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 oflifespreading 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 crushanybody 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 constantlybeset 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.
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-ONEEmergency 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 toneedto 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 supremelyinefficient 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.
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-TWOFour Funerals
The statistician in me said the fact that the place the Möbius Beast was most likely to be found was also a place where Leviathans of a less mythic flavor gathered was not so very surprising. The Sunday-school kid in me said it was Providence. The atheist in me said it was luck.
