In the Mouth of the Whale

It began like every other day. Ori climbed into her immersion chair and plugged into her bot, trundled it out onto the skin of the Whale, and helped her crew shepherd a pair of probes from their garage to the staging post. Fuelling and charging them, running final checks before they set off on their long journey down the cable. Important, demanding, finicky work, but nothing out of the ordinary.

The staging post was near the base of the Whale's vertical cylinder, at the lip of the conical end cap that tapered to the cable's insertion point. Immediately above, a marshalling yard spread like ivy around a tree trunk, bustling with purposeful movement. At the upper end, hoppers stuffed with a variety of raw construction materials scooted down rack and pinion tracks towards tipplers that seized and lifted them up and turned them upside down and mated their hatches with the hatches of bulbous freight cars. The hoppers shed their cargo with quick peristaltic shudders, were swung right side up and set down on return tracks on the far side of the tipplers, and zipped back to the refinery. Further down the yard, loaded freight cars assembled themselves into long strings that trundled away along one of the four parallel magrails that crossed the inverted hill of the end cap and converged on the cable, the strings rolling over flying bridges at the insertion point and gathering speed as they descended the cable towards the deck of fluffy white ammonia clouds that sheeted the sky from horizon to horizon, passing strings of empty cars climbing in the opposite direction.

Ori had a few moments to take in this familiar view while she waited for her crewmate and bunkie, Inas, to sign off the go-list for the ignition system of one of the probe's separation motors. The chains of freight cars, descending and ascending. A crew of bots prinking about the edge of the vacuum-organism farm that patched the curve of flank above the marshalling yard with a couple of square kilometres of dull red fibrous tangles. The bulk of the Whale looming beyond like a moon-sized thunderhead. Her world entire: a fretted cylinder ten kilometres tall, hung in the upper troposphere like a stylus balanced on its point, packed with hot hydrogen ballonets, fusion generators, try works and refineries, accommodation modules, garages, workshops, and the great engines that kept it stabilised in the constant wind that circled Cthuga's equator.

Out in the wide green-blue sky, a small formation of ramscoop drones was heading inward, laden with organic material collected from plumes that trailed downwind of upwelling festoons at the northern edge of the Equatorial Zone. And higher still, at the limits of the resolution of the optics of Ori's bot, a black fleck moved through the diffused glare of the sun's white point. A shrike-class raptor orbiting the upper levels of the Whale.

She often wondered what it would be like to fly one of those sleek, powerful machines. Fly, not ride. That was the thing. The True pilots didn't control them from an immersion chair safely lodged inside one of the Whale's accommodation modules. No, their fierce pride and honour demanded that they put up their lives every time they flew, testing themselves against the storms and hurricane winds of Cthuga, bringing the war directly to the enemy.

Ori had come a long way in her sixteen years, working her way up from general purpose swabbie to refinery loader, machinist, and finally bot jockey. Working hard to prove her worth, abasing herself when she had to, showing initiative whenever she could, finally making it all the way to the outside. Why not higher still? Maybe she could try out for mechanic one day. After all, keeping raptors sweet couldn't be that much different from running system checks on probes. And if she did well at that, perhaps she'd be allowed to fly one of the drones that accompanied raptors during long-range patrols . . .

The raptor's tiny thorn swung away around the bulk of the Whale. Inas jogged Ori, saying, ‘No time for dreaming, kid.'

‘They don't usually hang around the Whale. Raptors.'

Inas ignored this, saying, ‘The phils want to start rolling this bird yesterday, and we still have to run through the rest of go-list.'

‘You ask me, something's up.'

‘I'm asking you to give me some help here.'

‘We're still ahead of everyone else.'

‘By a bare second. Let's swing.'

‘Aye-aye.'

‘You want to fly, you need a spotless rep.'

Inas knew all about Ori's ambitions, and cared enough to encourage her.

‘Or I could just let go,' Ori said, raising up and hanging from just two limbs for a moment, dangling above the vertical length of the probe, the long drop past the inward-angled slope of the end cap, and the even longer drop beyond, ten klicks to the top of the cloud deck, another hundred and fifty through layers of ammonia-ice, ammonium sulphide, and clouds of water-ice where lightning storms flickered . . .

‘Falling isn't flying,' Inas said.

‘Sure it is. Except when you're flying, you're in control,' Ori said, and came down to a squat beside her bunkie's bot and started the tedious work of checking each function of the separation motor's simple nervous system.

