Leviathans of Jupiter

your own brain?”

“Doesn’t have to be implanted,” Corvus said. Tapping his temple, he explained, “You just fit the sensors on your head, like a crown.”

“But how will you fit the sensors on the leviathans?” she asked.

Corvus’s enthusiasm wavered the slightest bit. “Well, we’ll have to get close enough to one of ’em so we can attach a sensor rig to its hide.”

“Like harpooning a whale?”

“Sort of.”

“Shades of Moby Dick,” Dorn muttered.

“And you intend to go down into the ocean and do this yourself?” Deirdre asked.

Corvus nodded. “Yep. Sure do.”

The three of them looked at each other, none of them knowing what to say next.

“DINNER IS SERVED IN THE MAIN DINING ROOM,” announced the ship’s intercom through the speakers set into the lounge’s overhead.

MAIN LOUNGE

“Dinner!” Corvus fairly leaped to his feet. “Let’s go. I’m starving.”

Deirdre felt relieved as she pushed her chair away from the cocktail table. She felt uncomfortable about Andy’s blithe willingness to immerse himself in the dark depths of the Jovian ocean and connect his brain to an optronic stimulator system. And my other companion is a cyborg, she said to herself. I sure can pick ’em.

Dorn got to his feet too and the three of them joined the others heading for the dining room.

Before they went a dozen steps, though, a burly, shaggy man in a tan one-piece coverall strode up to them and took Deirdre’s wrist in his thick-fingered hand.

“You’ve got to be the most beautiful woman aboard this ship,” he said, staring at her with unabashed admiration. “No, I take it back. You’re the most beautiful woman this side of Earth.”

“Thank you,” Deirdre said, deftly removing his hand from her wrist.

“I’m G. Maxwell Yeager. Don’t ask what the G stands for. I’m your dinner partner.”

G. Maxwell Yeager was almost as tall as the lanky Corvus and almost as wide across the shoulders as the cyborg Dorn. His face was stubbled with the beginnings of a dirty-brown beard and his hair, also sandy-colored, was a smoothly brushed mane that fell past his shoulders. He wore a rumpled khaki jumpsuit and an incongruous pair of shiny black cowboy boots, into which he had stuffed the legs of his coveralls.

He appraised Deirdre with a look that was halfway between sheer admiration and a blatant leer.

Reaching for her wrist again, he said, “Come on, let’s go to dinner.”

Deirdre backed away a step and Dorn moved between them, grasping Yeager’s extended arm with his prosthetic hand. “The lady is with us,” he said.

Yeager stared at the cyborg for a moment, then shrugged nonchalantly and said, “Okay, okay. In that case, I’ll join you.”

With Dorn on one side of her and Andy Corvus on the other, Deirdre left the lounge and entered the adjacent dining room. Shaggy-haired Yeager kept in step with them, on Dorn’s other side.

“Hey, Max,” a younger coverall-clad man called to him. “I thought you were gonna eat with us.”

Yeager waved at him dismissively. “I found somebody better-looking than you ugly mugs.”

Deirdre saw that the younger man was part of the raucous group that had been sitting together in the lounge.

“Scoopship team,” Yeager explained to her. “Engineers. You know what they say about engineers: so narrow-minded they can look through a keyhole with both eyes.”

Andy giggled. Dorn remained impassive. Deirdre wondered why Yeager made fun of engineers.

“I’ve heard about you,” Yeager said to the cyborg. “You’re a priest or something, aren’t you?”

“Or something,” Dorn muttered.

Deirdre felt Dorn’s reticence like a palpable force. She said to Yeager, “And what’s your reason for going to Jupiter, Mr. Yeager?”

“It’s Doctor Yeager,” he replied, drawing himself up haughtily. “Doctor of engineering physics, University of Arizona.” Then he grinned at her. “But you can call me Max.”

“Hi, Max,” Corvus said good-naturedly from Deirdre’s other side. “I’m Andy.”

Yeager hadn’t taken his eyes off Deirdre. “And pray tell, fair one, what might your name be?”

With some reluctance, she told him, “Deirdre. Deirdre Ambrose.”

“Deirdre,” Yeager echoed. “That’s an Irish name. It means ‘passionate,’ doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Deirdre lied.

The dining room was just as sumptuously decorated as the lounge, and it was filling up rapidly. Yeager spotted a table for six halfway across the big chamber and led the others to it. He moved around the table to sit beside Deirdre, then tipped the chair on his other side to lean against the table.

“Put up the chair beside you, Andy,” he said to Corvus as they all sat down.

Blinking in puzzlement, Corvus asked, “Why?”

“They’ll think we’re saving the seats for another couple of people,” Yeager explained. “That way we can just be the four of us without any strangers butting in.”

“But we’re all strangers,” Corvus blurted. “I mean, we just met a few minutes ago.”

Yeager waved him down. “Nah, we’re old buddies. Shipmates.”

He dominated their conversation all through dinner, talking almost exclusively about himself.

“So I tackled the challenge. Me and my grad students. That’s three of them over at the table across the room, with the scoopship team. We designed a submersible vehicle that can carry a maximum of six human crew a thousand kilometers deep into the Jovian ocean and allow them to cruise down there for at least five days.”

“A considerable engineering challenge,” Dorn admitted, as he carefully brought a forkful of hydroponic greens to the human side of his mouth.

Yeager agreed cheerfully. “There’ve been two human missions into that ocean and both ended in disaster. Casualties. People got killed.”

“The pressure down that deep must be incredible,” Corvus mused.

“It is, and then some,” Yeager said. “Some of the uncrewed probes have been crushed. I mean, it’s tough down there.”

Deirdre listened with half an ear as Yeager nattered on. She wondered about Dorn. He was a priest? That was weird. He wasn’t wearing anything that looked clerical: just plain gray coveralls. The left side of his face was etched metal, as was the top of his head. His left arm was prosthetic. A priest? she wondered. He said the scientists wanted to see if he could handle the pressures of a deep dive better than a normal human. That means they’re planning a crewed mission into the ocean. After nearly twenty years. After killing people both times they tried it before.

“So I completed the design and my people have built the dingus out at Jupiter orbit,” Yeager was saying. “Now I’m heading out to the Gold station to supervise the final checkout before we start testing the beast.”

Andy Corvus looked impressed. “A submersible that can carry humans safely deep down into that ocean.”

Yeager mopped up the sauce on his plate with a crust of soybread. “It was a tough design challenge, let me tell you.”

No one responded to that, so he went on, holding the dripping crust in two fingers, “The secret is, you’ve got to make the beast big. I mean big. Big as the research station, almost. The problem with those earlier birds is they made ’em too small.”

“As big as Gold itself?” Dorn asked, intrigued despite himself.

Yeager nodded as he popped the bread in his mouth and chewed vigorously.

“That big, just to hold six people?” Corvus asked.