By this stage Marsh had taken to holding great sermons from the prow of the ship, which had grown increasingly popular amongst the crew, initially amongst those who fell, phenotypically speaking, into what the Starry Wisdom sect called the Last Devoured, but eventually even some of those who the Devouring God was set to consume first started attending.
“It just makes sense,” explained a young Europan voider who, by Starry Wisdom doctrine, would be very near the top of the Devourer’s menu. “Besides, it probably doesn’t meanme.”
We had passed through the storms into the Southern Tropical Zone with relatively little difficulty, although admittedly that might have been because we were all judging difficulty relative to being boarded by pirates.
Now we were in calmer skies, we could get to work patching up the hull. So when we found the nursery (you see, the biology does matter), I was suspended by a line out of a larboard airlock, fusing a great panel of leviathanic carapace over the breach the raiders had made.
Which meant I had a spectacular view.
Leviathans are impossible. Neither science nor theologyaccounts for them. And when gathered in numbers they’re impossibility magnified. The nursery was a cloud, like a swarm of Wyrms or—if what I’ve heard about the skies of Old Earth and the aviaries of Paestum Vallis is true—a flock of swallows. Except bigger, so muchbigger.
The signal to lower was sounded and I finished my spot-weld as quickly as I could before hurrying off to my primary duty of piloting the death boat.
Normally the launch bay was if not a well-oiled machine then at least a decently efficient place-where-people-went-and-got-in-stuff, but this late in the voyage we were tired and uneasy, and, oh yes, a good dozen or so of us had joined an apocalypse cult.
Marsh, Truelove notably walking behind him now, proceeded almost in state to his boat, wielding his coilgun like a staff of office. His followers trailed behind him, murmuring warnings about the coming annihilation and, when he reached the boat, they lifted him into it on their shoulders, with Truelove climbing up after.
Between that and the captain striding all purposeful and alone to her own boat with its illegal neurally networked copilot, I was beginning to get the sense that things were not going well aboard the Pequod.
“No time now,” said Locke, as if answering my thoughts. “We lower. And bring the narcotic lances.”
The narcotic lances were something the hunt used very rarely and only in target-rich environments. If the hunt did encounter a very large pod of Leviathans, or a whole horde of them like we had here, it would be extremely hard to single one out to kill. So instead of killing them, we drug them.
I say drug: the narcotic in question is a lethal neurotoxin delivered in doses that would kill an entire hab-dome if they got into the air filters. But to a Leviathan they mostly just make it fly erratically and, more importantly, the lances themselves are tagged with a high-frequency ID marker that flags the Leviathan’s corpse—should it eventually succumb to the poisonor to other wounds it suffers in the chase—as the property of the ship. If it didn’t have this tag on it, and itdiddie, then like the ambergris corpse it would be considered a loose beast, and free for anybody to haul in and carve up. By attaching our tags, we marked our Leviathans as fast beasts, and our own property.
The practice might seem odd to those outside the fishery, where property rights are usually a tad more complicated than calling electronic dibs. But in a lot of ways I liked the purity of the system. It broke the whole sky into two categories: things that were owned, and things that were waiting to be owned. It fit well with the world as I understood it.
For example, I, like Dawlish, was very much a fast beast. My body was property of Aphrodite Pharma State and would be until my debt was paid or they came to collect it. The rest of the crew, as far as I knew, were loose beasts. Their bodies were the property of whatever power came by and chose to claim them.
What sort of beast you are is left as an exercise for the reader.
Venom spears loaded, we climbed into the boats and, with Marsh’s choir singing hymns of dissolution, we lowered.
From time to time throughout my life, I’ve had moments of disconnection or of dissociation. Moments when the world has gone distant or fuzzy or shrunk down to two-thirds of its regular size and I’ve felt like somebody else was living through me. I’ve never had one stronger than I did in that lowering.
Once, on Vesta, I knew a woman with an intricate tattoo the length of her spine. It was of a great eel winding around a barbed hook to take its own tail in its mouth. But when you looked carefully you saw that the eel was picked out in tiny legible words—poems, prayers, jokes, blessings and curses—only visible if you got close enough that the picture itself vanished.
Approaching the leviathanic cloud was like that. From a distance it seemed one thing, pulsing and rippling as if a single will animated it. It was only as we drew nearer that I began to makeout the individual beasts and to get a sense of the absurd, astronomical scale of the whole gathering. The smallest amongst them—jaws to tail—was a third the length of the Pequod, the largest far longer, and there werethousandsin that gathering. Together they would have represented a treasure trove of sperm (still saying it, how’s it going?) more valuable than the wealth of entire cities, perhaps even entire trade-states. No hold could carry even half their oil; no ship could catch a tenth of them, a tenth of a tenth.
Though the beasts were densely packed on the scale of gods and gas giants, close to I could see that there was immense space between them. Plenty of room for us to move between the monsters and loose our payloads as needed.
“Range closing.” That was the captain, and I realized how strange it was to hear from her on a hunt. But maybe she thought to find the Möbius Beast amongst the cloud. “Stir them up and strike at will.”
The order to strike at will was immediately taken up by the other boats but Locke gave the command for us to hold, and so we held. “No sense wasting good venom,” they explained. “And no shortage of prey either. But watch it, the skies will be getting rough.”
And they were right. Each time a beast was speared, it shied, and the once-harmonious movements of the swarm got super fucking chaotic super fucking quickly. Because Locke had kept us back slightly, I had a view from the outside and I could see the panic spreading through the Leviathans like a plague through a prison ship. Patterns gave way to noise and beasts careened past each other in their hurry to get away from their would-be killers.
This was my first time amongst a mass of Leviathans, and I’d wondered, before lowering, why we used the poison darts here and not in other hunts. This monstrous tumult gave me my answer.
On a regular hunt, against a lone beast or a small pod, youraim is to secure the capture of a single target because a single target is often all you have. The line and the chase is the best way to achieve that goal; the poison would be wasted at best and—if it made the beast act unpredictably—a liability at worst. But in amongst this density of Titans, the line is impossible to use. If one of our boats had tethered itself to a single Leviathan, it would have found itself dragged across the path of five or six more, and it’d be incredibly likely to get smashed into sky trash for its trouble.
So instead we throw out toxins. Drug a hundred beasts and maybe nine or ten will actually surrender to the venom and of those you’ll catch one or two. The rest will drift away to be eaten by Wyrms or sink at last to the core of the planet where they’ll become one with its immense magnetic field and get their vengeance on hunter-barques by unleashing elveses in the upper atmosphere.
“Now,” ordered Locke calmly, and so I downed canopy and brought us in.
This was after Q’s recovery. It was definitely after Q’s recovery. Or before her injury. She was there with me, I remember that for certain. As certain as I can be. It’s been a long time.
Braced against my seat, she loaded and fired her coilgun, loaded and fired, loaded and fired, sending spear after spear into any monsters that came close to us. I, for my part, did my best to keep us on an even keel while leviathanic tails slashed past us and feeder tendrils reached out for us and more than once the great armored bulk of an enraged or terrified creature flew directly into our path.
