The Jupiter Theft

Janet was thumbing back one of Boyle’s eyelids, looking at it with a coldlight stick. She’d got Maybury to help her. The little astronomy tech was elevating a plastic bag with a tube leading down to a needle in Boyle’s arm.

“Is he going to lose the leg?” Jameson inquired, bending over.

Janet gave him a look of tight fury. “Probably,” she said. “And there’s no way to clone a new one for him here.”

Maybury said, her voice shaking, “Isn’t there anything you can do, Commander?”

Jameson shook his head. “I could rally some of the men. We could arm ourselves with the garden tools and pipes from the hydroponics equipment. But Klein has the upper hand. We can’t get near him with that automatic weapon of his. Those things have a range of a couple of hundred yards in this gravity, and aim doesn’t count.”

“But you’ve got to stop them! They’re crazy!”

Ruiz limped over and rested a hand on Maybury’s shoulder. She looked up at him with quick gratitude.

“Commander Jameson’s right,” Ruiz said. “Chia has a hand-laser, too. I saw it. And the devil knows what other weapons they smuggled in here.”

People had started to drift across to the gateway to see what Klein and his friends were doing there. There was quite respectable crowd now, keeping a wary distance, watching silently. Then there was the Sound of a scuffle, and some angry shouting. The crowd started to disperse, then changed its mind and came uncertainly together again.

“Something’s going on,” Jameson said to Maggie. “I’d better…”

He stopped and strained to see in the dim light. Somebody was running toward him, bounding in huge swoops in the one third gravity down the shelved bowl. As the figure drew closer, he saw that it was Beth Oliver, her blond hair disheveled and flying.

“Tod!” she panted, drawing near. “They’re taking people with them! By force! They’ve got Kiernan, and Kay Thorwald—they say she can handle the ship with Yeh! And Sue Jarowski!”

“I’d better see what I can do,” Jameson said. He turned and started to go. Maggie hung on to his arm, trying to drag him back.

“Tod,” she said. “Don’t go.”

He disentangled her gently. “With Boyle out of it, and if Kay’s being held, then I’m in charge. I’d better see—”

“You can’t do anything,” she cried, oddly agitated for someone as usually self-assured as Maggie was. “You said so yourself. You’ll only get hurt.”

“I’ll be all right,” he said, turning again.

“You don’t know what Klein and that—that Chia are capable of!”

“I’m afraid I do,” he said, nodding toward where Boyle lay sprawled. Janet had the bleeding under control, and she had a rolled-up blanket under Boyle’s head. Dmitri and Kiernan’s opposite number, Wang, had taken over from Maybury and had set up a tripod of garden tools to hold the drip bag. The leg hung by shreds, and Janet was removing pieces of bone with a pair of tweezers.

“I’ll go with you,” Mike Berry said, falling in beside him.

“All right, Mike, but keep out of trouble. Where’s Ruiz? Maybe he can try to talk to Klein again.”

“He went over there a few minutes ago,” Mike said. “Mayb’s with him. You aren’t going to get anywhere with that bastard, Tod. You know that type. If he blew up the world, he’d say he did it to keep America free.”

Jameson nodded grimly. He ascended the tiers of synthetic stone, past the metal trees and the random tumbled blocks the Cygnans had put there for variety. To his left a miniature waterfall was sluicing down the steps toward the murky pool at the bottom. Mike hopped along beside him, trying to keep up, bouncing too high in the low gravity and then having to take another giant step when his foot touched bottom.

As Jameson drew close, he could see people milling around uncertainly, keeping well beyond an invisible line. On the other side of the line were the people in Klein’s party. Most of Yao’s bomb crew were there—a score of powerfully built young men and bandy-legged girls who had armed themselves with a miscellany of slats, garden shears and trowels, and what must have been branches of the iron trees, clandestinely filed to the snapping-off point during weeks of captivity. Only one of Tu Jue-chen’s Struggle Group fighters was there—the one who’d helped Gifford. The rest must have been dismissed as unreliable, despite their attempt to switch sides. Jameson’s own partner, Li, was in the party, apparently voluntarily, as was Maggie’s opposite number from the computer section, Jen Mei-mei. They were talking to three Chinese fusion techs.

Kay, Kiernan, and Sue were backed up against the inward-leaning wall of the zoo enclosure, guarded by Gifford and Fiaccone. Gifford was holding Kiernan, pinioning the smaller man’s arms behind his back. Kiernan looked dazed, as if he’d been hit on the head. Mike’s young assistant, Quentin, under no apparent restraint, was talking volubly at Sue, who averted her head, refusing to look at him.