Chapter Sixty-Four. The Last Storm
CHAPTER
SIXTY-FOUR
The Last Storm
I’ve not really written about the storms we faced on the Pequod. There hasn’t been time or space for it, and they were so frequent and, in their way, so alike that to talk about one of them is to talk about all of them.
So I’m going to talk about the last.
You might have a question here. You might ask me, Hold on, isn’t the last storm Hell’s Heart itself, that’s a storm by definition. And I suppose in a way you’re right.
Except what is a storm?
To have a storm, you need an atmosphere.
And gas giants are all atmosphere. But that’s exactly the issue.
A great poet of Old Earth once said that fish had no word for water, and so we, since we evolved—sorry, I of course mean since we were created to participate in the bounty of prosperity—on a terrestrial world we have no easy word for the great slow phenomena that shape continents.
We have language for it, of course. Language is endlessly flexible. We can talk about tectonic activity and continental drift. But we never look down at our feet and say, “Wow there’s a lot of subduction happening today.”
“But that’s the difference,” you might be saying. “Those kinds of things only happen slowly, whereas the weather changes all the time.”
And I would say I agree.
Which brings me back to my initial question: What’s a storm?
If we understand weather by its temporariness, then the storms of Jupiter aren’t weather at all.
They’re places. Vast, permanent places. Or permanent enough.
Some are only as long-lived as people, others as lasting as empires.
On a gas world, a storm is like what I imagine an Old Earth forest must have been (and it’s a limited imagination, based on what Q has managed to explain).
Something ancient and wild and indifferent that was there long before you or me and will be there long after.
What makes a storm feel like a storm is that you pass through it.
Hell’s Heart itself is a world of red unending chaos.
To call it a storm makes as much sense as calling an ocean a flood or a desert a drought.
Which means that the storm I’m about to describe was the last storm we faced on that hunt, before we went to a place where storms stopped having meaning.
“You can’t take us that way,” Locke was saying to the captain. “Not with the hull still weakened from the breach.”
The captain was agate-eyed and tranquil in her reply. “You have our bearing, and you have your orders. The hull will be bolstered but I will not delay. Not with the end so close.”
“The end is when we return to Europa with a full hold and divide our take according to our contracts,” replied Locke in the exasperated tones of somebody who knows they’re dealing with a fanatic and is tactfully trying not to admit it.
Except that wasn’t the whole of it. There was sorrow beneath the frustration. The deep and quiet sorrow of not knowing if you were talking to a woman you used to love, or a monster wearing her face.
But the captain’s reply gave no clue one way or the other. “Fix weathering plates,” she commanded. “We continue.”
So with their usual diligence, Locke set about seeing the hull reinforced with the makeshift upgrades we euphemistically called weathering plates.
More cynical hunters called them cope panels.
It meant maintenance crews working around the clock and that, in turn, pulled eyes off the array in ways that could have cost us the sight of spouts but, since the captain was likely to order they be ignored anyway, it was probably the best decision tactically speaking.
When my time on the maintenance crew came, Q and I descended on long cables with a selection of tools in our belts and a hopper of spare parts beside us.
By that point I’d been outside of the ship a hundred times, and in all manner of what in other contexts would be called weather.
But this was something else. The captain was guiding us now into the anticyclonic corona of the Heart, and here the winds whipped us with such ferocity that we needed to have our welding gauntlets clamped onto our arms to make any use of them at all.
Had I been working with anybody else, one or the other of us would have felt the need to say something.
To make some kind of comment on the harshness of the conditions and how fucking typical it was that we’d been stuck with this job, which—and voiders made this observation about anything we were asked to do—was undoubtedly the worst on the ship.
It wasn’t like that with Q. I’d learned to understand enough of her language, and of the deliberately slow, staccato way she spoke Exodite, that we could communicate verbally perfectly well.
And I was increasingly sure she understood every word anybody said and just chose on most occasions not to respond.
But usually we reveled in the language of silence and the dialogue of bodies.
Whether working or fucking, we moved with a synchronicity I’ve never found before or since and have never admitted that I was looking for and am still looking for.
Well, never admitted until the exact moment I wrote those words.
Perhaps eventually I’ll stop associating love with death. But the catechism taught me well and if it’s good enough for the Father and his appointed Son, surely it’s good enough for the rest of us.
You might remember one of the things that first drew me to the Pequod was that its exterior was all decked out in Leviathan bone.
At the time I’d thought this was a style choice.
And in defense of that assumption, the captain really was extra as fuck and so it probably was at least a small factor in her decision-making.
But I was belatedly realizing that it was also just a feature of the ship being old and often repaired.
Hunter-barques carry a lot of shit with them.
Like a lot of shit. As the voyage goes on they swap this shit out, on a more or less one-for-one basis, with barrels of sperm, which is how they’re able to both carry enough supplies for a three-year voyage and also bring back enough cargo for the trip to be worth making.
But as much shit as they carry, there are some things you can’t have that many spares of, and gigantic fuck-off plates of void-hardened steel are one of those things.
Volume-wise they don’t take up a ton of space.
You could probably pack dozens of them into a single cargo bay—at least if it hasn’t been converted into a temple—but they’re unwieldy and dense as hell so they add a lot of weight to a vessel that needs to operate in a variety of gravities and be VTOL capable.
So instead, a lot of hunter-barques fix themselves—and make dodgy, probably barely functional upgrades to themselves—with the carapaces of their slain enemies.
Leviathan bone, or Leviathan carapace (they seem to be made of similar materials but since I’m neither a biologist nor a materials scientist I won’t speculate), is by its very nature designed (intelligently designed, of course, by the Father who in his infinite wisdom put them on a planet light-minutes from Earth millennia before humans even knew what a planet was, aware that we’d eventually need them and find them, truly Providence is wise) to survive in the atmosphere of Jupiter.
And since the Leviathans swim at all depths, from skimming the sea to basking in the distant light of the sun, they’re also naturally radiation resistant.
Of course actually fusing bone to metal was a pain in the ass, but over the centuries the hunter-fleet had developed specialized tools for the job.
So there Q and I clung, with winds that our species was never meant to face whipping past us.
Side by side, we spat white-hot sparks from welding blades to conjoin the ship and the monster at the atomic level in the hope that this would make it safe for us to sail her into nightmares.
Well, safe-ish. The ship’s new armor would stand the storms well enough. But the storm wasn’t what we were chasing.