“Eek,” or “Ick,” said Cook. And, being neither slow on the uptake nor eager to die, he unloaded the contents of the cargo net into Cybelle’s maw as fast as she could absorb it. She sucked down the fat sausage-tubes of warmly pulsing cultured liver tissue, some of them showing the pink freckles of an enthusiastically metastasizing hepatocellular carcinoma; head-sized transparent bags of perfusion fluid that pulsed and wobbled in the microgravity air flow: supplementary saccules of crunchy phosphate-rich shipboard biscuit crawling with unindentured mechanocytes. As she consumed, Cybelle changed shape, her abdomen bloating and new veins forming just below her skin. They pulsed as the skin above them erupted in spikes, piercing the perfusion bags to drain their contents directly into her circulatory system. Like a vast, pallid, avian fetus stripped of its shell, she wrapped herself around the fluid sacks and growled as she gnawed on gobbets of barely processed flesh.
One may infer from his shifty body language and reluctant posture that Willard was less than enthusiastic about his proximity to the mindlessly feeding priestess; he leaned ever farther away from her presence, eyes swiveling sidelong in search of an avenue of escape. Presently he found one—or rather, manufactured it by unsealing one end of a fat liver sausage and squirting the contents in the direction of Cybelle’s face. Her tongue, gray and wrinkled and tentacular, temporarily tipped with circular tooth-lined maws of its own, slithered forth to lick her eyeballs clean. While she was thus distracted, Cook made his escape and hauled himself hand over hand away from the floating pile of comestibles.
Willard didn’t pause until he’d closed a hatch between himself and the feeding horror. Then he slumped slightly and reached for his phone. “Emergency, calling you all! Cook ’ere. I just run into Her Grace in Companionway Four, and she’s hungry. Got meself away by the skin o’ me teeth. She be snacking down on the supplies yer ’oliness ordered for ’er, but I am thinking about barricading meself in me kitchen for the duration. Anyone gorra net?”
A paper-dry whispery clicking answered him from the other end of the companionway he’d taken shelter in. Willard looked up, aghast, as a door opened at the other end of the tunnel. The red sparks of infrared transmitters glimmered in the depths of eye sockets, illuminating them with misplaced sparks of sapience. “I will take care of this,” hissed the skeleton (buzzing with each sibilant, for its speaker was improperly secured to its jawbone, vibrating against an ancient molar): “Return to your station.” Cook cowered, backing against the wall of the companionway as the skeleton approached, followed by half a dozen more mummified remotes: all clad in the ragged cerement remains of space suits, clutching a variety of improvised weapons ranging from wrenches to sharpened docking probes. They streamed past him, clattering and crackling quietly, and formed a circle around the hatch. Willard barely spared them a glance before making himself scarce.
By the time the Mother’s boudoir door clanged shut behind me I was beginning to harbor deep reservations about the wisdom of having booked my working passage aboard this vehicle. One may reasonably expect a certain degree of eccentricity among the long-term crew of a flying church, but there is a point at which eccentricity begins to impact operational effectiveness, and my fellow travelers were well past that juncture. On top of all of this, there was the puzzling and worrisome presence of the stowaway who had attacked me. I will confess to having become a bundle of nerves by this point. And so I fled directly toward my own tiny compartment, with every intention of barricading myself inside it and not coming out again until we entered orbit around Shin-Tethys.
However, as I turned the corner onto the C-deck passage leading to the various storage compartments and my coffin-sized room, I slowed. A nasty thought had occurred to me.
Replaying my memory of my assailant I thought, Does she not look somewhat familiar? Why, yes: I had become used to seeing that same face reflected in my tattered wall retina every day on Taj Beacon, whenever I cleaned myself before venturing out in public. And what had she said? What is your name? Indeed. And there was the matter of Andrea’s too-long-ignored message packet, now that I thought about it, and of Ana’s disappearance.
I began to incubate an unwelcome hypothesis. Imagine for a moment that Ana’s disappearance was not an accident: that she had in fact been disappeared. (I made a note to write a letter to her former lover or debt collector or whoever it was who had been asking after her.) Suppose that her abductor had been interested in the activities of our little syndicate for some time. Suppose that they had become aware of my impending visit, under cover of pilgrimage. Suppose that they were sufficiently ruthless and greedy. Taking all of this into account . . . what if they imagined that I was a courier, perhaps bringing to Ana the other half of a large, orphaned, slow money transaction, and that once we got together, we would be in a position to assert ownership of the aforementioned bond by right of salvage? If such a person supposed that a not-inconsiderable amount of money might be at stake, a sufficiently ruthless individual might be tempted to take actions that— Oh dear.
It was in this paranoid frame of mind that I approached the door to my room. I had let my guard down somewhat once I was aboard the chapel, and we were under way. I had not discussed the sub-rosa sororal syndicate, of course, but I had let my guard down a little with Dennett and the others. Now I began to chew over the question of whether I might have accidentally disclosed too much information about my purpose here in Dojima System. As I approached the door, I groped for the retina I’d hung on the wall of my room with the corner of my mind that deals with inanimate objects. I could feel it, distantly tugging at my proximity sense. Pausing, I screwed my eyes shut and looked out through its face.
My room was dark, but not dark enough to conceal the dim infrared fleshlight of a lurking intruder, waiting for me just behind the door.
I withdrew my vision from the retina. Glancing round hastily, I spotted the nearest cleaning-supplies locker. As quietly as possible, I made my way to it and nudged the hatch open. There was, as I expected, a canister of emergency sealant. That would do the job, but I’d need to wedge the door shut while it set. It took me a little longer to confirm that a high-gee broom would do the job, threaded through the spokes of the hand wheel that manually disengaged the teeth of the door’s seal. And so, within a matter of minutes, I jammed the door to my room shut and carefully extruded the caulking gun’s freight of sealant around the rim. Designed to set rapidly and hold back the pressure of escaping air in event of a micrometeoroid strike, the sealant should suffice to keep my stalker confined while I went in search of help.
I congratulated myself on a job well done, then went in search of the deacon in order to tell him about the stowaway and to see how he was managing Her Grace.
Now, here is a curious fact to which, for some reason, neither Deacon Dennett nor I had given due consideration:
Pirates tell lies.
I found the deacon in the crypt, supervising the reinterment of Her Grace in the Soyuz sarcophagus, a small army of ambulatory skeletons in attendance. Some of them were a bit the worse for wear, pursued by various stray arms and legs (and in one memorable case, a jawbone) which were anxiously awaiting reattachment to their missing bodies.