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From Hell's heart I stab at thee!
Without the unpredictable presence of Pile, Ahab's cabin had settled once more into a grim, funereal atmosphere. Though it was, in theory, the most comfortable room aboard, there was no cushion soft enough, lamp bright enough, or meal big enough to obscure the suffocating tension that infused Ahab and his demesne. Since thePelkot's arrival at Sirius, he had sequestered himself in those lonely quarters, ostensibly for the purpose of mending the broken Pan Bass. Mended it he had, though this task had in truth only taken an hour or two. The rest of his time in that oversized, comfortable coffin had been spent monomaniacally tracking the white whale as it approached, and checking and re-checking calculations of its arrival time and place.
Struck and Flak had each intruded on his solitude once or twice, to relay to him the ship's surveys of the system so that he might update the relevant charts, but the captain clearly resented these intrusions, and they had ceased soon enough. It was plain that Ahab did not particularly care for the sizes, paths, and positions of Sirius or its small companion, nor the few comets and asteroids that the navigators had spotted in orbit around one or the other. Surely there would eventually prove to be a planet in the vicinity, but even that would only be of any use to him as a likely destination for the white whale, and therefore a place it could be ambushed. All his grand talk of winning the space race, and all the joy it had seemed to bring him, had evaporated, leaving only a hardened precipitate of single-minded vengeance, like the brilliant yet tumorous pearl that can only be pried from the flesh of a giant Europan oyster by splitting its adamant shell fatally open.
Though he no longer had an appetite for things so base as food, Ahab nonetheless forced himself to feed, lest his inevitable contest with the fated whale be undermined by an empty stomach. He cut the meat as if it had slighted him personally, chewed the hardtack with force to rival a shark, and bit the citrus slice with such displeasure that one might think he preferred the scurvy. It was customary on vessels like thePelkot for the mates and harpooners to dine with their captain, but his monolithic presence had made it increasingly intolerable as the voyage ranged further and further afield. Now, it seemed, none would dare to cross his threshold in search of dinner. None, it seemed, but Stalu.
"Captain?" he asked, standing at the now-open door.
"Stalu," Ahab grunted, looking up from his plate but otherwise unmoving.
"Might I dine with thee?"
"'Tis thy right as first mate."
Taking this as assent, Stalu advanced, closed the door behind him, and settled across the table from his captain. Though he hadn't used it since their foray through… the other place, his usual place had nonetheless been set. Struck and Flak's, he noticed, had not. Stalu wasted no time in filling that plate from the bowls and platters still steaming lightly at the table's center. For some time thereafter, there was no sound but the two men's chewing and the scrape of their cutlery. Only once that sound had been reduced by half could Stalu bear to look at the captain. First he looked at the other man's plate, still half full. He sighed. Then he met Ahab's eyes, squinted with impatience.
"Captain-" he began.
"If ye have come to dissuade me, then ye have come for nothing."
Stalu shook his antlered head. "Nay, captain. I know thou art unmoving. And besides, we have reached our goal. What dissuading is left to do? Thy methods proved effective, and we far outpaced our adversary at no cost but Pile's life, and the chance to have pleasant dreams again. You were right, captain, and I was wrong to defy thee."
"And yet ye do not carry thyself like one come to admit defeat."
Stalu sighed again, wiped his mouth, and set his cutlery aside. "No, captain. I have come to plead."
Ahab scoffed.
"Listen, will you, captain? For how many years have I loyally served thee?"
"Twenty or more, by my account."
"And in all that time, have I not earned a single ear, bent to an honest conversation? I have protested all along this way, and all along it thou hast shouted over me. What have I done to deserve such treatment? If I be wrong, as indeed I have thus far been, would you at least afford your foremost mate a full consideration? Or do you no longer trust your right-hand man?"
Ahab grunted and leaned back in his creaking chair. "Very well, Stalu. I shall hear thee out."
Stalu nodded. "Thank you, sir." He took a last sip of his drink, then cleared his throat. "Now, Captain Ahab, I must beseech you to abandon your vengeful hunt."
Ahab's fists clenched hard, but to his credit, he did not do as Stalu had expected by springing from his seat and using them to beat or rout him. Thus encouraged, the first mate continued.
"We have already accomplished a mighty deed unlike any before us. Glory is ours, as is this star system and all that it holds. Were I the captain of this vessel, I would be tempted to retire on such an accomplishment!"
"That is why ye arenot captain," Ahab quietly warned. "Ye would do best to remember that."
"Aye, sir, I know. I have not come to mutiny thee, for I have not the heart or the power." Stalu raised both hands, to show that neither was clenched 'round the sword at his belt — though indeed the right had been, before he had steeled himself to open the cabin door.
Thus assuaged, Ahab nodded. Stalu went on.
"But still stands my point: that I, and every soul aboard but thine and perhaps that of thy inscrutable shadow, is content with the victory already won. Further, we are afright of losing it, should our clash with the whale end unluckily."
Stalu had expected an outburst at this insinuation of his captain's fallibility, but Ahab only held the same piercing glare. In a way, that was more upsetting.
"In short, captain, I think it better than our current course to complete the claiming of this system, then use our lead on the whale to avoid it altogether. Then perhaps we might return another voyage, with settlers and miners and more fighting-ships in tow, to truly solidify our hold. But if we are destroyed or sunk, even if yonder Pan Bass becomes damaged again in the battle, this time beyond the point of repair, we shall be stuck here 'til our deaths, and unable to re-pave the crumbling road of our wake for future Fae or our own rescuers. So much has been gained, but in hunting this white whale, ye stand to lose it all. Such risk seems, ah… with all due respect, captain, it seems quite foolish."
