Donald Moffitt - The Jupiter Theft

He took the telescope from her. Jupiter overflowed the port, a billowing globe that now had a distinct rim around it. The sticklike Cygnan ships were black hieroglyphs against its face. They were arranged in a five-pointed figure rotating around a common center of gravity.

Looking at those forked shapes, it was hard to believe they contained worlds.

Jameson lifted the eyepiece to his face. He saw that Maybury had programmed the telescope’s pea brain to damp outmost of the light on Jupiter’s chaotic wavelengths. The tortured planet was a dim ghost among the stars. The five ships were no longer silhouettes. They took on proper three-dimensional shapes, chisel-edged constructions illumined by the amplified light of the distant Sun.

A ruby thread of light stretched between two of the crouched forms. Laser light. Jameson wondered if one of the ships was the one he had been on; he’d lost track of their positions.

Now another thread of light stabbed out, linking with a third ship. From the tips of the inverted V, two more beams joined themselves to ships at the lower points.

“What is it?” Li said, sweat rolling down his face.

“They’re communicating,” Jameson said. “Keep working.”

Cursing in Chinese, Li continued to trace circuits. He ripped out a tiny wire and respliced it elsewhere.

The Cygnan ships had to be shedding a lot of dust and molecular debris to make the laser light that distinct. The invisible cloud that surrounded the fleet must have grown to a radius of thousands of miles in the months they’d been parked here.

“Sloppy housekeeping,” Jameson muttered.

“What?” Maybury said. “Oh, you mean whatever’s scattering light. Cygnan ships are leaky, aren’t they?”

Jameson continued watching. The lines traced a pentagram across Jupiter’s spectral face in filaments of red fire. The angle of vision foreshortened it a little, giving it depth. He knew it was rotating, though he’d have to wait a long time before he saw movement.

An astonishing thing happened next. A perfect five-pointed star etched itself within the pentagram.

Of course, it was a geometric accident, the consequence of every ship being linked up with every other ship, but it was a strange and spellbinding sight all the same.

A pentacle within a pentagram.

He gasped just as the sign erased itself.

“What happened?” Li said.

“They’ve stopped talking. We haven’t much time.”

He handed the telescope back to Maybury and took up his screwdriver again. There was a clipboard of checklists for powering and firing the landing vehicle in an assortment of circumstances, but they were of limited value. None of them included the problem of using the craft’s engines while it was still clamped to the mother ship. Before Jameson dared cut in the engines, he and Li had to disconnect the safety circuits and improvise an entirely new firing sequence.

“What do you think?” he asked Li.

“Another half-hour.”

Jameson punched through to the bridge. Kay Thorwald’s plain, pleasant face showed up on the little screen.

“Ready to blast in a half-hour, Kay,” he said. “What’s the condition of the ship?”

“We’ve finished a preliminary damage survey, Tod. There’s nothing we can’t fix—in time. We’re not going to try to make the whole ring airtight. We’ll all just have to live in close quarters in a few of the compartments. Kiernan says he can get the air plant going—enough frozen seed stock survived.”

“How about the attitude controls? Can we get this ship pointed in the right direction?” He glanced down at the slip of paper Maybury was shoving under his nose. “Maybury says that if we fire in thirty minutes, you’ve got to line the ship up with Vega and keep correcting for the angle of my push.”

“Just a minute.”

She turned away from the screen toward a work table where Yeh was going over some diagrams with Fiaccone. She and Yeh talked a moment.

“Comrade Yeh says that we can do it. Some of our attitude jets are gone, but we can lock the ring and use the thrusters that normally set it spinning. There’s a good distribution of workable ones around the circumference. We’re feeding the problem to the computer now.”

“Thanks, Kay.”

He switched off and got the engine room. A harried-looking Chinese fusion tech said, “ Dong-yi-dong, I’ll get him.”

Mike appeared on the screen, his hair and beard disheveled.

“How long?” Jameson said.

Mike scratched his head. “The Cygnans didn’t touch much,” he said. “But they bollixed things up just looking. Quentin will have the boron part of the cycle fixed in a couple of hours. But we can’t get a fusion reaction going for at least a day.”

“It’s up to Li and me, then,” Jameson said.

“You and the Giff,” Mike said and signed off.

Jameson looked out a port at the long shaft of the ship. Gifford’s white spacesuit was visible among the blue-clad Chinese strapping down a scoop-nosed drone that Jameson recognized as one of the Jupiter cloudtop orbiters. Just over the curve of the hull was the stubby shape of the vehicle that contained the radiation-shielded crawler that had been destined for a soft landing on Io. They had represented a bold ambition of the human race. Now, he thought sadly, neither of them would ever be used. Their increment of thrust—that’s all they were good for now.

He tried to attract Gifford’s attention through the port, but failed. He called Communications and got Sue Jarowski. “Sue,” he said, “can you patch me through to Gifford’s suit radio?”

“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.”