Manta's Gift

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."

"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?"

"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.

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."

"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 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.

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.

"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 cliche 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.

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.

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.

"Well, it's not like we'd be able to go anywhere right now anyway," Chippawa pointed out, his voice far too reasonable for Faraday's taste. "Firing up the turboprops now would just snarl the blades.

Wait a sec."

He bent suddenly over the controls. "Something?" Faraday asked hopefully.

"Just a thought," the other said. "If I can fine-tune the emscan a little, maybe we can see how thick the skin is over the other shipwrecks out there."

"Oh," Faraday said, feeling the flicker of hope fade away.

Still, now that Chippawa mentioned it, the view outside did rather look like a shipwreck scene. A

dozen ships lying at the bottom of a murky ocean, with strange underwater seaweed growing up over all of them. "What do you want me to do?"

"Check the manual and see if there's any way you can boost power to the radio," Chippawa said. "If we can find a way to punch a signal through this soup, we can at least let Prime know about all this."

He smiled tightly. "I mean, we should at least let them know we're due some posthumous citations."

"Got it," Faraday said. He didn't smile back.

They worked in silence for what seemed like a long time. The only sounds in the cabin were the beeping of the instruments, the howling of the wind outside, and—at least for Faraday—the thudding of his own heart.

The window was almost completely covered by the time he finally gave up. "We're not going to get through," he said. "The atmosphere's just too thick. I can't even pick up their carrier; and if I can't hear them, they sure as hell can't hear us. Any luck there?"

"Possibly," Chippawa said. "The creature's skin in general is pretty thick, up to thirty centimeters in places. Definitely the same as the wrapping around the mummies out there, though that stuff's not nearly as thick. But this batch—"

"Wait a sec," Faraday interrupted him. "Mummies?"

"That's what the emscan shows," Chippawa said. "The big one, anyway. It has the same basic internal structure as the fellow who buzzed us."

"And that structure's intact?" Faraday asked. "Not decayed or digested or anything?"

"Not that I can tell," Chippawa said. "That's point one for the good guys: At least we're not about to be eaten or absorbed alive. Point two is that the batch growing up around the Skydiver isn't nearly as thick or strong as the rest of it."

He nodded toward the window. "Which means that if the starboard helium line clears up soon enough, and if we're not too deep for the float to deploy, there's a chance we'll be able to punch our way out of here."

"Lot of ifs in that," Faraday pointed out doubtfully. An image floated to mind: a Golden Movie Age vid he and his brothers used to watch called Pinocchio, where the heroes had been trapped in the stomach of a giant whale. How had they gotten out of that? He couldn't remember. "Assuming all the rest of it, how do you propose we do that?"

The last remaining sliver of outside view vanished beneath the sheet of brown-gray. "I don't know,"

Chippawa admitted. "Maybe an electric discharge, if we can boost the voltage high enough and figure out how to deliver it. Or maybe some acid from one of our fuel cells will do something."

"Or maybe a fire," Faraday said. That was it; they'd made a fire in the whale's stomach. "Don't forget, most of that soup out there is pure hydrogen. If we can supply enough oxygen from our own air supply, we should be able to get a nice little fire going."

Chippawa whistled softly. "And maybe fry ourselves in the process," he pointed out. "But it's better than doing nothing. Let's figure out how much we can spare—"

He broke off as, once again, the chairs dropped out from under them. "We're heading down again,"

Faraday said tightly, looking over at the depth indicator.

The indicator, contrary to what his stomach and inner ear were telling him, was holding perfectly steady. "What the—? Oh. Right."

"It's the pressure of the skin around us," Chippawa said. "Fouls up the readings. Still, at least that means we're not going to get flattened like roadkill."

"It also means that if we wait too long to punch our way out, we won't be able to do so," Faraday countered. "Not much point in breaking free if you're only going to get squashed a millisecond later."

Chippawa made a face. "Yeah. Point."

"And of course, with the depth meter off-track, we won't even know when we've passed that nochance depth," Faraday added. "We don't even know how deep we are right now."

"Maybe I can do something with the emscan," Chippawa said. "You get busy and figure out how much oxygen we can spare."

Once again silence descended on the probe. This time, muffled in their freshly grown cocoon, there wasn't even the wailing of the wind outside to keep them company.

Wrapped up in his work and his thoughts, Faraday only gradually became aware of the new sound rumbling beneath his feet.

He paused, listening. In some ways it reminded him of the howling of a restless wind, rising and falling with no discernible pattern. But the tone was deeper and more varied than simple wind.

And as he listened, he could swear he could hear words in it...

"Scotto?" he murmured.

"Yeah," the other said quietly. "I'm not sure, but I think they're talking to each other."

Something with lots of cold feet began to run up and down Faraday's back. "They?"

Chippawa gestured toward the emscan display. "They."

The image was vague and indistinct, like looking through a thick layer of gelatin. But it was clear enough. There were at least twenty more of the lumpy creatures out there, some of them swimming around, others more or less floating in place. Straining his ears Faraday discovered he could hear more of the windlike rumbles coming from outside, at least when the one they were attached to wasn't making any noise of its own.

It was like a damn roundtable discussion. And judging from the direction all of them out there seemed to be facing, he could guess the topic of conversation.

The Skydiver.

With an effort, he found his voice. "So these are the intelligent ones? Not the torpedoes?"

