All Spun Out

It was nice being inside the orbiter because everything was soft and padded. With so much turbulence in Jupiter’s atmosphere, shock waves could send you reeling at any time, and thus every part of the cabin was protected with enough foam that you could smack into it without so much as getting a bruise.

The outside, however, glistened with cold metal. I always thought of it as icy, with memories of ice back home on Mars, but obviously there wasn’t any moisture in the gaseous mix above Jupiter.

I was outside right now. Fixing an antennae that had shaken loose over time. My tether snaked and floated around me, then back to the latch by the compression chamber. It too glistened in the pale light from the far-away sun. It was strange to think about, but my craft created more localized heat than the sun could shine on anything at this distance.

There was a hideous jolt, and then I was spinning backwards. It must have been an especially dense pocket of atmosphere. Air (though it wasn’t oxygen) rushing from somewhere to somewhere else. I waited for the tether to stop my motion before I tried to orient myself. It didn’t.

I kept spinning, rotating like a plate on a juggler’s stick, facing down towards the endless storms. Just off towards the horizon was the eye, massive and red, swirling endlessly in all its majestic fury.

This was it. It would be days before I died of dehydration, but at least I would have something to watch below. If I looked closely, I could see the enormous belts and zones met, and see the swirling interchange of rising and falling gases.