Saturn Rukh (22 page)

“Twenty tons of fuel left,” announced Chastity after they had been pulling for a number of minutes.

“Going to use it all,” answered Rod. “We can make more later if we get out of this.” He looked at the display Jeeves had arranged for him. The ship and the balloon were both moving slowly toward the edge of the “cylinder of death” that was being carved out of the sky by the gigantic maws of the flying cone of rukhs. At first, the speed of the capsule—and the balloon it was dragging—had increased with time under the constant acceleration of the rockets. The speed now seemed to be stuck. Despite the constant strong thrust of the dozen roaring engines there was no further increase in speed. The viscous drag on the balloon had increased as their velocity had increased, and they had now reached their equivalent of terminal velocity through the thick air. Rod could only watch with concern as the two tiny dots that indicated the rocket hauling the balloon slowly crawled their way to the edge of the “cylinder of death,” while the formation of rukhs glided inexorably toward them, eating everything within that cylinder.

At the science console, Sandra was keeping all of Jeeves’s sensors busy, gathering every piece of data she could on the giant birds, making sure at the same time that a copy of all the data being collected was being transmitted up to the commsats for relay to Earth. The leading dot on Rod’s screen, which indicated the position of the crew capsule, switched to yellow, then green, as it broke out of the gray-hatched cylinder of death. The balloon, trailing a kilometer behind, was still red. The leading edge of the “eating cone” was still ten kilometers away, with the four “beaters” about five kilometers out ahead. The nearest beater was on a trajectory that would take it about three kilometers below them. Sandra prepared her cameras to take images of the rukh as it flew under them.

“Green!” exclaimed Rod with relief. “The balloon is clear of the cylinder! We’re going to make it!”

“Good thing, too,” said Chastity. “We’ve only got three tons of fuel left.”

~ * ~

Petro was quite amazed at what he saw ahead. There was a tiny dense object emitting a glare like the Sun. It was rising rapidly upward, while following behind it was a strangely shaped roundfloater, moving much faster than any roundfloater Petro had ever seen before. What was most peculiar was that the roundfloater was below him, but had chosen to jet upward instead of dropping downward. Petro had been sending out strong hunting sounds, and although the roundfloaters were very stupid, even
they
knew that when the hunter is coming at them from above, it is foolish for the prey to rise to meet the maw that intends to devour it. If the roundfloater had deflated and dropped like all the others before it, Petro would have left it alone, for he had recently been gorging at the tail of the cone and would leave the roundfloater for those in the cone to eat. But since this one was rising up above the cone, where those in the cone could not reach it, it became fair game for him. Pulsing his sides harder and lifting his tail to tilt himself upward, he rose in pursuit of the morsel.

~ * ~

“Rod ...” said Sandra from the science console. Rod was throttling down the engines, letting the ship drop below the altitude of the balloon, so its buoyancy could take over the task of keeping them from falling. Sandra’s voice had a worried tone. “The outrider rukh is leaving its position in the formation and is coming up after us.”

“She’s right, Rod!” said Chastity, watching on her screen as the trajectory of the giant bird changed to meet theirs. “It’s going after the balloon!”

Rod started up the engines again and was just at the point where he was starting to pull up on the balloon again, when the rukh met the balloon.

Sandra screamed:

“It’s swallowed our balloon—whole!”

~ * ~

4

SWALLOWED BY THE MAW

“Prepare for shock!”

Jeeves’s voice bellowed throughout the ship. Red warning messages flashed on all the consoles. The shock wave generated by the strike of the fast-moving rukh traveled swiftly up the taut Hoytether and pulled violently on
Sexdent
’s nose, jerking the capsule end for end. Rod’s seat broke away under the strain and he went flying back into the ladder.

