He wasn’t falling like he was supposed to. He’d missed his target.

Looking behind him, he saw it through the reflections of orange and red clouds in his faceplate—a black ship with a flat belly and a long, arched back, like a humpback upside-down. It was getting smaller. His platoon, like fleas, landed on its hull.

His vision was shaking, his body rattling in alien turbulence. His helmet speaker crackled. “Crazy gust. Henderson went wide,” the sergeant reported to command. “We lost Henderson.”

He flipped off his radio. Now he could hear the Jovian atmosphere roaring around him. His respirator whined. His suit snapped in the air like a flag.

Nothing but clouds the colors of coffee and fire, now, for the rest of his life. Atmo pressure would crush his bones, squish his insides into a bony soup. His suit might survive, full of rotting man, tossed around in an century-long hurricane. Burial in the sky.

He tried to think of something to say. To broadcast. He chose silence, and hoped it would be haunting.