“The Cygnan route crosses Earth’s orbit twice—on opposite sides of it. The combined strike zone adds up to at least one hundred twenty degrees out of three hundred and sixty.
Boyle was silent a long time. He stood in his bulldog position, his lower lip thrust out, a frown on his wide forehead.
“We’re wasting time,” Klein said. “In about six hours that overhead plumbing’s going to be filled with those vermin-ridden snakes.”
Heads swiveled involuntarily to fix on the darkened tubes that twisted through the zooscape. Some of them looped down almost to ground level. They’d been pried and hammered and hacked at by some of the more belligerent younger men, but nobody had been able to so much as scratch them.
So many people in the crowd missed Boyle’s first step toward Klein. The captain’s hand was extended. “We’re not going anywhere,” Boyle said in a level voice. “That’s an order. I’ll take that gun now.”
Klein actually began backing away. “Don’t make waves, Captain,” he said. “We can get along without you if we have to.”
Jameson tensed, gauging his distance from Klein, from Yeh and Chia. The others were too far away to bother about. A few yards away he could see Mike Berry stirring uneasily.
“Hand it over,” Boyle said, and lunged forward, making a grab for it.
There was a fluttering sound in the thin air, like someone riffling the pages of a book, and Boyle was suddenly writhing on the ground, his leg almost severed at the knee.
A woman screamed, and there was a general scramble among the spectators to get out of the way. Jameson, off balance, fought to stay still.
Klein swung the tiny gun around in an arc. “Anybody else?” he said.
Boyle was still conscious, but looked as if he was going into shock. The sliver-sized microflechettes had stitched across his leg, almost blowing it off. Blood spurted from the pulpy mess, black in the chalky light.
Down in the struggling throng, the voice of Janet Lemieux sounded, high, clear, and indignant. “You get out of my way, Jack Gifford!
Klein and his gang had drawn into a tight, cohesive group and were edging their way from the scene along the broad apron of the terrace. They’d made a mess of it, and they knew it. People got out of their way hastily, parting to let them through. Jameson watched them go, along the rim of the stepped bowl, all the way to the opposite side, toward the entrance. He could see their forms, tiny and dim, gathered in a circle, having some kind of conference.
Maggie had found him again. She hung on to his arm, “Tod, what’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Janet was thumbing back one of Boyle’s eyelids, looking at it with a coldlight stick. She’d got Maybury to help her. The little astronomy tech was elevating a plastic bag with a tube leading down to a needle in Boyle’s arm.
“Is he going to lose the leg?” Jameson inquired, bending over.
Janet gave him a look of tight fury. “Probably,” she said. “And there’s no way to clone a new one for him here.”
Maybury said, her voice shaking, “Isn’t there anything you can
Jameson shook his head. “I could rally some of the men. We could arm ourselves with the garden tools and pipes from the hydroponics equipment. But Klein has the upper hand. We can’t get near him with that automatic weapon of his. Those things have a range of a couple of hundred yards in this gravity, and aim doesn’t count.”
“But you’ve got to stop them! They’re crazy!”
Ruiz limped over and rested a hand on Maybury’s shoulder. She looked up at him with quick gratitude.
“Commander Jameson’s right,” Ruiz said. “Chia has a hand-laser, too. I saw it. And the devil knows what other weapons they smuggled in here.”
People had started to drift across to the gateway to see what Klein and his friends were doing there. There was quite respectable crowd now, keeping a wary distance, watching silently. Then there was the sound of a scuffle, and some angry shouting. The crowd started to disperse, then changed its mind and came uncertainly together again.
“Something’s going on,” Jameson said to Maggie. “I’d better…”
He stopped and strained to see in the dim light. Somebody was running toward him, bounding in huge swoops in the one third gravity down the shelved bowl. As the figure drew closer, he saw that it was Beth Oliver, her blond hair disheveled and flying.
“Tod!” she panted, drawing near. “They’re taking people with them! By force! They’ve got Kiernan, and Kay Thorwald—they say she can handle the ship with Yeh! And Sue Jarowski!”
“I’d better see what I can do,” Jameson said. He turned and started to go. Maggie hung on to his arm, trying to drag him back.
“Tod,” she said. “Don’t go.”
He disentangled her gently. “With Boyle out of it, and if Kay’s being held, then I’m in charge. I’d better see —”
“You can’t do anything,” she cried, oddly agitated for someone as usually self-assured as Maggie was. “You said so yourself. You’ll only get hurt.”
“I’ll be all right,” he said, turning again.
“You don’t know what Klein and that—that Chia are capable of!”
“I’m afraid I do,” he said, nodding toward where Boyle lay sprawled. Janet had the bleeding under control, and she had a rolled-up blanket under Boyle’s head. Dmitri and Kiernan’s opposite number, Wang, had taken over from Maybury and had set up a tripod of garden tools to hold the drip bag. The leg hung by shreds, and Janet was removing pieces of bone with a pair of tweezers.
“I’ll go with you,” Mike Berry said, falling in beside him.
“All right, Mike, but keep out of trouble. Where’s Ruiz? Maybe he can try to talk to Klein again.”
“He went over there a few minutes ago,” Mike said. “Mayb’s with him. You aren’t going to get anywhere with that bastard, Tod. You know that type. If he blew up the world, he’d say he did it to keep America free.”
Jameson nodded grimly. He ascended the tiers of synthetic stone, past the metal trees and the random tumbled blocks the Cygnans had put there for variety. To his left a miniature waterfall was sluicing down the steps toward the murky pool at the bottom. Mike hopped along beside him, trying to keep up, bouncing too high in the low gravity and then having to take another giant step when his foot touched bottom.
As Jameson drew close, he could see people milling around uncertainly, keeping well beyond an invisible line. On the other side of the line were the people in Klein’s party. Most of Yao’s bomb crew were there—a score of powerfully built young men and bandy-legged girls who had armed themselves with a miscellany of slats, garden shears and trowels, and what must have been branches of the iron trees, clandestinely filed to the snapping-off point during weeks of captivity. Only one of Tu Jue-chen’s Struggle Group fighters was there—the one who’d helped Gifford. The rest must have been dismissed as unreliable, despite their attempt to switch sides. Jameson’s own partner, Li, was in the party, apparently voluntarily, as was Maggie’s opposite number from the computer section, Jen Mei-mei. They were talking to three Chinese fusion techs.
Kay, Kiernan, and Sue were backed up against the inward-leaning wall of the zoo enclosure, guarded by Gifford and Fiaccone. Gifford was holding Kiernan, pinioning the smaller man’s arms behind his back. Kiernan looked dazed, as if he’d been hit on the head. Mike’s young assistant, Quentin, under no apparent restraint, was talking volubly at Sue, who averted her head, refusing to look at him.
Chia and Yao were on their knees, doing something to the lock mechanism of the massive barred door. It was an armor-plated disk, big as a wagon wheel, half buried in a slot in the metallic sill. There was a neat array of tiny electronic instruments and miniature tools spread out on a quilted jacket whose cotton stuffing oozed from a dozen slashes. Jameson made out the flickering blue glow of a CRT display no larger than a thumbnail, and then, from beneath Chia’s hand on the lock, a flash of laser light. Klein was standing over them, negligently facing the crowd, the wicked little gun in his hand.
