Mahnmut stayed inside The Dark Lady—now packed with gel—while Koros III and Ri Po rode sixty meters away in the forward control module they’d come to call the bridge. The plan was for Ri Po to handle all navigation chores during their brief mad-mouse ride in, while Koros III served as titular commander of the expedition. The plan also called for the Ganymedan to transfer to Mahnmut’s submersible shortly before The Dark Lady—emptied of its gel—was to be dropped into the Martian atmosphere. Once in the oceans of Mars, Mahnmut was to serve as a taxi driver—delivering Koros III to whatever landing point the commanding Ganymedan chose for his land-based spying. Koros had been downloaded various specifics of the mission that would not concern Mahnmut.
Orphu of Io had installed himself in his crèche on the outer shell of the ship behind the ten solenoid toruses and in front of the sail-cable struts, and was connected to the bridge and the submersible by every sort of voice, data, and comm link imaginable. Most of his nontechnical conversation was with Mahnmut.
I’m still most interested in your theory of the dramatic construct of the sonnets, my friend. I hope we live long enough for you to analyze more of the cycle.
But Proust! responded Mahnmut. Why Proust when you can spend all of your existence studying Shakespeare?
Proust was perhaps the ultimate explorer of time, memory, and perception, replied Orphu.
Mahnmut made a static sound.
The scarred Ionian sent his rumble through the audio line. “I look forward to convincing you that both can be enjoyed and learned from, Mahnmut, my friend.”
Koros III’s message came over the common line—Everyone might want to raise bandwidth on the visual lines. We’re approaching Io’s plasma torus.
Mahnmut opened all visual feeds as requested. He preferred to watch external events through Orphu of Io’s lenses, but at the moment the more interesting views were from the forward ship cameras, and not necessarily in the visible-light spectra.
They were accelerating toward the great red-and-yellow-blotched face of Io, coming at the moon from below the plane of the ecliptic and making ready to pass over its northern pole just before flying into the Io–Jupiter flux tube.
During the short trip in from Europa, Orphu and Ri Po had downloaded pertinent information about this region of Jupiter space. A creature of Europa, Mahnmut had always focused primarily on sonar and some visual-light perception within the black oceans there, but now he perceived the Jovian magnetosphere as the loud, crowded place it was. Looking ahead on the decametric radio bandwidths, he could see Io’s Jupiter-thick plasma torus and, at right angles to the torus, Io’s flux tube running like wide horns to Jupiter’s north and south poles. Far beyond Jupiter and its moons, beyond the magnetopause, Mahnmut could sense the bow shock turbulence crashing like great white waves on a hidden reef, could hear the upstream Langmuir waves singing in the magnetic darkness past that reef, and could pick out the ion acoustic waves crackling after their long voyage uphill from the sun. The sun itself was little more than a very bright star from Jupiter space.
Now, as the ship swept up and over Io and into the flux tube, Mahnmut could hear the Whistler-mode chorus and hiss that the little moon made as it plowed through its own plasma torus, eating its own tail, as it were. He could see the deep bands of equatorial emissions and had to tone down the decametric and kilometric radio roar coming from the flux tube itself. All of Galilean space was a furnace of hard radiation and electromagnetic activity—Mahnmut had spent his whole existence with its background roar in his virtual ears—but passing from torus to flux tube so close to Jupiter sent violent cascades of tortured electrons hissing around their ship like banshees screaming to be let in a beleaguered house. It was a new experience and Mahnmut found it a bit unnerving.
Then they were in the flux tube and Koros III shouted “Hang on!” before sound channels were drowned out by the hurricane roar.
The Io plasma torus was a giant doughnut of charged particles stirred up within the trail of sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and other gases left behind—and then accumulated again—by Orphu’s violent home moon. As Io sped in its fast 1.77-day orbit around Jupiter, slicing through the gas giant’s magnetic field and plowing into its own plasma torus, it created a huge electrical current between Jupiter and itself, a double-horned cylinder of incredibly concentrated magnetic surges called the Io flux tube. The tube connected to Jupiter’s north and south magnetic poles and created wild auroras there, while the horns of the flux tube itself carried a constant current of some five megaamperes and constantly produced more than two trillion watts of energy.
The Five Moons Consortium had decided some decades ago that two trillion watts of energy would be a terrible thing to waste.
Mahnmut watched as Io’s north pole flicked beneath them. Ejecta from various sulfur volcanoes—especially from Prometheus far south near the moon’s equator—was being spewed 140 kilometers high and higher above the pockmarked surface, as if the violent moon was shooting at them, trying to make them turn back before they reached the point of no return.
Too late. They were already there.
On the common forward video, Ri Po’s superimposed navigation brackets showed their proper insertion into the flux tube and projected alignment with the scissors. Jupiter rushed at them, rapidly filling the view ahead like a multi-striped wall.
The physical blades of the scissors—that dual-armed, rotating, magnetic wave accelerator set within the natural particle accelerator of Io’s flux tube—were 8,000 kilometers long, only a fragment of the flux tube’s length of more than half a million curving kilometers connecting the north pole of Io to the north pole of Jupiter.
But the scissors could move. As Orphu of Io had explained to Mahnmut, “Angular momentum can be a many-splendored thing, my little friend.”
The ship nestling Mahnmut’s beloved submersible had approached Io and the flux tube—even after full acceleration from the ion-tugs—at a velocity of only some 24 kilometers per second, less than 86,000 kilometers per hour. At that speed, it would take more than four hours just to traverse the flux tube distance between Io’s north pole and Jupiter’s, e-years to reach Mars. But they had no intention of continuing on at that creeping pace.
The ship entered the crackling, roaring, twitching field of the flux tube, found the vertex of the scissors, aligned itself with the upper blade, and then used the tube’s own accelerator properties to hurl the spacecraft-solenoid through the five-kilometer-wide field coils of the superconducting dipole accelerator. As soon as the ship entered the first gate like some clumsy croquet ball passing through the first of several thousand wickets, the blade of the accelerator-scissors began snapping open with a differential angular velocity nearing—and theoretically even surpassing—light speed. They were riding a rippling bullwhip one second and then flicked from the tip of it the next, using as much of that two trillion watts of energy as the scissors-accelerator could grab.
The ship—and everything in it—went from zero-g to almost 3,000-g’s within two-point-six seconds.
Jupiter zipped toward, past, and under them in an eyeblink. Mahnmut slowed all his monitors down so that he could appreciate their departure.
“Wheeehaw!” cried Orphu from the outer hull.
The ship and submersible strained, creaked, groaned, and whinnied from the g-force, but it was all made of tough stuff—The Dark Lady itself had been built to withstand several million kilograms per square centimeter of pressure in Europa’s deep seas—and so were these moravecs.