Its fusion engine flaring, the Ra gondola approached Ceto.
Detail of the animal’s huge flank slid across Falcon’s viewscreen. Rumbling sonic cries and the lurid radio-transceiver mottling of her flesh showed that Ceto was urgently trying to speak with her fellows in this ghastly slaughterhouse line, trying to calm them with the words of the gloomy quasi-religion of the medusae.
Then, after the moment of closest approach, Falcon pulled Ra into a tight vertical climb—he heard Trayne grunt, but the Martian did not complain at this new loading of acceleration.
Falcon brought the gondola to a relative halt, standing on its attitude jets some way off from the line of medusae. Soon he saw the torch ships of the “whalers” of this gruesome New Nantucket, sparks flying in the fading daylight, taking up stations around him. But there weren’t enough of them to cage him in this three-dimensional sky, and these short-haul, atmospheric craft, evidently optimised for the close-in work of corralling the doomed medusae, could not catch his own orbit-capable ship anyhow. He could get out of here any time he wanted—and he couldn’t believe that even Machines would go so far as to try to shoot him down.
But even if they did try, he was going nowhere.
Trayne pointed at a screen. “Wow. Look at those.”
Falcon turned to look. He saw what looked like a squadron of aircraft, jet-black arrowheads, coasting close to the Ceto’s flank, well within the cordon of human ships. “Like Spitfires attacking a Zeppelin.”
“Like what?”
“Never mind. You know what you’re seeing?”
“Mantas. They look so small against the flank of the medusa. But they themselves are—what, a hundred metres across?”
“You did your homework. In Jupiter, everything is built to an enormous scale . . .” Watching the mantas’ graceful glide, Falcon was irresistibly taken back to the Kon-Tiki and his own earliest glimpses of the mantas, and he remembered with some embarrassment his own over-excited first reaction: “Tell Dr. Brenner there is life on Jupiter. And it’s big.” Later, Geoff Webster had never let him live it down.
“But,” said Trayne, “what are the mantas doing here? In this killing field?”
His elderly mind clogged with too many memories, it hadn’t occurred to Falcon to ask that very question.
Trayne was watching closely. “Look—the mantas aren’t attacking Ceto, or any of the other medusae. They’re just escorting them. But if the medusae drift out of line . . .”
It took Falcon a couple of minutes to see what Trayne was getting at. “You’re right. Those manta formations are just spooking the medusae—keeping them in line, far more effectively than if those fusion ships tried to do it alone. The medusae have evolved to flee mantas, after all; they must be easy to startle.”
Trayne said carefully, “So the managers of this slaughterhouse are using the mantas to herd the medusae. It is just as farmers in Earth’s Agricultural Age would use dogs to round up their sheep.”
Falcon turned to him, surprised. “How would you know about that?”
“At school we study the history of terrestrial life. Farming and stuff.”
“Why? Nostalgia for the mother world?”
“No. So that one day we can do it properly.”
“Well, maybe this has given us a way to resolve this situation.”
Trayne frowned. “How? Commander, even though the Ra can outrun those torch ships, we are heavily outnumbered.”
“Take it easy. I’ve no intention of trying to break up this operation. I’ll leave that for the authorities. All I want to do today is to save an old friend from the butchers’ blades.”
Trayne thought that over, and grinned. “Ceto.”
Falcon began tapping a keyboard. “I’m sending a message to Ceto now . . . Trayne, I think you’re right that they’re using these mantas as sheepdogs. But we spent tens of thousands of years domesticating the wolf to produce a biddable, intelligent collie. These secretive butchers have only had a few years to work with the mantas. I’m going to gamble that their obedience will be much more easily broken.”
“So what message are you sending?”
“Simple. ‘Sorry, old friend. Just stay calm. You’ll know what to do.’” He grasped the gondola’s controls. “Now, brace yourself—”
* * * *
With its exhaust of superhot hydrogen-helium plasma flaring, the gondola swept through the swarm of mantas—Falcon momentarily glimpsed the huge black forms fluttering away, alarmed or angered—and soared down towards the medusa once more. Racing over Ceto’s broad back, Falcon saw a surface scarred and pitted from past predation and accident, almost like the surface of a crater-pocked moon. A medusa’s very skin was a badge of courage and endurance and survival, Falcon thought, a badge of age.
And now he was going to have to burn a trench into it. “This isn’t going to be pretty, Martian,” he warned.
He hauled at his controls so that the Ra tipped up, and the fusion torch blasted across the medusa’s flesh, scouring and scourging. The skin blistered, and, as lift sacs beneath burst, huge flaps of skin, gobbets of flesh and strands of cartilage were hurled up into the air. Ceto gave another agonising acoustic cry.
“Ouch,” said Trayne sympathetically. “As big as she is, that’s a nasty wound.”
“If she survives, she’ll heal. Medusae are resilient. They have to be; they are pestered by predators throughout their lives. The question is, is it working?”
Trayne checked other monitors. “If you mean, are the mantas breaking formation—yes, they are.”
