Timothy Zahn - Manta's Gift

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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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Manta's Gift

"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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Manta's Gift

"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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Manta's Gift

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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Manta's Gift

"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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Manta'sGiftTimothyZahnManta'sGiftFormyagent,RussellGalen,whopickedAchilles'otherchoicePROLOGUETheSkydiver7hadbeenfilledwiththesoftsoundsofbeepinginstrumentsandtheomi\nousrumblingofthewindstormoutsidewhenJakobFaradayhadfinallydrifted\offtosleep.Now,sevenhourslater,thestormwasstillragingagainsttheprob...

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