The Jupiter Theft

He hurried to Ruiz on one hand and two feet. Ruiz and the missile man were doing their best to strangle each other. The Chinese had dropped his weapon; Ruiz had given him no choice with his gouging and biting. Ruiz was getting the worst of it now. The man was pressing his thumbs into Ruiz’s larynx. Ruiz lost his grip and weakly tried to break the man’s little finger—an old New Manhattan trick. Jameson laid his wrench along the missile man’s skull. Ruiz got up, rubbing his throat. Together they tumbled the stunned Chinese down into the metal valley.

Ruiz tottered unsteadily on his feet. He turned to face Jameson.

“Thanks, I—”

He never finished. There was a sputtering sound from the shadows at the end of the ridge, and Jameson was spattered with Ruiz’s blood.

Ruiz’s body began its nightmare drift down the slope. Jameson went flat and with a convulsive twist levered himself below the opposite side of the ridge. A stream of angry mosquitoes zzzz’d overhead.

“Get down!” he yelled to Maggie, just in time to keep her from sticking her head over the peak.

Before he could do anything, Klein’s thin face rose above the metal rim, about twenty feet away, where the shadowed hugeness of the Cygnan machinery overhung the cliff. Klein aimed his nasty little gun at him.

“Stay where you are, Jameson,” Klein called. “Stay alive a minute. McInnes, move away from him.”

“Do what he says, Maggie,” Jameson said.

Jameson weighed the situation. He could launch himself in a hopeless scramble toward Klein as soon as Maggie was out of the line of fire. He might as well die trying. Or he could stay where he was and wait for Klein to rake him with automatic fire. There was no cover on that featureless metal slope.

He threw the wrench at Klein, not too fast.

Klein unhurriedly moved aside a couple of inches, and the wrench went sailing lazily past him. The aim hadn’t been good.

Klein seemed to be enjoying himself. “Got anything left to throw, Jameson?” he asked.

“As a matter of fact, I have,” Jameson said. “Here, you can have it.”

He reached around to the back of his waistband and drew out the Cygnan cattle prod. His thumb found the recessed stud in the bulbous handle and, with a metal-bending strength impossible to Cygnan fingers, jammed it full on.

He tossed the instrument in a slow underhand pitch toward Klein, setting it spinning. His aim was better this time. Klein, with a ferret’s grin, batted it aside contemptuously.

The prod’s center of gravity was somewhere in its three inches of bulbous grip. The slender prongs spun round it with a radius of fifteen inches. Naturally, whatever it was going to hit, it would hit prong end first.

Klein howled as a thousand wasps stung him. The hand holding the gun jerked upward spasmodically, sending the weapon flying toward the shadows. Klein’s senses were gone, erased by fifty thousand volts.

Jameson launched himself along the ridge in a flat dive and caught Klein’s twitching body before it could fall. “Maggie!” he yelled. “Get the gun!”

Klein was moaning in his arms. He was limp, paralyzed. Jameson could appreciate the pain the man was feeling. He had felt it himself. It was like sticking your finger into a light socket.

He saw Maggie working her way along the rooflike slope toward the looming shapes of machinery. There was a service platform there; the gun would be somewhere on it. With the gun to hold off Chia’s gang, and with Klein as hostage, there would be a chance to throw a monkey wrench into the mad plan to bomb the starship. Eventually a Cygnan would happen along, even in this uninhabited housing for the gigantic mechanism that folded the arm of the ship.

“Maggie, hurry up!” he called.

He could see the little forms of Klein’s reinforcements, halfway up the slope now. Klein stirred in his arms. He’d require another touch of the prod soon. Jameson could see it, just a few feet away. Klein’s convulsive spasm had slammed it against the slope, where it rested in a shallow corroded groove.

“You … bastard,” Klein said weakly.

There was movement in the shadows. Jameson turned his head to see Maggie standing there under the fifty-foot teeth of the gears. She had the gun.

She pointed it at him.

“Let him go, Tod,” she said.

“Good work, MacInnes,” Klein said.

Maggie stood where she was, very sensibly not coming any closer to Jameson. “Are you going to take me with you?” she said.

Klein moved away from Jameson to leave Maggie a clear field of fire along the ridge. “Yes,” he said. “I promise you.”

“What about a suit?”

“You can have Mei-mei’s suit. I’ll fix it up with Chia. You can run a computer as well as Mei-mei can.”

“What’s this all about, Maggie?” Jameson said.

“Go on, tell him,” Klein said.

Maggie faced Jameson defiantly, her knuckles white on the gun. “I work for the Reliability Board too,” she said. “You’ve been my assignment.”

Jameson’s knees felt weak. “I don’t believe it,” he whispered.