The Jupiter Theft Part 34

The necklace broke up as he approached, turning into a random swarm, of blue and white manikins.

Jameson slid the little flat pistol out of the waistband of his shorts.

He wondered what he looked like to them. He must be a startling figure, bare-chested in airless s.p.a.ce, straddling a metal staff with-a rainbow bubble shimmering at his back.

Suit jets flared, quick diamond sparkles against blackness, as the drifting shapes used their suit radios to organize themselves. Jameson was acutely aware of his nakedness.

At a quarter mile, Jameson switched off that frightening beam of raw energy. The prisoners were mixed up in the jumble of stuffed figures. He might have drawn his finger of light across his enemies, but the others would have sizzled and fried too. He was going to have to get in among them.

He twisted around, climbing the stick like a fire-pole, one leg twined and one hand gripping to give him maximum freedom of movement. His agility in the skintight sheath would be an advantage. He hadn't realized it was possible to feel this free in s.p.a.ce.

Slowly, slowly, the figures became more distinct, seeming not to move closer but to grow before his eyes. They were a complicated frieze against a s.p.a.ckle of frosty stars, sharp and harshly lit in the clarity of vacuum. He could pick out faces behind faceplates: Chia, her rosebud lips curled, holding Maybury's upper arm with one hand and with the other fumbling in her toolbelt. Yeh with his big jaw and sloping shelf of brow. A young, Chinese fusion tech, looking frightened. Gifford, staring popeyed at him, one mittened hand closing on a screwdriver.

And then he was among them, one bare foot lashing out to kick Gifford away before Gifford, clumsy in his suit, could slash with the screwdriver. A Chinese missile man was swinging at him with a barbed hook, like something moving in a dream. He dodged easily and fired a burst at close range into the broad chest. Klein's ugly little gun twitched in his hand. He was appalled at what happened then: The s.p.a.cesuit shredded and bits of the living man inside exploded outward. Jameson's momentum kept him going. He crashed into Yeh, and instantly the man's big mitts were closing on the plastic balloon around his head.

Jameson ducked out of the way, and before Yeh could grab, a thrust of Jameson's shoulder had sent him spinning out of the fight.

Another man from the missile crew collided with him. Something gleamed in a mittened fist. Jameson let go of the broomstick, and his left hand found the little safety latch at the man's air-hose connection. He gave a yank. The stuffed suit twitched and the mittened fist opened up. A sharp little awl drifted away.

The body tumbled lazily backward, horror behind its faceplate.

Jameson then found himself in a clear s.p.a.ce, a flock of people wheeling around him like gulls. Suit jets puffed out their glittering motes, and four blue shapes were converging on him. He had time to recognize Yao's face behind gla.s.s, the lean ascetic features drawn back in a rictus. He fired, and the missile officer ran into a hail of little bees that plucked at the material of his suit and turned him into a rag doll. Jameson swiveled and cut the two men flanking Yao into ribbons. Still rotating on his axis, he aimed the machine pistol at the fourth man, coming at him with a glowing soldering iron fed by a cable from a belt pack.

He pulled the trigger, but nothing happened.

Empty!

He flung the pistol at the man's helmet. It bounced off. The man kept coming. The tip of the soldering iron shone orange. Jameson wriggled helplessly in emptiness. The broomstick with its vacuole of alien life hung out of reach, slowly twisting. Jameson had no reaction ma.s.s, no way to move. He hovered there, waiting for the searing touch of the iron.

And then there was a flash of brilliant light, brief as lightning. The Chinese disappeared below the waist.

The torso came tumbling on, the gloved hands clenching and unclenching reflexively in the brain's last memory of pain. When the half of a man b.u.mped Jameson, the soldering iron was swinging on its tether and he was able to snare it without getting burned.

He twisted his head around and saw the Cygnan broomstick sailing away under the impetus of the burst of light. One of the humanoids must have managed to reach the sliding stud through the yielding membrane and switch it on for the fraction of a second that it was lined up with the attacking Chinese.

