She needed to stop thinking about the causes. The mask! She had to get the breathing mask back. She could still see it. Kimikizu moved her wings so she would speed up. She managed to reach it quickly, but then a cross-current wrenched the mask to the side. She corrected her course. Suddenly the mask paused mid-air, and she flew past it too quickly. It was like someone was pulling back on her with cords so she couldn’t grab hold of it and would suffocate miserably.
She extended her tail feathers and braked. Now she was underneath the mask. All she had to do was grasp it. There! And again a cross-current blew the mask aside. The vortex was unpredictable. With two beats of her wings, she glided after the mask as it disappeared into an opaque cloud. Kimikizu followed.
The damp gas in the cloud burned her skin. Was that sulfuric acid? No one had ever noticed sulfuric acid in the vortex. She accelerated again to leave the cloud, and there the mask was in front of her again. With a beat of her wings, Kimikizu was right up next to it. The first time she missed, but then she got it. She quickly pulled the mask over her face and attached it to the flight suit, the very existence of which still seemed strange to her.
Suddenly the memory returned. She had never set eyes on her home planet. Her subconscious must have tricked her somehow. A drop in pressure within the flying machine had slammed her against the airlock door. She could hear the terrible sound of the metal tearing out of the anchoring. After that, she must have passed out. The aliens were to blame! Kimikizu now remembered the screams in the cockpit. Norok had ordered everyone to get into the suits. This was after the entire hull of the ship had started to rattle.
The aliens had not come with friendly intentions. They had attacked them without warning or any declaration of war. The ships—Kimikizu no longer remembered how many—had appeared on the screen, only they seemed very small. Norok had tried to contact them, but there was no answer, at least none that they could understand. Perhaps they had even been asked to surrender. Who knew?
Grisok had been working hard on cracking the code, but by then it was too late. Kitok, Lashok, and the others had tried to install the magnetic cannon in the nose cone. Had they been successful? Kimikizu couldn’t remember. Probably she’d been thrown out of the flying machine beforehand.
This was something that could give her hope, so she clung to it. Perhaps the flying machine had fought back, or at least been able to escape. Possibly the Iks on board had survived, or at least some of them. Norok. Norok might have survived. That was important to her, even if her own death might be coming soon.
No, this was not a good thought, even if it had been an involuntary one. With an effort of will, she managed to push it aside. She wasn’t going to die. What would old Lobozinu have done in her situation? The next steps were to secure the status quo, take stock of the situation, and develop a plan. She was not on the home planet as she’d dreamed. She was somewhere in the dense atmosphere of the gas giant they had previously discovered. The planet had a strong magnetic field, which was good because it meant she could better orient herself.
First of all, she’d have to slow her fall. The deeper she got into the atmosphere, the harder it would be for somebody to save her. The flight suit protected her body from the cold and the vacuum, and her wings were resistant. The problem was that the suit’s energy reserves were finite. She’d have to economize. The best thing to do was to maintain altitude on her own. But to do that she’d have to leave this cyclone, which would require additional energy.
How would the others be able to find her? Each suit was equipped with a tracking device. She checked the equipment and determined the transmitter was working. But how far did its signal go? The planet’s strong magnetic field made radio communication difficult, as they’d already determined in their preliminary studies. So she would not only have to leave the vortex and maintain her altitude, but also climb as high as possible. And to save the suit’s energy for the operation of the life support systems, she’d have to do it using her own strength.
Did this constitute a satisfactory plan? Kimikizu moved her wings. Gradually her muscles grew warm, and her heart was pumping blood through her body faster. It also seemed to her that her mind benefited from this. The task ahead of her now seemed more straightforward. Yes, this was a plan. She had three days to carry it out. If she wasn’t found within this time, she would die. But this didn’t scare her because she’d already started to rescue herself.
Twelve flaps of the wings, then a pause for the duration of two flaps—this turned out to be the best rhythm. During the pause she would sink a little bit. But without this short break, in the long run each beat of her wings would have been weaker. Kimikizu felt she could go on like this forever, although she knew that she would reach her limit sooner or later. She was well trained, but her muscles could only endure so much long-term stress. All the same, she still felt no pain.
Now she had reached the upper edge of the cyclone. This storm sent air down where it would cool, but there also had to be vortices where the gas from the atmosphere was blown upward. If she found such a storm, she could ride it with little effort until the energy of her suit ran out.
Kimikizu looked around. On the home planet, she would have been able to admire the magnificent landscape. At least that was how it was told by the generation that had seen it. It was very different here. While the planet had a rock core, it was hidden under impenetrable layers of hydrogen and helium. As the pressure increased with depth, it turned the helium into liquid and brought the hydrogen into its metallic state. These areas would remain inaccessible to the Iks forever. But the layers above provided plenty of living space—and, most importantly, probably large quantities of the helium isotope they needed for their power generators.
