LEVIATHAN
The urge to dissociate was growing stronger. Leviathan swam upward toward the cooler waters above, hoping that the darters would be less likely to seek their prey there. Its sensor parts could not detect darters within their range of observation, but Leviathan knew how swiftly the predators could swarm in and overwhelm a lone member of the Kin, especially when it was in the process of dissociating.
Already some of the flagella members were shuddering with the desire to split away and begin budding.
Not yet, Leviathan insisted. Not yet. Be faithful. The time is coming but it’s not yet here.
Leviathan had purposely steered away from the current of downfalling food, reasoning that the darters would lurk near it in hopes of trapping a solitary member of the Kin. There is safety in doing the unexpected, Leviathan thought.
Hunger gnawed dully in Leviathan’s inner organ parts. Even the sensor parts and faithful dull-witted flagella began to send hunger signals to Leviathan’s central brain.
Wait, Leviathan told its members. Better to be hungry than to be eaten by darters.
The water was cooler at this level, which made the hunger pangs all the more insistent. No darters in range, the sensor parts reported. Leviathan could feel the trembling urge to dissociate growing stronger, stronger, rising toward an irresistible convulsion. In a few more moments the craving would be unstoppable and Leviathan would begin to disconnect into its separate components.
One of the flagella members detached from Leviathan’s body, shuddering uncontrollably as it drifted away. Still no darters within sight, the sensor parts reported.
But wait! Something was moving out in the cold darkness, coming closer. Leviathan desperately commanded its member parts to resist the craving to dissociate. Its brain studied the image the sensor parts were observing.
Not darters. Something strange. Almost as large as a full-grown darter, but misshapen, round, spherical, cold, and hard-shelled.
Something alien.
“Something’s out there,” Dorn muttered as he stared at the central display on his console.
Corvus floated to his side and peered at the screen. “I don’t see anything.”
Deirdre and Yeager came up, too, floating high enough in the perfluorocarbon liquid so they could look over the shoulders of the two men.
Dorn said, “Pressure sensors are showing that something is moving out there, sending an irregular pattern of waves through the ocean.”
“Fish?” Yeager suggested.
“Switching to active sonar,” said Dorn.
“Seventy-three kilometers away,” Dorn muttered.
Corvus nodded. “At that distance the thing must be at least ten klicks across.”
“We got one!” Yeager hooted.
A leviathan, Deirdre realized, peering more intently at the screen. The image was gray and grainy but she could make out the beast’s streamlined shape, studded with what looked to her like little pods. No, she remembered from her earlier briefings, those are fins, hundreds of fins that propel the animal through the water.
Yeager asked, “Any of those shark things around?”
“None in sight,” Dorn replied.
“So far, so good,” the engineer muttered.
“We’ve got to get closer,” Corvus said. “Closer.”
Without glancing away from the screens, Dorn said, “Slowly. We’ll approach slowly. We don’t want to alarm the creature.”
Alarm it? Deirdre asked silently. How could we frighten something that big? That powerful. We’re like a little child’s toy compared to it.
Then Corvus said, “Hey! It’s coming apart!”
Katherine Westfall stood alone in the observation deck staring out at the hard, unblinking myriads of stars blazing their light against the infinite blackness of the universe. Like people, she thought. We each shine with our own light, struggling against the darkness of inevitable death.
But is death truly inevitable? With rejuvenation therapies one can live for hundreds of years, she told herself. And in another century or two we’ll know even more and be able to extend our lifespans even further. Death needn’t be inevitable, not if you have access to the latest medical techniques.
And to have access to the latest medical techniques you need money, Westfall reminded herself. Money and power. She thought back to her childhood, when she had neither. To her mother drudging away in restaurant kitchens night after night, year after year, coming home exhausted, throwing herself on her bed only to get up again the next day and go back to work.
For what? For me, Mother always said. So that I could have a better life. Yes, I found a better life. I married it. I saw my chance and I took it. I’ll never be poor again, never be powerless, never have to worry that if I don’t please this one or that one I’ll be thrown out into the street.
She remembered her mother’s death, wretched and shriveled from the tumors that fed on her body. The best medical care in the world couldn’t save Mother. All they could do was to ease her pain at the end. And Elaine, the sister she never knew, the scientists couldn’t save her. They killed her, really. If it wasn’t for men like Grant Archer and that Muzorewa person, my sister would still be alive today.
The stars were slowly moving across the glassteel window of the observation deck. Westfall smiled inwardly as she imagined herself the center of the universe, with all the stars of heaven revolving around her. A pleasant thought, she felt. That’s the kind of power that could keep you safe forever.
And then the stars began to dim as Jupiter’s mighty radiance flooded the observation deck. Even before the body of the massive planet swung into view, its powerful glow dimmed the stars themselves. Westfall felt the warmth of that glow touching her cheek, making her suddenly nervous, frightened.
Stand your ground, she told herself. Face your fears.
Jupiter rose from beneath her feet, a mammoth overwhelming presence, a true god, streaked with whirling, racing clouds, dotted with storms, powerful and all-engulfing.
Katherine felt the terror she’d known when strange men would come home with her mother, laughing powerful men who patted her on the head and shooed her off to her own corner of the room.
She hated those men. And she hated her mother for needing them. I don’t need anyone, she told herself. I destroy anyone who stands between me and safety. I’ll destroy Archer. He’ll never become chairman of the IAA. I will.
Face your fears, she said to herself as she squared her shoulders and stared into Jupiter’s swirling, seething clouds. You think you can conquer me? Giant planet, king of the gods, you’re nothing but a tool for me to use. I’m not frightened of you. I’m not. I’m not.
She laughed aloud at the sight of mighty Jupiter. Archer’s destruction will begin down there, Katherine Westfall told herself, with the destruction of that ship he sent into those clouds, with the death of the people he sent into that ocean.
