Manta's Gift (2 page)

And caught his breath. There, floating outside the thick Quadplexi window, squarely in the center of the probe's external lights, was a two-meter-long solid object. It looked something like a cross between a dolphin and a very large, very fat manta ray with a pair of long tails trailing behind it.

And as he watched, it rolled over and flapped away through the roiling atmosphere, its twin tails beating rhythmically at the air. A second later, two more of them swam into view around the sides of the probe and charged off after the first.

Slowly, Faraday turned to look at Chippawa. Chippawa was looking back at him.

Chippawa said it first. "I guess Keefer
wasn't
imagining things," he said, his voice studiously casual.

Faraday nodded, all the data from all of the manned and unmanned probes for all of the past twenty years flashing through his mind There was no life on Jupiter. None. Zip, zero, nada. All the books, all the studies, all the experts agreed on that.

And all of them had ridiculed Keefer for what he'd claimed to have seen at the edge of his probe's lights...

"No," Faraday said. "I guess he wasn't."

Chippawa hunched his shoulders. The familiar whine of the servos in the suit seemed to get him back on track. "Well," he said briskly, keying for the radar section of their full-spectrum emscan sensors. "You'd better give Prime a full tie-in. I'll see what kind of track I can get on the things."

"Right," Faraday said, forcing his fingers to function. Whatever had swum past them had had the courtesy, or else the sheer clumsiness, to announce its presence with a loud knock on the hull.

Which could potentially be a very serious problem. The
Skydiver's
hull was designed to handle immense but steady pressures, not the sharp impact of something solid ramming into it.

He keyed the tie-in first as Chippawa had instructed, giving the tether ship flying far above them full audio and visual access to what was happening inside the probe as well as the usual telemetry feed. Then, trying to ignore the feeling in the pit of his stomach, he activated the outside cameras and started a systematic examination of the hull.

Chippawa got to his finish line first. "Got 'em," he announced. "Four blips, moving off to starboard."

"I thought there were three of them," Faraday said absently, his own fingers pausing as the cameras located the impact point. It wasn't much, as impact points went; the dent was hardly even noticeable. But it
was
a dent.

And as he stared at the image he could swear he could see the marks of teeth...

"There must have been another one we didn't see," Chippawa said. "Wait a second. There are
five
of them out there. No; six. Sheester's Mother."

He shook his head. "It's a school of them," he said. "A whole double-clove-latte
school.
Like a pod of whales."

"Or piranha," Faraday said. "Take a look at this."

Chippawa glanced at the image on Faraday's display. "One of them bumped us," he said. "We knew that."

"Look closer," Faraday insisted. "I may be imagining things, but those look like teeth marks."

"You're imagining things," Chippawa declared. "Come on. Anything bigger than a puppy knows better than to chew on metal."

"Unless it's what they eat," Faraday countered crossly. Chippawa didn't have to dismiss his concerns quite so cavalierly.

"What, in the Jovian atmosphere?" Chippawa scoffed. "You think floating metal grows on trees around... oh, my God."

"What?" Faraday demanded, spinning around to his own emscan display.

And felt his skin prickling. There was a school of the fat mantas out there, all right. Maybe two dozen of them.

All of them clustered around two very large blips. Blips, if the radar could be believed, that were each the size of a nice little starter house in the suburbs.

Chippawa's comment on this development would undoubtedly have been a very interesting one. But he never got the chance to make it Even as Faraday's brain registered the size of the newcomers the probe lurched, the background humming hiccupping into a sudden twang. "What—?" Faraday yelped.

"Something hit the tether," Chippawa said. "There—look."

Faraday craned his neck. Another of the fat mantas was scooting along across the edge of the
Skydiver's
light cone. Unlike the others, this one seemed to be trailing an expanding mist of bright yellow. "He didn't just hit the tether," he said, the bad feeling in his stomach getting suddenly worse. "He cut himself on it."

"Sure looks like it," Chippawa agreed as the manta vanished outside the range of their lights. "Better check it out." He reached for the camera control—

And suddenly the probe was slammed violently sideways.

