The Jupiter Theft

Jameson sniffed the air. It smelled good.

The two pink pixies were urging the Cygnan into a sack. It crawled inside and curled up peaceably. The two humanoids crawled in after it, with a collection of air canisters.

They wanted to take it along!

After half a minute of futile gestures, Jameson gave in. He sealed the neck of the sack and turned to Dmitri. Dmitri’s lips were forming the words “Good luck.” Mei-mei was huddled next to him, big-eyed.

Jameson looked over at where Ruiz’s crumpled body lay. The gaunt profile, skin stretched like parchment over the sharp cheeks and the beak of a nose, stared past the metal ceiling, perhaps a mile overhead, to something unseeable beyond.

“So long, Hernando,” Jameson said. “You tried.”

With Klein’s gun in his belt and a Cygnan broomstick in his hand, he picked up the transparent balloon with its two or three pounds of alien life inside, and stepped through the lock into the dark.

Chapter 29

A necklace of people stretched across the stars. Jameson counted: twenty-seven of them, all holding hands. They’d turned off their thrusters long since. They were falling raggedly toward the spoked wheel of the Jupiter ship a couple of miles away—a circle drawn round a Y, shining with reflected Jupiter light.

He was riding the Cygnan broomstick backward, braking at a reckless quarter g, gripping it with both hands and clamped thighs to keep from sliding down the slender shaft toward the deadly beam of light that fanned out from its business end. The four-foot bubble with the Cygnan and the two humanoids curled inside was snubbed securely to the shaft.

The necklace was mostly blue, with nine white human trinkets spaced along it. Six of them would be the American prisoners, each sandwiched between two guards. That left twenty-one of them to deal with—including Maggie.

He eased down the thrust, matching velocities. The broomstick had only one control, a sliding stud that turned it on and graduated the thrust all the way up to one g. You pointed it where you wanted to go, and you judged your turnover point, by eyeball and by the seat of your pants.

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 space, 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 space.

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 spackle 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 spacesuit 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.