“She brought a curse on us,” added the Cerean. He and I had barely interacted apart from that one time he kicked me in the head, but I knew he was from Ahuna Mons, which in the Church we used to call Little Pluto. He was, I suspected, a true believer in the catechism.
“Can we maybe deal with one curse at a time?” I tried. “The captain’s a curse, Q is a curse, we’re cursed because we didn’t kill one of the Death’s Heads and hang its skull off ourlarboard hull. Did it ever occur to you that maybe life is just random and this job is just hard?”
The Bright-Eyed Titanian moved in very close beside me. She wasn’t armed, but four friends behind you was the best weapon you could have. “Listen to me, you pissant little tourist. Each and every one of us has mouths to feed and bills to pay and your faux-wisdom bullshit isn’t keeping a single damned one of us from starving.” She glared, which I won’t pretend I didn’t find hot because, well, I’m not calling her the Bright-Eyed Titanian for nothing. “Keep your little piece of Terran ass in line, or we’ll do it for you.”
I did my best to shrug that off. “You’ve got a problem with Q, take it up with…” A realization hit me. “You did, didn’t you? And she beat the crap out of you.”
The Second Europan scowled. “She caught us by surprise.”
“What, all of you?”
“The heathen is full of tricks,” replied the Cerean.
I permitted myself a smile. “So is the believer, in my experience.”
That didn’t sit well with the Cerean. “Beloved,” he began, which threw me until he continued the quotation, “believe not every spirit, because many false prophets are gone out into the world.”
And you know what? Fuck that. I stepped forward. Thisdidput the Titanian behind me, which would have been incredibly bad if it actually came to violence, but at least it let me get right into the face of my sort-of-but-not-but-sort-of coreligionist. “You do you,” I said. “I’ll pick a ravening wolf every time.”
By my very inexact calculation, I was about seventy-six seconds from this little group deciding that talk was getting them nowhere and giving me another kicking to make themselves feel better. Except just as they were squaring up to take swings at me, we heard footsteps across the deck.
Sometimes Iswearshe’d had speakers put in. Because the captain’s footsteps echoed in a space that it should have been acoustically impossible to echo in. It wasn’t that she had a heavytread, in fact if anything she walked lightly, but she took each step with such confidence that her every footfall was a gunshot.
A shot right to the heart, in my case.
“Crewmates,” she said, aloof and passionless as the stars.
In an effort to avoid some unspoken, unthreatened reprisal, my would-be assaulters fell into line, murmuring various flavors ofcap’nunder their breaths.
“Mark me,” she said to them, and to the void, and perhaps to me, “I am not insensible of your woes nor ignorant of your disappointments.” This was, I suspected, strictly true. All she’d claimed, after all, was that sheknewof the crew’s woes, not that she gave a crap about them. “Whether you hunt for glory”—she glanced at the Bright-Eyed Titanian—“or for profit”—the Europans—“or to satisfy a god who tells you honest toil is sacrament and wealth a blessing”—the Cerean and, with more than a trace of irony, me—“you shall be well served by the next stage of our voyage.”
Behind me, the Mimean murmured something about not having been served too well by it so far.
“We fly south,” she went on, addressing the complaint without acknowledging it. “To richer skies, and there I swear to you, shipmates, our fortunes will be born anew. For we will carve through storm and swell and electric fire to the very heart of this world’s wonders. To the fountainhead where monsters are birthed and heroes are made and a hunter’s hand can overflow with sperm, ripe for the taking.”
The fact that the captain could talk about hands overflowing with sperm and everybody took it totally seriously said a lot about her.
“Cleave to me, shipmates,” she said, “and look to your duties. We cross the tropics soon, and any of you sorry sky-dogs caught lagging at your post will be flogged.”
They didn’t cheer. Even A couldn’t quite get people to cheer a threat of flogging. But they went on their way sharply enough. Except for me. I hovered a moment, snagged like a shard of shrapnel in the field of an accelerator coil.
“Thank you,” I stage-whispered. Loud enough that she’d hear me, quiet enough that I could pretend I’d not meant her to.
She looked down at me. And in a tight, strangling moment, I realized she had no idea what I was thanking her for.
CHAPTER
FORTY-SIXWhat Else Is Out There
I know, I know, get back to the fucking and killing. But I’m not in a fucking and killing mood, and thenextbit of fucking and killing is going to involve some context.
You might have gotten the impression that Jupiter is empty, and in a relative sense, it kind of is. But that’s because it’s bigger than every other body in the system put together. You could fit a hundred Earths just onto its surface and then pack in hundreds more in layers as you go down, down, down into the middle and the hydrogen sea.
Which means the emptiness of Jupiter actually contains a whole lot of shit.Planets’worth of shit. As well as the hunter-barques there are hydrogen-skiffs, observation stations, interwell signal relays, asset recovery ports, and so on.
They haven’t really mattered so far, because while there’s a lot of them—millions, probably—they crop up in clusters and on a Jovian scale they’re so far apart that they might as well not even be on the same world. It’s sort of like how when you look out into space you see endless clouds of stars but no matter how far you fly they never get any closer because those endless clouds are scattered across even more endless distances and the space between them is vast and alive and incomprehensible.
Those things that haven’t mattered? They’re about to start mattering.
