It was Trayne who first noticed the anomalous radio signal.
Falcon was listening to the transmission from Orpheus with a mixture of wonder and envy. “‘For now, however, I am comfortable.’ Textbook laconic. By damn, you’d swear Orpheus was as human as Young or Hilton—and as cold-blooded.”
“Maybe,” Trayne said, frowning, distracted. He pointed to a display. “Commander, look at this. One of your filters is picking up another signal. Nothing to do with Orpheus. Is it one of your medusae?”
Falcon looked over to the screen. Indeed, pulses of shortwave radio transmissions were being detected by the Ra’s huge antenna arrays, and he immediately recognised the basic modulation pattern. Hastily he locked in the translation software suite he had patched together over the decades—the centuries, now—of his contact with the inhabitants of Jupiter.
Trayne said, “I can’t tell how remote the source is.”
“I can guess from the signal strength, and we’ll have triangulation soon . . .”
A synthesised voice, soulless, sexless, without inflection, gave the first rough translation of the signal. The Great Manta has returned. The Great Manta is among us. Pray to the Great Manta that you are spared. Pray to the Great Manta that you are not spared . . .
Trayne’s eyes were wide. “Is that . . . ?”
“A medusa. You bet it is.”
“And I bet I know who it is—that is, which medusa. Ceto, yes? The one we encountered before. “The Great Manta.” You said she was talking about that. It had something to do with a medusa’s ideas of death and extinction?”
“Yes—an ambiguous myth. Medusae are sentient prey animals. They understand that they are locked into a wider ecology in which the mantas and other predators play an essential role. So they accept the loss of a proportion of their own kind, a toll they pay to the ecology that sustains them—and yet at the same time they will pray to a manta to spare themselves, just for today . . . Something’s happening. She’s in trouble.” He hesitated. “She’s calling for help. My help. She wouldn’t be shouting in the shortwave band otherwise.”
Trayne eyed him. “And you want to help her, don’t you?”
He grimaced. “Why? Because that’s what your kids’-story version of a hero would do? Abandon his post and go dashing off to a damsel in distress?” A damsel two kilometres wide . . .
Trayne looked faintly offended. “No. It’s just that I know you, at least a little. And if she’s calling for you, maybe the trouble she’s in has something to do with humans.”
Falcon hadn’t thought of that. He said grudgingly, “You may have a point. We’re narrowing the fix. She’s many thousands of kilometres away. Even if we broke away, how could we get there in time? The Ra, like the Kon-Tiki, is basically designed to float around on the wind, not set speed records.”
Trayne shrugged. “So we cut away the lift envelope. The gondola has its own fusor propulsion system—”
“Designed to take us out of the atmosphere and back to orbit, not for jaunts in the cloud banks.”
“Sure. But there’s plenty of spare energy. And the engine is a ramjet—it uses the external air as reaction mass—so it’s not as if we are going to run out of propellant.” In response to Falcon’s surprised look he said more hesitantly, “I checked out the Ra’s specs before we set off from Amalthea.”
“You did, did you?”
“I’m not some pampered Terran, Commander. I’m a Martian. I grew up under a plastic dome on a planet that will kill me as punishment for the slightest slip. Of course I checked.”
“Okay. I’m reluctantly impressed. But we have a mission here. We’re a relay station for Orpheus—”
“The envelope can station-keep. It has a backup comms systems of its own. Besides, even without us, the signals from Charon 2 are probably strong enough to be picked up directly by Charon 1 back at NTB-4.”
“You checked all this out too, right?”
Trayne grinned.
Falcon turned to his controls. “Okay. You asked for it. Checking deuterium-helium-3 ratio . . .” Restraints locked down Falcon’s frame, fixing it tightly to the structure of the Ra. Make sure you have your exposit powered up and locked into its frame, I’m not going to be sparing the acceleration.”
“Wouldn’t dream of asking you to.” Trayne backed up to his suit’s wall station.
“Checking jet chamber temperature.” Falcon glanced over his instruments one last time. Then he broke the safety seal over the ripcord button. “Lighting the blue touch paper.”
“The what?”
“Never mind.” He pressed the button.
There was a sharp crack as explosive bolts separated the gondola from the gas envelope, a brief sensation of falling—they were already committed to this jaunt—and then the ramjet drive cut in. Acceleration pressed. The gondola had turned into an independent craft in the Jovian air, a candle riding a column of superheated hydrogen-helium.
“You okay, Martian?”
“Never better.”
“Liar. I’ll get our trajectory locked in. And I see Amalthea Control is already demanding an explanation. I’ll let you take care of that . . .”