and promised the kind of prey that would make the entire crew rich. And by a twist of chance, Ironhands and Rannick were tasked to the same boat, so for the next few fateful minutes they were bound together by the hunt.”
“Mm-hmm?” said Pandora sleepily.
“It wasn’t long before they had visuals on the target. And what they saw was a creature more wonderful and terrible than any other in the Jovian storms. As long itself as the ship they’d left, its carapace milk-white and scarred from a thousand battles. Its hundred eyes gleaming with living malice and its limbs ever seeking and its mandibles ever hungering. It was the Möbius Beast that they had found.”
The name meant nothing to Pandora, who made an indistinctwhatnoise and shut her eyes. It meant a deal more to me, as you will learn in time.
“The whole hunter-fleet knows the Beast,” I told her, only a little impatient, “and the whole hunter-fleet would understand why Rannick, a proud man and a foolish man and a man who would never believe a warning, set his sights on being the one to slay it.”
She sighed and drew closer to me.
“He took up the bolt-driver and the chitin-saw—which are the tools used to strike the final blow to the Leviathan, once the harpoons have run it to exhaustion—and ordered Ironhands to steer him as close as he could to the beast’s head. He ordered darts launched and canopy down and harpoons secured and the boat brought in as close as could be to the nape of the monster’s neck and then, latching himself to the harpoon-line, he leapt from the cabin.”
Beside me, Pandora stirred. “He jumped onto a Leviathan?”
“It’s common. You need to get the kill somehow and the beasts are gargantuan. With any other animal it would have worked. But the Möbius Beast isnotany other animal. As Rannick was skimming the distance between them, fire-eyed and wind-whipped, it rolled as if to give him its throat. But where its throat is its limbs are too, and a great sweeping feeder arm whipped down and snagged the line and the hunter both.”
Once more, she gasped. But now I was grateful for it.
“When the quarry catches the line like that, the pilot has two choices, loose it or try to ride it out. Loosing it is safer for the boat but means giving up a kill and maybe a crewmate. And Ironhands took the safer choice, as he was well within his rights to do. And so Rannick spun off into the Jovian skies, minuscule against the monster and the planet and the whole impossible vastness of everything.”
She looked at me uncomprehending. And how could I expect her to understand? She’d never felt small in her life.
“And then the Möbius Beast’s jaws scythed closed and thevoiders in the boat saw Rannick obliterated, his suit ruptured, his body crushed by the monster and the gravity, his blood aerosolizing onto the winds in streams of crimson mist. And so Ironhands had his revenge, and all without raising a hand at the man who’d wronged him.”
I felt Pandora’s fingertips walking across my stomach and her breath warm against my shoulder. “Isanyof that true?”
“Of course it is,” I told her. “Many years afterwards, I met Ironhands himself in a bar on Halimede. He confirmed everything. Or everything that matters.”
She lay down and whispered charming platitudes about how strange and wonderful a life I’d led, and at last fell asleep. It never occurred to her to ask why, if I’d met Ironhands as I claimed, I hadn’t been able to tell her, at the start of the story, whether his name was justified or not.
