“Do it anyway. Will this disruption to the crew’s recreation endanger the hunt?”
The machine intelligence thought about it and, while it was thinking, I imagined I could hear whirrings and strainings from deep inside the ship. From the bank upon bank of data-stacks that over their distributed network made up the vessel’s computing power. And then, after a few moments, the thought engine, the intelligent machine, the entity that all doctrine told us was wiser and more terrible in its thoughts than any mere human could be, replied, “Could go either way.”
“Bring up the images.”
The air above the imaging desk shivered, and the same pictures that had been haunting the crew’s spank banks for the past several weeks coalesced into view. Except they were different now, more refined, closer to reality—or at least close enough to be usable. And at the captain’s command they went from mere pictures to diagrams, plans, schematics. On the imaging layer above the desk, the thought machine plotted out attack vector after attack vector, scenario after scenario, and as the captain watched the images, I watched her. Saw her enthralled and entranced and endlessly, endlessly calculating.
So no, I didn’t manage to get the crew their porn back.
Which was why the next time I found myself alone in an out-of-the-way service tunnel, six of them kicked the hell out of me.
That night, Q tended my wounds. Medical supplies, like most other shipboard commodities beyond the absolute bare minimum level of nutrition we needed to stay upright, were charged out of our lays, but she didn’t seem to mind. Besides, there was a lot you could do with water and salvaged scrap.
And then, as she was cleaning blood from my scalp, she said, simply, “Leave.”
I’d been expecting it for a while, I always did. So even though I was feeling bruised and sore and aching and all around fucked I eased myself out of bed, but Q put a hand on my shoulder and guided me back down.
“Leave her.”
I didn’t need to ask whichhershe meant. “I thought you didn’t believe in owning people.”
Her jaw set and her expression grim, Q looked down at me. “This,” she said. “Her machine. Her hunt.” And then, though she absolutely didn’t need to say it, she said, “Dangerous.”
It wasn’t just the beating that was making me uncomfortable. I’d fought long and hard for the right to make my own shitty decisions, and being reminded how shitty they were wasn’t helping me right then. So I said, “She isn’t…” and then I said, “It’s not…” then, “You don’t…”
And finally, despite Q’s protestations, I slipped away from her and went to walk the lower decks.
I felt like a child. And not in a safe, cared-for way. In a what-the-fuck, why-can’t-you-just-fucking-grow-up way.
And I hated it.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHTClouds
In the days that followed, the captain’s winter mood kept her confined to her cabin. This left Locke in charge by default, which, from an objective point of view, was absolutely for the best. We changed course and for a while we were on a completely ordinary hunter-voyage.
That was how we continued for a month or so, and when I think back on that time I can almost let myself forget the doom that hung over the journey. I can almost forget the horrors and let myself think only of the wonders, of the beautiful things.
Almost.
We aren’t far into the story yet. Not really. But I’m already getting muddle headed. Sifting back through memories and dreams and wishes and might-have-beens, it’s sometimes hard for me to sort what actually happened from what I’ve just told myself happened. Or what should have happened. Or what should never and could never have happened but I wanted so badly that the wanting has become a substitute for recall.
Don’t get me wrong, what I’m telling you is true. But ask anybody who collects stories for a living, any detective or journalist or executioner-errant: eyewitnesses aren’t worth shit. We—and byweI mean humans in general but I also mean the specific humans who try to explain things to other humansusing words—so often start with a pattern we want to see and fit the facts around it.
Still, I’m sure I remember the brit.
You may not have heard of brit. It’s not a common term outside the hunter-fleet. It’s the general name we give to the smallest Jovian organisms, the myriad sky-plankton that float on the winds and live by thermotrophy or chemotrophy or psychotrophy depending on their nature.
I don’t know how small the smallest brit-organisms are. Nobody has ever done a full breakdown and any of them that aren’t visible to the naked eye and don’t show up on ship sensors would never be recorded by practical-minded hunters. Bluesky exobiologists, on the other hand, seldom come as far out as the gas giants. When they do, it’s usually to study the subterranean seas of Ganymede, which have the advantage of being close to some very good hotels.
What I do know is that the biggest brit-organisms are about the size of a fist, and roughly the same shape. Little fleshy balls covered in fine spines or whipping flagella or rippling pseudopods. Most of the time they’re few enough and far enough between that you barely think of them unless their blended remains start gumming up the intake jets of your boat or, worse, the ship itself.
Sometimes, though, they get blown together in clouds the size of continents. And those clouds are one of the most beautiful sights you will see in all the system.
Life is strange. Life-the-phenomenon, I mean, not life-the-experience. It must be one of the most unevenly distributed things in the cosmos because it’s so rare across so much of it but when it does appear it appears in abundance. And nowhere is that truer than in a brit-cloud. The brit itself is already spectacularly diverse in shape and form and color. Quite a lot of it is bioluminescent, so as the ship flies into it the sky comes alive with rippling displays of light like you’ll see nowhere else.
But life (like, the catechism teaches us, society) also forms hierarchies. So where the tiniest, weakest creatures gather,the things that feed on them gather too, and the things that feed on the things that feed on them, and the things that feed on those, and—above even the great apex predators—the hunter-ships of humanity and the carrion eaters that swarm alongside us.
