I was probably imagining it, but there was a sadness in Q’s eyes then. A terrible distance. “Can’t live like you,” she said. “Ships. Cities. Domes.” She shrugged. And then gave up on Exodite and with a touch of frustration in her voice said, “Considerate lilia quomodo crescent non laborant non nent dico autem vobis. Nec Salomon in omni gloria sua vestiebatur sicut unum ex istis.” And then she set her tinkering aside, hauled herself up to my bunk, and kissed me so very, very gently. “This”—with a single small movement of her head she managed to indicate an all-encompassing everything: the steel walls of the ship, the harsh glare of the strip-lights, the blue-white glow of the screens, which were currently advertising holiday packages to a pleasure complex on Mimas—“is not all there is.”
I was sure that on some unhelpfully literal level she was right. Despite my upbringing I wasn’t completely incapable of acknowledging that other ways of being probably existed. Out there. Somewhere. For other people. As a child I’d harbored secret dreams of running away to be a pirate. Of living by blood and plunder from a hollow asteroid somewhere in the Trojans, or on a rogue atmospheric station in one of the gas giants. But while I’d made a very, very large number of terrible decisions in my life, I hadn’t quite had the guts to go all in on being a professional murderer.
Sighing in place of speaking, I shuffled sideways so there was just enough room for Q to slide into the bed beside me, and she got the hint. Or at least, she got part of the hint.
Actually that’s not true.
You’ve probably already noticed that I spend a big chunk of this book talking about how horny and self-destructive I am. And don’t get me wrong, that isn’t a completely unfair characterization. But I’m not quite as one-dimensional as I tried to make out the first time I wrote this chapter.
When I said she got “part” of the hint, I was trying to imply that what I really wanted was sex, and that Q made a mistake by not fucking my brains out there and then.
She didn’t. She didn’t at all. It’s just way easier for me to pretend that I wanted to get laid than to admit that I wanted her to hold me. That right in that moment what I needed, more than anything in the world, was to be with somebody. To lie there in the quiet. To be allowed my uncertainties.
The screens were still playing advertisements at us and Q, with an instinct for mercy or a distaste for commercialism that I found equally wonderful, asked the computer to show us something else.
She asked it to show us stars.
I wasn’t sure how much she knew about the way the intelligence was gradually suborning the ship’s noostructure. I’d told her more than I’d told most people, but I’d been cagey even with her. Whatever she understood, she’d made an inspiredchoice. If there was one thing it definitely wouldn’t have been overwriting it was star maps.
After a few moments’ silence, she traced a finger over the too-low ceiling of my bunk, now covered in an illusory sky, and said, “Cetus.”
It was the first time we’d shared a word. The first time we’d shared an idea. It wasn’t something I’d ever really thought about despite my travels, but the stars were so impossibly distant that the constellations looked the same no matter where in the system you were. The Great Bear was the Great Bear from the Temple of Commerce on Pluto. It was still the great bear from the crystal waterfalls of Mercury. I traced a shape of my own. “Hydra.”
Q moved her finger to a single, bright star. “Polaris.”
That one was foreign to me. “Polaris?”
“North,” she tried. “Always there. Fixed. Unmoving.”
And just like that, she’d lost me again. I’d never been to Earth. Never lived on a world with fixed stars. Never been able to look into the sky and know for certain that one light would always be there.
CHAPTER
THIRTYKraken
As beautiful as the brit-clouds were, we hadn’t steered into them for the aesthetics. Life gathers to life gathers to life and where there’s brit, there’s Leviathans.
I didn’t really understand this at the time, being new to the business, but hunting in a brit-field is kind of a gamble for a hunter-barque and one that usually goes badly for inexperienced crews. Not only does the brit itself cause problems with jet or rotor propulsion, but the intense biodiversity that brings the ship there in the first place creates its own set of challenges. On the one hand, the abundance of Leviathans makes it the absolute definition of a target-rich environment, so if your goal is just to kill big monsters you’re absolutely laughing. But if you want to pick out specific, valuable creatures amongst the crowds you’re basically stuffed.
At least you’re stuffed if you only rely on radar. Which, once again, is why hunter-barques, even when they aren’t captained by obsessives on a vengeance crusade, so often make use of the eyeball mark one.
It was day two when the cry went up from the array. A white shape, plainly visible on the horizon.
“Confirm shape and color” was the reply from a suddenly interested captain. She’d been away so long, but the merest hintof a kill, or at least of the one kill she truly wanted, roused her like Lazarus from the grave.
Confirmation came back immediately. “Long and low, milk-white and moving quickly.”
The order to launch came without hesitation and the whole crew went at once to the boats. Moving through the brit-cloud, we were on foils and rockets for maneuver, but if we could bag a Ridgeback—even if that Ridgeback turned out not to be the specific one that had devoured our captain’s every waking thought—it would have been worth the extra difficulty.
So we flew out. Over comms, Flint was keeping up his cheerful commentary about the value of a good coilgun while Truelove intoned hymns to the dread between the stars and Locke whispered bearings and measurements andsteadyin our ears.
The captain was silent. Dead silent. Though she flew once again at the head of the pack, as straight and true as a sniper’s bullet.
Visibility is poor in a brit-cloud, the trillions of tiny organisms sometimes as little as an arm’s length apart, bursting on the boat’s canopy as it flew against the wind. So we had to track the strange white shape by shouts and half glimpses until the tides of fate and atmospheric chaos fell our way and a sight line opened up, showing us at last what we’d been chasing.
It wasn’t one beast, in the end, but two.
A great Death’s Head Leviathan locked in combat with something still greater, a titanic, amorphous Kraken from the deep sky, come to feed on whatever it could snatch up in its endless, grasping tentacles.
