"Getting a reading," Chippawa called out over the wind. "Incoming. About eight meters long—roughly torpedo-shaped—"

"We're falling," Faraday all but screamed at him. So much for the luck of his wooden ring. He was about to die. They were both about to die. "What the hell does it matter—?"

The sentence was choked off as his armrest again slammed hard into the side of his exoskeleton, the impact jarring his ribs. "What happened?" he demanded, eyes flickering over his instruments. No new error messages were showing.

"I don't know," Chippawa said. "It's—oh, boy."

Faraday looked up. And stopped breathing.

The slab of gray had returned. Only this time it had shifted around until an eye was visible.

Gazing steadily through the window at them.

Faraday stared back, the wind and the pressure and even the fact that he was a dead man suddenly fading into the background. The eye was big and very black, either with no pupil at all or else with all pupil. The kind of eye that would suck in every bit of radiation across a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, he realized, using every bit of light available to see in the gloom of Jupiter's deep atmosphere. There was a hint of polygonal faceting around the eye's edge, though it didn't seem to be an insect-type compound eye.

And like a textbook optical illusion that shifted from duck to rabbit and back to duck again, he couldn't decide whether the expression in the eye was one of interest, sympathy, or malevolence.

Or maybe that was just his imagination. Or his hopes.

Or his fears.

With an effort, he found his voice. "Should we wave?" he said.

"Unless you'd rather ask it to take us to their leader," Chippawa said. "Emscan's running... man, this thing's got one complicated internal structure."

"How complicated?" Faraday asked, starting to become interested in spite of himself.