I sat quietly through this part of the exchange. The Tall Ganymedian hadn’t actually been with the group that jumped me for not getting their porn reinstated, but he’d been dropping some serioussomebody should do somethinghints just beforeit happened, and that made me disinclined to idly chat with him.
Q, for her part, was following the conversation with the same detached semi-attention she gave to most non-Terrans. I wondered, not for the first time and not for the thousandth, what was going through her head. Even when she shared her thoughts with me, they were so removed from my experience that I could scarcely engage with them. I often wondered if we were as opaque to her.
Of course, in a lot of ways all humans are unknowable to all humans, much as the Leviathan and the Kraken are unknowable, but I felt it more keenly with Q. As the poet might have put it, I was never closer to her than when she was looking at clouds, or further from her than when she was looking at me.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONEWeapons
We’ll get back to the hunting and/or fucking in a second, but I need to explain some stuff to you first. If you’re a coreworlder, or even an outworlder who just happens not to think much about energy infrastructure, you might never have bothered to ask how a hunter-boat can actuallykilla Leviathan. After all, over the past few millennia our species has developed some pretty gnarly ways to blow things apart, so if killing a Leviathan is difficult, it’s not because of a lack of boom.
Boom, we’re fine with. Not that we carry much of it on a hunter-barque on account of not being a warship. But the technology exists. It’s just that the technology is also completely wrong for our business. Sure, a hypersonic antimateriel round with fly-by-wire guidance and autostabilized trajectory correction will blast through a Leviathan’s carapace and turn huge chunks of it into, well, huge chunks relatively easily. But that’s the exact problem. Huge chunks of exploded monster aren’t what we’re here for. The hunter-barque needs tokillthe beast in flight but thendismemberit afterwards. And don’t worry, we’ll get to the dismembering eventually.
Anyway, if you’re going to follow the next bit of the story it’ll help you to know exactly what weapons a hunter-boat carries, and how they work and why exactly they can take out an armor-plated monster the size of a skyship. If you’re notinterested in those kinds of details, you could always pretend that this is actually a metaphor for, like, society or something. If metaphors for society also aren’t your bag you could always skip to the next chapter. Just don’t complain to me when you don’t know what a chitin-saw or a bolt-driver is.
Maybe you can work it out from context.
Anyway.
Hunter-boats use a sort of wave system with their weapons. They start with the harpoons, two wing-mounted, one or two more manually fired. You’ve already seen what these do—they tie your boat to a gigantic space monster and let it drag you away on a subsonic death ride through the winds of a hostile world.
If we get very, very lucky, that’s all we need. The beast pulls against the darts and the engines and, with enough little holes in it, slowly expires from exhaustion and whatever its version of blood loss is.
If we don’t get very, very lucky, there’s one more step. And that’s when some poor motherfucker has to actually try to jump on the thing and take it down close-to.
There’s two ways to get in for the final blow: from above and from below. The approach from above is usually made by one person, who gets fully out of the boat and rappels or zip-lines or just plain leaps onto the Leviathan’s back. It’s the exciting, heroic way of attacking and it appeals to a certain sort of hunter. It’s also the angle where you actually need the chitin-saw, because you’ll be right on the thickest part of the carapace. The chitin-saw is a large rotary blade designed to strap onto the left arm, leaving the right arm free for other weapons or just generally holding on to stuff so you don’t fall to your death. The carapace is thick enough that the saw probably won’t get you all the way through by itself, unless you can get to one of the parts where the plates overlap and wedge it in the gap. But it can make a big enough dent that you can ram a bolt-driver in and expect to dosomething.
The bolt-driver is the real killing weapon. A rod about sevenfeet long that magnetically rams out a barbed metal spike with the kind of force you in no circumstances want to be on the wrong side of. The business end is clawed, and those claws will intheorydig into the monster’s carapace to stop the recoil catapulting the unfortunate hunter off their feet and into the clouds. They sometimes work.
If you try instead to approach the Leviathan from below, you miss out on the armor but you have to deal with the legs. Not all the limbs are weapons, or at least they’re not meant to be. But whether something’s meant to be a weapon or not doesn’t make a huge difference when it’s heavy and hard and swinging at your head.
Coming up from underneath, the whole crew can stay in the boat, which means there’s less room for individual heroics and much more shared danger. Most of you, when you go this way, will be fending off the limbs with long knives, spears, and forks, but if you’re aiming to kill and not just to survive, at least one of you will need a bolt-driver and the courage to aim at the gut of the beast, trusting your boatmates to keep you safe, and trusting the boat itself not to crack apart beneath you.
Locke favored the attack from below. The captain favored the attack from above.
Make of that what you will.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWOTruelove Kills a God
Although the different members of the crew disagreed aboutwhyexactly Ridgebacks were likely to be found near Kraken—with explanations ranging from “because they eat them, obviously” to “it is the will of the Father and not to be questioned”—they all agreed that theywereand so the watchers on the array kept expectant eyes out and their expectations were met sooner rather than later.
This was my third launch with the Pequod and came, if I’m remembering right, near the end of the first year of the voyage. I’d never have said the process became routine, but it was getting familiar. The scramble for the boats was feeling less like a panic and more like a drill.
It was kind of a mixed blessing. The thing about familiarity and contempt is a bit of a cliché but it’s also true in a lot of ways. and I have a habit of checking out when I’m used to something.
Besides, even days later my head was full of Krakens.
We were nearing the edge of the brit-cloud now, but it was still busier than the skies had ever been outside it. So much busier that we found two Ridgebacks within a klick of each other and split the boats between them.
I could tell immediately that they were much more voracious than the Death’s Heads I’d gotten used to seeing. Their lashing feeder limbs worked in endless waves to snatch up britand grazing Wyrms and anything else they could draw out of the sky. They swept the cloud less clean, but they moved with more intention and—although this might have been my imagination—something that looked like spite.
They were gray-brown beasts, which meant the captain lost what little interest she’d had almost immediately. Obsessed as she was, she wasn’t quite so far gone that she’d give up an opportunity for a kill just because the target wasn’t the specific object of her vengeance, but she led the boats with a kind of detached competence. She was an old sky-hand, after all, and even at her least driven she was more than capable of managing a hunt.
Locke, for their part, handled this hunt exactly as they’d handled the last two. Deep, deep inside me, the part of my spirit that hadn’t learned to see stability as a cage and reliability as a trap found it almost comforting. I guided our boat onto the same attack vector we’d followed in our first launch and Locke nodded their approval.
“Darts” came the order and then “Canopy,” and we were bound once again to a listing Leviathan. This time when it rolled I was able to keep our angle relative to it, so the line didn’t snag and we didn’t get slammed against the creature’s underside before we were ready.