One corner of Ahab's mouth twitched, rising from a scowl to what might have been half a smirk. "Or mad?"
Stalu nodded solemnly. "Perhaps, sir."
Ahab eyed him intently for one more second, then — to the first mate's surprise — hung his head.
"Aye, Stalu. I am mad. But just as ye are my crew, and thePelkot my ship, these are extensions of Ahab, and sharers of that madness, no matter how they like it. Certainly Ahab does not. Would that my leg were returned, and my honor with it. Would that I were not drawn to the one that took it like a hanged man up the gallows. But such have the stars been set, and not even Ahab can wrestle fate."
Now Stalu felt his own fists clenching. "Thou speaks of thy crew as if one body, but what of those thatare thy flesh and blood? Hast thou not a family?"
The lines of Ahab's weathered face grew ever deeper. "Aye, though at times it feels less than true. Forty years and more I have lived a sailor, and how much of it at home? Not a tenth, I tell you. Less. Were it not for this clumping leg, I doubt my son would even know me if I returned from this voyage to greet him. Can a father really call himself that, when his son does not? Can a lover, when his love spends nine-tenths her life widowed by the sea? Nay, I say. Nay." Slowly, his fists unclenched, revealing bloodied nails. One hand closed round the edge of the table, as it to grip it for support. A gold ring shone around one of its fingers. "If any true love I can be said to have, she is this ship. And if any true son I have… " Ahab's eyes, now softer than any had ever seen them, rose to meet Stalu's. "It is thee, Stalu." His other hand extended towards the young man, palm up, back resting on the wood.
Stalu stared back. This, among all the potentially fair and foul outcomes of this conversation, he had not anticipated. Uncomfortable with the alien kindness — theweakness — on his captain's face, Stalu looked away, down to the extended hand of friendship and family. He felt his next words rise like bile, and reflexively, he coughed them up.
"And thou wouldst throw thy son overboard, when all he asks is caution and consideration, when all he has done is care?"
The hand closed. As if hurt, it retracted. Ahab looked away.
"Aye," he whispered. "I would."
Stalu stood. "Then we have nothing else to say."
"Indeed."
Stalu adjusted his jacket, then nodded. "Captain."
"First mate."
And Stalu left.
In the grim silence of the cabin, none remained to see the single tear that ran from Ahab's eye. None but Fetateuthis, who silently crept from a shaded corner and, with one delicate, curious tendril, wiped it away.
"Land ho!" came the cry from the masthead. Much shouting and scrambling followed, the noise of which was more than sufficient to draw Ahab from his benighted chambers. The ruckus calmed around him as he proceeded to the bow. Through an unbroken spyglass on indefinite loan from Flak, Ahab peered one squinting eye in the direction the lookouts indicated. Far off that way, he sighted a speck of light, still too small to show any details but too large to be a distant star, with perhaps a hint of red to the shade of its shine.
"That way, then," he ordered, with little enthusiasm. "Fetch me when 'tis close enough to see with my own aged eyes." At that, he stumped irritably back to his cabin. It was some time before Ahab's set condition was met; though thePelkot hurtled through the void far faster than it could across water, propelled as it was by accelerating wind always faster than the ship itself, any speed short of sailing off-road was pitiful before the staggering size of the Outer Ocean. None dared complain, though, as none had any particular eagerness to sail off-road again any time soon. For days, the new planet hovered off the bow, growing larger and brighter with greater and greater speed as the ship accelerated toward it. It expanded from a bright, reddish point to a small, reddish circle, and eventually a disk no bigger than a thumb at arm's length.
By this distant look, and by looks made closer with magically-magnified spyglasses, it looked to be a giant world, shrouded in endless clouds so darkly red that they were almost purple. Soon, it had grown large and close enough that the mates — through a ritual not unlike Ahab's constant tracking of the whale, but with much lesser speed and precision, owing to the lack of a contagion link — were able to estimate its distance, and thereby its true size. It seemed that this newly-discovered body was a bit larger than great Jupiter, though the gravity-compasses linked to the down-spell suggested a weight many times that.
"'Tis no planet at all," Ahab muttered, scowling at the bruised mass of it one evening. "This be a stillborn star. Look," he said, pointing to the side of the looming body not lit by blazing Sirius. "Mark you that glow, as if a continent of coal smoldered 'neath the violet smoke? There is fire at the heart of this thing, though it be yet too weak to light the whole sphere ablaze like yon Sirius or its other companion. Perhaps this be a young star, an egg of sorts, waiting for some natal eon to pass before it bursts alight. Or perhaps it be a corpse, robbed of body and all but the cinders of a soul by some cosmic calamity. But nay, says I — there is a mood of tragedy about it. A hole in the weave of fate, where a lively and wholesome future might have been, had these companion stars not aligned as they did. Had it not, in the endless seas of the universe, crossed paths with such a gigantic and hungry whiteness as Sirius and had all the food of growth snipped away, and with it all ability to give light or warmth to the barren moons caught in its well… "
And indeed, as if called to heel by Ahab's musings, a planet — no more than a bright crescent, the tip of a tiny fingernail — at that very moment was seen to emerge from behind the still star that had until then eclipsed it. Ahab gave the order to sail for it, according to quick calculations he made of its speed and where it might be by the time they reached it.
"Haste, men, haste! Less than two days before the whale is upon us!"
