Chapter Forty-Three. The Old Man of the Sky
CHAPTER
FORTY-THREE
The Old Man of the Sky
We were mid–fuel transfer with the Jungfrau, and her crew mid-gam with us (both of which, if you think about it, involved a fair amount of sticking things in places and pumping fluids through them), when a call went up from the array.
There’d been a spout, and from the speed at which the ships and their crews disengaged, a promising one.
I got off my knees and dashed for the boat, where I found Q and Locke and the rest of the usual crew waiting.
Across the launch bay the captain, once again, was going calmly to her thought-machine-guided craft.
And there she sat in the cockpit, bathed in blue holographic light and looking more like a ghost every time I saw her.
Because the Jungfrau had been able to drop boats immediately while the Pequod had needed to wind in her fuel pipes to keep from spraying fuel-sperm all over the skies, they had a bit of a head start on us.
So as we jetted out into the Jovian atmosphere, the voices of the mates came over comms with … gentle words of encouragement.
“Fry the fuckers.” That was Flint. “Steal our beasts from under our noses, will they? We’ll blow them out the sky.”
“They seek to come between the chosen and our just rewards.” That was Truelove. “As the man says, fry the fuckers.”
Even Locke was uncharacteristically aggressive. “Steady as she goes,” they were saying, “but we make no pay if we lose the prize, so if necessary…” They bit their lip. “Yes, frying the fuckers would be appropriate in this context.”
Although the Jungfrau crew had the lead over us, their pilots were less experienced than ours.
They were even less experienced than me, and I—as I think I’ve pointed out a couple of times—was shit at most parts of this job.
Right now, that difference was pretty academic, because you don’t need a decade of flight training to know that in a chase it’s a good idea to go fast in a straight line, but as we got closer and maneuvering started to matter, it would get a whole lot more important.
Turned out it was going to get a whole, whole lot more important.
Ordinarily, Leviathans are solitary beings, but this time we’d picked up a pod.
If I were a woman of science, I’d probably have been thrilled by this, because we know basically nothing about the reproductive cycle of the Leviathan.
We don’t even know if they give birth to live young (although if they’re egg-laying it would raise a whole lot of questions about where those eggs are).
But we do know that sometimes you see big Leviathans next to small Leviathans and since obviously everything that exists in nature is a reflection of the Father’s plan for humanity, those groups of differently sized monsters must be leviathanic nuclear families.
And following up the mother and children was the great patriarch.
He was gargantuan, the largest beast I’d ever seen and the second largest that I would ever see.
His carapace was scarred and pitted from a thousand battles, his starboard flight-membrane a ragged mess of tears and scars.
His long, barbed tail swayed as he flew, and he listed slightly in the sky.
“All boats,” said Locke, both to us in our little cabin and to everybody over comms, “prio the big bastard.”
It seemed like the Jungfrau crew had gotten the same idea, because they banked around to bring their harpoons online at the monster’s flank.
“Last scene of all”—Marsh’s voice came over comms as we drew our own beads on the ancient Leviathan—“that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion.”
We were still behind the Jungfrau boats, but they were holding fire, their harpooners not skilled enough to make the shot from our current range.
“Down canopy,” ordered Locke, their voice still low and calm and—now I’d talked myself into that headspace—strangely hot. “Let’s show these callow fuckers what a Cthonius crew can do.”
Since I’d left Cthonius Linea near as soon as I’d arrived, I wasn’t totally sure I counted as part of a Cthonius crew, but I liked the label anyway. Besides, all I had to do was hold us steady while Q did her thing.
From much farther out than I’d seen her fire before, Q lined up the coilgun.
Taking her time, she made some adjustments to settings I didn’t understand, and the indicator lights on the side of the weapon blinked from greens into reds.
I imagined it making a kind of high-pitched humming, but that was entirely in my head.
We were in environment suits and surrounded by subsonic winds; all I could hear was the faint rattling of my helmet and the occasional voice over the internal comms.
