The thing is, at the time, it felt different. Less obvious how completely fucked everything was getting. Maybe it was the isolation. Maybe it was—and I’ve tried to make this clear but maybe I haven’t made it clear enough—that the captain was extraordinarily hot. Maybe it was the inescapable, neutron-star gravity of her that no amount of words on paper (or more likely on electroreactive Wyrm skin, another useful byproduct of the noble trade of the Leviathan hunters) can really capture.
Or maybe I’m just a fool.
“Captain?” I called out to her as she came into view around the creature’s quadripartite jaw.
She stopped and stared at me like I was some kind of ghost. “Do you mean to haunt me, shipmate? I assure you I am haunted enough.”
Yeah okay, not doing myself any favors here on the why-are-you-into-this-person front. “Just inspecting the head.”
She came and stood beside me, gazing up at the beast in silence. “All life in the system,” she said, “all human life, at least, depends on the unknowable power that rests within that creature’s brain.”
The image of Q’s scrimshawed drawing came back to me. There were places, I was now strangely aware, where that wasn’t true. Where you didn’t need to burn the cerebrospinal juices of star-monsters just to breathe. The thought was still alien to me, and it stuck like a fish bone in the gums.
“And yet,” the captain continued, “it tells us none of its secrets. It hides and withholds and flees into clouds and liquid hydrogen. It has touched the face of Heaven and yet its face reveals nothing.”
I should have realized she was losing it. I should have mentioned something to somebody. But what would it have helped? Once the voyage has begun the ship is its own world and the captain rules over it like a king or a god or, if you’re reallylucky, a competent and dispassionate middle manager. I had no power to challenge her, and no will to.
Also, right in that moment I mostly just wanted her to do me.
For a while, she and I stood in silence contemplating the vastness and the incomprehensibility of the Leviathan. And then the rest of the crew—those members of it who were on draining duty, at least—started to arrive, and we were back in the world of chaos and industry.
The extraction of the sperm (still hasn’t stopped being funny, has it) from the neurological system of the Leviathan is of such importance aboard a hunter-barque that it’s overseen by a specialized demi-officer called the trepanissimer. They’re mostly a drone-wrangler, and it’s their job to make sure that the incisions through the skull are made with minimal contamination of the spermaceti. Our trepanissimer aboard the Pequod was a grim-faced woman by the name of Enderman, but as vital as her function was to the success of the voyage, she and I barely interacted and so I won’t say any more about her.
I will talk a bit more about her drones, though.
They start the process by meticulously cutting around the frontmost head plate of the Leviathan. They do this with a kind of small vibrating saw that slices easily through rigid materials but can’t penetrate softer ones. This allows them to pry away the head plate and reveal the glistening, surprisingly tough membrane that fills the interior of the monster’s head, sheltering its brain, its spinal bundles, and its precious, precious sperm.
C’mon, say it with me now. It’s fun.
Once the membrane is exposed, a different variety of drone hooks up further cables to allow the head to be tilted so that the exposed area of membrane faces upwards. They have to do this because otherwise the creature’s head is so positively brimming with delicious sperm that if the—it has a technical name, but I’m going to say “sperming hole”—isn’t exactly level it will spill out and if it does, well. Then you have sperm going everywhere and not only is that unprofitable it’s also extremely messy.
The next step of what I flatly refuse to stop calling the sperming process has to be done by hand. Spermaceti, by its nature, is electrodynamically and psychokinetically active to an uncharted extent—the refined form we use as fuel isn’t really refined at all, it’s processed and diluted to make it manageable. Which means that if hunter-barques tried to get drones to harvest it they’d fry their circuitry and waste a bunch of good kit and a bunch of good sperm all at the same time.
Instead, the drones run a crisscrossing pattern of lines across the draining chamber in two layers, allowing the crew to walk along one while holding on to another. This is, to use the official terminology, really fucking dangerous. But it’s the way the hunter-barques have been doing it for centuries, and change costs money.
On this particular occasion it fell to Marsh to make the initial incision, under the watchful—if distant—eye of Enderman. He made his way carefully to the center of the room, walking on cables and clinging to cables, gripping a long, sharp spear (whichisn’tcalled a sperming spear but should be) under one arm. When he’d gotten to the right spot, he hunkered down, hooking his arms over the upper cable to free his hands, and he forced the spear downwards, hand over hand, until it pressed against the rubbery sac of the Leviathan’s cranial membrane.
In spite of myself, I held my breath.
As he leaned just a little more weight downwards, the tip pierced at last, and sperm began to well up through the… okay I’ll admit it, even I’m finding this a bit silly now. But look, this is a serious industrial process that just happens to produce a product whose name has unfortunate connotations.
Once he’d poked a big enough sperm hole, Marsh signaled for the pipes, which came coiling down from above like… like I don’t know what. If you’re a coreworlder and have seen plants and animals that aren’t star-Wyrms and ice fish, there’s probably a comparison here. Half a dozen long, sinuous tubes unfolded in Marsh’s direction and his last job was to guidethem into place so they actually went into the sperm instead of bouncing off what was left of the protective membrane.
And this last job, he fucked up spectacularly.
To be fair, it’s hard. I’ve tried it myself since, and you’re high up, you’re standing on something extremely wobbly, you’ve just been handling a long spear covered in sperm. In some ways I’m amazed accidents don’t happen more often.
But one happened now.
Reaching for an errant sperm pipe, Marsh overbalanced, slipped from his cable, and tumbled headfirst into the Leviathan’s cranial cavity.
Most of us just stood there like unused dildos, watching. Dawlish made a brief move to go after him, but there was no way his cybernetics would have taken the exposure to raw spermaceti so he had to stop himself. He looked stricken, but it wasn’t like anybody else was rushing to help.
The impact of the fall combined with Marsh’s first extremely doomed attempts to haul himself out had set the head swinging, and now it slammed into the walkway, jolting me and the captain backwards and sending a good few of our other crewmates sprawling.
A cable snapped and the whole thing pitched sideways, spilling bucketfuls of spermaceti to the floor where it began to crystallize like frost on an ice miner’s beard.
“Secure the head,” called Locke from the upper walkway. “If it falls the voyage loses millions.”
