“Go lateral,” Locke ordered as the canopy slid back into place. “We can’t fight the beast and gravity both. Pull it aside until the struggle’s worn out of it.”
Always willing to let somebody more experienced take over, I did as I was told, turning the engines 90 degrees to the fall and hoping to hell that the mate was right.
Right or wrong, it seemed that Locke—and this shouldn’t have surprised me—was making a textbook play. So the other boats knew what we were about and backed us, and the creature began to roll.
For a second I thought we had it, but glancing down I realized the boat’s gyroscope was reading a few degrees off level, and though the line was still taut it was no longer running straight. It was tangling in the Leviathan’s forelimbs and, as it turned, winding us closer and closer to it.
As the line shortened it began to pass through resonances with the wind, vibrating like a violin string playing an ever-dwindling, deadly symphony.
“Hold,” Locke repeated. “Let it wear itself out.”
The line shortened and shortened again. We were close enough now that I could see where the cable was biting into the creature’s limbs, making it seep a transparent ichor into the clouds. I could see too that while some of its appendages were claw-tipped, others ended in billows of feathered tendrils that scooped and tasted the wind. It was marvelous, apart from the tiny fact that it was going to kill us.
Locke frowned, just slightly, then reached back into a spring-locked cabinet, drawing forth a long, curved sword. “Blades,” they said, “and spears. We’re about to have a fight on our hands.”
The line was too short now for the engines to keep us steady, and we began whipping round towards the Leviathan’s body, grasping legs coming down to meet us. Hoping that Locke was right and fighting was better than sheltering inside a metal-and-crystal pod, I downed canopy once more, and this time I was better braced for the shift. Beside me, Q already had a spear in her hand ready to strike the beast as we crashed against it. I stood awestruck but when somebody passed me a blade I took it without thinking.
The Leviathan reached down with a flurry of its fronds, and I swung with what strength I could, striking down so that gravity would at least be on my side. I needn’t have put so much effort in, because the limbs it had reached out to us turned out to be impossibly delicate, and as my blade sliced through them like a razor through lips, I saw them recoil and I half heard, half imagined a high, keening scream.
Closer now, closer, and the segmented arms, if you could call them arms, were tightening around us. Spears in the joints kept them from crushing, and the grim work of hacking and carving kept the rest of the boats visible, even if it prevented usfrom following them. Still, it was a losing battle. And by the time Locke gave the order to drop the line it was too late.
I heard metal buckle and crystal crack and felt the click of somebody latching me to a line as the hull and the wings gave out and, giving the chase up as doomed, we jumped.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWOLife
On Jupiter, you don’t falldown. The winds are so fast that you fall eastwards or westwards depending on whether you’re in the red or the white. You also, if you can possibly help it, don’t fall alone.
In the early days of the hunt, bailing mid-sky had been a death sentence. The atmosphere was too hostile, too hot or too cold, too high-pressure, gravity too great. In the years since there’s been a lot of progress in suit design, and abandoning a stove boat has gotten much less likely to see you ripped apart by excoriating clouds or drown-crushed in the distant hydrogen sea.
The fall-line was the first and simplest change. Rescuing half a dozen voiders, each cast a different way by a different current, would be… not impossible perhaps, but prohibitively expensive, and with most voyages trade-state sponsored, that amounted to the same thing. So in the event of needing to abandon our skycraft, we trained to tether ourselves together to make rescuing us more budgetarily justifiable.
More sophisticated but not necessarily more important was the system of deployable patagia that would unfurl between the arms and legs of more modern voidsuits, providing enough lift that a skywrecked hunter could keep a more or less evenaltitude, guide themselves clear of any angry monsters, and generally maximize their chances of recovery. Using these polymer wings effectively, especially when tied to four or five companions, was difficult, and the more diligent crews would take time to run drills in the wind-tunnels that were built, for this exact purpose, into most hunter-barques.
Our crew had not trained anywhere near enough.
Several of us deployed our wings, and we did our best to hold a lift-optimizing formation, but one of the less memorable crewmen panicked, curling into a ball and dragging us onto a chaotic downwards trajectory. The rest of us tried to compensate, and I felt Q’s gloved hand in mine on one side, Locke’s on the other as we spread ourselves out to catch the wind.
Behind us, the Leviathan shook off the last of its tormentors and rose triumphant through the atmosphere to freedom. The prop-wash of its great tail and the electromagnetic fallout of its titanic thoughts swept over us and sent our little group spinning. Through the crystal visor of my voidsuit I saw debris falling like meteorites and ichor falling like rain and boats swooping around to either rescue or abandon us.
Locke’s suit, being a mate’s rather than a lowly ship’s hand’s, had a built-in distress beacon, and it was broadcasting now, although until we were clear of the Leviathan it would be touch and go whether the signal would be trackable.
“This is Locke,” they were saying over comms, their voice impressively calm for somebody being whipped sideways by a celestial hurricane, “requesting pickup at these coordinates. All hands accounted for.”
I shut my eyes and felt, welling up from inside me, a tremendous urge to laugh.
Life, in so many ways, was a joke. A crude, cruel joke to be sure, but a joke. Here we were, me and my boatmates, six terrestrial primates whose ancestors—and not evendistantancestors, on the timescale of the universe—had walked the plains and forests of Old Earth, staring up at the stars and thinking them gods. And now we were falling-flying through eddies ofhelium and ammonia on a world so vast it could swallow the Earth a hundred times over, so far from our ancient home that the very concept offarbecame meaningless.
I’d been lost when I set out for the skies, and wanting to lose myself further. And what could be more lost than this? Suspended on wings of synthetic fabric inside a planet that was somehow massive and insubstantial all at once.
Imagine, for a moment, if you could travel back through time and tell Jonah about the skies of Jove. He would stare at you uncomprehending and call you a madman. To the prophets of old, all talk of ionospheric turbulence and distances measured in light-minutes and storms the size of planets would seem fantasies. Utter ludicrous fantasies.
The only part of the sky-hunter’s work that Jonah would understand would be the Leviathans.
“Acknowledge.” That was Flint, and like me he seemed to find the humor in the situation. “Charting intercept now.”
A sky-rescue is hard to pull off. Really hard. The speeds involved are so high that if you don’t match trajectory exactly, all you do is smash into your stranded crewmates at Mach 3 and spare them the indignity of a long death. The gravitics help. In an emergency they can be set to cushion the impact in much the same way they take the edge off everything else. But it’s wise to assume that if your boat gets stove you’re just dead.
