I have to say there were some Great things about this story, but overall, I think it had too many problems to work.
Narration was excellent, as was the slow unfolding of the character's nature, his affection for his men, and the horrible situation he was in. The writing was solid and kept me interested, and the concept of the oracle was horrific and well done.
With all of this going for it, it's a pity that the story doesn't work for me, and I have to say that's because there really is no story there - there's just a concept.
What I mean by that, is the situation does not change from the start of the story to the end of the story. Oracle is already on the ship, the devil's bargain has been made, the situation is already established. The audience doesn't know all the details of the situation yet, but once we do, it is clear that it is essentially unchanged from start to finish. There is no story arc to speak of, no action, no plot really. There is a really cool concept, but I personally can't abide stories that attempt to substitute revelation for narrative. Told in this manner, all of the action (encountering the oracle, transferring it to the ship, feeding it human flesh the first time) already happened in an earlier encounter, which probably would have been the more interesting story! I wish that the author had chosen to write that story, because I think it is really weak storytelling to try and substitute an "aha" moment of awful realization for a good narrative. I've been guilty of trying to do that myself, and I just don't think it works well when one sets out to do it - primarily because if the audience is clever and figures it out ahead of time, then they're not really left with anything to watch happen.
The second part of my criticism of the story is that the moral dilemma is rather bogus. Why on earth would they have to lose 1 out of 5 engagements in order to feed bodies to the oracle? Why wouldn't they just win ALL of the engagement and feed it the bodies of their enemies? It appeared that they were using the subterfuge of collecting their own dead, but with so much at stake, I'm pretty sure they could find a crew and ship willing to collect enemy dead under some pretext.
For all of this criticism, I should say that my praise for this piece outweighs it. (It's just not as fun to write nice stuff!) I really enjoyed the characterizations, the details of the landing (from the way the landers moved when empty to the gory details), and the rather clever and awful concept of the oracle. Again, the prose was solid and narration excellent, so even though I have problems with the structure of the story, I put this as one of my favorite Pod stories.