Call me Impish. That's not my name, though I suppose to an outsider it seems close enough to most Gnome names. We don't usually get imps in aetherspace. But I had an uncle, once, who spent some time down there in Newton Caverns, and he sees all sorts. "You're impish," he said to me once, after I rewired his new Sparkatron to produce magic mouths spouting colorful insults, instead of sparkles. "It'll get you in trouble some day, boy."

Well, it's gotten me into trouble now. That's why my home ship, the Star Hopper, is currently bound for some little bubble called Aquagoria in the back end of Prime aetherspace that's nothing but water, water, and more water, to drop me off for duty on board some vessel called the Tid-Bit. The Tid-Bit itself is not even an aethership properly: it's a surface vessel. Honestly, nobody sane would volunteer to serve there. 

I didn't volunteer either. I was volunteered because I tried to run away into deep aetherspace with my girl Tink and a little two-room aethership I built myself. One chair, one grid, all of aetherspace in front of us. Well, apparently that caused a bit of a ruckus since Tink was supposed to be selling her dresses this trip, and Captain Girda had to fend off a bunch of angry surface folk, and then Tink changed her mind about it anyway. So Captain Girda threw me off the ship, and none of the other ships wanted to take me on, except this Tid-Bit - I presume because they can't get anyone else.

A knock on my cabin door makes me look up. It's Tink, in all her pink-haired glory. "Are you ready?" she asks me. "The Captain wants to know if you've packed."

"Yeah," I reply, because there's no way to say 'I'm bringing everything but you' or 'You could at least have come with me.' She wouldn't anyway, I guess. There's no high fashion to be had this side of the Aether, and I never really thought (even when we were planning to run off by ourselves) that Tink would ever be happy in the long term without getting to make her dresses for people.

"Sorry, Impish," she says quietly, and I shake my head.

"Let's go," I say, and we walk out the door, down the corridors I've known all my life, and I leave it all behind.

---

The captain of the Tid-Bit is a formidable-looking gnome, maybe even more so than Captain Girda. He cuts an imposing figure, with a clockwork leg and an expansive air. His ship is a lot more cramped, and the captain's viewing chamber is at the bottom of the ship instead of the front, which is disorienting to me. But Captain Beehab nods as I introduce myself, and looks me up and down.

"Well, lad," he says, "You don't look like much, but I suppose you'll do. I run a tight ship around here, and there's no other ship within hailing distance most of the year. The Star Hopper's been kind enough to give us some supplies, but otherwise we make do with what we can get ourselves. So there's to be no complaining - everything you're having, the whole crew is sharing. But we're gnomes on a mission, and we've got to get the job done."

I nod along, and it's not until I'm being shown to my quarters that I summon up the courage to ask my guide what the Captain's on about. Is he looking for glaetherial dust, or maybe auronidion? This little bubble seems like a strange place to carry out any sort of mission.

The other crewman is a friendly sort, and introduces himself as Speedy. "Well, I'm new too," he says, "So I only know what the others told me, but long ago, the Captain was exploring here. He wasn't even on his ship - he had an aethership back then - he was just on the bubble. When up came this giant monster squid out of nowhere, right? And grabs the Captain by the leg. Not the mechanical one, I mean. Well, the real one before he got the mechanical one."

"And?" I ask, horrified and fascinated despite myself. We reach the end of the hallway, and I stop by the door so I can hear him out.

"And it was crushing him and dragging him down into the depths, so he had to blast off his own leg to escape. And they say that ever since he's been looking for revenge on the beast, and that's why he built this ship, and hired on all these crewmen, because he wants to kill the giant squid." Speedy shudders, and looks around. "Personally, between us, I think that's a little crazy. But all we have to do is follow orders, right? I'm on a rotation here from my home ship, and they're coming back for me in three months. Just have to wait till then."

"Lucky you," I say, and mean it.

---

The ship - the submarine - is a little crazy in more ways than one. For one, it's not run by an algontherine, and it doesn't run on power. Apparently other aetherships used to bring down fuel, but at some point they decided enough was enough and gave up on us.

We just drift aimlessly on the sea, while Flannel the alchemist tries to think up increasingly bizarre things we could use to propel ourselves forward. Flannel reminds me a little of Professor Gargle back on the Star Hopper, though maybe he's a little more focused. Gargle tended to forget what he was working on at any given moment. Flannel remembers the end goal, just not which step he's currently on.