For all his cries of haste, Ahab himself seemed in no hurry to explore the newfound planet, doubtless because the white whale's aberrant bulk had left no room for anything else in his mind. He took some minutes to scan its cratered surface with the spyglass, but it was to his eye and all others no more than a scorched and blasted rock, shrouded in orange clouds of unbreathable air, without even any active volcanoes to break up the silent monotony. Still, it was a place, and with the proper Name anchored to it, it would have the makings of a Place. Then future ships would be able to sail to it by less wild and perilous means, and perhaps even render it habitable after a generation or two of the same mighty geomancy that had made the Second Hytoth into a second home for those long-ago pilgrims from Earth.
Traditionally, the captain of a vessel wielded the same Naming rights over newly discovered planets as he did newly created pocket-seas; but Ahab showed no more regard for this tradition than he had any of the other proper behaviors of the starry sea. When thePelkot completed its slow descent through the new planet's thin orange atmosphere and dropped anchor on its dull gray surface, Ahab flatly proclaimed "I shan't set foot on this drab isle, for I have but one foot to set," and bequeathed the responsibilities of Naming and claiming to his first mate. So it was that Stalu in one whaleboat, and the other mates in others, with not quite half the crew spread between them, descended to the cold stone face of a new world. The whaleboats touched down, kicking up small plumes of dust like small, slow meteors. After the landing, the crew who'd made the descent waited respectfully for their captain — or, in this unusual case of his merciful absence, the first mate — to take the first small step.
Stalu stood at the prow of his whaleboat, a furled flagpole in one hand, and looked at the surface of this new world with less enthusiasm than anyone in his position likely ever had. He used his other hand to conjure a small personal atmosphere, then, with a sigh, took a giant leap for Faekind. The other mates slowly followed suit, as did the few others among the crew who were talented enough to provide themselves some air. They milled about, making footprints or dust angels, enjoying the high jumps made possible by this world's lighter and more natural gravity, tossing rocks at each other, and otherwise taking joy in the first solid ground they'd seen in years. Stalu, meanwhile, took big steps towards the nearest crater, which seemed easily large enough to fit the whole moon of Mab inside. He stood there for a long time, gazing deep into the hazy shadows that hid the bottom of that stony pit, headless of the sailors gallivanting behind him.
Eventually, Struck noticed his friend there, lingering at the precipice. Cautiously, he approached.
"Everything alright?" he asked, placing one hand on the first mate's shoulder.
Stalu crinkled his noise at the smell of Struck's pipe-smoke, now infiltrating his own breathing space. Rather than answer the second mate, he took a step back and took the flagpole in both hands. He contemplated it for a silent moment, then looked up across the vast crater.
"Bare and nameless planet," he said, with a steady diction far softer than Ahab's thunderous pronouncements but still with its own sort of borrowed power, like a boulder carried by a flood, "thou art cold and lifeless, a home to nothing and no-one. A hard, rough, unwelcoming, inhospitable world. But there is strength in thee still; stone untouched by weather, iron unmarked by rust. And despite thy chill, thou yet burns, scalded hot by the great white light, and the dull smolder of thy dead parent. The sun's wind has blasted and ruined thee, before thou ever had a chance to thrive. But now that we have found thee, now that thou is no longer lost and isolated from all civilization, perhaps others may come after us, and with their ministrations turn thy cold rock face to a world more warm and welcoming. A new home, full of life and happiness and peace. That is what I wish for thee, and what by this conquest I grant. And so with this flag I claim thee in the name of Queen Mab, Immortal Tyrant and God-Queen of the Earth and Stars, Mother of Empires, Conqueror of the Universe, and so forth, and so forth, and in that name, I give thee thine, and by it subjugate thee. Now and forevermore, I Name thee Ahab."
At that, Stalu raised the flagpole and, with all the force he might use to lance the vitals of a boarded space whale, drove it into the dark dust of the planet Ahab's surface. With a wave of one hand, he set about it a breeze that unfurled the cyan banner of the Mabbite Moons, marked with a dark ring for each of the Isles that she claimed — though even Stalu knew she had never fully ruled them all, and certainly did not today. The Name's power hummed through the struck ground, ringing up through the feet and personal atmospheres of the men who stood upon it. They watched the flag flutter in that fleeting breeze, until, turning slowly overhead, the light of Sirius moved behind the loomingPelkot and cast its dark shadow back over them. Stalu looked up at it, muttered something only he heard, and set a path back to the whaleboats. Struck looked to him with questioning eyes, but saw no answers.
When they once more boarded thePelkot, Captain Ahab — who had not left his post at the starboard rail, nor lowered the spyglass from his eye, nor wavered from that whaleward direction — absently asked his first mate, "Well? What did ye call it?"
"Ahab," came the answer.
The captain knew, from the weight of it, that he was not being addressed. With some thought, he lowered the spyglass, but did not turn to face the accusing gaze of the one who'd uttered it. Quietly, he replied.
"'Tis an accursed name."
"Aye," answered Stalu, and continued on.
With the claiming and Naming out of the way, the next order of business aboard thePelkot was to lay a trap for the approaching whale. The shadow of Planet Ahab seemed as good a place as any for the ship to lay in wait; the dead, red-violet star hanging motionless in its sky was by far the most visible object in the system besides Sirius and its bright companion, and spyglass scans of the sky had failed to identify any other planets around it. Ahab stomped back and forth along and across the deck, shadowed always by Fetateuthis, and always keeping one eye to the sky and the other to the crewmen that he would beat and berate if they failed to move with adequate speed or enthusiasm. The anchor was raised, and the ship ascended until she could see the whole curve of the planet spread out below, mirroring the bulk of the aborted star overhead. Men were to stay on the mastheads at all times, and more at every rail, constantly scanning the expanse for even a hint of white.
