Leviathans of Jupiter (37 page)

Andy Corvus, already seated, extended a hand to help her. Dorn had gone in first; he was sitting by the control panel of blinking lights and keypads set into the capsule's curving bulkhead. If Andy noticed her haircut he said nothing about it.

Max Yeager came through the hatch behind Deirdre, looking serious, almost grim. She thought that he must be reconsidering his decision to come on the mission. Not even Max said anything about her hair. Maybe being bald has made him more thoughtful, Deirdre surmised.

“Hope none of us are prone to claustrophobia,” Corvus said. It was an attempt at humor, but it fell flat.

“Helluva time to think of that,” Yeager grumbled.

All four of them wore nothing more than black elastane tights that hugged their bodies like second skins, lined inside with medical sensors that reported their heart and breathing rates, body temperatures, and blood pressures. Arms and legs bare except for a few more sensors plastered to the skin. Necklines low enough to allow easy access to the feeding ports in their necks. Deirdre was surprised at how buff Andy looked: lean but sinewy. She tried not to stare at Dorn's half-metal body. She realized how uptight they all were when no one commented on how she looked in her revealing maillot, not even Max.

Dorn said gravely, “If anyone has second thoughts, now is the time to act on them.”

Deirdre felt a sudden impulse to get up and squeeze back through the hatch. But one look at Andy's expectant face froze her in place. He's depending on me, she thought. I can't leave, not now.

Nodding, Dorn said, “Very well. We begin the mission.”

He touched a keypad and the hatch swung noiselessly shut.

“Here we go,” Deirdre heard herself say.

“Initiating immersion,” Dorn said into the tiny microphone built into the control panel.

“Initiating immersion,” a voice crackled from the grillwork of the speaker. Deirdre thought it sounded like that little blond woman who was the chief of the mission control team.

Thick oily perfluorocarbon liquid began to flow across the capsule's deck, quickly covering their bare feet and rising toward their knees.

“Why do they have to keep it so cold?” Yeager groused. “They ought to warm it up a little.”

“Like soup,” Corvus said.

“Yeah. Gazpacho.”

Deirdre said, “I prefer lobster bisque.”

“Where'd you ever get lobster bisque?” Yeager demanded.

“We imported it from Selene,” Deirdre explained as the chilly liquid reached her hips. “It's expensive, but we bring it in at least once a year, for the holidays.”

“Lobster bisque,” Yeager muttered, with a shake of his head.

The perfluorocarbon had climbed to their waists. Deirdre realized she was biting her lip. Andy was smiling nervously, Max staring down at the rising liquid. Dorn was turned slightly away from her, focusing on the control panel; she could only see the etched metal side of his face.

Deirdre tried to steady her breathing as the liquid rose to her breasts, then her shoulders, and up to her chin. Relax! she commanded herself. You've been through this before, several times. Just relax and try to breathe normally.

She couldn't, of course. None of them could. Deirdre closed her eyes as her body spasmed and her lungs began to burn from holding her breath. She could sense the others struggling also, but kept her eyes shut tight. She didn't want to see them, it would only make things worse.

At last she sucked in a breath and gagged on the cold, slimy liquid. Her body told her she was drowning even while the rational part of her brain insisted that it was all right, she'd be perfectly fine, just try to relax and breathe normally.

Breathe normally, she repeated to herself. As if this is normal.

After a few year-long seconds of coughing and nearly retching she began to breathe almost naturally. Opening her eyes, she saw that the three men were also gasping, shuddering, looking terribly afraid, as if each breath would be their last. Their breathing slowly steadied, though, and soon enough they were all breathing the perfluorocarbon. Just as she was herself.

Her lungs felt raw, and there was a cold knot in the pit of her stomach, but she was breathing.

“Immersion complete,” Dorn said, his voice strangely low, reverberating like a moan from hell.

“Copy immersion complete,” came the voice of the mission controller, also low now, distorted.

Looking squarely at Deirdre, Dorn asked, “Is everyone all right? Any pains? Any problems?”

“I'm … all right,” Deirdre said, her own voice sounding like a bassoon in her ears.