"What about wood?" Flannel shouts at me unceremoniously, two weeks after I arrive on the ship. I open up my eyes blearily, to see him standing over me in his sleeping robe. I don't know why he picked me - maybe because my room is closest to his laboratory.

"What about it?" I mumble. My head feels like it's stuffed with wool. I look at my watch. It's two hours past midnight.

"We could burn it," says Flannel excitedly. "And use it to boil water, and make steam to send towards the propellers. It would carry us forward."

I take a deep breath, and try my very hardest not to grab Flannel and bang his big head against the railing of my bunk. "Flannel," I say patiently. "We are in the middle of an ocean. We do not have wood. Go back to sleep."

"Well," he calls out as he leaves, "It was a decent idea."

Flannel's a bit of an oddity like that - all the crew have a Flannel story of some sort. They say he's been here since the beginning with the Captain, and somehow the Captain has managed to get Flannel to believe in this crazy mission. He spends all day hunched over his workbench trying to find a poison for the giant squid. I'm not sure why we can't just shoot the thing with a turret like we had on the Star Hopper, and I ask one day at dinner while Flannel's not there. The room goes briefly silent.

"Have you ever seen the beast?" asks one of the older crew. I shake my head. "It's huge," he says. "Like an aethership huge. And you can't hit it - when you try, it multiplies. You thought you were fighting one monster, now you have two. Hit it again, now you have three."

"That's not possible," I say, dumbly. "Squid don't reproduce like that."

"It's not any old squid," says the old-timer. "I hear it's a soulless beast." A murmur goes through the room, and he shakes his head. "It'll kill us all yet."

Speedy and I exchange a glance. I don't know if what they say is true, or if they're just ribbing us newcomers, but I guess I'll find out.

---

By and by the weeks blur together, and soon enough I've been on the Tid-Bit for two months. Life's not bad, for all that it's not what I'm used to. Passing aetherships bring us rations, and instead of trying to purify our own water - which is hard when you're surrounded by so much sea - we've got one of Professor Gargle's self-filling teapots. I've never managed to reverse engineer one of those, and the one time I wanted to take a closer look at it here the Captain took one look at me and said he'd throw me out the pressure lock if I tried.

Two months is when Flannel has his latest, greatest idea. "Things that burn!" he shouts. I look at my watch. It's four in the morning, but since I was on night duty trying to spot the squid anyway, I guess I can't complain. Flannel grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me.

"Listen to this," he says. "We want a renewable source of something that burns, right? And that can be generated here?"

"Yes," I answer, because he seems to expect it.

"Well, there's something that fits all of that - squid. We shoot the squid, it makes more squid. We kill the more squid, and now there's something to burn!"

"You're three heads short of a scyllus," I tell him, because that's the craziest idea I've heard from him yet. He must have gone to the Captain with it though, and the Captain clearly liked it, because next thing I know we've all got harpoons and waterbreathe enchantments. Speedy and I get paired up, and as we kick off into the murky depths of the sea, it briefly occurs to me to wonder how this is my life.

The old-timers weren't lying about the squid. We spotted the huge squid in the distance, but before we knew it we ended up surrounded by so many smaller squids, undulating menacingly at us. I don't have a lot of experience with squid, but they didn't give us too much trouble. Speedy and I hauled the carcasses back to the Tid-Bit, where Flannel all but drooled over them.

He made it work, the crazy genius. A few short hours later, the Tid-Bit was moving again, as we roamed the ocean floor in search of that squid. Better still, Flannel finally finished his complicated poison, and brought us out a special harpoon to administer it. The Captain grins fiercely, like a man who sees home berth at the end of a flashpoint.

"Who's the best harpoon hand among us?" the Captain asks, and everyone looks at Speedy, because despite how new he is he took to it like an algontherine to a manse. "All right," the Captain says. "Speedy, you're on harpoon. Impish, you watch his back."

The Tid-Bit chased the squid, and Speedy and I go back out into the ocean. It's easy now to spot the huge dark form in the distance - our enemy we'd been hunting for so long, the Devourer of Destiny. I signal to Speedy, indicating that we should sneak around to strike it in the side, out of sight of its beady eyes and out of reach of its maw. 

As we swim, I can see Speedy getting tenser, his hand gripping the harpoon tightly. We're quiet, and we're almost there. He draws back his arm -

- and the squid suddenly lashes out, turning its gigantic form around, a nightmare of a spiked maw opening towards us. Speedy freezes for just a moment, but it's too late. I feel a strange cold that's not from the sea water, as everything happens as though in a slow dream. The maw grabs Speedy by both legs, tosses him up through the water. I see rather than hear Speedy cry out, as he lets go of the harpoon. Then the maw snaps again, closing around him, and Speedy is gone.

