In the weeks after Marsh fell into the head—and the months that followed those weeks—the whole atmosphere on the ship, which had been showing signs of improvement, started to backslide. Locke hadn’t been entirely wrong about how saving Marsh’s life had cost the ship a lot of money—the sperm Q had spilled in freeing him could have been processed into enough fuel to power a city for a month, and it would have been priced accordingly. Nor had they been wrong about how since that money was split, however unequally, amongst the crew, the loss of so much sperm had led to a certain amount of resentment. Notspecificresentment—nobody was quite willing to admit to being selfish enough to be angry at Q for saving a man’s life—but a sort of general low-key discontent. We’d had our first big payday, and because of an accident nobody could control and a choice nobody could fault, it had gotten much less big and involved much less pay than it should have.
It all led to a vague sense of unease over the voyage. The initial rush of enthusiasm that you always get at the start of a new, well, a new anything was fading, and the excitement of hunting the legendary Möbius Beast was giving way to the more mundane question of how we were all going to pay our bills when we got back to Europa.
Things weren’t exactly helped by the fact that being bodily immersed in so much spermaceti for so long seemed to have sent Marsh even stranger than Starry Wisdomers usually are. I’ve talked a bit before about how we don’t really know how Leviathans stay up, or why their sperm is such a powerful fuel, but there’s at least some speculation that it has psionic properties. And I’m not saying that’s true and I’m not saying that’s false, but I am saying that it sure as hell did a number on Marsh’s brain.
He started wandering the decks at all hours—sometimes even when his shift said he was meant to be somewhere else—whispering to himself in a low voice. When people asked him, he’d tell them that he could hear the Leviathans. That they were calling to him.
With hindsight, the fact that the captain took that seriously and started spending long hours in consultation with him wasn’t a great sign either. But I admit that at the time I was mostly just jealous.
Thinking about it, that probably contributed to the whole fuck Locke plan as well.
And it turned out to be a way more complicated operation than I’d expected.
The thing is, I usually don’t have that hard a time getting laid, mostly because I have extremely low standards. Look long enough and look desperate enough and you’ll find somebody who wants something. But generally I don’t go after specific people, at least not consciously. Q was directly assigned to my bed by an innkeeper, and I didn’t so much pursue the captain as get drawn inevitably into her orbit like a piece of space debris spiraling down towards impact.
This, though. This felt like an intellectual exercise. And I can, on occasion, be an intellectual person. I’ve spent as much time in classrooms as crawlspaces, and although a lot of my education was unhelpfully dogmatic, that means I’ve read a lot of apologia, and if I can make the case for theodicy, I can make the case for sleeping with me.
At least in theory.
In practice… turns out that it’s surprisingly hard to get in the pants of a deeply rules-bound superior officer who already thinks you’re too in bed—both literally and metaphorically—with somebody they believe is actively dangerous.
I started out subtle. Just kind of vaguely hinting any time we happened to cross paths, which we did fairly often on account of how I was their pilot, that if theyhappenedto want to drag me off somewhere and fuck my brains out I’d be, y’know, cool with that.
Subtle wasn’t getting me anywhere.
I seriously considered getting myself disciplined deliberately, because I figured there’d be a better than even chance of Locke wanting to oversee the punishment themself. But I’d been around the skyfleets long enough to know that they didn’t do the fun kind of flogging. Of the three great pillars of naval life, the lash was the one I had least fondness for.
Sometime near the start of the second year of our voyage, I was sitting on my bunk trying to work out how I could scratch this particular itch, with Q resting in the bunk below, drawing her trees, when Locke’s voice over comms announced a hail from another ship.
She was called the Jungfrau, and according to their communications she was low on fuel.
I should back up and say that this might strike you as odd. After all, starships run on spermaceti, and the whole point of a hunter-barque is that it goes out and brings in more spermaceti than it could possibly use. And obviously ingeneralyou want to avoid running out of fuel on any far-system voyage because if you wind up somewhere in the Kuiper Belt and you can’t poweryour oxygen diffusers you’re fucked. Like super fucked. Like ghost-ship-floating-dead-for-a-century-before-anybody-finds-your-anaerobically-preserved-corpses fucked.
But it does happen.
The thing is, the spermaceti you pull out of the skies isn’t fuel-grade. It needs to be processed in the fractating columns and centrifuges of a dedicated refinery. It needs to be suspended in a more stable fluid, turned from the weird uncanny power of the deep skies into something resembling a conventional material. It needs to be tamed. Tamed, transformed, repackaged, and, of course, at long last sold back, at a profit, to the people who harvest it in the first place. Squirting the raw stuff into your generators in the hope that they’d run would be like trying to cook a fish by detonating a bomb in your kitchen. You might get a result that lookedvaguelylike the one you were after, but not usefully and not without far more trouble than it was worth.
Still, the fact that the Jungfrau was having fuel problems, and also—we’d later learn—had killed precisely zero Leviathans and so was carrying zero spermaceti anyway, strongly suggested that they didn’t have a fucking clue what they were doing. And a nasty, bitter part of me found that somewhat cheering. Sure, we’d lost a chunk of sperm from our first kill and sure, our captain might have had the teensiest bit of a death wish, but to spend so long in the deep red that you burn through your entire fuel supply and have nothing to show for it at the end, that wasn’t even the cool kind of death. That was the death of getting home and finding you couldn’t fucking eat.
The Jungfrau drew up alongside us and its crew flooded in through our airlocks. They looked surprisingly cheerful for people at risk of being forced home empty-handed, but I wasn’t going to begrudge them that. If you’re going to starve, you might as well starve happy.
Also, happy people tend to be more fun at parties. Although admittedly often worse in bed.
Since the Jeroboam had been quarantined, the meeting withthe Jungfrau was the first proper gam the crew had been able to indulge in since the Town Ho, and I couldn’t help wondering if the captain had been strong-armed into agreeing to it on account of the growing discontent belowdecks. The high of the last kill had been wearing off evenbeforeQ had quite literally cut into the profits, and the crew was beginning to remember all sorts of grievances that hadn’t seemed important just days earlier.
But whatever her reasons, when the captain formally greeted the captain of the Jungfrau, it went the same way every other gam had gone.
“Hast seen the Möbius Beast?” she asked, without introduction or ceremony.
The captain of the Jungfrau, who seemed far too young to be in charge of a hunter-barque and so had probably inherited his position or bought it at an auction, clearly had no idea what she was on about. “I’m sorry,” he said, “the what?”
Which was apparently Marsh’s cue to sidle up to him and whisper, “TheBeast,” in his creepiest voice. Then he followed up with, “Full fathom five the monster lies, of its bones are coral made.”
With the weaponized politeness of the affluent and clueless, the captain of the Jungfrau turned to him. “Come again?”
“Those are pearls,” Marsh replied, “that were his eyes.”
Heartily sick of these distractions, Locke cut in with, “The Beast is no matter of importance, a large-ish Leviathan that our captain has an interest in. Fuel, on the other hand, is a pressing issue for all parties.”
