Chapter Twenty-One. Going Down
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
Going Down
“All hands, stations for lowering” was the announcement, repeated every thirty-four seconds over comms. There was no other signal needed. I was by far the greenest of the crew and even I knew what was expected of me.
Q and I clambered back to the launch deck up grimy cables and rickety ladders.
There were elevators, somewhere, but we were nowhere near them, and they ran fast and crowded during a drop.
When we arrived at our boat we were very much the worse for the trip and since we were flying under Locke, that meant we got the harshest but silentest dressing down I’d ever received.
“A four point three,” they told us. In hunters’ slang the value of an expected chase was measured relative to the size of the electromagnetic disturbance the creature’s priceless neurotransmitters generated in response to the ship’s sensors.
This we measured on a ten-point scale that was named for its inventor, but since that man was clever, rich, and dead, I can’t be bothered to name him here.
“We’ll see larger before long, but its wake will be fierce enough. ”
Q needed no further instruction. She was already taking up her place in the boat, coilgun by her side, atmospheric suit in place and helmet at the ready. I would have been just as quick, should have been just as quick, but for the sight of the captain across the launch bay.
I wasn’t the only one watching. It’s not that it was uncommon for a captain to go down to the boats with their crew; in fact it was common enough that there was a boat stowed in one side of the bay that, technically, had been reserved for the captain’s use.
But the crew was small, and we all knew each other, and a hunter-boat wasn’t a solo craft.
Things only grew stranger when she passed her hand over the lock and the canopy hissed back to admit her.
OLD IONIAN VOIDER: She can’t mean to fly alone.
SECOND EUROPAN VOIDER: Has she lost her wits? Are we in deep skies with a captain out of her mind?
She climbed into the cockpit and the canopy closed behind her. Just as I wasn’t the only one watching, I also wasn’t the only one to see the flickering shapes that moved behind the glass. Phantoms of light and data.
TALL GANYMEDIAN VOIDER: Strike me, it’s haunted.
OLD IONIAN VOIDER: Aye, it’s the ghosts of her old crew she brings with her.
Even if I hadn’t been raised in a church that forbade superstition, I don’t think I would have believed in ghosts.
And the lights in the cabin looked more holographic to me than sepulchral.
Still, I knew the captain a little by then, and the Old Ionian wasn’t entirely wrong.
The captain carried ghosts with her by the hundreds.
Ghosts of the past and the present and, like the Old Earth fable about a wise man misled by spirits, ghosts of things yet to come.
But as Locke seemed about to remind me, I was not there to stare at my captain, or to second-guess her choices. I was there to join in the great hunt for monsters. And the moment I called back my senses, I was full of passion for the chase.
Though I was new to the hunt the good captains Emerson and Thoreau had seen fit to place me as a pilot, and I knew my way around a boat well enough that I didn’t think I’d let them down.
Once Q and Locke and the other crew who—I’ll make no apologies or excuses for this—made less of an impression on me were aboard I attached my helmet, sealed the canopy (it should always be in that order), and waited for instructions to launch.
I didn’t have to wait long. The captain’s voice came over comms with a soft but unanswerable “To the skies.”
The little squadron lowered as one, starting in tight formation and then fanning out into the white clouds of Jove.
From above, the planet had seemed opaque.
Matte strips alternating orange and cream like smoked glass.
But close to it, inside it, flying through it, there was so much more.
Clouds of condensing ammonia rushed past on winds so fast that all I could think of was childhood sermons about judgment and wormwood and the Father’s wrath.
But in the breaks between the clouds were such vistas.
Skyscapes like amorphous mountain ranges, shoals of Wyrms flying free and violent amongst insubstantial peaks. The roads the Leviathans walked.
I’d seen all this before, of course, from the array, but as watching from the array was different from watching from deck, so watching from a boat was different again.
On the ship, the shielding and the gravitic normalization created a kind of cocoon.
An artificial safety that made it feel not so very different from being surfaceside.
The boat was different. On the boat you felt the wind in the wings as you pitched; you felt the way you fell faster and climbed slower than you would on a different world.
You saw the ammonia-ice on the wings forming and then boiling off as you turned and the friction brought the heat up.
And then, at last, some thirty klicks from the ship, minutes at most at skyboat-speeds, you saw the Leviathan.
I tried, when I wrote my cetology for the early chapters of this memoir, to explain a little of what the great beasts of Jupiter are.
How they live and how they are hunted and what you could expect on first meeting one in, if not the flesh, then in the present tense of the narrative.
Now that I come to it, I realize how fucking pointless that was.
At first, of course, it didn’t look like much.
Distance plays tricks, and for a few deceptive moments it was just a speck on the horizon, a dot on a scan that my copilot watched while I had my eyes on the sky.
But with terrifying speed it grew closer and grander and more detailed until the full Behemoth glory of it was searing into my spirit like a welding laser.
It was long. Half the length, perhaps, of the ship and many, many times longer than our little boat.
By the distinctive ridge on its back we knew that we were at least chasing the right kind of beast. It was a Ridgeback, a Sperm Leviathan, and its psychoconductive fluids would light a city for a year.
But only if we could kill it. And now that I saw it, that seemed impossible.
The ridge looked supple but not fragile, and it rose out of a back lined with plates of bone or chitin or whatever equivalent Jovian evolution had spawned into the universe.
This particular beast had a carapace that shone a hypnotic, opalescent purple-gray, marked here and there by deep scratches, their edges long worn smooth by the wind.
“Steady,” Locke commanded under their breath. “It’s seen us but it won’t dive yet.”
