Beside me, Q sighed. “Mobiles ad superstitionem perculsae semel mentes.”
“Perhaps,” said the First Europan, “but there’ssomethingabout this ship that’s not right. We’ve all seen the shadows in the captain’s boat.”
“Holograms,” I insisted. “Not ghosts.”
It took me all of two and a half seconds to regret speaking. The whole mess turned to me and the Second Europan said, quite casually, “Well, I guess you’d know.”
While I was still gathering my thoughts, Q leaned forward. “What do you say?”
“Oh, come on”—this was the First Europan again. I remember that he had an elaborate tattoo over one eye andcybernetics replacing his little finger—“it’s not like it’s a secret she’s fucking the captain.”
We’d firmly established by now that Q could care less who I slept with but she had a protective streak that I really didn’t want anybody to trigger. So, uncharacteristically, I stood up for myself. “What I’m doing and who with is my business.”
“True enough,” agreed the First Europan. Except it was a fake agreement. An agreement that was clearly a trap. “But what thecaptain’sdoing and who with. That’s a whole ’nother thing. That’sallour business.”
A knife was always a useful tool on a ship, which unfortunately meant most of us were armed most of the time. So when I saw Q’s hand inching towards the edge of the table, I covered it gently with mine in the hope we could avoid things kicking off.
“Audi, vide, tace,” she said to the First Europan, “si tu vis vivere in pace.”
The First Europan’s eyes narrowed. “Watch it, Earther.”
“It’s fine,” I told the room. “I’m sure the officers are on it.”
“Like fuck they are,” said the Tall Ganymedian. “What you really mean is that you’re the captain’s pet deckhand and you don’t want to admit how little of a shit she gives.”
“Or what strange and fell things she be up to,” added the Old Ionian.
“She hasn’t done anything strange and fell,” I replied, not really wanting to explain why I was so confident on this point. Especially because a thinking engine was actually considered pretty strange and fell by a lot of people.
“Perhaps not,” conceded the Bright-Eyed Titanian, “but she’s got the whole ship roped in to hunt a monster that doesn’t exist, and half the crew are already fool enough to cheer her for it. That might not be witchcraft but it’s fuckery of some sort.”
“And since you’re fucking the fucker who’s fucking us with her fuckery,” added the Second Europan, “this is on you.”
I didn’t think that followed. But I also didn’t think they were any of them in a mood to take no for an answer. It’s terriblewhat interrupting somebody’s masturbation schedule will do. “Fine,” I said. “If it’ll get you off my back, I’ll… I don’t know, I’ll mention it next time she asks to see me or something.”
It was a foolish thing to offer. My relationship with the captain was the opposite of the kind where I got to make requests. But it pacified the crowd, for a while at least. That was all I’d really been planning on.
I mean. I sayplanning. You might have already worked out that planning isn’t really my bag. Which is probably why this whole thing went as badly as it did.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIXChasing Ghosts
As it happened, I didn’t get the opportunity for a while. Because the captain was fickle, and before too long she’d moved on to a new obsession.
It was Marsh who saw it first. A shimmering in the readouts that didn’t quite look like a Leviathan but couldn’t possibly have been anything else. It was far enough out that it wasn’t worth dropping boats immediately but the captain gave orders to adjust course towards it, and from the observation platform on the prow we could see electromagnetic flares that weren’t elveses or sprites but didn’t look quite like a Leviathan-sounding either. It was a pale flare, almost ghostly, but we definitelysaw it. I saw it myself.
But while we followed the trace for some hours, it slipped off the readouts as mysteriously as it had appeared and, when the captain ordered that we drop boats anyway and search for it, we found nothing within a hundred klicks.
In the end, we started calling it the ghost-trace.
We chased that shadow for a week at least, and after our first unsuccessful launch the captain began standing at the prow herself, staring out into the storm and moving from her vigil only when we took, as we did once or twice a day, to the boats again. And then she would lead the hunt, canopy down, theholographic specters of the thought machine casting her in eerie blue light so she looked pretty damned otherworldly herself.
It didn’t do a lot of good for the rumors that the ship was haunted.
“We’re off our course,” Locke tried to tell her, three days into the chase. “Pursuing what’s almost certainly an atmospheric anomaly, wasting food, fuel, and time.”
For a long while, the captain acted like she hadn’t heard anything. And when it at last became clear that Locke wasn’t going to take no answer for an answer, she said, “Noted.”