But none of this was visible. Around her, it was very close to dark. It had gradually grown a little lighter as she’d ascended, but it was still impossible to tell whether it was day or night. It was only thanks to a specialized type of sensory cell in her eyes that she could distinguish colors. The Iks called them night colors. In her mental image of the surroundings, they had a pervasive glow, like the kind that glowing butterflies would spread at night.
Kimikizu preferred the day colors. With the night colors, things took on a life of their own. There was something organic about the gushes of sulfur oxide that occasionally whirled through the clouds. Kimikizu recalled the fluffy webs of the sky spiders—or rather her idea of them, because she had never seen them with her own eyes.
She was heading north. If the air coursed downward in one place, it had to rise elsewhere. Upon their approach, they’d found that the atmosphere was rather clearly divided into belts that surrounded the planet almost independently of one another. So she wouldn’t need to make her way toward the North Pole, which she would never be able to reach anyway because of the planet’s enormous size. All she had to do was to reach the edge of the right belt, where she hoped to encounter the ascending winds that would carry her if her muscles failed her.
Her stomach was starting to demand her attention. The cook had offered her some food an hour before the attack, but she hadn’t been hungry and had turned it down. She imagined some crunchy roasted insects and had to swallow. It wasn’t a good idea to torture herself.
She checked the reverse side of her suit. There was the radio. She actuated it with her beak, but she only heard static. Perhaps the flying machine was remaining silent so as not to be discovered by the enemy?
But if an outsider was listening in on the radio channels, she had a problem. If she were to climb higher so her tracking device could be heard better, she would be noticed. She’d stand out like a blind fish in the dark. It was no wonder that the blind fish were almost extinct. But did she have any other choice? Her survival depended on this tracking device, and even if one of the attackers found her, there was still at least a chance.
Over time, the environment changed. Instead of sulfur compounds, methane dominated. Drops of this compound dampened her feathers, causing fl
ying to become more strenuous. She was apparently coming closer to the rising currents. Though they offered the advantage that she could float in them, they also presented two disadvantages.
First, the gas was warmer and wetter, since when it was up this high, the water vapor and methane condensed. She was flying through a huge rain cloud, and the suit had to work harder to keep her warm.
She only recognized the second disadvantage when it was too late. The gases streaming from below brought a lot of energy with them, and they were clearly high-tension. She felt it in her magnetic field sense whenever the static electricity discharged in a huge arc. She was passing through a giant thunderstorm. If one of the lightning bolts were to strike her, she’d be dead on the spot.
At first this thought troubled her. Then, the heavier her plumage became and the more she had to exert herself, the more she began to see it as an opportunity—an opportunity not to painfully suffocate, but to be killed quickly and painlessly.
The lightning came conspicuously closer, the bolts glowing bright white. Then the thunder came, spreading quickly in the dense atmosphere, followed by the burnt smell of ionized molecules, which the respiratory mask could not wholly filter out. It didn’t trouble her extremely robust breathing system, but to her, the flashes smelled of death. How close did lightning have to be so that you could smell it?
Kimikizu tried to block out the sight by closing her eyes, but the specters flickered through the clouds so quickly that she wasn’t fast enough. And even if she’d managed to shut her eyes, her magnetic sense was still going crazy. It didn’t help. The flashes were coming too quickly to avoid them. She would just have to keep flying. The thunderstorm would stop, and if not, she’d leave the area where it was raging.
And then the time had come. The air was almost clear. When she looked down, she saw where she was. She had reached the eye of the storm. A gentle, warm, and surprisingly dry stream carried her up. She’d made it to paradise. The only thing missing was fried paradise beetles soaring through the air. But she shouldn’t be thinking about food.
How far would the updraft take her? The rings they’d seen from space led to the uppermost regions of the atmosphere. She should have asked Grisok about this planet instead of spending all that time sleeping… but hindsight was always crystal clear. All she had to do was trust the current. Wherever it took her, it was saving her energy, and this affected both the suit and her muscles.
Kimikizu turned over. Like any Iks, she could sleep lying on her back while hovering in flight. Before, there had been members of her species who refused to set foot on ground level even once. They had considered themselves the uncontaminated ones. Kimikizu felt the warm current from below drying her feathers.
Gradually, the first stars appeared. The sky was still covered with numerous wisps of fog, but now and then a particularly bright star peeked through. Kimikizu imagined that this was the home world 40 light-years away. It was said to be visible from this system, but only under optimal conditions. Were these conditions good enough? She quickly learned to appreciate what there was. She was floating on her back through the gas giant’s atmosphere and had the stars above her. That was something. She held on to it.
Then she saw something flash in the distance—it looked like an explosion, which brought her back to reality. The light from the explosion faded slowly, until a dark shadow suddenly eclipsed it.
Rescue
That’s insane!
The scout was striking the thread so quickly that Tolkut had trouble understanding the individual vibrations. At the same time, a sharp smell of fear and concern pervaded the Bud’s control center. It wasn’t only the remote scout emitting those pheromones.
The ship isn’t built for such a maneuver, he added. The turbulence will tear it apart!
