The Medusa Chronicles (13 page)

THREE

RETURN TO JUPITER

2284

18

The pink-purple light of a Jupiter evening shone on the face of the sleeping Martian.

When the medical monitors chimed to inform him that Trayne Springer was beginning to wake at last, Falcon reluctantly turned away from his conversation with Ceto. Not for the first time since his first encounter with the medusae—which had been, astonishingly, nearly two centuries ago—Falcon found himself puzzling over the content of one of the great beasts' communications. He could tell Ceto was concerned, however. Even frightened about something—the multiple references to the Great Manta in her long radio songs were proof enough of that . . .

But for now Ceto would have to wait.

The young Martian stood upright in his atmospheric-entry support unit like a mummy in a coffin, all but encased in exoskeletal armour that left only the flesh of his face visible. His gloved hands were crossed over his breast—partially obscuring the gaudy image on the chest plate, of a springbok leaping over the Valles Marineris. It was a personal adornment that would have told Falcon all he needed to know about the boy's family background even if he hadn't known his name. Trayne's eyes remained closed, he breathed to an accompaniment of a steady hiss from the machines
that helped inflate his lungs in the heavy gravity, and the pale-pink dribble at his mouth was a last trace of the suspension fluid that had supported his frame and internal organs through the worst of the thirty gravities' acceleration the
Ra
had endured during its entry into the Jovian atmosphere.

Falcon took a tissue and gently dabbed the stray fluid away.

“Thanks.”

The Martian's voice startled Falcon, and he rolled back. Trayne's eyes were open now, and he was smiling. Falcon knew he was just thirty years old; he looked younger with those wide blue eyes and the very Martian pallor of his skin. Falcon said, “I'm a pretty good nurse for an old rust-bucket. So you're awake at last.”

Trayne frowned. “At last?”

Falcon believed in being blunt. “Your recovery took a lot longer than your countrymen on Ganymede predicted. Days, in fact, rather than hours.”

Trayne seemed concerned. “Well, this was an experimental procedure.” Martians sent to work in the Jovian atmosphere, though braced against Jupiter's steady gravitational pull, were generally brought down in slow-­descent, low-deceleration trajectories that could take days, rather than the mere savage hours of Falcon's preferred, more direct method. Now, given the Martians' involvement in the Machines' Core Project, Trayne had been a guinea pig for a new, physically tougher strategy. “I hope there's been no lasting damage.”

“None that the monitors can detect. But let's check it out. You remember your name?”

“Trayne Springer.”

“Good.”

“And you're Commander Howard Falcon. My cousin Thera, that Terran fuddy-duddy, is in command up on Amalthea—”

“No need to show off. What's the last thing you remember?”

Trayne concentrated, then smiled. “Before we began the atmospheric entry, you set the hull to transparent to show me Halley's Comet. Quite a sight.”

Falcon smiled back. “It's the fourth encounter I've witnessed. You get used to it. What's the date?”

“AFF 298.”

Falcon puzzled over that, until he got the reference. “AFF—after the first footstep on Mars, by John Young in 1986. Correct?”

“According to the archaic calendar still used by your World Government—”

Falcon held his hands up. “
Your
World Government too; you're as much a citizen of it as I am. And I notice you count in Earth years, not Martian.”

“Only to avoid confusing the Terrans.”

Falcon suppressed a sigh. Only offworlders called citizens of Earth “Terrans.” “Evidently you're just as compos mentis, and just as annoying, as when you stowed away on my craft up on Amalthea.”

Trayne grinned. “I'm relieved to hear it.”

“But that ten-gee deceleration knocked you flat, not to mention the thirty-­gee peaks. I'd say the trial has already proven its point—you Martians
will
need a hand when you challenge the heart of Jupiter alongside the Machines. Wouldn't you say?”

“I'll leave that to my bosses. Now, could you help me out of this coffin . . . ?”

19

Since the voyage of the
Kon-Tiki
, Howard Falcon had returned to Jupiter many times.

This time he was back because of the Machines.

Times had changed. The unthinkable had become commonplace. Machines back in the inner solar system. Machines in the clouds of Jupiter.

It was already thirty years since, after fifty years of silence, the Machines had made tentative contact from their self-imposed exile in the Oort Cloud. There had followed years of negotiation and argument between Machines and various human factions. The World Government was still bruised from the exodus of 2199—from the humiliation of losing control of the autonomous agents it had brought into being, and from the consequent collapse of the KBO volatile supply chain once the brains of the operation had been removed, after which the solar system economy had sunk into a long and demoralising recession. The Martians, meanwhile, had petitioned for a renewed contact with the Machines. Their argument was that the Machines were out there anyhow, and that sooner or later there would have to be renewed engagement. Surely it would be better to have that contact under terms of peaceful cooperation . . . ?

