Chapter Twenty-Two. Life
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Life
On Jupiter, you don’t fall down. The winds are so fast that you fall eastwards or westwards depending on whether you’re in the red or the white. You also, if you can possibly help it, don’t fall alone.
In the early days of the hunt, bailing mid-sky had been a death sentence.
The atmosphere was too hostile, too hot or too cold, too high-pressure, gravity too great.
In the years since there’s been a lot of progress in suit design, and abandoning a stove boat has gotten much less likely to see you ripped apart by excoriating clouds or drown-crushed in the distant hydrogen sea.
The fall-line was the first and simplest change.
Rescuing half a dozen voiders, each cast a different way by a different current, would be …
not impossible perhaps, but prohibitively expensive, and with most voyages trade-state sponsored, that amounted to the same thing.
So in the event of needing to abandon our skycraft, we trained to tether ourselves together to make rescuing us more budgetarily justifiable.
More sophisticated but not necessarily more important was the system of deployable patagia that would unfurl between the arms and legs of more modern voidsuits, providing enough lift that a skywrecked hunter could keep a more or less even altitude, guide themselves clear of any angry monsters, and generally maximize their chances of recovery.
Using these polymer wings effectively, especially when tied to four or five companions, was difficult, and the more diligent crews would take time to run drills in the wind-tunnels that were built, for this exact purpose, into most hunter-barques.
Our crew had not trained anywhere near enough.
Several of us deployed our wings, and we did our best to hold a lift-optimizing formation, but one of the less memorable crewmen panicked, curling into a ball and dragging us onto a chaotic downwards trajectory.
The rest of us tried to compensate, and I felt Q’s gloved hand in mine on one side, Locke’s on the other as we spread ourselves out to catch the wind.
Behind us, the Leviathan shook off the last of its tormentors and rose triumphant through the atmosphere to freedom.
The prop-wash of its great tail and the electromagnetic fallout of its titanic thoughts swept over us and sent our little group spinning.
Through the crystal visor of my voidsuit I saw debris falling like meteorites and ichor falling like rain and boats swooping around to either rescue or abandon us.
Locke’s suit, being a mate’s rather than a lowly ship’s hand’s, had a built-in distress beacon, and it was broadcasting now, although until we were clear of the Leviathan it would be touch and go whether the signal would be trackable.
“This is Locke,” they were saying over comms, their voice impressively calm for somebody being whipped sideways by a celestial hurricane, “requesting pickup at these coordinates. All hands accounted for.”
I shut my eyes and felt, welling up from inside me, a tremendous urge to laugh.
Life, in so many ways, was a joke. A crude, cruel joke to be sure, but a joke.
Here we were, me and my boatmates, six terrestrial primates whose ancestors—and not even distant ancestors, on the timescale of the universe—had walked the plains and forests of Old Earth, staring up at the stars and thinking them gods.
And now we were falling-flying through eddies of helium and ammonia on a world so vast it could swallow the Earth a hundred times over, so far from our ancient home that the very concept of far became meaningless.
I’d been lost when I set out for the skies, and wanting to lose myself further. And what could be more lost than this? Suspended on wings of synthetic fabric inside a planet that was somehow massive and insubstantial all at once.
Imagine, for a moment, if you could travel back through time and tell Jonah about the skies of Jove.
He would stare at you uncomprehending and call you a madman.
To the prophets of old, all talk of ionospheric turbulence and distances measured in light-minutes and storms the size of planets would seem fantasies. Utter ludicrous fantasies.
The only part of the sky-hunter’s work that Jonah would understand would be the Leviathans.
“Acknowledge.” That was Flint, and like me he seemed to find the humor in the situation. “Charting intercept now.”
A sky-rescue is hard to pull off. Really hard.
The speeds involved are so high that if you don’t match trajectory exactly, all you do is smash into your stranded crewmates at Mach 3 and spare them the indignity of a long death.
The gravitics help. In an emergency they can be set to cushion the impact in much the same way they take the edge off everything else.
But it’s wise to assume that if your boat gets stove you’re just dead.
I was almost disappointed that we weren’t.
“First time?” Dawlish asked me after the canopy came down and the six of us were nestled safe against the spare lances.
I nodded, not that the gesture meant much through the helmet.
“Saw you getting right in there,” said Flint merrily. “You’re a cold fish, Locke, but fuck me if you don’t have the instinct when it counts.”
Locke made no visible response but, again, suit. “If we make no kills, the whole voyage will be worthless.”
“Okay,” I tried, “but we did nearly get crushed by a star-monster.”
Flint clapped me on the back. “It’s the life, girl. It’s the life. No risk, no reward.”
And at last I started laughing, and I didn’t stop.
When Q and I returned to our berth and I peeled myself out of my suit and threw myself into the shower I was still laughing.
I was still laughing when Q joined me. The cubicle was tiny but I appreciated the closeness, the way her tattoos glowed through the steam and the too-strong pulse of the recycled water.
“How are you so calm?” I asked her. My hands—now I looked—were shaking slightly.
She took my trembling fingers in hers and lifted them to her lips. “Mors certa,” she told me. “Hora incerta.”
It wasn’t the closest I’d ever come to dying. But it was the closest I’d come to dying impersonally, to simply being snuffed out by an indifferent cosmos. Assuming a Leviathan counted as indifferent, of course. The captain seemed to think otherwise.
Although I was grinning like a fool at the absurdity of it all, I felt tears stinging my eyes, and as the adrenaline of the chase started draining it was getting harder to speak and harder to think and honestly harder to stand, although in a shower space barely two feet square I didn’t have much option on that last one.
“We nearly died,” I said aloud.
Q nodded. Her eyes were a universe.
“We nearly died,” I repeated.
Q nodded again. Her hand, tracing my ribs to my hip, was comfort and torment and invitation all at once. “Sic sunt hominum fata,” she whispered, “sicut in arbore poma.” And then she added. “We die. But we live also.”
I wanted it to be comforting. It wasn’t quite. “I think…” I didn’t quite know what to say next without sounding selfish. Then again I’ve always been selfish. At least that’s what the pastors told me. “I think I really need you to fuck me right now.”
So she did.
The water cut off—it was on a strict timer and we paid for it out of our lays—but I didn’t care. She pushed me against the wall with a passion I only ever saw when I asked for it, and she took me like the winds of Jupiter. And I laughed and cried and let myself fall apart.