Faraday grabbed at his board as his chair bounced down out from under him and then slammed hard up against his tailbone again. A stray thought caught oddly at the back of his mind; what had happened to his coffee cup and was it leaking on anything. There was a second jolt, this one from the other side, then a third that seemed to come from above. Something that looked like a gray wall studded with randomly placed dimples slid past bare centimeters from the Quadplexi. There was another slam from above, the worst one yet—

And with a horrible twisting of Faraday's stomach, his chair fell away from beneath him and didn't come back up. The tether to the ship above had been broken, and the probe was in free fall.

"Floats!" Chippawa snapped.

Faraday already had the safety cover wrenched up and out of the way. "Floats," he repeated, and pressed the button.

There was the
crack
of explosive bolts, and the moaning of the wind outside was joined by a violent hiss as the tanks of compressed helium began dumping their contents into the probe's rubber-raft pontoons. Faraday held his breath...

And then, with another horrible twisting of his stomach, the
Skydiver
rolled over onto its right side.

"Malfunction!" he barked, eyes darting to the error display as all his weight slammed down onto his ribs and his right armrest. The words flashed onto the screen in bright red—"Starboard tank's blocked," he reported tightly. A support slide unfurled from the right collar of his suit, moving into position along the side of his head to relieve the strain the change in attitude had put on his neck. "No helium's getting into the float."

"Must be water in the valve," Chippawa said grimly from his seat, now hanging directly above Faraday. "Firing secondary."

Faraday held his breath, straining his ears for the sound of hissing helium. But there was nothing.

And the error message was still glaring red at him.

"Secondary also malfunctioning," Chippawa reported. "Damn water must be in the line, not the valves. The expanding helium's frozen it into a solid plug."

And they were still going down. "Any way to get to it?" Faraday asked.

Chippawa shook his head, an abbreviated wobbling around his own suit's neck support. "Not from inside. It's bound to fix itself sooner or later—it's over three hundred Kelvin out there."

He clucked his teeth thoughtfully. "Question is, will it unfreeze in time to do us any good?"

Faraday's stomach felt ill, and not just from the deadly gravity. Already they were too deep for any chance of rescue from the tether ship. Now, they were drifting still deeper.

And as they did so, the rising atmospheric pressure would begin to compress their one working float, reducing its already inadequate buoyancy and making them fall still faster. After that, even if the other float fixed itself, the pressure of its helium tank wouldn't be enough to deploy it.

That was the physics of it. The cold reality of it was that he and Chippawa were dead.

They would be crushed to death. That would be the final end of it The fragile walls of their capsule would shatter under the pressure from outside, shatter into a million pieces that would drive inward into their bodies like shrapnel.

And behind that shrapnel would come the full weight of Jupiter's atmosphere, squeezing in on them. Their blood vessels would explode; their bones would break; their skulls would shatter like empty eggshells. Crushed to death.

Crushed to death...

He looked up at his partner, expecting to see his same fear in the other's face.

But there was no fear there. Chippawa was concentrating on his board, apparently oblivious to the fate that was moving like a runaway monorail toward them.

And in that stretched-out instant of time, Faraday hated him. Hated the man's courage and professional calm. Hated his ability to ignore the fear and the danger.

Hated the twenty extra years of life Chippawa had experienced that Faraday would never have a chance to taste.

"Getting a reading," Chippawa called out over the wind. "Incoming. About eight meters long—roughly torpedo-shaped—"

"We're falling," Faraday all but screamed at him. So much for the luck of his wooden ring. He was about to die. They were both about to die. "What the hell does it matter—?"

The sentence was choked off as his armrest again slammed hard into the side of his exoskeleton, the impact jarring his ribs. "What happened?" he demanded, eyes flickering over his instruments. No new error messages were showing.

"I don't know," Chippawa said. "It's—oh, boy."

Faraday looked up. And stopped breathing.

