“Roll, twenty-five degrees,” Locke ordered with surprising gentleness, “and loose wing-darts.”
I rolled, and the gunner fired, and our next two harpoons passed close above and close below the wings of the nearest boat. Now that I had a sense of what we were doing, I felt a strange thrill of danger and cruelty. Because right now we were walking a line between “polite discouragement” and “deliberatemurder.” If the Jungfrau pilots were competent, they’d see that they couldn’t get a good fix on the monster with our lances past them, and they’d ease away, doing their best not to tangle in our lines.
If they weren’t competent, they’d fuck their foils and spin out of the sky, or down canopy anyway and get their heads sliced off by monofilament wires under unbearable tension.
They went… kind of the middle way. Not quite reckless enough to press on but not quite skilled enough to disengage cleanly. The lead boat’s wing scraped our cables as it turned, sending a shower of sparks into the Jovian clouds and a wicked vibration all along the line. To make matters worse, the weight of harpoons was making the old Leviathan patriarch list and fall, dragging our lines down and across the bows of the Jungfrau’s boats, sending two of them into a tailspin I quickly lost track of.
I choose to believe that they lived.
In our own cabin, I struggled to keep us in line, the weight of the Leviathan making us pitch and the pressure of the half-trapped wing of the other boat making us yaw and the stress of the whole thing making me feel alive in the exact way I came to the skies for in the first place.
“Cut lines?” I asked as the tremors continued to run through the cabin and the canopy both.
But Locke silently shook their head, and in their eyes I saw a determination that was in its own way as strong and as unbending as the captain’s. Except where the captain had her monomaniac vision, Locke had a cold and terrible calculus. A mind that could weigh the lives of everybody in the boat and value them down to the last drop of sperm, and then adjust them probabilistically against the odds of triumph and disaster.
The monster was rolled half onto its side now, and we could see amongst its feeder tendrils great tumors and ulcers. Signs of its remarkable age perhaps, or just of its ill fortune.
“Now that’s what I call a soft underbelly,” observed Flintover comms. “Bring me close, shipmates, and I’ll drive a spear to the quick of it.”
Ahead of us, the boat on our line spun away, and I followed it just closely enough to see it righting its course and returning to its ship. But then all my attention snapped back to the miserable, venerable Leviathan as Flint’s boat sped towards it, reeling in its lines to shorten the distance and cover a greater depth of sky.
“Will he need backup?” I asked.
That at least got Locke to reply verbally instead of just with stoic head movements. “Negative. The best thing now is to keep back and keep tight. He’ll strike hard enough when the moment comes. What we need to do is keep the beast strained and make ready to take the weight when it dies.”
So I did what they asked, keeping distance and keeping tension and watching, fascinated, as Flint closed in with his bolt-driver at the ready.
Normally the crew of his boat would be fighting hard with sword and spear to stop the countless lower limbs of the Leviathan crushing or overturning or otherwise destroying them as they hove closer, but this beast was so ancient that they barely needed to. What tendrils it had left were broken and sluggish, and it seemed to take no work at all for Flint’s boat to carve a path through them to the creature’s distended, cancerous underside.
“There’s for you, you great brute,” called Flint, presumably to the monster although he said it over comms anyway. And he thrust upwards with the bolt-driver and fired it deep into the tumorous mass above them.
It burst.
The blood—if you can call it blood—of Leviathans is usually clear and colorless, like liquid water or lymphatic fluid. But this came out a deep cloudy green and spattered down on its attackers like a gory rainstorm.
The monster convulsed, its tail whipping through the atmosphere so fast that it made a booming, tearing sound and camedamned near to smashing one of our backup boats out of the sky. As for us, it was the most I could manage to keep us on an even keel and save the darts from being ripped clean out as the creature bucked and writhed at the end of our lines.
And then it died.
When a Leviathan dies, much of the strange power that keeps it airborne stops working, so the carcass becomes a dead weight hanging beneath the boats. But normally that weight is bearable. Some property of the atmosphere, the nature of spermaceti, and the unique physiology of the monsters makes them not quite as heavy as they should be given their size and the sheer amount of bone-stuff in them.
But for whatever reason, this one was different. As its life oozed out of its body through that awful, pulpy abscess, the Jovian gravity took it more and more strongly until it was dragging every boat down into a screaming death-dive towards the core of the planet.
“Adjust foils,” Locke told me with—given that we were plunging to icy, hydrogenous doom—a frankly worrying level of calmness, “set density compensators to manual assist, and be ready for things to get bumpy.”
They weren’t kidding. I’ve never been an engineer, but I know enough to understand that the lift you get out of an aerofoil depends on a mix of the speed of your boat and the thickness of the air. Which meant I wasn’t completely taken off guard when our dropping faster and faster through an atmosphere that was getting both thicker and thicker and hotter and hotter started making life in the cabin extremely uncomfortable, but “not taken completely off guard” isn’t the same as “ready.”
“It’s lost.” That was Truelove, fatalistic as ever over the airwaves. “We should cut lines.”
“Gah, you’re a coward as well as a fool.” That was Flint. “Ride it out past the screaming and we’ll have our prize yet.”
“Pull up.” And that was Locke. “Power to engines, and trust to the lines. It isn’t over until it hits hydrogen.”
The clouds were ammonia here: tiny white crystals that werelike-yet-not-like water ice, whipping past the canopy and bathing everything around us in a thick fog. So for a while as we fell I couldn’t see the other boats, or the ship, or even the great corpse we were lashed to.
About our wingtips, the clouds began to glow red with frictive heating, and my instruments were making very worried noises. In the merchant service, we’d have turned back two warning lights ago. “She’s not happy,” I told Locke.
To which they laid a hand on my shoulder and just said, “Steady.”
