Chapter Forty-Three. The Old Man of the Sky #2
When a Leviathan dies, much of the strange power that keeps it airborne stops working, so the carcass becomes a dead weight hanging beneath the boats.
But normally that weight is bearable. Some property of the atmosphere, the nature of spermaceti, and the unique physiology of the monsters makes them not quite as heavy as they should be given their size and the sheer amount of bone-stuff in them.
But for whatever reason, this one was different. As its life oozed out of its body through that awful, pulpy abscess, the Jovian gravity took it more and more strongly until it was dragging every boat down into a screaming death-dive towards the core of the planet.
“Adjust foils,” Locke told me with—given that we were plunging to icy, hydrogenous doom—a frankly worrying level of calmness, “set density compensators to manual assist, and be ready for things to get bumpy.”
They weren’t kidding. I’ve never been an engineer, but I know enough to understand that the lift you get out of an aerofoil depends on a mix of the speed of your boat and the thickness of the air.
Which meant I wasn’t completely taken off guard when our dropping faster and faster through an atmosphere that was getting both thicker and thicker and hotter and hotter started making life in the cabin extremely uncomfortable, but “not taken completely off guard” isn’t the same as “ready.”
“It’s lost.” That was Truelove, fatalistic as ever over the airwaves. “We should cut lines.”
“Gah, you’re a coward as well as a fool.” That was Flint. “Ride it out past the screaming and we’ll have our prize yet.”
“Pull up.” And that was Locke. “Power to engines, and trust to the lines. It isn’t over until it hits hydrogen.”
The clouds were ammonia here: tiny white crystals that were like-yet-not-like water ice, whipping past the canopy and bathing everything around us in a thick fog. So for a while as we fell I couldn’t see the other boats, or the ship, or even the great corpse we were lashed to.
About our wingtips, the clouds began to glow red with frictive heating, and my instruments were making very worried noises. In the merchant service, we’d have turned back two warning lights ago. “She’s not happy,” I told Locke.
To which they laid a hand on my shoulder and just said, “Steady.”
So I kept her steady. Or as steady as I could. And we kept on falling.
You fall for a long time on Jupiter. In fact, in a lot of ways, there’s nowhere in the system you can fall longer or farther.
I mean, yes, you can go out to an arbitrarily distant orbit from any body you like and then let whatever gravity you can still feel pull you into a decaying orbit.
But that isn’t the same as falling. Being on a body with a sky above and no ground below and just an endless, endless down.
You haven’t seen down until you’ve seen Jupiter. It has worlds’ worth of down. Planets’ worth of down. A kind of down you can’t normally get to before down as a concept stops existing.
The clouds were red now, sulfides and hydrogen sulfides.
We’d managed to just about balance the weight of the monster, but all that meant was that we were falling at a constant rate instead of falling ever faster.
By this point my instruments were telling me that the pressure was too high, the temperature was too high, and the strain on the relativistic compensators was past too high and into just plain fucked.
But we still held her steady.
We held her steady until I saw, for the first time, the great superfluidic mirror of the hydrogen sea.
What with it being the core of the planet, and having seen it on diagrams and schematics for months now, I’d somehow gotten it into my head that it would be small.
Which, compared to the rest of the planet, it was.
But compared to every single other body in the system put together, it was huge.
It was so vast that for a moment I didn’t even realize I was seeing it.
The clouds broke and beneath them was an enormous, reflective nothing.
A wide expanse of liquid metal, roiled by electric winds.
As we descended I began to see shapes on the surface.
Tiny at first, like maggots on a clean spoon.
Then larger and larger until it became clear that the Jovian Behemoth is longer than any ship or any Leviathan, and its ponderous pilgrimage though the hydrogen sea an even greater mystery than the most elusive of lesser monsters.
My instruments had given up. Between the speed and the heat and the pressure and the electromagnetic vortices ripping up from below us, they were just assuming we were already dead.
It was one of the backup boats that cut loose first, decoupling its line and pulling into a step climb back to the Pequod.
“Sans teeth,” whispered Marsh over comms.
Truelove’s boat was next, the fatalist mate not willing to face the promised oblivion sooner than he had to.
“Sans eyes.”
Flint screamed profanities at the ones who’d given up, but even he, I think, knew it was a lost cause.
“Sans taste” was Marsh’s soft commentary.
And at last, Locke gave the order, and we cut ourselves off also.
“Sans everything.”