The Jupiter Theft

“They don’t want us to have a chance,” Ruiz said, his face grim. “The people they left behind are a complication in their plans. I’ll tell you what I think. I think the first missile they intend to fire will be targeted for this pod.”

“No!” Jameson cried. “Not even Klein or Chia would do a thing like that! Disable the spine of the ship, they said! They wouldn’t slaughter their own people!”

“Types like that always start with their own people,” Ruiz said.

Dmitri was rummaging in the piles of goods. He came up with a fire ax that had been overlooked and stuck it in his belt. Maggie collected a bottle of alcohol and some cotton and, after she had explained their use, then said: “Don’t look shocked. I come from a family of rebs.” Ruiz found a kitchen knife and tied it to the end of a fiberglass pole that had been part of a stretcher. Jameson armed himself with an eighteen-inch crescent wrench and then, in the same tool locker, found a six-pound maul and an assortment of chisels. After some thought he tied a nylon cord around the handle of the maul and stuffed a coil of twenty or thirty feet of line inside his shirt.

“Something’s moving!” Maggie cried. “Over there!”

Jameson whipped around and saw a tiny glittering thing emerge from a pile of castoff clothing and begin to climb the slanting wall. Before he could do anything there was a blur of pink motion as one of the diminutive humanoids streaked for the thing. It trapped it in a dainty four-fingered hand and presented it to Jameson.

Jameson looked it over and immediately smashed it beneath his heel.

“What … was it?” Dmitri said.

“Piece of electronics,” Jameson said. “One of Klein’s motile probes. Pinhead lens, rice-grain mike, little magnetized ball-bearing wheels, trailing a spider-thread antenna. It must have been activated by our movements or body heat. Klein’s watching his rear.”

“So now he knows we’re after him,” Ruiz mused.

“Probably. I don’t know what the range of a thing like that is.”

“How do we find them?”

“Good question. He’s got those miniature probes to scout out a safe route for him. Wish we had the same. Or at least a bloodhound. Now, which direction did he go in?”

He looked around the expanse of floor, frowning.

“What’s got into them?” Maggie said.

The two humanoids were behaving oddly. They were prowling the area on all fours—not on hands and knees, as people would have done, but bent double in an impossible arch, walking on the tips of their toes and the backs of their little hands, with their fingers curled up. The position seemed entirely natural for them. They moved with a supple, spidery grace, their faces casting back and forth a half inch from the floor.

Dmitri watched them intently as they worked in widening circles, then turned to Jameson.

“I think you’ve got your bloodhounds,” he said.

Chapter 27

They climbed more than a mile before they saw their first live Cygnan. Klein had been correct in his assumption: Even in an artificial environment that was more crowded than Hong Kong or Dallasworth there were service and utilities routes that were untraveled and almost unvisited.

“This is like sneaking through the sewers of Paris in an old novel by Victor Hugo,” Ruiz observed, “while thousands of Parisians are walking around a few feet overhead.” Then he had to explain who Victor Hugo was.

The route they followed was a tangled confusion of pipes, enormous three-sided ducts and twisting cables as thick around as oak trees. They passed through narrow chimneys of metal that they had to squeeze through inch by inch, and yawning spaces that seemed to have been wasted in the design of the ship. Jameson was reminded of just how old the ship must be; some of the chambers they traversed had been used for various purposes and abandoned by past generations of Cygnans. The dust of centuries lay on the crumbling artifacts that loomed in the flickering dimness provided by skeins of leaking optical fibers.

“Cygnans are sloppy housekeepers,” Jameson said at one point, looking at an electrical cable that had been gnawed clean through by some small animal. “They never repaired this.”

“The function it served might have disappeared a thousand years ago,” Ruiz said. “Do we maintain the Roman aqueducts, or the transatlantic cables?”

There was life all around them in the unused spaces—little furry things that fled chittering as they approached. Mosslike fungus grew near damp spots where pipes had burst or condensation beaded the walls. Once they saw a small flying thing—a podlike shape suspended from a crown of furiously beating transparent wings.