It was still oddly beautiful.
The cloud of Leviathans, as it turned out, wasn’t a cloud at all. It was a shell. A wide sphere two to three beasts thick surrounding a denser inner sphere of pure white.
After nearly three years in the sky, I was beginning to dread seeing white things in the distance. The moment we caught sight of it, the captain’s boat shot away from us.
“There,” her voice rang over comms, “and at the heart as all my dreams foretold.”
As I turned my boat to follow her, Locke and Q both laid hands on my shoulder.
“Steady,” Locke whispered. “I’ve a feeling she’ll come up disappointed.”
“The path is smooth,” Marsh added, “that leadeth on to danger.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I took Locke’s warning more seriously than Marsh’s, although since they both seemed to be giving the same advice it didn’t entirely matter. I slowed and watched.
At this depth, the skies of Jupiter were a constant haze; we were below the white clouds and deep into the red-orange sulfide and acetylene, which cut visibility unpredictably and randomly. When we next caught glimpse of the white shape it was clear that we hadn’t found the horror which A had been hunting. What the captain had taken for the whiteness of the Möbius Beast’s carapace was in fact the glistening, newborn whiteness of countless gigantic maggots. Or things a whole lotlikemaggots. They were held, suspended, in the feeder tendrils of a cluster of Leviathans that flew in a close circle about half a klick ahead of us. The part of my brain that the catechism had taught to read every natural thing as a metaphor for the values of my upbringing saw it as motherhood.
And I probably wasn’t far wrong.
“It’s a spawning ground,” Locke called urgently over comms. “Captain, that isnotthe Beast, it’s a death sentence. Abortnow.”
But the captain had already breached some invisible line, and the whole armada of Leviathans turned its attention towards us.
Leviathans don’t really have faces, and even if they did we were far enough inside the shell now that it was back to looking a whole lot like a swarm of locusts or a flock of birds (disclaimer: I don’t know what either of those things actually look like, I’m going mostly from the Testament). Still, I read anger into them.
Maybe I was projecting. Maybe I was anthropomorphizing needlessly. But either way they did, as a collective, decide to murder the fuck out of us, and in a lot of ways their motivations were immaterial.
A fair chunk of our downtime on ship was spent on drills, simulations, and other kinds of practice for common skyfaring scenarios. Funnily enough, we’d never drilled for this. Which meant it was every boat for itself.
I might have mentioned a few times that I actually kind of suck at many, many aspects of my job. Or of the job I had back then, at least. I’m too undisciplined to be a good eye on the array. I lack the skills or the temperament to defend the ship in a crisis. I’d never make it as a harpooner. But I pilot okay. There’s something about imminent danger that makes me really stay focused and in turn that makes me pretty reasonable at things like not getting my boat scythed in half by the mouthparts of a bestial god from the deep sky.
So I wove our little boat between the enraged bulk of the Leviathans, swooping low to avoid their tendrils then pulling up at the last moment as the armored dome of another soared into view. The drugged spears were, in this exact context, making things substantially worse because poisoned monsters, while they would eventually slow as the venom did its work, were also more violent and less predictable in their movements.
A younger, slighter beast—panicked from the toxin and the chaos—cut straight across the path of my boat and I pulled us into a steep climb. The compensators aren’t really designed for going straight up or down, so the feeling of it was weird, with Jovian gravity pulling us back into our seats and the compensation pushing us towards the canopy so we slid gently upwards, clinging to whatever we could cling to because despite the speeds involved, sky-hunting wasn’t compatible with seat belts.
As we soared over the back of the monster, I lost visual, but the proximity detectors said it was still where we’d left it, and from the readings I was getting, it was still freaking out.
It freaked out so much that, portside, I saw its sinuous, barbed tail arcing upwards, bowed in a way you never saw from an uninjured beast, and it drove down towards us fast, sharp, and hard. Which is how I sometimes like it, but not in this context.
Hunter-boats are fixed-wing, which means that to turn they have to roll, and to roll they have—ideally—tonotbe hugging the carapace of an adolescent space-horror so tight they scrape their wingtips. But the devil makes marks of us all, and as I banked to get us out of the way of that slashing, jabbing tail I saw sparks fly and felt the whole body of the boat judder. Not waiting to see what the beast would do next, or even taking a moment to reflect on how this whole situation was a metaphor for the human condition, I hit the afterburners and forced us onwards.
Behind me, the other boats were doing the same. Despite the seamier things I’ve described in this memoir, you should understand that the crew of the Pequod were hardy and seasoned, and knew what the fuck they were doing. Though the nursery-hunt was chaos, we came through it without losing a boat. Each pilot, in their own time and on their own instincts, fixed unerringly on a break in the cloud, and each of us, close as we came to destruction, made it back to the ship with all souls alive.
Ages ago now—it seems like years though I’ve been at work on this memoir for less than twelve months—I spoke of the parallels between hunters and soldiers, of how we expose ourselves to every bit as much danger for a tiny fragment of the glory. I hope now you see a little of what I meant. A writer of ancient Earth once said that there are those who think a fleet of ships or a row of soldiers is the most beautiful thing in the world. She might have been right, I don’t know what ships looked like in those days. But I know what a hunter-barque looks like. And I remember the faces of Flint and Locke and Truelove and Dawlish and even poor, possessed Marsh.
I want to do my best to honor them. Them and the rest, the ones I can only half conjure. The Old Ionian. The Ganymedian dandy. The First and Second Europans. The Bright-Eyed Titanian. The scads of ordinary voidhands who a kinder, more conscientious woman would be able to distinguish more clearly, even in memory.
They all deserve a better epitaph than this.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-SIXFast
As the journey had worn on, the captain had called for me less and less. Perhaps she’d just gotten bored, and that’s fair enough. People usually do. I’m an entertaining distraction for a day or a week or a year. I’m not the kind of person people settle down with. I’m not the kind of person who settles down.
Boo-hoo. Nobody loves me. Sorry, I know I sound pathetic sometimes. Maybe most of the time. There’s a reason I’ve spent so much of my life running.
Anyway, on this particular day, whenever it was—after the Rose Bud, certainly, but before the Samuel Enderby—she’d had need of me. Something had been worrying her, and she’d wanted somebody to take it out on, and I was more than happy to help.
