Cloud Leviathan

Thea Kasprzak spent eleven years being laughed at for believing something lived in Saturns clouds. Then the long-range radar aboard Kestrel Station picks up a shape four kilometres long, flying against the wind.

The creatures are vast, slow and ancient: living balloons the size of cities, grazing the haze and talking to each other in waves of light. For two days, the six researchers aboard the floating station watch them in awe. Then a superstorm rises from the deep, lightning tears open Kestrels envelope, and the station begins to fall towards pressures that will crush it flat.

Something rises to meet them. The largest of the creatures opens its mouth and swallows the station whole, gently, with everyone still aboard.

Inside the warm, glowing body of the beast the crew call the Abbot, they find a living cathedral, a nursery of young, and a collection of fallen things it has guarded for decades, including a scorched fragment of the Cassini probe. They also find a secret their corporate sponsor has been keeping for eleven years. The Abbot is old, it is dying, and it is sinking into the deep. Helion Resources is sending drones to cut the crew out and take the creature apart.

To survive, Thea must learn to speak a language made of light, and convince the creature that saved them that it is time to let them go.

Cloud Leviathan is a story of wonder, sacrifice and first contact in the skies of Saturn.