Though I was new to the hunt the good captains Emerson and Thoreau had seen fit to place me as a pilot, and I knew my way around a boat well enough that I didn’t think I’d let them down. Once Q and Locke and the other crew who—I’ll make no apologies or excuses for this—made less of an impression on me were aboard I attached my helmet, sealed the canopy (it should always be in that order), and waited for instructions to launch.
I didn’t have to wait long. The captain’s voice came over comms with a soft but unanswerable “To the skies.”
The little squadron lowered as one, starting in tight formation and then fanning out into the white clouds of Jove.
From above, the planet had seemed opaque. Matte strips alternating orange and cream like smoked glass. But close to it,insideit, flyingthroughit, there was so much more. Clouds of condensing ammonia rushed past on winds so fast that all I could think of was childhood sermons about judgment and wormwood and the Father’s wrath. But in the breaks between the clouds were such vistas. Skyscapes like amorphous mountain ranges, shoals of Wyrms flying free and violent amongst insubstantial peaks. The roads the Leviathans walked.
I’d seen all this before, of course, from the array, but as watching from the array was different from watching from deck, so watching from a boat was different again.
On the ship, the shielding and the gravitic normalization created a kind of cocoon. An artificial safety that made it feel not so very different from being surfaceside. The boat was different. On the boat you felt the wind in the wings as you pitched; you felt the way you fell faster and climbed slower than you would on a different world. You saw the ammonia-ice on the wings forming and then boiling off as you turned and the friction brought the heat up.
And then, at last, some thirty klicks from the ship, minutes at most at skyboat-speeds, you saw the Leviathan.
I tried, when I wrote my cetology for the early chapters of this memoir, to explain a little of what the great beasts of Jupiter are. How they live and how they are hunted and what you could expect on first meeting one in, if not the flesh, then in the present tense of the narrative. Now that I come to it, I realize how fucking pointless that was.
At first, of course, it didn’t look like much. Distance plays tricks, and for a few deceptive moments it was just a speck on the horizon, a dot on a scan that my copilot watched while I had my eyes on the sky. But with terrifying speed it grew closer and grander and more detailed until the full Behemoth glory of it was searing into my spirit like a welding laser.
It was long. Half the length, perhaps, of the ship and many, many times longer than our little boat. By the distinctive ridge on its back we knew that we were at least chasing the right kind of beast. It was a Ridgeback, a Sperm Leviathan, and its psychoconductive fluids would light a city for a year.
But only if we could kill it. And now that Isawit, that seemed impossible. The ridge looked supple but not fragile, and it rose out of a back lined with plates of bone or chitin or whatever equivalent Jovian evolution had spawned into the universe. This particular beast had a carapace that shone a hypnotic, opalescent purple-gray, marked here and there by deep scratches, their edges long worn smooth by the wind.
“Steady,” Locke commanded under their breath. “It’s seen us but it won’t dive yet.”
Over the open comms I heard similar instructions from the other boats.
“Fear nothing and go calmly.” That was Truelove. “The end will come when it does, and it is sin to hide from it.”
Flint, meanwhile, was taking a more proactive approach. “Prime coils, ready lances, hold for the range, and brace—we’ll soon have our prize.”
I listened over the chatter for the captain, but she was silent.What, after all, did the squadron need to be told? This was their livelihood, and whether driven by greed or need or piety or the sheer love of the chase, every person present would pursue the precious sperm with the zeal of a fanatic.
It’s been a while since I mentioned sperm, hasn’t it? Stopped laughing yet?
Give it time.
“Down,” ordered Locke, and I guided the boat into a dive. With the tyrannical grip of Jupiter’s gravity we lost height fast, and I saw the bulk of the Leviathan soar above me. While its back was majestic and impenetrable, its underside was the stuff of nightmares. Hundreds of segmented limbs gripped close to its abdomen, reaching down now and then to grasp at something I couldn’t see. As my boat skimmed closer to its head I saw mandibles working endlessly to draw in whatever nutrients it was sweeping from the skies.
Locke’s eyes tracked the monster as we rode along in its wake. “Hold.” Then, “Canopy.”
From our angle, the wing-guns would be useless, but between the creature’s limbs and its jaws and its vast body segments I could see—or thought I could see, or hoped I could see—chinks in its armor that a skilled harpooner could strike.
I downed canopy.
The moment I did the gravity hit. I can do basic ship-work but I’m no field scientist or Lorentz engineer, so I have no idea how the gravitational compensators actually work. But they seem to need an enclosed space to be fully effective, and so as soon as we were exposed, the weight of the boat doubled. Dropping into a controlled fall helped, but we had to keep in range of the beast or the whole maneuver would get us nowhere.
Between the strain on the engines, the wind that was now scouring past just a suit’s breadth from our skins, and the new heaviness in my limbs, I didn’t think I could keep us steady for more than a handful of heartbeats.
But a handful of heartbeats was all we needed. Q fixed one end of the harpoon cable to the hull with a transmagnetic lock, aimed her coilgun, and fired.
We were so dwarfed by the monster that the shot, for the first blink and a half, was anticlimactic. The dart flew into the distance and vanished into the chaos of twitching members that lined the Leviathan’s underside. Then any sense of disappointment I might have been nurturing vanished as the line snapped taut and the boat lurched forwards, the beast reacting to us at last.
“It begins,” said Truelove over comms. “Strike now.”
“There it goes,” called Flint. “All guns, all guns primed and charged and down the throat of the beast. Time’s come to show the damned thing what we’ve got.”
So the other boats closed with wing-guns and hand-launchers, and the Leviathan began a sharp and sudden descent. The undulating flight-membranes that ran the whole length of its midline whipped and snapped in the plunge-wind and our little boat trailed in its wake.
Over comms, I thought I heard the captain’s voice just saying “Yes.”