Ahead of us, the boats from the Jungfrau were bearing down on the Leviathan, but before the closest of them could launch their harpoons, Q fired, and her own dart flew so close to the canopy of their lead boat that it had to adjust course to avoid fouling on the line.
“Roll, twenty-five degrees,” Locke ordered with surprising gentleness, “and loose wing-darts.”
I rolled, and the gunner fired, and our next two harpoons passed close above and close below the wings of the nearest boat.
Now that I had a sense of what we were doing, I felt a strange thrill of danger and cruelty.
Because right now we were walking a line between “polite discouragement” and “deliberate murder.” If the Jungfrau pilots were competent, they’d see that they couldn’t get a good fix on the monster with our lances past them, and they’d ease away, doing their best not to tangle in our lines.
If they weren’t competent, they’d fuck their foils and spin out of the sky, or down canopy anyway and get their heads sliced off by monofilament wires under unbearable tension.
They went … kind of the middle way. Not quite reckless enough to press on but not quite skilled enough to disengage cleanly.
The lead boat’s wing scraped our cables as it turned, sending a shower of sparks into the Jovian clouds and a wicked vibration all along the line.
To make matters worse, the weight of harpoons was making the old Leviathan patriarch list and fall, dragging our lines down and across the bows of the Jungfrau’s boats, sending two of them into a tailspin I quickly lost track of.
I choose to believe that they lived.
In our own cabin, I struggled to keep us in line, the weight of the Leviathan making us pitch and the pressure of the half-trapped wing of the other boat making us yaw and the stress of the whole thing making me feel alive in the exact way I came to the skies for in the first place.
“Cut lines?” I asked as the tremors continued to run through the cabin and the canopy both.
But Locke silently shook their head, and in their eyes I saw a determination that was in its own way as strong and as unbending as the captain’s.
Except where the captain had her monomaniac vision, Locke had a cold and terrible calculus.
A mind that could weigh the lives of everybody in the boat and value them down to the last drop of sperm, and then adjust them probabilistically against the odds of triumph and disaster.
The monster was rolled half onto its side now, and we could see amongst its feeder tendrils great tumors and ulcers. Signs of its remarkable age perhaps, or just of its ill fortune.
“Now that’s what I call a soft underbelly,” observed Flint over comms. “Bring me close, shipmates, and I’ll drive a spear to the quick of it.”
Ahead of us, the boat on our line spun away, and I followed it just closely enough to see it righting its course and returning to its ship.
But then all my attention snapped back to the miserable, venerable Leviathan as Flint’s boat sped towards it, reeling in its lines to shorten the distance and cover a greater depth of sky.
“Will he need backup?” I asked.
That at least got Locke to reply verbally instead of just with stoic head movements. “Negative. The best thing now is to keep back and keep tight. He’ll strike hard enough when the moment comes. What we need to do is keep the beast strained and make ready to take the weight when it dies.”
So I did what they asked, keeping distance and keeping tension and watching, fascinated, as Flint closed in with his bolt-driver at the ready.
Normally the crew of his boat would be fighting hard with sword and spear to stop the countless lower limbs of the Leviathan crushing or overturning or otherwise destroying them as they hove closer, but this beast was so ancient that they barely needed to.
What tendrils it had left were broken and sluggish, and it seemed to take no work at all for Flint’s boat to carve a path through them to the creature’s distended, cancerous underside.
“There’s for you, you great brute,” called Flint, presumably to the monster although he said it over comms anyway. And he thrust upwards with the bolt-driver and fired it deep into the tumorous mass above them.
It burst.
The blood—if you can call it blood—of Leviathans is usually clear and colorless, like liquid water or lymphatic fluid. But this came out a deep cloudy green and spattered down on its attackers like a gory rainstorm.
The monster convulsed, its tail whipping through the atmosphere so fast that it made a booming, tearing sound and came damned near to smashing one of our backup boats out of the sky.
As for us, it was the most I could manage to keep us on an even keel and save the darts from being ripped clean out as the creature bucked and writhed at the end of our lines.
And then it died.