Chapter Thirty-One. Weapons
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
Weapons
We’ll get back to the hunting and/or fucking in a second, but I need to explain some stuff to you first. If you’re a coreworlder, or even an outworlder who just happens not to think much about energy infrastructure, you might never have bothered to ask how a hunter-boat can actually kill a Leviathan.
After all, over the past few millennia our species has developed some pretty gnarly ways to blow things apart, so if killing a Leviathan is difficult, it’s not because of a lack of boom.
Boom, we’re fine with. Not that we carry much of it on a hunter-barque on account of not being a warship.
But the technology exists. It’s just that the technology is also completely wrong for our business.
Sure, a hypersonic antimateriel round with fly-by-wire guidance and autostabilized trajectory correction will blast through a Leviathan’s carapace and turn huge chunks of it into, well, huge chunks relatively easily.
But that’s the exact problem. Huge chunks of exploded monster aren’t what we’re here for.
The hunter-barque needs to kill the beast in flight but then dismember it afterwards.
And don’t worry, we’ll get to the dismembering eventually.
Anyway, if you’re going to follow the next bit of the story it’ll help you to know exactly what weapons a hunter-boat carries, and how they work and why exactly they can take out an armor-plated monster the size of a skyship.
If you’re not interested in those kinds of details, you could always pretend that this is actually a metaphor for, like, society or something.
If metaphors for society also aren’t your bag you could always skip to the next chapter.
Just don’t complain to me when you don’t know what a chitin-saw or a bolt-driver is.
Maybe you can work it out from context.
Anyway.
Hunter-boats use a sort of wave system with their weapons.
They start with the harpoons, two wing-mounted, one or two more manually fired.
You’ve already seen what these do—they tie your boat to a gigantic space monster and let it drag you away on a subsonic death ride through the winds of a hostile world.
If we get very, very lucky, that’s all we need. The beast pulls against the darts and the engines and, with enough little holes in it, slowly expires from exhaustion and whatever its version of blood loss is.
If we don’t get very, very lucky, there’s one more step. And that’s when some poor motherfucker has to actually try to jump on the thing and take it down close-to.
There’s two ways to get in for the final blow: from above and from below.
The approach from above is usually made by one person, who gets fully out of the boat and rappels or zip-lines or just plain leaps onto the Leviathan’s back.
It’s the exciting, heroic way of attacking and it appeals to a certain sort of hunter.
It’s also the angle where you actually need the chitin-saw, because you’ll be right on the thickest part of the carapace.
The chitin-saw is a large rotary blade designed to strap onto the left arm, leaving the right arm free for other weapons or just generally holding on to stuff so you don’t fall to your death.
The carapace is thick enough that the saw probably won’t get you all the way through by itself, unless you can get to one of the parts where the plates overlap and wedge it in the gap.
But it can make a big enough dent that you can ram a bolt-driver in and expect to do something.
The bolt-driver is the real killing weapon.
A rod about seven feet long that magnetically rams out a barbed metal spike with the kind of force you in no circumstances want to be on the wrong side of.
The business end is clawed, and those claws will in theory dig into the monster’s carapace to stop the recoil catapulting the unfortunate hunter off their feet and into the clouds. They sometimes work.
If you try instead to approach the Leviathan from below, you miss out on the armor but you have to deal with the legs.
Not all the limbs are weapons, or at least they’re not meant to be.
But whether something’s meant to be a weapon or not doesn’t make a huge difference when it’s heavy and hard and swinging at your head.
Coming up from underneath, the whole crew can stay in the boat, which means there’s less room for individual heroics and much more shared danger.
Most of you, when you go this way, will be fending off the limbs with long knives, spears, and forks, but if you’re aiming to kill and not just to survive, at least one of you will need a bolt-driver and the courage to aim at the gut of the beast, trusting your boatmates to keep you safe, and trusting the boat itself not to crack apart beneath you.
Locke favored the attack from below. The captain favored the attack from above.
Make of that what you will.