If you like you could think about both of those things at once, but it might make a mess of your sex life.
Where was I?
Oh yes. The boats.
If you want to understand the Leviathan hunt, you need to understand one thing first and foremost. It’s impossible. Nothing about it should remotely work. The beasts are too vast and too well armored. They break physical laws that still constrain our vessels. They thrive in an environment that wouldkill you, or me in seconds, same way it would any fucker without so much chrome in them that they’re more a capex line item than a human being.
They are monsters. They are legends. They are gods.
And we are a bunch of terrestrial primates flying machines whose core technological principles haven’t really changed in a millennium.
It’s a miracle any of it works at all.
The hunter-boat (just “boat” in this text and any text on the subject worth reading) is a fixed-wing atmospheric craft that seats six comfortably and twelve uncomfortably. Its mandatory crew include a pilot, a copilot, a harpooner, and three others, one of whom takes primary responsibility for the kill proper. If there’s an officer in the boat, that’s usually their job. Killing and giving orders. Because apparently the hunter fleet thinks those two jobs are the same thing.
Each boat has two harpoon cannon fixed to its wings, but since they only fire forwards and in a single plane, each boat also carries a human harpooner—Q and Marsh and Dawlish on the Pequod; some have more, some have fewer, although all have at least two—who can aim more freely and take more precise shots.
Of course, doing this means opening the canopy, which exposes the entire crew to the Jovian atmosphere, which makes that particular part of the job an absolute fucking nightmare. Pedantic readers might note that exposing the crew to the Jovian atmosphere also flushes the breathable air out of the boat every time the canopy flips. In a real hunt, there’s a short changeover window where the O2is evacuated when the canopy drops and then the air is recycled when it goes up again. But if I prefaced every reference to the canopy dropping with a short description of the atmosphere exchange it would get really tedious really fast. Anyway, it doesn’t usually matter because in 90 percent of the boat scenes we’ll all have our suits on anyway.
Where was I?
Oh yes, harpoons. The purpose of the harpoons isn’t to killthe beast, just to keep us tethered to it so it can’t get away, and so that it will—in theory—gradually tire from fighting against our engines. The killing blow comes later, and I’ll tell you all about that when it becomes important.
Usually, when I write one of these chapters, I find a way to make it philosophical. To make the boat a metaphor for the shared human condition or the harpoon a symbol of those things that tie us together even as they harm us. Or maybe the canopy that covers the boat until the critical moment says something about the way safety is so often at odds with opportunity.
Honestly, though, today I’m not feeling it.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. A boat is just a boat. A Leviathan is just a Leviathan.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONEGoing Down
“All hands, stations for lowering” was the announcement, repeated every thirty-four seconds over comms. There was no other signal needed. I was by far the greenest of the crew and even I knew what was expected of me.
Q and I clambered back to the launch deck up grimy cables and rickety ladders. There were elevators, somewhere, but we were nowhere near them, and they ran fast and crowded during a drop. When we arrived at our boat we were very much the worse for the trip and since we were flying under Locke, that meant we got the harshest but silentest dressing down I’d ever received.
“A four point three,” they told us. In hunters’ slang the value of an expected chase was measured relative to the size of the electromagnetic disturbance the creature’s priceless neurotransmitters generated in response to the ship’s sensors. This we measured on a ten-point scale that was named for its inventor, but since that man was clever, rich, and dead, I can’t be bothered to name him here. “We’ll see larger before long, but its wake will be fierce enough.”
Q needed no further instruction. She was already taking up her place in the boat, coilgun by her side, atmospheric suit in place and helmet at the ready. I would have been just as quick,shouldhave been just as quick, but for the sight of the captain across the launch bay.
I wasn’t the only one watching. It’s not that it was uncommon for a captain to go down to the boats with their crew; in fact it was common enough that there was a boat stowed in one side of the bay that, technically, had been reserved for the captain’s use. But the crew was small, and we all knew each other, and a hunter-boat wasn’t a solo craft.
Things only grew stranger when she passed her hand over the lock and the canopy hissed back to admit her.
OLD IONIAN VOIDER: She can’t mean to fly alone.
SECOND EUROPAN VOIDER: Has she lost her wits? Are we in deep skies with a captain out of her mind?
She climbed into the cockpit and the canopy closed behind her. Just as I wasn’t the only one watching, I also wasn’t the only one to see the flickering shapes that moved behind the glass. Phantoms of light and data.
TALL GANYMEDIAN VOIDER: Strike me, it’s haunted.
OLD IONIAN VOIDER: Aye, it’s the ghosts of her old crew she brings with her.
Even if I hadn’t been raised in a church that forbade superstition, I don’t think I would have believed in ghosts. And the lights in the cabin looked more holographic to me than sepulchral. Still, I knew the captain a little by then, and the Old Ionian wasn’t entirely wrong. The captain carried ghosts with her by the hundreds. Ghosts of the past and the present and, like the Old Earth fable about a wise man misled by spirits, ghosts of things yet to come.
But as Locke seemed about to remind me, I was not there to stare at my captain, or to second-guess her choices. I was there to join in the great hunt for monsters. And the moment I called back my senses, I was full of passion for the chase.
