Donald Moffitt - The Jupiter Theft

A thread whose tip was a glowing blue spark.

The bomb crews began their grim rehearsals the next day. Hollis drove his men hard—too hard in an environment where fatigue could be fatal. Boyle had spoken to him about it, and received an answer in advanced officialese that amounted to “mind your own business.”

It was amazing, Jameson thought, how well Major Hollis got along with his counterpart, People’s Deputy Commander Yao Hu-fang, when his relations with his fellow Americans were so distant and grudging. Hollis acted as if he were in enemy territory whenever he ventured out of his spun-foam cocoon on the inner rim of the wheel to see Boyle or confer with Liz Becque about his men’s rations. He was never seen after hours in the lounge. Evidently he drank alone with his executive, a watchful, tight-lipped man named Toscano.

Standing in the observation lounge on the inner side of the rim, Jameson was getting a good view of the latest rehearsal through the overhead bubble.

The long spear of the ship’s drive section, a hundred meters overhead, was aswarm with bulky spacesuited figures, scrambling around a cluster of dart-shaped missiles splayed out in their launching racks at an angle to the hull. The weapons, finned and needle-nosed, obviously had been designed for atmospheric launch, and their presence on this mission showed how hasty the preparations had been.

“So they’re playing with their toys, are they?” a voice said behind him.

Jameson turned. Ruiz was there, looking tired. He was dressed in shorts and sandals and a short-sleeved shirt that for once seemed to be pressed.

“They’re not exactly toys,” Jameson said. “There’s a rumor that they’ve got a gigaton bomb with them. It’s never been tested. Couldn’t be, on Earth. They think it would make a fifty-mile crater, maybe even break through the Earth’s crust.”

“Lunatics!” Ruiz said. “What kind of a crater do they expect to make in space? Or Jupiter, for that matter. No solid surface.”

“The bombs are for the Cygnans, aren’t they?” Jameson asked carefully.

“The Cygnans. Of course, they don’t officially exist. They’re not supposed to have survived ten thousand years of hard radiation.”

“That’s what Dmitri keeps saying.” Jameson grinned.

“They’ve exhibited some remarkable activity for an extinct race, haven’t they? Moving worlds about like that.”

Both men looked up through the bubble. The little spacesuited figures were swarming around a piece of equipment, maneuvering it into place on one of the launching racks. It looked as if they were hooking it into the missile guidance system.

It was late when Jameson returned to his quarters. After leaving Ruiz, he’d bumped into Li and been trapped onto a long technical discussion about using the Callisto lander to land on the Cygnus Object’s moon. The moon was settling into a new orbit around Jupiter, an ellipse that crossed the orbit of its former parent world, and they would have to time their expedition for the eight-day period when the satellite would be outside Jupiter’s most intense radiation zone. The orbital calculations were going to make some difficult work for Maggie and Jen Mei-mei. Jameson finally shook Li off and made his way down to the section of outer ring that held the officers’ living quarters looking forward to a drink with Maggie and a relaxed evening—or what ship’s convention had defined as evening.

His cabin was dark when he let himself in. Maggie was nowhere around. Jameson frowned. She should have come off duty an hour ago. He kicked off his sandals, made himself a drink, and put on some music. With a sigh, he settled down to study some equipment-maintenance reports while he was waiting.

Maggie straggled in an hour later. She looked dispirited and bedraggled. Her orange hair hung down limply, a stray strand across her cheek, and one tail of her shirt had escaped her shorts.

“Is that a martini?” she said. “Gawd, let me have a sip!” She flopped down on the aircouch and drained Jameson’s glass. Silently he got up to mix another batch.

“Thanks,” she said as he handed her a fresh glass. “Jeeks, what a day!”

“What happened?” he said.

She turned a tired face toward him. She looked pale and drained, and her freckles showed more prominently. “I’ve been drafted,” she said. “Me and Mei-mei. We spent the day working for Hollis.” She took a sip of her drink. “Plotting bomb orbits.”

From less than a quarter million miles away, the alien ship showed its form starkly through the telescopes. It swam against the luminous striations of Jupiter, an angular, many-armed silhouette. The shape was peculiar. It wasn’t designed the way humans would have done it, but it made sense.

Picture a slender rod fifteen miles long—slender only by virtue of its enormous scale. It had to be at least three miles in thickness. Radar echoes had shown its cross section to be an equilateral triangle—a three-sided stick. The echoes also must have told the aliens that someone was looking at them.

From the tip of the rod, three long arms sprouted sideways making the shape of a Y. Each of the arms was fifteen miles long. Folded back along the rod, they would just about have reached its opposite end.

Each arm ended in a prism. The cross section of the prisms was the same as the rod—an equilateral triangle three miles on a side. They were in effect shorter slices of the rod, measuring four and a half miles from triangular face to triangular face. The arms with their clubbed ends twirled lazily, a whirligig for titans.

There were five of the great ships, clustered in a pentagonal formation, revolving around a common center of gravity. But this one, etched against Jupiter’s roiling clouds, was easiest to see.

Jameson tore himself away from the eyepiece reluctantly and levered himself across the observatory to join the rest of the group. They were gathered around a large projection screen which reproduced the telescope image, but it wasn’t quite the same as seeing it firsthand.

“It’s obvious,” Pierce was saying. The young astronomer was flushed with excitement, talking too rapidly. “The long shaft is their drive section. In flight, those three arms fold back along the shaft like the ribs of an umbrella. Those nice flat surfaces are meant to rest against the three faces of the shaft.”

He stopped, out of breath, and glanced apologetically at Ruiz.

“Go on,” Ruiz said. “You’re doing fine.”

Pierce ran a hand over his mussed hair. “But when they’re not accelerating or decelerating,” he said, “the arms open out and spin to give them artificial gravity. Those wedge-shaped modules at the ends of the arms are the environmental pods.”

“Environmental pods!” Chu exclaimed. He sucked on his wispy moustache. “Look at the size of them! They’re—they’re worldlets!”

“To think of engineering on such a scale!” Li said admiringly. “Supporting masses like that on ten-mile booms!” He flashed a disingenuous smile in Jameson’s direction and said, piously: “They must be socialists.

That earned him a suspicious stare from Tu Juechen. She sucked in her pleated cheeks and fixed him with her little monkey eyes. Li met her gaze innocently. The Struggle Group leader had shown up shortly after Jameson and Li had arrived and had been glaring at everybody since then, poor Dr. Chu most of all.

Jameson couldn’t imagine why she was there. It wasn’t any sort of formal meeting. Ruiz had called him up when he was turning the bridge over to Kay Thorwald, and asked him if he’d like to drop by for a look at the alien ships before he went back to the spin section. The ships had just emerged from behind Jupiter in the complicated sixteen-day orbit they shared with the Cygnus Object’s former moon, and Ruiz had promised him a more spectacular view than last time. On the way back to the observatory he’d bumped into Li, who’d immediately asked if he could tag along.