So there I knelt, bare knees on her tatami mats, bare chest on the cold glass of her imaging desk. My neck was craned back at an awkward angle so I could see the full spread of the port windows before me, though it was hard to concentrate with one of the captain’s hands tangled in my hair and the other tracing a map across the naked skin of my back. She’d set her canes aside for now, and though I loved the sound of her voice, I wished she hadn’t.
“I fear that I lose them,” she was saying, partly to me and partly to the ship and partly to the view out the window. We were low, low down now, skimming the surface of the hydrogensea. One of the drugged Leviathans had come down a little way from the great congregation and we had wasted no time in swooping in to collect it.
It was a shame, in a way, because by itself, dead in a habitat neither natural to it nor unnatural, it was a beautiful thing. Wyrms—sky-Wyrms and sea-Wyrms, both sorts exist—swarmed about it in a riot of life that made me think of the oldest scriptures, of how the Father had separated air and land and water and had ordained that there would be things that swam and crawled and flew.
There was divinity in putrefaction, I thought.
“Too many voices,” the captain continued. “Too many voices that are not my own.” She released her grip then and took up one of the scrimshandered switches that she’d so briefly denied me. It stung me like love. “The prisoner still speaks anarchy, and while I would not deny the man his philosophy it is not a part of my design.”
A blow, not quite light enough to be gentle, not quite hard enough to be cruel, landed on my shoulder.
“Then there is Marsh. A sweet boy I thought, and foolish. But now he speaks for the void and the crew listen. Oh how they listen.”
Her lips were by my ear now, her breath hot.
“Do you listen?”
Outside, the boats had been deployed. For sea-work they needed hydrogenous adaptors, which permitted them to skim the surface without being overwhelmed by the cold or the current or the unpredictable electromagnetic phenomena that surged throughout the metallic ocean.
“No,” I managed to reply. “I listen only to you.”
And in that moment it was the truest thing that I had ever said.
To my dismay, the captain hauled me upright and turned me round so I faced her, or at least faced her thighs. I turned my eyes upwards and tried not to look too much like I was begging her to force me down again.
I totally was.
“You are well liked amongst the crew.”
It wasn’t a question so I couldn’t really contradict her. Although given how some of my earliest run-ins had gone, it was at the very least an overstatement. It would have been more accurate to say I’d fucked quite a lot of them. Which in my experience didn’t require them to like me one little bit. So I went with a noncommittal “I hope so.”
“What do they say?” she demanded. “Of me. Of this. Of the mission.”
It was a bad time for her to ask me any kind of question. At least any kind of question that needed an answer more nuanced than “more” or “harder.” Still, I did my best. For her I always would. “It’s been two years,” I reminded her. I think that’s right. It might have been more. Or less. Or never have happened. “You promised a great reward for news of the Beast, but voiders have short memories. And if I’m honest, half the crew’s always thought you were mad.”
She laughed. It was a derisive laugh, but not an unbelieving one. “Then they are in good company, for I have often thought the same myself. Although I have lately come to the conclusion that it is not so.”
“You think you’re sane?”
“I think I am madness maddened. I think that I have seen and have endured such things that a mind must either shatter or be reforged, and I have chosen to be reforged.”
On the whole, not the most reassuring thing she could have said. But by this stage I was already all in on the captain and there isn’t much I could have done.
Like how was I supposed to reply? “Hey, have you considered maybe not?” or “Okay, but why not just finish up this voyage and go home and leave this whole driving-a-spear-through-the-pasteboard-mask-of-the-world deal for other people?” Was I meant to say “Take your last lay and retire and take me with you and do whatever you will to me and do it forever, that’s all I want”?
And would it have been, actually? What I wanted, that is. Let’s be real, I have terrible taste in women and I don’t think I’d have been half as into A as I was if it hadn’t been extremely clear that she’d probably get the lot of us killed. I could never have stopped for death, so she kindly stopped for me.
After longer than was necessary but less than the eternity I yearned for, the captain sent me back to my duties. The drugged beast had already been dragged beneath the ship and made fast—in the chained sense, rather than the claimed sense, though I myself had recently been both.
From there the process of butchering was much as it had always been. I’ve already told you most of how it works. It worked the same way this time. It works the same way today as far as I know. It will probably work the same way a hundred years hence. That’s the thing about going to the sky. The days are long and the years short. It’s an irreplaceable experience where every part is the same and the whole thing is still somehow unique.
For the first time, or the ninth, or the hundredth, Q and I put on our voidsuits and descended the side of the Leviathan to begin carving it apart.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-SEVENAn Extended Cock Joke
Two nuns are in the bath. One says, “Where’s the soap?” and the other one says, “It does, doesn’t it?”
