“If I say no, will it make a difference?”
“I’ve a sense you’re the sort who’ll take a cock if there’s nothing else, but it’s not where your heart lies. And I’m afraid I’m vain enough to want to be wanted for my own sake.”
This was going a bunch of places I didn’t like. So I pivoted. “I’m going to tell the officers what you’re planning.”
“Do. No plan worth making relies on secrecy.”
He was probably bluffing. Not that there was anything I could do about it in the moment. So instead I turned my back on him and tried not to listen to any more of his whispering.
It didn’t entirely work, but I made it to the end of my shift without doing anything I regretted, and at that stage of the voyage, I’d been celebrating far smaller victories.
CHAPTER
SIXTYPaying the Price
The mutiny didn’t happen. Not immediately, anyway, and Wolfram had been infuriatingly right about the captain. I’d told her (and yes, I’d been on my knees at the time, and probably my position hadn’t helped my position if you see what I mean), and she’d been all “He seeks to set his will against mine” but it’s not like shedidanything. I told Locke as well (and yes, I also told them in a sex context, I’d been having a bad week and it was that or the razor blades), and they were more attentive but in a veryI’ll take that under considerationkind of way.
Looking back, it’s almost quaint that I was concerned at all. There I was, in a tin box with monsters within and without, and I was worried about a few voiders with guns.
Two full years had passed. I think. At the very least itfeltlike two full years had passed. Feels like that looking back. Two full years had passed and we were drawing ever closer now to Hell’s Heart. While the hunting was getting better—unquiet skies seemed to bring the beasts out of hiding—the crew were increasingly discontent. More lowerings meant less downtime, and although on an ordinary hunt that would have meant less time to dwell on mutinous thoughts, on this particular voyage it didn’t seem to be shaking out that way. We managed to avoid casualties—permanent ones, at least—but the pall that had hung over the entire voyage was growingheavier by the day and somehow even our victories were tasting hollow.
The growth of the Starry Wisdom hadn’t helped. Where normally every barrel of sperm we wrung from the skies would remind us of the profits we stood to reap when we got back to shore, between Wolfram’s casual reminders about the uneven split of the proceeds and Marsh’s constant talk of oblivion, it was hard to take joy in them.
By this point, Marsh’s congregation had gotten about as big as it was going to get, but while their numbers had stopped increasing, their activities hadn’t. They were growing louder and more influential with every passing day, and those of us who hadn’t fallen under his sway were getting more and more annoyed with those who had.
“Will youplease,” the Pretty Vestal was saying over the mess table to one of the acolytes, “just knock it off while people are trying to eat?”
The acolyte, who I thought was Phobosi but I might have just been making assumptions, replied with a look of pious affront. “I’m only telling you how things are.”
“What if,” I tried, “we all agreed to disagree vis-à-vis the imminent consumption of this ship and by extension the entire cosmos by the Thing That Lies in Wait and focus on getting the boats flight-ready?”
“Get them ready or don’t,” replied the acolyte. “It will make no difference in the end.”
The Pretty Vestal pinched his temples in frustration. “What fucks me off is that you seem so damned happy about it. Like suppose you’re actually right and a horrific space monster devours all of humanity,so what? What do you get out of it?”
To their very limited credit, the acolyte seemed to genuinely think about this. And to their even more limited credit, it felt like they gave an honest answer. “Vindication.”
We didn’t get much further because, to everybody’s relief, an announcement went over comms that a ship had made contact. Which meant that for the first time in a very long while wewere going to get to interact with people we hadn’t been stuck with for literal years.
The ship in question was called the Samuel Enderby, and unusually, A insisted on taking a boat out to meet her before our two ships hooked up for the gam proper. This wasn’t normally necessary either for practical or social reasons, and it only really happened in emergencies. Although what counted as an emergency aboard the Pequod was anybody’s guess.
Since the captain’s boat was crewed by a machine intelligence, she didn’t particularly need anybody to go over with her. But I was in the hangar anyway running tune-ups, so I was able to persuade her to bring me along.
As a pilot, I found riding as passenger, especially passenger to a machine that would almost certainly have been trained to value my life less highly than the property of Olympus Extraction State, a little unnerving. Then again, feeling unnerved and kind of like a passenger was pretty much my entire life when I was near the captain. All our lives, really. The woman was a great tidal current, a rush of wind that carried us with her like a boat in a purposeful sky.
“They have seen the Beast,” she said aloud as we flew across the red-roiling space between our ships.
“They have,” replied the intelligence. “Although their navigational data is inconsistent.”
“Then I shall speak with their captain, and learn the truth of it,” replied A, partly to herself and partly to the intelligence and partly to the sky and whatever lay beyond. “If truth there be in a world of vapors.”
Not quite replying, the intelligence kept up its own commentary, so that I felt like I was listening to two soliloquies that occasionally collided. “Their claims are consistent with prediction. If our data is good, the target is within the Heart.”
“And so after all these years I shall find you, and though it be the last thing I do I shall wring from you a kind of reckoning.”
I was feeling very, very ignored. Of course, my relationship with the captain wasn’t exactly a verbal one and since we wereoutside the ship, we were both dressed in voidsuits which made our usual mode of interaction untenable. For now I contented myself with just sitting and listening to her, and I tried to convince myself that she wasn’t talking like somebody who would 100 percent get us all killed.
And when that failed, I tried to convince myself that I didn’t like it.