“Okay,” said Corvus.

“No problems,” Yeager said. Deirdre thought it sounded grudging.

“Very well,” said Dorn. “Now we ratchet up the pressure.”

Deirdre knew it would take precisely three hours to increase the perfluorocarbon pressure to the point where it was designed to be. Three hours of sitting in this cramped little metal womb and doing nothing except waiting for your body to break down, your internal cells to implode, your brain to go berserk.

None of that happened. They talked to one another, meaningless chatter to pass the time. Corvus made a few pathetically weak jokes. Yeager kept telling them that “all things considered, I'd rather be in Philadelphia.” No one laughed.

Deirdre thought she felt a dull pain in her abdomen, but it was so slight she didn't mention it. Psychosomatic, she told herself.

Then she remembered her conversation with Katherine Westfall, at the party Dr. Archer had given them a few nights earlier.

After her toast with the faux champagne, Westfall had pulled Deirdre to one side of the crowded conference room and smiled coldly at her.

“I understand that your case of rabies has been cured,” she said.

Deirdre nodded happily, the champagne tickling her nose. “Yes. Dr. Mandrill says there's no trace of the virus in my blood now.”

“Thanks to nanotherapy,” Westfall said.

Deirdre nodded again, uncertainly this time. She didn't know how much she should admit to.

“You're a very fortunate young woman. Dr. Archer went to great lengths to help you,” Westfall said. It wasn't a question.

“I'm very grateful.”

“I'm sure you are.”

“Now I can go on the mission without any worries … about my health, that is.”

Westfall said nothing, merely maintaining her sphinxlike smile.

A little hesitantly, Deirdre asked, “Do you still want me to keep you informed? Once we come back, I mean.”

With the slightest shake of her head Westfall replied, “That won't be necessary. Not at all. I'm fully satisfied with my other sources of help.”

Deirdre's blood had run cold at the sight of Westfall's eyes. Although her lips were smiling, Katherine Westfall's eyes were like a pair of razors, like the eyes of a poisonous snake.

“Full pressure,” Dorn announced.

Deirdre snapped out of her memory. The capsule was fully pressurized. Time for the next step of the mission.

“Now we separate from the station and rendezvous with
Faraday
,” said Yeager, needlessly. They all knew the procedure. Max is talking because he's nervous, she thought.

Indeed, Yeager chattered every step of the way, his voice basso deep in the perfluorocarbon, as the capsule left station
Gold
and glided the short distance to
Faraday,
co-orbiting with the station. While Yeager told them all how cleverly he had designed the system, the capsule locked onto
Faraday
's main hatch. Led by Dorn, the four of them swam down the long metal-walled tunnel that penetrated through the twelve pressure spheres of the ship and ended at the ship's bridge, in the vessel's core.

Deirdre floated into the spherical chamber and looked around at the consoles and display screens studding the bulkheads. It was just like the simulators that they had trained on, back in the immersion center aboard
Gold
's third wheel.

“Well,” said Yeager, “here we are.”

“Home sweet home,” Corvus said, with a lopsided grin. Even his voice sounded weirdly deep, distorted.

Then Yeager leaned toward her and said, in a near whisper, “By the way, you look sexier than ever in that buzz cut.”

Deirdre smiled with relief.

LAUNCH

Standing in
Faraday
's cramped bridge with little to do while the ship swung in orbit around massive Jupiter, Deirdre felt a dull ache in her stomach, as if she had eaten something that disagreed with her. It's the pressure, she thought. We'll all have aches and pains from the pressure. They warned us about it, about how the diaphragm will feel sore from working in high pressure. But in the back of her mind she saw Katherine Westfall's reptilian eyes glittering at her.

Deirdre's assignment was to monitor the ship's sensor displays—unless or until Corvus made contact with the leviathans. Her station was to the right of Dorn, who stood at the bridge's central console and handled the ship's controls. Dorn also stayed in contact with the mission controller. Sure enough, Deirdre saw on the display screen built into Dorn's main console that the controller was the little blond Russian woman who had seemed so friendly with Max.

