Chapter Four. The Hunter’s Story
CHAPTER
FOUR
The Hunter’s Story
Breakfast in the Coffin was better than I’d expected.
It was too low-rent to serve offbody food, which meant it was all ice fish and algae, but they were well prepared and I’ve eaten a lot worse in my time.
Q was diving in with enthusiasm, spearing slices of eel with the knife she’d nearly used to spear me.
The dining hall was filling with skyfarers.
Some I recognized from the night before; others had drifted in since.
The Starry Wisdomers were there, sitting even farther from the rest of us than they had previously, perhaps not wanting a repeat of the theological debate.
Two workers from a Martian rust convoy—easily identifiable by the dust, which gets everywhere—had settled in opposite us and were telling lewd stories about their stopover on Vesta.
One or two others I thought might be from the hunter-ships.
They looked too worn for merchants, too lean for scavengers, and too lightly armed for pirates.
Curious about what I was getting myself into, I asked this last group if they had any stories.
Voiders always do, and this lot turned out to be no exception.
The man who was speaking now was, by his accent, Ionian.
He was old—eighty if he was a day, even accounting for the hard life of a skyfarer—and as fortune or, if you prefer, the ineffable will of the Father would have it, he was later to be one of my shipmates.
I never got to know him that well, and so many years have passed since that I only remember him as the Old Ionian.
A rotten thing, memory.
“Some thirty years ago,” he was saying, “when I was just a lad”—okay, maybe he was a bit less than eighty, or maybe a lad was a very subjective term—“I shipped aboard a hunter-barque called the Essex, under Captain Pollard.”
“Would that be the Essex that they made a very popular streaming show about relatively recently?” asked the Ganymedian, only a little bit superciliously.
“Might be,” replied the Old Ionian. “But I wouldn’t know. Still, you’ll have the tale from me as true as it happened.” He took a breath and launched into his story. “For six months we’d been skimming ammonia, playing in the upper atmosphere where the sprites and elveses dance.”
At the time I assumed sprites and elveses were some whimsical cloudhunter’s superstition, but I eventually learned differently. They’re actually the technical terms for a kind of intense electromagnetic discharge you get in the atmosphere of gas giants. Consider this foreshadowing.
“Cautious captains,” the Old Ionian went on, “or fresh ones, they like to stay shallow on account of it keeps you in lower gravity, which in turn spares the afterburners when you’re leaving the well.
But as Pollard was learning to his cost, the shallow skies aren’t where you find the best or the richest Leviathans.
No, to get those you have to go deep, and after six months—”
“You already said it was six months,” the Ganymedian pointed out.
“After six months with nary a spout to be seen, by eye or by scan, the captain decided that we’d be best risking the plunge.”
With a storyteller’s instinct, he paused, letting us hang a moment as no doubt the Essex had hung before its pilots steered it from the ammonia-ice of the upper reaches to the hydrogen-sulfide depths.
“Down we went,” quoth the Old Ionian. “And down and down to where the winds are so strong they’ll strip the flesh from your bones and the clouds are so dense you can chew on them if you take your helmet off. Well, chew on them for the forty seconds you’d live in that heat and that pressure and—”
“And with the wind so strong it’ll strip your flesh from your bones,” offered the Ganymedian, now openly mocking.
The Old Ionian fixed him with a cold stare. “Fie on ye, thou pamperloin. A fine waste of air-rations you’d be on a hunting voyage.”
“Wouldn’t go near one.” The Ganymedian was giving intense wouldn’t-be-caught-dead energy. “A nice safe merchant run for me.”
A nice, safe merchant run seemed about the Ganymedian’s speed, and probably it was the most sensible option (spoilers: given what happened to me and my shipmates it was definitely the most sensible option).
But hearing him say it, in that moment, I felt such a bile of contempt rise up within me that, if I hadn’t been such a giant fucking coward, I’d have called him a prick there and then.
“We had better luck in the deep sky,” the Old Ionian went on, apparently deciding that it was better to just ignore the interruptions.
“And we took plenty of sperm on that run. But one day, some sixteen hundred klicks out from resupply station kappa-two, we caught a spout the like of which none of us had seen, the like of which I’ve nary seen since. ”
The Ganymedian seemed about to say something, but he got cut off.
“A spout that lit up the array, so strong was its pulse, and when we got into visual, we saw an enormous Leviathan. Twice as long as our barque and pure white—”
“Hang on.” Now it was the Phobosi interrupting. “Pure white? You’re talking about the Mobius Beast.”
The Old Ionian nodded. “That I am, friend. That I am.”
“One”—the Phobosi held out a finger that I couldn’t help noticing was missing a fingertip—“the white Leviathan is a myth, and two”—he held out a second, which was missing the tip and half its length; the pair together looked like they’d been cut through with a single stroke and probably had been—“even if it weren’t, nobody ever said it was the beast that wrecked the Essex. ”
“Perhaps,” pitched in the Ganymedian, “they should have hired you as a consultant on the adaptation.”
“Tace,” said Q to the Ganymedian and the Phobosi both. And while none of us spoke her language we got the sense that it meant Shut up.
The Old Ionian gave her a grateful nod. “Glad to see there’s some young folk still have manners. But I’ll not waste more of the story on this lot, though it’s true as I’m sitting here.”
At my side, Q stifled a laugh. “Habeoque senectuti magnam gratiam,” she mused to nobody in particular, “quae mihi sermonis aviditatem auxit, potionis et cibi sustulit.” Then, smiling at some private joke, she rose, placed a hand on my shoulder, and added, “I will walk. You will walk with me?”
The Starry Wisdom cultist was already raising her own objections to the hunter’s story, and I couldn’t personally be fucked to join in with the inevitable rounds of pics-or-it-didn’t-happen that would follow.
Besides, we had work to look for, so I set my hand over Q’s, stood beside her, and let her lead me out into the streets of Cthonius Linea.