Manta's Gift

by Timothy Zahn

  He clucked his teeth thoughtfully. "Question is, will it unfreeze in time to do us any good?"

  Faraday's stomach felt ill, and not just from the deadly gravity. Already they were too deep for any chance of rescue from the tether ship. Now, they were drifting still deeper.

  And as they did so, the rising atmospheric pressure would begin to compress their one working float, reducing its already inadequate buoyancy and making them fall still faster. After that, even if the other float fixed itself, the pressure of its helium tank wouldn't be enough to deploy it.

  That was the physics of it. The cold reality of it was that he and Chippawa were dead.

  They would be crushed to death. That would be the final end of it The fragile walls of their capsule would shatter under the pressure from outside, shatter into a million pieces that would drive inward into their bodies like shrapnel.

  And behind that shrapnel would come the full weight of Jupiter's atmosphere, squeezing in on them. Their blood vessels would explode; their bones would break; their skulls would shatter like empty eggshells. Crushed to death.

  Crushed to death...

  He looked up at his partner, expecting to see his same fear in the other's face.

  But there was no fear there. Chippawa was concentrating on his board, apparently oblivious to the fate that was moving like a runaway monorail toward them.

  And in that stretched-out instant of time, Faraday hated him. Hated the man's courage and professional calm. Hated his ability to ignore the fear and the danger.

  Hated the twenty extra years of life Chippawa had experienced that Faraday would never have a chance to taste.

  "Getting a reading," Chippawa called out over the wind. "Incoming. About eight meters long—roughly torpedo-shaped—"

  "We're falling," Faraday all but screamed at him. So much for the luck of his wooden ring. He was about to die. They were both about to die. "What the hell does it matter—?"

  The sentence was choked off as his armrest again slammed hard into the side of his exoskeleton, the impact jarring his ribs. "What happened?" he demanded, eyes flickering over his instruments. No new error messages were showing.

  "I don't know," Chippawa said. "It's—oh, boy."

  Faraday looked up. And stopped breathing.

  The slab of gray had returned. Only this time it had shifted around until an eye was visible.

  Gazing steadily through the window at them.

  Faraday stared back, the wind and the pressure and even the fact that he was a dead man suddenly fading into the background. The eye was big and very black, either with no pupil at all or else with all pupil. The kind of eye that would suck in every bit of radiation across a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, he realized, using every bit of light available to see in the gloom of Jupiter's deep atmosphere. There was a hint of polygonal faceting around the eye's edge, though it didn't seem to be an insect-type compound eye.

  And like a textbook optical illusion that shifted from duck to rabbit and back to duck again, he couldn't decide whether the expression in the eye was one of interest, sympathy, or malevolence.

  Or maybe that was just his imagination. Or his hopes.

  Or his fears.

  With an effort, he found his voice. "Should we wave?" he said.

  "Unless you'd rather ask it to take us to their leader," Chippawa said. "Emscan's running... man, this thing's got one complicated internal structure."

  "How complicated?" Faraday asked, starting to become interested in spite of himself.

  "At least as complex as ours," Chippawa said. "I'd love to see the biochemistry of something that swims around in hydrogen and methane all day. You hear that?"

  "Yes," Faraday said, frowning. It was a scraping sound, coming from somewhere beneath them.

  "It's checking us out," Chippawa said. "Running a flipper or something along the hull."

  "Is that why we've stopped falling?" Faraday asked. "It's holding us up?"

  "Yes and no," Chippawa said, peering at the displays. "We are still going down, only not as fast."

  "But it is intelligent," Faraday said, staring back at that unblinking eye. "And it's figured out that we are, too."

  "Well, maybe," Chippawa said cautiously. "I'd definitely say it's curious. But then, so is a kitten."

  "It is intelligent," Faraday insisted. "Something that big has to be."

  "Yeah, well, as the cliché says, size doesn't really matter," Chippawa said with a grunt. "The last rhino I saw wasn't giving lectures on quark theory. Anyway, it may all be academic."

