Hell’s Heart

Chapter One. Cthonius Linea

CHAPTER

ONE

Cthonius Linea

Call me … call me whatever the fuck you like.

Isha. Or Isobel. Io. Imogen. Iris. Ivy. If there’s a point to all this—to any of this cacophonous bullshit in my head—it’s that I don’t think I’ve ever been sure what the I in I Am stands for.

But it’s the only word or name or pronoun that’s always been mine.

That nobody’s tried to take from me. That’s always felt right.

I’ve never been a grounded person. Or a rooted person.

It’s not that I haven’t tried. There’ve been days when I thought I could settle.

When I even thought I could belong somewhere.

But then there’s always other days when my whole life feels like a prison and my body feels like the jailer and something inside me wants to tear out through my chest or my throat and scream to the stars.

That’s when I figure it’s time to go voyaging.

It’s a choice I make. The other choice would be to walk out of a fucking airlock. To let the Europan winds or the Venusian rains or the beautiful lethal sunlight of Mercury do what they will with me. Not that I’ve ever been able to afford a trip to Mercury or Venus. I’m not made of money.

Still, one way or another, when I get like that, I have to leave.

The last time I got the sky-lust I’d been on Europa three months and was flat broke.

And since that meant I couldn’t keep up repayments to the pharma-state of Aphrodite Terra, and that meant I was risking getting half my body repossessed, I needed a job, and ideally—for where-my-head-was-at reasons and dodging-the-flesh-bailiffs reasons—I wanted that job to be in the skies.

So I went hunting Leviathans.

Looking back, it was a mistake. I say looking back, but it wasn’t even that long ago. Still—fuck me, does it feel like I was young then.

I should have booked on with a merchant ship, but the outer worlds were disaligned and the Europa–Rhea runs were cutting crew to compensate.

Besides, I wanted to see something new. To catch a glimpse of the great Jovian beasts whose cerebrospinal fluid powered every ship, lamp, relativistic damper, and oxygen diffuser in the system.

The hunter-barques fly from three ports on the Jovian moons. The largest is Loki Patera, on the banks of the great Ionian magma-lake where the titanomachic and mining industries feed each other in an ever-widening sprawl of steel, sulfur, and spermaceti.

For those of you who aren’t technically minded, spermaceti is the name we give that cerebrospinal fluid I was talking about, like, two paragraphs ago.

You may never have heard of it; you almost certainly never think about it.

Especially if you live on one of the core worlds, light-hours away from the monsters it comes from and the people who hunt them.

In the business there really are people who call it sperm with a straight face.

I’m not one of them. Then again I wasn’t in the business very long.

In any case, there are two other big hunter-cities out there.

Enki Catena, one of the few settlements that sit on the surface of Ganymede instead of luxuriating in its subsurface oceans, is the wealthiest, but real Leviathan hunters look down on it for the same reason the whole Commonwealth looks down on Ganymedians.

They’ve been rich too long to know what’s what but not long enough to have any class.

No, for me there was only one place to go Leviathaning: Cthonius Linea, first and best and most broken.

I traveled from Harmonia Linea with a crew of ice miners looking to take their earnings offworld. I didn’t fancy their chances. Cthonius was a vampire city; half the population was just passing through and the other half lived by sucking the first half dry.

“This time,” one was saying as our shuttle rattled over rails that hadn’t been repaired in a century, “it’ll be different.”

“You said that last time,” replied another. Both men were old, their skin frost-burned from the mines and their lips cyanotic from years of not quite enough oxygen. “You never made it past Pilgrim’s Row.”

“This time it’ll be different,” the first repeated. “Can’t do another three years.”

In my long and fucky life, I’ve been many things.

A trader, a teacher, a pilot, and a poet.

But I’ve always stayed clear of mine work, ice-mine work especially.

I can’t stand feeling trapped, so I can’t imagine much worse than a life in freezing, flooded tunnels.

It’s a job for the hardy and the desperate, and I’ve only ever been one of those things.

“What about you, girl?” the second miner asked me.

I’d not expected him to ask me anything, so I stalled. “What about what about me?”

“Where you headed? Io? Ganymede? Out-of-well?”

“Hunting,” I told him. It was short, it was clear, and it was true.

Didn’t stop them laughing.

I drew my coat tighter against the chill. “Something funny?”

“Fools and mad folks go to the hunt,” a third miner said. The ice had taken his nose and three fingers from his left hand.

“Fools and mad folks go down the mines,” I replied.

They laughed again. But with me this time.

Which was warming in its own way. I appreciate that I might be coming across a bit of a misanthrope here, what with all the talk of walking out of airlocks and shitting on Ganymedians (everybody shits on Ganymedians), but I don’t actually hate people.

Most people. Most of the time. And maybe if we hadn’t been packed like farmed eels in a tin box that would kill us all in seconds if its thermals failed I’d have been friendlier.

Hell, maybe I’d have blown one of them just to feel something—sorry, that’s the airlock voice again.

Anyway, point is it was a short trip and I was in a weird mood and I’d already made up my mind to head out into the sky to try and kill the biggest thing I could possibly kill.

We’ve all been there, right?

I said goodbye to the miners as the shuttle docked and the antique hydraulics spat us out into the first of Cthonius Linea’s 109 habitation domes.

There’s this ritual I do whenever I arrive in a new place.

I stop and I breathe and I take in the scent of it.

That’s harder on Europa, of course; the atmosphere outside—what little there is of it—is at fifty and this near to the walls the air is so cold you can barely inhale it, much less smell it.

But you can’t jam this many people this close without there being some kind of savor on the breeze.

Cthonius Linea, then, smells of travelers, of the nothing-scent of the ice, of the fried fish hawked by the street food vendors.

Under that there’s rust and ozone, the signs of a life-support system that’s definitely seen better days and probably better decades.

Spermaceti built the city of Cthonius Linea.

With Old Earth long out of resources and the transuranics available in the rest of the system cutting it less and less over the centuries, energy had become our number-one problem.

That’s “our” as in “humanity’s.” Because let’s face it, we’re all stuck in this mess together.

Well, most of us. The people on the core worlds seem fine, actually, even though energy-crisis-wise they’re the ones who need the most on account of it being really hard to maintain a garden full of orchids on a world where the temperatures outside cross seven hundred and it rains acid.

All part of the divine plan I suppose.

Where was I? In case you either skipped history in school or this book gets inexplicably popular thirty years after my death and you’re reading it in a totally different cultural context, a few centuries ago we were, as a species, fucked.

So the discovery of the Leviathans, right when we needed them most, must have felt like a miracle.

Of course the Plutonian Church says it was exactly that.

Proof of a benevolent Father who wishes to guide the Worthy to Prosperity.

I think the Venusian Church says it’s proof that a benevolent Father seeks always to safeguard life, for life is all that is holy.

Other cults say different. Whoever’s right, a rush of the faithful and the entrepreneurial came to the outer worlds.

Merchant-pilgrims in solar ships pushed to the limits of their photoelectric sails.

I sometimes wish I’d been born back then.

In the frontier years, before the sky was carved up and tamed.

Back when people believed the future would be better than the past instead of worse.

The Cthonius I saw when I finally arrived was a shadow of a ruin of what it used to be.

In the launch towers of the docklands, water-ships outnumbered hunter-ships by twenty to one.

Still, the streets thronged with travelers from across the system—corporates from the inner worlds, indolent Ganymedians, severe scholars from the Golden City on Pluto—and that was enough of a crowd to lose myself in.

But I could imagine a time when all those thousands of people, to the last, would have been here for the hunt.

Except those days were gone. Had been since long, long before I got there.