Timothy Zahn - Manta's Gift

Manta's Gift

Timothy Zahn

Manta's Gift

For my agent, Russell Galen, who picked Achilles' other choice

PROLOGUE

The Skydiver 7 had been filled with the soft sounds of beeping instruments and the ominous

rumbling of the windstorm outside when Jakob Faraday had finally drifted off to sleep. Now, seven

hours later, the storm was still raging against the probe's thick hull. But a new sound had also been

added to the mix: a low but pervasive humming.

"Welcome back to the edge of the envelope," Scotto Chippawa greeted him as Faraday eased

through the narrow doorway into the cramped control cabin. "Up a little early, aren't we?"

"Couldn't sleep," Faraday said, sliding into his chair beside the older man, listening to the faint

whirring from his power-assist exoskeleton as he awkwardly strapped himself in. The gravity suit

was a supreme nuisance, he'd long ago decided, and not nearly as user-friendly as its designers

probably thought. But moving around down here in Jupiter's two and a half gees would be well-nigh

impossible without it. "How are things going?"

"About the same as when you left," Chippawa said. "The wind's eased up a little, and the

temperature's passed three hundred Kelvin on its way up again. Coffee?"

"Sure," Faraday said. "Double latte, easy on the cinnamon, with double cream."

"Right," Chippawa commented dryly. "Nearest latte's currently—" he peered at one of the displays

"—a hundred thirty klicks straight up. Help yourself."

"Don't think I'm not tempted," Faraday grunted, swiveling his chair around to the zero-gee coffee pot

in its heating niche behind him. So they'd descended another forty kilometers since he'd toddled off

to bed. That put them well into Jupiter's troposphere, not to mention within striking range of the

record depth Keefer and O'Reilly had made it to last year. "I missed the rest of the cloud layers?"

"Slept right through them," Chippawa said cheerfully. "Don't worry, you'll get to see them again on

the way up."

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"Right," Faraday muttered, trying not to think about the hairline cracks the techs had found in Keefer

and O'Reilly's probe after their dive. "I'll look forward to it."

He went through the unnecessarily complicated routine of drawing a cup of coffee from the zero-gee

pot into his zero-gee mug. Another supreme nuisance, but one they also had no choice but to put up

with. The Jovian atmosphere was about as calm and peaceful as one of the Five Hundred's budgeting

sessions, and the pixel-pickers on Jupiter Prime got very upset when their glorified babysitters

spilled coffee on expensive electronics.

Especially given the current funding battles the Jupiter Sector was having back on Earth. The Five

Hundred, that oligarchy of the rich and powerful who effectively ran the Solar System, were

constantly pushing humanity's boundaries outward, pressing on to new frontiers almost before the

homesteading stakes had been driven into the ground of the last hard-fought conquest. With their

attention now turned to new colonization efforts on Saturn's moons, Jupiter's interests and struggles

were starting to get lost in the shuffle.

"By the way, Prime won't like it if they find out you shaved an hour off your sleep period,"

Chippawa commented. "They're very strict about the eight-hour rule."

"What was I supposed to do?" Faraday countered, sipping carefully at the brew. Fortunately, there

wasn't a lot even Chippawa could do to ruin instant coffee. "Just lie there and stare at the ceiling?"

"Sure," Chippawa said with a power-assisted shrug. "That's what the rest of us do."

Faraday sniffed. "I guess I'm just too young and idealistic to sluff off that way when there's work to

be done."

"Of course," Chippawa said. "I keep forgetting."

"It's that old-age thing," Faraday added soothingly. Chippawa was, after all, nearly fifty. "Memory

always goes first."

"Yes, but at least I sleep well," Chippawa said pointedly.

Faraday grimaced. "It always feels like there's a sumo wrestler sitting on my chest whenever I lie

down," he said. "I just can't sleep on these things."

"You'll get used to it," Chippawa assured him. "Somewhere around your fifth or sixth tether ride."

"If I last that long," Faraday said. "When did we pick up that humming noise?"

"About two hours ago," Chippawa said. "Prime thinks it's the wind hitting some sort of resonance

with the tether."