They'd chosen sides, all right!

n.o.body else seemed to have been touched by the finger of light, but now the broomstick was a hundred yards away and still retreating. The humanoids might be able to turn it on, but they couldn't aim it. There was another flash of light that only worsened their vector, and then they were falling into endless night.

There was the sparkle of a suit jet, and one of the white suits that had been hanging against the flamboyant backdrop of Jupiter took off after the broomstick. It wasn't Gifford; Jameson could see him hovering next to one of his Chinese friends. Was it Fiaccone?

He located Chia's' small blue suit in the starry s.p.a.ce around him. Aiming himself carefully, he shoved as hard as he could at the dreadful thing that was b.u.mping against him. The dismantled torso floated off, and Jameson was coasting with nightmare slowness toward Chia.

Chia let go her grip on Maybury and pointed something at Jameson-the corkscrew-wrapped barrel of a hand-laser. He could see it pulsating with faint light as its flash tubes pumped photons. It would take only a couple of seconds until photon excitation reached the critical point; then a spurt of energetic light was going to drill him clean through.

He floated relentlessly toward her, powerless to change direction. With the light of Jupiter on her, she was limned sharp and clean in his vision. Behind the square visor her face was a blushing peach, distorted by fury. The half-naked apparition before her had ruined her plans, probably beyond salvage. Only five members of the bomb crew were left, without Yao to direct them.

Jameson was but a dozen feet from her now. He wondered if it would hurt.

A thread of violet light stretched past him and winked off. Maybury, floating forgotten behind Chia, had come out of her daze of grief. Or perhaps she had only been waiting. She had Chia's wrist in a small gloved hand. The laser flashed again. Then Maybury's other hand in its stubby-fingered gloves was spread over Chia's faceplate, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the fastenings. Chia struggled, like an overstuffed doll in her s.p.a.cesuit, but she couldn't get her am back far enough to dislodge Maybury. The faceplate blew off and the peachlike face behind it burst with running juices.

Jameson collided with the tangled bodies. Gently he pried Maybury's hands loose and pried the laser from Chia's grasp. He gave the body a little push to disengage it, and made Maybury understand that he wanted to keep holding on to her for the use of her suit jets.

No more than fifty feet away, Gifford's wide form blocked the stars, the screwdriver still clasped in a mittened fist. He was conferring, helmet to helmet, with one of his Chinese allies, his other hand gripping the man's sleeve. Jameson tensed, waiting to see what the two of them would do. The laser in his hand was very comforting.

The helmets came apart. Gifford still was steadying himself with a grip on his friend's arm. Then, with a swift, savage motion, he plunged the screwdriver into the belly of the man's suit. Jameson couldn't tell immediately if it had penetrated. Gifford reversed his grip and smashed the weighted handle of the screwdriver into the Chinese faceplate. He kept hammering until the visor went frosty. The blue suit had become floppy. Gifford held the screwdriver up, letting Jameson see it, then tossed it away.

Jameson nodded.

Gifford swam over to another white suit, which had to be Fiaccone, and the two of them went over to get Smitty. Jameson could tell that it was Smitty because he could see a glint of golden hair inside the helmet; it had come undone, filling the bowl. They all put their helmets together for a minute, conferring.

Then they waved their hands outward toward Jameson in the universal gesture.

Other white suits were drifting toward Jameson on short bursts of thruster: the prisoners; n.o.body among the remaining ten Chinese was bothering to keep any of them under guard. One of the Americans-an undersized suit that had to contain Kiernan-had gotten hold of some kind of floating tool, and he was shaking it threateningly in the direction of the Chinese. It must have ma.s.sed considerable because Kiernan was bobbing up and down at the end of the handle almost as much as the tool was.

The cl.u.s.tered Chinese had turned to watch something. Jameson looked in the same direction.

A pencil of light was drawn against the frosty void-the broomstick coming back. The American who had chased it was bringing it back. Jameson could see the white doll-like figure hunched over the shaft.

The bubble with its curled-up Cygnan and fetal humanoids was still snubbed in place.

