There was no single tipping point. At first, it was just an aesthetic shift. Starry Wisdom iconography began showing up in more and more parts of the ship. That was bad enough in itself because they’d increasingly embraced blood and viscera as artistic media, and while regular head counts of the crew and spot DNA checks by Dr. Pierce confirmed that they at least weren’t usinghumanblood or viscera, it didn’t make for a particularly pleasant working environment.
Then there were the gatherings. The cultists were more likely to move in groups now, and to share talking points not just ontheology, which they always had, but on shipboard policy. They started to agitate for things to happen.
And the first thing they agitated to have happen was for Wolfram and his companions to be released.
Marsh and Truelove and some twenty of their followers, robed in Leviathan leather or bloody polymers, came to the deck in force and descended, while I watched from the shadows, upon the captain’s cabin.
Since the captain’s cabin was biometrically locked and the door was inch-thick steel, this didn’t turn as immediately disastrous as it might have. They demanded she come out via intercom and then, with a surprising amount of restraint for an Armageddon cult, waited for her to emerge.
She could have just stayed below and hoped they’d get bored, and if she’d been in a different mood or if her machine intelligence had been saying something particularly interesting to her (which, I’d learned by then, in practice meant something that particularly reinforced a position she already agreed with), she probably would have.
But they’d caught her on a good day. Or a bad one. Depending on your perspective.
After a mere five or six minutes, the doors to her cabin opened and she rose—like Venus from the waves if you’re feeling classical, like a beast from the sea if you’re feeling more ominous—and ascended the short stairway to the deck, where the deputation from the Cult of the Devouring God pressed in close around her.
She didn’t ask them what they wanted. She didn’t berate them for disturbing her. She didn’t really say anything. She just stood and waited and watched Truelove—Truelove, I noticed, not Marsh—with her gaze steady and her expression impassive.
“It is not for prisoners to be too silent in their words,” said Marsh, his voice soft but carrying even over the storm.
With the captain still looking exclusively at him, Truelove translated: “You’re keeping members of the flock hostage. We’ll stand it no longer.”
I expected a reply from the captain here. I didn’t get one.
“Brother Wolfram,” Truelove went on. “He has repented his evil ways and embraced the teachings of the Church, as have several other former members of his boarding party.”
Once more the captain responded with silence.
“We demand they be released into our care.”
None of the crowd were armed exactly. But the life of a voider is a busy one and hardly a minute goes by when we aren’t fixing something or opening something or cutting something apart. So while they weren’t armed a lot of them had… tools. Tools that could fuck a person up royally if they had to. Or if they wanted to.
This didn’t seem to faze the captain. She just nodded, chased the ghost of a smile, and then said, “Then let us speak with them.”
I followed her, and the crowd that was going with her, down to the brig. Wolfram was lounging on his cot, watching the assembly with a detached expression that read to me as smug.
“These fine people ask that you be released,” the captain told him.
“Let it never be said,” replied Wolfram, “that I stood in the way of giving the people what they want.” Then he shot a wary eye at Truelove and added piously, “Although in the end it makes no odds. The Devourer comes for us all regardless, does it not?”
“Some to the common pulpits,” said Marsh in his usual low and distant tone, “and cry out ‘Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement.’”
The captain pressed the switch on the nearest intercom. “Captain to central, open the brig.”
For a moment there was nothing. Then, “Central; request confirmation,” followed by Locke’s voice saying, “Belay that.”
“Belay nothing,” demanded the captain. “Open the—”
She was cut off by Locke again. “Yousurelycannot have decided to set a gang of pirates loose on the ship.”
“We’re about to enter the Heart,” the captain replied with a certainty that, had I been one of Marsh’s cultists, I would have found concerning. “We will need every good hand.”
This, to Locke, was a terrible answer. “Theyaren’tgood hands. They’re thieves, traitors, scoundrels, and vagabonds.”
In his cell, Wolfram raised his hands in a you-got-me gesture. “I’m all that and more,” he admitted. “But I know my way around a ship and I’m a fair pilot and”—he smiled like a serial killer—“I’ve seen the Truth of Endings, so I’ve no longer got any ambitions you need worry about.”
I’d love to believe that I was the kind of woman who could speak truth to power. Who would grab Truelove by the shoulders and shake him and say something likeThis man is obviously playing you. But who am I kidding, that’s not me and never has been. Besides, why would he believe me? At the end of the day, people are like clouds. We see the shapes in them we want to see.
“Orders?” came the query from Central.
