A lesser speaker would have been knocked off her rhythm by this. The captain was not a lesser speaker. “I know that my ways have been, at times, strange. I know that this is not an ordinary voyage—though I ask you all to ask yourselves,How much have ordinary voyages profited you?”
That got a better response. There wasn’t a soul on the ship, even the relatively well-off ones with the decent lays, who didn’t feel a nebulous sense that they should be getting more than they presently had.
“I know too,” she went on, “that many amongst you have opened your eyes to new and terrible truths in your time aboard this vessel, and though I cannot walk your path beside you, I would ask that there be accord between us.”
There was more enthusiasm now, but also more unease. The Starry Wisdomers made up a sight less than half the crew and it didn’t feel great to those of us whoweren’tservants of a malevolent star-god to see them so nakedly pandered to.
“Come forth, Marsh.”
I’d been on intimate terms with the captain for actual years now, and I’d been privy to some of her most private thoughts—admittedly mostly because she soliloquized them to the window while she was fucking me—but even I’d not expected this. Marsh walked through his followers and, Truelove trailing behind him, ascended the steps to stand beside the captain. And if her calling him out had surprised me, what happened next promoted that surprise into shock.
She knelt.
She knelt and raised up the harpoon on her palms like she was in some old painting of a surrendering general.
“I give this lance now to the anointed representative of the Devouring God,” she declared, “and I ask humbly for His blessing.”
This was an angle. It had to be an angle. Somebody who would leap down the throat of a nightmare made flesh because it wronged her wouldn’t bow before another nightmare made flesh unless she was getting something out of it.
Wordlessly, Marsh took up the harpoon, and two of his followers came forward with rough Leviathan-bone bowls full of rank-smelling biological mush. Dipping his hands in the mess of not-exactly-meat, he daubed it in haphazard strokes over the weapon. “Let them lay by their helmets and their spears,” he said, and his followers gave a sharp intake of breath as if it meant something, “and both return back to their chairs again.”
The captain rose gracefully, snatched back the harpoon, and then faced the mob. “I take this blessing,” she said, “with a full heart, and knowing the worth of it.”
The applause that came from the crowd was strange, because it began with the Wisdomers, clapping in just slightlytoo much unison, so that it felt more like a pulse than a roar. Then, because applause tended to be contagious, it was caught up by other crew members and spread through the crowd in ripples that resounded off the dome but didn’t quite drown out the sound of the storm.
And definitely didn’t drown out the sound of the explosion.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-EIGHTStarving
Redundancy is the name of the game aboard a hunter-barque. Redundancy on redundancy wherever possible. It’s a running joke in the fleet that most captains would take a duplicate ship if they thought they could manage it. The mission is long and takes the ship months or years out from any form of repair or resupply save what the crew can improvise from the remains of their prey.
Which meant that as well as a fuel tank, the Pequod had a backup fuel tank, and a backup-backup fuel tank.
It was the backup that ruptured.
In a lot of ways that was the worst-case scenario. The main fuel tank was mostly depleted thanks to the demands of the voyage and the backup-backup was half the size of the other two owing to how rarely it was needed.
And itwasrarely needed. I might have been new to the fleet, but I listened well and read better, and so I knew that it should have been practically impossible for the backup fuel tank to be lost when it wasn’t in operation. It was heavily armored, which meant it was unlikely to be punctured by anything short of a warship, an angry Leviathan, or an orbital collision. Mechanical malfunction was a risk with the main tank because it was being regularly used, but the backup was only in operation for maintenance cycles and those cycles were almost by definition closely monitored by maintenance crews.
Then again those crews were mostly automated, and the automated systems seemed to be going increasingly weird, so it’s not inconceivable that they’d decided to make some helpful but unsupported upgrades to the system under the influence of the ship’s ever more erratic environmental prompts.
“It was sabotage,” Locke speculated aloud while I did my best to distract them from the ship’s current problems and convince them that fucking me rigid was a much better use of their time. It sometimes worked these days but not when the ship had a crisis. And crises, unfortunately, were getting really common.
“Sabotage by who?” I asked. I could think of multiple answers, none of them good.
“Her,” they said. “Or him.”
I didn’t really need to ask who her or him were. “It wouldn’t be the captain,” I said, probably too defensively. “She needs the ship in working order to take us into the Heart.”
“Does she?” Locke looked the kind of doubtful that fundamentally rational people got when trying to comprehend fundamentally irrational minds. “Or does she need us desperate?”
“A desperate crew will want to turn back.”
“Desperate people are unpredictable,” Locke countered. “And the captain seems to have gained a liking for the unpredictable. The crew is getting less and less convinced that hunting a beast from myth that might kill them all is good business, even with her offering up her lay.”
They weren’t necessarily wrong. “Perhaps, but she’s not the only one with plans. And a pirate seems more likely to be playing the chaos card than somebody who’s already getting what they want.”