Nonsense, Tolkut replied, trying to exude confidence, which he accentuated with the corresponding dance moves, although deep down he doubted whether his decision had been the right one. The Bud can handle a lot more!
Tolkut was determined to take advantage of this opportunity. The crew member from the alien ship was still alive. Even though the images were blurry, they’d made it possible to tell that much. It was unmistakably beating the strange wings that protruded from the spacesuit. An intelligent life form with wings, he mused in amazement. Who would have thought something like that could exist!
Of course, the Mendraki scientists had long considered the theoretical possibility of other life forms on distant planets—even the possibility that some of these life forms could have developed intelligence. But they had agreed that evolution would inevitably only produce intelligent life if it were very similar to the Mendraki’s. To exist and develop in a potentially hostile environment, it was necessary to have several limbs, at least six, in order not only to grasp, but also to be able to flee quickly in the event of danger.
Evidently, bipeds had not survived long on Mendrakia. With just two eyes, they could not see in all directions at once, and the inevitable result was that in the course of evolution, they quickly fell victim to predators.
On the other hand, flying animals could not develop any intelligence because they were too light-bodied, which they had to be in order to be able to rise into the air, and too slight in build, which meant far too little space for a complex brain. Logically, this only left multi-legged, multi-eyed, compact-bodied ground dwellers as candidates for intelligent life.
This is what the apparently irrefutable arguments had stated—until now! The alien ship’s crew was clearly composed of flying creatures, and no one could dispute that they were intelligent.
Tolkut did not want to miss the opportunity to meet one of these fascinating beings, and perhaps even be able to come to some sort of understanding with them. If they could discover more about the aliens and their intentions, it might be possible to bring the Shipmasters who remained undecided to their side. Should Kasfok be confronted by a majority, he would have to come to his senses, especially if it was possible to reason with the aliens. What could be better than saving one of their lives, even if at first the Mendraki had put this very life in jeopardy? The aliens would then have to see that not all Mendraki were hostile.
The Bud shuddered again as it hit some turbulence.
Shipmaster! The radio drummer danced the steps of compunction, and the position of his mandibles indicated complete submission. He was trembling with fear. The ship will come apart if we don’t return to free space!
An alarm light began to flash, and urgent warnings from the central computer vibrated on the general line of communication. A console exploded on one of the central station’s side walls, covering the officer in front with a shower of sparks. A new tremor rocked the Bud.
Do you still have contact? Tolkut asked the radio drummer. He tried not to let his strikes on the thread reveal the concern he was now feeling.
The radio drummer pulled himself together and checked his displays. Only very weak contact. That deep in the atmosphere, the electromagnetic spectrum is sheer chaos. The strong magnetic field and the numerous electrical discharges in the countless storm fronts are masking the signal more and more.
How far away are we?
I can’t say exactly, because I don’t know the signal’s output strength. But we are almost right above it. However, it seems to be sinking even deeper into the atmosphere.
Just after the space traveler had been thrown out of the damaged ship, they’d been able to pick up a regular signal. It was unmodulated and seemed to make only one bearing possible. Tolkut had immediately suspected that it was some kind of emergency transmitter that could be used to help track down a missing crew member. However, with each passing micropulse, it became less and less likely that they would still be able to catch up with the space traveler.
The radio drummer was right—they couldn’t stay that deep in the atmosphere much longer. Although they were still on the periphery, the effects from the stormy bands of clouds surrounding the entire planet were already outsi
de the tolerance range for a Mendraki spaceship. Tolkut knew he had to make a decision quickly.
He was just about to give instructions to rise back up into free space when a new report came from the radio drummer.
The signal isn’t dropping anymore. It appears to have stabilized at an altitude. Now it is moving horizontally, toward the edge of the band of clouds it’s moving through. In addition, it seems to be in the middle of one of the storm fronts, which makes it even more difficult to locate. Periodically, I don’t receive it at all. If I hadn’t known what to keep my eyes out for, I would have lost it long ago.
The Bud bucked again like a wild epproll that had been bitten by a kletz mosquito. For a moment, Tolkut thought sadly about the epprolls, which had been destroyed along with the kletz mosquitoes and the home planet. The good-natured, six-legged riding animals had been the Mendrak’s faithful companions for many thousands of macropulses.
The sound of a violent explosion somewhere in the Bud and the vibration warning that immediately followed tore him out of his thoughts.
We have lost an energy storage unit on deck three, the message announced over the thread. The overload from the grav stabilizers caused the array structure to break down.
Tolkut realized that he couldn’t test fate anymore. The ship was suffering like a living creature from the murderous conditions of the gas giant’s atmosphere, and like a living creature it could be fatally injured.
We’ll climb a little higher, he ordered. Keep your eyes on the signal as much as possible.
The engines roared as the Bud struggled to gain altitude against the planet’s gravitational pull. Again and again, violent shocks tore through the ship. It almost seemed as if the planet did not want to release its victim from its claws.
Helium 3: Fight for the Future Page 12