The Dogs of God

by Chris Kennedy

  The Jupiter-Cup Regatta had been put on hold for three years of inquests after the tragic race of 2198, when nineteen of twenty crews had perished. After allegations of sabotage to improve ratings almost ruined the sport, the regatta was finally re-endorsed by the Intrasystem Stratosail Racing Commission. Twenty crews would climb into their paper-thin hulls and plunge headlong into the maelstrom of Jupiter’s great eye. Dropped from a five-hundred-kilometer orbit, their lighter-than-air craft would soar into the layer of atmospheric pressure where buoyancy and gravity pulled equally upon them.

  Then they would race.

  Six-thousand kilometer-per-hour winds would propel them around the course at speeds no unpowered craft could match. They were the speed demons of the solar system, the last sporting heroes of a culture starved for new heights of entertainment. They knew the winner’s purse was only a bribe for them to risk their lives, and still they loved it.

  There were relatively few rules to the race: No powered propulsion; no interference with another team’s vessel, rig or electronics; and each vessel had to come within a predetermined range of each of the twelve laser beacons that delineated the course before they fired their retrieval thrusters and popped up from the hazy atmosphere to be plucked up by the committee ship.

  If they survived.

  From the moment the stratosailors dropped away from the committee ship, their life expectancies would plummet even faster than the crafts they rode.

  A gong sounded, and the buzz of the crowd hushed. Butterflies of apprehension doused the smiles of the teams.

  It was time.

  A booming voice cut through the silence, “The Committee ship has matched orbital velocity with the drop zone. The beacons are lit! Sailors to your boats, please, and Godspeed!”

  The convex walls of the hall flicked into transparency, revealing the swirling hell of Jupiter’s Great Eye. A knife-edge of daylight sliced across the monstrous red spot; the storm that had lived a million and a half years, and would live a million more. Men and women would challenge the storm today, and the storm would try to kill them. It always did. More often than not, it succeeded.

  The crowd roared as the teams waved and departed the cavernous hall, but there were no smiles on the sailors’ faces now.

  “Hell of a way to make a living,” Wren muttered as they left the hall, waving to the crowds.

  * * *

  Berk strapped in behind Wren and looked up through the transparent hull of their stratosailor at the committee ship. The kilometer-long wing shape bulged at its middle, where the observation hall hung down like an insect’s bulbous abdomen. Twenty miniscule crystal eggs nestled in neat rows along the wings. Twenty crews, forty souls, preparing to taunt death.

  “Cross check,” Wren said, breaking the silence.

  “Navigation.” Berk tapped the transparent wall that held back the vacuum of space. The nav-pack came up on the surface, their position directly over the Buoy One laser, altitude displayed numerically.

  “Check.” The diagnostics showed on Wren’s forward display.

  “Heat exchangers.” He tapped it up.

  “Check,” she answered.

  Of course, it was all for show. The systems aboard Scotch Bonnet had been checked and rechecked a hundred times before they came aboard. Every move they made was for the ratings.

  Fifty paper-thin holorecorders adhered to various surfaces inside the hull; tiny cameras watching their every move, transmitting to the committee ship and out to the Sol System Network for billions to see. Berk suppressed the urge to make a rude gesture, but even if he had, it would have been edited out. Family audience, you know. Until there was a hull breech, and a stream of ten thousand KPH superheated hydrogen sliced the crew in half. Then the cameras would record the entire grisly spectacle for twenty billion spectators to watch, from twenty different angles, in high definition color and surround sound.

  Entertainment.

  “Cross-check complete.” Wren enlarged the chronometer displayed over her head running backwards down to zero. “Drop minus one minute, ten.”

  “Check your life insurance policy,” Berk quipped, earning a half-glare from Wren. The other half was smile. His little quips bought them ratings bonuses, if they were good. If they were bad, well…she wouldn’t have been smiling.

  But her smile faded quickly.

  This was the worst of it, the last minute before drop.

  A large red handle hung just above each of them: the Chicken Switch. If it was pulled, a locking mechanism would prevent Scotch Bonnet from plummeting. Crew members had pulled the Chicken Switch before, and they may have even saved their own lives, but their careers had been instantaneously and irrevocably snuffed out.

