“True.” Locke frowned. I definitely wasn’t getting fucked tonight. At least not by them. “The worst of it is, I don’t know which of them I’d rather it was.”
“Wouldn’t you rather it was just an accident?”
Locke laughed a bitter, mirthless laugh. “Certainly not. If it was an accident this ship has structural problems that willprobably destroy us. If it was the captain or Mr. Wolfram, well… that might be managed.”
“And who would be easier to manage?”
I’d not meant it as a trick question, but Locke grew very silent at that. And they didn’t need to say out loud why. Theirs was a mind of tonnages and percentages and bargains. They were a corpo to their little tin heart and though they’d never admit it, that gave them far more in common with pirate scum like Wolfram than with a true believer like A.
“If we are very, very lucky,” they said at last, “there might be a third outcome.”
I left it there, because I was afraid to take it further. Locke would never, under any circumstances, consider mutiny, but as first mate and the appointed (not anointed, funny how different those words are when they’re so close together) representative of Olympus Extraction State they had the theoretical authority to remove the captain from her post, although they’d need cause. Worse, from their perspective, they’d only be able to take that kind of action if they could justify it both to Olympus after the fact and to the crew in the moment. And those two groups had radically different motivations.
Fearing I’d get no more of anything I wanted that evening, I crept back to my bunk. Q was waiting for me, sharpening her knife. That wasn’t a particularly unusual thing for her to be doing—a sharp knife was an important tool on a ship for a whole lot of reasons. But context was everything and it made me uneasy.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Si vis pacem, para bellum.”
I didn’t understand all her words, but I got her tone. “You think things will go badly?”
She shrugged. “Perhaps.”
Since she’d been shot once by a pirate already, I suspected it was Wolfram and his allies she was concerned about, rather than the captain, but maybe that was just me projecting my own wants. “Whatever happens,” I said to her, “keep your head down.”
“Head down?”
“Don’t get involved. Don’t try to be a hero.”
“I do not,” said Q. And then as if she was directly trying to confuse me, she added: “Will.”
Whether that meant she didn’t want to be a hero or that she wouldn’t try because she’d succeed, I had no idea.
“It won’t come to violence,” It was my best not-sure-who-I-was-reassuring voice. “I trust the captain.”
She smiled. “Amor et melle et felle est fecundissimus.”
With that one she’d completely lost me, so I crawled across the bed towards her and laid my head in her lap. “We’ll be okay,” I told her. And I kept telling her, until she set aside her knife and stroked my hair and soothed me until I fell asleep.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-NINEThe Happy Ship
It was unusual for hails to be broadcast internally. Normally they were a private matter between the captain or whichever officer was fielding them, and their opposite number on the other vessel.
Which was why I immediately smelled a rat when Locke’s voice came over comms with the words, “Reading you, Bachelor, request gam and request assistance.”
I nudged Q. “Are you hearing this?”
She was, although whether she was understanding it I couldn’t say.
“What kind of assistance do you need, Pequod?” asked the captain of the Bachelor. Her voice was light and airy, full of the kind of joy you get when you’ve just come to the end of a hard road of toil. Like a hunter-voyage or a really difficult shit.
“Our backup fuel tank breached,” Locke explained. “Your manifests say you’re homeward bound.”
“That we are,” replied the captain of the Bachelor. “Homeward bound and laden down with so much sperm that even the deckhands have stopped laughing at the name.”
“Then would you share a little of your good fortune with us? We can compensate you, of cour—”
