The atmosphere of Jupiter is divided into reddish and whitish bands called zones and belts, not necessarily in that order. Between the bands, for atmospheric physics reasons I can’t even begin to understand, the wind whips into jets that surge east-west then west-east, and depending on which transition you’re making and when, there’s often only a few safe paths through. That might sound odd—after all the whole planet is made of wind, and you’d think wind is the same wherever you go—but remember we’re talking planet-sized meteorological conditions that evolve on a timescale of centuries. The winds of Jupiter are as different from each other as a plain from a mountain, an impact-crater from a volcano. Sure, those things are all just rock, but they’re very differentkindsof rock.
TL;DR, some bits of Jupiter are way too dangerous to fly through, and between those dangerous bits, there are less-dangerous bits. And those create choke points. And choke points create opportunities.
Which is why we got chased by pirates.
The captain had been flying us inexorably south for months now, putting us well into the second half of the voyage. And ever since she’d stepped in to spare me a beating with news of richer grounds and wilder skies, the word had gotten about amongst the crew that her ultimate goal was the Southern Tropical Zone and the endless storm that raged there. That storm, in the language of the old sky-dogs, was called Hell’s Heart, because it beat red and terrible and destructive.
But to get to Hell’s Heart and the Southern Tropical Zone we needed to cross the equator and from there brave powerful retrograde jets that would, themselves, be riven by endless microstorms cast off from the Heart itself.
“I don’t like it,” Dawlish was saying into his bowl of nourishing gruel as we sped southwards. “Nothing good comes out of the Heart and those who go seeking in it are fools.”
“The common curse of mankind,” agreed Marsh solemnly. “Folly and ignorance.”
Ignoring him, Dawlish went on. “I’d feel better if I didn’t know she was taking orders from a thinking machine.”
That made me laugh. Few things had lately. “The captain doesn’t take orders from anything.”
“Even so.” Dawlish was clearly in no mood for laughter. “She listens to it, and it’s making her reckless.”
“There’s profit there,” the Bright-Eyed Titanian pointed out. “If we can seize it.”
“And I’ll remind myself of that,” Dawlish replied acidly, “when I’m dying on a stove ship in a red sky.”
Q shrugged. “Audere est Facere.”
“I don’t know how this happened”—the Bright-Eyed Titanian shot Q a look of grudging solidarity—“but I agree with the Terran. Better to go into danger with open eyes than to limp home with a half-empty hold. We can’t eat caution.”
I was about jump into the conversation myself with something insightful or witty or possibly even both, when an alarm went off. We’d done a rundown of what all the ship’s alarms stood for when I’d first joined the crew but that, by this stage, had been two years ago, so I had no clue what it meant. Still, when everybody else—well, everybody except Marsh, who wasn’t really responding to things in a reasonable time these days—scrambled for their stations I made scrambling motions along with them.
Sensing my confusion, Q looked at me and said, “Piratae.” And then in case I hadn’t picked up on it, translated into Exodite. “Pirates.”
Star-piracy was rare, not because there was any real law in the void but because it was so fucking difficult to know where you’d find a ship with something worth stealing. Apparently on Old Earth, when something was hard to find, they used to compare it to aneedle in a haystack. And while I’m not really sure what a haystack is, I’ve seen needles, and a haystack can’t have been more than a couple of billion times bigger. And while that sounds like a lot, it’s fuck all on an interplanetary scale.
But the jets of Jupiter made piracy possible and, moreimportantly, profitable. The safe passages through the vortices and atmospheric anomalies were narrow and marked out with beacon stations, only some of which were honest.
From the deck, where those of us without immediate jobs to do in the event of pirate attack gathered for orders, we could see the enemy fleet bearing down on us through the red clouds of the equatorial belt. Each of their ships, individually, was a fraction of the size of the Pequod, but we ran on long voyages that needed plentiful supplies and small crews, while they darted out from well-stocked stations in ships that were all packed with armed bastards.
“I suggest we withdraw,” Locke was telling the captain as they stood at the prow, watching the oncoming fleet pulling closer. “They’re not much faster than us, and even if we can’t outrun them we can outrange them. They’ll not have the fuel for a long chase.”
It was the right call. Everybody in earshot knew it was the right call. And we also knew that it was never a call the captain would make. “Skirt them,” she ordered. “Take us off the narrow way and into the storm. They won’t follow there.”
And they probably wouldn’t. Of course, they also wouldn’t necessarily have to because if we didn’t turn around as Locke suggested, we’d still mostly be going towards them and it’d be hit or miss whether we’d break into the interband jet before they broke into us. With boarding lances.
But the sky was the sky and the captain was the captain, and so the order went down and the helm punched in our new course. As a general hand, my place was to be wherever the fuck I was needed, moment to moment, and since we were still shooting for speed, that meant I was on engines.
In a way, the pirates were the most dangerous thing we’d encountered in the skies so far, if not the most dangerous thing we’d ever encounter. The Leviathans could, if angry, stave a ship in two, but they mostly didn’t. Krakens would try, but while their beaks could rake holes in the hull they were generally more interested in eating Leviathans.
We were an invasive species in this ecosystem. The only natural predators we had were each other.
The funny thing was, though, it was hard tofeelthe danger. When you’re out in the boat, wind rushing past your foils and the beast so close you can reach out and touch it and that isn’t even a metaphor, you’re very, very aware of all the things that can kill you.
But deep inside the ship, a ship whose whole purpose was to make a little bubble of habitability against a universe that thought human life was a mistake, it was hard to remember there was anything wrong at all. I mean sure, the engines were running at full capacity and that meant the compressors were at risk of overheating, but that felt like an engineering problem, not a somebody-trying-to-murder-us problem.
If I listened very carefully, I could hear the impacts echoing through the hull, but even those were rare. The pirates weren’t trying to down us—like everybody in these skies they were motivated by personal gain, and they’d have none of that if we splashed into the hydrogen sea.
Easing out of the mass compressor that I’d been busily retuning for the past half hour, I became eerily conscious of eyes on me. I looked into the crawlspace to see Marsh kneeling on his hands, watching.
“Need something?” I asked.
