“None of your business,” I told him.
“We’ve been through this,” said the Second Europan. “Shit on this ship has got weird, you’re the only one the captain even talks to—”
“If she talks to her,” the First Europan chimed in. “Not sure I’d think she was worth listening to, if I were the captain.”
I gave the First Europan a look that I hoped was withering. “Are you trying to use reverse psychology?”
“No, I just sincerely doubt she listens to you.”
I wasn’t quite sure what the safest way to play this was. Unusually, I went with honesty. “Good. Because she doesn’t.”
“Make her,” the Tall Ganymedian insisted. “Because right now the whole crew is getting twitchy and you really don’t want a twitchy crew deciding you’re the problem.”
I wasn’t normally good at defiance, but Ganymedians barely counted. “And why might they decide that?”
The Tall Ganymedian shrugged with an innocence so obviously fake I almost respected it. “What can I say? Crews get funny ideas.”
With that parting shot still lodged in my head like a barbed dart, I was more than usually on edge when I arrived at the captain’s cabin.
So on edge that she noticed.
“Where are you?” she asked when she caught my mind wandering.
“Here,” I lied. I’m a terrible liar, but old habits are hard to break.
“I say you are not. I say your thoughts are elsewhere, and though I know well the call of the wild skies, I find I mislike the insult.”
In a strange way, I was pleased. She so often spoke through me or past me instead of to me. And I would have taken her displeasure a thousand times over her indifference. So I told her what had happened. “Some of the crew,” I explained. “They wanted me to speak to you about the data-stacks.”
She looked at me like I was a voice from another world. Like I was shouting to her through deep water. “The data-stacks?”
“They’re corrupted,” I explained. “At least, the entertainment storage is. Footage of Leviathans is getting spliced into everything. Or at least everything worth watching.”
“Worth watching?” asked the captain, as close to bewildered as I’d ever heard her.
“Porn, mostly,” I clarified.
The captain was staring at me like I was the most tedioussort of mystery. “This ship,” she said, “that even now pursues a beast whose name the boldest dare not speak. That I have bent my will to guide upon its fated course. That none save I may…” She stopped. Blinked. “The crew are up in arms for want ofpornography?”
I tried to look matter-of-fact about the issue. “Entertainment in general, but… yeah. It’s sometimes months between gams, and with the stacks down there’s nothing todoexcept craft projects and sex.”
This was the closest I’d ever really come to a proper conversation with the captain. To her listening to something I said instead of extemporizing a soliloquy off the back of it.
It didn’t last.
“To have come so far,” she said to the empty air as she rose from bed fully clothed and stalked to the imaging desk, “to be hindered now by so small a thing. Report.”
This last command was neither directed at me nor at the cosmological sounding board she so often made the universe into. It was a direct instruction to her thinking machine.
“Sorry,” it said at once, “that was me, actually.”
“Explain.”
“You asked me to analyze the Beast’s weaknesses. That meant scraping all existing data regarding Leviathan physiology and constructing simulations. I had to do that somewhere.”
“Speculate. Will—”
“I’m not meant to speculate.”
