“Silence!” Krebs roared. “Deeper!”
LEVIATHAN
Leviathan cruised slowly through the stream of food, eating constantly to regain its strength. The flagella were already in bud, to replace the members that had been lost, and that took even more energy. Leviathan ate greedily but swam steadily around the great storm, heading back for the haunts of its Kin.
Several of the skin members were budding, too, but it would be a long time before their offspring could be thickened and hardened to replace the armor Leviathan had lost when it was up along the edges of the cold abyss.
Leviathan was impatient to find its Kin, eager to replay to them the tale of its battles with the Darters and the eerie, tentacled monster up in the cold distance. Yet it knew that the Elders would display their displeasure. Many times they had warned Leviathan against moving away from the Kin. Youngsters often wanted to strike out on their own, they had pictured to Leviathan time and again, their imagery flashing deep red to show their seriousness. But youngsters usually disregarded the wisdom of their elders. Many never returned to the Kin.
Leviathan would return, it told itself, and return in triumph. It had gone to regions of the all-encompassing sea that no one of its kind had ever seen before. It had traveled up toward the cold abyss and survived. The Elders treasured knowledge, or so they imaged. Yet how could new knowledge be gained if no one moved off into the unexplored parts of the world?
Leviathan envisioned itself swimming with the Picturers, drawing the scenes of its epic journey so that they could add the depiction of its tale to the Kin’s history of images. No matter how many times its members dissociated and recombined, this adventure would remain in the minds of all who could see. It would never be forgotten.
But first Leviathan had to get back to the Kin. It followed the food stream, heading toward home. It would be good to return, even if the Elders flashed pictures of discontent over its adventure. They will be jealous, Leviathan thought. While they remained in the same old feeding grounds, I explored new regions. I will add to the store of knowledge, and that is a positive thing.
Leviathan realized that some time in the future it would become an Elder. The thought startled Leviathan. But it resolved never to cease exploring, even when it was an elder. And it would never discourage a youngster from exploring, either. Leviathan was certain of that.
Then a cluster of its sensor members felt a distant tremor in the darkness of the ocean.
Darters! they warned. Following us and coming up fast.
CONTACT
“Number-four cylinder’s failed!” Karlstad yelped.
“I see it,” said Krebs, her voice tight. “The piston has jammed. Structural integrity is not threatened.”
“It can’t take any more pressure,” Karlstad insisted.
“We are deep enough,” Krebs said. “Almost.”
Grant had tapped into Zeb’s sensor returns. He saw a herd of enormous things out there in the ocean, objects the size of mountains, of islands, so huge that size began to lose all meaning.
“Distance?” Krebs demanded.
“Fifty-two point four kilometers,” answered Muzorawa.
It made no sense to narrow the distance to them, Grant thought. They were so immense that getting closer would mean the sensors could focus only on one of them. On just a part of one of them, at that.
“Hold here,” Krebs commanded. “Conform to their course and speed.”
Grant felt the thrusters straining to match the speed of the Jovians. They were Jovians, he was certain. No doubt about that at all. Mind-boggling in size, they were gliding through the ocean, propelled by rows of flippers five times bigger than Zheng He. They seemed to be cruising leisurely through the stream of organics, sucking the particles up into many openings that lined their undersides.
They’re alive, Grant told himself. But could they be intelligent? They’re grazing like cows.
A light flashed on one of them, a sudden yellow glow that flared for a moment and then winked out.
“Did you see that?”
“A light of some kind.”
“Natural bioluminescence, do you think?”
“Look! They’re flickering back and forth!”
“Like signals!”
“Be quiet!” Krebs snapped. “Attend to your duties. Make certain that everything is being recorded.”
Grant’s heart was racing with excitement. He could see the giant creatures flicking lights along their massive flanks, red, yellow, a piercingly intense green. What does it mean? Are they intelligent signals? Can we make any sense of them?
“Maintain this distance from them,” Krebs repeated. “Conform to their course and speed.”
Grant had never felt so small, so dwarfed. From a distance of fifty-some kilometers the Jovians reminded him of a stately herd of elephants, but they were so blessedly big. Bigger than any creature that had ever lived on Earth. Bigger than a city. We’re just puny little insects compared to them. Ants. Microbes.
“They’re following the flow of organics,” O’Hara said.
“Cruising in the current,” Karlstad agreed.
“I can see that,” snapped Krebs. “Stop this chattering! Check all systems. Now.”
Grant felt resentful as he disengaged from the sensor data. Why can’t we all watch them? he grumbled to himself. We don’t need to check the damned systems. If there’s something wrong we’ll know it right away.
He realized that his headache was still pulsing away; he had ignored it during the excitement of seeing the Jovians. But the pain in his back was nagging at him, too, no longer merely stiffness but an ache that he couldn’t quite pin down, like an itch that moved when you tried to scratch it.
Then he saw it in razor-sharp clarity. The number-two thruster was sputtering, its plasma flow no longer smoothly laminar. The hot ionized gas was crinkling, twisting in the thruster tube. The magnetic fields that should be guiding and accelerating the plasma were pulsating fitfully.
Grant felt the thruster’s imminent failure as an increasingly sharp pain. His first instinct was to shut down the thruster and allow the automated repair program time to reline the tube with heat-shielding ceramic spray and replenish the liquid nitrogen coolant for the magnets.
To do that, though, he needed the captain’s approval. The thruster could not be shut down unless Krebs physically relinquished her control of the propulsion system.
“Captain, thruster number two—”
“I see it,” Krebs said.
“We should take it off-line for repair,” Grant told her.
“Not now.”
“But it’s headed for catastrophic failure.”
“Not for another twenty hours.”
Grant saw the diagnostic and double-checked it with a glance at his console screens. “But, Captain, that’s only an estimate. It could fail much sooner.”
Her voice heavy with disdain, Krebs said, “If we shut down the thruster we will slow down. The beasts out there will move away from us. We must keep pace with them.”
“Even if we lose the thruster altogether and can’t get ourselves out of the ocean?” Grant demanded.
“We are here to get data. We can always fire off a data capsule.”
“But we’ll die!”
“The data comes first. That is what is important.”
She doesn’t care if we live or die, Grant said to himself. Our lives, even her own life, isn’t as important to her as observing these creatures.
“The thruster can be repaired without taking it offline,” Krebs said calmly.
Grant checked into the maintenance program and found that she was right, up to a point. “It would only be a temporary patch,” he said. “The program recommends complete shutdown for necessary repairs.”