Manta's Gift

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 i

"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 i

"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."