Jupiter (33 page)

But they would not engage the linkage unless Krebs gave the command, and she was still asleep, floating behind the four of them.

'Well, at least we knows she sleeps,' Karlstad stage-whispered.

'That's good,' O'Hara whispered back. 'Everyone needs to sleep sometime.'

'You are eager to work,' Krebs' cold, hard voice slashed at them. 'Good.'

Karlstad rolled his eyes toward heaven.

'Connect your linkages,' Krebs commanded.

Grant linked up smoothly this time, actually finishing before Karlstad. He felt a glow of anticipation warming him, saw that O'Hara looked the same way.

'Engage linkage,' said Krebs.

Again, Grant felt the power of the fusion generator surging through him, felt the music of electrical currents racing through every section of the ship. The thrusters, he begged silently. Ignite the thrusters.

Instead, Krebs patiently checked through the navigation system, waiting to reach the precise point in their orbit around Jupiter's massive bulk where they were to insert the ship into its de-orbit burn and plunge toward the multi-hued Jovian clouds.

'Approaching the keyhole,' Muzorawa called out.

Without asking permission, Grant closed his eyes and linked momentarily to Zeb's sensors and saw what they were showing: the racing clouds of Jupiter, streaming madly as the planet's tremendous spin whirled them into long ribbons of ocher, pale blue and russet brown. Lightning flickered through the clouds, crackles of vast electrical energy. He felt the heat radiating up from those clouds, he heard the eternal wailing of winds that dwarfed the wildest hurricanes of Earth.

And he realized that there was a storm, a vast swirling whirlpool of dazzling white clouds, screaming its fury in the area where they had expected to make their entry into the cloud deck.

'The entry area's covered with a cyclonic system,' Muzorawa said tightly.

Grant opened his eyes. Zeb's face was set in an expressionless mask. Turning, he saw that O'Hara and Karlstad both looked concerned.

Krebs made a sound that might have been a grunt. Or a suppressed growl. 'Very well. We'll go on to the alternate injection point.'

Grant glanced up at the main wallscreen display. It showed their orbital path against the swirling clouds. The alternate entry position was a quarter-orbit away. Closer to the Red Spot, Grant saw. Not close enough to be dangerous, he knew. Still, getting closer to that titanic storm was unsettling.

No one spoke for the forty-nine minutes it took to reach the alternate insertion point. Grant occupied himself by concentrating on the fusion generator; it was like standing by a warming, crackling fireplace on a cold winter's day. Soon we'll be in the clouds, he told himself. And then the ocean. That's when we'll see how accurate my mapping of the currents has been. 'Automated countdown,' Krebs called out at last. Grant unconsciously licked his lips as the countdown timer began clicking off the seconds. The taste in his mouth was odd, not unpleasant, but the perfluorocarbon liquid was unlike anything his taste buds had encountered in the past. He had no memory references for it, down at the cellular level where instinct lived.

'Retro burn in ten seconds,' the computer's synthesized voice called out. Despite himself, Grant trembled inwardly with the anticipation of the thrusters' power.

The thrusters blazed to life. Grant felt their strength surging through him like a tidal wave smashing down seawalls, trees, buildings, levelling 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, two-legged apes clinging to the 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, he 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' 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' 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 cloud-scape, 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 multi-hued 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 demarcation between air and sea. Somewhere down there the inexorable pressure thickened the atmosphere until it became liquid, 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-girdling 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 like a discus hurled 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.

Deeper and deeper into the Jovian atmosphere they plunged, further 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 probes found? And the algal colonies that float in the clouds? The sky here looks empty, barren.

He realized that none of the others had spoken more than a few words since they'd linked with the ship's systems. It's working on them, too, Grant told himself. They're just as absorbed by this electronic seduction as I am. Just because they've had more experience with it doesn't mean it's any easier for them to handle it.

'I thought we'd see airborne organisms,' he said aloud.

Karlstad seemed to twitch, as if suddenly awakened from a trance. 'They're out there,' he said.

Muzorawa countered, 'The sensors haven't detected any.'

'Not even on the microscopic scale?'

'Ah, well… micro-organisms are present everywhere,'

Muzorawa agreed.

'But what about the big life-forms?' Grant asked.

'They're pretty thinly scattered,' Karlstad replied. 'They need a lot of territory to support themselves.'

'Maybe they're afraid of us,' O'Hara suggested in a subdued voice.

'Afraid?'

'After all, we did come crashing down here like a great blazing meteor, didn't we?'

Karlstad hesitated a moment, then conceded, 'Yes, there is that.'

O'Hara started to add something, but bit the thought off and said instead, 'Message from the director coming in, Captain.'

The wallscreen view of the unbroken haze was instantly replaced by a grainy, static-streaked image of Dr Wo. He looked grimly angry.

'The IAA inspection team is making their final burn to rendezvous with the station,' he said, without preamble. 'I have been ordered to recall your mission. You are supposed to return to Station
Gold
immediately.'

Everyone on the bridge froze. Grant turned slightly and saw Krebs floating up near the overhead, one thick-fingered hand pressed against the metal paneling to hold her in place. She was staring at the screen, the stony expression on her face unreadable.

'You are to acknowledge receipt of this message,' Wo said, drawing out each word as if to emphasize them.

The silence on the bridge was palpable. Grant felt shocked, bitter disappointment that the mission was being aborted, anger at the IAA for cutting it short. He wanted to go on, to stay linked with the ship, to probe deeper into that alien sea.