Over the open comms I heard similar instructions from the other boats.
“Fear nothing and go calmly.” That was Truelove. “The end will come when it does, and it is sin to hide from it.”
Flint, meanwhile, was taking a more proactive approach. “Prime coils, ready lances, hold for the range, and brace—we’ll soon have our prize.”
I listened over the chatter for the captain, but she was silent.
What, after all, did the squadron need to be told?
This was their livelihood, and whether driven by greed or need or piety or the sheer love of the chase, every person present would pursue the precious sperm with the zeal of a fanatic.
It’s been a while since I mentioned sperm, hasn’t it? Stopped laughing yet?
Give it time.
“Down,” ordered Locke, and I guided the boat into a dive.
With the tyrannical grip of Jupiter’s gravity we lost height fast, and I saw the bulk of the Leviathan soar above me.
While its back was majestic and impenetrable, its underside was the stuff of nightmares.
Hundreds of segmented limbs gripped close to its abdomen, reaching down now and then to grasp at something I couldn’t see.
As my boat skimmed closer to its head I saw mandibles working endlessly to draw in whatever nutrients it was sweeping from the skies.
Locke’s eyes tracked the monster as we rode along in its wake. “Hold.” Then, “Canopy.”
From our angle, the wing-guns would be useless, but between the creature’s limbs and its jaws and its vast body segments I could see—or thought I could see, or hoped I could see—chinks in its armor that a skilled harpooner could strike.
I downed canopy.
The moment I did the gravity hit. I can do basic ship-work but I’m no field scientist or Lorentz engineer, so I have no idea how the gravitational compensators actually work.
But they seem to need an enclosed space to be fully effective, and so as soon as we were exposed, the weight of the boat doubled.
Dropping into a controlled fall helped, but we had to keep in range of the beast or the whole maneuver would get us nowhere.
Between the strain on the engines, the wind that was now scouring past just a suit’s breadth from our skins, and the new heaviness in my limbs, I didn’t think I could keep us steady for more than a handful of heartbeats.
But a handful of heartbeats was all we needed. Q fixed one end of the harpoon cable to the hull with a transmagnetic lock, aimed her coilgun, and fired.
We were so dwarfed by the monster that the shot, for the first blink and a half, was anticlimactic.
The dart flew into the distance and vanished into the chaos of twitching members that lined the Leviathan’s underside.
Then any sense of disappointment I might have been nurturing vanished as the line snapped taut and the boat lurched forwards, the beast reacting to us at last.
“It begins,” said Truelove over comms. “Strike now.”
“There it goes,” called Flint. “All guns, all guns primed and charged and down the throat of the beast. Time’s come to show the damned thing what we’ve got.”
So the other boats closed with wing-guns and hand-launchers, and the Leviathan began a sharp and sudden descent. The undulating flight-membranes that ran the whole length of its midline whipped and snapped in the plunge-wind and our little boat trailed in its wake.
Over comms, I thought I heard the captain’s voice just saying “Yes.”
“Go lateral,” Locke ordered as the canopy slid back into place. “We can’t fight the beast and gravity both. Pull it aside until the struggle’s worn out of it.”
Always willing to let somebody more experienced take over, I did as I was told, turning the engines 90 degrees to the fall and hoping to hell that the mate was right.
Right or wrong, it seemed that Locke—and this shouldn’t have surprised me—was making a textbook play. So the other boats knew what we were about and backed us, and the creature began to roll.
For a second I thought we had it, but glancing down I realized the boat’s gyroscope was reading a few degrees off level, and though the line was still taut it was no longer running straight. It was tangling in the Leviathan’s forelimbs and, as it turned, winding us closer and closer to it.
As the line shortened it began to pass through resonances with the wind, vibrating like a violin string playing an ever-dwindling, deadly symphony.
“Hold,” Locke repeated. “Let it wear itself out.”
The line shortened and shortened again. We were close enough now that I could see where the cable was biting into the creature’s limbs, making it seep a transparent ichor into the clouds.
I could see too that while some of its appendages were claw-tipped, others ended in billows of feathered tendrils that scooped and tasted the wind.
It was marvelous, apart from the tiny fact that it was going to kill us.
Locke frowned, just slightly, then reached back into a spring-locked cabinet, drawing forth a long, curved sword. “Blades,” they said, “and spears. We’re about to have a fight on our hands.”
The line was too short now for the engines to keep us steady, and we began whipping round towards the Leviathan’s body, grasping legs coming down to meet us.
Hoping that Locke was right and fighting was better than sheltering inside a metal-and-crystal pod, I downed canopy once more, and this time I was better braced for the shift.
Beside me, Q already had a spear in her hand ready to strike the beast as we crashed against it.
I stood awestruck but when somebody passed me a blade I took it without thinking.
The Leviathan reached down with a flurry of its fronds, and I swung with what strength I could, striking down so that gravity would at least be on my side.
I needn’t have put so much effort in, because the limbs it had reached out to us turned out to be impossibly delicate, and as my blade sliced through them like a razor through lips, I saw them recoil and I half heard, half imagined a high, keening scream.
Closer now, closer, and the segmented arms, if you could call them arms, were tightening around us.
Spears in the joints kept them from crushing, and the grim work of hacking and carving kept the rest of the boats visible, even if it prevented us from following them.
Still, it was a losing battle. And by the time Locke gave the order to drop the line it was too late.
I heard metal buckle and crystal crack and felt the click of somebody latching me to a line as the hull and the wings gave out and, giving the chase up as doomed, we jumped.