Sometimes, you just had to play the part somebody else had written for you. “What thing is that?”
“The chase.”
When I’d eased her aches as best I could, she put her shirt and jacket back on and dismissed me. This, I suspected, would be a night she spent walking the deck and brooding, not one she spent making me kneel and beg and whisper her name.
So I went back to Q, who like the ambassador’s wife never resented my excursions. And she held me in silence, neither of us really able to sleep, until the first watch was called.
On the morning of the second day, the captain summoned us once more before the array and showed us the crypto-lock. “This”—she pointed at the swirling icon and the genuinely enormous sum of wealth it represented—“is mine, as the Beast is mine. I was the first to call him and will be the last to see him living. But you deserve reward for your labors, and so I say that whoever sights the Beast first on the day he is slain, they shall have the whole of my share of the voyage. And if I call him myself, well then I’ll take this share and all other wealth I have laid by and see it split amongst you all as equals.”
The question of the cipher and its extremely lucrative payload had been mildly straining the crew ever since the captain had refused to accept Marsh’s call the previous day, but this cheered them. Her previous betrayal had only affected one of them personally and so, human nature being what it is, it was easily forgotten by the others.
Truelove was almost going to protest, because the one thing as good as being given a ton of money yourself is having a ton of money given to somebody you’re close to who is demonstrably terrible with their personal finances. But he was still smart enough to know that the bulk of the crew would rather have a chance at the prize than see it already given away to the Wisdomers, so he stayed silent. It was quite possibly that or get a marlinspike through the skull when he least expected it. And, let’s remember, it was his religious duty to watch other people die, not to die himself.
For much of the day, we followed the Beast’s trail on a mix of instinct and stochastic extrapolation. This in itself wasn’t unusual—hunter-barques were tenacious by nature and on this very journey there had been Leviathans we’d hunted for days or, in one case, a full week because no better prospect presented itself.
And so the voyage began to feel—fleetingly—normal. There we were, a ship full of monster hunters, hunting a monster, the way monster hunters did. And when we caught it, we’d kill it, and carve it up, and drain its sperm into barrels so we could sell it to be burned in power stations on planets most of us would never walk on.
What could possibly have been more ordinary?
Equally ordinary were the half a dozen or so false alarms and abortive lowerings as a watcher or a machine or some doubly addled combination of the two mistook a flock of Wyrms, or a sprite, or a particularly aggressive-looking cloud for the great horror of Hell’s Heart.
And then…
“There”—it was unmistakably Dawlish this time, and this time the captain didn’t begrudge him the claim—“a spout to prow and starboard, patching coordinates now.”
I was pleased for him. If the captain kept her word—and she still might, I believed then that she still might—her bounty could actually clear him of indenture and give him back some kind of life outside service to his creditors.
“Lower,” the captain inevitably commanded, “all lower.Locke, I shall play harpooneer for you. The Terran may move to a lesser boat.”
So close to the end of our voyage, I didn’t much like the thought of being separated from Q. I’d been in the sky with the captain exactly once, and while it hadn’t been without its upsides (the sex, I’m talking about the sex) a hunter-boat’s crew worked as a team, and knowing each other’s weights and movements and, well, bodies, was a huge part of the job. None of us had properly hunted with the captain except maybe Locke, and that would have been long ago.
But there was no questioning the captain. She had a vision, and we were all flying in her wake like Wyrms behind Behemoths.
“Welcome aboard,” said Fidelity cheerily as we all piled in. “I’ll be your copilot, ancillary gunner, strategic advisor, and emotional support for this lowering. If you’d like to play a game or engage in erotic roleplay, just ask.”
“Sorry.” Lobscouse poked his head over the side. “The change of hosting set its training back.”
“You will focus,” the captain told the machine, “on one thing: we hunt the Möbius Beast, which is a great white Leviathan, its carapace scarred from many battles. We are to slay him at all costs and you are to facilitate that. Do you understand?”
I just heard Locke murmur, “Not atallcosts, surely,” as Fidelity replied, “No problem!” and without my prompting it closed the canopy over us and started launch procedures.
The chase on the second day was clean—we were still in the Heart, of course, so the skies were still a ruby riot of sulfide clouds and flares of near-infrared lightning, but whatever local conditions had been dominating the day before had passed and we saw the Beast fleeing straight, true, and majestic before us.
In my memory—I’m writing all this from memory and you don’t need that thing with the basketball and the gorilla to tell you that memory is extremely faulty—the Beast was not, in fact, as white as the captain described it. Its carapace would be best described as mottled, gray in places, white in others, andseeming whitest in all honesty when crusted with ammonia ice, which many Leviathans were.
In a strange way, it was his size that made him seem whitest. Depending on where in the atmosphere you went, Jupiter was either freeze-the-air cold or boil-the-steel hot, and so most Leviathans got a white sheen of ice when they were in the mid-to-upper skies that quickly vaporized away as they descended. But the Beast was so large and terrible that his icy cuirass froze thick and durable. Even at these altitudes, which were water-freezing but not sky-freezing, his cloud-venting armor had the depth to keep it frozen for years to come.
Looking back, I also wonder if the captain remembered the Beast as white because, in her tradition, it was the color of death.
“Down,” the captain commanded, and Fidelity obeyed before I could. “We will not pierce his back. We must brave his limbs from below.”
The boats—we were keeping formation this time, the captain seeming calmer now that she was confident we wouldn’t lose the monster—descended, and as we did we passed the creature’s gargantuan flight-membranes, which undulated in the gale-force winds and shone in ever-shifting colors. Below those its feeder tendrils, longer and thicker and stronger than those I’d seen on any other beast. Even the frilled flagella it used only on brit and sky-plankton seemed somehow crueler and more menacing than those of more commonplace horrors.
He was ignoring us. Although whether he was oblivious to the danger we posed or the reverse, I couldn’t have said.
I can say now, for what it’s worth, and, spoiler: It was the second one. We were fucked.
“Fire,” commanded the captain. And once again my finger hit the firing stud half a second after Fidelity had already responded. Shipboard darts flew from every boat at once, some clattering harmlessly from chunks of sky-ice, some bedding themselves deep into the flesh of the monster. Although even those that hit home seemed like tacks on a train line.Theoretically a problem, but insignificant against the bulk and the speed and the inevitability of what they struck.
