Chapter Thirty-Five. A Long Way Down
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
A Long Way Down
The whole bottom of a hunter-barque opens into a huge airlock-hangar that you can fit most of a Leviathan into. But only most.
Before that, it has to be cut down to size.
In a lot of industries, that’d be a job for drones—flyers or walkers or crawlers with laser cutters built into their frames so that they can trim back the carcass in its most hard-to-reach places.
But drones are expensive, and if the barque loses one, that eats twice into the profits of the journey. Once because it makes the whole ship run less smoothly, and once because the lost machine will need replacing.
So the job is left, instead, to the crew. If we plunge screaming to our deaths in the Jovian skies, we leave the ship short handed, but the company will at least save a little on our lay, which in the event of our deaths is paid by default to the good people of Olympus Extraction State.
The bloody business of butchering is always done in pairs, two of us yoked together and then lowered over the side on a long, strong cable.
One of the pair carries a saw a lot like the one used in the hunt while the other carries a sword or spear or some other weapon for scaring away the Wyrms that swarm in greater and greater numbers around the carcass.
The saw role is easier, and it was the one I usually took.
I trusted the actual weapon to Q. Like with sword-welding, it was the safest way around for everybody.
She was a whole lot stronger than me and with the gravity making everything heavier than it ought to be, I wouldn’t have been able to keep brandishing a blade for more than a minute or so.
Since every part of the Leviathan is valuable to somebody, the goal in the dismemberment isn’t to just fling its extremities off into the void—much as the Wyrms might enjoy that—but to bring them up again.
Which is why each pair of butchers is suspended above a wide, deep hopper, like a very big bathtub or a very small skip.
And into it we throw chunks of carapace, strips of flight-membrane, and the occasional outer leg that we hack through and rip off.
When I’m up on the array, watching for spouts and the Mobius Beast, my mind tends to wander. I get almost philosophical on account of how deep down I’m an insecure poser who likes to think she’s smarter than she really is.
For some reason, some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, I don’t get the same problem when I’m hanging over empty air, sawing through an undulating strip of monster fin that three voracious sky-Wyrms are still trying to eat.
Without comment, or even warning, Q struck down at the nearest Wyrm, the sword falling quicker than I could track.
The creature was split into two wriggling halves, seeping that same clear ichor that the Leviathans bleed.
Its head-part and tail-part tumbled into the hopper, followed by the next strip of Leviathan fin as I carved it off then signaled up to the ship to move us along.
The cable holding us shuddered sideways, dragging me and Q and the hopper a few feet farther along the side of the beast. Most of the Wyrms had the sense to scatter as we went—it’s not human flesh they’re here for—but one or two stayed out of stubbornness or greed or sheer viciousness.
I edged my saw blade towards them and one brought its jaws around to snap at me.
Q took its head off. The blade came within an inch of my wrist and I had a very sudden, very stark vision of my hand tumbling down, down, down into the hopper alongside the Wyrm parts and Leviathan flesh.
At fever-dream speed I imagined it stripped of its skin and its flesh and its fingernails.
Its fat rendered down for oil and its bones strung on a scrimshander necklace around some voider’s neck or given to somebody’s sweetheart as a gift.
For a barely significant moment, I wanted it.
I was still mostly focused as I went back to dismembering.
But the image-thought of that falling hand stuck with me all the while, and every time I worked on carving up a corpse afterwards.
There was something about the job that made the grim reality of our trade in bodies feel very real and very close.
I just couldn’t get away from the fact that here with my saw, with Q watching over me like an extremely sexy angel, we were taking a thing that had once been majestic and terrifying, and making parts of it.
The flight-membranes for oil, even if it was a lesser kind than the precious spermaceti.
The carapace for scrimshander.
The tail and the limbs for timbers.
The teeth, yanked from inside its once horrifying mouthparts, would go the largest for building materials, the smallest for jewelry.
The only part of a beast I didn’t know a use for were its eyes. Its hundred beautiful inhuman eyes that have looked out on Jupiter for … for how long?
It may shock you to learn this, but I’m not actually an expert on cetology.
I did a fair bit of research when I made the jump from schoolmistress to monster hunter, and I’ve done more since because I’m writing a fucking book about the damned things, but there’s a lot I don’t know.
There’s a lot we don’t know. There are volumes and volumes and volumes on how to refine spermaceti, how to use it and exploit it and make it power cities and starships and civilizations.
There’re treatises on Leviathan hide and fashion plates—old ones now, I’ll admit—showing fine corsets and bracers and collar pieces made from the bones and armor of the beasts.
One of the mil-states even did a study on whether their tail-spikes could be used as ramming weapons in ship-to-ship combat (the answer was yes in theory, probably no in practice).
But nobody knows how long they live in their natural habitat. We guess at what they eat, but that’s just voiders’ tales and supposition. Only the crews of hunter-barques ever come to Jupiter. Ever sail its skies alongside the monsters.
Only we catch a glimpse of what they see when they look out, through their hundred eyes, on a world of winds and vapors.