Donald Moffitt - The Jupiter Theft

“You … bastard,” Klein said weakly.

There was movement in the shadows. Jameson turned his head to see Maggie standing there under the fifty-foot teeth of the gears. She had the gun.

She pointed it at him.

“Let him go, Tod,” she said.

“Good work, MacInnes,” Klein said.

Maggie stood where she was, very sensibly not coming any closer to Jameson. “Are you going to take me with you?” she said.

Klein moved away from Jameson to leave Maggie a clear field of fire along the ridge. “Yes,” he said. “I promise you.”

“What about a suit?”

“You can have Mei-mei’s suit. I’ll fix it up with Chia. You can run a computer as well as Mei-mei can.”

“What’s this all about, Maggie?” Jameson said.

“Go on, tell him,” Klein said.

Maggie faced Jameson defiantly, her knuckles white on the gun. “I work for the Reliability Board too,” she said. “You’ve been my assignment.”

Jameson’s knees felt weak. “I don’t believe it,” he whispered.

“That’s right,” Klein said, amused. “Her first assignment was your friend Berry. She turned in a good report on him—I don’t know why they let him stay on the mission. Then she was told to watch you. You were a tough nut to crack, Jameson. She couldn’t get you to make any Unreliable statements. You were a good little government boy. I told her to keep working on you. I knew you’d slip sometime. And you did. You were a Rad all along, weren’t you?”

“You’re crazy,” Jameson said. He turned to Maggie. “Maggie, how could you do a thing like that?”

She tossed her head. “You wouldn’t know!” she said bitterly. “You’ve had it all, right from the start. Government family, government education, the right friends and the right opinions. How would you like to have a New England code in your passbook, a grandfather who fought in the Secession, and a father who always got you into trouble by talking like a Rad?”

“She turned him in when she was sixteen, Jameson,” Klein said. “That was what got her on our books. We okayed her for the Space Resources Agency training program after that. She’s worked for us ever since.”

“That apartment!” Jameson said. “And the ski weekends at the MacDonald, and the concert tickets, and the collection of antique plastic bottles! No wonder you could afford them!”

The gun never wavered, but her eyes begged him. “You don’t understand! You were born Government! I had to fight for it! It was get into a government program or be a dirty Privie all my life!”

Almost, Jameson was moved. But then he remembered Ruiz’s body tumbling down out of sight, and Boyle, crippled.

“You’re right, Maggie,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

Maggie’s face had become ugly. “I’ll tell you something!” she spat. “You’re a bore and a fool, and you’re lousy in bed, and I’m glad I’ll never have to listen to that stupid Giles Farnaby music again!”

“Maggie,” Jameson said steadily. “They left you behind. They wrote you off. Don’t you realize that? Give me the gun.”

Klein stooped and picked up the Cygnan prod. “Good-bye, Jameson,” he said. There was a dreadful searing pain, and then Jameson, blind, deaf, and paralyzed, was falling into an endless abyss.

There was a red darkness with bright sparks of pain drifting through it. There was a hollow silence with the sound of distant surf booming behind it, and over that, the sound of a woman sobbing.

He stirred, and hurts stabbed all through a body that was monstrously stiff and swollen and raw-edged. Presently he became aware that the sound of surf was within his skull, and the woman sobbing was outside it.

His eyes flicked open. He was sprawled, half sitting and half reclining, against the base of the metal slope. Through blurred vision he saw dim figures busily moving about on the floor of a metal plain that bulged with odd protuberances as big as glacial boulders.

The sobbing came from Maybury, a dozen yards to his left. She was huddled over the body of Dr. Ruiz, cradling his broken head. “Dr. Ruiz, Dr. Ruiz,” she whimpered. She gulped air. “Her—Hernando…”

Chia was standing a little beyond, looking down at Maybury impatiently. Her smooth, exquisite face was smudged, dark hair straggling around it. She was wearing a quilted blue spacesuit and had one of the cylindrical Chinese helmets tucked under her arm. In her ungloved hand she held a hand-laser.

“Get her into a suit,” Chia said.

Numbly Maybury allowed herself to be led away and stuffed into a spacesuit. Jameson’s vision was clearing. He could see that almost everybody was suited up.

He tried to move, and discovered that he was tied up, wrists and ankles. He wriggled a bit. It hurt a lot, but nothing seemed to be broken.

Gifford came limping over, bent like an old man. “Awake now, you son of a bitch?” he said admiringly. “I’ll bet you have a sore backside. You slid down it like a playground slide and never bounced your head once. That’s more than I can say for a couple of the poor bastards you shoved over the edge. Five dead, all together. Chia wants to burn you, slow. She and Klein are still arguing about it.”

“Why am I still alive?” Jameson said.

“You can thank Maggie. She told Klein there wasn’t any reason to kill you now that it’s over. Said it wouldn’t look good on the report. Ruiz and Boyle—that’s another story. They were shot while attempting to interfere with an arbee officer in the performance of his duty.” He grinned. “Anyway, chum, there are too many witnesses.”

He limped away to join the crowd of spacesuited figures clustered around the air lock. Was one of those bulky blue dolls Maggie? She’d have had a time squeezing into Mei-mei’s suit, even with all the slack that a Chinese spacesuit provided. The Chinese, egalitarians all, didn’t believe in custom fitting, but there were limits.

Jameson tested his bonds. There was no give to them. But what was the use of getting loose anyway? He felt close to despair. They’d be gone—in minutes now. They’d already got through the hardest part of their obstacle course. The Cygnans, even if searching for them, had no idea precisely where they were. Now all they had to do was cross fifty miles of space on their suit jets. How long would it take them? An hour? They’d be spotted, of course. With luck they’d be halfway across by then. Then it would take time for the Cygnans to organize a pursuit. It wouldn’t take long to get the missiles in firing order. They wouldn’t even bother to compute orbits, probably. Just aim them, with a proximity fuse or a radio signal. The Cygnans would snuff them out in short order, of course. But the damage would be done. How long would it take the Cygnans to repair the damage done by just one 100-megaton bomb? They’d have to jettison what was left of a pod, maybe even evacuate a whole ship if the central drive was damaged, and resettle a population of millions.

What had Ruiz said? A delay of a month in the Cygnans’ departure would surely break up Earth’s crust, flood it with radiation, tear it out of its orbit, as the Cygnans sailed past with their Jovian trophy. And that would be by mere oversight! With ten million of their sisters murdered, they might decide to do that very thing on purpose!

Jameson watched helplessly as the first group filed into the air lock, which could hold four or five people at a time.

The air lock was simplicity itself. The Cygnans were profligate with their air, just as they were with other people’s hydrogen. There was no lock mechanism, no vacuum pump. You grabbed a handle on that round door and pulled it toward you manually. It slid forward like a desk drawer on three greased shafts. You had to duck under one of the shafts to get inside, but that didn’t bother Cygnans. Attached to the back end of the shafts was another circular door. Once you were inside the lock, you pushed on it and squeezed through the outer opening into space. When the outside door was projecting out into vacuum, the inner disk sealed the cylindrical lock. When the inner door was pulled inward, as it was now, the outer door stopped up the shaft.