“Got to run! Bye!” As the target turned, the stalker aimed her knife and braced for the throw—but the target somersaulted and bounced down the corridor with reckless, manic abandon and heedless haste, almost as if she realized what the stalker intended for her.
The stalker kicked off in pursuit, but the target ran without hesitation—then it reached the next internode and slammed the hatch shut behind. A rattling clang of catches notified the stalker that she was locked out. Worse: The target now knew she was pursued.
A human hunter would have become upset and angry at this point. But the stalker merely paused, then turned and rapidly made her way back to the next internode. The target could have made her way in five different directions; but she was still trapped aboard the chapel. The stalker would resume her search pattern. Sooner or later, she would come upon the target again and put an end to this stage of the mission.
After Cook’s departure, the Gravid Mother’s mood began to fall. She was clearly unhappy with me for some reason—perhaps it was the news I carried, or perhaps it was simply that my arrival had interrupted her recreational fornication—so after reassembling her bed-web, she retreated into it, muttering darkly to herself and occasionally glancing in my direction, as if wondering why I was still there. And after an hour, so was I.
In times of stress, I attempt to distract myself by enumerating repeating features of my environment: I find the contemplation of figures soothing. Unfortunately, there were few items to count in her room and nothing germane to this account. Also, I think, she became disturbed by my hand gestures. I tried to conceal them, but—“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Counting.” I held up both hands. “Did you know there are seventy-six strands in your bed?”
“Did I—how do you know that?”
I stared at my fingers. “That’s seventy-six. Isn’t it obvious?”
“But you don’t have seventy-six fingers!”
“Of course not; I have six on each hand. But that’s enough to count to four thousand and ninety-six, in binary. Without even using my toes.”
She squinted at me. “You’re mad.”
“No: I’m numerate.” I started counting the cushions again, for the eighteenth time. “How long do you think Cook should take?”
“What? To round up”—Her Gravidity muttered under her breath: After a moment, I realized she was counting aloud—“about half an hour. Why?”
“I haven’t heard any alarms. And he’s been gone fifty-eight minutes already. Shouldn’t he be back here by now?”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be silly, child. I’ll call him.” With which she raised one wrist to her cheek, and cooed, “Cookie, sweet cookie? My delectable cookie? Where are you?” She frowned impatiently as seconds ticked by, the silence lengthening. “Willard, are you there?” Her confident facade began to sag, like lime plaster undermined by the water of uncertainty slowly dripping down a wall.
“You have a voice communicator?” I asked, fascinated. “Like a telephone?” I kicked myself mentally for not having thought to ask for such a thing earlier: It would have made life simpler.
She didn’t reply. Instead, all at once she turned on me. “This is all your fault! You and your horrid story, frightening us with pirates and crazies!” She heaved up against her bed restraints and began unhooking them: “You want to kill us all, don’t you? You wheedled your way on board by sweet-talking the deacon and brought your pirate associates along and now you’re trying to get me to go out and follow Willard!” She finished unstrapping herself from the bed, still fulminating: “I’m not a fool, you know! I stay here and I watch everything that’s going on outside my room and I know things. I know exactly what you are!” She grabbed my ankles. “Go on, call your accomplices! Tell them I’ve got you! They’re going to send Willard back to me, and he’d better be fine, because if he isn’t, I’m going to send you back to them in lots of tiny little pieces—”
I started to struggle, but the Gravid Mother was surprisingly strong: She was taller and more massive than I, which gave her an unfair advantage of leverage and reach. “Let me go!” I demanded, shoving clumsily at her head.
“Oh no you don’t,” she crooned. “I’m not going to let you go! I’m going to keep you here with me until your friends come, then I’m going to show them what I can do—” She bundled me into a quilt and balled it up, knotting it around my neck to deny me leverage. “This is all your fault.” I cowered in the makeshift sack as she raised her wrist again: “Willard, are you there? Anyone, is anyone there? Deacon, your holiness?” But nobody answered. “This is all your fault!” she repeated as she cried, punching me with her meaty fists.
I don’t know what she intended, but punching a person you have just wrapped in a padded quilt is certainly not an effective way of harming them. Instead, I drifted across the room, quite out of her reach, which gave me time to fumble the knot loose and tumble out into the air. She snarled at me and shuffled around in her web, but I rebounded from the far wall and kicked off for the hatch. She swung toward me indecisively and finally jumped as I fumbled with the lock, but I had the advantage of leverage and caught her with a clumsy swipe that sent her spinning. The hatch clicked open as she fetched up against the far wall and rebounded toward me—but she was too late. I slipped into the twilight beyond the hatch and pulled it closed behind me. Not that I relished the idea of being at large aboard the chapel with a murderous stowaway on board, but the Gravid Mother had given me cause for concern with her increasing paranoia: If one must choose which space to share with a possibly homicidal lunatic, then one should pick the one with the most hiding places.
Willard the Cook slowly made his way toward the crypt through the warren of cadaver-lined companionways that surrounded the ground-level hub of the chapel. “Deacon? Yer holiness? I’ve got yer recuss fluids! An’ yer tubespam! And the rest of yer orders. Feeling a wee bit peckish?” He pushed a bulky cargo net before him, full of sloshing demijohns of perfusion fluid and fat, rolled Fragile liverwurst. “Where are you?”
It is not possible at this remove for me to tell what was passing through his mind. Perhaps he was seething with resentment at the small, colorless person who had interrupted his afternoon’s entertainment in the Gravid One’s web—a very fetching spider in the eyes of this particular fly—and possibly also some mild apprehension at the incongruous talk of pirates and emergency procedures. But that is just my guess.
Nor is it possible at this time to tell of the location of Deacon Dennett, for that worthy had legged it at panic speed as soon as he realized that Her Ladyship was out and about and on the prowl for snacks. One might point the finger of reproach at Dennett, for, unlike me, he was equipped with a shipboard phone and certainly knew how to use it to alert everyone aboard the chapel to the situation; but he wasn’t entirely in his right mind at the time, or even that of his badly burned brethren. With full and perfect hindsight, I think it is fair to say that Dennett was, in his own way, as unfit for command as Lady Cybelle.
What we can be sure of (for the cameras in Mausoleum Companionway Four recorded it for posterity) was Willard’s expression of gape-jawed terror as Lady Cybelle’s cadaverous, crypt-pale body loomed out of the dark tunnel and clawed toward him. What we can also be sure of is the way he swung the bulk of his supply sack between his own body and his attacker—and the way Cybelle’s aim shifted, darting toward the fat wormlike sheath of wrapped tubespam, which she grabbed and bit in half in a single fluid motion.