“Let her have her head! Stop fighting her,” Rams raged at the big woman as she struggled with the wheel. He lifted himself on one elbow on the low bunk.
“What the hell do you think I’m doing,” Louella shot back. “You try steering this damn overgrown tub with one arm and see how easy it is!” She lifted her sling to emphasize her words.
“Let me get over there…” Rams said weakly. He tried to push himself up and failed. He flopped back onto the pallet Pascal, Louella’s navigator, had rigged for him.
“Don’t bother trying to get up. You’d fall right on your ugly face even if you ever did manage to get your ass in gear,” Louella said nastily. “With that smashed leg you probably couldn’t make it to the pilot’s seat, even if you weren’t so doped up. Now, be quiet and let me concentrate; I’ve gotten ships home in worse weathers than this. Trust me: I know what I’m doing!”
The Primrose was a huge whale of a vessel. Her crew quarters were nestled deep within a bulbous pressure hull. Beneath her hull hung a kilometer-long diamond fibre keel and on her upper deck were the enormously strong sails that harnessed the howling winds of Jupiter. Lashed securely to her side was a smaller ship, Thorn; a barque that, until recently, had been JBI’s sole entry into the Great Jupiter Race. It was this tow that made handling of Primrose so difficult.
Rams was still struggling weakly when Pascal arrived with three mugs of steaming tea. He placed one mug where Rams could reach it and held out another cup out for Louella. “If you want to drink this you’ll have to let me take the wheel. You’ve only got one arm.”
“Don’t wreck my ship,” Rams mumbled as he fumbled with the spill-proof cup, trying to put the nipple to his lips.
“Fifteen years of handling large sail, Captain. I think I can keep her on track while Louella sips her tea,” Pascal replied affably. “Now drink your tea. It will make you feel better.” “Sure, long as she didn’t make it,” Rams grumbled. During Rams; infrequent conscious periods he always complained about the food. Of course, on that matter, Pascal could only agree. The one skill that neither of them had mastered in all of their years of ocean racing was cooking. On their two person races they’d usually eaten prepackaged food, which required no cooking and could be eaten wherever and whenever necessary. Pascal’s own mastery of the culinary arts was limited strictly to a properly brewed “cuppa tea” and the boiled or microwaved pouch of whatevers when he had the time.
He couldn’t understand this ship’s advanced food preparation technology. No matter what he did, the best he could turn out were slabs of tasteless, tough, and practically indigestible generic foodstuffs (the package said it was meat, but he still wasn’t sure about that—it tasted too much of wood pulp to come from an animal). Foolproof, that’s what the instructions said; absolutely foolproof. Ha!
The only thing that was worse than his attempts at cooking were Louella’s cinders of burned organic matter, offerings, no doubt, to her unknown teacher in the culinary arts.
A week earlier Pascal had given Rams pain blockers for his smashed and broken leg. He had administered as much emergency treatment as he could with the limited medical supplies he found within Primrose, using medical skills that had been acquired in his years of ocean racing, when competent medical help for an emergency was, more often than not, hundreds of miles away.
He’d stabilized Rams, stanched the bleeding, evacuated the wound to prevent infection, and splinted the broken leg to prevent any further damage from inadvertent movement. More extensive treatment than that required a well-equipped medical center and trained staff who knew more than he, and that meant that they had to find their way to a station soon, before they ran out of pain killers.
The Great Jupiter Race had started out so well, a sailing concept of intense interest on the part of sailing enthusiasts throughout the solar system. Although the great sailing vessels of Jupiter had been plying the endless red seas of Jupiter’s atmosphere for decades it was only the race sponsored by the corporate giants that turned atmospheric sailing on the giant planet into a sport.
Jerome Blacker, head of JBI industries and one of the men who built the Jovian industrial empire, had sent his best captain and navigator, a team that had won most corporate races on Earth’s seas, to win the Great Jovian for the corporation. Not only would the race provide a way to use the JBI funds the Jovians had tied up in their banks, but it would provide an opportunity for unmatched publicity.
But the hurricanes and typhoons that Louella and Pascal had faced on Earth’s tiny oceans were nothing in comparison with the swirling monsters that spun out of Jupiter’s great heat engine. Eight days out of the start their barque, Thorn, had been hit by a monstrous hurricane that left them helpless and floundering in the great dark.
By sheer good fortune Primrose, the sailing ship they were now on, had managed to rescue them, although at great cost to Rams, Primrose’s captain, who broke his leg while trying to save them.
Rams’ ship, like every sailing vessel on Jupiter, held a complete data base of every station. The data bank’s information allowed the ships to venture into the fierce winds of the giant planet with assurance that they could reach their destination. The inertial continually calculated each station’s relative bearing.
According to the inertial they had been several hundred hours north and west of the nearest floating station when Rams had rescued them. Since they came on board they had been steering as tight a course as they could to intercept that station’s projected track.
Pascal knew that each station was stabilized to stay at a particular latitude. They maintained their track by manipulating huge drogues—bucketlike sea anchors—to maintain a constant and predictable velocity as they were blown along the belts by the winds of Jupiter. The floating and stationary hub stations were the only stability a sailor had in the maelstrom that raged at this level of the atmosphere.
For the first five days they had hoped to intercept Charlie Sierra Twelve as she followed the steady fifteen meter per second track in the data bank. Now it appeared that they would not intercept it as planned. They were falling farther and farther behind with each passing hour.
