Chapter Seventy. Titanfall
CHAPTER
SEVENTY
Titanfall
Even in death, the Behemoths of Jove were magnificent.
I watched our whole descent from one of the viewing blisters on the keel, and as we plunged through clouds I saw glimpses of the hydrogen sea below us.
And at first I thought I saw nothing. Then I thought I saw a black spot amidst the mirror sheen.
Not long after, the next time the clouds parted, the spot had become a smudge and then a blur and then a vast agglomeration of life spreading out along the sea’s surface like cracks through an overpressure dome.
The Behemoth itself, although titanic in its scale—some two or three times the size of the Pequod—was only a tiny fraction of what we were descending into.
The air around it swarmed with Wyrms, cloud after cloud of them feeding and sparking electromagnetic signals to one another.
And across the surface of the hydrogen sea there gathered other things that I have no name for.
Our ships are rated for vacuum and for atmosphere, but below the liquid-metal surface of the Jovian core we’d be drowned and crushed and baked and ripped apart by currents all at once.
Whatever fish swim that sea, I will die without knowing their names or seeing their faces.
The harvesting itself was a nightmare of technical and manual work.
This deep down, the atmosphere alone would crush anybody who stepped outside of a pressurized vessel, and so we were able to get at the corpse only in powered, custom-built rigs that the ship carried in case a Leviathan sank to the sea and needed to be worked on in situ.
They were heavy, rust-brown suits of mechanized armor that clanked and groaned and screamed when you wore them in the ship, and probably did the same outside although then there was so much else going on you that you didn’t notice.
The Pequod had a dozen sets of this low-atmosphere kit, of which six were in use at any one time while the other six were being frenetically maintained by Lobscouse, working hellish night-and-day shifts with his finger tendrils weaving hypnotic patterns as he sealed cracks and greased servos and reconstituted hydraulics.
The crew likewise went to work in shifts, so that six suits were always out on the back of the Behemoth, and we carved into it like miners carving into ice.
I worked with Q on my shift, as I always did whenever I could manage it, and in the fecund chaos of the titanfall, I wouldn’t have felt safe without her, even in a mech suit.
The rules of the normal world stop applying when you go to the skies.
They get overwritten with the rules of the ship and the hunt.
And those rules stop applying again when you step outside the ship into the wild atmosphere of Jupiter.
Especially at the lowest level, where hydrogen liquefies at temperatures that would boil water, and things that should not be live their lives at the fringe of a world that no human can enter or even think about with any real insight.
As I stood beside Q, carving strips and chunks out of the rock-like-leather-like-slug-like flesh of the Behemoth, a scintillating plasma gathered around our fingertips.
On Old Earth they had called it—or something much like it—St. Elmo’s fire.
I tried once to work out who St. Elmo was, and my researches suggested that he was the red-haired saint of trauma dumping, which felt odd to me but no odder than most theologies.
If you’ve never been there, it’s hard to describe the mix of terror and drudgery and beauty all at once.
We were constantly beset by electric winds and stayed on our feet only because they had mechanized claws that gripped the monster we were walking on.
We were beset too by voracious Wyrms, which, although they favored the flesh of the Behemoth, were not above trying our suits from sheer curiosity.
These, Q drove off with her saw and the retractable claws that were built into her gauntlet.
Even in a powered atmosuit she was swift and graceful, and I’ve never really understood how she managed it.
Beside her I always felt slow and clumsy and broken and worthless.
Then again, I feel like that most of the time, so maybe that was less to do with her and more to do with me.
Between shifts on horror-back, I did my best to watch the crew.
I wasn’t spying, exactly, although I did very much want to know if we were still three steps from mutiny.
Not that I had any real way of judging, but Wolfram at least seemed to have been knocked back down the pecking order.
He’d made his play and been out-fanaticked, which …
which was a problem to circle back to later.
All in all we mined the Behemoth for three days, in which time I worked five shifts at increasingly meaningless hours.
And when we’d stripped all we could from it, we hauled its cracked, not-quite-mineral, not-quite-animal flesh to the ancient and seldom-used try-works, where it would be rendered down for Behemoth oil, an altogether less valuable but more immediately useful fuel than the unrefined spermaceti we were carrying for sale.
Restocked from that charnel house that was also a nursery, we rose again. From here out we had no destination but the Heart, and that lay eastwards, and above us. With our eyes set once again on the heavens, the ship flew on.