In the Mouth of the Whale Read Online Free PDF

reached their target. The sea of liquid hydrogen wrapped around Cthuga’s 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, 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 fly-bys – 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 hoppers and tipplers. Fierce little sparks blooming everywhere as hoppers were welded to their rack-and-pinion tracks. Inas and the rest of the crew were working at the base of the flatbed car, 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 the 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 that Inas was working on. For all the good it would do. The flatbed car was already locked down on the magrail; if that gave, a few welds weren’t going to hold it.
    She kept half her eyes focused on the distant cloud tops 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. Three 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.
    Bots worked with graceful haste around the two flatbed cars. In under a minute they had done all they could and all movement ceased everywhere. Inas’ bot wrapped its limbs around the post of a power point and the bots of the rest of the crew clung limpet-like to various protrusions or squatted inside hastily spun nests of elastomer fibrils. Hunkered down. Waiting for the uprushing