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when we’ve already got eyes in the Main ring. Most of the sensors don’t last as long as they’re supposed to and the ones that do never tell us anything we don’t already know. Weeding – picking up the dead sensors – is actually more interesting. When the dead sensors break down, they combine with the dust, taking on odd shapes and textures and even odder colorations. If something especially weird catches my eye, I’ll ask to keep it. Usually, the answer’s no. Recycling is the foundation of life out here – mass in, mass out; create, un-create, re-create, allathat. But once in a while, there’s a surplus of something because nothing evens out exactly all the time, and I get to take a little good-luck charm home to my bunk.
    We’re almost at the Halo when the jellie tells us whichever crew seeded last time didn’t weed out the dead ones. So much for mass in, mass out. We’re all surprised; none of us ever got away with doing half a job. We have to hang in the jellie’s belly high over the North Pole and scan the whole frigging Halo for materials markers. Which would be simple except a lot of what should be there isn’t showing up. Fred makes us deep-scan three times but nothing shows on Metis and there’s no sign that anything leaked into the Main ring.
    “Musta all fell into the Big J,” says Bait. He’s watching the aurora flashing below us like he’s hypnotised, which he probably is. Bait’s got this thing about the polar hexagon anyway.
    “But so many?” Splat says. “You know they’re gonna say that’s too many to be an accident.”
    “Do we know why the last crew didn’t pick up the dead ones?” Aunt Chovie’s already tensing up. If you tapped on her head, you’d hear high C-sharp.
    “No,” Fred says. “I don’t even know which crew it was. Just that it wasn’t us.”
    Dubonnet tells the jellie to ask. The jellie tells us it’s put in a query, but because it’s not crucial, we’ll have to wait.
    “Frigging tube-worms,” Splat growls, tentacles almost knotting up. “They do that to feel important.”
    “Tube worms are AIs, they don’t feel,” the jellie says with the AI serenity that can get so maddening so fast. “Like jellies.”
    Then Glynis speaks up: “Scan Big J.”
    “Too much interference,” I say. “The storms –”
    “Just humour me,” says Glynis. “Unless you’re in a hurry?”
    The jellie takes us down to just above the middle of the Main ring and we prograde double-time. And son of a bitch – is this crazy or is this the new order? – we get some hits in the atmosphere.
    But we shouldn’t. It’s not just the interference from the storms – Big J gravitates the hell out of anything it swallows. Long before I went out for sushi (and that was quite a while ago), they’d stopped sending probes into Jupiter’s atmosphere. They didn’t just hang in the clouds and none of them ever lasted long enough to reach liquid metallic hydrogen. Which means the sensors should just be atoms, markers crushed out of existence. They can’t still be in the clouds unless something is keeping them there.
    “That’s gotta be a technical fault,” Splat says. “Or something.”
    “Yeah, I’m motion sick, I lost the O,” says Aunt Chovie, which is the current crew code for Semaphore only.
    Bipeds have sign language and old-school semaphore with flags but octo-crew semaphore is something else entirely. Octo-sem changes as it goes, which means each crew speaks a different language, not only from each other, but also from one conversation to the next. It’s not transcribable, either, not like spoken-word communication, because it works by consensus. It’s not completely uncrackable, but even the best decryption AI can’t do it in less than half a dec. Five days to decode a conversation isn’t exactly efficient.
    To be honest, I’m kinda surprised the two-steppers who run JovOp are still letting us get away with it. They’re not what you’d call big champions