The figure, swung the shaft under, climbing for a moment on a pillar of fire, then did a complete backflip, rising on arms and legs like a jockey. The searing beam of light traced a large circle around the scattered swarm of people, then died out as most of the rider s forward velocity was canceled.

It had been an expert braking maneuver.

It also had been an object lesson.

The Chinese went into a quick conference by radio. Jameson could tell they were talking by the amount of nodding and gesturing that went on.

The broomstick rider drifted in Jameson's direction, using suit jets to damp out the remaining momentum.

As he came close, Jameson saw that it was Mike Berry, with a big grin on his face.

The Chinese finished their discussion. They made ostentatious palms-outward gestures and floated over to join the Americans. What was left of the Jupiter expedition was united again.

A last blue-clad figure, awkward in a s.p.a.cesuit that was too small a fit, had been left behind. That would be Maggie in her borrowed suit. After a moment, she followed. She had nowhere else to go.

Chapter 30.

"Where are the six-legs?" Li asked, sweating inside his helmet. He'd removed his faceplate and mittens so that he could work faster, even though the Callisto landing module wasn't fully pressurized yet. "They must know for long time now that we here in ship."

"I don't know," Jameson replied tightly. "I just hope that they don't come after us for at least a couple of hours. By then we ought to be far enough away and moving fast enough so they'll figure it isn't worth the bother of chasing us."

He continued working with his screwdriver on the guts of the dismantled control panel. He'd torn the plastic bag off his head as soon as he, safely could. The Cygnan spray-on s.p.a.cesuit already was, starting to flake away in white scales that looked like dead skin-evidently a consequence of being exposed to atmosphere after being in vacuum. When his job in the lander was finished, somebody was going to have to come out with a spare s.p.a.cesuit to ferry him back to the ship.

Maybury was wedged uncomfortably against him, crouching in front of the luminous squiggles of the lander's computer console. The c.o.c.kpit wasn't really big enough for three people. She had been plotting escape orbits through a radio link to the Jupiter ship's data banks, but now she was looking through a telescope out the bowl-shaped port.

"Commander, you'd better have a look," she said.

He took the telescope from her. Jupiter overflowed the port, a billowing globe that now had a distinct rim around it. The sticklike Cygnan ships were black hieroglyphs against its face. They were arranged in a five-pointed figure rotating around a common center of gravity.

Looking at those forked shapes, it was hard to believe they contained worlds.

Jameson lifted the eyepiece to his face. He saw that Maybury had programmed the telescope's pea brain to damp outmost of the light on Jupiter's chaotic wavelengths. The tortured planet was a dim ghost among the stars. The five ships were no longer silhouettes. They took on proper three-dimensional shapes, chisel-edged constructions illumined by the amplified light of the distant Sun.

A ruby thread of light stretched between two of the crouched forms. Laser light. Jameson wondered if one of the ships was the one he had been on; he'd lost track of their positions.

Now another thread of light stabbed out, linking with a third ship. From the tips of the inverted V, two more beams joined themselves to ships at the lower points.

"What is it?" Li said, sweat rolling down his face.

"They're communicating," Jameson said. "Keep working."

Cursing in Chinese, Li continued to trace circuits. He ripped out a tiny wire and respliced it elsewhere.

The Cygnan ships had to be shedding a lot of dust and molecular debris to make the laser light that distinct. The invisible cloud that surrounded the fleet must have grown to a radius of thousands of miles in the months they'd been parked here.

"Sloppy housekeeping," Jameson muttered.

"What?" Maybury said. "Oh, you mean whatever's scattering light. Cygnan ships are leaky, aren't they?"

Jameson continued watching. The lines traced a pentagram across Jupiter's spectral face in filaments of red fire. The angle of vision foreshortened it a little, giving it depth. He knew it was rotating, though he'd have to wait a long time before he saw movement.

An astonishing thing happened next. A perfect five-pointed star etched itself within the pentagram.

Of course, it was a geometric accident, the consequence of every ship being linked up with every other ship, but it was a strange and spellbinding sight all the same.

A pentacle within a pentagram.

He gasped just as the sign erased itself.

"What happened?" Li said.

"They've stopped talking. We haven't much time."

