In the Mouth of the Whale Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.’
    ‘The phils want to start rolling this bird yesterday, and we still have to run through the rest of the 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 bunky’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 launch cradles on flatbed rail cars, attended by a small crew of bots that clambered over and around them. The bots were flexible, radially symmetrical machines that looked a little like brittlestars: 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; when it reached 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 that were 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 broke down. Or so the theory went. In practice, only a few payloads ever