Chapter Twenty. Boats
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Boats
Just as a mercenary will get pissy at you if you say gun when you mean rifle, pistol, or antipersonnel neurotoxin diffuser, voiders get extremely upset at you if you say boat when you mean ship or for that matter if you say jet or worst of all fighter when you mean boat.
We’re going to the boats now. In a moment you’re about to see the great Leviathan hunt in all its glory. Well, some of its glory. It would be fucking awful pacing if I put the most exciting hunting scene in chapter twenty-one, after all.
But before we get to the action, I’m going to talk to you at length about technical details. Think of it as a stern parent telling you to eat all your dinner so that you’ll appreciate your dessert. Or if you don’t buy that, assume I just really enjoy edging my readers.
If you like you could think about both of those things at once, but it might make a mess of your sex life.
Where was I?
Oh yes. The boats.
If you want to understand the Leviathan hunt, you need to understand one thing first and foremost. It’s impossible.
Nothing about it should remotely work. The beasts are too vast and too well armored.
They break physical laws that still constrain our vessels.
They thrive in an environment that would kill you, or me in seconds, same way it would any fucker without so much chrome in them that they’re more a capex line item than a human being.
They are monsters. They are legends. They are gods.
And we are a bunch of terrestrial primates flying machines whose core technological principles haven’t really changed in a millennium.
It’s a miracle any of it works at all.
The hunter-boat (just “boat” in this text and any text on the subject worth reading) is a fixed-wing atmospheric craft that seats six comfortably and twelve uncomfortably.
Its mandatory crew include a pilot, a copilot, a harpooner, and three others, one of whom takes primary responsibility for the kill proper.
If there’s an officer in the boat, that’s usually their job.
Killing and giving orders. Because apparently the hunter fleet thinks those two jobs are the same thing.
Each boat has two harpoon cannon fixed to its wings, but since they only fire forwards and in a single plane, each boat also carries a human harpooner—Q and Marsh and Dawlish on the Pequod; some have more, some have fewer, although all have at least two—who can aim more freely and take more precise shots.
Of course, doing this means opening the canopy, which exposes the entire crew to the Jovian atmosphere, which makes that particular part of the job an absolute fucking nightmare.
Pedantic readers might note that exposing the crew to the Jovian atmosphere also flushes the breathable air out of the boat every time the canopy flips.
In a real hunt, there’s a short changeover window where the O2 is evacuated when the canopy drops and then the air is recycled when it goes up again.
But if I prefaced every reference to the canopy dropping with a short description of the atmosphere exchange it would get really tedious really fast. Anyway, it doesn’t usually matter because in 90 percent of the boat scenes we’ll all have our suits on anyway.
Where was I?
Oh yes, harpoons. The purpose of the harpoons isn’t to kill the beast, just to keep us tethered to it so it can’t get away, and so that it will—in theory—gradually tire from fighting against our engines. The killing blow comes later, and I’ll tell you all about that when it becomes important.
Usually, when I write one of these chapters, I find a way to make it philosophical.
To make the boat a metaphor for the shared human condition or the harpoon a symbol of those things that tie us together even as they harm us.
Or maybe the canopy that covers the boat until the critical moment says something about the way safety is so often at odds with opportunity.
Honestly, though, today I’m not feeling it.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. A boat is just a boat. A Leviathan is just a Leviathan.