Jupiter's Reef (28 page)

“We’ll do the best we can,” said Johnny.

“Now that we know our limits,” offered Alex, “we can work around them.”

Tony didn’t seem convinced. He grumbled and returned to his seat.

The breaks in the walls that had offered them an exit were gone. Now they were surrounded by the reef. Alex had the feeling that they were moving faster. A glance at the instruments told him his senses were correct. Their angle of descent had steepened to 5° and they were moving into the reef at fifteen kilometers per hour; up from ten when they entered the cave.

“We’re in a channel that leads under the reef,” said Johnny. “Actually we’re between two layers that seem to have joined, except for where this channel keeps them apart. The radar shows a space, a huge space, about ten kilometers ahead. It’s over twenty kilometers across.”

Alex checked his radar but the screen was hard to see through the holographic image that hovered between him and the com.

Alex looked around to tell Johnny to cut off the holographic projector. Behind him, distorting the hologram, were two bubbles of reef – magnified sections that Johnny was examining in detail. Alex jumped when he saw them. “Dingers, Johnny! What are those?”

“I kept them behind you so’s not to distract your piloting. Sorry if they spooked you.”

Alex laughed. “I thought the reef sprouted eyes.”

“No,” said Johnny. “The reef’s eyes are up above the clouds, I think,” he added.

Tony gave the Professor, a dubious look. “Care to elaborate on that, Johnny?”

“Not at the risk of sounding the fool,” said Johnny. “Those gas bag things. The apparent eye-spots on them. The attacks ...”

“Attacks on us, you mean?” said Mary. She had gotten two squeezers of java for Alex and herself. She looked back to see if her kitten was okay, then she slipped into her seat.

Apparently smelling the coffee, Johnny climbed out of his virtual bubble and went to the food service panel, stretching his limbs oddly as he walked in the reduced gravity. He yawned, then stood a moment looking at the menu scroll and pondered aloud what to order; frenchytoast or sauseggs. A minute later the smell of breakfast wafted through the cabin.

The Professor looked back at Alex who was engrossed in piloting the ship along the narrowing air channel.

“Has it occurred to you that we were taken into the reef?” asked Johnny.

“Sure. Hasn’t it been obvious?” said Alex, lifting the squeezer to his lips. Then he looked gratefully at Mary. “Amazing how java smooths the sails.”

She grinned and nodded. Coffee was the one bad habit Mary had picked up from Alex that she didn’t regret. Somehow the rest of her clan were all tea drinkers although Mary One never drank Martian tea, claiming it was worse than dirt. Mary Seventeen was different from her sisters in many ways. She wondered if her sisters were picking any of this up. Usually she could sense when they were, but now there were other things to sense. She hadn’t said anything to Alex and she was glad he didn’t ask. What bothered her were the clicker men. Not that she could hear them. The opposite was true. It was as if they’d all vanished. And there was something else. And it lay ahead of them. Mary decided it was time to speak, for all their sakes.

“I have noticed, too,” she said. “And there’s something else, I’ve noticed.”

Alex looked at her wide-eyed. “No clicking,” he said.

2
“You haven’t heard the radio clicks. From those clicker ... clicker men? That’s what you’re saying?” asked Johnny, looking earnestly at Mary. “You said earlier that you could hear them. That they knew we were here, or something like that.”

“I know. That was before we did the transmission link and entered the reef,” said Mary. “I got distracted, I guess.”

“What are you feeling now?” said the Professor.

“Mary looked at him in disgust. “This is ordinary radio, Professor, not some exotic sense of mine. Not magic or parlor tricks. I may look like a freak but everything artificial about me was put in with a knife before I was old enough to have a say in it.”

“Jesus,” said Tony.

Alex touched Mary’s arm. “Nobody’s blaming you or anything. Ease up.”

Mary took a deep breath.

“I’m sorry, Mary,” said Johnny. “I didn’t think.” He looked down at her kitten. It was happily asleep next to its low-gee litter box. Johnny smiled. “Your kitten is pretty unflappable. I wish we all could be as calm about all this but ...”

“But that cat has no idea what’s outside the walls of this ship,” said Tony. “If he did, he’d shit himself.”

“Hold him in your lap and explain it to him,” said Mary.

