Chapter Seventy-One. Emergency Power
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-ONE
Emergency Power
With our primary fuel tank near empty, our backup tank being replenished from the inferior stock of the titanfall, and the hardest part of the journey yet ahead of us, the ship switched mostly to its emergency systems.
The heart of those emergency systems was the try-works.
Most modern hunter-barques didn’t even include them, relying instead on their regular generators and the backups to those regular generators.
You’d only ever find yourself in the position to need to run the try-works if something had gone disastrously wrong.
And while having so robust (if creepy) a backup power supply could save a whole lot of lives in a crisis, given the choice between saving lives and saving money, the pious folk of the trade-states chose the greater good.
But the Pequod was an old ship, so deep in the labyrinth of its lower decks was the ancient generator. A machine so arcane that even Lobscouse didn’t seem to understand it entirely.
Overall its operation was simple: There was a hopper at the top, into which we threw chunks of monster meat so old and awful that it was all crust on one side, all mulch on the other.
Then somewhere in its heart was a furnace which sweated that meat until it dripped a raw, caustic fuel which burned hotter and dirtier and more repugnant than the clean, processed fuel we derived from spermaceti.
This process was supremely inefficient and produced great gouts of gray-black smoke that needed to be channeled through the ship’s waste atmosphere system, ruthlessly stripped of any remaining oxygen, and then finally vented into the sky.
Throughout this stage of the voyage, we ran mock flights in our boats, making sure our crews were well practiced for the great hunts ahead. As a result, I got several opportunities to see the ship from outside.
In many ways, she’d changed little from the strange cobbled-together creature that had captured my imagination back on Cthonius Linea.
She was still a barque in the old style, still hung all over with bones.
But at the start of the voyage, those bones had looked to me like jewelry.
Like sculptures in ivory. Their bloody origin only obvious if you forced yourself to think about it.
Now she seemed a flying, dismembered corpse, her hull a shattered rib cage and her masts fingers reaching hopelessly for the sky.
The emergency lighting, in keeping with a convention I’ve never particularly understood, was crimson, and for most of the day that was the color of the light that bathed her decks and spilled from her portholes and observation blisters.
Behind her, the ship trailed smoke and ashes as she ascended, choking her wake with soot.
But only in her immediate wake. Jupiter is vast, and you didn’t need to look far to stern to see the ship’s detritus vanish on the wind.
For the billowing pollutant clouds she was venting to mingle invisibly into the rushing red and white of the Jovian skyscape.
Viewed straight on, she was a nightmare from which there was no waking.
Looking back, it was as though she had never been.
Burning a corpse and glowing like blood on a floodlight, half its crew still murmuring prayers to a god who promised only to devour them last, the Pequod broke through the atmospheric boundary at the rim of the Southern Tropical Zone.
Broke at last into Hell’s Heart.