  “Drop minus thirty.”

  “Oh, crap!” Berk pounded his armrest in frustration.

  “What!

  “I forgot my toothbrush!”

  “Drop minus twenty, smart-ass.” She thumbed the pad at her armrest, polarizing the hull. “Put on your sunglasses.”

  “SPF two-hundred on everything that counts, Captain!”

  The hull darkened until all the hues of the maelstrom were dimmed; red became black, yellow, orange. They were falling into a UV nightmare, but the hull would protect them.

  “Five, four, three—”

  “VD’s online!” Berk shouted as the rumble of the velocity dampening rockets shook them.

  “Two, one, drop!”

  The Committee ship leapt ahead of them. They weren’t really dropping, not yet, but as the VD rocket packs spent themselves, killing their orbital velocity, they began to fall.

  The rumbling stopped, and the spent rockets fell away.

  Silence.

  “I love this part,” Wren whispered, just loud enough for Berk to hear. He didn’t know if it was for the cameras, for him, or for herself, but he had to agree: this was the best part.

  The great planet came up to meet them, slowly, ponderously, twenty tiny jewels lined up in a perfect string, teardrop pearls around the neck of a vast goddess. It never seemed to last long enough.

  “Coming up on some flux in the magnetosphere,” Berk told her, seconds before the tiny hull shuddered.

  “Keel, twenty percent,” she ordered. “Mast, ten percent. Outriggers, four percent, and trim it to thirty degrees counterspin.”

  “Counterspin?” His voice cracked, fingers stalled over the pad.

  “You heard me, Berk. Counterspin! Now!”

  “Crazy bitch!” he muttered, executing the maneuver.

  Nineteen tiny gems darted away to the right, and one darted left, against the rotational spin of the great eye storm.

  The usual route—the sane route—was to let the hypervelocity winds carry you around one revolution, your sails out in a steadying diamond between the outriggers, mast, and keel. The primary vector of the wind was behind you, though there was always some turbulence, and the occasional ice or lightning storm. But going counterspin—tacking against the winds—it was faster, sure, but almost twice as far, and a hundred times more dangerous. Others had tried it, some had even survived, but none had made it profitable.

  “Thirty degrees,” Berk confirmed as the rig came into shape and they started to skim the atmosphere. “Picking up some air.”

  Well, it wasn’t even close to air, but even a few molecules at their speed felt like a hurricane. The tiny hull jerked and pitched, hammering through the upper magnetosphere like a bullet through layers of tissue paper.

  “Let the fun begin.” Wren grinned fiendishly as she tapped a sequence into her panel. Music ripped through the cabin, tearing at the air and their eardrums with equal ferocity.

  “Man, I hate that stuff,” Burk shouted, loud enough to be heard if the music had been below eighty decibels, which it wasn’t. He watched the bar graphs of stresses on the rig dance in response to every jolt, every variance in the atmosphere. “Hope she’s up to specs!”

  Scotch Bonnet’s spars were made of a charged single-molecule carbon nan
otube weave, laminated in virtually unbreakable electrostatically-bonded layers. Mimicking the action of human muscle, but on a molecular level, they extended or contracted in answer to Berk’s input. The sails were invisibly thin sheets of woven multiwalled nanotubes. The infinitely strong molecular cables were woven loose enough to let through about half of the hydrogen molecules that hit the weave. Maybe a third of the helium passed, and none of the heavier compounds. Right now, Scotch Bonnet was falling at a hellacious rate of speed, so the rig was reefed in to about five percent of its full potential. It was more than enough.

  They hit the upper hydrogen layer like a sword shattering a plate-glass window. The sails glowed white, and the masts incandesced until the hull polarized further to save their eyes. Heat was the problem now. Fortunately, the hull itself was virtually impervious, layers of super-conducting nanotubes sandwiched between voids of insulating vacuum. Heat in the form of hydrogen plasma trailed behind them in a glowing contrail for the spectators aboard the committee boat to admire.

