I’d noticed a shift in the dynamic between Truelove and Marsh in the last couple of weeks. While the harpooner wandered the ship declaiming nonsense, the second mate had taken to following him and listening—really listening—as if he truly believed that a brief soaking in spermaceti had given Marsh a spiritual link to their fucked-up entropy god.
While the crew were gathering on the foredeck to stare at the blasted carcass, the officers and captain came by to make their own assessments.
“Worthless,” announced Locke to the crowd. “There’ll be no oil worth having in something so old and rotted.”
Truelove, who had been listening to Marsh intently throughout the encounter, turned to Locke with what you might call respectful defiance. “There’s more to wealth than oil, and my harpooner says the corpse is a blessing, for all its outward decay.”
I could see the look of contempt in Locke’s eyes. Like me, they’d been raised in the Church, but unlike me, they’d rejected its spiritual teachings entirely and nailed their colors firmly to the mast of pragmatism. “We’re a hunter-voyage, not a prayer group.”
Openly sneering, Truelove turned to A. “What say you, Captain?”
But the captain wasn’t listening. She was staring out at the great white mass of the corpse. “To have come so far,” she was saying entirely to herself, “to be cheated so late, and like this.”
“Captain,” repeated Truelove, “what say you?”
“I’ll not believe it.” She was answering her own question, not Truelove’s. “Not until I have looked in its eyes.”
“Captain?”
“Make ready the boats.”
Lowering for a dead beast was a different experience from lowering for a live one. Different but not necessarily better. In a strange way it felt more dangerous, even though it was less so in every single way possible.
When you went out against a live monster, there were half a dozen ways it could kill you, but you were so aware of that and so ready for it that the adrenaline made you feel at least two-thirds immortal. When the monster was dead already the whole mood was more somber and the grave felt so much closer that it was harder to forget where you were. That you sat in a pressurized cabin above a fall longer than worlds and your job was to butcher gods to sell their blood to pay the price of another day of living.
Or maybe that was just me. Remember, Q was still in medbay at this point, so I was probably getting a bit morbid.
The winds in this part of the sky were intense, and so the floating body of the Leviathan naturally moved as we drew closer to it. But when we were about halfway there, it started to move much less naturally. This kind of corpse normally bobs freely, going this way and that as the unpredictable eddies ofthe Jovian atmosphere dictate, but this one suddenly started drifting with purpose, directly away from us.
“Fuck”—Flint’s voice crackled across comms—“some other bastard is out here.”
Sure enough, as we broke the next cloud bank we saw a small squadron of hunter-boats and, behind them, a great barque decorated in Ganymedian fashion—its hull sleek and its deck picked out in colored lights that seemed incongruously jolly given its grim business. This ship’s boats had harpooned the dead Leviathan from the other side and were now rapidly towing it back to their barque.
Where a few minutes earlier, the crew of the Pequod had been at best indifferent about what looked like an extremely low-value prize, the sudden appearance of competition spurred us on and we opened our throttles to catch up with the other fleet.
“Unidentified ship”—that was the captain—“this is the Pequod. Identify yourselves.”
“This is the Rose Bud.” The voice that came back had a distinct Ganymedian accent. “And we claim this as a loose beast.”
I’ll explain the loose beast thing later. Maybe. Basically it meant anybody could grab it. And they were in the right on this one. They’d gotten to the corpse before we had and speared it fair and square.
Out the larboard side of our cockpit, I saw a single boat break free of our little flotilla. I didn’t quite know who it was, but my money—if I’d had any but as I think I explained right back in chapter one, I was broke when I started this trip—would have been on it being the captain.
“Pequod,” the Ganymedian captain’s voice came through again, “we have claimed this as a loose beast. Withdraw.”
The captain didn’t withdraw. Of course she didn’t withdraw. Instead she asked, as she always asked, “Hast seen the Möbius Beast?”
“Pequod, please repeat.” The Ganymedian captain clearly had no idea what she was talking about.
“Hast seen a beast, long as your ship and white as Europan ice?”
There was a pause and then the Ganymedian’s voice came back. “We’re towing one?”
Comms were dead but I could hear the captain’s disbelief in the dead air. If this was truly the Möbius Beast, passed from natural causes and towed off by a dilettante captain who had never even heard of it, the realization might actually break her. And that thought, for a moment, ruined me. I wasn’t quite far enough gone that I didn’t realize the captain’s obsession with the Möbius Beast was all kinds of fucked up, but sometimes life took you to a place where fucked up was all you had and if you lost it you became a healthy, well-adjusted void that collapsed in on itself with a scream so loud that nobody could hear it.
I didn’t want that for her.
“Pequod”—the Ganymedian seemed to be losing patience—“move away from our prize.”
