I took her hand in mine, ran my thumb across the pattern of scars that formed intricate concentric designs on the back of it. “First mates are arrogant”—I thought back to Locke—“well, most of them. And so when the spout was sighted, he gave the order to lower.”
I described the sequence of lowering to her. And now that I was working from experience instead of fragments I’d stolen from other people I could be clearer, more precise, more alive in the moment. And I think she noticed.
“The boats slipped into the wake of the great Beast,” I told her. “You’d think that a bigger Leviathan would be slower than a small one, but that’s not how it works. Something about the way they move.” I was sensing she didn’t care about the details. “They shot off their wing darts—”
“But it was for naught,” said the Old Ionian. “Clattered off the monster’s carapace like—”
“—piss off tin,” said the Tall Ganymedian.
“And so,” said Ironhands, “they lowered the canopy so the harpooners could do their work. But no sooner was the cover down and the crew exposed than the Beast’s great tail cracked”—he brought his low-density-composite hand down hard on the bar.
“—like a whip,” said the Tall Ganymedian.
“—like thunder and lightning both,” said the Old Ionian.
“—fit to tear the sky,” said the Bright-Eyed Titanian.
“—cross the path of the first mate’s boat,” said Ironhands, “and the very tip of it slashed across the cockpit, and though most of the crew had drilled well and knew to duck…” He gave a smile that was half a sneer. “Officers. Am I right?”
“Not a soul was harmed,” said the Old Ionian.
“Not one hair on one head out of place,” said the Tall Ganymedian.
Dawlish gave me a look that said he only half believed what he was saying. “’Cept for the mate. Who was swiped out the boat and plunged to a meaningless death in the skies.”
After a moment’s silence, the woman with one green eye looked at me skeptically. “That seems unlikely.”
“It’s more common than you’d think,” I told her. “Close calls happen all the time, and if one person is a bit out of position, they can get hit way worse than anybody else.”
I don’t think she liked that explanation. It felt as if I’d denounced a miracle.
Which I suppose I had, in a way.
“So,” the Old Ionian went on, “it all fell out as the Archangel proclaimed.”
“Reckless man does reckless thing,” said the Tall Ganymedian. “Dies. No magic there and no mystery.”
“A beast doesn’t have to be a god,” Dawlish concluded, “to be well worth staying away from.”
That much, at least, was true. And by the same token a man didn’t have to be an angel to speak prophecy.
He just had to open his eyes.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-NINEScrimshander
A few days after the Jeroboam’s visit, we finished the cutting down, and the great corpse of the Leviathan was drawn into the underbelly of the ship. It was a slow process, beginning with the evacuation of the entire lower deck so we wouldn’t vent a massive chunk of our oxygen into the Jovian storm. When that was done, the lower airlock, which ran the whole length of the ship’s keel, creaked open. And the difference in pressure meant that the mostly-hydrogen atmosphere of Jupiter rushed into the gap like a hurricane, carrying sky-Wyrms up with it and—in one of the few examples of the harsh conditions actually helping the ship instead of hindering it—supporting the great mechanical arms which came down to pull the beast up for the next stage of its dismemberment.
The sound of the atmospherically backed rising of the Leviathan was fittingly immense. It set the whole hull of the ship shaking with the grinding of metal and the screaming of the wind, and since I was lying in bed with Q when it happened, it made it really hard to fuck.
So we made our way down to the viewing platform on the bottom deck to watch the next stage of the drawing.
Eventually the screaming, shuddering noise of the pulling-in was over but, as we came closer to the hold, we heard it replaced with a new, perhaps even more disturbing sound. Abeating, drumming sound, like the heaviest rain you ever heard, but coming from below and within instead of outside and above.
Once we reached the viewing platform, with its thick walls and its reinforced portholes, we realized what it was. The hundreds upon hundreds of Wyrms that had been drawn in alongside the carcass were still feasting but, knowing themselves trapped, they were now as often hurling themselves against the walls and the viewing ports as against the ever-dwindling body of the Leviathan.
And then, as Q and I watched, one final sound began. A low, loud hissing as once more the atmosphere of the hold was evacuated.
