The day we chained the corpse, the captain had no use for me. Too busy with her charts and her calculations and the machine intelligence that echoed her thoughts back to her. Off rotation, I had no further duties, but in that nihilistic mood I had no further comforts either.
I descended through the ship to the keel balconies.
The primary watch post on a hunter-barque is the array, where the instruments scan the horizon for the telltale signs ofLeviathans. But a ship is a flying thing, and it exists in a three-dimensional space, so there’s room for lookouts below as well as above. Below was right for me then.
The keel balconies on the Pequod, like all its outer surfaces, were strangely bedecked with the bones of her prey. While the viewing window itself, as on every hunter-barque, was a hemispherical blister of transparent crystal bulging almost obscenely from the lower hull of the ship, the walkway that led out to it was pure and white and osseous. Who had built it that way or why, I couldn’t say. But in that moment I found it fitting.
I stood on the bones of a murdered god looking down at the body of a murdered god, shackled beneath the ship in chains my lover had risked her life to fix in place.
The carapace of the great corpse stretched out beneath me, and it was almost like it was of one piece with the monster-bone platform I stood upon. Some trick of Jovian space and the methane clouds made it hard to see where the creature ended and the ship began and where I stood and who I was.
Hard for me. Hard also for the Wyrms.
There were hundreds of them. Thousands, perhaps, all feeding on the body. A Leviathan’s back is segmented and while its carapace is impenetrable to Wyrm teeth when it lives, in death nothing stops them from flying into the soft, intimate cracks between its great armored plates and wrenching at it with their vicious scavengers’ teeth.
Nor was there, ultimately, anything stopping them pitching themselves at the sides of the ship, believing it perhaps to be just another kind of Leviathan, one stubbornly unwilling to show them its tender, fleshier parts.
I pressed my hands against the crystal viewing window and stared at the Wyrms. And they, in their hunger, stared back. They battered against the glass, their jaws inches from my fingertips, voracious and primal and a strange kind of comforting. If I’d been able to, I think I would have opened the window then, let them swarm in and consume me, let them swim-fly all through the ship and take the crew apart one by one.
I’m sorry. This wasn’t what I meant this chapter to be about. I was trying to talk about anatomy. About the Leviathan. About how its head is some sixty to a hundred feet in length and protected above by thick chitin and then beneath that by a denser, harder substance that isn’t quite bone. How its mandibles have on each side a dozen parts that move independently of each other and grind its food to a slurry of undifferentiated biomass. How set deep inside its jaw it does, in fact, have a tongue. A thick, muscular tongue whose movements nobody has ever seen and lived.
But much as I pretend sometimes, I’m no scholar. I’m not even much of an autobiographer. I’m not a writer of adventure stories or of tales of forbidden passion. I’m not a philosopher or a believer; I’m too cowardly to be an apostate and too uncreative to be a heretic.
The crystal glass was cool under my fingers, tremoring just slightly when the Wyrms struck it. I could feel myselfwillingit to crack. To let the sky pour in and to make it all be over in one blissful moment of bloody simplicity. And then, unbidden, a different thought began to sneak up on me. The thought that if I’d made a different choice that evening I could be in my bunk getting fucked senseless by my closest friend instead of being where I was and as I was and doing what I was doing.
Standing on bone. My mouth dry and my skin still crawling for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. Watching sky-serpents writhe through the flesh of a slaughtered Titan, I wept.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVEA Long Way Down
The whole bottom of a hunter-barque opens into a huge airlock-hangar that you can fitmostof a Leviathan into. But only most.
Before that, it has to be cut down to size.
In a lot of industries, that’d be a job for drones—flyers or walkers or crawlers with laser cutters built into their frames so that they can trim back the carcass in its most hard-to-reach places.
But drones are expensive, and if the barque loses one, that eats twice into the profits of the journey. Once because it makes the whole ship run less smoothly, and once because the lost machine will need replacing.
So the job is left, instead, to the crew. If we plunge screaming to our deaths in the Jovian skies, we leave the ship short handed, but the company will at least save a little on our lay, which in the event of our deaths is paid by default to the good people of Olympus Extraction State.
The bloody business of butchering is always done in pairs, two of us yoked together and then lowered over the side on a long, strong cable. One of the pair carries a saw a lot like the one used in the hunt while the other carries a sword or spear or some other weapon for scaring away the Wyrms that swarm in greater and greater numbers around the carcass.
The saw role is easier, and it was the one I usually took. I trustedthe actual weapon to Q. Like with sword-welding, it was the safest way around for everybody. She was a whole lot stronger than me and with the gravity making everything heavier than it ought to be, I wouldn’t have been able to keep brandishing a blade for more than a minute or so.
Since every part of the Leviathan is valuable to somebody, the goal in the dismemberment isn’t to just fling its extremities off into the void—much as the Wyrms might enjoy that—but to bring them up again. Which is why each pair of butchers is suspended above a wide, deep hopper, like a very big bathtub or a very small skip. And into it we throw chunks of carapace, strips of flight-membrane, and the occasional outer leg that we hack through and rip off.
When I’m up on the array, watching for spouts and the Möbius Beast, my mind tends to wander. I get almost philosophical on account of how deep down I’m an insecure poser who likes to think she’s smarter than she really is.
For some reason, some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, I don’t get the same problem when I’m hanging over empty air, sawing through an undulating strip of monster fin that three voracious sky-Wyrms are still trying to eat.
Without comment, or even warning, Q struck down at the nearest Wyrm, the sword falling quicker than I could track. The creature was split into two wriggling halves, seeping that same clear ichor that the Leviathans bleed. Its head-part and tail-part tumbled into the hopper, followed by the next strip of Leviathan fin as I carved it off then signaled up to the ship to move us along.
The cable holding us shuddered sideways, dragging me and Q and the hopper a few feet farther along the side of the beast. Most of the Wyrms had the sense to scatter as we went—it’s not human flesh they’re here for—but one or two stayed out of stubbornness or greed or sheer viciousness. I edged my saw blade towards them and one brought its jaws around to snap at me.
Q took its head off. The blade came within an inch of mywrist and I had a very sudden, very stark vision of my hand tumbling down, down, down into the hopper alongside the Wyrm parts and Leviathan flesh. At fever-dream speed I imagined it stripped of its skin and its flesh and its fingernails. Its fat rendered down for oil and its bones strung on a scrimshander necklace around some voider’s neck or given to somebody’s sweetheart as a gift.
For a barely significant moment, I wanted it.