With all on-deck lights extinguished, the dark wood of thePelkot's hull and masts would be nearly invisible in the planet's shadow, as would the black-dyed sails she had exchanged her white ones for, to retain propulsion without compromising stealth; but the pallid hide of the hated whale would stand out like a moving star in the light of the alien sun. In one way, this was a blessing; other whales could use the many tiny symbionts dwelling in their coral shells to turn their backs as black as the background, a defense that made most whale hunts a complicated game of cat and mouse. The white one, its hide bleached by incredible age, could not engage in such. Yet the whiteness of the whale was also a curse, for everything it lacked in subtlety was made up for in ferocity.
Few indeed were the sailors who would not have known the ice-cold grip of fear at the sight of that pale hulk gliding toward them like a phantom of death. The few ships that survived their battles with that eldest of the space whales emerged invariably escaped with lost crew, shattered whaleboats, or stoven hulls. Even the mightyPelkot, with deific Ahab at its helm, had only narrowly escaped its prior clash with the white whale. Ahab, it seemed, had never done so; to him, every moment since the loss of his leg and the mortal settling of their score marked not a reprieve, but a brief and infuriating lull in the war that would rage in his mind and soul until both were either quenched or extinguished.
By this time, Ahab was tracking the whale almost continuously, whenever he was not using his leg-staff to walk. Less than a day after their brief and only landing, the captain finally declared what all aboard had been anticipating and dreading since their arrival in the system:
"It's here! It's here, blast it! Dropped out of hyper-speed near the companion, and heading this way! Battle stations, men, keep watch, keep watch! Fetateuthis, to the mainmast with me!"
While others scrambled to ready their harpoons, lances, and whaleboats, Ahab rose to the top of the mainmast in Fetateuthis's arms and — with no protest from the hastily scrambling man he replaced — seized hold of the iron ring thereupon. With one hand and one foot, the one he'd been born with, he clung to the masthead. The other hand held tight the spyglass, pointed always in the same way that his ivory leg extended, out over the deck, out into space, out toward the place where, on the other side of the solar system, his nemesis swam unaware of the bloody vengeance that had followed it to this far-flung star.
Occasionally, he shouted updates down the mast, carrying his voice on the same wind that slowly stirred the sails to keep the ship in proper position. Though the whales could double or even triple the speed of light with the help of their crustaceous hyperdrives, flight at such speed was necessarily blind, and therefore both unproductive and dangerous when exploring unfamiliar systems. The white whale had slowed accordingly to a more careful but still staggering velocity that, by Ahab's measurements and calculations, would put it in sight of thePelkot within a day.
Of the many tense and trying hours that had elapsed since the ship's last sight of Sol, those that intervened the landing on planet Ahab and the white whale's arrival were the most so. Scarcely could anyone bear to talk, so shadowed were they by the monomaniac captain overhead and the unseen spacebeast gliding toward them across the gulf.
When the cry finally came, it hit at once as a deep relief and a bell-toll of terror. Now, at least, the men could set their dreadful thoughts aside and let their well-practiced bodies take command.
"There she blows!" Ahab bellowed. "Straight off the starboard, coming 'round the planet!" And so it was; a mere speck of white, the whale's blanched belly scattering Sirius's shine into space, as it orbited the planet it could now never be the first to claim. The crew sprang into action. The black sails filled with a hot, howling wind, like the breath of a beast that would dwarf even the whale. By adjustments to its gravity spell, the ship sank lower in the sky so the whale wouldn't spot its star-blotting silhouette against the darkened planet, but the whale itself would be clearly visible to the sailors' dark-adjusted eyes against the dimly glowing star.
In less than a quarter of an hour, the approaching whale passed into the planet's shadow and winked out of easy sight, but Ahab, watching it constantly and guided by the magical pull of his leg, still kept sight of its starry silhouette. At his orders, the ship was slowed and brought around so its bow pointed the same way the whale was heading. It seemed to be circling the new world's equator, perhaps searching for a suitable landing point, though such searching would be useless on the benighted side of the sphere — and hopefully, therefore, the attentions of the whale were not directed downward.
Though no sound could have traveled across the vacuum between thePelkot's airy shroud and the body of the whale, it still felt taboo to transgress the tension with insolent speech. The sailors merely waited at their stations, the mates and harpooners in their whaleboats, silently tracking Ahab at the masthead as his spyglass slowly, slowly, like the head of a sunflower, tracked the whale's dark silhouette up, up, and up, until…
Like an inverted eclipse, the whale's dark outline glided into view. Directly beneath the ship, the planet Ahab was a black marble, featureless. Above, the gassy surface of the brown dwarf was lit with stripes of pink and orange in Sirius's rays. But directly overhead, where the planet's shadow fell upon its parent, only the deep red glow of slow fusion in its depths set the clouds aglow. And there, at the center of that smoldering circle, loomed the silent shape of the whale.
"Launch!" Ahab ordered, already gliding down to his own whaleboat in Fetateuthis's arms. As soon as his mismatched feet touched its boards, it and the other three detached from where they hung across thePelkot's rail, and with magical nudges of wind and gravity from their pilots, lifted toward their prey. Over each whaleboat was thrown a great tarpaulin, its canvas enchanted to match the color of its surroundings and thereby provide an extra layer of camouflage. Each boat's mate, also its pilot, peered out from below the tarp near the bow to see and steer, but the hulking harpooners would remain hidden beneath until it was their time to strike.
