The Jupiter Theft

It was a bleak, rocky desert, split with deep cracks from the tidal forces which were trying to tear it apart. The cracks steamed with noxious gases being squeezed out of the interior. Some of the cracks looked to be hundreds of miles wide, and God knew how deep—canyons that dwarfed anything on Earth. When the Cygnus planet came to its final equilibrium—if Jupiter didn’t break it up first; the observatory computer was still trying to make up its mind about that—the shifts and grindings of these gravitational wounds would sculpt that world’s only features.

It had no others. There were no craters, as on other airless worlds, no sea basins or continents or mountain ranges. It was a world without geology, a world that had never been born. It had come out of the cosmos as smooth as an egg, and Jupiter had cracked it.

“Rock,” Ruiz said. “Bald rock and the traces of a hydrogen atmosphere. Nothing ever lived here.” He turned to Li and shook his head. “This isn’t the Cygnans’ home planet.”

“Why did they bring it along then?” Jameson said.

“Mizz Maybury,” Ruiz called out. “Swing the telescope back to Jupiter.”

Another million-mile twitch, and Jupiter was back on the screen, a vast marbled presence. The three-pronged shadow of an alien ship lay across it like an insect claw. The bands of colored clouds seethed and boiled, flowing visibly toward the equator. The familiar horizontal belts of Jupiter had been gone for some weeks now, replaced by these convolving streaks. Local eddies swirled in thousand-mile curlicues, a meteorologist’s nightmare. Jameson could barely make out the pale pink splotch that once had been the Great Red Spot. It had shrunk to a fifth of its former size, and it was leached of color.

Maybury panned slowly across the cloudscape till she came to the edge of space. The bracelet that Jupiter had been wearing lately showed as a thin bright line etched against the ebony void.

“I’ll tell you why they brought it along—” Ruiz began.

An alarm sounded stridently, and the ship lurched. Jameson felt this feet press against the observatory floor with about a hundredth of a g. He had weight now—about a pound and three quarters of it. Tethered objects in the room began to settle toward the floor. The ship had begun the final braking maneuver that would swing it past Callisto and put it in orbit around Jupiter half a million miles beyond the fringes of the radiation belt.

Ruiz opened his mouth again, but before he could speak, there was a shriek from Tu Jue-chen.

“Huo-hua!” she gasped, pointing. “Lights!”

Jameson turned with the rest to stare out the curved view window.

Out there in the blackness, a thousand fireflies glowed and pulsed: a swarm of small vehicles coming toward them. They were too far away for details to be seen, but they were moving fast. It was an enormous phosphorescent cloud against the deep of space.

Maybury got a telescope pointed at the swarm. Blurred shapes bounced back and forth on one of the overhead display screens. Jameson craned his neck, trying to make sense out of the irregular contours.

And then the image compensator had one of them pinned down, and Jameson caught his first glimpse of a Cygnan. It quivered on the screen, a sleek many-legged shape clinging to a stick, like a lizard on a broomstraw.

Ruiz was beside him. “They’ve decided to notice us,” he said.

Chapter 13

Half the crew was crowded two and three deep against the long, curving observation rail, with more men and women pouring into the bridge’s lower level every minute. The Chinese and American fusion/fission teams were still at their posts in the tail of the ship, and Brough and the rest of the medical staff had elected to stay with their patients in the ring, but it seemed that everyone else who didn’t have a station to tend had jammed into the ship’s command center, with Boyle’s and Hsieh’s tacit consent.

At a time like this, you wanted to be with other members of your species.

To the naked eye, the Cygnans were still nothing more than a cloud of campfire sparks in the void, but they were coming fast. The big observation screen forward occasionally fixed a brief glimpse of a blurred individual form; Pierce and Maybury had stayed below in the observatory to work the telescopes, and they were piping in their images.

“They’re traveling a quarter million miles on those broomsticks, without a ship around them,” Ruiz said. “They must be used to space.”

“How long will it take for them to get here?” Jameson asked.

“Three and a half hours for the trip. I don’t know when they left.”

“Three and a half hours?”

“They’re accelerating at a constant one g.”

Jameson turned back to the window in time to see the glowing patch of light suddenly-flare up. A low murmur went up from the crowd along he rail.

“That was their turnover point,” Ruiz said, “They’ll be here in an hour and three quarters now.”