Synopsis/Details
For a century, telescopes have watched Jupiter's Great Red Spot get smaller. NASA science officer Jane Diaz believes something beneath the storm is killing it, and only a crewed ship can find out what. In a windowless Pentagon council room, she and Canadian commander Marie Anderson win approval for a classified mission. The catch: if they come home with a theory instead of proof, Anderson's career, and Canada's future in deep space, are finished. The crew of the Galaxy Explorer is not a team yet. Pilot Brian Walker cares about one thing: bringing home the ship he has flown on three missions, which is scheduled to be scrapped after this flight. Flight engineer Matt Fitzgerald has a baby due in five months. Drive designer Nina Reyes and young technician Theo Kowalski clash over how to keep her hyperdrive running. And Diaz, brilliant in a simulator, freezes the first time real danger comes at the ship. The journey tests them all. A debris field, a solar storm, and a hyperdrive failure near Mars that Reyes and Kowalski fix only by combining her math with his homemade titanium tools. Diaz finds her nerve guiding the ship through the asteroid belt, rock by rock. But their first run at the Red Spot nearly kills them. The storm's winds seize the ship and drag it down, and the crew escapes only after twenty minutes at full power on a drive that might fail at eighteen. From two thin lines of data, Diaz finds a heat spike coming from deep inside the planet. Slower, careful surveys reveal a volcanic heat source beneath the Spot, and a planet that pulls that heat back down faster than the volcano can supply it. The storm is losing the energy that holds it together. Detours to Jupiter's moons, two hidden storms near the north pole, and a violent storm merger all support her theory. But it is still only a theory. Then the volcano surges. Diaz has one chance to take a direct reading at the bottom of the storm while it happens. Walker agrees to one pass, if Diaz calls the timing. They dive through a twenty-second gap in a venting plume, get the reading, and tear free with a cracked hull and a drive core at its redline.
The crew comes home with proof, and with each other. The Council withdraws the order to scrap the ship. The world learns where they have been. And the six of them are already looking toward Saturn.
