“They say the owl was a baker’s daughter.”
He’d been like this ever since he fell into the sperm. For a while we’d hoped it would wear off. It hadn’t. “Do they?”
A blank look crept over his face. “Do they what?”
“Say the owl was a baker’s daughter.”
The faintest echo of a smile crept onto his lips. “They say somanythings. I lose track.”
I sat with my back against the mass couplings. They were cold and solid, which they should have been because they needed to take a hundred thousand atmospheres when the compressors were running. “Like what?” I asked, not totally sure what answer I wanted.
He laughed at that. “Nothing sure. Yet much unhappily.”
That felt like half an answer at best. “Don’t you have a job to be doing?”
“I strew dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds.”
Honestly the whole ship was beginning to feel like a dangerous conjecture. “And that’s going to save us from pirates, is it?”
As if in answer, an alarm sounded.
“Too slow of sail,” he said, “we put on a compelled valor.”
I wasn’t a fighter, but when boarding claws were inbound there wasn’t much distinction. I hurried—okay, not hurried exactly, there was no point volunteering to be first in a firefight—to the security deck where Flint was handing out guns like it was Christmas (for those unfamiliar with the Church of Liberty, this simile is exact; the Libertines celebrate most festivals with gifts of firearms).
On the rare occasions that a hunter-barque has to defend itself, we fight much as we do against the Leviathan. I like to think, though I’ve no idea if it’s actually true, that this makes us like the great warrior cultures of old. The people who lived and fought and hunted as one and who in their own various ways bestrode the ancient Earth like colossi. Although I suspect those great warriors of old never had to split their spoils fifty-two-forty-eight with a corporate sponsor who made all the important decisions from forty light-minutes across the void.
Q, Locke, and I were armed with boarding scythes and antimateriel launchers, and sent to the usual boat. We plunged out into the skies to see the brutal shapes of assault craft bearing down on us, their docking claws and cutting seals jutting out from their prows in a way that reminded me strangely of the jaws of the Leviathan.
In our small, cramped cabin, Q’s hand came to rest gently on my shoulder. “Per angusta,” she said, “ad augusta.”
“Take it slow,” Locke ordered from behind me. And I could tell that this was a dangerous situation because I just obeyed the order without also briefly imagining it in a sexual context.“They’re quicker than we are, but less nimble. And as sky-hunters I expect you to know how to fight a bigger fish.”
We did, or at least we mostly did. I was still quite new to the business. But it wasn’t so much thesizeof the fish we were fighting now that had me worried. It was that the fish had guns.
As if echoing my thoughts, the nearest pirate boat launched a stream of white-hot darts towards us. They were faster by far than the ones we used in the hunt, not needing to hold fast or to tow a line, but only to pierce hulls and crack domes. They missed us by what felt like inches and, hoping that what worked for Leviathans would work for marauders, I put us into a dive.
“Canopy,” said Q, and because I’m just about willing to follow chain of command, I waited for Locke’s nod before trusting my instinct to do exactly what she said.
The weapon Q had taken from Flint’s worryingly deep stockpile of armaments had been a variant on her usual coilgun. It was longer and broader, and while I wasn’t an expert in weaponry it looked as though it had a whole bunch of after-market modifications.
With the boat still diving steeply, Q was forced to make one hell of a tricky shot, bracing herself on the back of my seat and aiming up at a target that was moving away from us and past us on two different vectors, both of them accelerating.
She fired.
And like the drone back on Cthonius Linea, the frontmost of the pirate boats erupted in a shower of sparks as Q’s harpoon burst straight through its port engine. I upped canopy at once and she crouched in the cabin reloading.
“Bring her around,” commanded Locke. “One more like that and she’s down.”
Bringing her around was tight because while we’d gotten behind one of the pirate boats there were several more and not all their guns were forward-fixed, so either way I needed to be taking evasive actions. As I turned, I saw that one of themarauders had succeeded in clamping on to the hull of the Pequod between the third and fourth decks and was beginning to deploy cutters. But that was somebody else’s problem. My problem was the boat still careening forward on one engine. One engine that would be perfectly adequate to push it across the remaining distance towards the ship.
We launched darts but even with the upgrades Flint had been insisting on, they were meant for organic targets, not void-hardened fighter boats. I downed canopy again, and Q braced herself for the gravitational spike as the dampeners disengaged.
“Steady,” commanded Locke, our suits’ internal comms doing their best to compensate for the roar of the Jovian winds. “Better one good shot than two bad ones.”
Yet again I was struck by the willingness of a hunter-crew to fly cheerfully into the jaws of death. In lining ourselves up for a killing strike on our boat we were making ourselves very tempting targets for any pirate who wanted to slip behind us and shoot us down.
I remember reading that in the ancient days of Earth—when wars were fought by ranks of men standing shoulder to shoulder instead of by tiny squads of infiltrators backed up by flotillas of autonomous multirole vehicles with heuristic intelligence—the way a battle line fought was to protect the man on your right and hope to hell that the man on your left would be doing the same. I don’t know if that’s remotely true, but it feels like the hunter-fleet is the only place you see that anymore. Where you still have to trust that everybody else is doing their job or else you’re totally fucked.
