2312

Pauline said, “There was something about three hundred meters downslope. Footprints should still be visible. The figure was moving irregularly-”

Wang hurried into the room, summoned, no doubt. “Lock it down,” he said curtly to his people. Ringing alarms went off in every room, painfully high and loud. Quickly the halls filled with people. Swan and Wahram were hustled along a hallway to the lockdown shelter. By the time they got there it was already crowded, and after they pushed their way in, the door was closed; apparently everyone was accounted for. Now they were inside the smallest Russian doll of all.

There were screens on one wall, and Pauline helped the station AI direct the station’s surveillance cameras. Soon enough one screen zoomed in on a view downslope: there, far down the rumpled and tilted plain of slag, a tiny figure was hopping downhill.

“Not a good idea,” Wang said. “The crust thins down there.”

And then the distant figure sank into a brief flare and disappeared.

“Keep looking around the station,” Wang said after a shocked silence. “See if there is anyone else out there. And put up a drone to have a look around for a hopper.”

The people in the room watched the screens in a grave silence. If the Faraday cage were to lose power, they would be cooked very quickly, every cell in them burst by Jupiter’s radiation.

But nothing seemed to have happened. The station’s power seemed secure, and there was no one else to be seen in the surrounding area.

Then there was a stir across the room. “Call from a ship requesting to land!” someone said.

“Who are they?”

“It’s an Interplan ship, Swift Justice.”

“Make sure it’s really them.”

The image of an incoming ship was shifted to a larger screen, and everyone watched as a small spaceship flared down into the hole in the station’s landing pad. Shortly thereafter a helmeted face appeared right in front of a surveillance camera lens in the landing bay, filling the screen to provide a retinal scan, then waving and giving them a brief thumbs-up. Friends, apparently.

They were let in, and there in the doorway stood three people, helmets off, one of them a small. Swan was startled to recognize the inspector who had visited them at Mqaret’s laboratory: Jean Genette.

“You’re late,” Wang said.

“Sorry,” Genette replied. “We were detained. Tell me what happened.”

Wang made his account brief, ending, “It appears to have been a single intruder. It approached and then went downslope and fell through the crust. We haven’t found any hoppers yet.”

Genette’s head was tilted to the side. “It just ran downslope to its death?”

“Apparently so.”

The inspector looked up at his companions. “We need to pull whatever remains of it out of the lava.” Then, to Wang and the others: “Back shortly. Maybe you should stay in lockdown a little longer.”

And the three of them disappeared back toward the station lock.

A ll right,” Swan said heavily, staring hard at Wahram in particular. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“I’m not sure,” Wahram said.

“We were just attacked!”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so?”

Wang spoke while still reading their screens. “A very ineffective attack, I must say.”

“So who would want to attack you?” Swan asked. “And how did this Inspector Genette get here so fast? And does this have anything to do with what you were doing with Alex?”

Wahram said, “It’s hard to tell at this point,” and Swan interrupted by punching him in the arm.

“ Quit it,” she said viciously. “Tell me what’s going on!”

She looked around the packed room: twelve or fifteen people all crowded in there, but now ostentatiously focused on their own affairs, leaving Wang and his visitors alone at a small table in a corner. “Tell me or I’ll start screaming.” She let out a little shriek to show them what could happen, and people all over the room jumped and looked their way, or tried not to.

Wahram glanced at Wang. “Let me try,” he said.

“All yours,” Wang said.

Wahram tapped on the table screen and called up a schematic of the solar system, a three-dimensional image that seemed to float inside the table. Spheres of bright holographic colors made something like the familiar solar system orrery, though this one had many more colored spheres in it, Swan saw, and a great number of colored lines connecting these spheres. Also, the spheres were not sized in proportion to the real sizes of the planets and moons.

“This image was generated from Alex’s analysis,” Wahram told Swan. “It’s an attempt to show power, and the potential for power. A kind of Menard graphic. The size of the spheres is determined by a compound function of the factors Alex considered important.”