I don't know what instinct made me react. I can feel myself screaming something incoherent, and my throat hurts with the salt of the sea. My hand snaps out as if by reflex, and grabs the harpoon. I strike hard; I feel the shock through my arm as my weapon sinks deep. There's no way to pull it out, with that barbed point. Instead, I shove harder, half-blind with fear, half-mad with rage. 

Something grabs me by both shoulders, pulls me backwards, and I know no more.

---

I wake up to bright lights and softness under me, though my head pounds. It's a familiar sight - there are my old navigation maps on the wall, and there's one of Tink's posters pasted to the ceiling. I'm in my own cabin. A face comes into view: Flannel the alchemist, with a bottle in his hand.

"You had a close call," he tells me, and hands me the bottle. "Drink up."

"Medicine?" I mumble, propping myself up on one arm to raise the bottle to my lips.

"Alcohol," says Flannel grimly, and after a moment, "What do you remember?"

It all comes rushing back: the sea, the darkness, the monster. I grip the bottle tighter. My hand is shaking. "Speedy?" I ask, and Flannel shakes his head.

"The Captain went out after you two," he says. "But we could only recover you, though the beast was dead at that point. Speedy was - "

- the giant maw, closing around Speedy. That frozen look of terror and surprise - 

"The Captain can go shoot dragons without a shockwave," I say roughly. I can hear the quiver of hysteria in my voice, but there's no stopping that. "What right does he have - what right did he ever have, to drag us all into this mess because some beast took his leg years ago? Speedy would be alive if not for this damn vengeance mission."

Flannel looks at me oddly. "Where did you hear that?" he asks me, and before I can go on, he says, "The Captain lost his leg only in the third year after we started hunting the beast. We've killed it four times by now."

I stare up at him, because it makes no sense. I haul myself out of my bunk and shove the bottle at Flannel, ignoring his protests. Then I stagger up the narrow corridor of the Tid-Bit and stumble down the stairs to the Captain's chamber, where Captain Beehab is staring out the window. He turns as I approach, and for a strange moment I feel as though I've returned to the first time I met the Captain, before all of this happened.

"You knew," I say accusingly. "You - knew - it comes back!"

The Captain nods at me slowly. "We're no Elder Gods, lad," he says. "The Soulless won't stay dead, with the means that we have. That wasn't the mission." He looks down briefly. "I'm sorry about Speedy. We've not lost anyone in many, many years." He contemplates his false leg, tapping absently at the gears there. "For many years, the only casualty was me."

"Why?" I ask. Why did he chase the beast so, if not for revenge? Why had he ever started? Why did he continue?

The Captain doesn't answer immediately. Instead, he leafs through the detritus of his desk, and shoves something towards me. I look down at it. It's a navigational chart, day by day, with all our co-ordinates marked in tiny, neat letters. It goes further back than when I joined - some of the earlier entries have faded ink.

"The Soulless might take the form of a sea beast," he says at last, "But never assume that's all that it is, or that anything so simple as an aetherbubble could contain it."

I look down at the chart again, looking at the trail we marked. Round and around the ocean, chasing the squid or being chased by it. Round and around, in endless circles, like a slanikk chasing its own tail.

The Captain looks thoughtfully at me. "I've received a hail," he says. "From Speedy's ship. They're expecting him back on board. I told them the news, and they say they'll take you instead. The Star Hopper would probably let you transfer back from there in a few months - I know Girda, and she'll calm down after a while." His manner softens for a moment. "You've done your part, Impish."

I look at the Captain, and think of the years he must have spent doing this, without hope of an end. I think of the Star Hopper: of the Professor and his gadgets; of Captain Girda, stern but not without her sense of humour; of Tink and her outrageously flirtatious manner that fades whenever she actually sits down to work on something, her fingers working deftly as she fashions a new gear on an aethersuit. I wonder who the Captain thinks of, and who he means to protect.

"I'll stay," I say. "Not forever. But for a while. You could use me."

The Captain nods. He doesn't seem surprised. "Get some rest for now," he says. "You've earned it. And when the beast wakes again, we'll start from the beginning."

I nod, and he turns back to the window, staring out into the deep. Around us, the Tid-Bit sails on, into the endless ocean.