So I kept her steady. Or as steady as I could. And we kept on falling.
You fall for a long time on Jupiter. In fact, in a lot of ways, there’s nowhere in the system you can fall longer or farther. I mean, yes, you can go out to an arbitrarily distant orbit from any body you like and then let whatever gravity you can still feel pull you into a decaying orbit. But that isn’t the same asfalling. Being on a body with a sky above and no ground below and just an endless, endlessdown.
You haven’t seendownuntil you’ve seen Jupiter. It has worlds’ worth of down. Planets’ worth of down. A kind of down you can’t normally get to before down as a concept stops existing.
The clouds were red now, sulfides and hydrogen sulfides. We’d managed to just about balance the weight of the monster, but all that meant was that we were falling at a constant rate instead of falling ever faster. By this point my instruments were telling me that the pressure was too high, the temperature was too high, and the strain on the relativistic compensators was past too high and into just plain fucked.
But we still held her steady.
We held her steady until I saw, for the first time, the great superfluidic mirror of the hydrogen sea.
What with it being the core of the planet, and having seen it on diagrams and schematics for months now, I’d somehow gotten it into my head that it would be small. Which, compared to the rest of the planet, it was. But compared to every single otherbody in the system put together, it was huge. It was so vast that for a moment I didn’t even realize I was seeing it. The clouds broke and beneath them was an enormous, reflective nothing. A wide expanse of liquid metal, roiled by electric winds.
As we descended I began to see shapes on the surface. Tiny at first, like maggots on a clean spoon. Then larger and larger until it became clear that the Jovian Behemoth is longer than any ship or any Leviathan, and its ponderous pilgrimage though the hydrogen sea an even greater mystery than the most elusive of lesser monsters.
My instruments had given up. Between the speed and the heat and the pressure and the electromagnetic vortices ripping up from below us, they were just assuming we were already dead.
It was one of the backup boats that cut loose first, decoupling its line and pulling into a step climb back to the Pequod.
“Sans teeth,” whispered Marsh over comms.
Truelove’s boat was next, the fatalist mate not willing to face the promised oblivion sooner than he had to.
“Sans eyes.”
Flint screamed profanities at the ones who’d given up, but even he, I think, knew it was a lost cause.
“Sans taste” was Marsh’s soft commentary.
And at last, Locke gave the order, and we cut ourselves off also.
“Sans everything.”
CHAPTER
FORTY-FOURJonah Pornographically Regarded
“Why,” asked Locke after we lost the Leviathan, “are you in my office?”
I had a bunch of reasons, if I was honest. But mostly it was because I was kind of freaking out. “That,” I told them, “was fucked.”
“Have you forgotten that this ship has a hierarchy?”
“Have you forgotten that you’re meant to be the one whoisn’tinsane? EvenFlintcut loose before you did.”
Locke always looked prim. This time they looked positively haughty. “That’s rather loaded language. We had a prize, we pursued it.”
“You nearly sank the whole fucking boat.”
“You’ve been on this ship nearly two years. Have you not yet realized that the risk of death is part of thejob? Which, incidentally, is why so many on board are still rather annoyed that your friend chose one man’s life over all our income.”
I stared at them. That was the problem with sexualizing people in your head as a defense mechanism: it made them really hard to argue with. “That’s not an answer.”
They half smiled. Locke rarely smiled and I was, sadly, asucker for rare smiles. Q smiled all the time, which I probably took too much for granted. The captain smiled not at all, and that made me treat glares and harsh words as passion. “I think you’ll find it is,” they replied. “I’m sorry I don’t have a dream to sell you. I’m sure that you’d prefer I was driven by some raging tempest in my soul, but I’m not. This is my job. I’m good at it, but it’s not my calling.”
The wordcallingechoed through me like an insult. Which it had no right to, because I was a green hand in the hunter-fleet. Except Ihadbeen called. The voice inside me had screamed at the stars until it felt like my skin would split. “And that’s…” I was almost hesitant. “That’s enough for you?”
“I have family on Europa. They live in the Olympian Enclave, far from Cthonius Linea. They sleep in warm beds and eat hydroponic rice most days. My mother makes kimchi when we can get the spices, which is less often than I’d like but more often than most families.”
