LEVIATHAN
Leviathan knew it was a foolish gesture, most likely a fatal one. The alien creature seemed to be dead, gone dark, sinking slowly toward the hot abyss below.
Still, the stranger had diverted the Darters and saved Leviathan from them. It was too late now to turn back. Once Leviathan had sounded its distress call to the Kin, the Darters left the stranger and rediscovered it, alone and near enough to attack.
Leviathan did not wait for the predators to strike. It roared in toward them, urging all its members to their utmost effort, desperately hoping to confuse the Darters and scatter them before they could form their attack pattern.
But they were too fast, too agile for that forlorn hope. Even as Leviathan rushed toward them, the Darters spread themselves into a screen, above, below, and on both sides of Leviathan’s charge.
Bellowing its distress call, Leviathan barely had time to notice that the stranger was not yet dead. Even though it had gone dark and a trail of bubbles showed that its shell had been cracked, it began to emit a jet of heated water—not as vigorously as before, but still it was a sign of life.
And then the Darters were upon Leviathan, nipping at its flanks, tearing at its flagella members. Cripple the flagella and Leviathan was helpless. But the mindless flagella were weapons as well as propulsion members. Leviathan clubbed at the Darters, felt bone snap and flesh rupture, madly hoping that if it killed a few of them, the rest would begin feeding on their own and leave Leviathan alone.
But the Darters would never leave a lone and wounded prey. In a growing frenzy they would attack and feed, ripping through Leviathan’s protective armor to get at the vital organ-members, while the vibrations of their furious struggle would signal others from far away to join the battle and the inevitable feasting.
Still Leviathan fought. There was nothing else to do.
The sharks on one side suddenly scattered away from Leviathan, swooping off in rapid retreat. Leviathan wondered why, even as it fought with all its waning strength against the others. The stranger! That alien creature from the cold abyss had charged in alongside Leviathan, spraying painfully hot steam into the midst of the attacking Darters.
But it was not enough. There were too many of the Darters, and more were coming. All the stranger had accomplished was to make certain it would be killed alongside Leviathan.
Then the water quivered with a new vibration: a chorus of undulating notes that rose and fell in perfect unison.
The Kin.
RESCUE
Grant watched, awed, fascinated, rapt so completely that he forgot the pain that racked his body, forgot even the pains that the ship suffered. That enormous, magnificent creature was battling the sharks, fighting them in a struggle that shook tiny little Zheng He like a dead leaf in a hurricane.
The sub rattled and tossed in the wild waves thrashing through the ocean. Grant saw that the sharks were tearing at the big whale, ripping away acres of flesh with teeth the size of buzz saws. The whale was fighting back, but it seemed a hopeless, one-sided battle. Here and there a shark drifted aimlessly, broken, oozing its internal fluids. But the others kept on attacking, their frenzy growing by the minute.
Get away! Grant told himself. While they’re busy killing each other, get the hell away from here!
But he couldn’t. No matter how his rational mind insisted that these creatures fought each other all the time, that this was their world and he had no place in it, that there was nothing he could do to help—still Grant lingered off to one side of the titanic struggle.
Maybe there is something I can do, Grant said as he powered up the thrusters and moved toward the flank of the enormous creature. It was like driving along a mountain range, or coming toward a big city whose towers loomed before you tall and powerful. Feeling like an insect approaching an elephant, Grant drove Zheng He into the battle, hoping that the thrusters’ exhaust would boil some of the sharks or at least frighten them away.
It worked—but it wasn’t enough. The sharks didn’t like the superheated steam; they raced away from the sub’s exhaust plume. But Grant saw that they merely jetted farther up along the great whale’s flank and resumed their attack there.
The whale’s oarlike flippers were just about the size of Zheng He itself. Rows and rows of them, by the hundreds. And eyes just above them. It was eerie, uncanny, to see hundreds of eyes, all turned toward him, watching him, staring at him.
Grant was accomplishing almost nothing. The sharks simply avoided the sub. The whale was so big that there were plenty of other places for them to attack. It would have taken a fleet of submersibles to protect this one creature. An armada.
Get away, Grant told himself again. There’s nothing you can do to help here. Get away while you can.
The sub suddenly began to reverberate with an eerie, undulating sound. Up and down, it rose and fell like a police siren, only deeper, lower, so profound that it sounded almost like the bottom bass note on the most tremendous church organ in the universe. God’s own chorus, a call to arms that might have been trumpeted by Gabriel himself. It grew swiftly louder, painfully louder, rattling the bridge, thundering in Grant’s ears, cracking his eardrums with its tremendous, frightening, awesome overpowering resonance.
The sharks stopped their attack. Every one of them pulled away from the whale and seemed to freeze in place, some of them with gobbets of the whale’s flesh clenched in their teeth.
The sound was painful. Grant felt as if hot needles were being jabbed in his ears. Louder and louder it rose, until he could hear nothing at all. The excruciating pain lanced through him as if a drill were driving through his skull. Touchscreens on the consoles began to shatter, bursting into showers of plastic shards and electrical sparks. The bridge vibrated as if some immense beast was shaking it in its jaws the way a terrier shakes a rat to death.
Grant hung on, vision clouding as one by one the ship’s sensors went out. The main wallscreen shattered, blowing sparks and broken pieces across the bridge. Grant ducked and cringed as plastic shards sliced through the fluid past him, tumbling slowly in the thick perfluorocarbon liquid. He could feel the sub’s multiple hulls quivering, reverberating like bells struck by a giant iron fist.
Like a school of minnows suddenly darting in unison, the sharks turned as one and fled away. One instant they were hovering everywhere, all pointed toward the source of the sound, the next they were gone, leaving nothing but bubbles in their wake.
The sudden turbulence of their swift departure tossed Zheng He fitfully, flipped the submersible upside down. Grant held on to his console with one hand, teeth gritting in pain. He couldn’t tell whether the agonies were his own body’s or the ship’s. What does it matter? What does anything matter now?
The sub was beyond his control. The turbulence left by the sharks had overpowered Grant’s ability to keep the vessel on an even keel. The thrusters were actually powering the ship downward now, spinning in a lazy uncontrollable spiral like a plane heading for a crash in slow motion. The thought flashed through Grant’s mind that the nearest solid ground must be tens of thousands of kilometers down, deep in Jupiter’s hot, dense core. We’ll be crushed and boiled long before we hit anything solid, he told himself.
With growing terror he tried to work the controls, running his hands madly across the touchscreens. Not even the thrusters responded to his commands. Everything must be so badly damaged, Grant said to himself. We’re going to die. We’re going to die. If only Krebs were conscious, he thought, she might be able to handle the controls and get us out of this. Or even Zeb.