  "What do you mean?" Faraday demanded. If the creature was intelligent, surely it realized they didn't belong here. It could just carry them back up to the top of the atmosphere—

  "One, we're still falling," Chippawa said. "That implies even with one float working we're too heavy for him to hold up. And two—"

  He gestured to the emscan display. "We've got more company."

  Faraday felt his mouth drop open. At eight meters long, the creature staring in at them was already pretty big. The suburban starter houses that the little guys had been clustering around had been even bigger.

  But the two radar blips now moving up from below and to their right were another order of magnitude entirely. Like a pair of incoming grocery warehouses...

  Abruptly, the armrest dropped out from under him again. He looked up, catching just a glimpse of their Peeping Tom as he scooted upward into the swirling air.

  And the Skydiver was again falling free.

  The seconds ticked by. A new set of creaks joined the howl of the wind outside, and a glance at the depth indicator showed they had officially beaten Keefer and O'Reilly's record.

  They were also nearly to the theoretical pressure limit of their own hull. Not only were they about to die, he thought bitterly, but they were going to get to watch the countdown to that death.

  Something flashed past the window, illuminated briefly by their exterior lights. "What was that?"

  "One of our thirty-meter wonders," Chippawa said. "Got some pictures as he went past."

  Lost in his own last thoughts, Faraday had forgotten all about the grocery-warehouse creatures that had chased off Dark Eye. "Anything good?" he asked, trying to force some interest.

  "I'd say we've found the top of the food chain," Chippawa said. "Look at this—it's got a bunch of those manta-ray things hanging onto its underside."

  Like remoras on a shark, Faraday thought with a shiver. Waiting to pick up the scraps from the big boy's kill. "So the smaller ones who ran past us were scouts or something?"

  "Could be," Chippawa said. Something moved up into their lights from below—

  And Faraday was slammed violently against his armrest as the Skydiver came to a sudden halt. For a few seconds he lay helplessly there, gazing at an incredibly lumpy brownish-gray surface outside the window. Then, with a sort of ponderous inevitability, the Skydiver rolled over into an upright position again.

  "Have we hit bottom?" Faraday asked, knowing even before the words were out of his mouth that it was a stupid question. There was little if anything that could be called "bottom" on a gas-giant world like Jupiter. Somewhere below them there might be a rocky center or a supercompressed core of solid hydrogen, but the Skydiver would never survive long enough to get anywhere near that.

  What had happened was obvious. Obvious, and frightening.

  They had landed on top of Predator Number Two.

  "We're still going down," Chippawa grunted. "These things must really be delicate. We're not that heavy, especially with one of the floats deployed."

  "I guess we're heavy enough," Faraday said, rubbing the side of his neck as he gazed out the window.

  His first impression, just before they'd hit, had been that the predator's skin was lumpy. Only now, as he had time to study it, did he realize just how incredibly lumpy it actually was.

  The skin was covered with dozens of ridges and protrusions of various sizes and shapes, like a snowfield t
hat had been whipped by the wind into odd drifts. Some of the lumps were low and flat, others long and narrow, sticking as far as eight or nine meters out from the surface. Like tree trunks, perhaps, whose branches had been stripped off.

  No, he decided. Not like tree trunks. More like torpedoes or rockets pointed the wrong way on their launching pads.

  Abruptly, he caught his breath. Like torpedoes? "Scotto..."

  "What?" Chippawa asked.

  "That lump out there," Faraday said slowly. "The tall one, dead center. What does it look like to you?"

  "Like a lump," Chippawa said, a hint of impatience in his voice. "Give me a hint."

  "Remember the fellow with the big eye?" Faraday said. "Wasn't he shaped like that?"

  "Yes, but—" Chippawa broke off, leaning closer to the window. "But that's the same skin that's on everything else," he said. "The predator's skin. Isn't it?"

  "Sure looks like it," Faraday agreed, his throat feeling raw. "As if the skin just grew up around one of them..."

  For a long second he and Chippawa stared at each other. Then, in unison, they both turned back to their boards.

