On the hot plate, the fin was beginning to pop and sizzle, its not-exactly-fat turning a yellow-brown that might or might not have meant it was edible.
“Then cook it over a fuel cell in your quarters,” suggested the Second Europan. She’d been part of the group that jumped me over the porn issue, so I didn’t really want to agree with her, but this was one of those moments when the worst person you know was making a great point.
While I’d chosen to stay quiet, Q never could. “Fugit, te inepte,” she shot across the table, but neither I nor the Second Europan actually understood what she meant.
With a look of honestly quite churlish defiance, Flint leveredthe blackening monster fin off the heat and onto his plate where it sat in a widening pool of psychoreactive grease.
“’Tis a bad omen,” the Old Ionian insisted. “No good ever comes of eating Leviathan.”
While Flint was stuffing god parts defiantly into his mouth, the Pretty Vestal decided to pick an entirely different fight. “You’realwayssaying that, old man. You said it about the captain being belowdecks. You said it about the entertainment system glitching. They both sorted themselves out, and the voyage is going perfectly well.”
I’d heard him express the absolute opposite opinion not three days ago, but it was amazing how much difference a kill made. Suddenly the whole crew was remembering that our main goal was to slay monsters for profit and that no matter how boring things got—and they would get plenty boring—they could also be thrilling and violent and, if they continued to go as well as they just had, they could end in a decent payday for all of us.
Also, he was wrong about the entertainment system sorting itself out. It had just stopped getting worse. But in my experience people easily confuse not getting worse with getting better, especially if they’ve got something to distract them. And there was little more distracting than the corpse of a legendary star-beast.
Little. But not nothing.
Because we were about to meet an angel.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVENThe Archangel
The work of hewing up and butchering the Leviathan took days rather than hours, so we were barely halfway done when a hail came through from another barque.
On this occasion, I wasn’t in the captain’s bed when the message came in (I know, I know, it wasn’t for want of trying), so I don’t know how she answered them. My guess is that she asked if they’d seen the Möbius Beast and they said they had, because we actually changed course to rendezvous with them.
Except it turned out a rendezvous wasn’t on the cards. At least not the getting together drinking and fucking kind of rendezvous the crew had been waiting for. Word soon went around that the Jeroboam had two distinct but equally weird things going on. Firstly, there was a plague on the ship, and although air filtration and decontamination rooms could do a certain amount, the kinds of things people liked to do on gams (see above re: fucking, drinking) were pretty much the opposite of social distancing.
As much of a bummer as that was, because the Pequod was getting cramped and samey after so long in the skies, it paled very slightly into insignificance beside the other weird thing about the Jeroboam, which was that it had the Archangel Gabriel on board.
I was sure they weren’t theactualArchangel Gabriel because the math on that one didn’t begin to check out. The way I saw it either the Church was onto something, in which case probably some two-fiftieth lay voidhand wasn’t likely to turn out to be an angel at all. Or else the Church was full of shit, in which case angels probably weren’t real.
There was, I suppose, a middle ground that worked theologically. It was possible that the churches were right in their broad cosmology but wrong on the finer points of doctrine. But believing that felt like it’d be a lot of work, and so I settled for assuming the whole thing was a load of crap.
Since the Jeroboam was keeping itself in isolation, the ships wirelessly linked their internal comms for a kind of remote gam. This happened sometimes, apparently, and it wound up being what you might call a party line—you could speak to random members of the other crew and use that fleeting moment of human connection to share stories about your past, or catch up with former shipmates, rekindle relationships with old friends. Stuff like that.
Or you could use it for sex. Most people used it for sex.
Unusually, I didn’t. I’d like to say that something about the vast unknowable isolation of the Jovian skies had turned my mind away from the physical and towards higher things, but the truth was I just felt a bit self-conscious about my voice.
Instead, I asked around the crew and tried to work out what the fuck was going on with this whole Archangel Gabriel business.
So I didn’t get an orgasm out of it, but I did get a story.
“He’s Venusian,” Dawlish told me, leaning on the bulwark and watching the Jeroboam from the observation deck. “From the Renouncers.”
It wasn’t a sect I’d heard of. The Great Churches liked to pretend they had a monopoly on faith, but even if you ignored the totally unaffiliated cults like the Starry Wisdom or the various Theonationalist Enclaves, there were little subsects and schismatic branches all over the place. “Renouncers?”
The look on Dawlish’s face was bitter. “Walked away from the Church of Life after the Bull on Cellular Personhood and the Rights of the Coercively Conceived.”
I’d been forced to learn a ton of theology in my time, but it was Prosperity-focused not Life-focused so I just stared at him blankly.
“The Church of Life is big on Venus,” Dawlish explained, his mechanical hand tightening on the gunwale. “The Bull is why I’m here, in a roundabout way.”
I had no idea where this was going.
“I’m a convict,” he explained. “A murderer. A mass murderer, in Venusian law.”