Glancing back, Falcon saw the mantas come swarming from all sides, irresistibly drawn by the fragments of meat in the air and the scent of a medusa’s equivalent of blood. They began to attack the open wound, snatching scraps of skin and meat out of the air, even snapping at each other in their helpless greed.
“Ha! That’s carnivores for you. So much for your sheepdogs, Nantucket.”
“I bet the supervisors are already alarmed,” Trayne said. “Ceto has drifted well out of line, and the medusae before and aft are showing signs of disturbance too. It must take a huge effort to round up the animals this way, a corralling operation spanning thousands of kilometres . . .”
“And once it’s disrupted it will be hard to put back together again. Good.”
Trayne glanced at Falcon. “I still don’t see what you’re trying to do, Commander. Ceto might be spared the flensing cage, but you’ve left her defenceless against the mantas.”
“Don’t worry about that. No medusa is defenceless, if she gets the chance. Look—it’s starting already. That’s my girl . . .”
Ceto, drifting further out of the line, was starting to tip up now, the forest of tentacles that dangled from her underside quivering and swaying, the black-and-white patchwork on her side that was her radio voice pulsing. All this happened against a chorus of low-frequency wails from the other medusae, and with chthonic slowness, it seemed to Falcon—but everything in Jupiter’s air took place at a stately pace; even a manta flying at full tilt rarely exceeded fifty kilometres per hour.
The mantas still swarmed around the open wound on Ceto’s back. But now the medusa’s inclination was becoming so steep that the mantas were having trouble maintaining their position. They slid away from the wound, each evidently agitated at leaving the treasure to its competitors, and they beat their graceful wings furiously as they fought to regain their positions. Meanwhile, the torch ships buzzed around, helpless, their exhaust sparks casting brilliant pools of light on the medusa’s hide in the swiftly fading gloom of the Jovian evening.
Anticipating what was to come next—he’d witnessed it many times since the voyage of the Kon-Tiki—Falcon began tapping panels and closing switches. “Brace yourself. I’m shutting down as many electrical systems as I can. It’s no accident that the Ra’s hull is entirely non-conducting. You may want to isolate your exosuit’s systems too. When the shock comes—”
He was almost too late with his warning.
Light flared beyond the gondola’s windows, and deafening static erupted from the comms system. Even Falcon’s much-augmented eyes were dazzled.
Looking out, he saw a kind of lightning—or a St Elmo’s fire perhaps—flare from the medusa and out through the crowd of greedy mantas, even catching some of the torch ships. The mantas scattered, some of them visibly wounded—and by the time the electric glow faded, two, three, four of the mantas were falling away into the depths, trailing black smoke. Shot-down fighter planes: that had always been Falcon’s analogy.
But he saw that some of the torch ships had been knocked out by the medusa’s electrical defences too; most stood back, but a handful fell away, exhausts flaring, obviously out of control—following the doomed mantas towards the lower cloud layers and the mysteries that lay below.
“That’s what a million-volt defence will buy for you,” Falcon muttered. “Enjoy your visit to the thermalisation layer, boys. Probably they’ll be able to bail out. Look, Trayne, I’m not a killer. But as far as I’m concerned the pilots of those ships had it coming, Martian or Machine.”
Trayne said dryly, “Commander, I look forward to backing you up at the court of inquiry. But in the meantime, it worked.” He pointed.
Ceto was far from the line now, Falcon saw. The butchers’ torch ships were busily engaged in trying to impose order on the rest of the corralled medusa herd. The great beasts were showing extreme agitation, not surprisingly, their songs were messages of confusion and distress—but now, Falcon thought, also communicating a little hope. “I’m sorry I can’t save you all,” he murmured. “Not this time. But at least Ceto made it.”
“We need to think about our own safety, sir,” Trayne said, watching a monitor.
“How’s that?”
“The reports we’ve been sending back to Ganymede have made a difference. The World Government consul at Anubis says she’s already had authorisation from Bermuda.”
Earth was currently forty light-minutes from Jupiter. “They’ve moved fast, then,” Falcon said. “For once. But authorisation for what?”
Trayne read swiftly from a screen. “They say this ‘whaling’ operation is illegal under the laws that protect the Jovian ecology, and specifically the rights of the medusae as enshrined in their provisional status as Legal Persons (Non-human) under international law—”
“Ha! I knew it.”
“And the medusa-oil shipments to Mars are in breach of World Government embargoes. In light of which, in advance of further consultation and enquiries, and blah, blah—” Trayne looked up. “Hellas! Commander, this isn’t an announcement of policy. It’s a warning. Anubis is going to destroy the whaling facility. They’ve already launched the missiles!” He shook his head. “I didn’t know there were any missiles on Ganymede.”
But Falcon remembered the glimpse of secretive military operations he’d seen from the Galileo Lounge with Hope Dhoni. “There are now. But that warning is for us, too. And the medusae—we need to warn them to get the hell out of here too, mantas or no mantas. You think you can pilot this tub, high acceleration and all?”
Trayne grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”
They swapped positions. As Trayne took over the gondola’s control, Falcon took his station at the comms console, and as he prepared his radio message for the medusae he glanced up uneasily at the sky, looking for the streak of missiles from Ganymede.