Under the inexorable pull of Saturn’s gravity, the capsule started falling ... spinning ... tumbling ... out of control. Chastity, her breath knocked out of her by her harness, grimaced as she rubbed ruefully at what she hoped weren’t broken ribs. The tumbling, twisting fall and the continued silence of the engines soon made her realize that Rod was out of action—quickly confirmed by a glance over her shoulder. Rod was still strapped in his broken seat, trying to wrestle free from his safety harness and bumping into things as the capsule twisted and twirled in its fluttering free-fall drop.

“Rod!” yelled Chastity from the scottyboard. “Shall I switch to jets?”

“No!” came Rod’s reply as he struggled free from the seat and pushed it through the passway hole to the deck below. “Keep your joyball on tether control. We’re going to need both rockets and tether if we’re going to get out of this mess. We don’t have enough fuel to stop our fall for more than a few minutes.”

He fought his way back to the pilot console. Holding on to the broken seat support with one hand, he stuck his other into the joyball controller. With a few expert blasts from the attitude control jets, he brought the spinning and twisting motions of the capsule to a halt. He was tempted to use the main engines to halt their fall, but he knew better and let the fall continue. Now that the scene outside his holoviewport had steadied, he could see the giant body of the rukh growing larger below them as they fell down toward it. Their fall would take them behind the long tail of the massive bird as it flew by underneath. By looking up, he could see the Hoytether that had previously connected them to the balloon, trailing away into the distance from its connecting point on the nose of the capsule. The track of the Hoytether arched upward and out across the back of the rukh to a point at the front near its left mouth, over a half-kilometer away.

Rod knew that when they came to the end of the Hoytether, they would experience another jerk. The next one might be strong enough to snap the tether, leaving them to fall into the crushing-hot hell that was lower Saturn. With almost no fuel left in the tanks, there was only one thing that could keep them aloft.

“If Sinbad could do it, so can we,” he said loudly.

“What?” asked Sandra from the science console, her voice small with fright as their continuing free fall went on, second after second.

“We’re going to hitch a ride on a roc.”

“It’s
rukh,“
persisted Sandra. “With a
u.“

“Rukh or roc. I don’t care. As long as it’s a rock that floats.” He turned to Chastity. “Chass! We’ll run out of slack soon. Let the tether run free at first, then turn on the electromagnetic brakes and bring us to a fast halt.”

Chastity nestled her right wrist in the restraint in the controller cavity under her console and gently grasped the joyball inside with her trimmed astronaut hand. The long painted fingernails of her left hand flickered over the soft surface of the touchscreen, pulling up information. The Hoytether was at only the twelve-hundred-meter point so there was plenty still on the reel. She would have no problem bringing them to a halt at a reasonable gee level. The fuel gauge showed there were only two thousand kilos of meta left. She frowned. It might as well be zero. Rod was right. Their only hope lay in the Hoytether. She hoped the giant bird was up to coping with the load the tether was going to put on it.

They fell in altitude below the rukh. The Hoytether now lay across the rukh’s black-feathered back and off the trailing edge of its winglike body. The tension increased as the slack Hoytether snaked its way across the rukh’s wingfeathers and more Hoytether started to pay out from the reel in the nose of
Sexdent.
Chastity engaged the electromagnetic drag brakes on the reel and gravity came back to the ship.

“Pull more gees!” said Rod.

“I was going to control the tether payout and bring us to a halt under the bird,” said Chastity.

“We’ll just be an easy target for an attack by another of those flying killer whales,” replied Rod. “Pull gees and swing us around underneath the bird and up in front of it. I’ll then fly us to a safe spot right in the middle of its back. At least we’ll be safe from another attack there.”

“Penguins do the same thing when they are attacked by a school of killer whales,” said Sandra. “I hope the poor rukh is able to carry our weight—its body is nothing but a big balloon, despite its great size.”

“If it has trouble carrying us when we’re centered on its back, then it’ll have even more trouble carrying us hanging from its mouth,” replied Rod brusquely. “It would be like a snagged trout having to haul a fishing weight around all the time.”

