He started to pray, but the thought that flooded his mind was I don’t want to die. O God, God, don’t make me die. Don’t kill me here, in this dark and distant sea. Help me. Help me.
Karlstad hovered beside him, eyes blank and staring at whatever inner universe filled his soul, his body curled into a weightless fetal posture. He’s given up, Grant thought. He knows we’re going to die.
Still Grant’s fingers raced across the touchscreens, seeking some measure of control over the sinking submersible, picking out links to the backup systems, trying to bring the auxiliaries on-line.
Help me, God, he pleaded. Don’t tell me this ocean is beyond Your realm. God of the universe, help me!
The ship shuddered.
Instinctively Grant looked up, then turned toward Karlstad. Egon blinked, stirred.
The bridge seemed to tilt, then righted itself. Grant floated free of his one intact floor loop, then his feet touched the deck once more.
Closing his eyes, he tried to see outside through the few sensors still working. Nothing. Only a mottled gray —the ship quivered again, swayed. One of the glowering red lights on Grant’s console suddenly turned amber and then green.
Peering through the ship’s sensors, Grant realized that what he was seeing was the immense stretch of a Jovian, so close that it was actually touching the sub, nudging it gently, like an elephant delicately balancing a baby carriage on its back.
Grant could hardly breathe. Glancing at his battered console, he saw that the green light was the attitude indicator. Zheng He was no longer spiraling downward.
He reached across and shook Karlstad by the shoulder, then typed, SENSORS.
Egon licked his lips, purely a reflex in their liquid surroundings, then tapped into the sensors.
Grant squeezed his eyes shut and saw that the sub was resting on the gigantic back of one of the whales. No, not just any of them; it was the Jovian who’d been attacked by the sharks. Grant could see wide swaths of raw flesh where the sharks had ripped away its skin.
WE RISING? Karlstad asked.
YES!!!! Grant’s heart was hammering beneath his ribs. A guardian angel! A million-ton, ten-kilometer-long Jovian guardian angel is carrying us up and out—
His elation snapped off. The Jovian can’t carry us out of the ocean. It can’t fly us home.
The thrusters. Grant checked the entire power and propulsion systems. The fusion generator was undamaged, working normally. The thrusters—could they last long enough to push them out of the ocean, through the atmosphere and clouds, out into orbit?
DATA CAPSULES, Grant typed. Even if we don’t make it, we have to give them all our information. He banged away on his keyboard as Karlstad prepared the last pair of the data capsules.
They were rising swiftly now. Through the ship’s sensors Grant could see the entire community of Jovians swimming around them, sleek and smooth, making hardly a ripple as they propelled themselves through the sea far faster than Zheng He could have gone on its own. The Jovians flashed signals back and forth among themselves; pictures, Grant was certain, hoping that the ship’s cameras were still working well enough to record it all.
The thrusters were still shut down. Can I power them up without causing them to fail? Then a new thought struck him: I can’t power them up while we’re riding on the Jovian’s back. The superheated steam would hurt him.
Would it? Yes, of course it would, Grant told himself. The Jovian’s made of flesh, its skin isn’t a heat shield. You killed a couple of the sharks with the thrusters’ exhaust, of course it’ll hurt the Jovian.
But if I don’t light them up we won’t get out of here. The whale can carry us only so far. The rest of the way we’ll need the thrusters.
Grant turned toward Karlstad, but he would be no help, he saw. Egon was standing rigidly now, fists clenched at his sides, eyes squeezed shut, watching the scene outside through the ship’s sensors.
Decide, decide! Grant raged at himself.
He called up the flight program, then instructed the computer to plug in their current velocity. The screen went blank for a heartstopping instant, then displayed a graph with a green curve showing the thrust vector needed to achieve orbit. The computer can hear my voice, Grant marveled, even though I can’t.
The numbers showed that he had a very small window of opportunity to ignite the thrusters. It would open in twelve seconds and close half a minute later.
Without further debate, Grant started the thrusters. Low, just minimum power, he told himself. Give the Jovian a warning of what’s to come. In the back of his mind he realized that the giant creature was performing as a first-stage booster, giving Zheng He an initial burst of energy in the long battle to break free of Jupiter’s massive gravity and achieve orbit.
Not a nice way to treat someone who’s saved your life, Grant said to himself. Sorry, my Jovian friend.
He edged the thrusters to one-quarter power.
Even through its thickly armored hide, Leviathan felt the heat. Its sensor-members shrilled an alarm. The others of the Kin, swimming with Leviathan, flashed their warnings, also.
Leviathan hesitated only for a moment, then plunged down, leaving the stranger to itself.
The Elders flashed superior wisdom: The alien rewards you with pain.
Its ways are different from ours, Leviathan answered.
It is just as well, the Elders pictured as one. We could not have climbed much farther into the cold. Come, let us return to our home region and resume the Symmetry.
Leviathan agreed reluctantly. But it took one last look at the tiny, frail stranger. It was shooting up through the water now, driven by the hot steam emerging from its vents, heading upward into the cold abyss.
The steam pushes it through the water! Leviathan marveled. Like the Darters, it uses jets instead of flagella!
And it is racing up into the cold abyss. It must want to be there. That must be its home region.
How could anything live up there? Leviathan wondered. There is so much that we don’t know, so much to be learned.
One moment they were riding the Jovian’s back, climbing smoothly through the ocean. Then, when Grant edged the thrusters’ power higher, the Jovian flicked them off its massive back and dove downward, returning to the warmer layers of the ocean. Grant pushed full power and Zheng He climbed, rattling, its cracked and battered hull shaking like an ancient fragile airplane caught in a storm.
Even in the viscous liquid Grant could feel the growing acceleration as he watched the one working screen on his console. A red blip showed the ship’s position along the green curve of the orbital injection trajectory. They were close to the curve, not exactly on it, but close.
Close enough?
Maybe, he decided. If the ship holds together long enough. Then he remembered the rest of the crew. He reached for Karlstad’s shoulder again, shook him out of his concentration on the sensors’ view.
He typed on his keyboard: ZEB? LANE? KREBS?
Karlstad shrugged helplessly.
TAKE A LOOK, Grant commanded.
Slowly Karlstad disconnected his optical fibers and swam back to the hatch. It was sealed shut; Egon had to punch in the emergency code to get it to slide open. It must have closed automatically when we were in all that turbulence, Grant thought.
He stood alone on the wrecked bridge, feeling the ship straining against the jealous pull of Jupiter’s gravity, struggling to climb through the thick heavy ocean, through the deep turbulent atmosphere with its swirling, slashing deck of clouds, and out into the calm emptiness of orbital space.
Karlstad swam back beside him. Without bothering to link his biochips he typed, I STRAPPED THM IN.