  “Keel forty percent!” Wren shouted over the music, as if he couldn’t read her commands on the display. “Mast twenty! Outriggers nine! Trim ‘em like you mean it! Heading is zero-two-zero.”

  “Deck’s coming up in about fifteen seconds!” he yelled, watching the cloud deck rising to engulf them. They were coming in at a steep angle, and would dive deep into the atmosphere before the buoyancy of their vacuum-filled hull, spars, and mast brought them back up.

  If it brought them back up.

  “Say Goodnight, dear!” The colorful layer of microscopic particles enveloped them. He felt the strain on the rig and trimmed his sails even before the computer told him to.

  The strain eased, the hull popping and clattering with dissipating heat as he checked his heading and speed, and made minute corrections. They were descending at a seventy-degree angle, decelerating as the atmosphere got thicker. It got darker, the thicker atmosphere carrying more molecules of the trace elements that gave Jupiter her colors.

  Berk watched the pressure increase on his display and wiped the sweat from his brow. It wasn’t really hot, but he had a serious case of nerves. He trimmed the spars without being told, as their speed reduced from insane to merely foolhardy. Their arc leveled out, and they finally started to come up. He trimmed again as the ship shuddered violently, an ice storm or a layer of heavy gas, ammonia maybe. They were through it in a flash and starting to accelerate again. He peeled his white knuckles away from the armrests and punched up the display that told him their rig was still intact.

  “Looks like we’re in our layer!” Wren punched up some numbers, and Berk nodded. Their altitude was stable. The weight of the keel and the buoyancy of the vacuum-filled mast kept them oriented correctly. Berk adjusted the sails again and took some readings.

  “Keel’s at sixty, mast at forty, spars at twelve and eighteen percent, fifteen degrees fore and aft.” He checked their speed. “And humming along at about eighty-three hundred KPH.”

  Despite the colorful surrounding haze, the atmosphere outside was more than ninety-nine percent hydrogen and helium, which afforded them minimal friction at this speed. They’d have burnt to a crisp if they’d been flying through something as dense as air.

  “Excellent!” She brought the music down to match their velocity. “We’re making good time. Watch your heading; we should alter about two degrees inward per hour at this rate. I’m going to sleep. Wake me up before you tack.”

  “Marvelous.” Burk watched the glowing sails through the haze of the howling winds. “Sleep tight.” He knew she didn’t hear him. She was already snoring.

  * * *

  “Trouble, Berk!”

  “Wha—” He woke in a flash, fingers tapping on the diagnostics board like rabid spiders before his eyes were even clear from the fog of sleep.

  It was dark.

  They were seventy-one hours in, which put them into night for the seventh time. Daybreak was an hour away.

  “My board’s green.” He shook the sleep from his eyes as he focused on the display that hovered before his eyes in a sea of roaring blackness. The sound of the wind never left them, but they’d learned to ignore it. It was the motion of the ship they became hyper-attuned to; a good sailor would jerk out of a comatose slumber with the slightest change in motion of their vessel, ignoring the continual roar of white noise less than an inch from their head. “What’s the problem?”

  “Copper-Top and Icarus both just vanished from my scope.”

  “They were running one and two, weren’t they?” he asked, punching up his transponder display. There were seventeen boats left. Spruce Goose had dropped out after only two hours with a mast failure. They’d fired their pickup rockets, and the committee boat had scooped them up.

  “One and two spinward, yeah,” she confirmed. Scotch Bonnet was hours ahead of the pack, even though they were racing in opposite directions.

  Then he noticed the special significance of the event. “We’re coming up on their position in about twenty minutes.”

  “Probably an electrical storm, or maybe ice,” she surmised. There were few things that could knock a stratosailor out of the atmosphere in a heartbeat. Of course, they could still be alive, just silenced by atmospheric disturbance, but it was more likely that they’d lost spars and were tumbling like leaves in a six thousand KPH breeze, falling down where pressure, radiation, or heat would eventually kill them.

  Not Berk’s idea of fun, in any case, so he quickly started to program a change of course that would take them around the patch of sky that had just killed two ships.