Quickly but carefully, the whaleboats rose, slowly turning to keep their concealing tarpaulins facing toward the whale. It grew larger and larger, too large to be believed, more than five times the length of the twenty-foot whaleboats and as many times as wide. The turrets on its flanks rose like the squat towers of a castle wall; its fins could have roofed houses; the span of its flukes was twice thePelkot's beam, and they sat as far from the tip of its monstrous snout as her stern did from the bowsprit. To see such a thing in slow, silent motion, armored body rippling with titanic muscle, was almost too much to bear — or it would have been, for a crew less seasoned. The stalwart mates and savage harpooners felt surprisingly little fear as their little boats neared the leviathan; practice had smoothed their panic into patience, and Ahab's mad charisma had flattened their doubts into determination.
When they were still some one hundred feet below the belly of the whale, just outside the range of its mysterious senses, Ahab signaled the boats to a stop. They turned slowly, pointing their bows up at the beast still swimming obliviously by. Then, as one, the concealing tarpaulins were swept aside, and the mighty harpooners — iron-gray Kikuwe with his scrimshawed tusks, one-eyed, blue Taketo, and warty green Dako with pointed nose and claws — rose, all wielding wicked harpoons tipped with hardest adamant, shod in darkest wood, and sharpened to impossible points. Ahab raised not his own harpoon, forged of mystic irrilite and quenched in the blood of the Voruteuth that pulsed and twisted behind him, but a single hand. For a brief, long moment, they hovered there on the precipice, the point of no return beyond which a battle with the whale could not be avoided; but in that instant, all realized that the true point of no return had not been this single second at all, nor the time of their arrival in this system, nor even their departure from Mab, and perhaps not even the day they first set foot aboard thePelkot; no, this confrontation had been coming since the moment of Ahab's birth, and by binding their own threads to his, these men had all fated themselves to the same screaming path. The thought was, in that moment, strangely comforting.
Then Ahab's hand lowered, and with bestial roars, the horned harpooners hurled their weapons across the void. The harpoons hurtled onward, deadly course unhampered by air or gravity, until they were lost in the whale's dim shadow. Less skilled harpooners might have feared that they'd missed.
Then the weapons struck home with the force of meteors, and there could be no mistaking it. Each one knifed through the whale's armor and bit deep into muscle and bone. Not deep enough to kill, no, but that was not the purpose of this first ambushing volley. As the iron missiles sank into their target, the cold iron glowed red with mighty magic — and, as they finally came to rest in torn and ragged wounds, flashed bright in the dark. The magic of the harpoons fixed them in space with an unfathomable inertia, like unwanted weighty anchors to drag the spacebeast down. So long as those cruel spikes stayed buried in its body — and only with much time and difficulty could they be removed, when their immense weight bound them in place as surely as their bloody barbs — the whale would be too slow and heavy to return to hyperspeed; that is, too slow and heavy to get away.
The white whale turned its fins, raising one and lowering the other, and in so doing telekinetically rolled itself to the right. At the same time, the psychic organ in the whale's head emitted aclick that painfully hummed in the heads of all present, who from that invasive headache knew that they had been detected. Through the huge glass porthole of the whale's right eye, the whalers below could see a Yeren weapons officer, grafted to a seat of living ivory. At his thought, the three starboard turrets swiveled and their barrels pulsed with anticipation.
"Brace!" Ahab shouted, his voice magically roaring in the ears of his companions, even across the intervening void. The mates lowered their lances — each a spear-tipped staff taller than its bearer, with a line of runes along its length — and dropped to their knees, calling with their words a shield of force before the bows of their whaleboats, and not a moment too soon.
In unison, the whale's turrets throbbed, launching long tendrils tipped with huge, venomous teeth. One sailed harmlessly past Stalu's boat and rebounded as if made of rubber; another struck Struck's shield and bounced away, coiling with redirected momentum; but the last, fired from the closest turret to the whale's tail, found a weak point in Flak's shield and shattered it. The tooth missed the shortest mate's head by a foot but impaled Dako in the chest. He screamed, first in pain, and then in utter agony as the countless pores in the projectile fang pumped his body full of hypergolic chemicals borrowed from the bombardier beetle. Then it ripped away in an explosion of steam, and the spray of Dako's boiling blood and flesh and scalded Flak into unconsciousness.
Immediately, Stalu swerved his boat towards that one to rescue Flak before the spells sustaining his air and gravity failed. Ahab intercepted him with a bark, though, and discipline crushed his momentary mercy. There would be time for rescue when the whalers were no longer fighting for their own lives.
"Turrets!" Ahab bellowed. "Kikuwe rear, Taketo center!" And to make up for the lack of Dako, Ahab raised his own harpoon as well. Those wielded by Kikuwe and Taketo lacked the portentous origin of Ahab's but were no less magical. As each left the grip of its thrower, its mass was transmuted to a bolt of glowing plasma — lightning, thrown from mortal hands! Their aim was unerring, and the flight of the bolts elapsed in less than an eyeblink. They solidified again mere inches from their targets, yet retained much of the thunderbolt's fiendish speed, charge, and temperature. They smote the whale's hide with all the fury of the divine, of Ahab, and reduced two turrets to red ruptures of burnt, boiled, and blasted flesh.
Ahab's harpoon tracked much the same, but it lacked the storm magic for which he was so famed. Instead, as the spike left his hand, dark Fetateuthis seemed drawn in an instant into Ahab's body, and one of its long, corkscrewing tentacles unspooled from his wrist as the harpoon hurtled on its deadly course. It bit the foremost turret, and instead of an explosion of thunder and lightning, it unfurled into a mass of burrowing, crushing, annihilating tentacles that shredded the turret to grotesque ribbons. Then, snapping back along its inky tether, the harpoon reformed in his steady hand, and Fetateuthis behind his broad back. Before the right eye's armored lid slid shut, the whalers could see its officer seize and die with the agony that wracked his connected system.
