Chapter Thirty-Three. Chains
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
Chains
The kill is the most thrilling part of the Leviathan hunt, but it’s not the most important. We’re not pest control, after all. We’re after stuff. Stuff you have to slay monsters for, but still stuff.
When it’s first killed, a Leviathan is lashed to the underside of the ship.
Eventually it will be drawn inside the hold, but the beasts vary so much in shape and size that they normally don’t fit easily.
Plus the monsters have so many weird sticky-out bits that they’d just clutter up the ship if we brought the whole thing inside.
The process of transferring the body from the boats to the ship is a fiddly one, part automated and part manual.
As we approached, the great fixing-arms came down from the undercarriage and spread wide to embrace the kill.
By themselves, they supported it well enough that we could loose our grapples, but in Jovian gravity the weight of the beast strained the servos, so they needed to be linked underneath by chains. And that we had to do manually.
So once the body was in place and the grapple was disengaged I took the boat down, popped the canopy, and guided us towards the first of the dangling chains.
We’d come in fast, because hunter-boats are fast by nature, but I brought us right down to gliding speed as we got close.
Q was going to need to grab the chain as we went past and if we hit it at cruise velocities, she’d be incredibly fucking dead.
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” I asked her, even though it was far too late now if she wasn’t.
“Non quia difficilia sunt non audemus, sed quia non audemus, difficilia sunt.” She fixed me with a deadpan look. “But don’t fuck it up.”
Even at glide speed, we weren’t exactly going slowly, and when Q caught the chain a jolt ran through the whole boat from the impact.
I really wanted to stop and check if she was okay but if I had, I’d have blown the entire maneuver, so I kept us flying forwards.
The chain would need to be tight, or as tight as we could draw it, so we flew as close to the creature’s belly as we could manage, Q paying out the links over her shoulder and dangling flagella whipping against our heads.
And we hadn’t even gotten to the hardest part yet.
Attaching the chain on the other side would take time. Not much time, but longer than the zero seconds a hunter-boat can hover for, which meant as we passed the fastening point, Q had to leap out, grab a handrail, and start screwing things into place while I circled around for the pickup.
It wasn’t my first lowering, but it was my first time trying this and I knew for certain that if I fucked it up I’d kill her.
And also that I’d be doing, like, the one thing she’d told me not to.
There are large parts of the job where you can get philosophical, where you can contemplate how in a very real sense are we not all bound together in the great hunter-barque that is the human experience.
This wasn’t one of those times. This was one of the parts of the job where if I moved my hand a half inch wrong or took my eyes off the instruments I could wind up spraying my friend and lover all over the winds of Jupiter.
I steered down. Too far down, really. But the selfish, irrational part of my brain would have hated myself way worse if I hit her than if I played it too cautious and she missed us.
From what I’d read—and how I’d trained in simulators—the trick was to line the boat up with the ship, making the relative velocities easier to match and substantially reducing the chance I’d slice her in half.
So I took us into a lazy arc and ran us parallel with the body of the great beast, traversing it from tail to jaw and passing under Q on the way.
She dropped a fraction before I reached her, because even with trajectory matching, even accounting for wind, the boat was fast enough that if she waited until we were underneath her she’d just plummet into our slipstream and either fall into nothing or, if she timed it really badly, get fried by our jets.
I needn’t have worried. I might have been a green pilot, but Q was an experienced harpooner, and she timed the drop perfectly, landing beside me with a heavier-than-it-should-be thump, the extra acceleration of Jupiter’s gravity making her far faster on that drop than I was used to.
I reset the canopy and stretched in my suit with relief as the relativistic compensators kicked back in.
Then I brought us up in a wide, helical arc that took us past the Leviathan’s great, dead head, all the way around its titanic corpse, and back to the hangar.
Q settled down just behind me, and even through two environment suits I could see she was breathing heavily.
She made everything look so easy—or at least so much easier than it felt to me—that I sometimes forgot she was as mortal as I was, and as aware of her own mortality.
For most of the day, I ignored that little fact. But that evening, as we lay together in my bunk, watching advertisements for soft drinks and opiates flicker past on the screens above, I plucked up the courage to ask her about it. “Were you not,” I tried, “absolutely fucking shitting yourself?”
“Mors certa—”
“Yes yes, mors certa hour uncerta. I know. But still”—I looked at her lying beside me, half smiling, her eyes soft and dark and everything all at once—“aren’t you…”
“Nemo potest non beatissimus esse,” she replied, “qui est totus aptus ex sese quique in se uno sua ponit omnia.” And then with a wicked grin she added, “But yes. Shitting myself. A bit.”
And then she kissed me, and I wished for the hundred thousandth time that every question had so simple an answer.