  “What are you doing?” Wren asked, eyeing the calculations on her display.

  “Getting us the hell out of here. What does it look like?”

  “Looks like a waste of time to me. Whatever knocked them down will have dissipated by the time we cross their path.”

  “You think.”

  “I know. We’re in a six-thousand-click-per-hour storm. Anything in that kind of environment is transient, at best. A fart in a windstorm, literally.”

  “Well, thank you Captain Gas-Giant Meteorologist.” More than a little sarcasm dripped from his voice. She thought she could bully him just because she had the degree and the captain’s bars on her collar. “We’re tacking.”

  “No, we aren’t.” She overrode his board and canceled his commands. “Tack now, and you could put us right into whatever knocked those two out of the sky. Atmospheric phenomenons move around in this storm!”

  “Look!” He punched up the transponder display; the remaining ships were all changing course. “You’re right and sixteen other captains are wrong, is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

  “You arrogant, egomaniacal, greedy, power-mad…”

  “Don’t start that crap with me, Berk! You know I’m right, and what’s more, I’m in command of this vessel. No tack.”

  “I may not be in command, Wren, and I may not have your degree, but while your ass was glued to a chair in a classroom, mine was in a stratosailor. And I am smart enough to duck when something’s coming at me at Mach ten!”

  “Fine, then, Sailor-Man, tell me how you avoid a hurricane.”

  “A what?”

  “A hurricane. You know, those big storms that used to crop up on Earth every year, before they got a handle on the weather. How did sailors avoid them?”

  “Easy, don’t sail on a liquid-gas interface; too much disparity in specific gravity. The ride’s too rough.” She glared at him. “Okay, if I was foolish enough to be in a craft that couldn’t simply fly out of the way, I’d sail downwind. Those storms were cyclonic; if you sail around it, it’ll spit you out.”

  “Half right and half dead wrong, Berk. It depends on which side of the storm you’re on to start with. If you’re on the spinward side, the wind is moving the same direction the storm is moving. Sailing downwind will put you right in its path. The only two things you can do in that c
ase are sail close to the wind outbound or inbound, and believe it or not, the better strategy is to sail for the center of the storm, because by the time you get there, it’ll be past. If you’re on the leeward side, you’re right, sailing downwind will spit you out the back end.”

  “Well, thanks for the weather lesson, Professor. Now, can I tack this boat, or are you bent on playing the tough bitch and getting us killed?”

  “No tack, Berk. Hold your course. We’ll be fine.”

  At that precise moment, Scotch Bonnet slammed to port like a paper airplane hit by a tennis ball.

  What actually hit their ship, or more precisely, hit one of their four sails, massed much less than a tennis ball. In fact, it barely massed more than a small terrestrial butterfly, but at the speed it hit, it had the kinetic energy of a bowling ball dropped from a skyscraper.

  The impact was on their fore-lower quadrant; the ship was knocked nose down and sideways. The rig didn’t break, which saved their lives, but the sail had been holed, a seemingly impossible event. Trailing streamers of invisibly thin sail weave glowed white hot as the craft righted itself sickeningly.

  “REEF!” Wren screamed, stabbing at the gyro controls that would level their flight.

  “Keel won’t respond!” Berk snapped as spars and mast retracted partway. They heeled sharply. He brought in as much as he could without flipping them over and locked off the controls. “I’ve got her stable, but speed’s falling off. I don’t know if I can—” Then he looked outside. “Holy shit!”

  It was still dark, and would be for about fifty more minutes, but through the dark, things flew past from bow to stern. Too fast to get a good look, they were white, small, and left trails of incandescence in their wake. And like Scotch Bonnet, they were moving upwind.

  “What the hell are they?” Wren asked, checking her instruments between gawks at the spectacle. It looked as if they were sailing though a snowstorm, but the snowflakes were moving in the same direction they were, just slower. “Some kind of ice crystals?”

  Scotch Bonnet was losing speed with her sails reefed down hard, and the blurring passage of the little white motes was slowing. They were matching velocities, and as they did, Berk could make out more detail.