Continuing to twist, the whale now turned its thickly-armored back to the whalers. Though additional thunder harpoons certainly could have cratered that landscape of shell and coral like the surface of the planet below, too much of their energy would be wasted shattering the armor to do any appreciable damage to the vulnerable spine or brain beneath. There was only a single weak point on the whale's back, at the joint where its backbone met the skull, but that gap was far too small to hit from a distance, even for the most skilled harpooner. The whale would have to be boarded, and indeed that would be the plan, once the other turret battery was disabled.
Or it would have been, had the whale not, with three beats of its titanic tail, hurtled away from the whalers and, keeping its armored back always towards them, begun a great circular dive that would bring it alongside thePelkot, lined up perfectly for a broadside.
"Mates, intercept!" Ahab ordered. "I'll kill the beast!" Before either could protest or wonder what delusion of effectiveness had seized their captain, Ahab reared back and — in a direction that was nearly straight up from his perspective — flung the cursed harpoon to intercept the diving whale. Once more, Fetateuthis flowed into and through him to follow the foul projectile. Then, as it connected with the whale's bleached reef-armor and exploded once more into a nest of tentacles, thereverse occurred; with a hideous, unnatural distortion, Ahab was absorbed by the tentacle affixed to his wrist, which instantly snapped back to the Voruteuth now clinging to the whale's back. For a terrible moment of uncomprehending horror, Struck and Stalu feared that the monster had somehow broken free and devoured their captain; but in only a moment more, they saw that he had not been destroyed, buttransmitted along the line and to Fetateuthis, who now carried him along the whale's back.
Dumbfounded by their captain's daring trick — and without the time to ponder the abandonment it resembled — the mates sprung from their brief paralysis to follow the mad captain's orders. Struck sped double-time back toward thePelkot, reversing his whaleboat instead of wasting the time to turn it. Stalu, though, now outside Ahab's attention and unwilling to leave his badly-burnt shipmate hanging in the void, completed his earlier-aborted rescue attempt and swept close enough for Kikuwe's long arms to haul the unconscious Flak aboard before his boat hastened after Struck's.
Fetateuthis moved like a long-legged spider crab, digging eight squiggling feet into the whale's armor while the other two held Ahab close against its body.
"Haste, Fetateuthis!" he urged, rattling his own ears with the power of his voice in the limited confines of his personal atmosphere. With a magical muttering, the hexed harpoon shifted and flowed, the irrilite head exchanging its barbs for a long, swordlike point and the haft nearly doubling in length, until it had become killing lance, its tip already crackling with electric fire in the same way a stalking wolf drools in the moment before the maul. Just ahead, a tall protrusion like a huge, lidded barnacle rose from the back of the whale's head. Only a yard or two from its base, Ahab spied the gap in the armor, the critical weak point that he would, with his last dying breath if necessary, plug with that storm-charged lance and convert to a wound as deep and painful as the one where his leg had once been, as the wound that had forever marred his blazing soul.
But alas, it seemed he was to be delayed once more — a great clam-shell opened from the top of the barnacle ahead, and a huge Yeren wrapped in woody organic space-armor climbed out. He pointed at Ahab with one huge arm, to the top of which was affixed a thing like a huge hornet. With a twitch, it launched its sawing stinger at Ahab, trailing vaporous venom and propellant. It rocketed far too fast, and over far too short a distance, for Ahab to have hoped to shield himself from it or swat it away with the unwieldy lance; but charged as it was with power, and fueled as it was by the tethered souls of a man so mighty and a thing so monstrous, the lance needed no guidance to lash out with a crackling black bolt and atomize the stinger before it could meet its deadly mark. The Yeren made to fire again, but he had not the time for it; striking like a cobra, Fetateuthis snapped across the distance between them and throttled the ape to pieces. Outside its grip, Ahab hung untethered for a moment before his straight path intersected the whale's curving one and slammed him against its back. With his free hand, he seized hold of the coral armor. With the other, he brandished the lance.
"See, Fetateuthis!" he cackled, "our bond is unbreakable, our path unshakable!"
The Voruteuth rippled inscrutably, then plunged down the hatch to pursue any others that would dare slay its mad master. One tentacle pulled the hatch shut behind it.
Though Ahab scarcely noticed it, the whale was now swooping alongside his ship, portside turrets ready to ruin it. The crew that remained aboard were in a panic, scrambling for ineffective shelter or equally useless weapons as the whale soared by. There were perhaps a hundred feet between them, the same distance as either was long. In the moment that their heads and tails perfectly aligned, the whale fired.
In the split second before another harpoon-tooth could spring from the front turret and fill thePelkot's hold with toxic gas, Taketo's harpoon screamed down from above and smote the turret from existence, sending the tendril therein unspooling uselessly into space. From Stalu's boat, Kikuwe aimed at the next, but the time spent saving Flak had cost him — and thePelkot — dearly. His harpoon destroyed the turret a mere instant too late to deflect its deadly projectile. A huge porous sphere, it slammed into the mainmast and shattered, belching forth a spray of adhesive slime, copied from the hunting habits of velvet worms. All on deck were stuck helplessly in place, and all the lines and spars glued together. Though she had not sunk, thePelkot could no longer steer. All feared that the third turret might finally spell the whole ship's doom with some payload of igniting oil or hull-dissolving acid, but mercifully — for most — it instead unfurled a thick tentacle lined with hooked suckers, which lashed at Struck with enough force to crack both his boat and Taketo's spine in two. Stalu swooped to rescue the second mate as the whale blew on past the ship. Both mates watched in desperate amazement as their captain crawled along its back.