Chastity increased the braking level and the gees rose as they began their giant swing ride underneath the gliding airbird.

“That sure is a big monster,” said Dan from the inside of his habitat as he looking out his viewport at the rear end of the rukh rising above them, its long, brightly colored tailfeathers stretching out behind it. “I was watching him during his strike and saw him swallow that balloon like the
Sesame Street
Cookie Monster eating a cookie.”

Sandra looked upward through the science console holo-viewport. She could now see the pale orange-white belly feathers as the capsule swung underneath the rukh on the end of the Hoytether. “A good match for the cloud layers above,” she murmured, admiring the effectiveness of the hunter’s camouflage. She quickly rechecked the science console to make sure that the science imagers were still tracking the bird and getting pictures to radio back to Earth. Even if they didn’t make it back themselves, the knowledge they had gathered would.

“We’ll be at the end of our swing in about ten seconds,” warned Chastity.

“Seichi,” commanded Rod. “Get out here quick. We may need you.”

Seichi came out of his habitat and took over the science console as Sandra ducked into her habitat to get out of the way. Seichi made a few quick flicks at some icons with a forefinger and the science console turned into a copy of the scottyboard in front of Chastity. Leaving the control of the Hoytether in Chastity’s hands, Seichi quickly checked all the engineering systems.

The capsule finished its swing underneath the rukh and passed in front of it. With much of the Hoytether now wrapped over the back and around under the kilometer-sized bird, they were now only a half-kilometer away from the prow-like keel that stuck out in front of the body between the two giant air-scoop mouths. Inside the mouths could be seen hanging featherlike structures.

“Looks like the inside of a baleen whale’s mouth,” remarked Sandra from inside her habitat.

“Form ever follows function,” remarked Dan from his adjacent habitat. “These air whales occupy the same niche here on Saturn as our water whales do on Earth. They need the same types of equipment to survive in the same type of niche.”

“Featherbones instead of whalebones,” murmured Sandra to herself.

The swing of the capsule brought them level with the head of the flying creature.

“They have two eyes,” said Sandra, as the top of the head portion came into view. “One on top of the prow and one below. It must have binocular vision in the vertical direction.”

“Those eyes are monsters,” said Doc, impressed. “Must be ten meters in diameter. As big around as a small house.”

“But still small compared to the size of the beast,” said Sandra. “Just like Earth whales again.”

“They may be small in comparison to the body size,” said Dan, “but they’re still large in an absolute sense. They must have excellent night vision with all that photon collection area as well as extreme range capability during daylight. I wouldn’t be surprised if they hunt by sight.”

“Will you two
shut up
so I can
think!”
yelled Rod, continuing on in a muttering tone that brought forth a throaty chuckle from Chastity. “Here we are, about to die, and all those two can say is: ‘What big eyes you have, pretty birdie.

They reached the end of the swing, started upward, and went into free fall. Gingerly using their main rockets, Rod flew them over the top of the bird, the Hoytether trailing along behind. With the last of the fuel, he brought them to a halt above the back of the giant bird. He had to keep some of the horizontal thrusters operating in order to counteract the strong wind flow across the rukh’s back as they flew in formation with it. They were now so close to the surface of the rukh that they couldn’t see its full extent.

“It’s like flying over a forest,” complained Rod, looking for a spot to land.

“A forest of huge black feathers,” remarked Chastity, awe in her voice.

“A truly gigantic forest,” agreed Seichi. “Many feathers are nearly one hundred meters long.”

Rod, carefully watching an image on his console produced by a camera pointed downward from the base of the capsule, lowered
Sexdent
on its rockets until he could see the feathers below starting to wilt.

“Don’t want to burn my way through my landing pad,” he muttered as he cut the engines. But instead of the expected silence as the rumbling roar of the jets faded away, they could now hear a different deep rumbling noise. It was a multitoned roar that arose around and through them as the
Sexdent
dropped heavily downward....