The slab of gray had returned. Only this time it had shifted around until an eye was visible.

Gazing steadily through the window at them.

Faraday stared back, the wind and the pressure and even the fact that he was a dead man suddenly fading into the background. The eye was big and very black, either with no pupil at all or else with all pupil. The kind of eye that would suck in every bit of radiation across a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, he realized, using every bit of light available to see in the gloom of Jupiter's deep atmosphere. There was a hint of polygonal faceting around the eye's edge, though it didn't seem to be an insect-type compound eye.

And like a textbook optical illusion that shifted from duck to rabbit and back to duck again, he couldn't decide whether the expression in the eye was one of interest, sympathy, or malevolence.

Or maybe that was just his imagination. Or his hopes.

Or his fears.

With an effort, he found his voice. "Should we wave?" he said.

"Unless you'd rather ask it to take us to their leader," Chippawa said. "Emscan's running... man, this thing's got one complicated internal structure."

"How complicated?" Faraday asked, starting to become interested in spite of himself.

"At least as complex as ours," Chippawa said. "I'd love to see the biochemistry of something that swims around in hydrogen and methane all day. You hear that?"

"Yes," Faraday said, frowning. It was a scraping sound, coming from somewhere beneath them.

"It's checking us out," Chippawa said. "Running a flipper or something along the hull."

"Is that why we've stopped falling?" Faraday asked. "It's holding us up?"

"Yes and no," Chippawa said, peering at the displays. "We are still going down, only not as fast."

"But it
is
intelligent," Faraday said, staring back at that unblinking eye. "And it's figured out that we are, too."

"Well, maybe," Chippawa said cautiously. "I'd definitely say it's curious. But then, so is a kitten."

"It
is
intelligent," Faraday insisted. "Something that big
has
to be."

"Yeah, well, as the cliché says, size doesn't really matter," Chippawa said with a grunt. "The last rhino I saw wasn't giving lectures on quark theory. Anyway, it may all be academic."

"What do you mean?" Faraday demanded. If the creature was intelligent, surely it realized they didn't belong here. It could just carry them back up to the top of the atmosphere—

"One, we're still falling," Chippawa said. "That implies even with one float working we're too heavy for him to hold up. And two—"

He gestured to the emscan display. "We've got more company."

Faraday felt his mouth drop open. At eight meters long, the creature staring in at them was already pretty big. The suburban starter houses that the little guys had been clustering around had been even bigger.

But the two radar blips now moving up from below and to their right were another order of magnitude entirely. Like a pair of incoming grocery warehouses...

Abruptly, the armrest dropped out from under him again. He looked up, catching just a glimpse of their Peeping Tom as he scooted upward into the swirling air.

And the
Skydiver
was again falling free.

The seconds ticked by. A new set of creaks joined the howl of the wind outside, and a glance at the depth indicator showed they had officially beaten Keefer and O'Reilly's record.

They were also nearly to the theoretical pressure limit of their own hull. Not only were they about to die, he thought bitterly, but they were going to get to watch the countdown to that death.

Something flashed past the window, illuminated briefly by their exterior lights. "What was that?"

"One of our thirty-meter wonders," Chippawa said. "Got some pictures as he went past."

Lost in his own last thoughts, Faraday had forgotten all about the grocery-warehouse creatures that had chased off Dark Eye. "Anything good?" he asked, trying to force some interest.

"I'd say we've found the top of the food chain," Chippawa said. "Look at this—it's got a bunch of those manta-ray things hanging onto its underside."

Like remoras on a shark, Faraday thought with a shiver. Waiting to pick up the scraps from the big boy's kill. "So the smaller ones who ran past us were scouts or something?"

"Could be," Chippawa said. Something moved up into their lights from below—

And Faraday was slammed violently against his armrest as the
Skydiver
came to a sudden halt. For a few seconds he lay helplessly there, gazing at an incredibly lumpy brownish-gray surface outside the window. Then, with a sort of ponderous inevitability, the
Skydiver
rolled over into an upright position again.