Falcon had been a witness to these tectonic shifts of history.

One ambiguous benefit of his cyborgised state, which had revealed itself only slowly over time, was a virtual immortality. Life-extension treatments were common now, but Falcon was easier to maintain than a fully normal human—easier than Hope Dhoni, say, who had continued to be his doctor and companion through the years. Indeed his lack of organs, of stomach and liver and genitals, rendered him calmer than most, it often seemed to him. A calm, passionless witness to centuries rolling like tides across the solar system.

And he was still engaged in the great game.

After that tentative first renewal of contact there had followed a decade of cautious negotiation. Then the World Government, through its Energy and Space Development Secretariats, had cautiously issued the first licences for Machine operations in the clouds of Jupiter. Tremendous floating factories would be built to strain the fine trace of a particular isotope, helium-3, out of the Jovian air. It was the best fusion fuel available, and had to be extracted from an environment to which, as Falcon had long argued, Machines, and not humans, were best suited. There had been political back-slaps all round when the first shipments of precious fuel started to be shipped to Earth and the colony worlds, kickstarting a spurt of economic growth.

That optimistic mood didn't last long.

When the operation had been approved the extraction plants were meant to be fully automated: in other words, crewed solely by Machines, under the control of WG staff stationed on the moons of Jupiter. But with time, the Machines had shown increasing signs of independence. Disturbed, and ever mindful of the KBO flinger disaster, the WG brought in a Martian crew to supplement the Machines, and to keep an eye on them—only to find, a few years later, the Martians themselves becoming increasingly independent-minded, increasingly difficult to manage and, Earth suspected, exploring options of their own on Jupiter. Options which had nothing at all to do with mining helium for the home worlds.

Eventually the Martians themselves came up with a plan to rectify this growing atmosphere of distrust: to include the Machines as equal partners
in a daring enterprise that required human expertise and Machine resilience together. It would be a cooperative venture, a political stunt—and also a grand and highly visible project that could not be achieved by either alone.

A journey to the centre of Jupiter.

The WG could hardly veto the project. But it needed somebody of its own on the inside. Somebody with historic connections to both Jupiter and the Machines. Somebody, ideally, seen as somewhat neutral and detached from all the worlds of mankind. A citizen of the WG equipped to survive the conditions of Jupiter.

Who else?

So Howard Falcon was summoned from his patient exploration of Jupiter's exotic outer regions, a study that had occupied contented decades. Of course he was drawn by the prospect of a mission to the Jovian core, for the dream of descending deeper than the highest clouds had nagged at him for most of his long life. Getting elbow-deep in the murk of inter­planetary politics seemed a small price to pay to achieve that dream.

And so here was Howard Falcon with a Martian on his bridge.

20

The pressurised cabin was a sphere cut in two by an open mesh deck, living space and control area above, stores and systems below. Trayne's armour-like exoskeletal support suit whirred and hissed as he moved through this space, and Falcon knew that he was supported by more subtle systems embedded within his body, from pumps and motors to assist his heart and lungs down to molecular-level restructurings of his organs, muscles, bone and cartilage.

All this to enable him to withstand Jupiter's ferocious gravity—two and a half times that of Earth, and around seven times that of Mars. It was an irony that Martians had been able to rebuild themselves to work in the Jovian environment where Earthborn humans, born in a tougher gravity, generally failed—but then for centuries Martians had needed technological support just to survive visits to Earth, and had learned to cope. Even so, the
Ra
's savage descent into Jupiter had put those systems under unprecedented strain, and Falcon hoped to prove that Martians still needed the experience and skills of an Earthborn such as himself to support their bold venture.

Still, he wished no harm on anybody, and certainly not on this high-­spirited if exasperating young Martian volunteer.

His mobility routine finished, Trayne sat down on a roomy couch, hooked his suit up to various support systems, and “ingested nutrients non-intravenously,” as his medical checklist demanded: he ate a bagel and sipped black coffee. Stiff supports at his neck and back made his movements awkward. “So I was out for days.” He sounded indignant now. “I missed all of the mission so far—the last stages of entry, inflating the ­dirigible—”

“Don't blame me. I argued with your medics, who wanted to abort altogether and bring you straight back to Amalthea.”

Trayne looked chastened. “All right. Well, I'm glad you let me get this far.” He glanced around at the cabin. The walls were cluttered with instrument and control panels, save for a few windows set to ­transparency—and beyond those windows, salmon-pink shadows shifted. Trayne grinned. “Wow. I feel like I'm slowly waking up. That's Jupiter out there. I really am aboard the
Ra
.”

