Is that selfish? Probably.
Compared to the awe-inspiring rush of the Wyrms, the electromagnetic flares that the thing we presumed was the Möbius Beast was sending up seemed borderline anticlimactic. They still limned the clouds in white lightning but for a long while we saw nothing of the monster itself. All I saw was the captain, far ahead of the flight now, vanishing into a cloud bank.
We followed her. We’d all committed to following her.
The instruments told me we were getting closer. While the Beast was spouting less regularly we were getting near enough now to pick up mass readings and we were almost in densitometer range.
I had to double-check the readouts, because they looked very, very wrong.
The monster we’d found, according to every dial, screen, and readout, was larger and more fearsome than anything we’d encountered in calmer skies. Half as long again as the largest bull Leviathan we’d killed. Fully twice the length of the Pequod. The boat’s built-in sperm-price evaluator (market valuations subject to change, assessments for information only, this is not financial advice) were pricing it at what I might reasonably call “fuck-you money” even when split a hundred ways, even with half that hundred ways swallowed by Olympus Extraction State’s off-the-top cut.
There were murmurs over comms as the rest of the hunt saw what I was seeing, and started mentally recalculating just how much death it was worth risking for a prize like this.
And then.
Then we saw it.
The clouds broke and we burst at barely subsonic speed into clear red skies. Clear red skies that were dominated by the titanic, mythological form of the Möbius Beast.
It was indescribable.
Sorry. Just messing with you. I’m not going to drag you along all this way on a hunt for a sky-rending super-beast and then leave you without telling you what it looked like. Obviously itwas perfectly describable and once I’m done being metatextual, I will actually describe it to you. But before I do, I’ll remind you—like I’ve been trying to remind you on and off for seventy-eight chapters now—that, all trolling aside, no description—not of the Beast, nor of anything in this book, nor, if we’re honest, anything in any book at all—is the same as or even a little bit like seeing it for yourself. It’s not the same as feeling it. Hearing it. Being there. Actually flying or falling or fucking or whatever experience you’re trying to half capture through words on screens or voices in your ears or tactile dots beneath your fingertips.
I’ll tell you what I saw when we found the Beast at last. I’ll tell you what I felt when I saw it. But it will be a treason of images. You can no more see what I saw than you can smoke a painting of a pipe.
Let’s start bathetic.
It was big.
Really big.
You might think it’s a long way down the road to the nearest narcotic-dispenser machine, but that’s algae flakes and dried polyps compared to the Möbius Beast.
Sorry, I’ll calm down.
When I first saw the monster, I saw it from below. And it was so vast and far off that I couldn’t get a real sense of it. If you’ve ever seen a mountain from the window of a suborbital transport, you’ll understand what I mean. Its size made it look so much closer and the distance made it look so much smaller that I truly thought I could reach out and take it in my hand.
From beneath, it wasn’t white at all. It was a layering of iridescences, its limbs—and as I got closer I could see hundreds, thousands of limbs—writhing and twitching beneath it, catching the storm light around it, and reflecting it back diffraction-shifted and eerie.
And it waslithe. Most Leviathans move stiffly, their carapaces relatively solid blocks over their entire body. But the Möbius Beast was segmented like a louse, and it bent andflexed as it flew, turning its head and body in arcs that made it seem like it was looking around in curiosity.
The captain’s boat, silhouetted against the Beast, was little more than a speck. A thumbprint on the visor of my helmet. A scratch on the canopy of my boat.
When we’d gotten close enough to make out just a little more detail, I could see that she’d already dropped canopy and was flying, spear in hand, the boat controlled entirely by Fidelity, down the very throat of the monster.
If I’d been in any position to be rational, detached, or objective, I’d have said she was fucked.
But I wasn’t in a position to be any of those things. I let the part of me that loved her to the point of worship believe that somehow she could do what was so obviously impossible. That she could spit a god on her lance. That she could shoot a harpoon through the very idea of humanity’s insignificance and tear open the sky from the sheer power of wanting it.
Looking back, it was in that exact moment that I first understood what faith felt like.
While the rest of us were still too far away to help, or even to run interference, she moved to strike.
Moved to strike. But never got to.
The Möbius Beast turned its head towards her, and I swear—I will always swear, and no force in the system can deny me—that I saw recognition in its eyes. The hundred eyes that ran asymmetric and terrible up either side of its armored, storm-pitted skull.
And then it opened its jaws. And inside those jaws opened more jaws. And more. And more, and then tendrils whipped from somewhere inside that matryoshka doll of fangs and flesh. Part armored, part muscular, part chitinous, they grasped for the captain’s boat and, although its pilot responded with a speed and precision only a machine intelligence is capable of, it was constrained by physicality. Wings can only take so much strain. Engines can only produce so much thrust. Relativistic dampers can only compensate for so much acceleration.
