Under the Light of the Earth

Chapter 4- The Orphaned Tower

The seas of the moon were terrors.

The Tapeworm was tossed upon them with great abuse, waves hundreds of feet high that the brave vessel would creep up nervously and just manage to scramble over instead of toppling into the oblivion of the deep.

What concerned the viceroy the very most was that Captain Christ-is-king seemed to love it. Well and truly, the man looked as though he had just learned to be a live and was still in the honeymoon faze. What was worse, the man had a tendency to cackle when he was happy.

His hands at the helm, enclosed in a brave dome, the angry foam of the waves would slosh all around him in his clear coffin.
The ship would go dark, all the windows obscured by the murk of the water, in a moment of zen-like silence, and then it would burst from the sea into the air again, with a great bounce, shooting up and up and up. The sea a great trampoline the boat shared with invisible giants who could trample it at any moment.

And Captain Christ-is-king lusted for the excitement of dancing between the toes of these giants.

Poor Mitchell was terribly sick. He had vomited several times on the first day, and his hardy earth complexion was beginning to turn as pale as the rest of them.

As small as the boat was, it had many quarters, and more places to sit. A smuggling ship, it was mostly hollow, which perhaps was what permitted it to float so well.

Mitchell had confined himself to the very bottom of the boat in the hopes that he would never have to see the moving of the horizon, which apparently made him sicker.

His wife did the best she could, but she was being made equally ill, though a different cause had begun to scourge her. Morning Sickness.

Husband and wife together were in an equal state of mess, one of them a nurse who felt inadequate to care for her patient, the other a man who felt he was failing to care for his woman, and both of them put rather in a bad mood.

The Viceroy had a weak constitution and could thus not stand to be near them much, which meant he had to seek company in either the Rusino Guards or in the Captain.

Well, that was an easy decision.

He stood up in the lower decks, looking out at the sea as it sloshed grey, with three guardsmen standing at attention earnestly either side of him.

They looked like they were gazing at him with utmost curiosity, since this was the first they had seen of him without his uniform.

At the moment they gazed at a jellyfish forest that the Tapeworm had found itself in the midst of.

It looked rather like a strange night sky, full of warbling half orbs that were mercilessly churned by the violent waves. White, milky, translucent things, their tops splashed by four crescents facing inward, like heraldic moons.

The things varied in size terrifically. Some of them were no larger than a finger tip, while others were the size of the boat itself.

"How can the Earth man be so sickened?" Corporal Scrout asked. Barely a man, with white peach fluff upon his pocked cheeks.

"Ah, that's the rub." The Viceroy said.

"Men from earth have a refined inner ear to give them balance. It is far more sensitive than ours. Mooners' inner-ears practically atrophy by the time they're three years old. But Earth men, some of them get sick when on the ocean. And that's merely the earth sea, which is a calm pond compared to this. Their waters are tugged feebly by us, whereas ours are violently wrenched by that titan, earth."

Scrout nodded.

"But if that be the case, Viceroy, then why is the Captain so ecstatic?"

Just on cue, they heard the man whoop and cackle as they burst up from under the water again, several jellyfish left stranded on deck, flaccid bubbles rolling about and tangling in their own tentacles.