The probe and its twin sat side by side in the cradles of their launch trucks, attended by a small crew of bots that clambered over and around them. They were flexible, radially symmetrical machines that looked a little like brittlestars, the bots: ten long and many-jointed limbs set around central discs edged with the glittering buttons of optical, microwave, and radio sensors. All engaged in an intricate ballet of hesitations, negotiations and sudden bursts of decisive activity, all talking constantly to each other, updates on what they planned to do, what they were doing, and what they had just finished doing, interlaced with gossip and jokes and banter, a familiar and comforting polyphonic work song.

Ori and Inas were responsible for checking out the little solid-fuel motors that would fire as the probe approached the cable terminus, separating it from its cradle, boosting it past the very end of the cable and correcting for yaw and spin imparted by the cable's pendulum-like swing. After that, the probe's primary stage motor would ignite, a brief fierce burn driven by antimatter fusion that would punch the secondary stage through a thickening fog of liquid hydrogen; then, on reaching the edge of the transition point where the fog turned into a vast deep sea, the shaped charge of the secondary stage would consume itself in a single violent moment and inject the bullet of the payload into the sea's currents, where it would drift down towards the dense hot sphere of superfluid metallic hydrogen at the planet's core.

The payload had already been inserted into the probe: microscopic yet potent amounts of degenerate matter, raw quarks and strange solitons, each suspended in pinch fields stitched into lattices of flawless diamond micropellets cased in rhenium carbide and yttria-stabilised zirconia felt. When the casings and diamond micropellets eroded, violent interactions between their cargoes and the superfluid would help to map and anatomise the place where reality itself broken down. Or so the theory went. In practice, only a few payloads ever reached their target. The sea of liquid hydrogen wrapped around the core was tens of thousands of kilometres deep, squeezed by pressure that could stamp the Whale flat as a sheet of paper in an instant, and reaching a temperature of more than five thousand degrees centigrade at the boundary with the metallic hydrogen core. After more than a century, the True philosophers had scarcely begun to unravel the mysteries of Cthuga's core. And now the gas giant was swinging around in its long orbit towards territory occupied by the Ghosts. War -- real war, not skirmishes and scouting flybys -- was imminent. Time was running out. The phils were sending down pairs of probes as fast as the manufactories could assemble them. At least one pair every day, sometimes more. And still it wasn't enough.

Ori was so absorbed in her work that she didn't at first notice the alarm, reacting a sluggish thirty milliseconds after it began, skimming the top layer of the fat burst of raw data, dumping the rest. Far below the cloud deck, something had struck the cable with enough force to snap it like a whip: residual energy was propagating up its length in a sine wave whose peak was just fifty kilometres away and closing fast. It was the real thing, no drill. No time to return the probes to the garage. Barely enough time to lock everything in place and hope for the best.

She looked all around, hoping to spot some trace of the enemy, seeing only empty sky. High above, a string of freight cars had halted near the exit of the marshalling yard. Beyond, bots were scrambling amongst freight cars and hoppers and tipplers. Fierce little sparks blooming everywhere as hoppers were welded to the rack-and-pinion tracks. Inas and the rest of the crew were working at the base of the flatbed, welding it to the skin at brace points, uncoupling power and transmission cabling, clearing clutter from the staging post's platform. Ori swung over the curved flank of the probe, and froze as something blurred past three klicks out. A sleek shape driving straight down towards cloud tops far below, dwindling away to a bright point seconds before the roar of its afterburners reached her.

Ori called to Inas. ‘Did you see that?'

‘See what?'

Ori threw a picture. ‘The raptor. Every weapon pod everted. Told you something was up.'

‘Are you done skywatching? Because I could use some help.'

‘It was ready for combat,' Ori said. ‘It has to mean the enemy hit the cable.'

‘It doesn't mean anything. It could be an eddy. Wind shear. Any kind of extreme weather. All I know is what I'm told. And all they're telling us is it's coming fast,' Inas said.

‘I hear you,' Ori said, and swung around and down and started welding the other side of the brace point Inas was working on. For all the good it would do. The flatbed was already locked down on the magrail; if that gave, a few welds weren't going to hold it.

She kept half her eyes on the distant cloudtops while she worked, half-hoping to see some trace of combat. If it was an attack, it would be the fifth in less than a hundred days. Four had been routine engagements with infiltrator drones far downwind of the Whale, but the last had been just a hundred klicks north and east, a whole wing of raptors streaking out to engage a package that had drawn a thin violet contrail as it slanted through the troposphere, vanishing beneath the cloud deck as they chased hard on its tail, the clouds lighting up a few seconds later as if struck by a localised thunderstorm. Controlled falling. Absolutely.

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