Donald Moffitt - The Jupiter Theft

“No time,” Jameson responded. “We’ll have to take our chances.” He spoke into the mike pickup. “Gifford, hear this. Tell the men they have thirty seconds to find something to grab on to. We’re moving.”

He switched off before Gifford could object. Some of the men must have been listening through their own circuits. There was a scramble as stuffed blue dolls wrapped themselves around stanchions, hooked themselves onto safety rails. Immediately under the port, Jameson saw Smitty wriggle out from beneath the lander and glide belly-down along the hull until she found a grip.

He settled down in the pilot’s seat beside Li, and the two of them began to run through the newly edited checklist for powering the vehicle. Maybury crouched behind them, lightpad in hand, helping them keep track of all the changes.

It felt strange to be doing it this way, after all the months of training. He and Li had honed themselves for one purpose: to land the spidery craft on the surface of Jupiter’s second-largest moon. The lockers behind them were crammed with geological equipment. The little boxy hovercraft for exploring Callisto’s surface was still folded in its bay. Now the lander would never touch down. It had been turned into a tugboat.

The main engine fired, and the cabin shook with unplanned stresses. A few seconds later, Jameson saw through the port that Gifford had ignited the strapped probes by radio signal. Little jets flared along the shaft of the main ship and along the circumference of the ring, as Kay and Yeh compensated for the irregularities in direction of the thrust.

There was no sensation of movement yet. The buildup was going to be slow, slow.

Maybury’s voice came hesitantly. “Maggie’s calculations were correct, you know. This won’t break us out of orbit.”

Without turning his head, Jameson said, “You checked her figures, then?”

“Yes,” Maybury answered in a small voice.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Jameson. “We’ll get ourselves into a return trajectory later. All I want to do now is get us moving!”

Slowly, like a freight train being pushed along the tracks by an elephant, the great wheel-and-axle of the Jupiter ship responded. Jameson could feel the first faint suggestion of weight on the seat of his pants. There was visible movement against the grid of stars, some of it lateral as the ungainly mass shuddered to align itself.

It wasn’t good enough.

Outside the port, space was alive with beams of light, flashing on and off as thousands of Cygnans made their final correction maneuvers. They were close enough to be visible through the port, little squirming golden worms clinging to matchsticks.

“Tod, p’eng yu, ” Li said, staring straight ahead. He’d used the word for “friend,” not “comrade.” “I want you to know. I’m sorry. None of it was my idea.”

Outside, trapped on the hull, one of the Chinese missile men lost his nerve and threw a wrench at the naked creatures swarming on their broomsticks. It tumbled harmlessly past one of the nearer Cygnans, who oozed sidewise to avoid it.

“What will they do?” Maybury wondered aloud.

Jameson shifted in his seat. “We’ve got nukes aboard,” he said. “We ran through their ship like weasels in a chicken house, killing. What would you do?”

Maybury’s hand, small as a child’s, was clutching his, the nails digging into his palm. Li stared out the window, saying nothing. Outside, Gifford’s work party had drawn together in a small defensive group, their movements hampered by the necessity of using a hand to keep from drifting away under the ship’s gentle acceleration. The Cygnans had no such problem. Some of them already had touched down, anchored to anything handy by whatever hand or foot was convenient, like sea polyps swaying in a current. At the head of the ship they were crawling like maggots all over the observation bubble.

“ Oh! ” Maybury gasped.

Jameson jerked his head around to see what had startled her. She was staring, wide-eyed, toward the Cygnan fleet in the distance. At this angle it could be seen against the dark. They’d moved far enough by now so that it hung like a cluster of shiny grapnel hooks above the raw and bloody carcass of Jupiter.

The laser light was flashing between them again. The figure of the five-pointed star within the pentagram did not appear again. Instead there was a shifting play of spiky forms as each ship in turn sent out brief tendrils of light to all its companions. A succession of clawed figures, looking like Greek or Hebrew letters, flamed red against the face of night.

Jameson could not guess at the message content. But the flashing signals galvanized the Cygnan horde. Like shiny midges, they rose by the hundreds off the crippled ship and wheeled and darted in a forming swarm. A thousand beacons lit the night, and then they were vanishing, a cloud of distant sparks heading with incredible velocity toward the ships beyond.

“They’re gone!” Maybury said wonderingly.

Jameson looked across at the barbed shapes of the ships hovering over Jupiter’s ripe and swollen orb, still semaphoring their sins and psis and lambdas, drawing fiery scratches in the void.

“Not quite yet,” he said.

They were four million miles out, well past the orbit of Callisto, when it happened. The feeble engines of the probes and missiles had not yet set them free, but had put them in a loose elliptical orbit that would carry them outside the orbit of Jupiter VII. Mike, Quentin, and the three Chinese fusion techs were working round the clock. Everybody pitched in to help: Maggie and Maybury on the engine-room computers, Jameson and Li and Fiaccone unplugging the damaged outside structures. Jameson had passed Maggie a couple of times in the corridors without speaking to her.

Now Jameson slumped, exhausted, in a contour seat on the ship’s bridge. Mike had promised boron fission within a couple of hours. The last missile rocket engine had been expended.

“What if they come back?” Kay asked, looking at him with red-rimmed eyes through a strand of straggling hair. “Even when we get going, we can only accelerate at a hundredth of a g. They can catch up to us in a few hours, any time they feel like it.”

Jameson looked out through the big bubble at Jupiter’s bright sphere. Io, or the sodium glow that surrounded it, was visible as a fuzzy yellow golfball that from this angle seemed to be poised just above Jupiter’s eastern edge. The Cygnan ships were invisible, but they could be seen through a telescope as a glowing pentad hovering close to Io, keeping its bulk between them and the giant planet. They had transferred their orbit from their own moon, the one they had brought with them, to Io with its closer position, a bit over a quarter of a million miles from Jupiter. The pentacle of laser light was evidently a calibrating device as the five ships fine-tuned their new joint orbit.

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Jameson said. “They’re ready to move, all right. Those ships started changing their orbit about three seconds after the boarding party got back to them. What worries me is being this close to Jupiter. If we’re still in orbit around it when they start moving, we’ll go right along with them. And we don’t have Io to shield us from radiation once they start moving through interstellar hydrogen at close to light speed.”

“We be dead long before that time,” Yeh grunted from his console. His lumpy face was lined with fatigue. He had worked without rest since reaching the ship.

Jameson nodded. “If we didn’t get torn loose by the sun and fry to death, it would be hunger, decompression, or systems failure. Take your pick. We’ll be lucky to nurse this wreck back to Earth in one piece.”