I wasn’t entirely complaining. The landlord had been right about the warmth, and I’ve always had a yearning for touch that nearly matched my yearning for sky. I curled into her arms and closed my eyes. For a woman who’d begun by pressing a knife to my throat, she held me surprisingly gently. But perhaps she thought I was surprisingly gentle for a woman who’d begun by stealing into her bed without asking. Or perhaps she thought I was trash. That was more likely.
When day came and the dome-lights started bleeding in through the windows she was still holding me. And even though she was a complete stranger, I let myself feel safe.
“It’s morning,” I told her. Because it seemed like I should.
She made a sleepy noise against my shoulder which suggested that, from her perspective, morning could get fucked.
“I need to look for a ship.”
The mention of ships stirred her slightly, but only slightly.“Ships,”she said. “Multae.”
“The landlord said you were a harpooner,” I tried.
Bleary and disinterested, she waved a hand in the direction of a wicked-looking coilgun.“Yes,”she said. “Harpoonersum.”
There were no two ways about it, this was a massive stroke of luck. My plan for finding work had been to walk the docks until I saw a promising vessel, then see if I could find somebody in a position to offer me a job. In hindsight, it had been anincredibly shitplan. And now by chance I’d met a woman who’d already been on the hunt. Who seemed like she might be willing to help me. It was almost enough to make me believe in providence.
Carefully, I rolled over to face her. “Do you—would you look for a ship with me?”
Q’s endless eyes met mine. And for a moment I saw something, imagined I sawherseeing something. Perhaps it was just the morning light, or the still needing to get out of my head, or the long, weird day I’d had yesterday. Whatever it was, I had an unexplained and powerful urge to kiss her. I resisted for a dozen different reasons. For a start, she’d woken me up with a knife. That’s the sort of thing should put a girl off.
I mean, it didn’t. But I tried to act like it had.
“We should get breakfast,” I said instead. And a part of me regretted it.
We hovered in that space, me not kissing her and her not kissing me either, for moments that stretched out like blown glass, and then she turned away, swung out of bed into the foot or so of space that made up the rest of the room. She touched the biometric seal of her traveling bag and, from within, produced a small rectangular icon. It was black, jet black, and almost mirrored. As she moved her fingers over its surface, I saw symbols dancing across it, and the lines of her markings glowed in sympathy with them.
I had no idea what she was doing. Terrans, I was always told, have little in the way of technology. How, after all, could they develop it without the churches or the vast incorporatedconglomerates of the trade-states to guide them? I decided, in the end, that it was a religious matter, and waited for her to finish.
“Yes,”she said as the surface of the icon returned to darkness.
“Yes what?”
“I will sail with you.”
CHAPTER
FOURThe Hunter’s Story
Breakfast in the Coffin was better than I’d expected. It was too low-rent to serve offbody food, which meant it was all ice fish and algae, but they were well prepared and I’ve eaten a lot worse in my time. Q was diving in with enthusiasm, spearing slices of eel with the knife she’d nearly used to spear me.
The dining hall was filling with skyfarers. Some I recognized from the night before; others had drifted in since. The Starry Wisdomers were there, sitting even farther from the rest of us than they had previously, perhaps not wanting a repeat of the theological debate. Two workers from a Martian rust convoy—easily identifiable by the dust, which gets everywhere—had settled in opposite us and were telling lewd stories about their stopover on Vesta. One or two others I thought might be from the hunter-ships. They looked too worn for merchants, too lean for scavengers, and too lightly armed for pirates.
Curious about what I was getting myself into, I asked this last group if they had any stories. Voiders always do, and this lot turned out to be no exception. The man who was speaking now was, by his accent, Ionian. He was old—eighty if he was a day, even accounting for the hard life of a skyfarer—and as fortune or, if you prefer, the ineffable will of the Father would have it, he was later to be one of my shipmates. I never got toknow him that well, and so many years have passed since that I only remember him as the Old Ionian.
A rotten thing, memory.
“Some thirty years ago,” he was saying, “when I was just a lad”—okay, maybe he was a bit less than eighty, or maybea ladwas a very subjective term—“I shipped aboard a hunter-barque called the Essex, under Captain Pollard.”
“Would that be the Essex that they made a very popular streaming show about relatively recently?” asked the Ganymedian, only a little bit superciliously.
“Might be,” replied the Old Ionian. “But I wouldn’t know. Still, you’ll have the tale from me as true as it happened.” He took a breath and launched into his story. “For six months we’d been skimming ammonia, playing in the upper atmosphere where the sprites and elveses dance.”
At the time I assumed sprites and elveses were some whimsical cloudhunter’s superstition, but I eventually learned differently. They’re actually the technical terms for a kind of intense electromagnetic discharge you get in the atmosphere of gas giants. Consider this foreshadowing.
“Cautious captains,” the Old Ionian went on, “or fresh ones, they like to stay shallow on account of it keeps you in lower gravity, which in turn spares the afterburners when you’re leaving the well. But as Pollard was learning to his cost, the shallow skies aren’t where you find the best or the richest Leviathans. No, to get those you have to go deep, and after six months—”
“You already said it was six months,” the Ganymedian pointed out.
