Jupiter

A lump of cream cloud grown over with ammonia crystal, cell by cell, as if something were building a comb out of frost. The cells are empty. A passage leads to a hollow in the middle, lit by a lantern that was not there when the crystals started.

A laboratory gondola under a balloon of captured storm cloud. It drifted the zones for years, taking pictures of the belts, until the envelope tore and it settled on a cloud. One wall has fallen out; the instruments and the last plates are still inside.

Something very large died in the zones and the clouds held it up. The ribs stand taller than a house, the skull lies open-mouthed at the head of the spine. No creature this size has been seen alive; someone hung a lantern in the ribcage and left a barrel in the jaw.

A slab of storm cloud that floats on its own, with a ring of amethyst and a column of end rods on it. Someone built it and left it to the wind; the wind has taken two stones from the ring so far.

A skimmer ship that drank hydrogen from the belts through the scoop under its bow. It drank until it was full and then kept drinking: one tank burst, the hull tore, and the cloud is swallowing it on the starboard side. The hold is still full of what it scooped, and so is the ship's log.

The same ring as on Earth, on a dais of the local stone and in the colors of this world: whoever set the gates out did it on every world at once. This one sleeps. It answers only one who has brought down the master of this world and lived through its trial; then lay the master's heart, the dust of the road and what this world gives into the ring, and it will join the other gates that are awake.

A mast on a platform in the belts, raised to charge batteries from the sky. Lightning strikes it more often than rain falls on Earth; the deck around its foot is scorched black, one guy chain is torn, and the batteries in the ring still hold a charge.

A tower of crimson cloud in the heart of the Great Red Spot, the only thing in the storm that does not move. Veins of red phosphorus climb it and glow at night. Someone banded it with station trim; the wind has scoured one side and broken one ring.

A bastion of storm metal hung in the upper cloud deck to milk the storms: every strike on its spires ran down the metal into the copper cells below. Four tiers lie under the cloud dock: berths and barracks, the halls of cells, the compass tier with its lattice bridges, and the lower holds. The garrison penned storm rays for their glands and steered by the compass of the wind, until the leviathan came out of the Spot. It feeds on lightning, and the ring in the holds was built to lure it and hold it. The luring worked.

A tethered float with a lamp and a vane, one of hundreds set out across the belts to measure the wind. The wind measured them instead: most are gone, and this one has lost half its mooring.