Jupiter

time it was a glancing blow. Still, it set the ship spinning.

“I don’t know how long the thrusters can maintain full power,” Grant yelled.

“We have to get away from them,” Karlstad shouted back.

Krebs shook her head. “They’re faster than we are. They’re racing ahead of us.”

“If only we had a weapon,” Karlstad muttered, “something to defend ourselves with.”

Grant heard himself say, “What about the plasma exhaust?”

“What?”

“The exhaust from the thrusters. It’s over ten thousand degrees when it leaves the nozzles. It boils the water behind us. They mustn’t like that.”

Krebs seemed to think it over for a moment. “If they stayed behind us…”

“They’re not,” Karlstad said, his closed eyes seeing what the ship’s sensors showed. “They’re forming up in front of us again.”

“We’re moving at top speed and they race past us,” said Krebs, sounding defeated.

“They’re too fucking stupid to realize we’re not food,” Karlstad grumbled.

“By the time they discover that fact, we will be dead.”

Grant said, “Can’t we spin the ship? Or turn in a tight circle? Spray our exhaust in all directions?”

“What good would that do?”

“It might discourage them.”

Karlstad laughed bitterly. “Brilliant! You want to circle the wagons when we only have one wagon. Absolutely brilliant.”

“It’s worth a try,” Grant urged.

“We have nothing else,” said Krebs. “We have nothing to lose.”

With the power back on, Grant grabbed for the loose optical fibers and slapped them onto the chips in his legs. Pain! Sharp, hard needles of pain jabbed at him. The thrusters were running full-out but they were damaged, their tubes dented from the battering by the sharks.

At least the sharks were not attacking now. Krebs was turning the sub in tight circles, spinning a helix of superheated steam around them, keeping the predators at bay.

For how long? Grant asked himself. He knew the answer: Until the thrusters give out. Then it won’t matter if they renew their attacks or not; it won’t matter if they think we’re food or not. We’ll be dead, drifting in this alien ocean, without the power to climb back to the surface and leave. We’ll sink until this eggshell is crushed by the pressure. We’ll die here.

LEVIATHAN

Leviathan could scarcely believe what its sensing members were telling it. The Darters had broken off their pursuit to chase—Leviathan did not know what to call the tiny round, flat thing that had caught the Darters’ hungry attention. It was unlike anything the Kin had seen before, except for the tale that had been flashed among them about a strange cold alien that had appeared briefly and then vanished into the abyss above.

Leviathan remembered sensing something like this stranger, when it had been in the barren cold region on the other side of the eternal storm. It was not one of the Kin, not even a member unit that had broken away to bud.

Whatever it was, the Darters were swarming around it and the stranger—whatever it was—was spinning madly, squirting hot jets of steam that boiled the sea into wild bubbling froth.

Where are the Kin? Leviathan wondered. How far from here could they be? Leviathan considered calling to them but feared that its distress signal would rekindle the Darters’ attention.

The Darters had forgotten about Leviathan in their blind hunger for this small, almost defenseless creature. The stranger was giving Leviathan a chance to race away, unnoticed by the instinct-driven Darters.

That would mean leaving the stranger to the predators. It did not seem able to get away from them. Every time it tried to climb higher, to head back toward the cold abyss above, the Darters drove it back down again. One of them came close to the hot steam and twisted away in agony, howling so loudly that Leviathan’s sound sensors shut down for several moments. Two of the Darters immediately attacked their wounded companion, silencing it forever with a few voracious bites.

But the others kept circling the stranger, holding it at bay, waiting for it to exhaust itself.

TRAPPED

“You’ve got to get higher!” Karlstad demanded, his voice almost a hysterical shriek. “We’ve got to get away from them!”

Krebs shot him a venomous glance. “Every time I try to lift, they swarm above me and batter us down again.”

“We can’t take much more pounding,” Karlstad said. “Hull integrity…”

Grant was awash with pain. His console lights were flickering from amber to red. The thrusters were close to failure and there was nothing he could do about it.

Krebs seemed to be fully aware of the situation. Grimly she muttered, “Full thruster power. We break loose from them or we die here and now.”

Vision blurring, his whole body spasming with agony, Grant felt the thrusters strain as he diverted all available power to them. The lights went out again as the bridge tilted dizzily, the emergency lamps glowed feebly. Grant reached for the handgrips on his console.

“Look out!” Karlstad screamed.

Something hit the ship with the power of an avalanche. If Grant hadn’t been hanging on he would have been flung across the bridge again. Krebs went sailing, banged against the food dispenser with a solid, sickening thud of flesh against metal. Karlstad was holding on to both his console’s handgrips, his feet torn free of the floor loops and flailing wildly.

“We’re sinking!” Karlstad yelled. “Hull’s been breached!”

Grant saw that Krebs was unconscious. Or dead. An ugly gash across her forehead was streaming a fog of blood into the fluid they were breathing. The optical fibers had been torn loose from her legs.

“What can we do?” Karlstad screeched. “What can we do?”

Grant tried to ignore his pain as he tapped at his console’s touchscreens, calling up all the ship’s systems. The sudden rush of information boggled his mind and body. Everything—every chip, every wire, every square centimeter of structure, all the sensors, the ship’s steering controls, the thrusters, the power generator, the auxiliaries, all the life-support systems, the medical monitors, the lights, the wiring, the welds along the hull—every molecule of the ship, every bit of data flowing through all its systems, all flooded in on Grant like a huge overpowering tidal wave. He was flung into a maelstrom, mind spinning madly as he desperately tried to cling to some vestige of himself, some trace of his own soul in this deluge of sensations, some thread of control.

He could no longer feel his own body. That reality had been flung aside, left far behind in this new reality of —power. That’s what it is, Grant told himself. Power. I am the ship. I have all its power, all its pain, all its destiny within me.

Godlike, he expanded his senses. He saw, sensed, felt every part of the ship. The crack in the outermost hull was like the sharp slash of a knife wound; the labored straining of the thrusters like the excruciating knotting of cramped, overworked muscles.

Zheng He was losing buoyancy, maintaining its position only by dint of the thrusters’ full-throated push against the ever-present power of Jupiter’s pervasive gravity.

And he saw the sharklike creatures, more than a dozen of them, swarming above and on both sides of the slowly sinking submersible.

Karlstad was babbling, but it was a faint jabbering noise far in the background of Grant’s consciousness. I