There were no chairs in the ship's bridge: none were needed as they floated weightlessly in the perfluorocarbon liquid. Yeager had slid his feet into the restraining loops beside Dorn, and was busily tapping out commands on the auxiliary keyboard of the central control console, at the cyborg's elbow. If Dorn was annoyed by the engineer's behavior, he gave no sign of it.

Corvus's job was devoted exclusively to the deep brain stimulation equipment. He had run his console, on Dorn's left, through a perfunctory systems check as soon as they had departed from station
Gold
. Now, with nothing to do while
Faraday
orbited Jupiter, Andy had floated over to stand beside Deirdre.

“What's Max doing?” Deirdre asked Corvus as he hovered beside her. She tried to whisper but her voice still sounded like a moaning foghorn.

“Checking out the ship's systems, I guess,” Corvus answered. “He wants to make sure everything's working right before we go diving into the clouds.”

Deirdre remembered that the mission control chief had teasingly called Max “little father” at the party. Now she saw how apt the label was. She watched as Yeager methodically called up every one of the ship's systems and subsystems, ticking off the green lights with a tap of his finger against the console display's touchscreen.

At last Yeager turned toward her with a half smile and said, “Everything's in the green.”

“Isn't that what you expected, Max?” she asked.

“Yeah. Sure.” His smile widened. “But it's good to see my baby's working the way she should.”

Dorn turned slightly from his post at the control console and announced, “Time line indicates we should take a meal.”

“Already?” Deirdre asked.

“We've been aboard for nearly eight hours,” said Dorn.

“That long?”

“Twelve hours since breakfast,” Corvus said.

“I don't feel hungry,” said Yeager.

“That's because your stomach is filled with perfluorocarbon,” Dorn said. “We won't feel normal hunger pangs.”

Corvus said, “Yeah, the medics told us about that, didn't they?”

“We must take meals on schedule,” Dorn said, very seriously. “Otherwise our performances will deteriorate.”

“Wouldn't want to deteriorate,” Yeager said, heading for the food dispenser. Then he added, “Could be dangerous.”

Deirdre watched Max as he floated over to the dispenser. It looked like a tall, oblong vending machine, except that its face was blank metal with a single square display screen built into it, and it had a slim hose hooked to one side.

“I think I'll have a filet mignon, medium rare, smothered with onions,” Yeager joked as he unlimbered the hose.

“And ketchup,” Corvus added.

Yeager shot him a disapproving glare.

Deirdre watched, half fascinated, half in dread, as Max clamped the end of the hose to the feeding port in the base of his neck. His expression was strange: He seemed to be trying to smile, but the revulsion he felt was clearly etched on his face.

The dispenser's screen lit up briefly, showing what looked like a pie chart, all cherry red except for a tiny sliver of gray. That must represent Max's meal, she thought.

Within a minute the dispenser gave out a tone that would have been a bell's ding in normal air. In the perfluorocarbon it sounded more like a metallic clunk. Max disconnected the hose and held it out for Corvus.

“Delicious!” he announced. “The steak was a little underdone, though.”

Corvus took the hose from his hand. “What's for dessert?” he wisecracked.

One by one the men went to the dispenser and hooked the feeding hose to their ports. Yeager took over at the control board when Dorn went for his meal. Deirdre hung back, wondering what it felt like.

Dorn held out the hose to her. “It's your turn, Dee,” he said, almost solemnly.

Taking a deep breath, Deirdre accepted the hose from Dorn's prosthetic hand.

“You need any help with that?” Yeager asked, with his old leer.

Deirdre felt grateful for it. Max breaks the tension, she thought.

Aloud, she replied, “Keep your distance, Max. I can do this for myself, thank you.”

She pushed the end of the hose against her feeding port and felt a sharp, brief sting as its hyperfine needle penetrated the port's protruding shell. Her teeth clenched, Deirdre watched the dispenser's display until it dinged and the screen said
FEEDING COMPLETE
.

She felt no different, but was glad when she disconnected the hose and hung it up in its slot on the dispenser's side. What an awful way to have a meal, she thought.