Involuntarily, Faraday glanced up at the cabin ceiling. "Terrific," he said. "You ever hear of the

Tacoma-Narrows Bridge?"

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"I took the same physics courses you did," Chippawa reminded him. "Saw the same old vids, too.

But this isn't that same kind of resonance."

"You hope," Faraday said, tapping a fingernail surreptitiously on the polished myrtlewood finger

ring his mother had given him when he graduated from high school. Not that he was superstitious or

anything; but the image of that bridge twisting and swinging in the breeze as the wind caught it just

right, and eventually coming completely apart, had haunted him ever since he saw it. "They will

keep an eye on it, I presume?"

"What, with two hundred million dollars' worth of equipment on the line?" Chippawa asked, waving

around. "Not to mention you and me?"

"Right." Taking another sip, Faraday gave the status board a quick check. Outside temperature was

still climbing, wind speed was manageable, atmospheric composition was still mostly hydrogen with

a pinch each of helium and methane mixed in. Hull pressure...

He winced and looked away. They were already at twenty bars, the equivalent of nearly two hundred

meters below sea level on Earth.

Two hundred meters was nothing to an Earthbound bathyscaph, of course. But then, an Earthbound

bathyscaph didn't also have to put up with heavy radiation and a magnetic field that could unscrew

the ratchets on a socket wrench.

He'd seen the specs on the Skydiver's design, fine-tuned somewhat since Keefer and O'Reilly had

taken their plunge, and he knew how much pressure it could handle. Even so, the actual raw

numbers still left his stomach feeling a little queasy. He lifted his cup to his lips—

And at that precise second, something slammed into the side of the probe.

"Sheester's Mother," Chippawa swore, grabbing for the stabilizer controls.

"What was that?" Faraday managed as his coffee tried to go down the wrong tube. Trained reflexes

set in, sending his cup flying as he grabbed at his own controls and checked the emergency board.

No hull breach; no oxygen tank or fuel-cell rupture; no hint of any other equipment malfunction.

"Sheester's Mother," Chippawa repeated, almost reverently this time. Faraday looked up—

And caught his breath. There, floating outside the thick Quadplexi window, squarely in the center of

the probe's external lights, was a two-meter-long solid object. It looked something like a cross

between a dolphin and a very large, very fat manta ray with a pair of long tails trailing behind it.

And as he watched, it rolled over and flapped away through the roiling atmosphere, its twin tails

beating rhythmically at the air. A second later, two more of them swam into view around the sides of

the probe and charged off after the first.

Slowly, Faraday turned to look at Chippawa. Chippawa was looking back at him.

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Chippawa said it first. "I guess Keefer wasn't imagining things," he said, his voice studiously casual.

Faraday nodded, all the data from all of the manned and unmanned probes for all of the past twenty

years flashing through his mind There was no life on Jupiter. None. Zip, zero, nada. All the books,

all the studies, all the experts agreed on that.

And all of them had ridiculed Keefer for what he'd claimed to have seen at the edge of his probe's

lights...

"No," Faraday said. "I guess he wasn't."

Chippawa hunched his shoulders. The familiar whine of the servos in the suit seemed to get him

back on track. "Well," he said briskly, keying for the radar section of their full-spectrum emscan

sensors. "You'd better give Prime a full tie-in. I'll see what kind of track I can get on the things."

"Right," Faraday said, forcing his fingers to function. Whatever had swum past them had had the

courtesy, or else the sheer clumsiness, to announce its presence with a loud knock on the hull.

Which could potentially be a very serious problem. The Skydiver's hull was designed to handle

immense but steady pressures, not the sharp impact of something solid ramming into it.

He keyed the tie-in first as Chippawa had instructed, giving the tether ship flying far above them full

audio and visual access to what was happening inside the probe as well as the usual telemetry feed.

Then, trying to ignore the feeling in the pit of his stomach, he activated the outside cameras and

started a systematic examination of the hull.

Chippawa got to his finish line first. "Got 'em," he announced. "Four blips, moving off to starboard."

"I thought there were three of them," Faraday said absently, his own fingers pausing as the cameras

located the impact point. It wasn't much, as impact points went; the dent was hardly even noticeable.

