Jupiter

The thrusters blazed to life. Grant felt their strength surging through him like a tidal wave smashing down seawalls, trees, buildings, leveling hills, tearing away everything in its path. He gritted his teeth, fighting with every atom of his willpower against giving way to it. He was strong! So powerful that he could tear the ship apart with his bare hands. Eyes squeezed shut, he could see the blazing plasma hurtling from the thrusters, feel the energy streaming from the fusion generator as if it were his own arms, his own muscles driving the ship deep into the clouds of Jupiter, down into the unknown, beyond the reach of help or the understanding of the pitiful frail twolegged apes clinging to their cockleshell station in orbit around Jupiter.

Outside, wind began to howl and shriek, as if protesting their entry into the atmosphere. Grant laughed inwardly. Come on, do your damnedest! he challenged Jupiter. The power of the ship’s thrusters was his own might, his own body standing against the fury of this alien world’s resistance. The ship staggered and bucked but it kept on its course, driving steadily deeper into the wild tangle of clouds. Grant felt like a pitiless conqueror forcing himself into a violently struggling woman. He was raping Jupiter, and no matter how the planet resisted he was too powerful, too ruthless, too driven to show mercy or restraint.

Abruptly the thrusters shut off. Grant felt it like a blow to his groin. He gasped, almost retched. For an endless moment he stood swaying in his foot straps, arms floating before him, hands clenched into fists. He was aghast at his own thoughts, his own emotions. Guilt, shame, terror at the primitive savagery buried within him racked his soul. He could hear the wind shrieking louder as the ship’s furious, howling plunge through the deep Jovian atmosphere continued. He could feel the ship’s outer skin glowing with the white heat of friction.

They were falling through the deep atmosphere now, dragged down by Jupiter’s powerful gravity, no longer conquerors but humble servants obedient to the planet’s massive pull.

Forcing his eyes open, Grant looked across at the screens of Muzorawa’s sensor console and saw that they were plunging through a maelstrom of swirling clouds. Zeb himself stood transfixed before the screens, eyes staring, fists clenched at his sides, body rigid.

Tentatively, furtively, without orders, he again linked with Zeb’s sensors and suddenly felt the blazing heat of their hypersonic entry into those thick, turbulent clouds. The ship was shuddering now, bucking like a pumpkinseed in a hurricane as it plunged deeper into the Jovian atmosphere, turning the tortured clouds around it into white-hot plasma, a howling, shrieking sheath of burning gases surrounding them, trailing back in their wake like the long glowing tail of a falling star.

Grant wanted to shout defiance at the burning gases that sheathed the ship. You can’t hurt us! he snarled silently. You can’t do anything except what we want you to do, he told the giant planet. We’re using you, using your thick blanket of atmosphere to slow us down enough to enter your sea and learn your secrets.

Jupiter thought otherwise. The ship lurched, plunged, slewed sidewise as a tremendous jet stream buffeted it. Grant swayed, tottered, his stomach going hollow within him. He would have sailed across the bridge if he hadn’t been anchored by the floor loops. As it was, he had to brace his hands against the console to prevent himself from being slammed into it.

The ship slowed. Grant recovered his balance, glanced around, and saw that no one had noticed his near frenzy. Or if they had, they paid no attention to it. Zeb, Lane, Egon—all locked in their own private universes, all feeling, hearing, seeing, even tasting the sensations from the ship’s sensors and systems. Grant had tasted raw, primal power, and now he felt empty in its absence, deprived, sullenly angry. And afraid.

“Approaching the bottom of the cloud deck.” Krebs’s voice sounded alien, distant, a disturbance in Grant’s universe of power and strength, like an alarm clock’s buzzing interference in a warm, exciting dream.

The thrill of the thrusters’ surge was gone, but the fusion generator still sang its beguiling song of power, whispering to Grant of universes beyond the beyond, worlds to discover and conquer.

“Look at that!”

Grant could not tell who said it, but the words stirred him out of his nearly hypnotic trance.

“Put it on the main screen.” That was Krebs’s voice, definitely. Even in the eerie distortions of this liquid gunk in which they lived, her thick harsh tone was unmistakable.

The wallscreen above their consoles showed a wild cloudscape, as far as the scanners could see, a vast panorama of billowing clouds scudding along on powerful streams of wind that tattered and shredded them even as the alien invaders from Earth watched, wide-eyed. Clouds boiled up from far below, only to have their tops sheared off by the furious wind. High above it all, the sky was covered with its eternal cloak of colorful clouds, stretched across the world like a blanket, the colors of its underside strangely muted, pastel.

The hydrogen-helium atmosphere was as transparent as … Grant almost giggled as he realized it was as transparent as air. It was thickly dotted with those fat billowing clouds scudding madly along, almost like fluffy cumulus of a tropical sky on Earth.

Far below was nothing but haze. Grant remembered that Jupiter’s atmosphere gradually thickened until it became liquid, with no clear demarkation between air and sea. Somewhere down there the inexorable pressure thickened the atmosphere until it liquefied into a world-girdling ocean, its water corrosively acidic, heavily laced with ammonia and exotic compounds.

Not like Earth, Grant said to himself. Not at all like Earth, where the oceans fill basins in the rocky crust and the gravity’s too light to squeeze the air into liquid. Not like Mars or Venus or even the Galilean moons, not like any of those balls of rock or ice. This is an alien world, different, totally different from anything we’ve ever seen before.

Zheng He was shuddering now, bucking in the jetstream winds. Grant pictured the ship as a tiny sliver of a discus being tossed and tumbled by the ferocious currents of wind streaking across the face of Jupiter’s all-encompassing ocean.

“Long-range sensors,” Krebs ordered.

The wallscreen view abruptly shifted. Far off on the distant horizon Grant saw a dark, ominous tower of clouds flickering with lightning bolts, climbing like a wrathful giant out of the ocean and rising to the cloud deck high above.

“That’s the Great Red Spot,” said Karlstad, his voice hollow with awe.

Krebs ordered, “Thrusters on. Minimum cruise power.”

The ship had been coasting since they had entered the clouds, using Jupiter’s thick atmosphere to slow them from orbital speed, turning velocity into heat as they rode through the thick cloud deck and down into the clear hydrogen-helium atmosphere, gliding across the skies of Jupiter.

“Thrusters on, I said!” Krebs growled.

Grant blinked and activated the thrusters with a thought. For good measure he pressed a fingertip against the touchpad on his console.

This is dangerous, he realized, an awful lot of temptation to put into the hands of mortals. Feeling the surge of power building within his own senses, Grant told himself, I can control the engines with a thought. I can destroy us all with a foolish impulse.

DEFIANCE

Deeper and deeper into the Jovian atmosphere they plunged, farther into the all-encompassing haze that gradually thickened into the global sea.

Still feeling the thrumming power of the ship’s generator, the muted thunder of the thrusters, Grant strained his eyes to pierce through the darkening haze that the wallscreen showed. There was nothing to see; not even the infrared sensors detected anything in the fog, yet still Grant stared hard at the screen. Partly he focused his attention there because it helped to keep him from falling completely under the hypnotic spell of the enhanced sensory systems in his implanted biochips. Like his father’s advice about impure thoughts, when he’d been a preteen first awakening to the seductions of the body: “Think about something else, son. Don’t dwell on the temptation.”

Grant stared into the emptiness and tried to ignore the deep, unbidden, relentless urge to power up the thrusters and dive the ship straight down into the ocean that waited for them deep below.

Where are the Jovian life-forms? he asked himself. Where are the medusas and those soarbirds that the