"Maybe they're all intelligent," Chippawa said. "Maybe none of them are. Maybe we've just stumbled on some kind of group mating dance or something."

There was a whisper of feeling in Faraday's inner ear. "We're moving," he said tightly, trying to sort out the sensations. On the emscan, the other images were dropping below them. "Moving... up?"

"I think so," Chippawa said, studying the instruments. "Yes, confirm that: We're moving up."

"What about the starboard float?"

Chippawa gestured helplessly. "No way to tell with the float held in the way it is. We won't know until we punch through whether it'll deploy or not."

"I was afraid of that," Faraday said. "It looks like we've got enough spare oxygen to make about a two-minute burn if we can dole it out slowly enough."

"And if we can't?"

Faraday felt his lip twitch. "Then we get a pretty decent explosion."

"I hate these either-ors," Chippawa grumbled. "Well, we're still going up."

"What do you think?" Faraday asked cautiously, not daring to jinx this by putting his hopes into words. "Act Two of your group mating dance?"

"He's not taking us up just to eat us," Chippawa said thoughtfully. "He could have done that down below. He's presumably now shown us to all the rest of his buddies, unless he's planning to go on tour around the whole planet. If we're still going up in ten minutes, I'd have to say he's trying to return us to the upper atmosphere."

And there it was, out in the open for everyone to see. Surreptitiously, Faraday tapped on his wooden ring. "I wonder how we'll go down in their history," he murmured. "The strange beings in the shining sphere who fell from the sky?"

Chippawa snorted. "I'd settle for being the pet frog his mother made him put back in the creek," he said. "Forget the dignity and just cross your fingers."

Ten minutes later, they were still going up. Fifteen minutes after that, Faraday had the oxygen tanks rigged for a slow leak. Or so he hoped, anyway.

And after that, it was just a matter of sitting back and waiting.

"Looks like more of the torpedo-shapes out there," Faraday suggested, peering at the emscan display. "We must be back up to where we ran into Dark Eye."

"You couldn't prove it by these pressure readings," Chippawa said, shaking his head. "You know, it occurs to me that if that skin layer out there is keeping up this kind of pressure, we may be completely enclosed. I mean, completely enclosed."

"Makes sense," Faraday agreed. "That would be why we weren't crushed while he was showing us off to his buddies."

"You miss my point," Chippawa said. "I'm wondering if we're even going to be able to get to the hydrogen outside."

Faraday opened his mouth, closed it again. "Oh, boy," he muttered.

"Maybe we can poke a hole with something," Chippawa went on. "We've got a couple of sampling probes we haven't extended, though they probably aren't strong enough. The pulse transmitter laser might do the job."

"Except that it's nowhere near the oxygen valve," Faraday pointed out. "Unless we can inflate the starboard float enough to push the skin back—"

He broke off as a muffled thud came from somewhere above them. "What was that?" he demanded, trying to penetrate the haze on the emscan display. "Another of those little guys?"

"Looks like it," Chippawa said. "Don't they ever watch where they're going?"

An instant later they were thrown against their restraints as the Skydiver was rocked violently by a quick one-two-three set of jolts. "Incoming!" Chippawa snapped. "Three of the big torpedoes."

The probe was slammed again to the side. "Depth gauge just twitched," Faraday called as the sudden change of reading caught his eye. "Settling down..."

"They've broken through the skin," Chippawa said. "They're tearing through the skin around us."

There was another thud, and this time Faraday could hear a distinct tearing noise along with it.

"Tearing, nothing," he said. "They're eating their way through!"

"So what were you expecting, a can opener?" Chippawa retorted. "This is going to work, Jake."

"Like hell it is," Faraday bit out, grabbing for the lever he'd rigged up for the oxygen release. "Let's give 'em a hotfoot."

"No, wait," Chippawa said. "Don't you understand? They're eating the skin right off us. All we have to do is wait and we'll be free."

"Until they try taking a bite out of the Skydiver," Faraday shot back. "We're open to the hydrogen. I say we go for it."

"And I say we wait," Chippawa said firmly. "Come on—they can't bite through the hull."

"The mantas left tooth marks on it," Faraday countered. "These things are four times bigger. You think they'll have any trouble biting straight through?"

"We have to risk it," Chippawa insisted. "Just calm down—"

"Like hell," Faraday snarled. Setting his teeth together, he pushed the lever.

A wave of blue-green fire rolled across the window. The Skydiver shuddered violently, and a bonechilling roar seemed to fill the cabin. "Jake!" Chippawa shouted. "What the hell—?"

"It worked," Faraday cut him off, jabbing a finger at the window. "Look—it worked!"

Chippawa inhaled sharply as the brown-gray skin seemed to melt away from the window, accompanied by a multiple splash of yellow liquid.

And a second later, accompanied by the sound of hissing helium, the probe jerked free from its prison. "Float deployed," Faraday shouted. "We're heading up."

"I've got the tether ship's carrier signal," Chippawa said. "They're on their way."

Something bumped Faraday's foot. He looked down, to find that his zero-gee coffee mug had come out of hiding and had rolled up against it.

He took a deep breath, let it out in a long, shuddering sigh. For the first time since the tether broke, he realized he was soaked with sweat. "It's over," he said quietly. "It's finally over."

But it wasn't over. In fact, it had just begun.