Primrose lumbered heavily with Thorn under tow: Louella could only bring her to within sixty degrees of the wind. What made it even more difficult to keep to the schedule they had set was that Primrose showed a definite tendency to try to turn downwind every time attention flagged. As a result they were moving slower than planned. According to Rams’ careful calculations they would miss the station by two days, and possibly more. So close and yet so far. It was frustrating.
Pascal and Louella constantly fought the ship’s desire to reach. If she did so they would slow to wind speed. Such a turn could easily spell disaster. With Thorn tied to Primrose’s side the force of the wind could easily smash the two ships against one another and cause extensive damage to both.
It wouldn’t take much damage to an outer pressure envelope to send them to their doom in the endless drop below. A rupture of either ship would drag the other down.
So they had to fight the weather and their own ship. They had to hold to a line that held a possibility of finding refuge and aid. They had to try for the next station in line.
Pascal was worried about Rams’ condition. The captain hadn’t taken well to his medication and had remained unconscious most of the time. Could he have calculated a wrong dosage? Suspecting that he had done so, he reduced the dose. As a result Rams stayed awake but was in a constant, low-level of pain. They had to get him to a decent medical facility soon. Without his intervention Thorn might have become a twenty-first century Flying Dutchman, sailing Jupiter’s vast seas with the ghostly crew of Louella and himself. He owed this man a lot for saving him from spending eternity as Louella’s constant companion, and that required far more gratitude than he could ever express.
After carefully reviewing the data bank of possible destinations Pascal selected station CS-17 as their next most likely target. After a few minutes of intense calculation he predicted that they would intersect her track just eight hours ahead of her, five days, fifteen watches, hence.
That meant that, once they got in front of her, all they had to do was simply reduce sail, slow below wind speed, and wait for the station to creep up behind them. It was a simple plan, and one that wouldn’t require special handling.
Twenty hours before they arrived at CS-17’s track the radar alarm hooted loudly, bringing Pascal to high alert and Louella staggering sluggishly from her cabin, her broken arm forcing her to move carefully down the passageway. In the past few days she’d banged it often enough to learn the painful lesson of keeping it held closely to her chest. Even the drugged Rams was awakened by the clamor.
“What the hell is that?” Pascal exclaimed, pointing at an indistinct shadow on the screens. “Louella, see if you can crank up the gain.” He fought to keep the image centered in the screen by manipulating the sail controls and the wheel.
“Don’t touch… gain,” Rams wheezed from his pallet. “Too much noise out here. You’ll wipe out whatever… we have. Try infrared instead. Maybe you can get a better picture with that.”
“Can’t; it’s too far away to use the IR—and the damn sonar doesn’t help either! Oh no, there it goes…”
Louella reached Ram’s side just as the hazy shape disappeared completely into the sparkle of background noise. “What was that—what did we just miss?”
Pascal scowled at her. “You should be sleeping, not up here in the cockpit.”
“Can’t sleep with that stupid alarm clanging,” she shot back, her weariness evident in the lack of conviction in her voice. “What did you see?”
Pascal described the faint image that had raced across the radar screen and his inability to resolve the image into anything he could comprehend. “If we had some decent equipment…” he began.
“Primrose has… best equipment on… planet,” Rams mumbled from his bunk. “Cost… a bloody damn fortune. But can’t run a tight schedule… without it. Won’t find better gear on any ship on the planet,” he finished in a rush.
“Then why couldn’t we see what that thing was?” Pascal demanded, angry with frustration and the lack of rest that kept him from concentrating.
“Environment’s the problem,” Rams explained. “Old man Jupe puts out… lot of radio noise—magnetic field or something. Too much noise for radar, even with the double encrypted digital radar I use… Best I can ‘see’ is ’bout a klick.”
“Which must have been just about the distance of that thing we passed,” Pascal said, shaking his head to clear it.
Louella was still scowling at the instrument panel. “One kilometer for radar and the double damned infrared’s only good for close range work; about a hundred meters or less. Since the docking sonar is only good for five hundred meters or so its like sailing blind on a dark night in the fog!”
“Gotta depend on your inertial,” Rams said with a whisper of finality.
“You heard the man: Depend on the inertial,” Louella repeated as she staggered back down the passageway. “Wake me when it’s my turn at the wheel.”
“So what was that thing we saw?” Pascal asked doggedly as she left. “Was something really there or was it just a radio ghost?”
“Don’t know,” Rams replied softly, his voice fading as he fell back to his drugged sleep. “Out here you… trust your inertial. You gotta trust… data.”
The next day the inertial indicated that they had arrived on the track of CS-17 and were leading it by nearly six hours.
Louella started sailing a waiting pattern, criss-crossing CS-17’s predicted track while heading the ship in the same direction as the station. Pascal anxiously scanned the three sensor screens for the station’s arrival each time they crossed her predicted track.
After ten hours of anticipation CS-17 still hadn’t arrived. According to the inertial’s readings the station should have been right on top of their position, yet both the radar and sonar showed nothing there except clear seas, roaring winds, and the perpetual hiss and crackle of radio noise at the limits of their range.
“Trust your inertial,” Pascal muttered angrily under his breath each time they crossed the empty track.
“If the station isn’t here then where could it be?” Louella demanded when she took over the watch. She was as frustrated as he at the lack of contact after nearly a day had passed. “Could the station master have altered the station’s course for some reason—to avoid the storm or run a rescue mission?”