Inside the heart of every true-blooded void-dog watching, there was a sudden conflict. Yes, a man was drowning. But he wasn’t exactly apleasantman—none of us liked Starry Wisdomers, chiefly because they didn’t like us—and even for those of us on long lays, the two hundred and fiftieth part of the price of the sperm in that beast’s head was a whole lot of money. Even set against Marsh’s life.
Truly, it was a dilemma.
But not for Q.
I’d come to the draining room alone, but Q was there too,on the upper walkway beside Flint, who was resting a hand on his pistol and trying to work out if there was any way to solve this problem by shooting something.
She sprang, full-body, into the air, caught one of the trailing cables, and rode it down onto the side of the bucking head. And I felt a weird mix of pride and affection that was tangled up with the fact we were fucking but wasn’tjustabout that.
Weird.
“That’s it,” Locke called encouragingly. “Refix the cable and then get the tubes back into place.”
Beside me the captain was watching intently, the fire that was her eyes burning low and sulfurous.
Except Q didn’t seem that interested in reattaching the cable. Instead, she crawled, spider-like, around to the underside of the head where she hung, nestled in what was left of the beast’s mouthparts.
The Leviathan is well armored above, but below its defenses are mostly that it will fucking kill you if you get near it, and that’s a threat that goes away when the thing is dead and dismembered. So Q seemed to have decided to go in through the jaw. She had her knife with her, the same one she’d nearly killed me with when we first met, and she was using it now to slice her way through what would have been the monster’s throat.
“By the Father,” exclaimed Locke from above, “what is shedoing?”
“Obstetrics,” replied Dawlish, with a smile that read to me as almost wicked.
And he was right, in a way. We couldn’t see—at least I couldn’t—through the mess of the beast’s lower hide, but Q filled me in on the details later. She cut her way through the crook of the jawline and up into the skull, where the cranial membrane housed the oh-so-valuable spermaceti and also, less importantly, a drowning asshole.
There, pressed between the immense weight of the sperm sac and the hard beastbone of the skull, she’d set about feelingfor Marsh, who she’d predicted—correctly—would by now be struggling at the bottom. Swimming is a rare skill outside of the core worlds. Even the subsurface fishers of Ganymede and Europa don’t have much call for it since the waters of those worlds would freeze you dead if you actually tried to swim in them without an environment suit, and swimmingwithan environment suit is more like doing a spacewalk.
The first evidence we saw of her success was when a trickle of sperm began oozing from beneath the head. And then a trickle became a stream and an ooze became a gush and then—
“Fuck”—Locke began barking orders—“you and you, cables, now. We can’t lose the whole kill.”
While two more teams of crewmen were scrambling out onto the head—not, in my opinion, anywhere near as gracefully as Q had done—Q and Marsh slithered, headfirst, out of the swinging carcass and plunged several feet onto the floor.
They landed with a wet thump, thankfully (well, thankfully for them, not so thankfully for those who cared more for their lays) cushioned by an ever-deepening layer of spermaceti.
Locke stared down at Q. “You,” they snapped, “report to my office at first watch.”
Q looked back up at them. And nodded. And smiled.
CHAPTER
FORTY-ONEStirrings
I hadn’t been asked to accompany Q to her appointment with Locke, but I hadn’t been asked not to either, and since she still spoke relatively little Exodite it seemed only fair that she have somebody to back her up.
Locke’s office was exactly as I’d have expected Locke’s office to be. Which is to say it was immaculate and a tiny bit soulless. They did have a picture-slab on their desk which cycled through images of people who looked enoughlikeLocke that I assumed they were probably family, but that was the one mark of humanity in a room that was otherwise a sleek, stark outpost of the interests of Olympus Extraction State.
“What,” Locke demanded of Q, when we stood at last before them in that austere temple to efficiency, “were you thinking?”
“Submersus est,” she replied. “Drowning.”
“She saved Marsh’s life,” I added, feeling like it should have meant something.
Locke looked unimpressed. “And cost this ship a fortune in spilled spermaceti.”
“Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas,” said Q. “Quam quidam appetentes erraverunt a fide et inseruerunt se doloribus multis.” And while I’d learned a little of her language in our time together I had absolutely no idea what that meant.
Leaning forward, Locke propped their chin on steepled fingers. “I’m sure you were very heroic,” they said, “but the livelihood of every last member of this crew depends on our cargo.”
