In most other respects, however, they exhibit enormous diversity. I’ll list a few here for your information:
TheBarnard’sorSlack-JawedLeviathan is the largest of the true Leviathans. It’s seldom hunted because it’s seldom seen, but some titanologists speculate that their bodily oils might prove more potent even than spermaceti. They speculate this because the Slack-Jawed Leviathan spends all its life skimming the surface of the hydrogen sea, jaws open, funneling frigid, conductive liquids into its mouth. In theory this should give it access to an incredible supply of ultra-dense energy, but what it uses that energy for nobody knows. When threatened, the Slack-Jawed Leviathan always dives towards the planet’s core where it’s impossible for regular boats to pursue.
The ominously monikeredDeath’s HeadLeviathan is named for the skull-like armor plates that cover most of its head (all Leviathans are armored, the Death’s Head just front-loads it). Although its jaws are dangerous, its primary means of attack against large enemies seems to be ramming. This makes it a huge threat to hunter-barques, but since it feeds exclusively on the lesser Jovian creatures, smaller even than the Wyrms,scholarly consensus is that the head armor evolved for mating duels, rather than for hunting.
TheRidgebackor—remember, if you laugh you lose—SpermLeviathan is the species most barques hunt, and the species that this memoir is (at least ostensibly, I might also be doing shit with themes) about. It takes its name (both of its names, really) from the long, broad ridge that runs the length of its spine. This ridge is filled with long bundles of nerve fibers, and those fibers themselves are bathed in the unique substance we callspermaceti. The creature’s brain is also marinated in the stuff. At least two scholars have suggested that this close neural connection to such a powerful fuel should grant the creature psychokinetic abilities, and one of those adds that this might help to explain how it (and by extension all Jovian creatures) can actually fly. You’ll get a chance to see many of these creatures close at hand, and I will go into far greater detail on their anatomy as and when their various parts become interesting, profitable, or dangerous.
TheHarris’sorKillerLeviathan is one of the smaller species. It has a quatripartate jaw, two sets of teeth closing perpendicular to one another. It feeds exclusively on larger beasts and attacks both them and ships with wild fury.
TheLaser-EyedLeviathan is almost certainly a myth.
I could carry on listing more species. The Split-Fin, the Hemingway, the Screaming Galliard, and so on. At some point it just becomes a string of names with no meaning.
Then again, you could say that of all names.
CHAPTER
ELEVENQueens and Pawns
The morning after signing up, Q and I moved what little we had into a two-bunk berth on the Pequod. She was a vast old ship, long of deck, broad of wing, and deep of hull. Though her crew was a little over a hundred, she was quite empty, in a lot of ways. Most of the ship’s systems were automated, most of her bulk given over to storage, or to space where things would in future be stored. It meant there were a lot of places to be alone, if you wanted to. Which I sometimes did, and sometimes really, really didn’t.
I’m not going to give you a full schematic. That would be tedious and confusing and probably involve the kinds of diagrams I was never trained to draw. But Q and I spent a while exploring, and I can give you a bit of a breakdown if you follow us.
That’s a literary device, obviously. You aren’t actually following us, you’re reading a book written years after the event. I’m not really talking to you and you have no control over how I tell this story.
We began on the top deck, or the observation deck as it’s also called. On a lot of vessels, this is an aesthetic inclusion—it’s nice sometimes to go out under a transparent dome and watch the stars go past, and it’s useful to have somewhere to gather everybody if the captain needs to make an announcement inperson instead of over comms. On a hunter-barque it has a more direct function. While most spacegoing ships are searching a huge area of hard vacuum for asteroids to mine or, in many cases, other ships to blow out of the sky, the Leviathan hunter is looking for a specific type of biological organism in a three-dimensional space filled with sheet lightning and neon rain. That makes the array—the three great masts that stand up in the center of the observation deck and conduct detector-signals perpendicular to the plane of flight—vitally important. It’s so important, in fact, that it symbolically cuts the ship in half, withbefore the arraybeing the domain of the regular ship’s hands andaft of the arraybeing the domain of the officers. Fortunately, Q was with me and, as a harpooner, she occupied a liminal space. That’s the funny thing about ships; they all have their own customs and, unlike surfaceside, those customs tend to include recognizing the actual value of things. On a hunting voyage, the only job that truly matters is killing, and the kill is impossible without the harpooners. Thus they go where they will, eat in the captain’s cabin, and sleep where and with whom they want.
And all they have to do in return is leap down the throats of monsters.
The observation deck was also where Q and I first encountered the first mate. Or perhaps more accurately, they encountered us.
“You there,” they barked as we were lingering by the gunwale looking out over Cthonius Linea. “Haven’t you work to do?”
Turning away from the domescape, I looked at our upbraider. In a lot of ways, the view was an upgrade; the first mate—Locke, I would later learn—presented themself like something out of a corporate brochure. Immaculately put together in not-quite-dress-uniform, they somehow gave the impression of wearing epaulets despite not in fact wearing epaulets. Their hair was cropped tidy to the point of severe, their fingernails trimmed neatly. Still, lines around the eyes and weathering about the cheeks said they hadn’t livedexclusivelybehind a desk.
“Well?” they continued when I took more than two seconds to reply.
“Harpoonersum,” Q explained. “Nothing to harpoon.”
“There’s stock to bring aboard.”
I put my hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Wouldn’t know where to take it until we’ve got the lay of the ship, though, would we?”
To my surprise, they smiled at that, which made a winsome bracket form at the side of their mouth, just shy of the natural frame formed by their vitiligo. “Well argued.”
“I apprenticed as a lawyer,” I lied.
“You’ve come down in the world.”
I decided to try smiling back. “Depends what you think of lawyers.”
Unfortunately, while Locke was open to a certain minimal level of badinage, they were mostly concerned with keeping the ship running smoothly. Which meant that having accepted my excellent point about not being able to do any productive work until I’d familiarized myself with the Pequod and all who sail in her, they made it their personal mission to rectify that problem as quickly as humanly possible.
It was nice, in a way, to be personally escorted around the vessel by a ranking officer, but I’d far rather have carried on lingering. Especially because throughout the tour, Locke insisted on conveying pertinent information to me with a directness and efficiency I found borderline offensive.
“Captain’s quarters,” they indicated as we marched hurriedly past an ominous-looking door at the aft of the observation deck. “Captain herself isn’t available. Complications from reconfiguring.”
That caught my attention the way your own name sometimes catches your attention in a babble of words you’re otherwise ignoring. “What did she have reconfigured?”
