The Jupiter Theft

Hollis’s tight, rasping voice issued from the speaker. To Jameson it sounded somehow sleepy. “I’m locked in on all five of the alien ships,” he said “The computer techs transferred the information from the observatory computer this morning. But first I’m going to set off a couple of gigaton bombs in the middle of that cluster coming toward us. It’s only a few hundred miles across; I can drench them with enough hard radiation to cook them all. Have to eyeball it and set off the bombs by radio signal.”

Jameson snatched the microphone from Boyle. “Listen, Major, you don’t understand the situation. Those scooters are traveling at over a hundred kilometers a second at this point, and decelerating. You can’t eyeball it. If you’re off by a couple of seconds, your missiles will pass right through them or else go off too soon. All you can do is make them mad.”

“That’s enough talk,” Hollis said, and switched off.

Boyle grabbed the mike back and shouted, “Major Hollis!” but the speaker was dead.

“He’s going to get his men into trouble, Captain,” Jameson said. “They aren’t proficient enough yet to—”

“Look!” Kay said in a strained voice.

The last ant in the column had fallen behind and was hurrying to catch up. He must have gotten careless, or been disoriented by the star-encrusted void whirling past him, because he lost his footing and stumbled backward. Top-heavy in his gear, he toppled over the low safety rail.

The wheel hurled him out into the dark. The wriggling silver figure shrank until it was gone. There had been a sudden rush to save him, and now Hollis’s men milled about aimlessly.

“Captain, can you stop the wheel?” Jameson asked.

Boyle looked at him steadily. “No,” he said.

Hollis must have been giving orders. The confused movement of the men stopped all at once, and they all began marching again toward the base of the spoke.

They climbed the outside handles painfully, all of them being very careful now. Two thirds of the way toward the hub, they all stopped. Hollis was giving orders again. Suit jets misting, they floated at an angle toward the missile pods on the shaft. Hollis had had them do it a hundred times before when the ship was coasting, saving time by lifting off the spoke at the point where centripetal force dropped off enough.

“He just killed his men,” Jameson said, between clenched teeth.

The difference in velocity was infinitesimal—less than ten centimeters per second per second. But, it added up. It took Hollis and his men twenty seconds to realize that an invisible rubber band was dragging them back to the plane of the wheel. Another twenty seconds and they were there—but their starting point wasn’t… The spoke swept by, tantalizingly out of reach, while they dropped past the waist of the ship at forty, then fifty and sixty centimeters per second.

Jameson’s knuckles were white on the rail. “The damned bungling Earthlubber!” he said. “Didn’t he realize he couldn’t do that trick when the ship was braking?”

Only a minute had gone by. Even then, some of them might have saved themselves, but they wasted precious seconds trying to catch up to the radiating spokes of the wheel. Only one of them had the sense to aim at an efficient right angle straight toward the giant shaft that was slipping by. He caught a handhold just forward of the flaring skirt and immediately began to crawl forward, away from stray drive radiation.

The rest of them, in a panic to escape the hellish beam of the exhaust, scattered sideways. The ship plunged past them, faster with each second. They were being left behind—or, more properly, were outracing the ship, keeping their initial velocity while the ship continued to decelerate.

And then there was just a swarm of silver insects hovering against the black depths, diminishing until they were lost among the stars. The edge of the swarm had been seared by the dreadful violent flame of the drive. They were the lucky ones.

The survivor was too terrified to let go of his handhold. Grogan and one of his men had to suit up and go outside to pry him loose. They coaxed him forward toward the auxiliary air lock behind the observatory. After a while he understood that ten centimeters per second per second wasn’t dangerous if you kept contact with the ship, and scrambled forward on his own.

When the bulky figure stumbled into the bridge with Grogan, there was a rush to help him out of his helmet. A long blond braid tumbled out.

It was the girl. The only one of them who’d had the sense to save herself. People turned from the observation window to stare at her with open curiosity. In all the months of the journey, only a handful of people had seen her. Hollis had kept her bottled up with his men. Jameson caught Klein eyeing her with furtive interest.