Leviathans of Jupiter

SEARCHING

Deirdre began to feel bored. The display screens remained dark. There was nothing for her to see, nothing for her to do. They had unstrapped from their restraining harnesses: Faraday swayed gently in the ocean’s surging current.

Corvus had gone to his console to check the status of his DBS equipment. He seemed quite content to run his tests, checking and rechecking the gadgetry. Yeager stood beside him, swaying easily with his feet in the deck loops, running equally incomprehensible diagnostic checks on the ship’s systems.

Deirdre looked over Dorn’s shoulder at the screens of his control panel, trying to make out what the blinking lights and colored curves meant.

As if he sensed her behind him, Dorn said softly, “All systems are performing well.”

“We’re going deeper?” she asked.

“Yes. Following the stream of organics. We’ve passed the three-hundred-kilometer mark.”

“And there’s still nothing out there.”

Dorn made a noise that might have been a chuckle. “I’ll put the sonar returns on-screen.”

The display screens lit up with ghostly images, strange, alien shapes.

“Activating the visual subprogram,” Dorn said, touching a key on his control panel.

The vague grayish shapes suddenly sharpened into clear imagery, brightly colored creatures, some sleek and swift, others that looked misshapen and horribly ugly to Deirdre’s eyes.

“Fish!” she exclaimed.

“The Jovian equivalent,” said Dorn. “The ocean is teeming with them at this level.”

Deirdre watched them, fascinated.

“The colors are added by the visual subprogram,” Dorn explained. “The actual creatures probably don’t look this way.”

That didn’t matter to Deirdre. She watched the Jovian fish flicking across the sensor screens. In the distance she saw an undulating, flattened thing that trailed a set of wavering tentacles. The data bar running across the screen’s bottom said it was nearly three kilometers across.

“It’s like a big, floating bedsheet,” Deirdre said, awestruck.

“With tentacles,” Dorn added.

As they watched, the flat undulating creature moved closer. It seemed to slither through the water, its tentacles wavering as it moved. Deirdre thought it looked monstrous, horrible. It made her blood run cold.

Suddenly one of its tentacles shot out and seized one of the fat, slow-moving fish. Before Deirdre could even gasp it pulled the fish in and shoved it, still wriggling and struggling, into a round mouth on its underside. Deirdre saw that the mouth was ringed with flashing teeth. The fish disappeared into that maw.

“It’s a predator!” Corvus said, sounding surprised. “We didn’t know there were predators at this level. Nobody ever saw one of those before.”

“A discovery,” Dorn said evenly.

Yeager glided up beside Corvus. “The bio guys thought all the critters at this level lived off the manna.”

“That’s what they told us at the briefings,” Deirdre recalled.

“Well, they were wrong, weren’t they,” said Corvus.

“That’s what science is all about,” Yeager said, a little pompously. “Busting up somebody’s pet theory.”

Dorn tapped the time line display with a prosthetic finger. “Time for Dee and Andy to take their rest period.”

Deirdre felt surprised. Six hours already? We’ve been in the ocean six hours?

Yeager turned to her with his old leering smile. “You need somebody to tuck you in, honey?”

“No thank you, Max,” Deirdre replied sweetly. “I can do it myself. I’m a big girl.”

“In all the right places,” Yeager retorted.

With Corvus trailing behind her, Deirdre swam to the narrow hatch that led to the bunks. She pulled out a fresh set of tights from the storage drawer beneath her coffin-sized bunk, then ducked into the lavatory briefly. The toilet had been adapted from zero-gravity systems developed for spacecraft: It clamped Deirdre’s bottom firmly. She wondered what would happen if she couldn’t pull free of it once she was finished.

But the collar unclamped easily enough. Deirdre stood up and changed into the fresh tights, then pushed through the doorway to the cramped space where the bunks were stacked, three on one side, two on the other. They were little more than long narrow shelves. While Corvus ducked into the lavatory Deirdre grasped the handbar atop the opening to her bunk and slid her body in.

She thought she’d be too tense to sleep, but her eyes closed as soon as she lay her head down. She dreamed of that slithering, devouring monster seizing her in its tentacles and pulling her toward its slashing teeth. But at the last moment of her dream the monster suddenly was Andy Corvus, and he was holding her tenderly in his arms.

RESEARCH STATION GOLD

Grant Archer came back to the control center and walked down its central aisle to stand behind the mission control chief as the screens on her console suddenly went blank, every one of them. Looking around, he saw that all the other consoles had gone dark, as well, together with the big wall screens.

Linda Vishnevskaya half turned in her chair and looked up at Archer. “That’s it,” she said. “They’re out of contact now. They’re into the sea.”

Archer nodded. “They’re on their own.”

Vishnevskaya got slowly, tiredly to her feet. Her tousled blond curls barely reached Archer’s shoulder. “On their own,” she murmured.

The other controllers were getting up from their consoles, stretching, working out the kinks in their bodies after sitting at their posts for so long. The whole mission control center seemed quiet, subdued, as if something had gone wrong.

“You’ll maintain a skeleton crew here, just in case?” Archer asked the chief controller.

She nodded. “One person. That’s enough to notify me and get everyone back here if something unexpected happens.”

“And if all goes as planned?” he prompted.

“Then we’ll hear from them in exactly one hundred and fourteen hours,” Vishnevskaya said, with a weary smile. “Of course, they will be sending up data capsules on schedule.”

“Good,” said Archer. He slowly climbed the stairs to the top level of the control center, where Katherine Westfall sat in one of the spectator’s seats, flanked on either side by a pair of blank-faced young men in dark tunics and slacks.

Trying to sound cheerful, Archer said to her, “They’re in the ocean, right on schedule. For the next five days they’ll be out of contact with us.”

Westfall stood up, and her two aides rose like automatons beside her. In her deceptively soft voice she said, “If something should happen while they’re in the ocean…” She left the rest unsaid.

Archer thought she looked almost … expectant. As if she wants something to go wrong. But he told himself he was being paranoid. Why would she want them to have trouble down there?

Linda Vishnevskaya left the control center reluctantly. She couldn’t overcome the feeling that nothing bad would happen to the mission as long as she stayed at her post. She knew it was stupid. Sheer emotion. Still she lingered, climbing the steps toward the exit as slowly as a child heading for a dentist’s chair.

Max, she thought. I know you have children my age and you don’t even know I exist except as a fellow technician. But I love you, Max. Come back to me. Don’t get yourself killed down there.