  "Underside cameras have gone dark," Faraday announced tightly, his eyes flicking across those displays. "Forward ones... maybe the connections were knocked loose in the crash."

  "Damn," Chippawa said. "Look at the window."

  Faraday looked up. On the lower edge of the window, a brownish-gray sheet was slowly working its way up the Quadplexi.

  "It's growing over us," Chippawa said, very quietly. "The skin is growing straight over us."

  Faraday licked at dry lips. Tearing his eyes away from the window, he searched out the pressure sensors.

  At least the news there wasn't any worse. "Underside pressure's holding steady," he said. "The skin isn't squeezing us any harder than the atmosphere is."

  "Pretty small comfort, if you ask me," Chippawa said grimly. Probably growing all the way up the hull. Whoops—main drive just shut back to standby. The whole ring, too. The skin must have rolled over all the proximity sensors at the same time."

  Faraday grimaced. That was standard deep-atmosphere probe design: If there was something sitting right next to you, the computer wouldn't let you move that direction. Now, with something around all of them, the whole bank of drive engines had simply shut down. "Damn safety interlocks," he muttered.

  "Well, it's not like we'd be able to go anywhere right now anyway," Chippawa pointed out, his voice far too reasonable for Faraday's taste. "Firing up the turboprops now would just snarl the blades. Wait a sec."

  He bent suddenly over the controls. "Something?" Faraday asked hopefully.

  "Just a thought," the other said. "If I can fine-tune the emscan a little, maybe we can see how thick the skin is over the other shipwrecks out there."

  "Oh," Faraday said, feeling the flicker of hope fade away.

  Still, now that Chippawa mentioned it, the view outside did rather look like a shipwreck scene. A dozen ships lying at the bottom of a murky ocean, with strange underwater seaweed growing up over all of them. "What do you want me to do?"

  "Check the manual and see if there's any way you can boost power to the radio," Chippawa said. "If we can find a way to punch a signal through this soup, we can at least let Prime know about all this."

  He smiled tightly. "I mean, we should at least let them know we're due some posthumous citations."

  "Got it," Faraday said. He didn't smile back.

  They worked in silence for what seemed like a long time. The only sounds in the cabin were the beeping of the instruments, the howling of the wind outside, and—at least for Faraday—the thudding of his own heart.

  The window was almost completely covered by the time he finally gave up. "We're not going to get through," he said. "The atmosphere's just too thick. I can't even pick up their carrier; and if I can't hear them, they sure as hell can't hear us. Any luck there?"

  "Possibly," Chippawa said. "The creature's skin in general is pretty thick, up to thirty centimeters in places. Definitely the same as the wrapping around the mummies out there, though that stuff's not nearly as thick. But this batch—"

  "Wait a sec," Faraday interrupted him. "Mummies?"

  "That's what the emscan shows," Chippawa said. "The big one, anyway. It has the same basic internal structure as the fellow who buzzed us."

  "And that structure's intact?" Faraday asked. "Not decayed or digested or anything?"

  "Not that I can tell," Chippawa said. "That's point one for the good guys: At least we're not about to be eaten or absorbed alive. Point two is that the batch growing up around the Skydiver isn't nearly as thick or strong as the rest of it."

  He nodded toward the window. "Which means that if the starboard helium line clears up soon enough, and if we're not too deep for the float to deploy, there's a chance we'll be able to punch our way out of here."

  "Lot of ifs in that," Faraday pointed out doubtfully. An image floated to mind: a Golden Movie Age vid he and his brothers used to watch called Pinocchio, where the heroes had been trapped in the stomach of a giant whale. How had they gotten out of that? He couldn't remember. "Assuming all the rest of it, how do you propose we do that?"

  The last remaining sliver of outside view vanished beneath the sheet of brown-gray. "I don't know," Chippawa admitted. "Maybe an electric discharge, if we can boost the voltage high enough and figure out how to deliver it. Or maybe some acid from one of our fuel cells will do something."

  "Or maybe a fire," Faraday said. That was it; they'd made a fire in the whale's stomach. "Don't forget, most of that soup out there is pure hydrogen. If we can supply enough oxygen from our own air supply, we should be able to get a nice little fire going."