He handed the telescope back to Maybury and took up his screwdriver again. There was a clipboard of checklists for powering and firing the landing vehicle in an a.s.sortment of circ.u.mstances, but they were of limited value. None of them included the problem of using the craft's engines while it was still clamped to the mother ship. Before Jameson dared cut in the engines, he and Li had to disconnect the safety circuits and improvise an entirely new firing sequence.

"What do you think?" he asked Li.

"Another half-hour."

Jameson punched through to the bridge. Kay Thorwald's plain, pleasant face showed up on the little screen.

"Ready to blast in a half-hour, Kay," he said. "What's the condition of the ship?"

"We've finished a preliminary damage survey, Tod. There's nothing we can't fix-in time. We're not going to try to make the whole ring airtight We'll all just have to live in close quarters in a few of the compartments. Kiernan says he can get the air plant going-enough frozen seed stock survived."

"How about the att.i.tude controls? Can we get this ship pointed in the right direction?" He glanced down at the slip of paper Maybury was shoving under his nose. "Maybury says that if we fire in thirty minutes, you've got to line the ship up with Vega and keep correcting for the angle of my push."

"Just a minute."

She turned away from the screen toward a work table where Yeh was going over some diagrams with Fiaccone. She and Yeh talked a moment.

"Comrade Yeh says that we can do it. Some of our att.i.tude jets are gone, but we can lock the ring and use the thrusters that normally set it spinning. There's a good distribution of workable ones around the circ.u.mference. We're feeding the problem to the computer now."

"Thanks, Kay."

He switched off and got the engine room. A harried-looking Chinese fusion tech said, "Dong-yi-dong, I'll get him."

Mike appeared on the screen, his hair and beard disheveled.

"How long?" Jameson said.

Mike scratched his head. "The Cygnans didn't touch much," he said. "But they bollixed things up just looking. Quentin will have the boron part of the cycle fixed in a couple of hours. But we can't get a fusion reaction going for at least a day."

"It's up to Li and me, then," Jameson said.

"You and the Giff," Mike said and signed off.

Jameson looked out a port at the long shaft of the ship. Gifford's white s.p.a.cesuit was visible among the blue-clad Chinese strapping down a scoop-nosed drone that Jameson recognized as one of the Jupiter cloudtop orbiters. Just over the curve of the hull was the stubby shape of the vehicle that contained the radiation-shielded crawler that had been destined for a soft landing on Io. They had represented a bold ambition of the human race. Now, he thought sadly, neither of them would ever be used. Their increment of thrust-that's all they were good for now.

He tried to attract Gifford's attention through the port, but failed. He called Communications and got Sue Jarowski. "Sue," he said, "can you patch me through to Gifford's suit radio?"

"Right away." He watched her face as she pushed b.u.t.tons. The long Cygnan captivity had melted flesh from her wide Slavic cheekbones, making them even more prominent. Her full, bold mouth and strong chin were set in concentration. Absent-mindedly she pushed back a curtain of thick dark hair. Jameson was thinking how striking she looked when Gifford's voice crackled from the speaker.

"Yeah?"

Outside, Gifford was looking in his direction. He raised a gloved hand and waved toward the window of the Callisto lander.

"How's it coming?" Jameson said.

Gifford's voice came over the sound of frying eggs. "Give us another couple hours and we can get one more drone out of its coc.o.o.n, pointed in the right direction, and bolted down. Then we gotta come inside. These boys can't work under acceleration. It ought to be enough to start the push. When we run out of juice, we'll come out again and strap on a cl.u.s.ter of rocket engines from the missiles."

"A couple of hours?" Jameson said. "Can you cut that in half?"

"Commander," Gifford called, sounding aggrieved, "I've got only five of these boys to work with, plus Smitty. And she's still under your boat, bolting on the braces."

"Can we break out of orbit with just the vehicles you've got ready now?"

"Maggie says no. If you want me to, I'll ask her to run the figures through the computer again."

Jameson's face turned to stone. "Don't bother," he said. "I'll take her word for it. Just work as fast as you can."