A few hundred meters away and fathoms below, Truelove and Flint were closing in on their own quarry. Flint’s overcustomized boat peppered the monster with darts burning white-hot from atmospheric resistance and over comms Truelove began to deliver commands that were half prayer.
“Bring us about,” he said. “Fast and close. And give to me the saw and the bolt.”
Our own Leviathan was straining against the wing-darts, and Q’s harpoon found its mark squarely in the third eye on the right flank, making the creature buck and plunge and writhe. With the captain moving from the other side, we closed on our prey, and Locke gave the order for us to ready blades and spears.
“My heart and my blood are pure,” Truelove was whispering over comms. “The stars teach that I shall be last consumed.” And, so saying, he jumped onto the back of the second Leviathan.
In our boat, the instruments were warning of tensions reaching critical levels as our hooked sky-fish struggled against its restraints. We were coming in sideways, which put us at a good angle for avoiding the legs but ran the risk of damaging the wings of our boat. I steered into the arc, making us turn faster but getting the wingtips out of harm’s way.
Below, Truelove’s saw and bolt bit deep and sprays of ichor began to rise up with the winds as the Leviathan flew down and down and down, its control failing more with each passing moment.
“Blades, spears, bolt,” commanded Locke, although this time the order wasn’t for me. We still had enough control of the boat that a pilot needed to pilot.
With the canopy down and the boat rolling, it was a rough angle to fight from, but that didn’t stop the crew. Q looked like an illustration from one of the comics I’d sneakily read as a child. The safe-for-work ones, in this case. She stood fierce and proud, one leg balanced on the capsule rim, long spear steady. Behind her, Locke waited with the bolt-driver ready as we swung closer, closer, and—
The line gave out, jolting us sideways and nearly pitching us into the skies. Q dropped back into a crouch, Locke threw down the bolt-driver to hold on to the back of my seat, and at least two of my boatmates dropped their swords over the side in their impious haste to preserve themselves.
With one line gone already, the other two went quickly, and the boat flew into a spin. I upped canopy and guided us from a fall into a spiral into a glide.
“Another pass?” I asked.
But Locke shook their head. “No time. She’ll be in free fall now.”
And she was. A truly panicked Leviathan will drop straightdown. Being adapted to the Jovian skies, they could handle accelerations well above those that would pulverize humans, and although it probably wasn’tgoodfor them, it was a whole lot better than getting spikes rammed into their central nervous system.
Trying (although not, if I’m honest, trying very hard) to quash their disappointment at being denied victory, the crew returned to their seats, and I brought us around to assist Truelove and Flint with their beast.
We descended through clouds flecked with Leviathan gore to see the other half of the boat-fleet on full afterburners, hauling the titanic corpse up towards the ship. Lowering our subsonic grapples, we took up our own place in the formation and joined in the glacial procession bringing the prey back home.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREEChains
The kill is the most thrilling part of the Leviathan hunt, but it’s not the most important. We’re not pest control, after all. We’re afterstuff. Stuff you have to slay monsters for, but still stuff.
When it’s first killed, a Leviathan is lashed to the underside of the ship. Eventually it will be drawn inside the hold, but the beasts vary so much in shape and size that they normally don’t fit easily. Plus the monsters have so many weird sticky-out bits that they’d just clutter up the ship if we brought the whole thing inside.
The process of transferring the body from the boats to the ship is a fiddly one, part automated and part manual. As we approached, the great fixing-arms came down from the undercarriage and spread wide to embrace the kill. By themselves, they supported it well enough that we could loose our grapples, but in Jovian gravity the weight of the beast strained the servos, so they needed to be linked underneath by chains. And that we had to do manually.
So once the body was in place and the grapple was disengaged I took the boat down, popped the canopy, and guided us towards the first of the dangling chains. We’d come in fast, because hunter-boats are fast by nature, but I brought us right down to gliding speed as we got close. Q was going to need tograb the chain as we went past and if we hit it at cruise velocities, she’d be incredibly fucking dead.
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” I asked her, even though it was far too late now if she wasn’t.
“Non quia difficilia sunt non audemus, sed quia non audemus, difficilia sunt.” She fixed me with a deadpan look. “But don’t fuck it up.”
Even at glide speed, we weren’t exactly going slowly, and when Q caught the chain a jolt ran through the whole boat from the impact. I really wanted to stop and check if she was okay but if I had, I’d have blown the entire maneuver, so I kept us flying forwards. The chain would need to be tight, or as tight as we could draw it, so we flew as close to the creature’s belly as we could manage, Q paying out the links over her shoulder and dangling flagella whipping against our heads.
And we hadn’t even gotten to the hardest part yet.
Attaching the chain on the other side would take time. Not much time, but longer than the zero seconds a hunter-boat can hover for, which meant as we passed the fastening point, Q had to leap out, grab a handrail, and start screwing things into place while I circled around for the pickup.
It wasn’t my first lowering, but it was my first time tryingthisand I knew for certain that if I fucked it up I’d kill her. And also that I’d be doing, like, the one thing she’d told me not to. There are large parts of the job where you can get philosophical, where you can contemplate how in a very real sense are we not all bound together in the great hunter-barque that is the human experience. This wasn’t one of those times. This was one of the parts of the job where if I moved my hand a half inch wrong or took my eyes off the instruments I could wind up spraying my friend and lover all over the winds of Jupiter.
I steered down. Too far down, really. But the selfish, irrational part of my brain would have hated myself way worse if I hit her than if I played it too cautious and she missed us. Fromwhat I’d read—and how I’d trained in simulators—the trick was to line the boat up with the ship, making the relative velocities easier to match and substantially reducing the chance I’d slice her in half. So I took us into a lazy arc and ran us parallel with the body of the great beast, traversing it from tail to jaw and passing under Q on the way.
She dropped a fraction before I reached her, because even with trajectory matching, even accounting for wind, the boat was fast enough that if she waited until we were underneath her she’d just plummet into our slipstream and either fall into nothing or, if she timed it really badly, get fried by our jets.
I needn’t have worried. I might have been a green pilot, but Q was an experienced harpooner, and she timed the drop perfectly, landing beside me with a heavier-than-it-should-bethump, the extra acceleration of Jupiter’s gravity making her far faster on that drop than I was used to. I reset the canopy and stretched in my suit with relief as the relativistic compensators kicked back in. Then I brought us up in a wide, helical arc that took us past the Leviathan’s great, dead head, all the way around its titanic corpse, and back to the hangar. Q settled down just behind me, and even through two environment suits I could see she was breathing heavily. She made everything look so easy—or at least so much easier than it felt to me—that I sometimes forgot she was as mortal as I was, and as aware of her own mortality.
