“How do you feel?” she asked, quickly adding, “The medical team is monitoring your physical conditions, of course.”
“I feel okay,” Yeager said. “Kind of chilly in this soup, but I guess we’ll get warmer as we dive deeper into the ocean.”
“Yes.” Vishnevskaya studied Yeager’s face. He seemed normal, despite the perfluorocarbon he was immersed in. Perhaps his face was a little puffy, but the medics claimed that was to be expected.
“Well,” she said, “I just wanted to wish you good luck before communications cut off.”
He nodded. A little warily, she thought. As if he were afraid of saying something he didn’t want the others to hear.
“Thanks. We’ll be okay.”
“Of course. You designed the vessel well.”
“See you when we get back.”
“Of course,” she repeated.
“So long, kid.”
“Good luck,” she said again, feeling inane, frustrated.
Yeager slid out of the display screen’s field of view and Dorn came back. “We’re on trajectory,” he said. “Time line is on the tick.”
Vishnevskaya nodded at the cyborg. But she was thinking, Max, don’t get hurt. Make your ship perform as it should and come back safe. Come back to me.
Grant Archer sat alone in the gallery that circled the mission control center. As he looked down at the handful of men and women working the consoles he thought, I should have gone on this mission. I should have gone with them.
A cold, almost sneering voice in his head ridiculed the thought. Gone with them? At your age? What would you do down there in that cold blackness? You’d be useless.
Archer nodded to himself, his eyes fastened on the big wall screens that displayed data from
I’d be a burden to them, he admitted silently. But I’d be with them. I’d be facing the same risks that I’ve asked them to face. I’d share their fate.
Totally alone in his melancholy, Archer bowed his head and prayed silently, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …
To his alarm, he found that he could not speak the next line, not even to himself. He did fear evil. He feared for the people he had sent into Jupiter’s dark, alien sea.
He feared the malice of Katherine Westfall.
THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE
“We’ll break through the clouds in two minutes,” Dorn said, his eyes focused on the mission profile curve.
Yeager was standing behind him, his feet anchored in floor loops as he swayed slightly in their liquid world. Deirdre thought of the undersea plants she had seen in vids of Earth.
“Shouldn’t you power up the sensor screens?” Corvus asked. He was at his station, to the left of Dorn in the cramped compartment.
The cyborg nodded toward Deirdre. “Powering the sensor screens,” he said as he touched an icon on the control panel’s master screen.
All the screens on Deirdre’s console lit up, but Deirdre saw nothing except swirling waves of color racing past.
“Wow!” Corvus blurted. “We’re really moving!”
“Diving like a falcon,” Yeager agreed.
“It doesn’t feel as if we’re diving,” Deirdre said.
“That’s because we’re inside,” Yeager explained. “We share the same relative motion as the ship.”
Dorn intoned, “Breakout in one minute.”
“The flight engineers call this a hypersonic descent,” Yeager went on, perfectly serious. “We’re gliding through the atmosphere at Mach 12.”
“Gliding?” Deirdre asked. “At Mach 12?”
Yeager nodded tightly. “Gliding. Saves on the propellants we’ll need to launch ourselves back out of here when the mission’s finished.”
“That’s why we have those aerodynamic fins attached to the ship’s exterior,” Dorn said.
“Right,” Yeager agreed. “And once we’re in the ocean they’ll serve as steering vanes.”
The ship was definitely shaking now, buffeting seriously.
“And the atmosphere’s ten thousand kilometers deep?” Deirdre asked, remembering the figure from their briefings.
Without turning from his control panel displays, Dorn nodded. “Ten thousand kilometers, roughly. Just about as deep as the Earth’s diameter. It’s—”
“Look!” Deirdre shouted.
The display screens suddenly cleared and showed a vast panorama of steel gray ocean stretching far below them. The horizon was far, far away, much more distant than the horizon on Earth. Enormous, Deirdre realized. This is an enormous world. The sky was blanketed with soft pastel clouds, bulbous and billowing as far as the eye could see.
“We’re below the clouds,” Deirdre breathed. It sounded silly, even to herself. The buffeting was getting worse, but no one seemed to take any notice of it. Am I the only one who’s frightened? she asked herself.
“Look over there,” Corvus said, pointing.
Little puffs of greenish clouds floated low across the ocean’s rippled surface, and other, darker smudges dotted the view.
“I’ll focus the telescopes on them,” Deirdre said, glad to have something to occupy her hands. The smudges grew into an armada of iridescent balloons sailing majestically across the boundless ocean, glittering in the pale light that filtered through the clouds.
“Look at them,” Deirdre gasped, pointing. “They’re beautiful!”
“Clarke’s Medusas,” Corvus murmured. “Completely adapted to living airborne. They never land anywhere.”
“There isn’t any land to land on,” Yeager said. “Nothing down there but a seven-thousand-klick-deep ocean.”
“They spend their whole lives aloft,” Deirdre said.
“They’re just sailing along,” Yeager said, a hint of awe creeping into his voice, “on winds that must be at least four hundred knots.”
“It’s home to them,” Corvus said.
Deirdre watched the medusas, fascinated. Long tendrils trailed from their colorful main bodies. Sensors, she recalled from her briefings.
“What’s that?” Yeager asked, pointing a trembling finger at a thin, flat ghostly figure that glided past the medusas.
“Spider-kite,” said Corvus. “They eat the organic particles raining out of the clouds.”
“So do the medusas,” said Deirdre. “No predators have been found among the organisms living in the atmosphere,” she quoted from memory. “They all feed on the particles coming down from the clouds. Like manna from heaven.”
“That doesn’t mean there aren’t any predators,” Corvus said.
