While Marsh muttered something rich and strange under his breath, the captain of the Jungfrau nodded enthusiastically, as if he’d been just waiting for the right time to broach the subject.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “It was a terrible business. You see, a Kraken pierced our larboard reserve tank and—”
But the captain put up a hand to silence him. “I’ll nothing with the details. Your story is no concern of mine.”
“What she means,” glossed Locke, “is that how you came to your present misfortune does not matter. What matters is whether we can come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.”
“Of course.” The captain of the Jungfrau was getting borderline obsequious now, his head bobbing like an undertuned suspension. “We would not expect you to assist us without recompense. Since we will now have to shorten our voyage, there are other supplies that we have in excess and—”
“Plague on your recompense,” said the captain dismissively. “Give them what they need, Locke, and don’t make them scrape for it. I’m no queen to make men grovel nor no merchant to barter with them.”
Locke looked pained. “I remind you that we have a fiduciary responsibility to our investors,” they said. “And we must take care not to leave ourselves short-supplied, lest we have difficulty on our own home journey.”
An old sky-hand had once told me that there’d been a time when ships had given to each other freely, knowing that their neighbor’s hardship today could be their own hardship tomorrow. But if that was true, it must have been long, long ago. Besides, it went against the word of the Father.
I tried to tell myself that it was this ancient tradition of mutual support that the captain was thinking of when she said, “Pay no mind to the home journey.”
I tried to tell myself that. But I knew it was wishful thinking. That Locke had been right. That she actually meant something far more obvious, and far more concerning.
CHAPTER
FORTY-THREEThe Old Man of the Sky
We were mid–fuel transfer with the Jungfrau, and her crew mid-gam with us (both of which, if you think about it, involved a fair amount of sticking things in places and pumping fluids through them), when a call went up from the array. There’d been a spout, and from the speed at which the ships and their crews disengaged, a promising one.
I got off my knees and dashed for the boat, where I found Q and Locke and the rest of the usual crew waiting. Across the launch bay the captain, once again, was going calmly to her thought-machine-guided craft. And there she sat in the cockpit, bathed in blue holographic light and looking more like a ghost every time I saw her.
Because the Jungfrau had been able to drop boats immediately while the Pequod had needed to wind in her fuel pipes to keep from spraying fuel-sperm all over the skies, they had a bit of a head start on us. So as we jetted out into the Jovian atmosphere, the voices of the mates came over comms with… gentle words of encouragement.
“Frythe fuckers.” That was Flint. “Steal our beasts from under our noses, will they? We’ll blow them out the sky.”
“They seek to come between the chosen and our just rewards.” That was Truelove. “As the man says, fry the fuckers.”
Even Locke was uncharacteristically aggressive. “Steady asshe goes,” they were saying, “but we make no pay if we lose the prize, so ifnecessary…” They bit their lip. “Yes, frying the fuckers would be appropriate in this context.”
Although the Jungfrau crew had the lead over us, their pilots were less experienced than ours. They were even less experienced than me, and I—as I think I’ve pointed out a couple of times—was shit at most parts of this job. Right now, that difference was pretty academic, because you don’t need a decade of flight training to know that in a chase it’s a good idea to go fast in a straight line, but as we got closer and maneuvering started to matter, it would get a whole lot more important.
Turned out it was going to get a whole, whole lot more important.
Ordinarily, Leviathans are solitary beings, but this time we’d picked up a pod. If I were a woman of science, I’d probably have been thrilled by this, because we know basically nothing about the reproductive cycle of the Leviathan. We don’t even know if they give birth to live young (although if they’re egg-laying it would raise a whole lot of questions about where those eggs are). But we do know that sometimes you see big Leviathans next to small Leviathans and since obviously everything that exists in nature is a reflection of the Father’s plan for humanity, those groups of differently sized monsters must be leviathanic nuclear families.
And following up the mother and children was the great patriarch. He was gargantuan, the largest beast I’d ever seen and the second largest that I would ever see. His carapace was scarred and pitted from a thousand battles, his starboard flight-membrane a ragged mess of tears and scars. His long, barbed tail swayed as he flew, and he listed slightly in the sky.
“All boats,” said Locke, both to us in our little cabin and to everybody over comms, “prio the big bastard.”
It seemed like the Jungfrau crew had gotten the same idea, because they banked around to bring their harpoons online at the monster’s flank.
“Last scene of all”—Marsh’s voice came over comms as we drew our own beads on the ancient Leviathan—“that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion.”
We were still behind the Jungfrau boats, but they were holding fire, their harpooners not skilled enough to make the shot from our current range.
“Down canopy,” ordered Locke, their voice still low and calm and—now I’d talked myself into that headspace—strangely hot. “Let’s show these callow fuckers what a Cthonius crew can do.”
Since I’d left Cthonius Linea near as soon as I’d arrived, I wasn’t totally sure I counted as part of aCthonius crew, but I liked the label anyway. Besides, all I had to do was hold us steady while Q did her thing.
From much farther out than I’d seen her fire before, Q lined up the coilgun. Taking her time, she made some adjustments to settings I didn’t understand, and the indicator lights on the side of the weapon blinked from greens into reds. I imagined it making a kind of high-pitched humming, but that was entirely in my head. We were in environment suits and surrounded by subsonic winds; all I could hear was the faint rattling of my helmet and the occasional voice over the internal comms.
Ahead of us, the boats from the Jungfrau were bearing down on the Leviathan, but before the closest of them could launch their harpoons, Q fired, and her own dart flew so close to the canopy of their lead boat that it had to adjust course to avoid fouling on the line.
