thrill he’d felt the first time he’d skied down an expert slope in the snowy Wasach Mountains. Breathless. Exhilarating.
Until Krebs growled, “Wipe that stupid smile off your face, Archer, and get back to reality.”
It took an effort of will, but Grant did it.
Hours passed. The ship still dove toward the sea. Krebs put different camera views from the sensors onto the big wallscreen, but they showed nothing but blank, featureless mist, all gray, colorless. To Grant it looked empty and dead.
Until Muzorawa shouted, “Look at that!”
“What?”
“Let me increase the magnification,” Zeb mumbled, his fingers working the console. “There. See?”
“Snow!” Grant said. Soft white flakes were sifting through the haze. It looked beautiful. Something like Earth, like home, on this distant alien world.
“Not snow,” Karlstad said. “Organics. They form in the clouds and precipitate out.”
“Manna from heaven,” said O’Hara.
“Food,” Karlstad corrected.
Muzorawa chuckled. “It is only food, my friend, if there are creatures in the sea to eat it. Otherwise it is merely organic snow.”
Grant thought of the distant, shadowy shapes that Dr. Wo had shown him from the record of the first mission. Life-forms? As big as whole cities? Dozens of kilometers across? It seemed impossible.
“Karlstad and Archer, rest period,” said Krebs. “Disconnect, take a meal, and sleep for four hours.”
Grant had to consciously force his hand to switch off the linkage. Suddenly he was no longer connected to the ship, he was alone again inside his own flesh.
Feeling naked, vulnerable, he pulled the optical fibers from the chips in his legs and stowed them away, then floated off toward the nutrient dispenser.
Egon was already plugging the dispenser tube into the port in his neck. “The soup line,” he said as he turned on the dispenser’s pump.
Grant hooked up, too. There was no satisfaction in eating this way. He never seemed to feel hungry, probably because the perfluorocarbon liquid kept his stomach filled. But there was no pleasure in eating, either. No taste, no aroma.
Karlstad broke into his thoughts. Leaning his head so close it almost touched Grant’s, he whispered, “Did you notice the way she couldn’t find you?”
“What?”
“When you were supposed to launch the data capsule. You were right in front of her, no more than three meters away, and she couldn’t see you.”
Remembering, Grant said, “Yeah, that was spooky.”
“She damned near panicked.”
Glancing over his shoulder to make certain Krebs wasn’t watching them, Grant whispered, “She has a funny way of looking at me.”
“At all of us.”
“What do you think it is?”
“Temporary spells of blindness, maybe.”
“She’s blind?”
“Maybe. In flashes. Her vision blanks out for a moment or two.”
“Is that possible?”
Karlstad made a barely discernible shrug. “I don’t know. I’ll see if I can find anything in the ship’s medical library.”
“Could the implants be affecting her vision?”
“Could be. What’s worse, though, is her defying Old Woeful’s abort order.”
The dispenser bell clunked. Karlstad yanked the feeding tube from his neck like a man pulling a leech off him.
Grant said, “I’m with her on that. We shouldn’t scrap this mission just because some IAA committee says so.”
Karlstad’s brows rose. “You? The True Believer? Now you’re ready to commit heresy?”
“It’s got nothing to do with religion!”
“The hell it doesn’t. Those IAA inspectors are probably all your New Morality people, or the equivalent.”
“No matter what they want, I want to go on with the mission,” Grant insisted. “Don’t you?”
“Certainly. But what happens when we get back to the station? How do you think those inspectors are going to treat us? Refusal to obey orders is called mutiny, you know.”
Grant’s jaw dropped open. Mutiny?
The timer bell went off.
“Stop your muttering,” Krebs called to them. “Get to sleep, both of you.”
Grant disconnected the feeder tube, his mind churning. Mutiny? Are we going to be treated as mutineers when we get back?
STORM TOSSED
Grant slept fitfully, dreaming that some giant hand was shaking him, pummeling him mercilessly. He snapped awake and found that it was no dream. The ship was shuddering, lurching, as if caught in the jaws of some vicious terrier and being shaken to death.
He banged his shoulder as he slid out of the berth, barked his shin when he got to his feet. There shouldn’t be this much turbulence so deep in the atmosphere, he told himself. Maybe we’re in the ocean now! This could be turbulent currents of liquid water. He wished that he’d been allowed to carry out his fluid dynamic mapping more completely. The truth was that neither he nor anyone else in the solar system had any except the vaguest of ideas of how Jupiter behaved at this depth, where the atmosphere imperceptibly merged into the ocean.
Grant staggered through the hatch that connected to the bridge. He knew that
If we’re banging around this hard here inside the core of the ship, Grant thought as he staggered to his console, we must be caught in the mother of all storms outside.
The Great Red Spot! Lord have mercy, Grant thought, are we tangling the Great Red Spot? He got a vision of the ship being sucked into the maw of the overpowering superstorm, pulled in and crushed like a tiny fragile leaf.
“What are you doing?” Krebs snapped at him as Grant started to connect with the ship.
“Linking up, Captain,” he replied.
“Mr. Archer, did I order you to cut your rest period short?”
“No, ma’am, but with the storm—”
“You are supposed to be resting.”
“But I thought—”
“Follow orders, Mr. Archer. I am quite capable of handling the ship without your help.”
Grant hovered before his console, three optical fibers connected to his implants, the other threads bobbing in the liquid. Muzorawa and O’Hara were at their stations, fully linked. Zeb glanced down at him and smiled gently. Lane was concentrating on her console, fingers playing rapidly, smoothly across the keyboard.
“Return to your berth, Archer,” Krebs commanded. “When I need your help I will call you.”
Shamefaced, Grant disconnected and swam the few meters to the hatch. The ship lurched violently again and he had to grab the hatch to keep from rolling into Krebs, who was floating in the middle of the bridge. He looked over his shoulder at the captain and saw that she was smiling. Smiling! She was enjoying the turbulence.