But it was a dent.

And as he stared at the image he could swear he could see the marks of teeth...

"There must have been another one we didn't see," Chippawa said. "Wait a second. There are five of

them out there. No; six. Sheester's Mother."

He shook his head. "It's a school of them," he said. "A whole double-clove-latte school. Like a pod

of whales."

"Or piranha," Faraday said. "Take a look at this."

Chippawa glanced at the image on Faraday's display. "One of them bumped us," he said. "We knew

that."

"Look closer," Faraday insisted. "I may be imagining things, but those look like teeth marks."

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"You're imagining things," Chippawa declared. "Come on. Anything bigger than a puppy knows

better than to chew on metal."

"Unless it's what they eat," Faraday countered crossly. Chippawa didn't have to dismiss his concerns

quite so cavalierly.

"What, in the Jovian atmosphere?" Chippawa scoffed. "You think floating metal grows on trees

around... oh, my God."

"What?" Faraday demanded, spinning around to his own emscan display.

And felt his skin prickling. There was a school of the fat mantas out there, all right. Maybe two

dozen of them.

All of them clustered around two very large blips. Blips, if the radar could be believed, that were

each the size of a nice little starter house in the suburbs.

Chippawa's comment on this development would undoubtedly have been a very interesting one. But

he never got the chance to make it Even as Faraday's brain registered the size of the newcomers the

probe lurched, the background humming hiccupping into a sudden twang. "What—?" Faraday

yelped.

"Something hit the tether," Chippawa said. "There—look."

Faraday craned his neck. Another of the fat mantas was scooting along across the edge of the

Skydiver's light cone. Unlike the others, this one seemed to be trailing an expanding mist of bright

yellow. "He didn't just hit the tether," he said, the bad feeling in his stomach getting suddenly worse.

"He cut himself on it."

"Sure looks like it," Chippawa agreed as the manta vanished outside the range of their lights. "Better

check it out." He reached for the camera control—

And suddenly the probe was slammed violently sideways.

Faraday grabbed at his board as his chair bounced down out from under him and then slammed hard

up against his tailbone again. A stray thought caught oddly at the back of his mind; what had

happened to his coffee cup and was it leaking on anything. There was a second jolt, this one from the

other side, then a third that seemed to come from above. Something that looked like a gray wall

studded with randomly placed dimples slid past bare centimeters from the Quadplexi. There was

another slam from above, the worst one yet—

And with a horrible twisting of Faraday's stomach, his chair fell away from beneath him and didn't

come back up. The tether to the ship above had been broken, and the probe was in free fall.

"Floats!" Chippawa snapped.

Faraday already had the safety cover wrenched up and out of the way. "Floats," he repeated, and

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pressed the button.

There was the crack of explosive bolts, and the moaning of the wind outside was joined by a violent

hiss as the tanks of compressed helium began dumping their contents into the probe's rubber-raft

pontoons. Faraday held his breath...

And then, with another horrible twisting of his stomach, the Skydiver rolled over onto its right side.

"Malfunction!" he barked, eyes darting to the error display as all his weight slammed down onto his

ribs and his right armrest. The words flashed onto the screen in bright red—"Starboard tank's

blocked," he reported tightly. A support slide unfurled from the right collar of his suit, moving into

position along the side of his head to relieve the strain the change in attitude had put on his neck.

"No helium's getting into the float."

"Must be water in the valve," Chippawa said grimly from his seat, now hanging directly above

Faraday. "Firing secondary."

Faraday held his breath, straining his ears for the sound of hissing helium. But there was nothing.

And the error message was still glaring red at him.

"Secondary also malfunctioning," Chippawa reported. "Damn water must be in the line, not the

valves. The expanding helium's frozen it into a solid plug."

And they were still going down. "Any way to get to it?" Faraday asked.

Chippawa shook his head, an abbreviated wobbling around his own suit's neck support. "Not from

inside. It's bound to fix itself sooner or later—it's over three hundred Kelvin out there."

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.

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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.

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"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.

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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 that 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.

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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.

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Timothy Zahn - Manta's Gift

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