Down in the engineering bay, Lobscouse was waist-deep in a maintenance hatch fixing one of the perennial things-that-needed-fixing.
“Engineer.” The captain rarely sounded amused, but this time she sounded like she lived in a world where amusement had never existed.
“Captain?” He didn’t look up. Then again, given how his ocular system worked I wasn’t sure he needed to.
“You are to make me a harpoon, according to the specifications I conveyed.”
He still wasn’t looking up, which was beginning to seem less like a quirk of his physiology and more like intentional defiance. “Will do, once the paperwork clears.”
“There will be no paperwork. You will do as I command.”
“Not with ship’s resources I won’t.” And now, at last, the engineer hauled himself out of the hatch, his tendrilous handslatching on to the floor in two dozen places and supporting him as he rose. “Not unless you authorize the payment through the proper channels.”
The proper channels meant Locke, who was pretty much the only person on the ship with a head for figures.
“You understand,” said the captain, “why I need the spear.”
“You’re hunting a monster that’s never been caught and that has killed more folk than I can count—and remember, I’m an engineer so you’d better hope I count well—and who took your leg off you the last time you lowered for him. You want to chase death, be my guest, but you’ll not do it with ship’s metal unless you pay for it. In full. In advance.”
All this talk of payment was comforting to the part of me that still rested safe in the bosom of the Church of Prosperity. But it was deeply unsettling to the much larger part that was the captain’s creature.
She was looking at the engineer now with the disbelief she always reserved for people who refused to be swept into her wake. “The sky took from you, as it took from me. Why do you remain so sanguine? You should want to see blood spilled in the clouds as much as I.”
The lights on Lobscouse’s eyepiece flicked out, then on. “Why? Because I lost some parts? I got them back again and still made a decent living after deductibles.” He flexed his tendrils. “It’s an improvement in a lot of ways.”
Now the captain’s expression was going from disbelief to contempt. “You made yourself a better tool for your masters and paid for the privilege. Live that way if you will, engineer, but I will not. Make the lance.”
Without giving him time to reply, she turned and swept out. I tried not to find it majestic, but I didn’t try very hard.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-SEVENThe Harpoon
A won in the end. She always won.
Okay, she always won except in the only confrontation that really mattered to her and even then I’m not totally sure. I suppose it depends on what you think she was trying to achieve.
“It’s a Temple lance,” Dawlish explained to me. “Least that’s what it’s called on the hunt. Its name on the patent is the Skyresh Toggled Lance mk17 (a) twelfth iteration.”
“Why Temple?” I asked. I felt a bit of a fool for asking. In so much of the hunt I was still basically a virgin.
“The patent calls it the Skyresh after Skyresh Toys and Munitions, the company that officially invented it. We call it the Temple, after the man who actually did.”
He was telling me this while the crew was gathering on the aft deck. The captain had something to say to us, apparently, but she was taking her sweet time getting started and I didn’t really want her to. It felt too much like sharing. “What was his deal?”
“Criminally indentured,” Dawlish replied. “Same as me. Hence his name not being on it.”
“What did he do?”
“Displayed immunity to the HVL8 pathogen. Immunity that could be traced to genetic markers that had been patented by a subsidiary of Aphrodite Pharma State.”
That had been sloppy of him. It wasn’t particularly uncommon for people to inherit proprietary genes, but a basic survival tactic was making sure that you didn’t let anybody know you had them or else the karyotic police would come knocking.
But our discussion of material history was cut off by the captain finally starting her address. Even in the short time since she’d made the commission, the atmosphere on the ship had declined. The star cult had continued to grow, in influence if not in number, and their weird biological graffiti was getting more and more common while the maintenance robots were getting less and less inclined to clean them up, possibly because their learning algorithms were coming to see them as a normal part of the ship’s structure. So now she stood above the crew on boards half slick with gore, holding a new, wicked spear aloft like a scepter.
“Shipmates,” she called down to us, “this is the weapon I will use to strike down the Möbius Beast.”
I was concerned but, perhaps, unsurprised to see that this announcement was met primarily with apathy. We’d been on the boat a long while, and the thrill of hunting legends had long since given way, for most of the crew, to a yearning for home and a break from the sky, and at least some kind of payout.