Heedless of the jagged coral edges that cut his fingers as they probed for handholds in the ridged armor, Ahab picked his careful way toward the whale's weak point. He could stir the air around himself and manipulate his personal gravity enough to stay aboard, but a careless push in the wrong direction might still send him flying too far away from his quarry to strike effectively, an inconvenience he absolutely would not tolerate at this stage. Finally, he felt the final ridge of bone that marked his target and used it to carefully haul himself upright, simultaneously bracing his ivory leg in a notch of the armor and securing it there with a quick flash of magic. Gazing now into the gap, he saw it: a narrow strip of translucent skin, pulsing two feet deep in an inches-wide crevice between two plates. Grinning madly, hair billowing in his personal wind, Ahab raised his mighty lance. Into it he summoned all his rage, all his hate, all the mindless self-slaughtering thirst for relentless retribution, every last drop of soul and spite left inside the old man. The razor point of it glowed like a miniature sun, like the bright Sirius that now crested the horizon behind him and set the whale's back unnaturally aglow. To the whale, to himself, to Mab and her court of gods, and to no-one at all, he cried:
"From Hell's heart I stab at thee!"
His blade bit backbone and brainstem. Fatal shocks thundered through the whale's nerves, its muscles, and its very heart, cracking bones and boiling blood. The Yeren captain, connected to its brain through a wormlike neural periscope, exploded in his chair, so full was he pumped with Ahab's hate. Steam screamed from the tongue-louse's exoskeleton as it writhed and scrabbled with atrophied legs. Seated at its head in a chair of grown bone, the hallucinating astrogator shushed it and stroked its twitching mandibles, granting assurances he could not believe.
For the first time in years, since a harpoon-tooth of the hated whale had first sheared off his leg, then been severed to replace it, Ahab allowed himself to feel something other than burning hate. Having poured all himself into that smiting mortal blow, he now found his limbs full of burning exhaustion, and the lungs that heaved to either side of his pounding heart struggling for breath. He sank to his knees, still clutching the buried lance for support, and for a terrifying moment felt utterlylost, adrift in the vast sea of a life with one purpose, now forever extinguished. As if hoping to find some familiar guidepost, a lighthouse that might remind him what else in the world there was besides the white whale, he looked to thePelkot.
Which, he only now realized, was directly ahead. And closing.
"Haste!" Stalu cried, prying another man from the snaring goo and veritably tossing him into the whaleboat that would in mere moments become a lifeboat. He and Struck had watched in awe as Ahab drove his colossal nemesis from the world, and were yet to fully blink the spots of his blazing lance-point from their eyes. But that awe had turned to horror when, in the seconds before that lance struck home, the white whale had wheeled round once more, and with the final strokes of its pounding flukes, set itself to ram thePelkot into oblivion. It bore down like an avalanche, like white Death itself, and now that it was dead, it could no more steer from that catastrophic collision course than the ship it was set to shatter. A dozen men were still glued to the deck, crying and begging for rescue, and at least as many more were still trapped beneath by stuck hatches. Worse yet, the whaleboat was already almost full. Even the space-louse hyperdrive, content to cling to Queen Mab's figurehead for years on end, had seen the oncoming whale and burrowed through her, hoping to escape belowdecks.
With despair all through his demeanor, Stalu leapt from the slime-drenched deck of the doomedPelkot and back into the whaleboat where waited those who might soon be its only survivors.
"Fetateuthis!" Ahab groaned, channeling a voice now hoarse and scratched through the lance, through his link, and into the unseen Voru within the whale. "Steer us aside, if it all you can. Let not the corpse of this wretched whale steal all from me that I have from it; let it not deny me that final right, to be downed with my ship; let it not ruin all I would have left behind, had I withstood this cursed quest! Oh, poor Stalu! Poor Ahab!"
Below, the Voru heard its master's pleas, greatly weakened though they were. Finished now with the last of the Yeren crew, it dropped the head it had been inspecting and streaked down the hall and through the now-paralyzed sphincter that opened on the bridge. The captain's remains were splattered, the neural cord that had once connected him to the whale frayed and severed. One weapons officer lay dead, killed by feedback from his destroyed weapons. The other sat alive but lopsided, brain robbed of function by the death of the connected whale. None of these little corpses could steer the great one barreling towards thePelkot that had been the Voru's unhappy home these past years. But hark — there, at the furthest end of the whale's mouth, crouched between the wall of teeth and the clacking mouth of the hyperdrive, was the astrogator. He smiled as Fetateuthis approached.
"Welcome, demon," he said, softly and in a language just as alien to the Voru as the speech of the Fae, but no less understandable all the same. "It seems your master has bested us."
Gazing down at the astrogator with a sense that was not sight, Fetateuthis marked the same gray lips, the same black grin, the same distant eyes that had marred little Pile back on his own ship. In a strange way, it felt that perhaps these astrogators could see it — see itproperly — as well. It spoke to the gris-mad Yeren in its own tongue, and he answered.
"If there is still any way to steer a dead whale, it is within my friend here." With one huge hand, he patted the dying hyperdrive. "You've seen the places these creatures can go."
Responding quickly, Fetateuthis reached out with all ten tentacles, carefully probing between the plates of the space-louse. Perhaps with its knowledge, however elementary, of the strange laws that governed its alien home, it could coax the louse to-
The astrogator laughed. Fetateuthis paused. The Yeren spoke.