Alex and the Professor laughed. But Tony looked at his instruments.

“Water vapor. Oxygen,” he said. “Plenty of carbon dioxide. Temperature, a little cooler than inside here. But rising. Actually this airstream is cooler than the reef. It’s only sweater weather out there.”

Alex looked at the display and shifted uneasily in his seat. The instruments showed their current negative ceiling was about fifty kilometers below the cloud tops.

Johnny ate his food and then climbed back into his bubble. Within a minute he was displaying radar data of the reef so that Alex could see it in his virtual display. Alex felt a sickening sense of vertigo when he saw the reef suddenly become strangely transparent. Now visible, deep inside the reef, was a maze of tunnels. But what caught his eye were the shapes that moved singly or in groups through those tunnels.

On the surface, aside from the normal flora and fauna, all was quiet.

“Dingers,” said Alex. “They are here.”

“We don’t know what they are, Alex,” said Mary. “They’re just shadows. Burrowing creatures.”

“There must be thousands of them,” said Tony, standing next to his chair. “Jesus, look at them all.” Then he looked at Mary. “Don’t you hear them?”

Mary shook her head.

Sciarra scratched his head. “That’s hard to believe. I mean, with all that activity out there...”

“Maybe they’ve ordered a blackout in our honor,” said Professor Baltadonis.

Alex squinted at the illusion before his eyes, trying to see ahead. As they moved along, the walls of the reef narrowed to a few hundred meters wide. The ceiling was equally uneven and perhaps fifty meters above and below the ship. There was ample clearance for
Diver
and its tight cluster of balloons and the airflow was fairly stable. Alex had no trouble steering the ship using minimal power.

What bothered Alex about the tunnel they were following was that it seemed unnatural. Instead of being tube-like, the top and bottom of the channel came together at some obscure point on either side of them, lost in a tangle of glowing reef. The channel looked more like a wrinkle between two huge mountain sized blankets of reef.

“I wonder what would happen if we decided to ... uh turn around?” said Tony.

Alex looked at the radar. It showed that they were a kilometer into the reef. It also showed they were in a tube that was getting smaller. But the radar showed something else. The reef was changing shape.

3
“I’ve been counting up our defensive abilities,” said Alex to Mary as he struggled to keep
Diver
centered in the tunnel. In a way he hoped only Mary heard him but he would have welcomed suggestions from Tony.

Suggestions would have to wait, though, because they were about to enter the mysterious open space at the end of the tunnel.

Johnny was the one who first noticed that the entire reef had changed shape. But he saw it as nothing sinister. Rather, he said it seemed logical that a floating mat of material would “complement the dynamics of the environment.”

“Spooky though it may seem,” added Sciarra.

“Spooky is right!” exclaimed Alex. “What do you make of this space we’re moving into, Johnny?”

But Baltadonis didn’t answer. He was humming a tune under his breath – some fanfare or march – but the way Johnny was humming suggested an ‘into the breech’ attitude.

“I guess we’ll all see for ourselves,” said Alex as his mind went back to the question of how they might defend themselves. He knew that in sheer weight and mass alone, no creature on this diaphanous reef was a match for their ship in a head to head struggle. On the other hand Alex couldn’t ignore the fact that a single thorny acid tipped nettle thrown at them by some unknown reef beast had actually penetrated their ship’s polyceramic hide.

Diver
’s main defense on their previous sojourn into the reef had been the null-gee field. That spherical bubble of buoyancy had been a deterrent to the clicker men, who had come at them in great numbers. Still, as Alex recalled the incident, many of them had reached the cabin windows and, presumably, had peeked into the ship and seen himself, Mary, and the Bradshaws and their two cats.

Alex pondered the encounters with the clicker men and decided that he might have underrated them. If they were sentient, then they could learn. What had the clicker men learned about humans? Had they figured a way to defend themselves, or at least a way drive the alien invaders from their reef?

Alex wanted to electrify the hull but wondered if that would really help. Jolts of lightning hit the reef with high powered electricity all the time and the reef seems to take it in stride. For all he knew the reef even benefitted from it.

Johnny continued his humming while Alex felt his anxiety grow into panic. They were coming to the end of the line and he could see the glowing opening he knew was the open space their instruments had detected.

