Chapter Seventeen. Contact
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Contact
One of the many true things the captain had told me the night she’d fucked me against the window of her cabin a couple of hours after informing the whole crew that we were about to hunt myths in the most hostile place in the system was that there were no sharp boundaries on Jupiter, at least not vertically.
So where in a different descent there would be a clear moment of atmospheric contact, just as there would be a clear moment of landing, here instead Jove reached his tendrils out into the interplanetary void like a rich man casually groping an employee.
There were a hundred jobs to be done come contact.
Hull temperatures to be measured, external pressure to be monitored for the switchover from rocket to jet to rotor, the array to be watched in case we caught an early spout, the boats to be primed before their first lowering, and the unending parade of glitches, breakdowns, bugs, SNAFUs, and FUBARs to be jumped on.
It was the boats for me in those first hours, under Flint, the third mate. While outside the atmospheric deceleration was shrouding the hull in a dull amber glow, I was lying on my back under a fixed-wing spear-boat, flushing coolant lines.
“Keep those coils tight,” Flint was telling me; he didn’t really need to. “We’re hunting big fish this voyage. Bigger fish than you’ve ever seen.”
I made vague, aye-aye type noises and carried on flushing.
“You know about the Mobius Beast, girl?” Flint asked, with a glee I’d eventually learn was typical of him.
“Not much,” I replied, then reached out for a replacement helium coupling.
“A monster,” he told me, all joy and gun sparks. “Mightiest monster in the skies, and our captain’s the one to bring him down, no doubt about that.”
On that much, at least, we agreed. The echoes of her were still shimmering across my skin.
“When you’re done there,” he went on, “fit these.” He slid a box of chunky c-coils towards me.
They had a jury-rigged look that I wasn’t sure I’d trust. Then again, I didn’t trust most things.
“The more acceleration we can get on the darts, the better we’ll be set when the devils start coming for us. ”
I didn’t know what Flint’s religious background was. Given his tremendous love of firepower, he was almost certainly Church of Liberty, or one of its branches. But devils were a common part of many faiths and, for that matter, a common figure of speech.
“They say the Mobius Beast fell on a ship out of Phobos a few years back,” he went on.
I had a feeling he was Phobosi himself, which made me take notice.
I’d been taught the Criterion of Embarrassment at a young age, and so I was far more likely to believe people when they were making their own in-group look bad.
“Now those ships have real guns,” he said with a note of rapture. “Terawatt launchers, atmospheric dazzlers, the works.” His voice lowered. “Still, they barely got out alive.”
I’d heard a hundred voiders’ stories, and they rarely needed encouragement to keep telling them, but I was actually interested this time so I asked, “What happened?” in the hope he’d give me the detailed version.
“The Beast happened,” he said. It felt more like an opening than an answer, so I kept quiet. “They didn’t know what they’d found at first—it was just a burst on the array—so they dropped boats and sent them out a-scouting, and that’s when they saw him.”
He paused for effect. They always paused for effect.
“Big as a battle cruiser, scarred deep and long from launchers, plates of milk-white bone all along his back and talons all scything beneath him. Jaws wide enough to swallow a wing of fighters.”
I didn’t normally pay much attention to these kinds of stories—okay that’s a lie, I pretend I don’t pay much attention to these kinds of stories while secretly loving every second of them—but my mind went back to the captain.
To the thought of her falling through the Jovian clouds, minuscule in the face of the Beast.
It was an impossible thought in so many ways. No matter how incomprehensibly vast the Mobius Beast might have been, in my mind the captain always eclipsed it. She eclipsed stars and worlds and realities.
“The folk of Phobos,” Flint was continuing, “they’re bold but not foolish. They turned fins back to the barque soon as they saw the monster. But it was too late. They’d caught his eye and his blood was up.”
Leviathans do have eyes. They don’t exactly have blood.
Oblivious to his poor metaphor, Flint went on. “A boat is more agile than a Leviathan, but the beast is faster over long distance. The skies of Jupiter are where they live and, well, we use their brain juice as fuel for a reason.”
I snapped the last of the c-coils into place and scooted out to fire up a test pulse. Then when all I got was a smell of burned polymer and the hiss of venting coolant, I ducked back to try again.
Momentarily put off his story by the need to do his actual job, Flint gave an affectionate rap on the wing of the boat.
“Focus, girl. Don’t waste material.” The ringing faded from my ears, and Flint went back to his tale.
“They made it back to the barque all right, but it didn’t help them.
The Mobius Beast came raging out of the skies like the wrath of whatever gods you care for.
They raked it with a broadside—all Phobosi ships run cannon—and it still plowed through like it weren’t nothing but a heavy rain.
And then its jaws and its claws and its horrid mandibles ripped into the side of the barque with all the rage and malice of—”
“Progress?” Locke’s voice came sharp and clear from the internal elevator. “Or are you too busy swapping tall tales?”
“Guns’ll be ready when we find the Beast,” Flint replied, only a little sourly. “Would have been ready far sooner if you’d signed off when I asked.”
As if to illustrate his point, or undermine it depending on how things went, I sent another test pulse. Less burning this time, that was positive.
“These boats are still property of Olympus.” Even half under the hull of a flyer I could hear the disdain in Locke’s voice. “And you are making these upgrades against my judgment.”
Sometimes Flint was a walking smirk. “Fuck your judgment.”
“Very professional of you.”
“Professional don’t keep the beasts right side of the hull.”
From the story he’d just been telling, nothing kept the beasts right side of the hull.
“Professional keeps the ship in the right skies, her hold full of spermaceti, and all her hands alive.”
The suspension of the boat glinked as Flint leaned against it, pushing the undercarriage just that little bit closer to my face. “Tell that to the captain. I’m fair sure she’s decided different.”
There was a pause there, ominous enough that I stopped welding.
“The captain has—” I could practically hear the moisture disappearing from Locke’s mouth. “She is not currently prioritizing the mission.”
When he wasn’t a walking smirk, Flint was a walking shrug. “The mission is to hunt Leviathans. Seems to me it don’t much matter which.”
“You’ve a stake in this voyage as much as anybody. More profit and less danger should be your lodestar, as it is mine.” Locke was the only person I’d ever known who could make risk management sound sexy.
“Captain wants what she wants,” replied Flint. “And as I see it, what’ll be’ll be. And whatever comes I’d rather face it well-armed.”
There was that silence again. There was the shadow of the captain, smothering us all in a way that some railed against, some relaxed into, and I found the sweetest flavor of oblivion.
“Make your changes.” Locke’s voice was void-cold. “And pray in the style of whatever church raised you that this hunt fails.”
Flint made a sound so dismissive that it was practically blasphemous.
Then he kicked another set of coils over to me.
When Locke’s footsteps had faded and the elevator had hissed its way into some other part of the ship, he leaned back against the body of the boat and said, not to anybody in particular, “Locke’s problem, I reckon, is that they still think the world makes sense. ”
I stayed silent. It wasn’t my place to speculate on what the officers’ problems were.
“But you and me”—okay, perhaps he was talking to me after all—“we know better. Don’t we?”
Not wanting to be part of anything if I could help it, I made noncommittal sounds.
And sure enough, Flint went on to tell me the thing he was confident we both knew.
“We know it’s all a joke. A giant joke on the lot of us.
Our whole species is predestinated like that—what happens happens, and you can laugh or cry or care all you want, but it won’t change a damned thing.
” He chuckled fatalistically. “Not a damned thing.”