  Chippawa whistled softly. "And maybe fry ourselves in the process," he pointed out. "But it's better than doing nothing. Let's figure out how much we can spare—"

  He broke off as, once again, the chairs dropped out from under them. "We're heading down again," Faraday said tightly, looking over at the depth indicator.

  The indicator, contrary to what his stomach and inner ear were telling him, was holding perfectly steady. "What the—? Oh. Right."

  "It's the pressure of the skin around us," Chippawa said. "Fouls up the readings. Still, at least that means we're not going to get flattened like roadkill."

  "It also means that if we wait too long to punch our way out, we won't be able to do so," Faraday countered. "Not much point in breaking free if you're only going to get squashed a millisecond later."

  Chippawa made a face. "Yeah. Point."

  "And of course, with the depth meter off-track, we won't even know when we've passed that no-chance depth," Faraday added. "We don't even know how deep we are right now."

  "Maybe I can do something with the emscan," Chippawa said. "You get busy and figure out how much oxygen we can spare."

  Once again silence descended on the probe. This time, muffled in their freshly grown cocoon, there wasn't even the wailing of the wind outside to keep them company.

  Wrapped up in his work and his thoughts, Faraday only gradually became aware of the new sound rumbling beneath his feet.

  He paused, listening. In some ways it reminded him of the howling of a restless wind, rising and falling with no discernible pattern. But the tone was deeper and more varied than simple wind.

  And as he listened, he could swear he could hear words in it...

  "Scotto?" he murmured.

  "Yeah," the other said quietly. "I'm not sure, but I think they're talking to each other."

  Something with lots of cold feet began to run up and down Faraday's back. "They?"

  Chippawa gestured toward the emscan display. "They."

  The image was vague and indistinct, like looking through a thick layer of gelatin. But it was clear enough. There were at least twenty more of the lumpy creatures out there, some of them swimming around, others more or less floating in place. Straining his ears Faraday discovered he could hear more of the windlike
rumbles coming from outside, at least when the one they were attached to wasn't making any noise of its own.

  It was like a damn roundtable discussion. And judging from the direction all of them out there seemed to be facing, he could guess the topic of conversation.

  The Skydiver.

  With an effort, he found his voice. "So these are the intelligent ones? Not the torpedoes?"

  "Maybe they're all intelligent," Chippawa said. "Maybe none of them are. Maybe we've just stumbled on some kind of group mating dance or something."

  There was a whisper of feeling in Faraday's inner ear. "We're moving," he said tightly, trying to sort out the sensations. On the emscan, the other images were dropping below them. "Moving... up?"

  "I think so," Chippawa said, studying the instruments. "Yes, confirm that: We're moving up."

  "What about the starboard float?"

  Chippawa gestured helplessly. "No way to tell with the float held in the way it is. We won't know until we punch through whether it'll deploy or not."

  "I was afraid of that," Faraday said. "It looks like we've got enough spare oxygen to make about a two-minute burn if we can dole it out slowly enough."

  "And if we can't?"

  Faraday felt his lip twitch. "Then we get a pretty decent explosion."

  "I hate these either-ors," Chippawa grumbled. "Well, we're still going up."

  "What do you think?" Faraday asked cautiously, not daring to jinx this by putting his hopes into words. "Act Two of your group mating dance?"

  "He's not taking us up just to eat us," Chippawa said thoughtfully. "He could have done that down below. He's presumably now shown us to all the rest of his buddies, unless he's planning to go on tour around the whole planet. If we're still going up in ten minutes, I'd have to say he's trying to return us to the upper atmosphere."

  And there it was, out in the open for everyone to see. Surreptitiously, Faraday tapped on his wooden ring. "I wonder how we'll go down in their history," he murmured. "The strange beings in the shining sphere who fell from the sky?"

  Chippawa snorted. "I'd settle for being the pet frog his mother made him put back in the creek," he said. "Forget the dignity and just cross your fingers."