“What’s your call, Johnny,” Alex shouted in case the Professor was wearing earphones. “Should I take steps? Electrify the hull?”

Mary looked at Alex doubtfully.

“We don’t know what’s in there,” said Alex.

“No need to go in with our defenses up,” said Johnny, still absorbed in his virtual bubble.

“Our defenses are a double hull of polycer and a null gee field,” said Sciarra.

“Are you getting anything, Mary?” asked Alex.

“Nothing.”

“Dingers,” said Alex, “I’m sure feeling something.”

“Tension,” said Mary.

“Yup.”

Ahead of them was the opening. It was a wide irregularly shaped break in the cavern. Beyond its fringed glowing edges was a pale foggy background. Alex couldn’t decide if the glow of the fog was the result of light coming from the edges of the cave mouth or from the opening itself, but the wind was taking them steadily into the cavern. The only way to prevent that was a full engine reversal. “Shall I power up?” asked Alex. “Talk to me, Johnny.”

“Steady as she goes,” said Professor Baltadonis.

Alex’s hand gripped the stick tightly as they entered the cavern. A moment later they were floating free in a vast fog-filled space. The air around
Diver
was alive with small flying things that reminded Alex of flying beetles and gnats. But otherwise there was nothing to see but a bluish haze. Behind them, the cave from which they’d emerged showed clearly as a wrinkle between two different layers of reef. The two decks looked similar but were separated by a layer of darker material that seemed to have less glowing components. This was the material that contained the cave that had brought them here. It was like a thick skin between the two.

But Alex didn’t have long to study it. The entrance to the cave quickly disappeared into the mist. Soon, only the radar showed the shape of the space they were in. Johnny said that it measured over three kilometers across,

The total height of the space was hard for Johnny to gauge, but he offered that the radar showed a seam that was, as far as he could tell, bottomless. Overhead, maybe a kilometer away, was a dome full of slightly denser and somewhat warmer air. “It’s a pocket of atmosphere. I’m not getting ... Alex ... let’s go up.”

Something inside told Alex not to, but he followed orders. “It’s okay,” he thought, “We’ll get in and get out.”

Mary glanced at him. She brushed a lock of white hair to the side, revealing an intensely beautiful eye. It was a window into Mary’s heart and it told Alex that she was afraid too. He decided it was time to speak up.

“This isn’t good, Johnny. I don’t like it.” he said. “I don’t know how to put this, but I’m ...”

“... afraid. I’m afraid,” said Mary. “Maybe we shouldn’t go there.”

Johnny’s head poked out of his bubble. “As I recall, during your earlier sojourn into the reef, the only time you had an opportunity to take a sample was when you rested the ship ... well, floated it, really ... at the top of a domed structure you found in the reef.”

“I remember,” said Alex. “That was so we could sleep. I was dogged. Hadn’t slept in a long time ... just like now.”

“Well, then. There’s another reason to go up,” said Sciarra. “You sound like you could use a little nap.”

“We go up ... take some naps and then do the sampling,” continued Johnny. “Just a bottle or two and then we are free to go. We have the power to punch through this reef structure at any time. But I think we should tour the place as much as possible. Let’s go up.”

The air inside the cavern was taking
Diver
up, anyway, and it took only a bit of heat added to the gas that filled the ship’s thirteen balloons to start them rising.

“Computer, restrict our upward speed to a meter per second,” said Alex.

The holographic image that surrounded them was a whiteout. The radar image that overlaid the optical image showed the walls of the great cavern. Their fuzzy edges were, of course, only lines drawn by the computer in the air, but it helped Alex conceptualize their position.

He watched the radar for other images; other traces that might reveal whether or not they were alone in this great pool of air.

Johnny had become skilled at reading the radar traces. He told them that in the reef that surrounded this great space activity had stopped, or at least he wasn’t detecting it.

“I’m seeing traces of things ... things in here with us,” added Johnny. “Also I’ve got this fog figured out. It’s caused by that channel of cool air we were following. The air was cool and dry. In here it’s warm and moist.”

“Moist?”

“Yeah. Making cloud ... or water vapor. I ... I don’t know how to say this but we’re about to enter a place that has an optimum atmosphere. And it’s full of earth-like cloud. I’ve been watching my instruments. I don’t believe this. See if yours are reading the same.”