I gasped and tensed and I wanted to close my eyes but wouldn’t let myself.
“Here is Hell’s Heart. Here is the face of every god and none.”
I died a little. As we all would soon enough.
After the captain dismissed me, I slunk back to the cabin I shared with Q.
I have a… tricky relationship with shame. The catechism teaches that we are all sinners, and that our sins can be absolved only by making the proper offerings—in cash or by digital transfer—to the Father’s appointed representatives. I like to think I’ve left that behind, along with the Church’s views on sex, family, and bioengineering. But as I climbed down thecold, slightly wobbly ladder between Access and Habitation, I couldn’t help but wonder what I’d been thinking. Running to heaven is a funny way to escape a god.
Unless you’re looking for a new one.
Q was already in bed when I got there, still communing with her little glass idol. She didn’t ask me where I’d been, and I didn’t much feel like telling her.
I think she might have guessed, though. Because she only said one thing as I lay down, shut my eyes, and tried to sleep instead of weeping.
She said, “Cave.” And then, when I clearly didn’t understand, she consulted the idol once more and said, “Beware.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEENContact
One of the many true things the captain had told me the night she’d fucked me against the window of her cabin a couple of hours after informing the whole crew that we were about to hunt myths in the most hostile place in the system was that there were no sharp boundaries on Jupiter, at least not vertically. So where in a different descent there would be a clear moment of atmospheric contact, just as there would be a clear moment of landing, here instead Jove reached his tendrils out into the interplanetary void like a rich man casually groping an employee.
There were a hundred jobs to be done come contact. Hull temperatures to be measured, external pressure to be monitored for the switchover from rocket to jet to rotor, the array to be watched in case we caught an early spout, the boats to be primed before their first lowering, and the unending parade of glitches, breakdowns, bugs, SNAFUs, and FUBARs to be jumped on.
It was the boats for me in those first hours, under Flint, the third mate. While outside the atmospheric deceleration was shrouding the hull in a dull amber glow, I was lying on my back under a fixed-wing spear-boat, flushing coolant lines.
“Keep those coils tight,” Flint was telling me; he didn’t really need to. “We’re hunting big fish this voyage. Bigger fish than you’ve ever seen.”
I made vague, aye-aye type noises and carried on flushing.
“You know about the Möbius Beast, girl?” Flint asked, with a glee I’d eventually learn was typical of him.
“Not much,” I replied, then reached out for a replacement helium coupling.
“A monster,” he told me, all joy and gun sparks. “Mightiest monster in the skies, and our captain’s the one to bring him down, no doubt about that.”
On that much, at least, we agreed. The echoes of her were still shimmering across my skin.
“When you’re done there,” he went on, “fit these.” He slid a box of chunky c-coils towards me. They had a jury-rigged look that I wasn’t sure I’d trust. Then again, I didn’t trust most things. “The more acceleration we can get on the darts, the better we’ll be set when the devils start coming for us.”
I didn’t know what Flint’s religious background was. Given his tremendous love of firepower, he was almost certainly Church of Liberty, or one of its branches. But devils were a common part of many faiths and, for that matter, a common figure of speech.
“They say the Möbius Beast fell on a ship out of Phobos a few years back,” he went on. I had a feeling he was Phobosi himself, which made me take notice. I’d been taught the Criterion of Embarrassment at a young age, and so I was far more likely to believe people when they were making their own in-group look bad.
“Now those ships haverealguns,” he said with a note of rapture. “Terawatt launchers, atmospheric dazzlers, the works.” His voice lowered. “Still, they barely got out alive.”
I’d heard a hundred voiders’ stories, and they rarely needed encouragement to keep telling them, but I was actually interested this time so I asked, “What happened?” in the hope he’d give me the detailed version.
“TheBeasthappened,” he said. It felt more like an opening than an answer, so I kept quiet. “They didn’t know what they’d found at first—it was just a burst on the array—so they dropped boats and sent them out a-scouting, and that’s when they saw him.”
He paused for effect. They always paused for effect.
“Big as a battle cruiser, scarred deep and long from launchers, plates of milk-white bone all along his back and talons all scything beneath him. Jaws wide enough to swallow a wing of fighters.”
I didn’t normally pay much attention to these kinds of stories—okay that’s a lie, I pretend I don’t pay much attention to these kinds of stories while secretly loving every second of them—but my mind went back to the captain. To the thought of her falling through the Jovian clouds, minuscule in the face of the Beast.
It was an impossible thought in so many ways. No matter how incomprehensibly vast the Möbius Beast might have been, in my mind the captain always eclipsed it. She eclipsed stars and worlds and realities.
