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.”