“You really are.”

“I guess for you it's just like being back aboard the
Kon-Tiki
.”

“Not particularly,” Falcon said dryly. “That dive was the best part of two centuries ago, you know.
Ra
features rather a lot of upgrades . . .”

If
Kon-Tiki
had been Falcon's Apollo, a one-shot pioneering vessel, the
Ra
was his Ares, the class of vessel John Young had taken to Mars, designed from the beginning for extended exploration.
Ra
had, among other enhancements, a buoyancy envelope consisting of a shell of self-healing polymer surrounding a structure of aerogel, “frozen smoke,” much more robust than the
Konicki
's air bag. The gondola, doubling as a shuttle to orbit, was powered by the latest deuterium-helium-3 fusor technology and was significantly more capable than his old craft's deuterium-­tritium equivalent. All these elements had been tested out over the years in a number of challenging missions.

“I know I'm a relic of a bygone age. But at least now they call me the Santos-Dumont of Jupiter, as opposed to the Montgolfier.”

“Who . . . ?”

“Never mind.”

“I was always a fan of yours, you know.”

“A
fan
?”

“I mean, the flight of the
Kon-Tiki
wasn't exactly Greenberg on Mercury, but it was still pretty impressive.”

“Praise indeed.”

“And now here
I
am, flying in the clouds of Jupiter.”

“Here you are.”

Geoff Webster had always said Falcon was basically a showman. Falcon remembered that quote his old friend had been so fond of: ASTONISH ME! Now, unable to resist a little of that spirit, Falcon clapped his artificial hands.

The cabin walls turned entirely transparent.

Trayne's eyes widened.

It was as if the two of them, with a clutter of equipment, were suspended in a tremendous sky, with the huge hull of
Ra
over their heads. Below was an ocean of cloud, pale and billowing, which stretched almost unbroken to a flat horizon. In that ocean lightning flashes swarmed and spread—electric storms, Falcon knew, the size of continents on Earth. They were looking to the west, where the setting sun—five times further away from Jupiter than from Earth—cast shadows hundreds of kilo­metres long. Above them were more cloud layers, filmy, cirrus-like sheets and streaks, obscuring a crimson-black sky in which a handful of brilliant stars could be seen to shine.

“It's almost like Earth,” Trayne murmured. “On one of that mud bath's better days.”

“Remember the briefings? We're about a hundred kilometres beneath the top of the atmosphere—which these days is defined as the point where the air pressure is one tenth of Earth's. We used to use an apparent surface a few hundred kilometres below this level as a reference, but
that
turned out to be little more than an artefact of sensor reflection, and too unreliable to be useful. We're just above the cloud deck the climatologists label the C layer.”

Trayne nodded, and pointed up. “A is ammonia cirrus, fifty or sixty kilometres higher up. Below that, B is ammonia salts—”

“And C is water vapour. Out there the conditions are like a shallow sea on Earth, which is why the local life is so rich—”

Trayne pointed to a darkish smear, off to the left, the south. “And what's
that
?”

Falcon eyed him. For the Earthborn passengers Falcon had brought this way over the years, starting with Geoff Webster and Carl Brenner and other veterans of that first descent in the
Kon-Tiki
, the trigger word “life” usually provoked a storm of questions. But not with this young Martian.

“That,” Falcon said heavily, “is the Great Red Spot.”

Trayne did a double-take. “Wow!”

“You're seeing it edge-on. It's a persistent storm—hundreds of years old, at least—but it's actually very shallow.”

“Is it safe?”

“For us? Oh, yes—we're thousands of kilometres away. We're more likely to be troubled by an eruption from one of the big, deep Sources.”

“The Sources—the origins of the big radio outbursts? I'd like to see
that
. The Wheels of Zeus!”

Falcon grunted. The “Wheels” were a spectacular but harmless phe­nomenon, tremendous bands of bioluminescent light in the air triggered by the shock of distant, tremendously powerful radio outbursts. Falcon was still embarrassed he had been alarmed when confronted with them in the
Kon-Tiki
. “Tourist-brochure codswallop.”

“Why are we so close to the Spot? I read that you took the
Kon-Tiki
down far away from that feature.”

“There was so little we understood before I made that first descent. In particular, we didn't know that storms like the Spot dig up nutrients from the layers below, all the way down to the thermalisation boundary. They're like ocean springs on Earth.”

“So the Spot attracts life?”

Falcon grinned. “Exactly. Life like that.” He pointed over Trayne's shoulder.

And Trayne turned to see, on the other side of the ship, a forest of ten­tacles waving like seaweed—it seemed just beyond the cabin wall.

“Citizen Third Grade Springer, I'd like you to meet Ceto.”