The Jupiter Theft

“Right away.” He watched her face as she pushed buttons. The long Cygnan captivity had melted flesh from her wide Slavic cheekbones, making them even more prominent. Her full, bold mouth and strong chin were set in concentration. Absent-mindedly she pushed back a curtain of thick dark hair. Jameson was thinking how striking she looked when Gifford’s voice crackled from the speaker.

“Yeah?”

Outside, Gifford was looking in his direction. He raised a gloved hand and waved toward the window of the Callisto lander.

“How’s it coming?” Jameson said.

Gifford’s voice came over the sound of frying eggs. “Give us another couple hours and we can get one more drone out of its cocoon, pointed in the right direction, and bolted down. Then we gotta come inside. These boys can’t work under acceleration. It ought to be enough to start the push. When we run out of juice, we’ll come out again and strap on a cluster of rocket engines from the missiles.”

“A couple of hours?” Jameson said. “Can you cut that in half?”

“Commander,” Gifford called, sounding aggrieved, “I’ve got only five of these boys to work with, plus Smitty. And she’s still under your boat, bolting on the braces.”

“Can we break out of orbit with just the vehicles you’ve got ready now?”

“Maggie says no. If you want me to, I’ll ask her to run the figures through the computer again.”

Jameson’s face turned to stone. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I’ll take her word for it. Just work as fast as you can.”

Maybury made a small choking sound behind him. “They’re coming,” she announced.

Jameson looked out the other port. Space was filled with a sudden hail of fire. Over a front that must have been a hundred miles across, streaks of light lengthened and shrank to points again, like golden straws tumbling among the stars.

“That was their turnover point,” Jameson said. “They’re halfway across. Decelerating at one g, they’ll be here in minutes.”

Li looked up from the console, his blunt peasant face smeared with grime where he’d wiped away sweat with stained fingers. “All through now,” he said. “Safety override is off. Now we should put it through test sequence.”

“No time,” Jameson responded. “We’ll have to take our chances.” He spoke into the mike pickup. “Gifford, hear this. Tell the men they have thirty seconds to find something to grab on to. We’re moving.”

He switched off before Gifford could object. Some of the men must have been listening through their own circuits. There was a scramble as stuffed blue dolls wrapped themselves around stanchions, hooked themselves onto safety rails. Immediately under the port, Jameson saw Smitty wriggle out from beneath the lander and glide belly-down along the hull until she found a grip.

He settled down in the pilot’s seat beside Li, and the two of them began to run through the newly edited checklist for powering the vehicle. Maybury crouched behind them, lightpad in hand, helping them keep track of all the changes.

It felt strange to be doing it this way, after all the months of training. He and Li had honed themselves for one purpose: to land the spidery craft on the surface of Jupiter’s second-largest moon. The lockers behind them were crammed with geological equipment. The little boxy hovercraft for exploring Callisto’s surface was still folded in its bay. Now the lander would never touch down. It had been turned into a tugboat.

The main engine fired, and the cabin shook with unplanned stresses. A few seconds later, Jameson saw through the port that Gifford had ignited the strapped probes by radio signal. Little jets flared along the shaft of the main ship and along the circumference of the ring, as Kay and Yeh compensated for the irregularities in direction of the thrust.

There was no sensation of movement yet. The buildup was going to be slow, slow.

Maybury’s voice came hesitantly. “Maggie’s calculations were correct, you know. This won’t break us out of orbit.”

Without turning his head, Jameson said, “You checked her figures, then?”

“Yes,” Maybury answered in a small voice.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Jameson. “We’ll get ourselves into a return trajectory later. All I want to do now is get us moving!”

Slowly, like a freight train being pushed along the tracks by an elephant, the great wheel-and-axle of the Jupiter ship responded. Jameson could feel the first faint suggestion of weight on the seat of his pants. There was visible movement against the grid of stars, some of it lateral as the ungainly mass shuddered to align itself.

It wasn’t good enough.

Outside the port, space was alive with beams of light, flashing on and off as thousands of Cygnans made their final correction maneuvers. They were close enough to be visible through the port, little squirming golden worms clinging to matchsticks.

“Tod, p’eng yu,” Li said, staring straight ahead. He’d used the word for “friend,” not “comrade.” “I want you to know. I’m sorry. None of it was my idea.”