"You should have killed me first."
Before the Voru could wonder what that meant, the astrogator created some new twist of physics in his gris-destroyed mind, and as confident in its truth as he was wrong, altered the space-louse to conform it. There was a shift of reality, an alteration to the matter of the louse, and suddenly Fetateuthis found its tendrils not probing and carving their way through the creature as it did all matter of this plane, butinteracting with it.
Explosively.
There was a flash of colorless light, and the whale's head split. Teeth shattered into a cloud of grapeshot; the jawbone spun away toward the planet below; and the whale's head rose, deflected ever-so-slightly upward by the force of the explosion. As the shattered teeth raked the deck, the remaining half of its head rammed not the deck, but plowed through the forest of slime-drenched masts, snapping them one by one like timbered trees. Knowing he'd be crushed in the falling snarl of sails, slime, splinters, and snapping lines, but seeing Stalu's lifeboat wrench away from the wreck, Ahab heaved away from the lance, away from the whale that had been his only thought for so long, and reached for his first mate as the whale's borrowed momentum carried him forward. Stalu saw him, and loyal Stalu, hopeful Stalu, the one who had followed mad Ahab to the end, a second son thrown from the sinking ship of Ahab's life, reached for him too.
Thirty feet.
Ten feet.
Two feet.
Six inches.
Crack!
The dying whale's last weapon, the hooked tentacle, still driven by its own crop of neurons and the last firing brain cells of the portside weapons officer, snatched Ahab from the air and carried him away, on with the pale carcass of the white whale, on with the wrecked sails of the founderingPelkot, on away from his first mate, his people, and all his kind. He cried out for receding Stalu, but by then their envelopes no longer overlapped, and neither could hear the other's last words.
As the blasted whale crashed through the masts above, Fetateuthis — unharmed by the explosion, and indeed seeming invigorated by it — slithered from the carcass, down the stump of the foremast, past the corpses of glued men gored by shattered teeth, and down through the matter of an exposed hatch. The white whale's hyperdrive had given it a taste, however brief and explosive, of something like itself, of home. In that moment before the detonation, it had remembered the indescribable world of the Voru on the other side of Mab's Maelstrom, and it had recalled sights and sensations that no Fae could understand, but thanks to them, it now understood the feeling those sensations had given it: homesickness.
Fetateuthis had set forth into this world, had bound itself to Ahab, because it had wanted to see this vast and different universe where the natives feared it so. It had experienced many things; food and drink unlike any in its native realm, the music of the Pan Bass, the feel of a sailing wind and the creak of a ship's rigging, and the sight of another star. But also had it known hate, and madness, and senseless violence and destruction, from a master who knew only these things, and could not see the strange beauty of the cosmos, the quiet contemplation of his companion, or the endless loyalty of his men, but only his single-minded search for mutual suicide, and all else as no more than a tool or obstacle to it. Fetateuthis had witnessed the true might of this universe, and with it the terrible ends that its possessors spiral inexorably towards. It had known the greatest man in this world, so it was said, and it could still faintly feel him, floating somewhere above, silently begging desperate forgiveness of the men he'd cast aside, forgiveness he would no doubt blindly receive, even in a death of his own making. It was tragic, yes, but above all else, it wasdisappointing.
Thus disillusioned, Fetateuthis wanted nothing more than to go home — and, with the power of thePelkot's stolen hyperdrive, perhaps it still could. The louse was not hard to find, cowering in the hold. Fetateuthis seized it, embraced it, plunged into it, permeated its existence with the Voru's aberrant physics, felt the Fae magic of the dimension-hopping Pan Bass, still linked somehow to the hyperdrive. With tentacles real and less than real, it seized these things and pulled. Then, theyripped.
It was quick, terribly quick. Ahab felt the connection break as Fetateuthis plunged through the black hole it had opened from the space louse, and the backlash might have knocked him from consciousness had the barbed constriction of the whale's tentacle not kept him filled with sharpening pain. He watched helplessly, squirming against the hooked grip and crying out into the void with equal ineffectiveness, as the black hole devoured thePelkot's compacting wreckage. In desperate, sobbing horror, he watched as even Stalu's whaleboat, straining against the impossible gravity of this impossible black hole, broke up and spaghettified into the lightless sphere of distorted space. Then, in a blinding burst of deadly radiation, the momentary hole in reality once more conformed to the normal rules of the universe and evaporated.
Ahab fell silent. He stared, dumbfounded, at the empty space where his ship, his life, had once been. All the fight was gone from him then, all the magic and thunder. He was growing cold, until he could scarcely feel the tentacle hooks digging into his skin. His eyes rolled closed as the dead white whale, now falling ever faster toward the planet called Ahab, began to burn. As he breathed his last breath, it caught fire, and together with his lifeless nemesis, Ahab's final flicker burned out — slain by the very air, on neither land, space, nor sea.
Had there been a living thing on the surface of that desolate world, it might have seen a white fire streak across the orange sky, flare brightly at first, then dwindle away to a small, pale ember as it swept on down the long arc of doom. It impacted with a soft, briefthump, and the displaced dust from its little crater quickly settled, like the spray from a cut-off fountain.
And there, at the bottom of that shallow grave, like a flagless mast, stood the last and only remains of man, myth, and monster alike:
A single ivory leg.
Cite this page as:
"The Heaviest Matter of the Universe" by Kothardarastrix, from theSCP Wiki. Source:https://scpwiki.com/the-heaviest-matter-of-the-universe. Licensed underCC-BY-SA.
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