“Canopy.”
My fingers moved to send a command that was already redundant. The dome over the cabin slid back and the captain was up, the custom-built harpoon stowed carefully on the floor while she shouldered and aimed a coilgun. Not Q’s coilgun, I was strangely gratified to notice. One of the ship’s standard stock. She aimed and, following no guidance but her own, she fired. The harpooners aboard the other boats fired with her, and with the synchronicity of a trained hunter-team they maglocked the lines to the hulls of their boats ready to reel in.
Ahead of us, and slightly above us, the Beast rolled.
Leviathans did this a lot when first darted. It was a natural instinct, to turn away from the thing that pained it and try, perhaps, to get the wind to blow it free. But the Möbius Beast was special. It wasn’t rolling from fear. It rolled like a fisher winding in a catch. Over and over, tangling our lines together so that some ripped out, and some held fast, and the ones that ripped out ripped out too late and got twisted with the others into an ever-shortening, ever-thickening cord of braided wires.
“Hold,” demanded the captain, a fraction of a second before Locke ordered, “Loose.”
Fidelity, of course, obeyed its training, responding to Locke with a polite “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Just as the machine obeyed its training, I obeyed mine. Though it would have been within my power to free the darts from the boat and so free the boats from the dart, I chose the captain. Because she was the ranking officer. Because she’d spoken first. Because I loved her.
No matter where you are on Jupiter, no matter what you’re hunting, the forces at work in spearing a Leviathan are immense. And here we were tied to the largest beast in the skies, in the strongest winds on the planet. The tensions in the lines must have been astronomical, and as each slow turn wound them tighter, as the captain, speaking over comms and in my ear at once, reassuredme that there was no way the Beast would outlast us, that it would tire before we crashed, I could almost hear them straining.
But it wasn’t the strain that did for us.
There are so many other things that test a hunter-craft. The downwards pull of twice-standard gravity, the tensile drag of the line. The shearing force of the wind. Our boats are robust but they aren’t indestructible, and when they break, it’s often the most sensitive systems that go first.
“Just for your information,” said the chirpy voice of Fidelity, “the foils are about to fail.”
That would cost us maneuver. That would cost us control. That would make us little more than a dead weight on the end of a long, taut rope swung by a monster out of legend in winds from another world.
That was exactly what happened to Flint’s boat, which lost control and slammed side-on into us.
Everything went wrong at once. The dampers gave out and we all doubled in weight. The canopy cracked and sent showers of glassy polymer ripping through the crews of both boats. Out of a childish, no-atheists-in-foxholes instinct I thanked the Father for the durability of our voidsuits, which had been stress tested against exactly this kind of accident.
With a boat lost, it was important to form a ring and deploy patagia as soon as possible, but we’d drilled this with Q in the loop, not the captain, so we were none of us where we should be and I reached out to my right and found no hand to hold mine.
Glancing behind me, I saw that the captain was kneeling on the floor of the cabin, one hand grasped tight to her lance, her ivory leg pinned beneath a segment of the hull that had caved in on collision. I held out my hand to her, and in a moment of what I prayed was connection but was probably just decades of voider’s instinct, she let me catch hold of her arm while, with the butt end of her harpoon, she levered the mangled remains of her leg free. Inside a sealed suit, I couldn’t hear external sounds, but I imagined the splintering of that marvelous metal-and-ivory limb, and I winced in sympathy.
We dropped. And though we had a not-quite-stranger amongst us, we formed the circle. It was made harder by the captain’s refusal to let go of her lance, but somebody took hold of her wrist and held to it like it was treasure.
Still, that left a monomolecularly sharp spear jutting out into the center of our ring of safety, and as we paraglided away from the wreck hoping that somebody, somewhere would catch us, half the boat’s crew found themselves wondering how much of a slip it would take for that barbed point to go straight through their chest and make them bleed and drown and asphyxiate all at once.
In the end we were lucky. After the crash, the other boats had cut loose and come back to fetch the stranded crews. I fell, a little hard but quite safely, into an open cabin and felt familiar arms around me.
“Ne dimittas eam et custodiet te,” Q whispered over a private channel, “dilige eam et conservabit te.”
“Orders, Captain?” asked the Tall Ganymedian, who had been heading this particular boat. “Do we keep up pursuit?”
Through the helmets of two voidsuits there was no way I could read the captain’s expression, but I didn’t need to. She was calculating. She was always calculating.
Above us, the Beast was lingering, its vicious, whip-like tail striking at any stray piece of debris that had managed to stay buoyed up by the winds. There was precision in those strikes. There was malice in them.
“We go back,” the captain said at last. “We have his trail now, and he knows us.”
It was the right call. We’d just lost two boats and only by luck, three years’ training, and the grace of the Father (in, I suspect, roughly that order of importance) had we managed to avoid losing any lives.
But the captain had lost another leg. And while it was mechanical it was as much a part of her as any limb of flesh or bone.
The moment we were back aboard, she called for Pierce and Lobscouse to make her another.
CHAPTER
EIGHTYThe Third Day
I went to her again that night.
